I have a really long standing interest in British and Irish history during what some (controversially) still call the Dark Ages. I would actually defend that term, although we more correctly speak of post-Roman and Early Medieval periods. Partly this was a question of my growing up in South Wales, but I was also a huge fan of the historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff, and that reinforced my Arthurian interests. I did my undergraduate degree at Cambridge in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and I chose my Mastermind subjects on related themes.
The Dark Ages and me now go back some fifty-plus years, so we are old friends.
I continue to keep watch on developments in that general field, and some of the archaeological discoveries of recent years have been stunning. I offer here a Working Bibliography, including many works I agree with, and some I don’t.
I continue to blog quite frequently on these matters, and I include a sizable number of the blogs I have done at the Anxious Bench site over the past decade or so. This is a large document, which covers a great many topics, but you can navigate your way around it by using the comprehensive catalog of blogs here. The virtue of the pdf document, of course, is that once you download, it, it is fully searchable.
You will also find a journal article that I published on this era.
This next item is not actually an unpublished paper: there is a story here. The article is titled “Maurice, Son of Theodoric: Welsh Kings and the Mediterranean World, 550-650AD,” and it appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, namely the North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 8(2013), at http://welshstudiesjournal.org/article/view/34. That is now, however, a dead link. The journal, appears to be extinct, as is the website: see the explanation at https://welshstudiesjournal.org/latest-news/. Hence my decision to present the “Maurice” article here, to preserve it and make it available.