Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia [21] 9781783275199

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IMAGINING ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

BOYDELL STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE ISSN 2045–4902 Series Editors Professor Julian Luxford Professor Asa Simon Mittman This series aims to provide a forum for debate on the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. It will cover all media, from manuscript illuminations to maps, tapestries, carvings, wall-paintings and stained glass, and all periods and regions, including Byzantine art. Both traditional and more theoretical approaches to the subject are welcome Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below Professor Julian Luxford, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, 79 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, UK Professor Asa Simon Mittman, Department of Art and Art History, California State University at Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0820, USA Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

IMAGINING ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND UTOPIA, HETEROTOPIA, DYSTOPIA Catherine E. Karkov

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Catherine E. Karkov 2020 The right of Catherine E. Karkov to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2020 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 519 9 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction

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1 A Plan for Utopia to Come

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2 Utopia Past and the Heterotopia of Origins

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3 Utopia/Dystopia: Humanity and its Others in the



4 Retrotopia: Anglo-Saxonism, Anglo-Saxonists, and the

Beowulf Manuscript Myth of Origins

125 195

Bibliography 240 263 Index

ILLUSTRATIONS



1 Anglo-Saxon world map. London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v, fol. 56v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. 2 The Franks Casket, front panel. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum. 3 The Franks Casket, lid. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum. 4 The Franks Casket, back panel. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum. 5 The Franks Casket, left side panel. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum. 6 The Franks Casket, right side panel. Reproduced by permission of Asa Simon Mittman and by permission of del Ministero per i beni e le attivitá culturali – Museo Nazionale del Bargello. 7 Donestre, The Wonders of the East. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 103v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. 8 Blemmye, The Wonders of the East. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 102v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. 9 Boar-tusked woman, The Wonders of the East. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 105v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. 10 Boar-tusked woman, The Wonders of the East. London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v, fol. 85r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.

71 78 78 78 79

79 142 146 147 149

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ILLUSTRATIONS

11 Conopenas, The Wonders of the East. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 100r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.

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The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of this book was written during a year of research leave from the University of Leeds. For that time away from teaching duties I would like to thank the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, and our Research Director Gail Day. For their helpful discussions of ideas or overall general support I thank Meg Boulton, Barbara Engh, Martin Foys, Johanna Green, Chris Jones, Gesner Las Casas Brito Filho, Clare Lees, Francis Leneghan, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Ian Riddler, Catalin Taranu, Simon Thomson, Elaine Treharne, and especially John Mowitt who read and commented on large sections of this book. For stimulating discussions about ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and Medieval Studies, the language we use, and the need to change the field, I am thankful to Roland Betancourt, Seeta Chaganti, Catherine Clarke, Denis Ferhatović, Jonathan Hsy, Esther Kim, Anna Klosowska, Kathryn Maude, Adam Miyashiro, and Vincent van Gerven Oei. For sharing their unpublished work with me I thank Josh Davies, Mary Rambaran-Olm, Eric Wade, and especially Donna Beth Ellard. As always, it has been a great pleasure to work with Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer, and I thank her and the series editors Asa Simon Mittman and Julian Luxford for their help and encouragement, and the anonymous readers for their perceptive and inspiring comments. Finally, I thank Boris who oversaw every word, and Natasha who remains completely unimpressed by the whole thing. Any errors that remain are of course my own.

INTRODUCTION

A ‘

nglo-Saxon’ England has always been an imaginary place.1 The Romans called the island Britannia based on the Brittonic Priden, modern Welsh Prydain, and the Angles and the Saxons were but two of the Germanic peoples that settled on the island in the years during and after the departure of the Romans. The nation and the people to which they gave their name were from the start comprised of multiple ethnic identities and maintained a number of differing political and cultural allegiances. Most notably there were the Britons who had occupied the land long before the arrival of the Romans, as well as the Picts and eventually the Scots, but also the descendants of the Romans and those of other ethnicities who had come to Britannia when it was part of the Roman Empire. There were other Germanic peoples such as the Franks and the Jutes who settled on the island at the same time as the Angles and Saxons, and there were the later invaders, settlers, and conquerors: the Danes, Norwegians, and Normans, and people from beyond the Continent.2 In time they all came to be known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons, whether during the historical period (ca. 500–1100) that now bears that name or over the course of the centuries as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came to be applied more broadly to anyone of English, British, or Germanic descent, and especially an English speaker.3 Anglo-Saxon England was a construct of the leaders and educated elite of the people who lived in England prior to the 1 The canonical text on imagined communities is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, rev. edn, 1983). While I will cite his study in the chapters that follow, my focus is not so much on the global processes of colonial politics with which he is concerned as on the differing natures of a single place as it was imagined and reimagined at specific moments in history and the implication of that for the study of England past and present. 2 On the ethnic diversity of the island in the post-Roman period see Susan Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the English (Leeds, 2019), who describes the term ‘AngloSaxon’ as ‘a chimera that shimmers into invisibility as one approaches it’ (p. 4). 3 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

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conquest of 1066, but it was continued and expanded by the Normans and their successors. What constitutes an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity continues to be imagined and reimagined today, often in violent, nationalist, and racist ways. While acknowledging its problematic nature, I retain the term Anglo-Saxon throughout this book because I am talking about an imagined place that was and is home to a specific type of identity, and about the ways in which this place and its inhabitants were reimagined from the sixth to the twenty-first century. I argue that Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating signifier. In doing so I explore a history to which some in the field still cling tenaciously. Disciplinary melancholy may be the reason, or at least one of the reasons, that scholars of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England find it so hard to let the term go. I acknowledge that I have been guilty of using the term uncritically in the past, accepting it as the name of a discipline and a period that were part of an academic tradition and institutional structure that kept them objectified. I ignored much of the history of the field because it was in the past, which was admittedly hypocritical as I was arguing at the same time that the people of Anglo-Saxon England used their art to create a semi-sacred image of themselves,4 a portrait genre for their rulers that projected them as authors of a particular image of a nation,5 and that, subject to waves of colonisation, early medieval England was a postcolonial nation that extended into the modern world.6 The Continental incomers created for themselves a powerful and enduring set of origin legends well known to those who study the period. Chief amongst these was the exodus myth, which cast their conquest of the island as a migration, a retelling of the biblical Exodus with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as a chosen people and Britain as a promised land, a living paradise that was a mirror of the earthly paradise.7 The story encrypts the violent colonisation of the island and displacement of the Britons, Scots, and others, by projecting them into another time and place and reimagining them as, if not entirely peaceful, certainly 4 Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001). 5 Catherine E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2004). 6 Catherine E. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2011). 7 Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven, 1999). The idea of Britain as a sort of paradise appears first in Gildas, De excidio Britonum, in which Britannia is a fallen bride or paradise. Gildas, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London, 1978).

INTRODUCTION

divinely sanctioned processes. This is reflected in the description of the island with which Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica begins,8 and by the embedding of a Christian paradisiacal identity into the pre-Christian landscape through place-names such as Heavenfield,9 site of the 633–34 battle in which Oswald of Northumbria defeated Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Bede’s description of the island is based on the earlier descriptions of Gildas, Orosius, Solinus, and Pliny, but it contains enough detail and elements observed in the landscape to make it entirely familiar to an eighth-century reader. Bede’s combination of idealising and closely observed documentation would go on to become a characteristic ploy of settler colonialism in the modern world, in which the settler’s wealth is constituted by land and the richness or variety of its abundant resources and production.10 The idea of Britain as a type of earthly paradise was also materialised in art through such phenomenon as the sculpted and painted high crosses, many of them decorated with vine-scrolls and other floral or foliate motifs that covered much of the early landscape, especially in the north,11 and in the eleventh-century Cotton mappa mundi (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.5, fol. 56v; fig. 1) on which the island of Britain is located at one end of the earth and the island of Taprobane (modern Sri Lanka), an island full of wonders, is located at the other.12 While the idea that Britain was located at the edge of the known world gave it a seemingly marginal position, the early medieval English and their successors turned this position into one of power by equating marginality with exceptionalism. At the edges of 8 ‘The island is rich in crops and trees, and has good pasturage for cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in certain districts, and has plenty of both landand waterfowl of various kinds. It is remarkable too for its rivers, which abound in fish, particularly salmon and eels, and for copious springs.’ (‘Opima frugibus atque arboribus insula, et alendis apta pecoribus ac iumentis, uineas etiam quibusdam in locis germinans, sed et auium ferax terra marique generis diuersi, fluuiis quoque multum piscosis ac fontibus praeclara copiosis; et quidem praecipue issicio abundat et anguilla.’) Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), i.1, pp. 14–15 [hereafter HE].) 9 HE, iii.2, p. 217; Uppinder Mehan and David Townsend, ‘“Nation” and the Gaze of the Other in Eighth-Century Northumbria’, Comparative Literature 53.1 (2001): 1–26, at 12. 10 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (2012): 1–40, at 6. 11 Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Fallen Angels and the Island Paradise’, in Origin Legends in Medieval Europe, ed. Lindy Brady and Patrick Wadden (Leiden, forthcoming). 12 Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 290. Connections between the two islands have a long history. Chrysippus the Stoic (280–208 BCE) had compared them in size, while the English science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke made Taprobane the site of the sky elevator in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise.

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the known world the island hovered in a liminal space on the border between the known and the unknown, this world and another world. It was an exceptional place, and its place mattered to its inhabitants to an exceptional degree. Kathy Lavezzo has observed that: Built into the myth of a sublime English frontier was a related imperial dream. If their otherworldliness made the English exceptional, their exceptionalism might also suggest how the English should be the rightful masters of the earth itself. The exaltation of the English world margin, in other words, could authorize the expansion of England beyond its borders in the world.13

Lavezzo is writing here of an idea that was only manifested on a global stage well after the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period, but the idea itself can be traced back to the way the English represented themselves from at least the eighth century. The island, its people, and its language were consistently represented as unique in relation to the geography, inhabitants, and languages of the rest of the world. Their wars, when they occurred, were just wars, their migration a justified and relatively peaceful settlement. But there is no colonial settlement without racial or ethnic violence, and the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Britons was the start of a long history of colonial-inspired violence. The special nature of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ themselves begins in seventh- or eighth-century Northumbria with the story of Pope Gregory the Great encountering a group of Deiran boys in the Roman market, recorded in both the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory the Great and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. Struck by their beauty Gregory asks the boys who they are, and when they reply that they are Angli he famously makes a play between Angli and the Latin angeli. They are angels: ‘“Good”, he said, “they have the face of angels, and such men should be fellow-heirs of the angels in heaven”.’14 Like the island, its inhabitants are fallen yet also worthy inhabitants of paradise. In time, the Angli and the place they inhabited would become one and the same. The exceptional place of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England and the later medieval authors and artists who wrote about, mapped, and 13 Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), p. 21. 14 ‘At ille: “Bene” inquit; “nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse coheredes”.’ HE, ii,1, pp. 134–5. For the Whitby version see Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 90–1. In the Whitby text Gregory’s response to the boys telling him that they are Angli is to identify them explicitly as angels of God (Angeli Dei).

INTRODUCTION

represented it have been explored in some detail, most notably by Kathy Lavezzo and Lynn Staley.15 What I will be exploring in this book is the way in which the early medieval English both recognised and possibly even critiqued the fallen and flawed nature of their exceptionalism and their living paradise at the same time that they were constructing it and believed in it, or at least appeared to do so, and at the same time that they encrypted the violence that resulted from their idea of exceptionalism. In a succinct summary of the psychoanalytical concept of the crypt Gabriele Schwab writes, ‘Designed to circumvent mourning, a crypt buries a lost person or object or even a disavowed part of one’s self or one’s history, while keeping it psychically alive’.16 That the crypt is both transhistorical and a psychic phenomenon that can be experienced by nations and peoples as well as individuals goes back to Freud.17 One way in which the English encrypted their own history of violence was through an idea of utopia. While some believe that utopia is by definition a modern phenomenon identifiable only after the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1515,18 the concept has been shown to have existed long before it received its modern name. Ernst Bloch’s three-volume study of utopia in particular traced manifestations of the idea from ancient Egypt into modernity, revealing utopian thought as fundamental to the way in which humanity deals with the world.19 Bloch identified what he labelled the ‘utopian impulse’, a hopefulness, or dream of, or way of conceiving of a different future that is the product of a deep dissatisfaction with the present – a utopian narrative of the ‘not-yet’.20 Utopia does not necessarily have to involve a plan for the future, but by the same token it is not just the 15 Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534; Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, 2012). 16 Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York, 2010), p. 2. 17 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London, 1950); idem, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 23 (London, 2001). 18 Frederic Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, Diacritics 7.2 (1977): 2–21; idem, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’, New Literary History 34.3 (2003): 431–51; idem, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London, 2007); Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, (New York, 1984). 19 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1986). 20 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, pp. 1–18.

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product of wishful thinking. It is in opposition to the world as it is. It offers the possibility of change in the future.21 Medieval utopias have been explored by both Michael Uebel and Karma Lochrie,22 both of whom focus on dream visions and travel narratives, two of the most significant genres of utopian literature, and most of the material with which they are concerned dates from the twelfth century or later; however, following Lochrie, it is most productive to consider ‘utopianism as a project that takes more than one literary form, incorporates more than a single philosophical perspective, spans religious and secular realms, and even anticipates some of the quirks as well as the characteristic features of More’s own utopia’.23 Prominent amongst the many utopian forms are the golden age and the earthly paradise,24 both clearly relevant to the way the English conceived of themselves as a chosen people and their island as a promised land. It is not the religious aspects of golden ages and promised lands that interest me even though they were certainly of interest to the early medieval English, largely because, as Mannheim points out, there is a difference between an ever-present idea of paradise and a plan of action for realising a utopian society.25 Although the Christian content of their utopia is inescapable, I am interested in the political and cultural uses to which English utopias and the idea of the ‘AngloSaxon’ as in some way utopian are put, both in the historical period we have and unfortunately continue to call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and in later medieval and modern culture. First and foremost, utopia is about place. Made up of the ancient Greek οu (not) and topos (place), and the Latin suffix -ia, place is at its centre. With its identity so heavily invested in place, indeed in the idea of an exceptional place, utopia and its variants (dystopia, heterotopia, retrotopia) are particularly appropriate tools for thinking through the ways in which the place of Anglo-Saxon England has been imagined – geographically and in both modern scholarship and popular culture. As Nicholas Howe and Sarah Semple, amongst 21 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1985). 22 Michael Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages (New York, 2005); Karma Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2016); see also Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (2006), special issue ‘Utopias Medieval and Early Modern’, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Karma Lochrie. 23 Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, p. 5. 24 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, p. 92; II, pp. 486, 502–9. 25 Karl Mannheim, An Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1985), p. 174.

INTRODUCTION

others, have noted, place mattered to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ in both the lived landscape and in their textual worlds.26 Utopia is by definition both ‘no-place’ and a ‘good’ or ‘happy’ place. More’s Utopia, like so many that preceded and followed it, existed between past and present, there and here. It was an island that had been visited in the past but it could be known only through the present text. It was precisely located yet it was also nowhere; despite being situated in a known geography it remained an unreachable fiction. It was a mirror for England, a satirical fantasy island that was the product of More’s dissatisfaction with Henry VIII’s England. Lochrie writes of its fictional island nature that ‘While England’s insularity was a fiction of its geography, Utopia’s was a deliberate creation of its founders’,27 however it can and will be argued that historically England’s insularity, its exceptional place on the edge, was as much the creation of its founders and historians as it was dependent on its geography. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon England, or an idea of it, had a profound effect on sixteenth-century scholarship and religious views. It was in the sixteenth century that an interest in Old English language and texts re-emerged after having lain dormant since the Middle English period. With the dissolution of the monasteries, scholars such as Matthew Parker began collecting, preserving, and translating the manuscripts that became available to them.28 Many of these same texts were used to support the new Anglican Church, vernacular translation, and the separation of the English Church from the influence of Rome. One of the most important of these texts was King Alfred’s Preface to and translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, which survived in multiple copies.29 While Thomas More died before the collecting of manuscripts dispersed during the dissolution, and thus was certainly not familiar with either Old English texts or Alfred’s Preface, one of the ideological roots of his Utopia was in early medieval monasticism, and one of the catalysts

26 Nicholas Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven, 2008); Sarah Semple, Perceptions of the Prehistoric in AngloSaxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape (Oxford, 2013). 27 Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, p. 125. 28 On the Elizabethan discovery and use of Anglo-Saxon England see Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English (Cambridge, 2012). 29 Suzanne C. Hagedorn, ‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville, FL, 1997), pp. 86–107, at 87–91.

