Nigel Frith is an author and lecturer at the Centre of Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Oxford. He is a scholar of epic and pre-modern verse forms and has written numerous novels, plays and works of poetry, many of which are inspired by and concerned with classical and world mythologies. He is also a keen artist, producing acrylic sketches and larger works with subjects ranging from mythological figures to architectural, sculptural, still life and landscape studies, amongst others.
On offer in this website is what Nigel Frith calls “an action-mode for the 21st Century, which avoids the mistakes of the 20th”. With a survey of Frith’s life and works, the traditions he came from and where he took them, the website explains the mode of action he has developed over the last fifty years, which is the opposite of that of the 20th. It is rather part of the British chivalry which exists in the World Wide Web, as founded in 1991 by Sir Tim Berners Lee, a chivalry for all.
The Frith Archive project began with the cataloguing of Nigel Frith’s personal papers as part of a masters dissertation conducted in 2012 by a student at City University, London. The archive includes a range of materials and media relating not only to Frith’s career as an artist, author and educator but also to his personal life and family history. thefritharchive.com has developed out of that initial archival intervention and is designed to explicate Frith’s concept of the Science of Panhistory and the development of his epic narrative Pangaia. It also provides access to a selection of his literary and artistic works including an updated version of Frith’s first published work, ‘Troilus’, and works deriving from Frith’s engagement with pre-modern verse-forms and mythology.
Visitors to thefritharchive.com will find information about Panhistory and the Pangaia sequence in the Pangaia and Panhistory section. Information about Frith’s sculptor forebears can be found in the Frith Family History section and about Frith himself, his publications and public events, in About Nigel Frith.
In the Published and Performed Works section visitors can access full texts of some of Frith’s works and materials relating to them.
In the Artwork section the visitor will find selections of Frith’s sketches and painting through which they are invited to browse. To view large versions of the images in the various galleries the visitor must click on the image, this will take the visitor to an information page for that work where the image must be clicked on again to bring up a full screen version. All works on this website are copyright of Nigel Frith unless otherwise stated.
The Nigel Frith Archive section provides access to the full catalogue of his personal and professional papers as well as Frith’s own introduction to the catalogue, ‘The Expedition into the Disciplines’.
Now, you are invited to take the first step and begin your journey into the heroic world-myth of Pangaia…