As anyone who's written a doctoral dissertation knows, the pain is not in filling it up, but cutting it down. I've recently been rummaging about the "cutting room floor" for some of the research I did for my Ph.D. dissertation but that did not actually appear in the submitted version.

In the following pieces, the observant will notice that there are a few footnotes picked out in underlined bold text, littered with question marks, and/or simply missing; these are references I never quite finished chasing up or nailing down the details of! But this is the internet, and I can publish new versions whenever I get around to it, so maybe I will ... someday! :)

Scandinavian Day Names

First up is a short piece on Scandinavian Day Names, which is basically a hastily "articlized" version of a talk I gave at Kalamazoo in 2000 (meaning I took some tables and stuff from the obligatory handout that went with the talk and chucked them into the text and footnotes). The main thrust of the piece is that although there's not enough evidence to show when the 7-day week and planetary day-names entered Scandinavian usage, there's no reason it couldn't have been around the 4th century AD (as opposed to in the Viking Age, as some scholars have maintained).

Origin of the Runic System

In an even rawer form (but such good fun that I've put it here anyway) is what was intended to be a dissertation chapter titled The Runic System as a Reinterpretation of Classical Influences and as an Expression of Scandinavian Cultural Affiliation. Gotta love thesis-speak titles .... The PDF file is just named "Runes_and_Reinterpretation.pdf" :) Anyway, this still claims to be "Chapter 4" (!) and occasionally references parts of the thesis which are probably in completely different places (if they even made it to the final version at all!) and some footnotes are just ... not there! Ah well, I could still polish it up :)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.