The Halls of the Wuffing Kings: Rendlesham and Blythburgh

with Dr Sam Newton

at Tranmer House, Sutton Hoo (map)
on Saturday 14th March 2009

An examination of our current knowledge of the sites of two of the main Wuffing folk-centres, based on what we can deduce of their locations and on what we can infer from analogous sites elsewhere.

We begin with a consideration of the significance of the feasting-hall in Old English culture as a model of civilisation and a focus for identity, as realised especially through the ideal represented by the Camelot of the Old English heroic age, the golden hall of Heorot in Beowulf. We shall then look at the historical and archaeological evidence for the Wuffing kingdom of the Eastern Angles and its royal halls, particularly Rendlesham and Blythburgh.

Sam Newton was awarded his Ph.D at the University of East Anglia in 1991 and published his first book, The Origins of Beowulf and the pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia, in 1993. He has lectured widely as a free-lance scholar and has also contributed to many television and radio programmes. His latest book, The Reckoning of King Rædwald, was published in 2003. He is currently a Director of Wuffing Education, NADFAS lecturer, and Time Team historian.

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Ellis Davidson, H., Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin 1964)
Fairweather, J. [tr.] Liber Eliensis – A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century (Boydell 2005)
Heaney, S. (tr.), Beowulf (Faber & Faber 1999)
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Lee, S. D., & E. Solopova, The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
McClure, J. & R.Collins, (eds.), Bede: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford 1999).
Newton, S., The Reckoning of King Rædwald (Redbird Press 2003)
Plunkett, S.J., Suffolk in Anglo-Saxon Times (Tempus 2005)
Scarfe, N., The Suffolk Landscape (Hodder & Stoughton 1972, Alastair 1986)
Scarfe, N., Suffolk in the Middle Ages (Boydell 1986)
Warner, P., The Origins of Suffolk (Manchester 1996)
Webster, L., and J.Backhouse, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600-900 (British Museum 1991)
Williamson, T., The Origins of Norfolk (Manchester 1993)
Williamson, T., Sutton Hoo and Its Landscape: The Context of Monuments (Oxford 2008)

Bookings

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Wuffing Education,
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