Dr Ruth Johnson

speaker

128 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 25 Jun

Dr Ruth Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Medieval Dublin · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

They started to uh clean it and photograph it and realize that they were actually drawings on this on this object, on this piece of stone.

So I got a call.

I was actually at the flu, but I got a call and I met them in Fallon's pub, which is on the corner, and uh we sat and had a look at this with our torches and tried to read the stone effectively.

Um so it's it's got um scratches on both sides.

It's sort of graffiti type images on both sides.

So on one side in the centre there's what looks like a warrior on horseback.

and on and some letters and on the other side there is um like an ABC, unfinished A B C lettering and another kind of animal or quadruped.

So that sort of set me off embarking on research to see who um this or what these images might just be, these pictographs on this stone and and whether it we could identify

by who the subject matter is, the mounted warrior.

Yeah, well I suppose what was challenging about this object was that it is it's very naive and a very naive piece of art, I suppose.

So it's not kind of fine art art for art's sake.

Um so obviously that is a challenge first and foremost, but the date of the site and the context of the find um made it

um difficult to know where to start looking for

um art historical parallels because I suppose you would expect on a Hyberdo North Street to have um insular and Scandinavian parallels for the artwork.

Um so I started off really looking at insular and Scandinavian parallels and of course the the animal with the rider on one side is has a bit of a wolfy look about it.

It's got like pointy teeth and big ears and it and it looks a bit wolfy.

So a l and also there's two birds um associated with that figure and that composition.

And of course in Scandinavian myths and legends, the god Odin was accompanied by two ravens, Hugginamun in ho and thought and memory, who travelled around the world and they brought him back stories about what was going on.

Um and Odin but Odin famously only had one eye, whereas our figure has two eyes and obviously it would be n really exciting if this was a wolf and this was a depiction of Odin and Fenrir the wolf on Ragnarok.

having a battle at the end of the world and that the animal the birds were hoogging and munin.

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