Matthew Townend

Profile

Biography

Matthew Townend’s research interests are in Old Norse language and literature (especially poetry), the history and culture of Viking Age England, and medievalism and philology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He is the author of English Place-Names in Skaldic Verse (1998), Language and History in Viking Age England (2002), The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: the Norse medievalism of W.G. Collingwood and his contemporaries (2009), Viking Age Yorkshire (2014), The Victorians and English Dialect (2024), and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Very Short Introduction (2024). He is currently writing a book about court poetry in the Viking Age.

Research

Overview

My research interests are in Old Norse language and literature – especially poetry – and also the history and culture of Viking Age England. I have written widely on Norse-English contacts between the ninth and eleventh centuries, have edited the skaldic poems composed in honour of King Cnut, and have published an interdisciplinary history of Viking Age Yorkshire. I am currently writing a book about court poetry in the Viking Age.

I am also interested in the post-medieval reception of the Middle Ages, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the relationship between philology and literature. I have written a book about the author and artist W.G. Collingwood (1854-1932), and more recently I have published a major study of 'regional philology' in the nineteenth century - that is, how the Victorian study of dialect was not only historicist but also thoroughly medievalist. I am interested in questions of language, identity, and the regional past, both in the Middle Ages and the modern period.

Supervision

I am interested in supervising research in any area of Old Norse studies, and also in nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism. Current and recent PhD topics supervised include: the vocabulary of wisdom in Old Norse poetry; the 'post-classical' Icelandic sagas; parental love in medieval Iceland; fear in Norse mythology; the Old Norse vocabulary of grief; the soundscape of the Icelandic sagas; extended cognition in Old English and Old Norse poetry; connections between Old Norse legendary sagas and Middle English romance; medievalism and travel-writing in the North Atlantic; and the Victorians and Viking mortuary culture.