The Wanderer Anglo Saxon History, mythology, Folklore and religion

On 25 September 1066, King Harold Godwinson won a crushing Anglo Saxon victory at Stamford Bridge, destroying the invading Norwegian army of Harald Hardrada and Harold’s own brother Tostig just days before the Norman landing at Hastings. Harold’s army had marched roughly 185 miles north in under a week, catching the Vikings by surprise as many were camped east of the River Derwent without their armour on a hot day.  The English surged across (and around) the bridge, broke the Norwegian line, and drove them back toward their ships in a bloody rout in which both Hardrada and Tostig were killed. Contemporary chronicles stress the ferocity and the scale of the slaughter, of around 300 ships that had brought the invaders, only about 20 25 were needed to carry the survivors home.  One famous passage even describes a lone Norwegian holding the bridge against the English until he was speared from below, allowing Harold’s men to pour across and finish the battle. Stamford Bridge ended the last serious Viking attempt to conquer England and secured the north for Harold but at heavy cost.  

THE ANGLO SAXON ERA IS BEING CANCELLEDHave we finally lost our minds? It seems that in the ivory towers of our ‘elite’ universities, history is no longer about facts, evidence, or heritage. It’s about how much of our past we can erase to avoid hurting feelings.I’m talking about the systematic, bizarre, and frankly insulting campaign to scrub the term ‘Anglo Saxon’ from our curriculum. Yes, you heard that right. Over a thousand years of English foundation, the very bedrock of our language, law, and identity being rebranded, sanitised, and pushed into the memory hole because some academics think it sounds a bit too... ‘white.’Today, we’re looking at the institutional madness taking over Nottingham and Cambridge, and why they’re desperate to convince you that your own history is just a ‘myth.’"

Nova Anglia, or “New England,” is a medieval tradition about Anglo Saxon exiles who left England after the Norman Conquest and founded a new homeland in the east, placed near the Black Sea or in Crimea. The story survives in later historical references and modern retellings, but it is generally treated as an evidenced episode.The basic idea is that some displaced Anglo Saxon nobles and warriors, rather than accepting Norman rule, carried their identity, customs, and perhaps their loyalty to an English political order into foreign lands. In that sense, Nova Anglia functions as both a migration story and a memory of lost sovereignty: Englishmen building an “England” elsewhere after their own had been conquered.What makes the tale interesting is that it sits at the edge of history and legend. Some accounts describe the settlers as creating a community with English names and institutions, So the story is best understood as a medieval exile narrative with a possible historical core.It also fits a wider medieval pattern: defeated elites sometimes imagined or attempted new beginnings in distant places, especially where there was room to settle and a political vacuum to exploit. Nova Anglia therefore matters not only as a curiosity, but as a window into how the Anglo Saxons may have understood loss, identity, and survival after 1066.

Today, we’re walking into an Anglo-Saxon mead hall to meet the storytellers of early medieval England – the men whose voices carried heroes, monsters, and memories through the centuries.The scop is part historian, part musician, part memory-keeper. He’s expected to know lineages of kings, famous battles, past victories, and the deeds of long-dead warriors. In a largely non-literate society, that knowledge isn’t in books; it’s in his head, shaped into verses that people can remember.And importantly, he isn’t the only one telling tales. Away from the great halls, families share shorter stories around the hearth at home. In these cottages and farmhouses, storytelling is more communal: anyone might sing a song, repeat a local legend, or pass on a favourite tale to children half-asleep by the fire.

The Anglo Saxons lived beneath skies they did not trust. To them, the heavens were alive capable of movement, intention, and warning. Night skies were darker than anything we experience today, and people watched them closely, not for wonder alone, but for survival. What appeared above was believed to speak, and sometimes to threaten.Their records contain unsettling descriptions that resist easy explanation. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle speaks of “fiery dragons flying in the air,” of strange lights that moved across the sky, and of glowing shapes that appeared before moments of catastrophe. In 793, just before the Viking attack on Lindisfarne, witnesses reported terrifying aerial phenomena flames, lights, and shapes in the heavens events described not as symbols but as things seen. The timing disturbed them deeply. The sky, it seemed, was watching.Other accounts describe crosses of light hovering in the air, radiant shields appearing above battlefields, and luminous objects that drifted, burned, or vanished without sound. These were not stars. They moved. They lingered. They returned. Medieval writers struggled to name them, reaching for the closest language they had: dragons, angels, heavenly armies, signs from God. But the descriptions themselves feel observational like people trying to make sense of something genuinely unfamiliar.The Anglo Saxons did not separate the natural from the supernatural. A strange light was not merely a phenomenon; it was an intrusion. Something crossing from one realm into another. Their older Germanic beliefs had spoken of otherworldly beings moving between skies and earth, while Christian theology reframed these encounters as divine or demonic. Yet in both systems, the experience remained the same: something unknown appeared, moved with purpose, and then was gone.Modern readers sometimes wonder whether these accounts hint at misunderstood natural events meteors, auroras, rare electrical phenomena. But some details are awkward for those explanations: the repeated sightings, the apparent maneuvering, the sense of presence, the way observers reacted with fear rather than awe. The texts give the impression that these were not passive lights but active signs, watching rather than simply passing through.What is most unsettling is not what the Anglo Saxons believed these things were, but how calmly they recorded them. They did not ask if such things existed only what they meant. The sky was not empty, and it was not safe. Whatever these lights and shapes truly were, they left a deep impression on a people who believed they were living at the edge of unseen worlds.Seen through a modern lens, these accounts raise an uncomfortable possibility: that encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena did not begin in the twentieth century, but have followed humanity for centuries changing names, forms, and meanings as cultures changed, yet always appearing just beyond understanding.