Emeritus Professor Christine Elizabeth Fell, O.B.E., M.A. F.R.Hist.S.

chrChris Fell was born on 23 February 1938 in Louth, Lincolnshire, and went to school there. She read English at Royal Holloway College, graduating with first-class honours in 1959 and going on to take an M.A. in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at University College, London. A year was then spent in Copenhagen working on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and her thesis, a critical edition of the Icelandic text, Dunstanus Saga, was published in 1963. Fell lectured at Ripon Training College from 1961 until 1963, when she moved to Aberdeen University as assistant lecturer, and then to Leeds as lecturer from 1965 to 1971. Thereafter her career was spent in the English Department at Nottingham University, being appointed Professor of Early English Studies in 1981, Head of the Department of English 1990-3 and first Director of the Humanities Research Centre in 1994, until retirement in 1997. Fell was a dedicated teacher, but her instruction was not confined to the lecture hall. She taught Old and Middle English and Old Norse, meagre subjects to the uninitiated but enlivened for her students by regular visits to libraries and museums to coordinate the study of manuscripts and objects, by field trips toViking settlements and by visits from the Scandinavian philologists and archaeologists with whom Fell kept in close contact. She was, perhaps, fortunate to follow in the footsteps of her friend, R. I. Page, who had spent the first ten years of his career at Nottingham, engaged in pioneering research into runology; and of Kenneth Cameron, a former Head of the English Department whose work on English place-names was exceptional. Faithfully, Fell consolidated and expanded the foundations they had laid, winning a `new blood’ lectureship in Viking Studies for the university in 1985 and initiating a five-year Leverhulme research project in 1992, A Survey of the Language of English Place-Names, which continues and is now funded by the British Academy. Her publications include an edition of Edward King and Martyr (1971), a translation of Egils Saga (1975) and a scholarly, but highly readable, original work, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (1984). Fell’s faculty for making difficult subjects accessible and enjoyable without devaluing them enabled her to compile the soundtrack, in both Old English and Old Norse, for the award-winning Jorvik Viking Centre in York, and to write its two best-selling pamphlets, Jorvikinga Saga and Toki in Jorvik! bought by millions of visitors over the years. She, and several (anonymous) academic colleagues recorded the soundtrack and her young nieces and their schoolfriends sang fragments of old ballads. A strong supporter of the Viking Congress since her first attendance at a meeting in York in 1961, Fell was a member of the English committee and helped to secure Nottingham as the venue for the 1997 congress, sadly her last. The Viking Society for Northern Research also benefited from her energy and enthusiasm; she served it in turn as council member, joint editor and president. Recognition of her contribution to Icelandic studies was the award, in 1991, of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon and, shortly before her death, she was appointed O.B.E. for her work in Early English studies.An able administrator, Fell was Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Nottingham University from 1985-9 with particular responsibility for student affairs when many young people, especially those from overseas, benefited from her warm friendship and practical advice. She served as a committee member, and later chair, of the Academic Awards Committee of the British Federation of University Women from 1986 and Convenor of the Women in Higher Education Network from 1989. She died in York, aged sixty, on 2 July 1998.