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for his writing was Henry VIII’s destruction of the monasteries with their libraries.30 As a neologism working between Greek and Latin, utopia is also characterised by a heavy investment in language.31 It is a product and a sign of interest in translation, a new space opening up between languages. Before I offer a summary of this book’s chapters and their exploration of dystopia and other variations on the concept of utopia, however, there are two characteristics of utopia (and its variations) that need to be considered: the uncanny and the melancholic. The former is important because utopias are always established as places set apart, places of difference, while those places that they are set apart from, and those peoples that their inhabitants are different to, continually mirror, haunt, or threaten them in uncanny ways. As Jameson observes in his reading of More, ‘utopian politics takes place within this gap between Utopia’s newly created island and its non-Utopian neighbors: and this gap is the point at which More’s Utopianism begins to seem indistinguishable from Machiavelli’s practice (whose codification is virtually contemporaneous with More’s text)’.32 The gap or boundary that produces the uncanny is thus also crucial to the creation of dystopia, which might itself be identified as one of the uncanny presences within utopia. Melancholia is important because there is so often also a melancholic state of existence that utopia either sets out to replace or rectify, and/or that acts as a catalyst to its conceptualisation. Yet there is also something melancholic about the idea of utopia itself, a dream of a future that can never be fully realised, and so often a dream haunted by ghosts of the encrypted past.

THE UNCANNY The word ‘uncanny’ has its origins in the early medieval north, un-cunnon in Old English, with similar words and concepts existing in other languages and cultures (for example Old Irish ingnáth).33 As a modern English word ‘uncanny’ has its specific origins in Scottish and northern English, which is ironic as the Scots, like the Britons Jameson, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’: 435–6. Patricia Clare Ingham, ‘Making All Things New: Past, Progress and the Promise of Utopia’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2006): 479–92, at 479; Jameson, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’: 432. 32 Jameson, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’: 432. 33 Dictionary of the Irish Language: http://www.dil.ie/ search?q=ingnáth&search_in=headword. 30 31

INTRODUCTION

as a whole, figure as uncanny others in so many Anglo-Saxon texts. In Gildas’s De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, they are part human, part animal, barbaric in nature, morally bankrupt, and living in caves and holes in the ground, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account of the arrival of the Angles in 449 states that they wrote back to their continental homeland requesting reinforcements and describing the choiceness of the land (landes cysta) and the worthlessness (nahtscipe) of the Britons who inhabited it.34 Gildas of course was a Briton, Welsh rather than Anglian or Saxon, and was writing about how the Britons had brought the invasions on themselves due to their moral and religious failings, but as Lavezzo notes, the AngloSaxons routinely absorbed and reconfigured their others, whether internal or external.35 Manuscript A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 920 King Edward the Elder secured the submission of various Scots, Danes, Norwegians, Britons, and English, and built strongholds at sites in the north.36 Yet, just as the uncanny Donestre we will encounter in Chapter 3 failed to incorporate fully the human victims it devoured, the English would never fully subsume the Welsh and the Scots and would never fully control their lands. Moreover, throughout the history of England there would remain contradictions and a doubleness to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity, meaning that some would be accepted and absorbed into it while others would be repulsed or encrypted; sometimes it would expand outwards to incorporate other peoples and sometimes it would declare its isolation from other areas – as was to be the case with the Scandinavians who are sometimes figured as ancestors and sometimes as invasive enemies, or on and off with Europe, or parts of it, in the nineteenth through twentyfirst centuries. In the art and literature of the pre-Conquest period that doubleness was more often than not manifested as an uncanny elsewhere that was used to reflect back a particular image of the island. Made up of the Old English prefix un- and the verb cunnan (to know), the uncanny refers literally to the unknown, the mysterious, weird, strange, unfamiliar, or uncomfortably strange – though in modern use it can also mean simply unreliable or unsafe.37 Old English, then, did have a word for and concept of the uncanny, even 34 Susan Irvine, ed., A Collaborative Edition: The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, vol. 7, MS E. (Cambridge, 2004), p. 16. 35 Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534, p. 20. 36 Janet M. Bately, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 3, MS A (Cambridge, 1986), sub anno 920. 37 See s.v. uncanny in the Oxford English Dictionary.

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if the range of its meanings was slightly different than in modern usage.38 While it was clearly not identical to the psychological concept developed by Freud, the uncanny could be something experienced by the self, and could arguably also be something that resided within the self.39 Islands in the Middle Ages were often uncanny places, and England especially so with its location on the edge of the known. Its representation whether in images or texts from Gildas and Bede onward was both familiar and unfamiliar, part fiction and part lived landscape. Bede states that the island of Britain was incognita to the Romans until the time of Caesar,40 with the word generally translated simply as ‘unknown’, although as the existence of the island was known, the word could just as easily be translated as ‘strange’ or ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘mysterious’. By the same token, utopia is always an uncanny place as it hovers between past and present, somewhere and nowhere, the real and the fictional.41 At the same time that England’s construction of its location established its otherness, it created others, the Britons, the Scandinavians, and eventually the Irish as the others against whom it identified itself and who would in turn celebrate their otherness to England and the English. Utopias also ‘crucially presuppose otherness’.42 Grendel, arguably a figure for the Britons, is uncuð in Beowulf,43 as are many of the other peoples and creatures that inhabit the texts comprising the Beowulf manuscript, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, or of the whalebone of the Franks Casket discussed in Chapter 2, which renders the casket both a living being 38 I would like to thank Lindy Brady for a discussion of the origins and meaning of the uncanny in Old English and Old Irish. 39 See Chapter 3 below. 40 HE, i.2, p. 20. ‘Wæs Breotene ealond Romanum uncuð, oððæt Gaius se casere, oðre naman Iulius, hit mid ferde gesohte.’ (The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Thomas Miller, part 1, EETS os 95 [London, 1890], p. 30.) The word may carry a more sinister connotation in the Old English translation of Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans, written at around the same time as the Old English Bede, in which Julian and his army are lost and wandering in the desert suffering from thirst and hunger when an uncuð man suddenly appears and kills Julian. (Malcom R. Godden, ed. and trans., The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius [Cambridge, MA, 2016], vi,31, p. 398). The Latin text (Book vii,30.6) gives a somewhat different version, specifying that Julian is wandering alone through the desert when he comes across an enemy horseman who runs him through with a lance (‘imperator tanto rerum periculo anxius dum per uasta deserti incautius euagatur, ab obuio quodam hostium equite conto ictus interiit’). 41 Christopher Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (Toronto, 2004), esp. pp. 74–8. 42 Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 5. 43 For example, Beowulf, line 960.

INTRODUCTION

and a manmade object. The primary other in Alfred’s Preface to the Regula pastoralis, the focus of Chapter 1, is the Viking, an uncanny figure, an absence in the text itself, but an absent presence that both motivates the writing of the Preface and lurks just beyond the text, haunting the nation and national language it constructs. By silencing the Vikings, the text also sets Norse culture up against the Latin/ English knowledge that the king pursues, and thus against what it is good to know, to be canny about. There are elements of Alfred’s writing and his use of language that are also uncanny. Nicholas Royle highlights the origins of the uncanny in language, and the very uncanniness of the word with its origins in the languages of a border area neither purely English nor Scottish. There are ‘uncertainties at the origin concerning colonisation and the foreign body, and a mixing of what is at once old and long familiar with what is strangely “fresh” and new; a pervasive linking of death, mourning and spectrality, especially in terms of storytelling, transgenerational inheritance and knowledge, and … a sense of the strange and irredeemably unsettling “place” of language in any critical reflection on uncanniness’.44 Cixous locates the uncanny precisely in writing, in ‘what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of the text’, and in the author’s ability to seduce and manipulate readers, turning both writing and reading into uncanny acts.45 In the Preface, genre, structure, and voice are all uncanny. It is a mix of genres – history and fiction, epistle and manual of instruction, prose and poetry – and the same can be said of both the Franks Casket and the Beowulf manuscript. The prose of the Preface borrows techniques from poetry and its verse incorporates the language of prose, as well as hybrid words that work between languages. It situates Alfred in one spot, the king is in his court writing and dreaming about the past and future, but at the same time the king’s mind is projected back and forth in time to speak either for or with the dead, and across space surveying the land of England and travelling the path northward from Rome. The structure of the Preface keeps returning the reader to the king and his dream, or vision, or memories with its repeated formula of ‘when I remembered all this then’. Past and present merge, collide, and haunt each other throughout.

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, 2002), p. 12. Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans Robert Dennomé, New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525–645, quotation at 525. 44 45

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MELANCHOLIA Melancholia has multiple meanings. In classical and medieval usage it meant an excess of black bile (melania- kole). People suffering from melancholia have generally been understood to be severely depressed or gloomy, brooding or dwelling on or emotionally attached to a loss, or something that has been lost, or alternatively to be brooding or depressed groundlessly, or at least without sufficient cause. They were also believed to suffer from or be prone to particular diseases.46 Melancholia is also a product of encryption, as one cannot mourn what remains unacknowledged, unburied, and continues to haunt the psyche.47 But from antiquity melancholia has also been characterised by a dialectic between complete despondency and emotional withdrawal, and intense emotion and/or active energy, the latter often manifested in artistic and literary production or political leadership.48 It has also been intimately linked with the concept of utopia. Robert Burton constructed utopia as a cure from melancholia but also identified melancholia as generative of knowledge and understanding by turning the noun into an active verb. He described himself as ‘melancholizing’, an activity that provided knowledge for him in the same way that others obtained their knowledge from reading books.49 Wolf Lepenies developed Burton’s analysis of the relationship of his own melancholia to utopia to argue that just such a dialectical relationship between melancholia and utopia can be identified throughout history from Democritus to the twentieth century.50 In contrast, through an analysis of Günter Grass’s reading of Dürer’s famous engraving Melancolia I and More’s Utopia, Lochrie identifies melancholia not as a condition for which utopia is a cure, but as the ‘affective mode of all utopianism’,51 which is perhaps simply another way of stating the link between melancholy and intellectual or artistic 46 For the variety of (sometimes contradictory) ways in which melancholia has been interpreted over the centuries see Jennifer Radden ed., The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford, 2000), esp., pp. 3–51. 47 Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand with foreword by Jacques Derrida (Minneapolis, 1986); Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, 1994); Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. 48 Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, pp. 3–53. 49 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, introduction by William H. Gass (New York, 2001), p. 22. 50 Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA, 1992). 51 Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, p. 188.

INTRODUCTION

production.52 As was the case with utopia, melancholia is generally seen as a purely modern phenomenon despite its roots in classical and medieval philosophy and medicine. With the turn to interest in medieval emotions and neuropsychological methodologies, melancholia has been identified in early medieval authors and texts, including Old English ones, although it is universally identified in these cases with mourning and not utopia or the inability to mourn. Mary Garrison, for example, has articulated the melancholy of Alcuin as rooted in his loss of the monastic community – his surrogate parents – that raised him, and especially in the loss of his childhood teacher and father figure Ælberht. Ronald Ganze has explored the intersection of melancholic emotions and memory in the poems The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament.53 Both poems feature solitary and lonely exiles. Solitary dwellers were believed by Cassian to be particularly prone to melancholia (or accidie, as he described it), though his focus was on monastic dwellers in the desert.54 In The Wife’s Lament in particular, the wife describes herself as ful geomorre (‘very mournful’, line 1), as plagued by modcearu (‘mind-care or anxiety’, line 40), breostcearu (‘heart-care or anxiety’, line 44), and uhtceare (‘early morning sorrow or anxiety’, line 7). All these terms suggest a constant state of brooding or depression that has a profound effect on both the speaker’s mind and emotions, her thoughts, feelings, and perhaps also her physical body as uhtceare can imply sleeplessness. The wife is ‘unable to move past the traumatic events of her past, which continue to define and control her present existence’.55 Ganze believes that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but a form of melancholia is also a distinct possibility given the intensity of her emotion and depression and her inability to overcome her loss or to take any action. Freud believed that melancholia was produced by the failure to mourn a loss, which is what I am arguing in this book; 52 See, for example, Raymond Klibinsky, Fritz Saxl, and Erwin Panofsky, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London, 1964); Laurinda S. Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art ca. 1500–1700 (Philadelphia, 2015); Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 53 Mary Garrison, ‘Early Medieval Experiences of Grief and Separation through the Eyes of Alcuin and Others: The Grief of the Child Oblate’, in Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Literature, ed. Alice Jorgensen, et al. (London, 2015), pp. 227–61; Ronald Ganze, ‘The Neurological and Physiological Effects of Emotional Duress on Memory in Two Old English Elegies’, in ibid., pp. 211–26. 54 John Cassian, Of the Spirit of Accidie, excerpted in Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, p. 71. 55 Ganze, ‘The Neurological and Physiological Effects of Emotional Duress on Memory in Two Old English Elegies’, p. 225.

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but there are many parallels between mourning and melancholia, and melancholia does manifest itself in many different forms and has many different definitions,56 one of which characterises it as a crippling or severe depression. It is also associated with the loss of a relationship and/or agency.57 This seems to be the state of the speaker in The Wife’s Lament, who can do nothing but mourn endlessly. Looked at another way, however, it is possible to read the poem itself as the work of art produced out of the melancholy state of the speaker or poet. The first chapter of this book reads King Alfred’s Old English translation of the Regula pastoralis, especially its Preface, as a utopian text, an outline for a planned social utopia to come, an England united in language and learning under one king. The movement of both his thoughts and his writing is from a place – his court in Winchester at the end of the ninth century – to a no-place, the imaginary realm of the past and a future world that could be. At its most fundamental level it is Alfred’s expression of his refusal to accept things as they are. Alfred looks back to the seventh and eighth centuries, a time he believes to have been a golden age of peace, learning, and multilingualism as a means of critiquing the present and as a foundation for his ‘not-yet’ England. Just this sort of use of time, Lochrie has argued, provides a basis for rethinking the theory and historicity of utopia, as it imbues the past with a ‘virtuality’ that enables action in the future, destabilising theories of the present and the way we categorise time.58 In Alfred’s view, the Angelcynn had become almost cut off from their past and from translation through the historical gap created by the Viking invasions; but neither had been completely lost, and the past comes to Alfred’s present in order to show him the path to both recovery and the future. The movement creates an uncanniness to Alfred’s text. Time and place are familiar yet also strange, a point to which I will return. As a translation lamenting the lack of and pointing a way towards increasing learning and translation, Alfred’s dreamed-of utopia is firmly located in and around language. Like Gregory’s play on Angli/angeli, it places English in a privileged relationship to Latin, but it goes further in seeking to establish English as one of the sacred languages of translation, a successor to Greek and Latin, and in establishing language as a defining element of Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, p. 47. 58 Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, p. 2. She develops this idea from Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of temporality. See Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Education and the Untimely (Durham, NC, 2004). 56 57

INTRODUCTION

community and nation – as it will also be for the British Empire and far-right groups in the UK and the USA today. In the guise of a plan for educational reform the Preface also proposes and, indeed, in its writing enacts a new political structure, a single kingdom rather than the multiple kingdoms that had covered the island in the past as well as in Alfred’s own present, and a church firmly under the control of the king. In doing so it colonises both land and future, but then the Anglo-Saxons were colonisers from the start, and lays the foundations of empire. Alfred’s English utopia is written in the first instance against the Scandinavian invaders and settlers, the uncanny others that haunt his narrative by their very absence from it, but it also sets the English apart from speakers of all other languages, reinforcing their insular exceptionalism, and leaving colonialism encrypted. Alfred’s use of pronouns adds to the Preface’s uncanniness as he moves from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again, merging the mind of the reader with his own, and also making it impossible in some instances to identify just who is speaking or being referred to. At the end of the Preface it is the book that speaks in verse, and in the verse Epilogue it could be the book that is speaking, or Alfred, or both. The doubling of voices, of languages, of the meaning of some words, the repetition and blurring of boundaries are elements of the uncanny found in many texts both ancient and modern.59 Moreover, the blending of the voices of book and author into one another in the verses that end both the Preface and translation bookend the text with direct speeches that return us to one of the primal scenes of Alfred’s youth, as well as one of the origin legends of the nation: the scene of Alfred at his mother’s knee lured into a love of the English language and its poetry by the book of poems she offered him.60 A mastery of its contents, whether by memorisation or actual reading ability, set him apart from his elder brothers and became one of the signs that marked him as the exceptional younger son who would be king. The melancholia of the wife in the poem The Wife’s Lament discussed above is not the type linked to Alfred’s textual production or his vision of utopia, although the later story of Alfred lost in thoughts of his own misery allowing the cakes to burn suggests that he was perceived in subsequent centuries as having those sorts of melancholic tendencies,

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, 1981), p. 220 n.32. Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [Ithaca, NY, 1980], p. 47) has linked the reappearance of a scene or image from childhood, whether of a person, race, or nation, to the Freudian uncanny. 59 60

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and he did suffer from illnesses associated with melancholia.61 His writing, however, is characterised by active energy rather than intense emotion – indeed, there is nothing emotional about the Preface. While Alfred may have feelings, he shifts them on to his people as a whole. In Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton extended the definition of melancholia to a situation of prolonged interior disorder,62 making it possible to speak of melancholy societies or nations, and it is precisely this state of being that brought about Alfred’s (and his peoples’) sense of loss. They have lost land, learning, and, to Alfred’s way of thinking, the ideal of a unified country. It is these that Alfred broods over as he dwells on or remembers all that has been lost or destroyed. Crucially his brooding is one centred on lack rather than complete loss,63 and his dwelling on that lack leads him to a plan for recovery. His writing becomes the ‘affective mode’ of his utopianism. His (and the AngloSaxons’) melancholy is the product of the invasions and settlements of the Vikings and the destruction and loss of territory that was part of them, thus very much part of the political problems of the present and not just something that happened in the past. But what Alfred cannot speak of is the fact that the golden age he imagines was the product of precisely the violence, colonisation, and destruction on the part of his ancestors that he is now suffering at the hands of the Vikings. Alfred’s brooding might be described as a ‘politicizing, splenetic melancholy’, in which ‘clinging to things from the past enables interest and action in the present world and is indeed the very mechanism of that interest’.64 In writing about or from this type of melancholy he extends it to the community of bishops to whom he is writing, as well as to the Angelcynn as a whole who, if Alfred is to be believed, have been hitherto largely unaware of the learning and multilingualism that have been lost. Here melancholy unites with the uncanny as he achieves this primarily through his ambiguous use of pronouns, the merging of multiple voices into one, and his invocation of the learned dead, who are made to speak. Alfred’s Preface is teaching about the past, translation, and language, performing the lessons of those books and scholars who have been lost but, as Nicholas Royle notes, ‘there is no 61 See below p. 28. The story of the cakes first appears in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum. 62 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 79. See also, Lepenies, Melancholy and Society. 63 On loss and lack in melancholia see Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London, 2001), pp. 243–58. 64 Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, p. 65.

