Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without the help and support of many individuals and communities. Above all, I am grateful to my doctoral supervisor, Richard Dance, not only for years of invaluable advice, but also for his patience, good humour, and kindness. At the University of Cambridge, I owe a great deal to the wider Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, in particular Judy Quinn (whose feedback when examining my doctoral thesis greatly improved this project), Lesley Abrams, Rosalind Love, and Mark Williams during his time there. Sincere thanks go also to Benjamin Abrams, Tom Adams, Joseph Ashmore, Matthew Birchall, David Callander, Marcus Colla, Caitlin Ellis, Robert Gallagher, Felicity Hill, Paul Sagar, David Winters, and Emmanuela Wroth.

I completed this book while based at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, and have been fortunate to benefit from the wisdom, steady support, and kind encouragement of Peter McCullough and Timothy Michael. A number of other colleagues have also helped and heartened me, and I’m especially grateful to Sarah Bennett, Samantha Ege, George Green, Jody LaPorte, Lydia Matthews, Maryanne Saunders, Andreas Televantos, Gabrielle Watson, and Lucy Wooding. This book has been much improved by many related conversations with Lincoln’s undergraduate and graduate students, and I am deeply thankful for their thoughtful engagement, their patience with my life course obsession, and all their enthusiasm for medieval literature. Elsewhere at the University of Oxford, I am extremely grateful to Helen Moore and Heather O’Donoghue for shaping my approach to medieval texts at an early stage, for supporting and encouraging me throughout the early stages of my career, and for continuously inspiring me as role models. I owe more than I can say to Francis Leneghan, who has been an incredible mentor and friend and without whom this book may well have never made it to print. I am also indebted to my supervisor during my master’s degree, Andy Orchard, for his advice then and in subsequent years. Nicholas Perkins has been a great source of support and encouragement since my graduate days, and my heartfelt thanks go also to Helen Appleton, Caroline Batten, Lucy Brookes, Rachel Burns, Amy Faulkner, Ayoush Lazikani, Hannah Lucas, Daniel Thomas, and Emily Winkler.

Encouragement and guidance from the external examiner of my doctoral thesis, Hugh Magennis, has furthermore been pivotal in improving this project. I am very grateful to Michael Bintley for nurturing and shaping my interest in the life course in Old English poetry in its earliest stages and since, and I would like to also thank Megan Cavell and Richard North for advice on several issues over the course of writing both my doctoral thesis and this book. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Emily Thornbury gave extremely helpful feedback on my thesis during my time as a visiting student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016, and I am grateful especially to Emily for subsequent help and advice as this book took shape. Since 2016, I have also been lucky to benefit from the wisdom, support, and friendship of Amy Clark and Jennifer Lorden, and it is an honour to watch and learn from them. I am much indebted to Mercedes Salvador-Bello for all her advice and encouragement during my time as a visiting researcher at the University of Seville in 2021 and since. For further support and encouragement in this book’s final stages, I am grateful to the community of fixed-term fellows at the Huntington Library in July 2022, especially Richard Ansell. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my collaborator and co-editor of a related volume (Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives), Thijs Porck, for years of much-valued support and advice.

For both encouraging me to write the book and providing a healthy sense of perspective on its importance, I would like to thank my family, especially Geoff and Hazel Soper, Joyce and Eric Soper, Mo and Fred Soper, Audrey and Ian Strachan, and Helen Strachan, as well as Benjamin Dalton, Anna Leszkiewicz, and Nathan Masih-Hanneghan, who all feel like family. For support, encouragement, and inspiration, I am furthermore grateful to Trevor Allinson, Mary Barton, Megan Brown, Ali Clow, Tom Corner, Alexander Coupe, Caroline Hanneghan, Kerry-Anne Hanneghan, Beth Kimber, Julia Long, Edward G. J. Lundy, Hanzla MacDonald, Daniel Masih, Robin Masih-Hanneghan, Joseph McCrudden, Felix Neate, Jacquie Reid, Katie Vann, Mary Walsh, and all those whose names I also should be including here but have overlooked.

My doctoral research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust (2014–17), and for further financial and institutional support I wish to also thank the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge; Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge; Lincoln College, University of Oxford, and the Michael Zilkha Trust; and the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. The lines of poetry which form the epigraphs of Chapters 2 and 4 are reproduced with the kind permission of Bernard O’Donoghue and the literary estate of Sir Geoffrey Hill, and I am grateful also to The Review of English Studies for allowing me to reproduce parts of ‘Reading the Exeter Book Riddles as Life-Writing’ (n.s. 68, 2017: 841–65) in Chapter 1, and to Quaestio Insularis for allowing me to reproduce parts of ‘Eald æfensceop: Poetic Craft and the Authority of the Aged in Old English Verse’ (17, 2016: 74–100) in Chapter 3.

Thank you, finally, to Daniel Wakelin (as series editor) and to Emily Hockley and George Paul Laver at Cambridge University Press for all their support throughout the publication process. The feedback provided by this book’s anonymous readers has been deeply valuable and transformative. In its final stages, this book has also benefited greatly from the keen eyes of Richard Ansell and Harriet Blackman, and from Tanya Izzard’s preparation of the index.