Michael Swanton

Michael James Swanton (born 1939) is a British historian, linguist, archaeologist and literary critic, specialising in the Anglo-Saxon period and its Old English literature.

Disadvantaged, he failed the Eleven-plus, but was educated at a Modern, a Technical and then a Grammar school in South London.

In 1975 he founded the Exeter Medieval Texts & Studies series (seventy-nine titles to 2020).

[3] Swanton’s own scholarly publications included translations of Beowulf, the Gesta Herewardi (a life of Hereward the Wake), the Vitae duorum Offarum (The Lives of Two Offas), and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,[3] as well as books on early English literature, art, architecture, and archaeology.

In 1965, at Richmond upon Thames, Swanton married Averil Birch,[4] who had also been chairman of the Durham University students' council, and they had three children: Oliver, Alexander & Richard.