On this part of the site you can find out about our collaborations with creative practitioners and local communities, bringing the story of King Oswald’s Raven to life for new audiences.
Our creative project started way back in 2019, but was severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Unable to develop our plans to collaborate with local communities, we instead developed a digital animation for a primary-school-aged audience. King Oswald’s Raven launched as part of the Being Human Festival in November 2020, alongside a series of creative activity videos and some short films about Oswald, his German legends and the medieval manuscript that inspired the visual appearance of the animation.
In late 2022, Johanna Dale and Sarah Bowden were awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which included seed funding for creative activities, initiating a new phase of collaboration between cultural historians, creative practitioners and local communities. So far, we have run pilot workshops in two secondary schools in Peterborough (City of Peterborough Academy and Hampton Gardens School) and we are currently further developing our plans in cooperation with a number of local and regional stakeholders.
Oswald’s story has been rewritten time and time again, from seventh-century northern England to seventeenth-century northern Italy. He provides the ideal figure through which we can explore writing and rewriting, to create new stories to serve communities today.
Dr Johanna Dale
Oswald of Northumbria 