INTRODUCTION

teaching without memory … of the dead, without a logic of mourning that haunts or can always come back to haunt’.65 Melancholy, memory, the uncanny, and the dead also haunt the images, objects, and texts, the heterotopias, dystopias, and retrotopias that are the subjects of Chapters 2, 3, and 4. It is important to bear in mind that Alfred was writing from a partially occupied territory, and that historically ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England also enjoyed a measure of diversity. At the same time that there was pronounced violence against the Britons (Æthelfrið’s massacre of the monks of Bangor in 603, for example)66 and Scandinavians, there was an interest in and contact with other cultures. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668–90) was a Byzantine Greek from Tarsus. He was accompanied north by Hadrian (d. 710), a North African who became abbot of St Peter’s (later St Augustine’s) Canterbury. Together they founded arguably the most important school of music, liturgy, and study in Greek and Latin in the country, and were instrumental in creating the golden age of seventh- and eighth-century learning that underpins Alfred’s idea of the past. Alfred himself was undeniably eager to attract students and scholars from elsewhere to England, corresponding with Elias III, Patriarch of Jerusalem and, if the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, sending emissaries to India.67 Nevertheless, the exceptionalism and English nationalism that his writing promotes undeniably helped to provide a historical basis for English imperialism and its sometimes implicit but more often explicit notions of white supremacy, issues that will be addressed in the final chapter of this book.68 It has been argued that the Preface was read in the tenth and eleventh centuries by the homilists Ælfric and Wulfstan, both of whom wrote with far greater vehemence against the Scandinavians than did Alfred, especially during the reign Royle, The Uncanny, p. 53. See further N. J. Higham, ‘Historical Narrative as Cultural Politics: Rome, “British-ness” and “English-ness”’, in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. J. Higham (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 68–80. 67 On the Chronicle entry and its historical validity see below, p. 74. 68 See also Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL, 1997); John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Chichester, 2015); Barbara Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 361–80; Barbara Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Anglo-Saxons and the North, ed. Matti Kilpio et al. (Tempe, AZ, 2009), pp. 132–49. 65 66

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of Cnut. It was certainly read by the later royalist Spelman, whose Life of Alfred the Great made the king a model for Charles I in the seventeenth century.69 During the nineteenth century the text was read and used by scholars in Germany, America, and England both in support of nationalism and as evidence for their fantasies of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic race.70 What Alfred was unable to do, writing at the end of the ninth century, was to create a critical distance from the idea of England that was sufficient to allow for serious self-reflection – although later pre-Conquest texts might well accomplish this – and this separates his utopia from those of more contemporary authors. If anything, it might be said that he shifts self-reflection onto reflection on the state of the English as a people in general. The moral decline of the English is what had brought punishment and loss upon them in the form of the Viking invasions and ensuing destruction and occupation of a large area of the island. He refrains from critiquing that decline in any detail, but he does drive home the need for moral change in addition to social action. The educational reform that Alfred proposed did take place and to that extent his idea of utopia was partly realised. England in the tenth and eleventh centuries did become a multilingual and learned culture, perhaps most especially because of the extensive and complex relationship developed between the Old English and Latin languages and the wealth of manuscripts it produced. The period between Alfred’s reign and the Norman Conquest is also now known as the ‘golden age of Anglo-Saxon art’ due largely to the flourishing of a nation-wide manuscript culture. It is possible then to consider Alfred’s dream of the future as a ‘eutopia’, a happy place that could be realised, however ‘eutopias and dystopias differ from other utopias only in the degree to which the criteria of good/bad and desirable/ undesirable predominate. Otherwise the same kind of imaginative processes are involved in understanding them.’71 Alfred’s utopia also carried the seeds of dystopia and its own destruction, not least in its establishing England and Englishness in relation to the alterity of the other people living on the island. Its exceptionalism and colonising 69 Hagedorn, ‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care’, pp. 88, 92–3, 97–99; on Ælfric and Wulfstan’s writings against Cnut see Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English 1020–1220 (Oxford, 2012). 70 Hagedorn, ‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care’, pp. 97–9. 71 Steven Hutchinson, ‘Mapping Utopias’, Modern Philology 85 (1987): 170–85, at 179.

INTRODUCTION

strategy laid the groundwork for later medieval and modern imperialism, for violent forms of nationalism, and for a weaponised idea of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (in the form of white and English-speaking) supremacy. The dystopian possibilities that exist within Alfred’s utopian dream are certainly identifiable in later pre-Conquest manuscripts in particular, though how aware their authors and readers were of this fact is another question. Chapter 2 is concerned with the eighth-century period to which Alfred looked back for his golden age. It provides a close reading of the Franks Casket, a whalebone box made in Northumbria, identifying it as both a crypt and a heterotopia, a placeless place. Heterotopia has many different meanings and can take many different forms. It was first used in the medical field to refer to matter out of place within the body, and was taken up by Michel Foucault to identify multiple places that were set apart from, while still existing in, the larger world – worlds within worlds and placeless places or places out of place.72 The library, the museum, or the cemetery, for example, are heterotopias in which multiple times and places coexist within an other place. The mirror is a heterotopia, a placeless place in which we see ourselves located and looking back at us at the same time that we know we are standing someplace else looking at an uncanny figure that is at once both us and not us. As such, they are by their very nature uncanny, unhomely homes for displaced matter, spectres, reflections, and imaginings. In particular, this chapter explores the casket as a crypt, a heterotopia that has death and emptiness at its centre and that also excludes our entry into it. As a box the casket could literally have been a crypt in which something, a relic of the dead according to some, might have been locked away; as the bone of a dead whale it is also that which is encrypted; as a cipher it encrypts language and meaning; as a place it is inhabited by cryptids. It also encrypts the violent origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England by projecting that violence out away from the island and making room for a different image to be projected back. Like the mirror, the casket is also a place of reflection and doubling. It is itself a double, a mirror place for England as it is just beginning to consolidate an idea of itself, a place in which a still fragmented collection of peoples and kingdoms can assemble its parts and see itself made whole. It is about doubling in many forms: living beings that turn back at us as dead things, the twinning of the divine and 72 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité (1984): 1–9.

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the human, the human and the animal, the sovereign and the beast. Romulus and Remus appear on the casket being suckled by the she-wolf, united by both the bond of brotherhood and their infantile state. Yet they turn away from each other. Romulus would go on to kill his wolfish twin Remus, but such human-animal brothers are part of many origin legends, including the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Hengest and Horsa who the twins could mirror. They are uncanny figures of the sovereign and the beast.73 The casket is about the telling of stories of the origins of one place through the origin legends and narratives of elsewhere, the elsewheres of Rome, the Holy Land, and the northern Germanic world in which the gens Anglorum located their own origins, and the elsewhere of the whale/casket. Heterotopia is always uncanny, but the casket encrypts the uncanny in multiple small details of its imagery and narratives. Its stories of exiles and hostages tell of the loss of the heim through the bodies of the dead and displaced, inhabitants now of a different and unheimlich place. The whale is uncanny as classical and medieval stories identified it as both land (island) and not land (sea-creature), a truly placeless place. One of the stories the casket narrates is that of the death of the whale from which it was made, making it an uncanny place in which the dead thing remains haunted by the presence of the living creature. Both its material and materiality make it far more uncanny than Freud’s example of the wooden table carved with crocodiles that causes one to question whether it is a table or a nest of living creatures.74 Cemeteries and crypts are commonly described as melancholy places, but the casket is also a melancholic place in additional and quite specific ways. Both it and the figures that inhabit its panels enact the condition of being-(always)-towards-death. Its melancholia is perhaps best expressed, however, in its naming of the whale, Gasric, a name that I argue is key, the key in fact, to our understanding of the casket. To name a creature is to claim a power over it that one can never really have; to name in the language of another is to create a state of melancholia or mourning; to name is to create a ghost that will live on after death, a reminder always of being-towards-death,

73 The term of course comes from Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans Geoffrey Bennington, 2 vols (Chicago, 2009) which informs both this chapter and Chapter 3. 74 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London, 2001), pp. 219–56, at 244–5.

INTRODUCTION

and the heterotopia of the cemetery or crypt in which the dead and their names remain encrypted. Naming, language, and the relationship between the animal and the human within narratives of conquest and colonisation are also important themes in Chapter 3, which explores the ca. 1000 Nowell Codex (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fols 94–209) as a compilation of dystopian fictions. More popularly known as the Beowulf manuscript, it contains a collection of prose and verse texts that, with the exception of the Beowulf poem, are all translations or paraphrases of Latin sources. In addition to Beowulf, the manuscript contains a fragmentary Passio of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and the poem Judith. The fact that its contents are concerned with violence, trauma, war, and invasion, is well established, and it is generally thought to reflect the time in which it was written, either the turbulent reign of Æthelred II or the equally turbulent reign of his successor Cnut. It may well do so, but the range of dates and geographical regions its texts cover, from the Old Testament world of Judith to sixth-century Scandinavia, suggests that it is in fact concerned with a longer view of history and the place of eleventh-century England in relation to it. Dystopias are unhappy places, frequently colonised places or oppressive or repressive cultures. I argue that not all the places that feature in the manuscript’s texts are dystopian in the narrow sense of the word, but that they are all concerned either with dystopian places or utopias under threat of becoming dystopias either through invasion from without or through the breakdown of internal order. They also offer a series of studies on the limits of the human both as a biological species and as a moral or ethical order.75 They are concerned with changes of order and the ways in which the human can become monstrous and the monstrous human, the two being always present alongside one another as the beast and the sovereign. The instability of the beast and the human is one of the dystopian elements of the manuscript’s world. No order or law can be relied on as cannibalistic dog-headed beasts become saints and sovereigns, women become lethal warriors, and villains and heroes exchange places. Identity in at least some of these texts is something that can be put on or taken off like a suit of clothes. The instability and exchange 75 I use the phrase ‘the limits of the human’ in reference to the entire manuscript and so to a far more complex set of relationships between the human, the animal, and the supernatural than that referenced by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe in her ‘Beowulf, lines 702b–836: Transformation and the Limits of the Human’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23.4 (1981): 484–94.

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of identity also render this dystopia uncanny – literally unknowable. Holofernes and Judith, for example, are opposites in every way, including gender, but as the poem progresses they exchange places. It is Judith who wields Holofernes’s sword, defeating the bestial sovereign only to take his place, receiving his weapons and armour as her own and displaying more and more of the pride and vanity that were originally his. They reveal themselves as two forms of a single state of leadership: the beast and the sovereign. Grendel and Beowulf undergo a similar confrontation and exchange of identities in Beowulf. Voice and naming feature in all five of the manuscript’s texts as signs both of power and of dystopias in which some are relegated to eternal silence, some mimic their invaders, some are perceived as speaking only gibberish, and some gain language and the power that comes with it. Grendel and his mother never speak and, while the poet tells us they are human, their lack of language indicates otherwise, or at least that they are something other than fully human. Most of the wonders in The Wonders of the East remain silent. Holofernes never speaks and is described by the Judith poet as making only inarticulate sounds, although we are told that he gives orders to his troops. The Donestre in the Wonders is able to mimic the speech of the foreign travellers who encounter it but it does not have a language of its own. Perhaps this is the reason that it is unable to consume the heads of its victims and weeps over them instead. Indic speakers throughout The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle are described as speaking only gibberish. The word used for their language is elreordig, which can be translated simply as ‘foreign’, but Alexander’s inability or refusal to understand the people he encounters, along with his dismissiveness of them, suggests that gibberish is exactly what he perceives their language to be. His identification of them as gibberish speakers also brings out the irony of the invader and would-be coloniser, the foreigner who casts indigenous peoples as foreigners in their own land. Christopher, on the other hand, begins life as a Cynocephalus, a beast that can only bark, but gains the power of human language when a divine breath is blown into his mouth. The uncanny also extends to the land, which becomes an active force in several texts, in some instances by partaking of the substance of those associated with it, and in others by becoming a protagonist in the narrative. The lands inhabited by the wonders of the East are as wondrous as they are themselves, and the land on which Christopher is martyred takes on the ability to cure when mixed with his blood – but these are conventions of many wonder tales and saints’ lives.

INTRODUCTION

In the Letter, on the other hand, the land and environment become forces that inflict more damage on Alexander and his troops than do the people and animals that inhabit it. In Beowulf the land and anti-hall in which Grendel and his mother dwell are dark reflections of the brilliantly lit world of Heorot that rises above them. Beowulf ’s identification with Grendel is completed by his passage down through the water into the mother’s home and his rebirth from it, recalling Freud’s supreme example of the uncanny. The manuscript also creates a melancholic world, a world in which the colonisers encrypt their own violence and are haunted by the ghosts of it. This is conveyed most effectively perhaps by the spectres of Grendel and his mother who silently haunt the wastelands around Heorot, and perhaps also by the Donestre who is fated to weep forever over the heads of its victims. But Beowulf is also melancholic as it is clear from the start that it chronicles a dying way of life. The same could be said of the India of The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East in which Alexander also features. Alexander leaves a path of destruction in his wake that includes the monuments that he constructs or orders to be constructed, and that is destined to be repeated by subsequent invaders and colonisers down through the centuries. Like the Franks Casket, the Beowulf manuscript encrypts by projecting its stories of England into the past and onto other lands, but it does so from a point in history when England perceived itself as threatened from within and without rather than one in which it might imagine itself coming into formation. Edward Said identified Anglo-Saxonism as the ideological partner of orientalism because ‘orientalism suppressed and exploited the East, whereas Anglo-Saxonism glorified the West as English civilization constructed it’.76 These Old English texts and translations portray the othering of the East and its inhabitants as deeply problematic. Those who lay claim to foreign lands, like Alexander, the Danes, or the unfortunate intruders we encounter in the Wonders are doomed to failure. Yet, these texts also deflect failure away from the AngloSaxons and onto the conquest of other peoples and other places, keeping England’s own history of conquest encrypted within its own origin legends and belief in its isolated exceptionalism. In doing so they lay the foundations on which the glorification of the Englishspeaking West and the suppression and exploitation of other lands and peoples across the globe would rest. 76

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), p. 8.

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Chapter 4 moves from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England to the development of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies, Anglo-Saxonism, and the uses to which the Anglo-Saxon has been put in the modern world, specifically in the UK and the USA. An idea of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the image of the special island that was developed by the English provided a foundation for both the British Empire and the settler colonialism of the USA. King Alfred became credited with the development of England as a naval power and a representative democracy, as well as with the creation of an educational system and with the birth of English law. He also became a model statesman for modern leaders, including Thomas Jefferson and Queen Victoria. The migration legend retold through works such as the Franks Casket and Beowulf became the justification for the colonisation of North America and the displacement and exile of indigenous peoples as the heirs to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ progressed further and further west. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Beowulf became a particular focus of scholarly interest and was turned into the national epic that it remains to this day. Both it and the Old English language were also claimed by the Scandinavians and Germans as deriving from their cultures, beginning a scholarly argument over the sources and primacy of many early medieval works that continues in arguably less political and contentious forms in much modern scholarship. The first translations of Beowulf into English were made and it was retold in multiple forms in popular and children’s literature as an example of the supposed heroic masculine greatness of the English and the white Anglo-Saxon world. Chapter 4 analyses the return to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a form of retrotopia that involves both a looking back to an idealised past and a metaphorical migration back to it as a means of creating particular types of modern presents. In its narrow definition, retrotopia, a word coined by Zygmunt Bauman,77 refers specifically to the twenty-firstcentury loss of hope and community and the resulting location of happiness and communal identity in an imaginary past. One result of the turn to retrotopia is the development of tribal groups and mentalities that deploy history and heritage, texts, and symbols or monuments from the past to create closed communities for their members, often through the violent exclusion of others. To be sure, people have always turned nostalgically to the past in the belief that things were simpler or better then, but retrotopia is different in that it is fuelled in part by the digital technologies of the twenty-first 77

Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge, 2017).

