I went to a talk on Anglo Saxon manuscripts today. According to the lecturer, when you find a duck in a document, it means you should pay attention to the text (and not stand around quacking).

I don’t know. I looked at a lot of ducks in manuscripts and it seems to me the common theme is “mmmm…duck!”

I also learned that any figure with three rays coming out of his head is always Jesus.

And Anglo Saxon women were allowed to take any job but priest or mayor. A woman was allowed to divorce, and she got half his stuff and the children – but if she decided later she didn’t want the children, she could send them back. (A lot of this feminist stuff disappeared after the Conquest, not to return for 600 years).

And finally, Harald Bluetooth was a 10th C king of Norway and Denmark. In 1997, a team member who’d been reading a historical novel about Vikings chose it as a temporary name for a short-range wireless project. It stuck. The Bluetooth logo is Harald’s initials in Viking runes.