Susan Signe Morrison

Delighted to hear that "Grendel's Mother" won the Words on Wings Book Award for young adult fiction, a Literary Classics Top Honors Award!

Here's my guest post for Sarah Johnson's wonderful blog, Reading the Past, about all things having to do with historical fiction. Enjoy.

Read about my students' amazingly creative games they made, inspired by Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon Culture.

I'm delighted to say that my article on "Six Trailblazing Medieval Women" has appeared on the BBC History Magazine website. My editors at Oxbow Books who publish A Medieval Woman's Companion: Women's Lives in the European Middle Ages arranged this connection. Social media is a great way to  Read More 

My dear colleague, lyric genius Cyrus Cassells, has just published a poem that should appeal to those interested in medieval women. Called “Spring and the Spirit of Saint Joan,” Cyrus’s newest publication appears in the inaugural issue of AMP from Hofstra University.

In that rushing, animate place
where Saint  Read More 

My mother, Joan, wrote about the Unknown Soldier in a poem from late May 1937 when she was 14 years old. You can trace her progress from experience–visiting the statue to an unknown doughboy in World War I as described in her diary–to her creation of a poem in honor of him.

Peter J. Smith, reader in Renaissance literature, Nottingham Trent University, has just finished Susan Signe Morrison’s Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife (Top Hat, 2015). “This retelling of the Anglo-Saxon epic by one of the period’s most renowned scholars is gloomy and powerful in equal measure. Morrison names the  Read More 

I'm delighted to report that Grendel's Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife has been awarded the Seal of Approval from Literary Classics. Here is their review.

"Skillfully penned in a style which flows remarkably well, while masterfully incorporating an old world flair, this book transports readers to medieval Denmark and the fascinating world of Grendel....This book reads well as a stand-alone, but would be an excellent companion piece as a prequel for those seeking greater depth, or an alternate view, of Beowulf. Grendel's Mother is highly recommended for home and school libraries and as a teaching tool for educators. This book has earned the Literary Classics Seal of Approval."

I'm delighted by this review! And the Seal of Approval.
 Read More 

Imagine thousands of medievalists rushing to sessions with titles such as “Fanfiction in Medieval Studies” and “‘Get Ye Flask’: Friars and Uroscopy in Medieval England” (uroscopy being the science of analyzing urine). You can read more about my experiences at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, an annual conference that takes place at  Read More 

Queen Aethelthryth had two chaste marriages. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, “To have one chaste marriage may be regarded as good fortune. To have two chaste marriages looks like calculation.” Read about medieval women inspiring medieval novelists today. Candace Robb's new novel, The Service  Read More