INTRODUCTION

century and uncanny isolated yet overconnected state they create. The white supremacist groups that use runes, ring-headed crosses, the Angelcynn, or the heroic masculinity they believe to reside in Beowulf or Viking mythology are prime examples of such tribes. Their misuse and weaponisation of the past are deplorable and unfortunately gain legitimacy through institutional and governmental support and the structures that have maintained the racism and misogyny of Anglo-Saxonism over the centuries. The situation has, of course, been made much worse by the white nationalism and insularity of Brexit and Donald Trump. As many have pointed out, however, the AngloSaxon and the medieval are not the victims of racism, nationalism, extreme conservatism, or white supremacy. They are a part of the foundations on which these beliefs and practices rest, and for which they have become active weapons. Moreover, at least in the UK, melancholia is intensified by the loss of empire, an empire that was built on notions of English exceptionalism and nationalism that can be traced directly back to the age of Bede and Alfred. It was also an empire that developed hand in hand with Anglo-Saxonism as both a form of nationalism and an academic discipline. Paul Gilroy has labelled the contemporary condition ‘postimperial melancholia’, a condition that arises not just from the loss of empire but also from the multicultural British society that has developed with immigration from the former ‘colonies’ and other parts of the non-English-speaking world. Postimperial melancholia is, ‘An older, more dignified sadness that was born in the nineteenth century [and] should be sharply distinguished from the guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to characterize Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers that have intruded upon it more recently.’78 While it is important to fight the weaponisation of the medieval that has been a prominent part of so much contemporary violence and racism, it is far more important to help the people who have been its targets. The chapter ends with a consideration of steps we can all take to help build a more inclusive and proactive academic field and community. There is nothing particularly uncanny about retrotopia, aside perhaps from its creation of an undead past. There is a melancholic element about it, however, both in the solitariness and isolationism of the social and political conditions that have produced it as well as in the emptiness at the heart of the ideologies that drive its racist and colonialising deployment. Unlike the places imagined as Anglo-Saxon 78 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon, 2004), p. 98.

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England in the first three chapters, retrotopia is generated simultaneously by a look back from both within and outside the island rather than being confined to production from within it. That longer and more distant look helps to highlight the emptiness within all of the ways in which ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is imagined. For Alfred there was an empty historical gap between the late ninth and the eighth centuries that he sought to fill by populating an imagined geography with a national language and a united people – a no place that was home to utopia to come. He did so by erasing the Vikings and the Danelaw (along with the Britons) from his narrative. For the makers of the Franks Casket, that precise place to which Alfred looked back for an imagined historical unity was in fact empty. It was not England, as Alfred imagined, but only Northumbria, a small kingdom in the as yet empty space of formation that would eventually become England. The casket collects other times and places, setting them alongside each other and carrying them to the island as a heterotopia, a placeless place of fragmented parts that mirrors and masks the history of a nation in formation. The casket’s narrative panels with their stories of other times and places circle around, keep hidden, encrypt, the emptiness of both the incipient nation and the idea of exceptionalism that would serve as a foundation for its expansion out from its island on the edge of the known world. The texts of the Beowulf manuscript are also all narratives of other places and past times that encircle the origins of England, but they circle around a dystopian England and the manuscript is itself a dystopia, a place in which everything is changing or falling apart by violent means. At its heart is the emptiness of colonialism and conquest, of the annihilation of peoples and ways of life, and of the failure of the human and human socio-political orders and classifications. To imagine Anglo-Saxon England is to confront an emptiness, to resurrect an undead past and the violence it has done and continues to do. The damage is not empty, it is very real, but it is enacted in support of the empty ideas and hierarchies that have emerged within Anglo-Saxonism. I leave Anglo-Saxon England as an imagined place, an empty space into which identities and ideologies have been written, and end with the possibility of eutopia, the hope that we can create a discipline that reads the narratives of pre-1066 England differently, in a way that opens our scholarship to alternative ways of seeing, and that is more inclusive, supportive, and stimulating for all those who wish to study it, even if that means burning the field down and starting over.

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I

begin chronologically in the middle, in the ninth century with King Alfred (r. 871–99) and the famous Preface to his translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis composed in the period 890–93. I begin in the middle because that is where utopia begins. Utopia is never in the present but always located elsewhere, in another place, in a past golden age, or in an anticipated future, a future often based on the idea of a past golden age from which something lost needs to be recovered or rebuilt. However, while utopia is never located in the present it is always a product of the present, a present that is in some way at odds with itself. In looking persistently back or elsewhere utopia is melancholic rather than nostalgic. There is a sadness for what has been lost, or what it is imagined has been lost, but that sadness can also be a catalyst for action in the present rather than longing for a simple return of the past, and this is the case with Alfred. He remembers a lost kingdom very different from the conflicted and violent one about which Gildas and, to a lesser extent, Bede had written. He remembers a kingdom filled with peace, learning, and languages, and his melancholy motivates a plan for the creation of a new age of peace and learning and a new linguistic community, and not a simple return to or re-creation of the past. But his memories are also of an imagined England that never existed, an island that still survived as an identifiable place but that was now an occupied space. His is a fictional story of a past that grows out of the gap created by the invasions and settlements of the Vikings and the destruction and separation of English speakers and kingdoms from each other that he believes to have been the result of them. It is this empty space that Alfred desires to fill, but that space also encrypts the land that was filled by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ centuries before the arrival of the Vikings. There is a forgetting in Alfred’s remembering of the country’s origins,

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and his refusal to name the Vikings hides the deeper silence and the violence of Anglo-Saxon origins. Traumas, including the violent histories of those responsible for them, are transgenerational and can remain encrypted for centuries, haunting future generations even if they do not realise exactly what they are haunted by. Settler colonials in particular often encrypt memory in order to escape the horror of their own violence.1 There is no specific object for Alfred to mourn, but only an emptiness, a sense of loss or lack, a lost ideal.2 There are, to be sure, objects that act as signs of that loss – books, wealth, and wise men for example – but these are all things that are still present, just not in the numbers the king would like them to be. Melancholia as a bodily humour was caused by a lack or imbalance, in this case an excess of black bile and a lack, rather than a complete absence, of the other bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, and yellow bile). The melancholic temperament was identified with specific diseases, including piles,3 from which Alfred is known to have suffered, and a loss of libido, about which Asser suggests that the king was at the very least ambivalent.4 It is also associated with an early loss of or ambivalence towards the mother, which might well apply in Alfred’s case as he did lose his mother quite young and she was, again according to Asser, a central figure in his love of English books, poetry, and learning, a figure who would ultimately be replaced by the father figure of Asser himself. What is tangibly lacking for Alfred in the Preface, however, become his tools. The books, the learning, the languages, and the wealth need to be increased in order to aid in the ‘recovery’ of a new kingdom created and united through learning, through writing, and especially through language. This is his utopia. The structure and narrative of Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Mourning generally involves a distinct ‘object-loss’ while melancholia is generally not focused on a specific object or refuses to recognise a loss. Melancholics can also see themselves as in some way responsible for the loss they feel (Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’), a responsibility that Alfred transfers to the English as a whole, locating it in the lack of proper Christian devotion and practice amongst the Angelcynn. 3 See texts by Aristotle (or one of his followers) and Galen in Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, pp. 57, 65. 4 Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 89–90. Asser states that in his youth when Alfred ‘realized that he was unable to abstain from carnal desire’, he prayed to God for the onset of a disease that would strengthen his love of divine service and was struck with piles as a result. At his wedding he was struck by another illness that would plague him for twenty-five years. See also David Pratt, ‘The Illnesses of Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 39–90. 1 2

A PLAN FOR UTOPIA TO COME

King Alfred’s Preface perform this process, looking to, remembering, and ‘recovering’ the past as a model of a learning and linguistic community that can be used to transform the future. It situates itself, and it begins in the middle. Kathleen Davis has identified the Preface as part of a nationalist discourse in which translation represents the ‘strong emergence of a national identity’,5 but it is also one that colonises both past and future, and one that will be picked up on, expanded, and distorted in the interests of a far larger colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Translation is also a process that exists in the middle, an act that looks backwards and forwards, centring itself and creating a movement between languages. Translation brings languages together, but it also sets them apart, and the king will use translation as a way of setting English apart, creating a space for it as a special even sacred language. Translation can also be a movement of people, as in the translation of a saint, and Alfred uses translation in this sense too as a way of writing the movement of a people, the Angelcynn, into the utopian space he wishes to fill. The idea of England and utopia (or as utopia) naturally raises the spectre of Thomas More’s Utopia. In reading the Preface as a utopian text I am not arguing that there is a direct connection between it and More’s Utopia, nor that its utopianism is identical to that of More – there are many utopias and many forms of medieval utopianism that lie between the two. Nevertheless, there are some connections between Alfred’s and More’s visions. First and foremost, both construct utopia as an England elsewhere, although Alfred’s is a dream of a utopian past on which a ‘not-yet’ England can be built, while More’s is a satiric geographical elsewhere. Alfred’s is a historical construction, More’s a-historical. Both texts are concerned with language and learning and use language to perform the processes about which they write. Both texts are also responses to concerns about the destruction of learning and faith in the present, More’s a response to the monastic destruction visited on the country by Henry VIII, and Alfred’s a response to the destruction caused by the Vikings centuries earlier. This is comparison at a very basic level and the differences between the texts and the times in which they were written far outweigh any similarities – most notably, one is a social plan and the other a satire, one is performing an assertion of royal power, while the other is doing quite the opposite – but the point is that they are not as comprehensively different from 5 Kathleen Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 (1998): 611–37.

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each other as scholarship upholding the traditional medieval/modern divide has encouraged us to think. I begin with a close reading of the Preface, well known yet endlessly rich and revealing territory, in order to establish just how carefully Alfred builds his vision step by step, and just how shifting and uncanny his authorial voice and imagined nation at times become. Shifting back and forth between speakers, between past and present, between fiction and reality, the lines between all are broken down, familiar territories become strange, voices difficult to identify, things speak, and metaphors morph into new metaphors or things, allowing his dream of both nation and utopia to emerge.

ALFRED’S PREFACE AND THE WORK OF TRANSLATION The text of the Preface is well known to students and scholars of Old English, far better known indeed than is the translation of the Regula pastoralis that it introduces.6 The prose section of the Preface is also far better known than the verse section with which it ends. The prose Preface can itself be divided into five sections, each one of which moves from the present time in which Alfred writes, back in time to a vision of the past, then returns to the present before finally mapping out a vision for the future. It begins quite precisely in the middle, in the present of the court with an address to the individual bishops. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20 begins: ‘Ælfred kyning hateð gretan Wærferð biscop his wordum luflice ond freondlice’ (King Alfred commands Bishop Wærferð to be greeted with his loving and friendly words).7 The Preface then shifts into a first-person direct address to the bishop and begins the structural formula that articulates each successive section of the text. As many have noted, this beginning is an expression of the king’s authority and gives the Preface the force of a legal text, but it also captures the movement of that text out from king and court across the historical geography that 6 The Old English translation is preserved in the following manuscriptfs from the Anglo-Saxon period: London, BL, Cotton Tiberius B.xi (5 fols) + Kassel, Gesamthochschulbibliothek 4° MS theol. 131 (1 leaf) (890–96, Winchester?); Oxford, Bodleian Librry, Hatton 20 (890–96, southern England, possibly Winchester); Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 12 (southern England, second half 10th century); Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.5.22 (717), fols 72–158 (10th/11th century, Sherborne?); London, BL, Cotton Otho B.ii and Otho B.x, fols 61, 63, 64 (10th/11th century, south-east England, possibly London). 7 All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

A PLAN FOR UTOPIA TO COME

Alfred envisages as an always already extant yet still to come England, an empty space into which, and ultimately out of which, he is persistently writing. Alfred desires his bishops to know that: me com swiðe oft on gemynd, hwylc witan io wæron geond An(g) gelcyn,8 ægðer ge godcundra hada ge weoruldcundra; ⁊ hu gesæliglica tida ða wæron geond Angelcyn; ⁊ hu ða cyningas ðe ðone onweald hæfdon ðæs folces Gode ⁊ his ærendwrecum hiersumedon; ⁊ hu hie ægðer ge hiora sibbe ge hiora sido ge hiora anweald innanbordes geheoldon, ⁊ eac ut hiora eðel rymdon; ⁊ hu him ða speow ægðer ge mid wige ge mid wisdome; ⁊ eac ða godcundan hadas hu georne hie wæron ægðer ge ymb lare ge ymb liornunga ⁊ ymb ealle ða ðiowotdomas ðe hie Gode don sceoldon; ⁊ hu mon utanbordes wisdom ⁊ lare hieder on lond sohte, ⁊ hu we hie nu sceoldon ute begietan gif we hie habban sceoldon. Swa clæne hio wæs oðfeallenu on Angelcynne ðætte swiðe feawe wæron behionan Humbre ðe hiora ðenunge cuðen understondan on Englisc, oððe furðum an ærendgewrit of Lædene on Englisc areccan; ⁊ ic wene ðætte nauht monige begeondan Humbre næren. Swa feawe hiora wæron ðætte ic furðum anne anlepne ne mæg geðencean be suðan Temese ða ða ic to rice feng. Gode ælmihtegum sie ðe ðonc ðætte we nu ænigne onstal habbað lareowa. Forðæm ic ðe bebeode ðæt ðu doo swa ic gelyfe ðæt ðu wille, ðæt ðu ðe ðissa weoruldðinga to ðæm geæmetgige swa ðu oftost mæge, ðæt ðu ðone wisdom ðe ðe God sealde ðær ðær ðu hiene befæstan mæge, befæste. Geðenc hwelc witu us ða becomon for ðisse weorulde, ða ða we hit nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufedon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lifdon: ðone naman anne we hæfdon ðættte we Cristene wæron, ⁊ swiðe feawe ða ðeawas.9 (It has come into my mind very often what wise men there once were throughout Angelcynn; both in religious orders and secular and how there were happy times throughout Angelcynn; and how the kings who had power over this people obeyed God and his messengers; and how they both upheld peace, morality and power within their borders, and also enlarged their territory outside; and how they succeeded both in war and in wisdom; and also how eager the religious orders were in both teaching and in learning and in all these services that it was their duty to give to God; and how people from foreign lands sought I leave Angelcynn untranslated as the word can refer to people, territory, or both, and there is no modern equivalent for it. The meaning of the term and its ambiguity are discussed further below. 9 The text is based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 12 as edited by Carolin Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context (Munich, 2002), pp. 191–9. 8

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wisdom and teaching in this land; and how now we would have to obtain them from abroad if we wished to have them. So thoroughly had they declined amongst the Angelcynn [or in Angelcynn] that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English, or even translate a single letter of Latin into English; and I think that there were not many beyond the Humber either. There were so few of them that I cannot think of even a single one south of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom. Thanks be to God Almighty that we now have any supply of teachers. Therefore I command that you do as I believe that you wish to do, that you detach yourself from these worldly matters as often as you can so that you can apply that wisdom that God has given you wherever you are able to. Consider what punishments came upon us in this world when we ourselves neither loved learning nor allowed it to other men. We were Christians in name alone and we had very few Christian practices.)

