Greetings and welcome to Finnston! Finnston is old Norse for "Finnr's Place", Finnr Grimulfsson being the name I use when I am reenacting the Viking age. My name is James Howell and this is my Longhouse on the web. I hope that you will find some interesting information here about me, about my hobbies, and about some of the individuals and groups that I work with either professionally or personally.

As I said, I reenact the Viking age, approximately A.D. 950, on the Isle of Man, an island just about square in the center of the Irish Sea. I do this through a number of venues. The Society for Creative Anachronism is an international organization that studies European culture prior to 1600. I "play" in the College of Yarnvid, Barony of Caer Mear, Kingdom of Atlantia. Markland is a similar but smaller group, covering the area from Virginia to New York and west to Ohio. I join their Ostvik Viking group at Military Through the Ages, a reenactment competition at Jamestown, Va. every spring, and I also am a member of the Longship Company, which owns and operates two reproductions of Norse boats in the Virginia/Maryland area, Manx Camp, which I created and am Camp Coordinator for, is a reenactment group that attempts to demonstrate through living history presentations what life was like for the Celto-Norse society that evolved on the Isle of Man in the 800s A.D.

As a Norse reenactor, one of my interests is runes and runic inscriptions. I taught a class on the subject at Atlantian University, the text of which can be found here.