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Lynne Grundy was researcher and lecturer at the University of London from 1988 to 1997 when she died. An inspiring teacher and rigorous scholar, she is much missed and the Trust was established with help from her students, colleagues and friends not only to commemorate her life, but in some way to continue her work, and to contribute to the future of AngloSaxon studies and Humanities Computing.
The aim of the registered charitable trust is to support scholars and students (without permanent full-time posts or adequate funding) in specific projects that would help them to achieve long-term goals. In 1991, Lynne herself was awarded a grant to attend a conference in Long Island, where she made contacts and found encouragement and support that made an enormous difference to her career, and this was the inspiration for the Trust.
The Trust was intended to fill a gap for scholars without permanent full-time posts or adequate support, to give the necessary boost at the right time.
So far the Trust has made ; it has supported a one-man show of Beowulf at the the Edinburgh Festival, helped to safeguard AngloSaxon monuments from bull-dozers, funded a new way of digitising narrative structure in the conservation of verbal art texts, helped scholars to get their books camera-ready, illustrated, and published, supported the teaching of Old English in Hungarian universities, and new translations of texts for new audiences, and has funded a lot of really ground-breaking research that makes a difference not only to the scholars themselves, but to the whole discipline.
The Trust has also supported many students in real financial hardship struggling to finish a thesis while waiting tables, working in betting shops, nursing and cleaning. Many awards have given the last push necessary to complete four or five years' work and finally achieve the PhD.
As well as the actual money, the Trust gives every award winner a presentation copy of Lynne's own Books and Grace and the memorial volume of Essays on AngloSaxon Themes published by KCLMS. Both these volumes were donated to the Trust by the board of KCLMS in memory of Lynne.
The Trust is run on a completely voluntary basis, supported by colleagues, friends and family, and by regular annual donations from the International Society of AngloSaxonists and the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland.
2007 was the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Trust, and an appeal year to raise funds for a very special tenth year of awards in 2008, and to continue the increasingly vital work of the Trust for another decade.
The 2008 awards will be made in May and will be posted here as soon as award winners have been notified.
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