The opening sentence establishes the golden age of the past to which Alfred is looking back as the period before the Viking invasions began, the happy times of the seventh and eighth centuries. This was the age of Bede and other ‘wise men’, and Alfred’s statement that thoughts of them have often come into his mind suggests a certain amount of reverie or brooding over or dwelling on the past, a melancholic act that here positions the king as a passive recipient of thoughts but will be carried through the text by the repeated return of thoughts or memories of the past that articulate its structure. In the first section, however, it is the past that is active. This is, in part, a logical way to begin as so much of the Preface is about the act of remembering and the role of memory as a basis for present action, but also because this is an age beyond Alfred’s memory. It must come to him. The construction of these opening passages also sets up Alfred as a figure for England itself. He sits alone, an island in a sea of thoughts. Wise men once came to England in search of learning and wise men now come to Alfred in what develops into a plan for the reinstatement of that learning. This idea is reinforced at the end of the Preface when Alfred names the wise men who came to his court to help him with his programme of translation. Three of the four named are from outside Alfred’s kingdom: Asser from Wales, John from Saxony, and Grimbold from St-Bertin. At the same time, Alfred establishes himself as one with the kings of the past who, in his mind, maintained a peaceful, Christian, and learned kingdom within their borders, but fought to extend their territory beyond them. Wars took place in an unnamed elsewhere, whilst foreign students and scholars from unnamed elsewheres came to England in search of learning. Now, if only there was an end to the

A PLAN FOR UTOPIA TO COME

unnamed punishments that have been visited upon them, learning along with Christianity and prosperity could be restored, although they had certainly not declined to the extent that Alfred suggests in this passage.10 Underlying the passage is not just the beginning of a plan of learning but also one for the expansion of West Saxon power over the island. For war to be associated with national prosperity, as it is in Alfred’s version of the past, it can only be a war against another people. But territorial expansion need not necessarily be achieved through war, or at least not through war alone. Just as the kings of old expanded their territory outside their borders, so Alfred seeks to expand his territory outside of the kingdom of Wessex that he ruled at the time that he wrote across the whole of the English land and people, filling both the chronological gap between the eighth and late ninth centuries and the geographical emptiness he constructs the Danelaw of his day as being with the unfinished business of AngloSaxon claims to the island. Writing and translation are the tools with which he will begin that process and we can see that strategy at work throughout the Preface as words and texts are projected out across the land by the king. Expansion will, of course, be furthered through military activity, but details of the current war and ongoing battles are kept out of this particular narrative, and the image of the king as a peaceful proponent of and centre for intellectual activity is maintained throughout. The identification of the king with both the land and the wise kings of the past begins the process of destabilising the reader’s location in time and place. The destabilisation or blurring of boundaries between times, places, people, and lands seems to be a deliberate strategy of the Preface, and one that can be identified in many of the texts associated with Alfred and his reign.11 In this text it begins with the terminology used for the land and its people. One of the most remarked upon features of the Preface is Alfred’s choice of the word Angelcynn for both England and the English. According to the Dictionary of Old English, the word can mean variously the English 10 On the exaggeration of the decline of learning and scribal culture in the ninth century, both in Alfredian texts and modern scholarship on them, see especially Simon Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word in Alfredian England’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh Centenary Conference, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 175–95. 11 Daniel Anlezark (Water and Fire: The Myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England [Manchester, 2006], pp. 245–72), discusses the fusion of kings from the heroic Germanic past with Old Testament figures and historical Anglo-Saxon kings in the Alfredian genealogies. See also Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009), pp. 175–7, 189.

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race, or the English people, or the land of England. The exact translation of Angelcynn has been the subject of debate, and it may well be that it was used to mean something different in different contexts. Patrick Wormald equated it with the English Church and understood it to correspond to Bede’s gens anglorum (translated variously as the English people, race, or nation).12 Sarah Foot interpreted it as having a much broader meaning, one that was not limited to just the idea of a shared identity in the church, but represented a ‘conscious effort to shape an English imagination’ that included a shared identity, history, and heritage.13 Davis has questioned whether or not Alfred would have had the ability to grasp and manipulate all the ideological implications that Foot attributes to the word and its use, but acknowledges that the term does do political work in presenting the reader with a ‘continuously existing linguistic and political community’.14 As Davis notes, Angelcynn is repeated seven times with, in her reading, some references clearly to people and others clearly to land, but with many more ambiguous and open to being translated as either people or land – for example, the first two uses of the term in the opening section quoted above.15 I am not convinced that the distinction is ever as clear as Davis suggests because just this type of ambiguity is characteristic of so much of pre-Conquest culture,16 but however one wants to translate any given instance of the word, the ultimate effect of all this is to equate the Angelcynn as a Christian people with the land itself. The idea of the Angelcynn as a single united people ultimately goes back to Gregory, whose ideas were elaborated by Bede,17 and it is thus particularly appropriate for a preface that both looks back Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1983), pp. 99–129; idem, ‘Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994): 1–24; idem, ‘The Making of England’, History Today 45.2 (1995): 26–32. On the translation of gens see s.v. Gens, Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham and D. R. Howlett (London, 1975–2013). 13 Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996): 25–49, at 28, 34–5. 14 Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 614. 15 Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 618–21, citation at 618. 16 See for example, Sarah Larratt Keefer, ‘Either/And as “Style” in Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry’, in Anglo-Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin Brown (Albany, NY, 2003), pp. 179–200. 17 Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, pp. 122–6; Patrick Wormald, ‘The Venerable Bede and the “Church of the English”’, in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell (Wantage, 1992), pp. 13–32; Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’: 26; Janet L. Nelson, ‘The Political Ideas of Alfred of Wessex’, 12

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to the age of Bede and introduces the translation of a text authored by Gregory. It is important to bear in mind that Alfred did have a choice of terminology as there was no agreed collective noun for the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ at the time that he wrote. The Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, which is roughly contemporary with Alfred’s programme of translation, uses multiple terms to translate gens anglorum, with an overall preference for Ongelþeod.18 Alfred’s consistency in using Angelcynn is thus remarkable,19 and marks a subtle yet central part of his writing into being of a united land and people. This was a colonising move, embedding the Angelcynn into what had never been a historically unified people or a unified land that they occupied. There had been, and there still were, Mercians, Northumbrians, West Saxons, and so forth. There had been, and there still were, rival, often warring kingdoms rather than a united land or people. The king also uses pronouns to construct a sense of communal identity for himself, his bishops and ultimately the Angelcynn over whom he is claiming rule, shifting back and forth between the first-person singular and plural pronouns and at times making it ambiguous as to whom those pronouns refer. In this opening section Alfred moves from his own thoughts in which the past and its kings come to him, to the idea that ‘we’ – here most likely referring specifically to Alfred and his bishops, but a more general reference to the Angelcynn as a whole is also possible – need to do something to recover the learning of the time in which those kings ruled. The modulation of ‘we’ will grow more complex as the Preface progresses. Such a use of the first-person plural pronoun was a common ‘device for the entrapment of the unwary reader’ in Old English poetry,20 and although this section of the Preface is not poetry, Alfred does use the first-person plural to similar effect, bringing his readers into the text so that they become one in the formation of his plans and unable to escape agreement with him. Moreover, as we know from Asser, Alfred had loved Old English poetry from childhood and would certainly in Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (London, 1993), pp. 125–58, at 135. 18 Sharon M. Rowley, The Old English Version of Bede’s ‘Historia ecclesiastica’ (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 62–70. 19 Nicole Guenther Discenza, Inhabited Spaces: Anglo-Saxon Constructions of Place (Toronto, 2017), pp. 60, 61. Discenza notes that ‘Engla lond’ does not appear before the eleventh century. 20 T. A. Shippey, ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care’, The English Historical Review 94 (1979): 346–55, at 350.

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have been familiar with its conventions.21 After establishing the need for communal action he addresses the bishops directly, bidding them to do as he is sure that they wish to do, that is apply themselves to learning as a first step in putting his/their plans of renewal into place. He closes the section by again invoking both a communal identity and a moral lack, asking his bishops to consider how ‘we’ have been punished for abandoning learning, and this is where melancholic guilt is shifted from the person of the king to the people as a whole. The implication is also that if ‘we’ don’t act now as the Preface directs, then those punishments will continue – the unnamed punishment being, of course, the arrival of the Vikings and the ensuing wars and destruction. The opening of the Preface establishes above all that a common English identity is vested in learning in the English language and the Christian religion, an identity that excludes those – like the unnamed Vikings – who, it is implied, are non-Christian and speakers of a foreign tongue, dehumanised others in every way to the Angelcynn. Of course many of the Scandinavian settlers were Christian and did speak English, and it is possible that Alfred’s intention was that they should be included amongst the Angelcynn, but such a model of ‘inclusivity’ could create as many problems as that of complete alterity, creating split selves caught between identification with both the dominant and dominated linguistic communities and their respective ideologies.22 The structure of the Preface is one of return and progression that mirrors its larger project. Alfred began the first section of the Preface with a fiction, thoughts of an imagined past and people, thoughts of a past beyond his memory and before his lifetime, and in the second section of the Preface, he returns to his reverie on the past, this time using his own memories of more recent history to connect the lost golden age with the present. Đa ic ða ðis eal gemunde,23 ða gemunde ic eac hu ic geseah, ærðæmðe hit eal forheregod wære ⁊ forbærned, hu ða cirican geond eal Angelcyn Asser, Vita Alfredi, chs, 22, 23, 75, 76 (Keynes and Lapidge, eds. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other Contemporary Sources, pp. 74, 75, 91). 22 Mary-Louise Pratt, ‘Linguistic Utopias’, in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Writing and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb et al. (Manchester, 1987), pp. 48–66. See also Elaine Treharne’s excellent discussion of Cnut’s later manipulation of languages in the texts addressed to the different linguistic communities over which he ruled in her Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English 1020–1220. 23 Gemunan can mean ‘reflect on’, ‘think about’, or ‘be mindful of ’, but however it is translated Alfred’s movement from thoughts of one period to another creates intimate connections across distant times and geographies. 21

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stodon maðma ⁊ boca gefylda, ⁊ eac micel menigu Godes ðeowa, ⁊ ða swiðe lytle fiorme ðara boca wiston, forðæmðe hie heora nan wuht ongietan ne meahton, forðæmðe hie næron on hiora agen geðiode awritene. Swylce hie cwæden: Ure yldran, ða ðe ðas stowa ær hioldon, hie lufedon wisdom ⁊ ðurh ðone hie begeaton welan ⁊ us læfdon. Her mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð, ac we him ne cunnon æfterspyrigan, forðæm we habbað nu ægðer forlæten ge ðone welan ge ðone wisdom, forðæmðe we noldon to ðæm spore mid ure mode anlutan. (When I then remembered all this, then I also remembered how I saw, before everything was harried and burned, how the churches throughout all Angelcyn stood filled with treasures and books, and also many multitudes of God’s servants, and they received very little knowledge from those books because they could understand nothing from them because they were not written in their own language. It was as if they had said: Our predecessors, those who previously inhabited these places, they loved wisdom, and through it they acquired wealth and left it to us. Here one can yet see their track, but we do not know how to follow their track. Therefore we have now lost both the wealth and the wisdom because we would not bend our minds to that track.)

The opening words, ‘Đa ic ða ðis eal gemunde’, echo the ‘swiðe oft on gemynd’ with which the Preface began while simultaneously signalling a new beginning. Thoughts of the distant past have led Alfred to memories of the more recent past and the punishments, the destruction that bridges the gap between the two, connecting them yet also marking their separation from each other and the emptiness between them. What could in the first section only be imagined gives way in the second to what has been witnessed. Alfred saw (geseah) churches filled with treasure and books before everything (eall) had been harried and burned. Who is responsible for the destruction is again not stated, although contemporary readers would have known, or at least assumed, that it was the Vikings. The king’s refusal to name them again silences the internal conflicts between kings and within kingdoms that also occurred,24 as well as other internal factors that might have contributed to a loss of Latin learning, a strategy very different to Gildas’s one of naming and blaming.25 It also deepens the 24 One could cite, for example, the various battles associated with the rise of Mercia in the eighth and early ninth century, the 825 battle of Ellendun between Egbert of Wessex and Beornwulf of Mercia, Egbert’s conquest of Mercia in 829 as well as the extension of his authority over Northumbria and parts of Wales, and so forth. 25 See for example Susan Kelly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word’, in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Rosamund McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 36–62; Jennifer Morrish, ‘King Alfred’s Letter as a Source of

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textual gulf between past and present, creating a space of unknown history and emptiness (where? who? for how long?) that can be neither remembered nor witnessed, the source of Alfred’s melancholic lack, and an empty crypt for the history and people he refuses to name. Language and learning are prominent in this section of the Preface, both in what Alfred actually writes and in the words he chooses to write with. The English as a race and English as a language become even more clearly equated with each other through Alfred’s use of the phrase ‘on hiora agen geðiode’, books written ‘in their own language’. The noun geþeode is generally translated as ‘speech’, ‘language’, or ‘tongue’, but it can also mean a ‘people’ or ‘nation’, and there is good reason to suspect that this is a deliberate wordplay equating race with language as just this sort of wordplay is evident elsewhere in the Preface.26 Nation and race become encrypted within language, and if language is equated with national or racial identity then those not of that nation or race can never really possess its language, forever remaining other.27 Alfred then enters into an imaginary dialogue, another favourite strategy of Alfredian prose,28 with clerics from the recent past and their words provide a tangible link, a path, back to the wise men from the distant past who entrusted them with their now lost wisdom and wealth. ‘Her mon mæg giet geseon hiora swæð.’ But where is ‘her’? Does it refer to the country as a whole or does it refer to the ruined churches and monasteries? ‘Her’ can refer to time as well as place in Old English, so does it here refer to the present in which Alfred writes, to the past from which the clerics speak, or both? And who is speaking? Although Shippey reads the first pronoun ‘we’ in this passage as spoken by the clerics of the past (we him ne cunnon æfter spyrigean), the second as spoken by the English of the present (we habbað nu ægðer forlæten ge ðone welan), and the final one as spoken by the English both past and present (we noldon to ðæm spore Learning in England in the Ninth Century’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, 1986), pp. 87–107. 26 E. G. Stanley, ‘King Alfred’s Prefaces’, Review of English Studies, new ser. 39 no. 155 (1988): 349–64. Stanley comments specifically on his use of the words spyrigean and spor, which have etymologically identical stems, to produce a play on ‘a track’ and ‘in their tracks’ (350–51). 27 One can see the evolution of Alfred’s use of English in ideas such as Daniel Hannan’s image of the ‘Anglosphere’. See his How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters (London, 2013), and below, p. 223–4. 28 Imaginary dialogue is a favourite strategy of Alfredian prose. See Dorothy Whitelock, ‘The Prose of Alfred’s Reign’, in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 67–103, at 92–3; Shippey, ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care’: 346.

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mid ure mode onlutan),29 the distinction in voices is not that clear cut. There is no agreement on the issue of who speaks or when they speak, as is made clear by the different transcriptions and translations that put the inverted commas indicating the speech of the clerics in this internal dialogue around different phrases.30 Nevertheless, the effect of the multiple pronouns is to bring past and present together no matter how ambiguous – and perhaps deliberately ambiguous – specific referents might be. It is a rhetorical strategy commonly found in narratives of nation building that creates an ‘uncanny simulacral moment’ in which a people, in this case the Angelcynn, appear as ‘a ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogenous empty time’.31 While the reader has difficulty tracking the voices, the track that the speakers cannot follow is that of learning. Much has been made of Alfred’s use of what appears to be a hunting metaphor prompted by his personal love of hunting in this passage, but both swæð and spor can refer to the track of anything, not just the animal droppings or tracks that some translate here.32 The tracks could just as easily be those of a different sort of animal, the tracks left by a quill pen made from the feathers of a bird, as appear in a number of early medieval riddles.33 This would make complete sense as Alfred is writing here 29 Shippey, ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care’: 350. 30 I have left inverted commas out altogether to indicate the difficulty and to refrain from imposing a particular reading. 31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 145; see also Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London, 1990), pp. 291–322, at 309. 32 See for example Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, p. 295 n.10. See also Janet M. Bately, ‘Alfred as Author and Translator’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2015), pp. 113–42, at 130; Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln, NB, 1991), pp. 77–8. 33 See Exeter Book Riddle 51 in which a quill leaves swaþu seiþe blacu (very black tracks), or Aldhelm’s Enigma 59 in which the quill’s dark tracks in a white field lead those who can follow them to heaven:

Me dudum genuit candens onocrotalus albam, Gutture qui patulo sorbet de gurgite limphas. Pergo per albentes directo tramite campos Candentique viae vestigia caerula linquo, Lucida nigratis fuscans anfractibus arva. Nec satis est unum per campos pandere callem, Semita quin potius milleno tramite tendit, Quae non errantes ad caeli culmina vexit. The bright pelican, which swallows the waters of the sea in its gaping throat, once begot me [such that I was] white. I move through whitened fields in a straight line and leave dark-coloured traces on the glistening path, darkening the shining fields

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about books and reading, and it is the path of learning preserved in books and writing that has been lost and needs restoration. The treasures and books that were lost will be replaced, most immediately by the translations of the Regula pastoralis and the costly æstels (book-pointers or markers) that accompany them. The æstels would quite literally have allowed readers to follow the track of the letters and words and to mark their place in the terrain of the text. The æstels are important to any reading of the Preface as it is with them, their value, and the injunction that both they and the books they mark should remain in the church when the books are not in active use that the Preface closes. The third section begins with Alfred returning again to his memories of the losses of the past, and this leads him to a moment of wonder. He wonders why the wise men of the seventh and eighth centuries had not translated their Latin books into the vernacular for those who came after them. Đa ic ða ðis eal gemunde, ða wundrode ic swiðe swiðe ðara godena witena ðe gio wæron geond Angelcyn, ⁊ ða bec be fullan ealla geliornod hæfdon, ðæt hie hiora ða nanne dæl noldon on hiora agen geðiode wendan. Ac ic ða sona eft me selfum andwyrde ⁊ cwæð: Hie ne wendon ðætte æfre men sceoldon swa reccelease weorðan ⁊ sio lar swa oðfeallan; for ðære wilnunga hie hit forleton, ⁊ woldon ðæt her ðy mara wisdom on londe wære ðy we ma geðioda cuðon. (When I then remembered all this, then I wondered very greatly why the good wise men who were formerly throughout Angelcyn and had thoroughly learned all those books, did not wish to translate any portion of them into their own language. But then at once I answered myself and said: ‘They did not think that people should ever become so negligent and learning so declined. For this reason they left them, that they wished that the more wisdom would be in the land through the more languages we knew.’)

