Broadcasting

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is steeped in Viking lore. She travels through the icy landscapes of the Far North in the footsteps of those Norse “far travellers” who have left us their wonderful poetic stories of kings and trolls and dragons. She’s an Associate Professor at Durham University and an AHRC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, and her fieldwork has taken her pretty much everywhere the Vikings went: through Greenland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and Orkney. Recently she went to stay on the Arctic island of Svalbard, where in 24-hour darkness she encountered a family of polar bears. 

Eleanor Barraclough’s music list full of snow and ice – glittering, shimmering music – from the Norwegian composer Frode Fjellheim and Sibelius’s 5th Symphony, through Eriks Esenvalds’ “Northern Lights”, to Martin Carthy, singing “Lady Franklin’s Lament”. She ends with music by Geoffrey Burgon that will resonate with anyone growing up at the end of the last century: the theme tune to the BBC dramatization of Narnia.

Michael Rosen discovers how the Vikings changed English. These invaders brought with them the words knife, gun, slaughter, ransack and anger. But then they settled, using their anger, verbs and great hair to transform our grammar, and our understanding of the landscape. With author Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and historical linguist Laura Wright.

For Christmas Day, Sheila celebrates The Wild Boar Feast – an ancient Viking tradition which still lingers on in Britain (think of ‘pigs in blankets’) and inspires our love of the Christmas Ham. Historian Eleanor Barraclough introduces Sheila to a stuffed boar’s head in the cellars of Queen’s College, Oxford, and explains about how the boar was at the centre of mid-winter pagan fertility rituals. In Cumbria, Sheila meets a field of wild boar and talks to farmer Peter Gott about the fearsome intelligence of his huge beasts. Scandinavian chef Trine Hahnemann reveals the huge importance of the Christmas boar in Sweden, and how to make a meatball sandwich for Boxing Day. And chef Giorgio Locatelli explores the passion for wild boar across Italy. With music from The Boar’s Head Carol, the oldest printed carol in English, and recipes from Trine Hahnemann and Giorgio Locatelli.

“We need authentic female role models to look up to.” We asked inspirational women what moment changed them the most this past year.

Norse Mythology and Marvel Comics

What do The Mask, Thor and The Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage To The Waters Of The Great Sea Serpent have in common? And what has this all got to do with Richard Wagner? Norse mythology expert Eleanor Barraclough explains all.

Jordskott Review

Beowulf

Vikings at the British Museum

Nordic Noir and the Sagas. New Generation thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is a specialist in Old Norse Literature at Oxford University. She’s just returned from Denmark where she has been studying original manuscripts of Icelandic Sagas – dark tales of murder and mayhem. Eleanor is also an addict of Scandinavian TV crime dramas like The Killing and The Bridge and in her first piece for Night Waves she reflects on the possible relationship between Nordic Noir TV and Old Norse Tales.

Icelandic Culture Discussion

As the Iceland Symphony Orchestra appear at the Proms, Radio 3’s New Generation Thinker and expert in Nordic sagas Eleanor Rosamond Barraclough joins novelist Joanna Kavenna to discuss Icelandic culture.

Their conversation will range from trolls and the myth of Thule to Nordic Noir, from the 19th century British visitors who included William Morris and Anthony Trollope to modern poets Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage.

Tove Jansson Review

A review of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tove Jansson exhibition, to celebrate the centenary of the Finnish artist and author’s birth.

Music inspired by the natural elements forms the second half the programme; a sea crossing to the Faroe Islands is painted by Nielsen, the nymphs in Greek mythology who inhabit the Mediterranean Sea appear in Sibelius’s Oceanides, and the dynamic weather of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Orkney home inspires his chilly Ebb of Winter. In an all Danish first half, Jakob Kullberg joins the orchestra for Between, Per Norgard’s cello concerto and the programme opens with Gade’s dark Hamlet Overture.

Beyond the Northlands

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough has published Beyond The Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. She was selected as one of the New Generation Thinkers in 2013 in a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which works with academics who want to turn their research into radio.

Dragons

As the second of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films, The Desolation of Smaug, hits big screens all over the country, we celebrate the Dragon of the North in myth and literature. Unlike its Chinese counterpart, western dragons signal trouble from their origins at the bottom of the Norseman’s world to their place atop piles of treasure in Old English Beowulf and J R R Tolkien. Norse and Anglo-Saxon expert and New Generation Thinker Eleanor Barraclough and John Lennard, literature and fantasy scholar, join forces to guide Matthew through a maze of dragons, drakes, worms and were-dragons to discover what is old about the monster and what has been added by modernity and especially modern warfare.

Illuminating York

It is a thousand years since King Sweyn ‘Forkbeard’ of Denmark was named king of England in 1013 and the Illuminating York Festival is marking the city’s Viking history with an artwork in the form of a Son et Lumiere based around Old Nordic and Anglo Saxon texts. Eleanor Barraclough, Radio 3 New Generation Thinker and lecturer in medieval literature at Durham University, has had a sneak preview.

Loki

Author Joanne Harris and Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough discuss the god Loki and the power of Norse mythology. Recorded at the Free Thinking Festival for the Northern Lights season.