Archiving Voices: Bill Griffiths’ Creative, Scholarly and Activist Practices with the Old English <i>Phoenix</i> in Seaham

Abstract Bill Griffiths (1948–2007) was a poet, publisher, activist and researcher of languages and local history whose work is beginning to attract more attention. Although the immensity and importance of Griffiths’ diverse, multiform and multimedia archive—and the task of studying it critically—is becoming more visible in the academy, what made him such a unique artist, and what criticism perhaps finds difficult to correlate, are the ways his scholarly training in Old English language and literature (pursued independently, but also at and with universities) consistently informed, and even fused with, his creative and activist endeavours. This essay begins with the fire that burned Griffiths’ houseboat-archive, Amra, in the late 1980s, tracing his work and movements in the aftermath and then through his years in Seaham in North East England. It does this by focusing on an Old English poem Griffiths translated and retranslated over many years, the Old English Phoenix. Burned drafts and fragments of Griffiths’ work with this poem, which mark a significant turning point in his creative and critical practices, survive in his archive at Brunel. Reading Griffiths’ work on this poem alongside his local activism in Seaham, we see how the early medieval period offered him not only consolation in the aftermath of losing his home, but also the creative inspiration for new kinds of poetry, resistance and research in place.