This is a moment in which two different types of wonder converge. Alfred begins by wondering in the sense of not knowing yet being curious about something, but wonder, as Albert the Great wrote, ‘is the movement of the man who does not know on his way to finding with my blackened meanderings. It is not sufficient to open up a single pathway through those fields – rather, the trail proceeds in a thousand directions and takes those who do not stray from it to the summits of heaven. Text and translation from Dieter Bitterli, Say What I am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition (Toronto, 2009), p. 143.

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out’.34 Alfred’s not knowing leads him to a moment of actual wonder in the sudden revelation of the answer. Through an internal dialogue with himself he suddenly comes to understand – or imagines that he understands – the thoughts and motivations of those long dead seventh- or eighth-century wise men. They had never believed that learning would decline to the extent that it had, and they expected that those who came after them would be able to acquire more wisdom, to read and to understand more languages. The king’s conversation with himself moves him gradually back in time and takes him into yet another memory, this time one about the history of language and translation and the place of English within that history. Đa gemunde ic hu sio æ wæs ærest on Ebrisc geðiode funden, ⁊ eft, ða ða hie Crecas geleornodon, ða wendon hi hie on hiora agen geðiode ealle, ⁊ eac ealle oðre bec. ⁊ eft Lædenwære swa same, siððan hie hie geleornodon, hie hie wendon ealla ðurh wise wealhstodas on hiora agen geðiode. ⁊ eac ealla oðra Cristena ðioda sumne dæl hiora on hiora agen geðiode wendon. Forðy me ðyncð betre, gif eow swa ðyncð, ðæt we eac sume bec, ða ðe niedbeðyrfesta sien eallum monnum to witanne, ðæt we ða on ðæt geðiode wenden ðe we ealle gecnawan mægen, ⁊ gedon swa we swiðe eaðe magon mid Godes fultume, gif we ða stilnesse habbað, ðætte eal sio geoguð ðe nu is on Angelcynne freora monna ðara ðe ða speda hæbben ðæt hie ðæm befiolan mægen, sien to leornunga oðfæste, ða hwile ðe hie to nanre oðerre note ne mægen, oð ðone fierst ðe hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit arædan: lære mon siððan furðer on Lædengeðiode ða ðe mon furðor læran wille ⁊ to hierran hade don wille. (Then I remembered how the law was first composed in the Hebrew language, and afterwards, when the Greeks learned it, they translated it all into their own language, and also all the other books. And afterwards the Romans did the same, after they had learned them they translated them all into their own language through wise translators. And also all other Christian peoples translated some part of them into their own language. Therefore I think it better, if you think so, that we also certain books, those that are most necessary for all men to know, that we also should translate them into the language that we can all understand, and do this, as we very easily might with God’s help, if we Albertus Magnus, Metaphysicorum, tract 2, ch. 6, in Opera omnia, vol. 6, ed. Auguste Borgner (Paris, 1890), p. 30; quoted in Karma Lochrie, ‘Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (2006): 493–516, at 494. On wonder and utopia see also Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1970), p. 4.

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have enough peace, so that all free-born young men of the Angelcynne [or of Angelcynne], those who have the means to apply themselves to it, might be set to learning, as long as they are not in any other useful occupation, until the time that they are able to read English writings well. After that one can teach them the Latin language, those who one wishes to teach further and bring into holy orders.)

The opening sentence of this passage maps a genealogy of translation and of learning from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English. Other peoples may have translated sacred texts into their own languages but only English is named as the successor to those sacred languages. The opening sentence also maps a genealogy of acquisition with each successive culture acquiring the sacred language(s) of the past. This spirit of acquisition or collection of languages (and alphabets) can be traced throughout early English culture,35 and will be explored further in the next chapter. It, of course, continues on into English culture, empire, and Anglo-Saxonism in the modern world. In this passage, however, it not only provides a direct line of descent from sacred language to sacred language, it also maps the journey of the Angelcynn, the new chosen people, back to the world of Old Testament language and learning, the same world from which the West Saxon royal genealogies claim their kings descended.36 The close special relationship documented here between English and Latin builds on that established in the Angli/ angeli wordplay of Gregory the Great when he encountered the group of Angle boys in Rome as recounted by the author of the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great and by Bede,37 two of the canonical golden age authors, and strengthens the concept of English exceptionalism that will underpin the nation’s later medieval and modern colonialism and empire.38 Yet Latin is also decentred in this passage, becoming just one in a series of languages that culminates in English, the language that ‘we can all understand’. Learning for all those who have the means and rank will be first and foremost in English, and only those destined for higher occupations

35 Daniel Anlezark, ed. and trans., The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 28–31, 34–8. 36 See above, n. 11. 37 Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, pp. 90–1; HE, ii.1. See also the discussion of the translation of these passages in Mehan and Townsend, ‘“Nation” and the Gaze of the Other in Eighth Century Northumbria’. 38 See further Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534; Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell; and Chapter 4 below.

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need be schooled in Latin.39 The fact that there was at this time no standardised English but rather a series of dialects, developed within the separate early English kingdoms, receives no mention.40 The result of Alfred’s promotion of his own dialect out from the court would be that West Saxon (along with the square minuscule script developed at Winchester)41 would become standard in line with imperial Latin, and Alfred has here positioned himself as ‘the father of a new English national grammatical culture’.42 A sacred community is constituted by and within this sacred language and, as Uebel observes in speaking of the construction of alterity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the ‘utopian drive’ that supports this model of Christian community ‘posits a harmonious and nostalgic social world in which language functions as a device for linking the members of that world. Matters of admission to membership are grounded within the notion of a privileged, legitimate script and language.’43 (Alfred will take the privileged nature of the language even further in the verse Epilogue to the Regula pastoralis discussed below.) ‘We’ in this passage again slips between referents, clearly referring to the king and his bishops in relation to those who will do the actual work of selecting and translating books, but to the kingdom as whole in relation to those who can understand the language and who wish for peace. By the end of the passage, language, people, and place have become united, as have the bishops, with Alfred’s own thoughts. What began as a plan that Alfred suggests will work, if the bishops think so too, has become an established plan of action written out from the mind of the king into the people and their institutions.

39 Alfred’s plan was echoed in the latter half of the nineteenth century when it was believed in both Britain and the United States that Old English would replace Latin as the foundational language of learning. See Chris Jones, ‘Old English for Non-Specialists in the Nineteenth Century: A Road not Taken’, in Saints and Scholars: New Perceptions on Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture in Honour of Hugh Magennis, ed. S. Williams (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 234–51. 40 Though of course no language exists in an entirely ‘pure’ form. 41 Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 627–8. However, all three of the earliest copies of the Old English Regula pastoralis do contain features from other Old English dialects (see Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 86–110). On the standardisation of language and script see Mechthild Gretsch, ‘Winchester Vocabulary and Standard Old English: The Vernacular in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 83 (2002): 3–49. 42 Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 416–17. 43 Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 40.

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In the final section of the prose Preface Alfred relates how he has already put into action the plan for learning and translation that his bishops will now help him to develop. He begins again with a memory, this time one that reaches back to the first section of the Preface and the decline of Latin learning that he ‘remembered’ there. In effect, he returns to the beginning, reminding his bishops of just what is now lacking before beginning anew with his own work of translation aided by the cooperation he has already received from the clerical community. Đa ic ða gemunde hu sio lar Lædengeðiodes ær ðysum oðfeallen wæs geond Angelcyn, ⁊ ðeah monege cuðon Englisc gewrit arædan, ða ongan ic ongemang oðrum missenlicum ⁊ monigfealdum bisgum ðissses cynerices ða boc wendan on Englisc ðe is genemned on Læden Pastoralis ⁊ on Englisc Hierdeboc, hwilum word be worde, hwilum ondgiet of ondgiete, swa swa ic hie geleornade æt Plegmunde minum ærcebisceope ⁊ æt Assere minum bisceope ⁊ æt Grimbolde minum masse ⁊ æt Iohanne minum mæssepreoste. Siððan ic hie ða geleornod hæfde, swa swa ic hie forstod swa ic hie andgietfullicost areccan meahte, ic hie on Englisc awende; ⁊ to ælcum biscepstole on minum rice wille ane onsendan; ⁊ on ælcre bið an æstel se bið on fitigum moncessa. Ond ic bebeode on Godes noman ðæt nan mon ðone æstel from ðære bec ne do, ne ða boc from ðæm mynstre: uncuð hu longe ðære swa gelærede bisceopas sien, swa swa nu, Gode ðonc wel hwær siendon; forðy ic wolde ðætte hie ealneg æt ðære stowe wæren, buton se bisceop hie mid him habban wille oððe hio hwær to læne sie, oððe hwa oðre biwrite. (When I then remembered how the knowledge of the Latin language had earlier declined throughout Angelcyn, but yet many could still read English writings, then I began amongst the other various and manifold cares of this kingdom, to translate into English the book that is called in Latin Pastoralis and in English the ‘Shepherdbook’, sometimes word for word, sometimes meaning for meaning, just as I learnt it from Plegmund my archbishop, and from Asser my bishop, and from Grimbold my mass-priest, and from John my mass-priest. After I had learned it, I translated it into English as most intelligibly I understood it, and I will send a copy to every bishopric in my kingdom, and in each will be an æstel [book-pointer] worth fifty mancuses. And I command in God’s name that no one shall take that æstel from the book, nor the book from the church: it is not known how long there will be as learned bishops as there are now nearly everywhere, thanks be to God. Therefore I wish that they always remain in their place,

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unless the bishop wants to have the book with him, or it is on loan somewhere, or someone is writing another copy from it.)

For the Angelcynn, the English language and English writings are the means through which a new utopia of learning might be achieved and so, amongst all his kingly duties, Alfred has found time to translate into English the Hierdeboc that follows, just as Gregory wrote his original text amidst and about his own duties. His translation will be sent out not just to bishops within the kingdom of Wessex over which he currently ruled but, as surviving manuscript evidence shows, to bishops across all those parts of the island that were under AngloSaxon control, as part of the very act of unification that Alfred envisaged.44 By the time that Alfred wrote, Wessex had already extended its power over parts of Mercia and Kent, but Alfred’s policy as laid out in the Preface is new in that his political actions were ‘supplemented ideologically by the creation and active promotion of a new common identity for this newly-formed “Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons”.’45 These works of wisdom to be distributed throughout the land will be accompanied by an æstel, which, it has been convincingly argued on the evidence of the Alfred Jewel,46 functioned as a seal accompanying what was in effect a royal writ. He then ends the prose Preface with a second assertion of royal authority similar to the one with which he had begun, he commands (bebeodan) that both book and æstel, wisdom and wealth, will be kept safe in the homes to which he has assigned them. If the Alfred Jewel is indeed one of the æstels that accompanied the translation of the Regula pastoralis, and if the other æstels were of similar iconography, not only would they have been signs of the king’s authority, they would also have suggested that the king was always watching. But Alfred also ends with a note of caution that both reminds the reader of the fact that the Preface deals 44 Those bishops known to have received a copy are Wærferth of Worcester, Hehstan of London, Wulfsige of Sherborne, Swiðulf of Rochester, and Archbishop Plegmund. Schreiber speculates that others to receive a copy may have included Denewulf of Winchester, Wulfred of Lichfield, Alhheard of Dorchester, Wighelm of Selsey, and Edgar of Hereford (Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 77–8.) 45 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 131. 46 Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature; Catherine E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 31–4. See also Matthew Kempshall, ‘No Bishop, No King: The Ministerial Ideology of Kingship and Asser’s Res Gestae Aelfredi’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford, 2001), pp. 106–27.

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with lack rather than complete loss and underscores the fragility and contingent nature of utopia, ‘it is not known how long there will be as learned bishops as there are now nearly everywhere’. Firstly, learned ecclesiastics have not completely disappeared as Alfred worries that bishops in the future might be less learned that those in the kingdom now. Secondly, this passage brings us back to the gap of the unknown and unknowable and raises the spectre of the unnamed troops that have harried and burned the country. It is unknown how long the destruction might persist, or whether it might occur in another form at some time in the future – just as it had occurred previously with the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic peoples about whom Alfred cannot speak. The unnamed and the unknown converge here at the end to remind the reader of the melancholia of loss and lack that was the catalyst for Alfred’s utopian desire, and to remind Alfred and his bishops of the possibility of failure and further loss. If the prose part of the Preface mapped a temporal descent from Hebrew to English and a converging of past to present, the verse section that follows it maps a geographical movement of the text of the Regula pastoralis from Rome to England and from Gregory to Alfred.47 Đis ærendgewrit  Augustinus ofer sealtne sæ   suðan brohte iegbuendum,   swa hit ær fore adihtode  Dryhtnes cempa, Rome papa.   Ryhtspel monig Gregorius  gleawmod geondwod durh sefan snyttro,   searoðonca hord. Forðon he moncynnes   mæst gestriende rodera wearde,   Romwara betst, monna modwelegost,   mærðum gefrægost. Siððan min on Englisc   Æl(f)fred cyning awende worda gehwelc,   ⁊ me his writerum sende suð ⁊ norð,   heht him swelcra ma brengan be ðære bisene,   ðæt he his biscepum sendan meahte,   forðæm hie his sume ðorfton, ða ðe Lædenspræce   læste cuðon. (Augustine brought this letter over the salt sea from the south to the island dwellers, just as the Lord’s champion, the pope in Rome, had On the verse Preface and issues of language, authorship, and authority see especially Nicole Guenther Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’, Neophilologus 85 (2001): 645–33.

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written it earlier. The wise Gregory had studied many noble writings through his wise mind, his hoard of wisdom. Therefore he acquired most of humanity for the guardian of the heavens, the best of Romans, most intelligent of men most renowned for his honours. Afterwards, King Alfred translated every word of me into English and sent me south and north to his scribes, commanded them to produce more of the same from the exemplars, so that he could send them to his bishops because some of them, those who least knew Latin, needed them.)

In the verse Preface the focus is on authority, authorship, and land rather than language or people. The book is brought over the sea from the south to the ‘island-dwellers’, a term that captures England’s isolation at edge of the known world and its special nature, set apart from the rest of Europe. It also marks its inhabitants as somehow different and unique to this space, elevated by their angelic nature as established by Gregory – ‘angels’ or Angelcynn ‘at the edge of the world’.48 Moreover, it traces without naming the earlier sea travels of those who came to be the island-dwellers and returns the journey of the Angle boys that Gregory met in Rome. Alfred then distributes the book both south and north across the island. Language and translation remain important, but as signifiers of England’s simultaneous links to Rome yet distance and difference from it, rather than as carriers of royal directives. The names of Gregory and Augustine, the Romans who respectively wrote and brought the Latin text to the island, remain in their Latin forms but the name of Alfred, who the book tells us translated it into English, is in its Old English form.49 In the middle and at the end of the verses are a pair of hybrid Latin/ Old English words, Romwara and lædenspræc, signs of the process of negotiation between the two languages and cultures, in which neither Latin nor English culture or language have remained untouched by the other, but also putting English on an equal footing with Latin. In receiving, translating, and mediating between the two languages Alfred establishes himself as the book’s new English author, reinforcing the position established in the prose Preface of the king as the restorer of wealth and wisdom. It also suggests that water is the conduit or 48 Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000–1534, p. 11. 49 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 6; Schreiber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach [Leiden, 2015], pp. 171–99, at 172–3, states that it is perfectly possible that Augustine did bring a copy of the Regula pastoralis north with him, and it was certainly known to both Bede and Aldhlem.

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carrier of that which will be restored, learning and languages. This is both appropriate and ironic in the context of Alfred’s melancholia as water is one of the elements lacking in the melancholic temperament, which, with its excess of black bile, is associated with land rather than water.50 As previously noted, utopia is always an uncanny place as it hovers between past and present, somewhere and nowhere, the real and the fictional.51 The internal dialogues in which voices from the past are made to speak and the multiple ambiguous pronouns of the Preface add to the uncanniness of this particular utopia, but it is brought out most clearly at this point by the speaking book. There is always already something uncanny about things that speak,52 as what appears to be an inanimate object is suddenly brought impossibly to life. In this case the book positions itself in exactly the same uncanny location as utopia – between past and present, there and here, somewhere and nowhere. It materialises utopia in the book. It also establishes the book as a historical witness. In its ongoing manifestations, travels, translations, and copying, it has witnessed the different times and movements it records. It speaks with the authority of a witness, and authority is as much at the heart of Alfred’s message as utopia. The Preface (prose and verse) is an appropriation of Gregory’s Latin text to a more secular and royal purpose, albeit one centred on the origins of England as a Christian nation. The prose Preface is a letter to Alfred’s bishops commanding their obedience.53 It is modelled generically on Gregory’s own preface to his Latin text, which takes the form of a letter to John, bishop of Ravenna. The primary purpose of such letters, like that of so many other medieval documents, was performative,54 they made narratives real rather than simply using narrative to describe or critique reality.55 Uebel observes that ‘letters, like histories, work to bring the past into the present, to 50 The sanguine temperament was associated with an excess of blood and the element of air, the choleric temperament with an excess of yellow bile and the element of fire, and the phlegmatic temperament with an excess of phlegm and the element of water. 51 See above, p. 8. 52 Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York, 2004). 53 Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, pp. 84–5; Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’, p. 627; Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 627. 54 Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections (Turnhout, 1976), p. 13. 55 Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’: 7–8.

