Welcome

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Set Yet Speaking. It’s been a while.

The last time I properly updated this website, I was still lecturing. Things have changed a bit since then. I realised an academic career probably wasn’t going to work out in about 2020, so I left lecturing at the end of 2021 to do other things and eventually moved back to the East Midlands. The problem is, I do miss that intellectual world and I often reflect on the amount of expertise I have that sort of sits there, inert, only stirring again while I tut my way through Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla or listen to some tech bro announcing the end of knowledge work.

Anyway. Let’s start at the beginning. For those who don’t know me: my name’s Nik and I used to lecture and research medieval language and literature professionally, with a particular love for that period known as the Viking Age (roughly AD 800 to AD 1100). I trained as a linguist when I did my undergrad degree, but I took plenty of medieval literature options as well. I specialised particularly in Old English and Old Norse.

Through both my research and teaching I covered a lot of theoretical ground: sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, stylistics, contact linguistics, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, not to mention a host of literary theory. Once you mix this cocktail of approaches together, you get something that looks a lot like philology: that strange, fusty old discipline that is often used to mean any number of things, but is, at its heart, the study of language in its totality, the point at which linguistics, literary criticism, history and material culture all overlap.

About Set Yet Speaking

I saw public education and outreach as a key part of my work as an academic and I had built a modest Twitter following as a result, sharing interesting etymologies, tidbits and translations. I even did a bit of consultancy, working with York Museums Trust on the re-opening of the Jorvik Viking Centre in 2017. It was translation that I really enjoyed, because that, for me, is how you get audiences to engage with texts and history that might otherwise seem daunting or distant. It brings you into conversation with the past. It is intimate.

Walter Benjamin said the translator’s task ‘is to find the intention toward the language into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original can be awakened.” That word intention is key, especially at a time when big tech has automated language and image making with AI. I think what Benjamin is (in part) talking about in this essay is the importance of the meeting of subjectivities in the act of translation, and in creativity in general. At a time when our lives are becoming depersonalised and mediated by technology, translation can bring us into communion with people from vastly different places, times and societies.

This website will host my own translations, and provide commentaries and occasional blogposts on other topics. It’s a way to keep my linguistic and medieval knowledge sharp, while also, I hope, being a useful resource for students, teachers and anyone with a passing interest in medieval literature. It’s also the case that there aren’t really that many literary journals which publish translations of ancient texts, and the few that did have either folded or taken different editorial directions. I hope that my writing might also spur readers to learn a new language, or try their hand at translation, or indeed at any creative endeavour that involves words.

With Twitter now effectively dead as a worthwhile platform for public outreach, I’ll be mainly be using Bluesky and Instagram to get my work out there. And who knows, I may venture into video at some point.

Beowulf, lines 1687-98a

The name of the website, Set Yet Speaking, comes from a section midway through the Old English epic poem Beowulf, possibly composed around AD 700, though our only existing copy is in a manuscript from about AD 1000. At this point in the narrative, Hrothgar, King of the Danes, examines a sword brought to him by the eponymous hero after his fight with Grendel’s mother. Beowulf nabbed the sword from the monster’s hoard of treasure, and it is ancient even to the legendary figures of the poem, being a relic from before the biblical flood.

There are runes (letters) on the sword and it is unclear whether Hrothgar or Beowulf can read them, a point of deliberate ambiguity. The phrase set yet speaking describes how these rūnstafas (rune letters) are recorded on the cross guard, translating the Old English geseted ond gesǣd, which is perhaps more literally set [down] and said. Here I decided to emphasise the tension between orality and literacy that characterised the period from which the poem emerged, the ‘visible song’ of textual culture as Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe once so evocatively described it.

For reasons that I hope are clear, set yet speaking seemed appropriate for the website.

Translation: