We are pleased to announce the start of the Gersum Project on 18 January 2016, a three-year collaborative research venture in English lexicography, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It is named after the Middle English word gersum, borrowed from Old Norse gørsemi ‘treasure’, and will be the fullest survey ever undertaken of the rich and varied body of English words derived from Old Norse. Its research will result in a fully searchable online catalogue of the up to 1600 different words for which a Norse origin has been suggested, in a corpus of major Middle English poems from the North of England. The project team will be Dr Richard Dance (ASNC) and Dr Sara Pons-Sanz (Cardiff University, and former PhD student in the Department, 2001–4), together with a Research Associate based in ASNC, Dr Brittany Schorn.
Further details about the project can be found here.