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collapse the distance between historical alterity and present reality, to ensure continuity between two temporal realities’.56 Letters perform this process through their direct address to the recipient. In replicating the format of Gregory’s preface, Alfred’s Preface presents the king’s voice and authority as parallel to those of Gregory, but its language is ‘startlingly innovative’,57 with its internal dialogues, multiple ambiguous voices, and blurring of the boundaries between past and present. None of these authorial strategies are to be found in Gregory’s Latin letter. The nature of authority claimed by Alfred is also different. Most importantly, Gregory was a pope writing to the bishops who were directly under his authority. Alfred, however, is a secular ruler, using his Preface to place himself in a position of authority over his bishops and the church they lead. On the one hand, this allows Alfred to establish the Regula pastoralis as an appropriate model of governance and pastoral care for secular rulers in addition to those in charge of the church and religious communities but, on the other, it makes it quite clear that the king now wields power over the church. As Nicole Guenther Discenza notes, Alfred’s rhetorical claim to authority over the church was accompanied by, in fact had been preceded by, his appropriation of church lands to be used in his defence of the kingdom against the Vikings, lands which then became part of his own holdings.58 At the same time that it makes explicit the authorial connection between Alfred and Gregory, bringing their voices together as one in the production of this book, the verse Preface provides a transition from Alfred’s epistle to the translation of Gregory’s text that follows.59 While Alfred’s prose Preface borrowed some of the elements of poetic composition, the verse Preface borrows from the language of prose with nine of its words being normally found in learned Latinate prose rather than in poetry.60 The technique lends an air of royal authority to both the verse form and the voice of the book, at the same time Uebel, Ecstatic Transformations: on the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 105. Irvine, ‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, p. 156. 58 Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 631. See also, Robin Fleming, ‘Monastic Lands and England’s Defence in the Viking Age’, English Historical Review 100 (1985): 246–55; Janet L. Nelson, ‘“A King Across the Sea”: Alfred in Continental Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 36 (1986): 45–68. 59 Susan Irvine notes that in the preface to the Alfredian-era translation of Gregory’s Dialogues first-person plural pronouns are used to create the same effect (Irvine, ‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, p. 149). 60 Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 628–9. 56

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that it performs the cultural translation from Latin to English. One of the learned prose words that it borrows is ærendgewrit (a letter or writ of authority), a word that here refers to the text of the Regula pastoralis that follows, but one that also appears in the prose section of the Preface, where it refers to an alphabetical letter. Though the meanings differ, the repetition furthers the connection between the different texts and also constructs Gregory’s text as a letter with the king as its intended recipient and thus the authorised mediator of his text.61 But ærendgewrit also echoes the ærendwrecum (messengers – in this case messengers sent by God) of the opening lines of the prose Preface, setting both Gregory and Alfred in a chain of authority and authorship that stretches back to God. That the church saw Alfred’s claims to power over it very differently is demonstrated by another letter, a letter of 877–78 from Pope John VIII to Archbishop Æthelred of Canterbury in response to a letter of complaint he had received from the archbishop. The pope states that he had written to Alfred reprimanding him for his appropriation of church land, urging him to be obedient to the archbishop and the church, and threatening him with divine sanction if he failed to obey. He also urges Æthelred to resist both the king and anyone else who acted against the church.62 It may be that in light of this, and because Gregory was long dead, Alfred saw him as a ‘safe pope to invoke’ in his assertion of authority over the church,63 but Alfred was claiming power over far more than just the church and its bishops and, as the pope identified most closely with the origin of the Christian church on the island, Gregory represented the twin ideals of recovery and a new beginning that were so central to Alfred’s vision. Moreover, as Pratt notes, all the texts in the Alfredian programme of translation are concerned with power and its proper use,64 not just those associated with Gregory. 61 David Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007), p. 142; see also Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 627. 62 Nelson, ‘“A King Across the Sea”: Alfred in Continental Perspective’: 46. For the text of the letter see Erich Caspar, ed., MGH, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, V (Berlin, 1928), pp. 71–2. (https://www.dmgh.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00000540_00095. html?sortIndex=040%3A010%3A0007%3A010%3A00%3A00); trans. in Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 1, c.500–1042 (London, 1955), no. 222. See also Richard Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in AngloSaxon England (New York, 1998), pp. 244–5; Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 631. 63 Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 631. 64 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, pp. 132–3, 172. It is worth noting that mirrors for princes texts were one of the genres that influenced More’s

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I am not going to analyse the text or translation of the Regula pastoralis itself in any depth as it is not Alfred’s composition and as it is for the most part a close literal translation of Gregory’s Latin text, indeed it is the most literal translation in the Alfredian canon. However, this text was chosen for translation in order to make a specific statement and to project a specific image of the king and there are points at which the translation differs subtly from Gregory’s text, appropriating it to Alfred’s own agenda. The differences between Alfred’s English and the Latin have been analysed in great detail by Carolin Schreiber and I offer merely a summary of her findings here.65 The essential differences all relate to the secularisation of Gregory’s Regula pastoralis, although the Latin text did already have numerous secular features,66 and as a text fundamentally about the duties and behaviour of those who care for a group of people it had always been potentially applicable to anyone in a position of leadership, religious or secular. It also had a long history of association with the learned men of the past to whom Alfred was looking back, having been known and used by Bede, Aldhelm, and Alcuin, as well as a tradition of use in support of reform movements. Gregory himself wrote in order to educate and reform his bishops, many of whom he believed were ill prepared for their positions both intellectually and morally.67 In 747 Boniface recommended it to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury in a letter criticising the irregularities and improprieties of the English church, and it was used by both Alcuin and Charlemagne during the educational and monastic reforms associated with the Carolingian court and the learned ecclesiastics that were a part of it.68 We can certainly question how well Alfred knew the history and previous uses of the Regula pastoralis, but whether by design or serendipitous chance, he could not have chosen a better text to inform and initiate the work he was proposing his bishops help him to achieve. It was a text authored by Gregory and part of what for the Angelcynn was certainly a golden age of the Roman church and its association with their land and people; it had been brought to England by Augustine as one of Utopia. 65 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context; Schreiber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’. 66 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, pp. 135, 194. 67 Bruno Judic, Charles Morel, and Floribert Rommel, eds. Grégoire le Grand: Règle Pastorale, 2 vols (Paris, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 77–88; R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 107–11. 68 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 7–9.

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the foundational texts of the English church and a guide for its first bishops and archbishops; it had been a source text for the seventh- and eighth-century churches and writers of Alfred’s lost golden age; and it had been one of the texts underpinning the Carolingian reforms that were so influential on Alfred and other pre-Conquest rulers, as well as on many aspects of early English culture in general.69 The most important alterations Alfred made in the process of translation were to increase the language of secular relationships and contemporary social hierarchies by incorporating terms such as ealdorman and comitatis, making the text applicable to all men in positions of social leadership, not just those at the pinnacle of church or state.70 He also provided sources for biblical passages, in some cases elaborating on their meaning as well, replacing ‘abstract concepts’ with ‘more concrete’ terms, such as divine dispensation with God,71 and put increased emphasis on the need for sinners to repent and the possibility of God’s mercy,72 quite plausibly because he expected his readership to include individuals less familiar than his bishops with the text of the Bible and the strict moral conduct demanded by the church. Indeed, it is quite likely that the translation was also meant to function as a type of mirror for princes guide for both the king and those members of the aristocracy responsible for supporting and enforcing his rule.73 It certainly had a deep influence on the image of the king that Asser presented in his Vita Alfredi,74 and the same idea of Alfred leading his people to a new utopian future, a promised land, appears in different form in the Mosaic preface to the king’s law 69 Joanna E. Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia c. 750–870 (London, 2003); Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946); David Rollason, Conrad Leyser, and Hannah Williams, eds, England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947) (Turnhout, 2010). 70 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, p. 138; Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 41–3; Schreiber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, pp. 187–9. 71 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 41. 72 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 41–3. 73 Nicole Guenther Discenza, ‘The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian Social Imaginary’, in Rome and the North, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Kees Dekker, and David F. Johnson (Paris, 2001), pp. 67–81, at 68; Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of AngloSaxon England, p. 44. 74 Kempshall, ‘No Bishop, No King: The Ministerial Ideology of Kingship and Asser’s Res Gestae Aelfredi’; Schrieber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, p. 191.

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code discussed below. Most importantly perhaps, Alfred heightened the divinely ordained nature of secular lordship with the forthright statement that it should not be opposed because ‘God ðe hlafordscipe gescop’, and to offend one’s lord was to offend God.75

THE GEOGRAPHY OF UTOPIA The image of a wise king leading a chosen people into a new promised land is an inherently utopian one. That this is what Alfred is doing is implied rather than explicitly stated in the Preface, but it is present nonetheless, and is but one aspect of the text that locates its narrative structure firmly within the genre of utopian literature; another is that it can be read as a type of travel narrative that incorporates journeys over both real and imagined geographies. The book’s journey to the island narrated in the verse Preface not only documents Augustine’s journey north, it also enacts a reversal of that of the Anglian boys who met Gregory in Rome, as noted above, and narrates the journey of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and other peoples from the Continent to Britain via the peaceful metaphor of the arrival of wisdom and the Christian church, a move that foreshadows the trope of the white Anglo-Saxon saviour of a ‘backwards’ people. It thus maps the colonisation of the island by both the Continental peoples and the Roman church, and in doing so the book retells the exodus myth that was so much a part of English culture from the seventh century on.76 The idea that Britain was a promised land was nothing new in itself, but in writing himself into that myth Alfred became a new Moses leading his people into the new promised land of learning. This is very much the image of the king preserved in the preface to the Domboc, which is of uncertain date but most probably contemporary with the Preface to the Regula pastoralis as it is both about and a part of the passage of the law and learning from Hebrew to English described there, even incorporating some of the same language.77 75 As Schreiber notes, Gregory’s language is far more ambiguous: ‘Nam cum praepositis delinquimus, eius ordini qui eos nobis praetulit obuiamus’ (King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 44). 76 Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England; see also Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford, 2006). 77 Simon Keynes dates the Domboc to the late 880s (‘Alfred the Great and the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2015), pp. 13–46, at 25 n.44),

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Þis sindan ða domas þe se ælmihtega God self sprecende wæs to Moyse ⁊ him bebead to healdanne; ⁊ siððan se ancenneda Dryhtnes sunu, ure God, þæt is hælend Crist, on middangeard cwom, he cwæð, ðæt he ne come no ðas bebodu to brecanne ne to forbeodanne, ac mid eallum godum to ecanne; ⁊ mildheortnesse ⁊ eaðmodnesse he lærde.   Đa æfter his ðrowunge, ær þam þe his apostolas tofarene wæron geond ealle eorðan to læranne, ⁊ þa giet ða hie ætgædere wæron, monega hæðena ðeoda hie to Gode gecerdon. Þa he ealle ætsomne wæron, hie sendan ærendwrecan to Antiohhia ⁊ to Syrie, Cristes æ to læranne. (These are the laws that God Almighty spoke to Moses, and commanded him to keep; and when the only begotten son of the Lord our God, that is the Saviour Christ, came into the world he said that he came not to break the commandments nor to countermand them, but to extend them with everything good, and he taught mercy and humility. Then after his passion, before the apostles set out to teach throughout all the earth, and when they were still together, they converted many heathen peoples to God. When they were all assembled, they sent messengers to Antioch and to Syria, to teach Christ’s law.)78

The law passes from God to Moses and through Christ to the apostles and on to the church fathers and, eventually, to the Angelcynn, a process that mirrors the passing and translation of the law from Hebrew to Greek and to Latin before it became fragmented as it passed into the multiple languages of early medieval Europe: ‘7 eac ealla oðra Cristena ðioda sumne dæl hiora on hiora agen geðiode wendon’. After carefully picking and choosing from the laws of his predecessors past and present, Alfred’s Domboc then translates and clarifies the law for ‘all men’. Ic ða Ælfred cyning þas togædere gegaderode ⁊ awritan het, monege þara þe ure foregengan heoldan, ða ðe me licodon; ⁊ manege þara þe me ne licodon ic awearp mid minra witena geðeahte, ⁊ on oðre wisan bebead to healdanne. Forðam ic ne dorste geðristlæcan þara minra awuht fela on gewrit settan, forðam me wæs uncuð, hwæt þæs ðam lician wolde ðe æfter us wæren. Ac ða ðe ic gemette awðer oððe on Ines dæge, mines mæges, oððe on Offan Mercna cyninges oððe while Mary Richards dates it to ca. 895 (‘The Laws of Alfred and Ine’, in ibid., pp. 282–309, at 282). For further discussion see Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1, Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), pp. 265–85. 78 F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols (Tübingen, 1960), I, pp. 42–3; trans. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, p. 421.

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on Æþelbryhtes, þe ærest fulluhte onfeng on Angelcynne, þa ðe me ryhtoste ðuhton, ic þa heron gegaderode, ⁊ pa oðre forlet. (Then I, King Alfred, gathered these together and commanded to be written down many of those which our predecessors held, those which pleased me; and many of them that did not please me I rejected with the counsel of my wise men, and ordered that they be observed in other ways. I dared not presume to put in writing all the many of my own, because it was unknown to me which of them would please those that are after us. But those that I found either in the time of Ine my kinsman, or of Offa king of the Mercians, or of Æthelberht who first among the English received baptism, those that seemed most lawful, I gathered them herein and left out the others.)79

It is noteworthy that the laws he chooses to include are all three from the ‘happy times’ before the arrival of the Vikings, those of Ine (688–726), his most powerful West Saxon predecessor, along with those of kings of Mercia and Kent, the same areas over which Wessex had already extended its power. It may also be significant that Æthelberht (550–616) was king of Kent at the time of Augustine’s arrival in Canterbury, and that Offa (757–96), perhaps the most powerful of all the early kings, asserted his power over the church by initiating the creation of the archdiocese of Lichfield, splitting the power of the archdiocese of Canterbury in two, and setting a precedent for Alfred’s own claim to power over the English church. Like the translation of the Regula pastoralis, the Domboc is also unusual in the emphasis it places on the power of the king and loyalty to one’s lord, including the statement that ‘one should love one’s lord as oneself ’.80 The text is, in the words of Simon Keynes, ‘subsumed with a sense of its own grandeur’.81 More importantly, in the Domboc the exodus legend is written into early English law as well as history, becoming yet another tool in the expansion of West Saxon rule across the land.82 Both the prefaces to the Domboc and the Regula pastoralis locate England in relation to other countries or cultures at the same time that they set it apart from them, leaving it in its island isolation with a direct line of travel to and communication with Rome and the classical or biblical cultures of the past. There is only Angelcynn, heir 79 Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I, p. 46; trans. Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, p. 277. 80 Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, pp. 283–4, citation at 283; Richards, ‘The Laws of Alfred and Ine’, p. 306. 81 Keynes, ‘Alfred the Great and the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’, p. 25. 82 Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 38–42.

