Maren McKenna

I only mention this because it actually plays into the story.

Well, it was a really nice sort of coincidence, really.

2012.

A few years after finishing her doctorate, Freya goes off to work at the University of Nottingham.

Nottingham's one of the places in the UK, not only for microbiology, but for Anglo-Saxon and Viking history.

And she goes there to study microbes, but she figures, hey, why not, while I'm here, brush up on my old English?

I'd studied some old English to a level where I could sort of read and...

and speak a little bit.

But she figured, hey, she could be better, and if she did, she would get deeper into the whole reenactment thing.

So I rather cheekily emailed the School of English's Old English Reading Group.

That's where she met Christina.

Yes!

The historian.

At one point, Christina, the historian, asks Freya, like, what do you do?

And Freya said, you know, my day job is that I'm a microbiologist, but on evenings and weekends, I'm...

history nerd and Christina said the moment she heard that I just kind of thought I found my kindred spirit here because she was like wow I'm like your mirror image because I'm a historian by day but by night I'm a microbiology nerd I've been interested in infectious disease for quite a long time which I'm

I don't find any kind of friends in my department.

She told me she's the kind of person who would, you know, watch Ebola coverage on the news and not be able to stop watching.

So eventually they start talking about historical diseases.

So, like, how would people back then have treated something like, you know, Ebola?