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to both the land of the Israelites and classical and early Christian Greece and Rome. In the Domboc the lands of all those other Christian peoples who translated portions of the law into their own languages go unnamed, just like the countries from which wise men came to England in search of knowledge in the Preface to the Regula pastoralis. The descent of languages and laws does create a genealogy for both, but it also suggests new beginnings. Alfred has chosen from all those laws of the past to form a new law code for the future, just as he will choose from all those books of the past, those that are ‘most necessary for all men to know’, to begin his revival of learning, and a new golden age. In the prose Preface to the Regula pastoralis it is Alfred’s mind that does the travelling. His memory travels across the island tracing the path that his translations will eventually take, but here too his memory is selective. The Humber and the Thames rivers mark specific but porous borders between learning communities of different abilities, but he is silent as to the significance of both as shifting political boundaries between kingdoms (and dialects) past or present. In the past the Humber had been the boundary between Northumbria and Mercia while the Thames formed the northern border of the kingdom of Kent. At the time that the Preface was written, however, the Danes controlled most of the land north of the Thames, including eastern Mercia, and their rule extended north beyond the Humber to the Tees. The areas in which learning had fallen off are thus confusing. To state that learning had fallen off south of the Thames implies that the Viking invasions and settlements to the north are the cause, but to state that it had fallen off north of the Humber includes the northern Danelaw in the area of decline along with Northumbria lying to the north of the Tees. In using these two particular rivers to define the decline Alfred is quietly reinscribing the borders of the old kingdoms into the landscape, the kingdoms of the age of Augustine and of Bede before the coming of the Vikings, but establishing them as boundaries of cultural contact that must be crossed rather than as lines of political difference. It is also a move that erases the presence of the Danelaw, inserting that empty space into which his dreamed-of England can expand, an emptiness from which the spectre of an England that never existed can seem to rise anew. The borders thus become markers of commonality and a shared history that must be crossed, signs of a unified and only temporarily fragmented identity rather than lines of cultural, historic, or ethnic difference. This mental travelling across a lost landscape of unity could only trigger Alfred’s melancholy as it fails to recognise the earlier ‘empty’ land in which

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his ancestors had settled. He hopes that the unity he identifies is possible, but in his recognition that his utopia is possible only under certain circumstances, the possibility of failure remains very real. As he writes, Alfred can only think across the river boundaries but this provides added incentive, in fact signals the absolute necessity for the king to cross them physically in order to know. His claim of uncertainty, as Davis notes, creates nameless voids into which he is able to project his vision and power: In this Preface description, a uniform language and anonymous individuals merge into an apparently pre-existing national landscape, where the moral and military decay brought on by the decline of wisdom corresponds both to the isolation of individuals (“very few,” “not many,” “so few,” “a single one”) and to linguistic failure and disintegration – the inability to understand or to translate “one written message” (an ærendgewrit). The rivers function here as naturalising figures for these discontinuities that threaten national unity and success, but that will be crossed over (as internal boundaries they have already been crossed out) by the restorative and unifying program of translation.83

The speaking book of the verse Preface implies just this crossing over and crossing out when it states that it had been sent south and north to be copied, the copies populating the land in advance of West Saxon conquest. As bodies of water that have been crossed mentally and will be crossed physically, they once again allude to the Anglo-Saxon origin myth of exile, each new crossing becoming a new search for and step in the recovery of the promised land, but they also mark the melancholic lack, delimiting areas in which, as the above quotation makes clear, there remain only a few or ‘not many’ or ‘a single one’. In Alfred’s verse Epilogue to the Regula pastoralis the book and its wisdom also become territories to be traversed whilst simultaneously being the means of traversing them. The book is a body of water, a vessel dispensing water, and the water that is dispensed. It writes and it looks forward to the recovery of all that is currently lacking. Đis is nu se wæterscipe   ðe us weroda God to frofre gehet   foldbuendum. He cwæð ðæt he wolde   ðæt on weorulde forð of ðæm innoðum   a libbendu wætru fliowen,   ðe wel on hiene geliefden under lyfte.   Is hit lytel tweo

83

Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 621.

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ðæt ðæs wætersciepes   welsprynge is on heofonrice;   þæt is Halig Gast. Đonon hiene hlodon   halige ⁊ gecorene, sieððen hiene gieredon   ða ðe Gode hierdon ðurh halga bec   hieder on eorðan geond monna mod   missenlice. Sume hiene weriað   on gewitlocan, wisdomes stream,   welerum gehæftað, ðæt he on unnyt   ut ne tofloweð. Ac se wel wunað   on weres breostum ðurh Dryhtnes giefe   diop ⁊ stille. Sume hiene lætað   ofer landscare riðum torinnan.   Nis ðæt rædlic ðing, gif swa hlutor wæter,   hlud ⁊ undiop, tofloweð æfter   feldum, oð hit to fenne wyrð. Ac hladað iow nu drincan,   nu iow Dryhten geaf ðæt iow Gregorius   gegiered hafað to durum eowrum   Drihtnes wille. Fylle nu his fætels,   se ðe fæstne hider kylle brohte,   cume eft hræðe. Gif her ðegna hwelc   ðyrelne kylle brohte to ðys burnan,   bete hiene georne, ðylæs he forsceade   scirost wætra, oððe him liefes drync   forloren weorðe. (This is now the body of water which the God of hosts promised for the comfort of us earth-dwellers. He said that he wished ever-living waters to flow continually in the world from the hearts of those under the sky who fully believed in him. There is little doubt that the source of the body of water is in the kingdom of heaven, that is, the holy ghost. From there saints and the elect drew it; then they, being obedient to God, directed it by means of holy books here on earth in various ways through the minds of men. Some guard the stream of wisdom within their minds, keep it captive with their lips, so that it does not flow away useless, but the pool remains deep and still in the man’s breast through the Lord’s grace. Some let it run away over the land in small streams. It is not advisable for clear water thus to flow away loud and shallow across the plains until it becomes a marsh. But draw yourselves water to drink, now that the Lord has granted you that Gregory has directed the Lord’s stream to your doors. He who has brought a watertight pitcher may now fill his vessel, and may come back quickly. If any man has brought here a leaky pitcher to this stream, let him repair it

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speedily, so that he may avoid spilling the clearest of waters or losing the drink of life.)84

The Epilogue again suggests a direct textual link back from Alfred to Gregory to God as the source of the flowing waters is heaven. One result of this is to identify the king and pope with divine inspiration and wisdom, but another is to imply once again divine and church sanction for the king and his agenda. Yet these waters also flow through Alfred in his production of the text, and then out through his kingdom in its dissemination, being directed by means of halga bec with bec being both the plural form of books and a word meaning a flowing stream, forming a sea of knowledge that readers must both travel with their minds and drink from. The metaphor unites readers with the book as they now become receptacles for the waters of wisdom that flow through its words and unites learning communities in its waters – in contrast to the rivers, the Humber and the Thames, that served to divide them. It also equates both king and people with the land, its waters ultimately flowing through all, and figures the utopian Christian kingdom of English speakers that Alfred sought to create. It carries the living word of God into the vernacular and through it into a space that makes Angelcynn into a living paradise. Water and travel over water are also central to the portrait of Alfred as king in Asser’s Vita Alfredi written in 893, so around the same time Alfred’s translation of the Regula pastoralis is believed to have been completed. Asser’s Vita was also influenced by Gregory’s text, so it is difficult to believe that the imagery of king and country he and Alfred created from and around it was not the product of close collaboration.85 Much of the Vita is devoted to the comings and goings of people over the waters (such as Viking attacks or Alfred’s childhood trip to Rome) but there are three key points at which Asser deploys the metaphor of both the text and the kingdom as ships sailing on the seas. The first comes when he turns from the events leading up the point at which Alfred is about to become heir apparent to recount

84 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 451–3; trans. Irvine and Godden in Irvine, ‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, p. 159 n.52. 85 On the Vita Alfredi and its central role in both later English colonialism and empire and the development of Anglo-Saxonism see Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (Punctum Books, 2019), ch. 4. Ellard discusses the same nautical metaphors discussed here, though her focus is on the body of the king and its relationship to those who wrote about him. I am grateful to Donna Beth for allowing me to read sections of her book prior to its publication.

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Alfred’s development as an exceptional child and rightful king of the Anglo-Saxons: Sed, ut more navigantium loquar, ne diutius navim undis et velamentis concedentes, et a terra longius enavigantes longum circumferamur inter tantas bellorum clades et annorum enumerationes, ad id, quod nos maxime ad hoc opus incitavit, nobis redeundum esse censeo, scilicet aliquantulum, quantum meae cognitioni innotuit, de infantilibus et puerilibus domini mei venerabilis Ælfredi, Angulsaxonum regis, moribus hoc in loco breviter inserendum esse existimo. 86 (But (to speak in nautical terms) so that I should no longer veer off course – having entrusted the ship to waves and sails, and having sailed quite far away from the land – among such terrible wars and in year-by-year reckoning, I think I should return to that which particularly inspired me to this work: in other words, I consider that some small account (as much as has come to my knowledge) of the infancy and boyhood of my esteemed lord Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, should briefly be inserted at this point).

He then launches into the story of how Alfred acquired his love of English learning at his mother’s knee before returning to events from the annals, Alfred’s career fighting alongside his brother King Æthelred, and his elevation to king at the latter’s death. While Alfred’s use of water metaphors is quite subtle, Asser’s use of the naval metaphor is anything but. He draws the reader’s attention to its introduction and deployment as a narrative strategy in no uncertain terms. It’s second appearance comes in Ch. 73 when Asser again turns from his account of battles against the Vikings at home and abroad to Alfred’s marriage to Ealhswith of Mercia. He turns back to the moment from which he digressed, i.e. his first introduction of the metaphor and Alfred’s learning to read English, so that he will not ‘sail past the haven of my desired rest as a result of my protracted voyage’.87 This time we learn about the marriage, but more importantly about Alfred’s illness, Christian devotion, the measures 86 William Henry Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford, 1959), p. 19; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, p. 74. 87 Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, p. 88. Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, p. 54: ‘Igitur, ut ad id, unde digressus sum, redeam, ne diuturna enavigatione portum optatae quietis omittere cogar’.

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he put in place for the education of his children, and his bringing to the court those men who he credits with helping him to translate the Regula pastoralis in the Preface. It is only after their arrival at court and Asser’s instruction of the king in Latin that Alfred is able to take over as helmsman of the kingdom and its people, and in the third and final use of the naval metaphor Asser shows us exactly the portrait of the king we see in the Preface, the king able to turn his bishops and people to his will: Sed tamen ille solus divino fultus adminiculo susceptum semel regni gubernaculum, veluti gubernator praecipuus, navem suam multis opibus refertam ad desideratum ac tutum patriae suae portum, quamvis cunctis propemodum lassis suis nautis, perducere contendit, haud aliter titubare ac vacillare, quamvis inter fluctivagos ac multimodos praesentis vitae turbines, non sinebat. Nam assidue suos episcopos et comites ac nobilissimos, sibique dilectissimos suos ministros, necnon et praepositos, quibus post Dominum et regem omnis totius regni potestas, sicut dignum, subdita videtur, leniter docendo, adulando, hortando, imperando, ad ultimum inoboedientes, post longam patientiam, acrius castigando, vulgarem stultitiam et pertinaciam omni modo abominando, ad suum voluntatem et ad communem totius regni utilitatem sapientissime usurpabat et annectebat. (Yet once he had taken over the helm of his kingdom, he alone, sustained by divine assistance, struggled like an excellent pilot to guide his ship laden with much wealth to the desired and safe haven of his homeland, even though all his sailors were virtually exhausted; similarly, he did not allow it to waver or wander from course, even though the course lay through the many seething whirlpools of the present life. For by gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding, and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every way, he carefully and cleverly exploited and converted his bishops and ealdormen and nobles, and his thegns most dear to him, and reeves as well (in all of whom, after the Lord and the king, the authority of the entire kingdom is seen to be invested, as is appropriate), to his will and to the general advantage of the whole realm.)88

88 Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, pp. 77–8; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, pp. 101–2.

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The remainder of the Vita is devoted to Alfred’s good works on behalf of both the church and his people, and to describing the king as very much the model of Gregory’s idea of the good leader.

AN UNCANNY DREAMSCAPE Alfred’s Epilogue to the Regula pastoralis establishes a direct link between the king and Gregory, but rather than doing so with Asser’s clarity, it creates uncanny connections across time and space and between voices and identities. Firstly, whose voice is speaking in the Epilogue? It could equally well be Alfred’s, the book’s, or both. Voice, along with metaphor, make Alfred and the book one. This lends the book the authority of the king’s voice and vice versa, but it is also disorienting and confusing. I have discussed the mutability of Alfred’s use of pronouns in terms of his manipulation of voice and the coercing of readers into agreement with him, but the blending of identities into each other is also one of the things that make the Preface and Epilogue so uncanny. Indeed, the unreliability and unsettled nature of identity that we find in Alfred’s writing is one of the hallmarks of the uncanny.89 Alfred’s mixing of genres, prose and poetry, history and fiction, might also be understood as uncanny, although it is certainly possible to question whether or not the early English had as rigidly defined literary genres as came to exist in the modern world.90 Seth Lerer has argued that Alfred’s appropriation of identities and genres reaches back into a broader past, bringing personal history together with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ history and Roman authors and literary forms in a way that allows us to read the Preface as ‘a chronicle of the creation of an author’.91 He reads the Preface not only in relation to the writings of Gregory, Augustine, and Boethius and the dialogic genres they favoured, but also in relation to Asser’s Vita Alfredi and the scenes of reading and writing that it stages. In it, Alfred stands out amongst his brothers for, amongst other reasons, his attraction to writing. The beautiful letters of the book of English poetry his mother offers is his initiation into reading in the vernacular, and this 89 Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’; Royle, The Uncanny, p. 39. 90 Both the Franks Casket and the Beowulf manuscript discussed below, for example, mix prose and poetry, while the prose Anglo-Saxon Chronicle includes a number of poems, Aldred embeds earlier verses into his tenth-century prose colophon to the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Ælfric is known for his rhythmical prose. 91 Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 77.

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becomes the originary moment for his use of language and writing to both restore the past and dream the future.92 In later life he carries a booklet with him in which he can copy texts that interest him, and Asser, his literary father figure, gives him a separate booklet of Latin texts on his initiation into the Latin language and translation.93 Together these scenes gradually build up a community of scholars that begins in the court and spreads outward culminating in the union of authors and readers, past and present, far and near that we find in the Preface and Epilogue to and translation of the Regula pastoralis.94 I’ll return to Alfred’s intellectual endeavour below, but what I want to examine here is the mental space or state that Alfred authors in the Preface. It is a dreamlike space in its simultaneous existence in and out of time and geographic space. Alfred’s meditations form a sort of daydream in which the king dreams of a better life in a land that does not yet exist and populates it with echoes and voices of both the dead and the living.95 To meditate on or brood over a lost golden age is in and of itself a daydream as, while such thoughts may have a basis in historical fact, they are always beyond the realm of experience or memory and thus always to a greater or lesser extent fictions or fantasies.96 At the very least Alfred’s meditation is a daydream-like vision of a longed-for future. As such, Alfred’s narrative does have similarities with the accounts of other types of dreams known from pre-Conquest England, some of the most prominent of which relate to the production of English, of texts, and of the promotion or defence of the kingdom. There is the dream at the centre of the Cædmon story, which, while a nocturnal dream, is the origin point (fictional or not) of English poetry and to a lesser extent translation.97 The story of Cædmon belongs to the lost golden age and is indeed an example of the type of learning that Alfred was anxious to recover. In other dreams space and/or time are distorted and figures from the past appear to speak to or through the living, often with the purpose of warning individuals or communities of the need to change their behaviour in order to escape punishment or initiate reform. Two See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 154 for the extension of this image of language and nation in the modern world. 93 Asser, Vita Alfredi, chs 23, 87, 88. 94 Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, pp. 95–6. 95 See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, pp. 88–90, 115 on the utopian nature and function of daydreams. See also Lochrie, ‘Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages’: 496. 96 Hutchinson, ‘Mapping Utopias’. 97 Bede, HE, iv.24. 92

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such notable dreams or visions were granted to kings from the golden age on which Alfred meditates and from the latter half of the ninth century, the period of destruction that he has seen around him. While in exile and under threat of assassination at Rædwald’s court, Edwin of Northumbria was sitting outside in the dead of night when a spirit came to him and told him that he would live through his present miseries, regain his kingdom, and surpass in power all of his ancestors and all who had reigned before him over the Angelcynn (omnes qui ante te reges in gente Anglorum fuerant) if he obeyed a sign. That sign was the hand of Bishop Paulinus placed upon his head. Edwin fulfilled his word and converted to Christianity, along with many in his kingdom, ushering in the seventh- to eighth-century golden age of Northumbria.98 And while Alfred was still a child, his father, King Æthelwulf, wrote to Louis the Pious about a vision granted to an English priest in which: A man appeared … one night while he slept, not long after Christmas, and ordered him to follow. He was led into a strange land filled with remarkable buildings and entered a church where he found many boys engaged in reading. With trepidation, the priest approached the boys and saw that they were reading books with alternating lines of black and blood-red letters. The guide explained that the bloody lines represented the many sins that Christians had accumulated because they cared little of what was commanded in holy books. The reading boys were the souls of the saints who daily deplored the sins and crimes of Christians who attempted to intercede for them and to lead them to penance. You will remember, the guide informed the priest, that in the present year there had been an abundance of fruit in the fields and trees, but because of the sins of many men a great deal of it had perished. He warned him that if men did not quickly repent and observe the Lord’s day, great danger would fall upon them. For three days and nights a great mist would cover the land and out of it would sail the Northmen (homines pagani) who would randomly murder men and destroy property with fire and sword. Only through proper penance for their sins would they escape this disaster.99

In a not dissimilar series of visions St Swithun (d. 863) would appear some one hundred years after his death to a smith, ordering him to Bede, HE, ii.12–13. Paul Edward Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, NB, 1994), pp. 107–8. Æthelwulf ’s letter is preserved in the Annals of Saint-Bertin for the year 839 (Janet L. Nelson, ed. and trans., The Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester, 1991), pp. 41–8).

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instruct one of the canons expelled from the Old Minster Winchester by Bishop Æthelwold to tell the bishop that his body was to be dug up and his bones translated into the church, an act that was at the centre of the reform and rebuilding of Winchester by Æthelwold and King Edgar in the latter half of the tenth century. Swithun would continue to appear in dreams when the behaviour of the Winchester community displeased him.100 One does not have to be asleep to have a dream or dreamlike vision, as the story of Edwin makes clear. In The Wanderer, dreams of the wanderer’s lost lord provoke memories of his kinsmen and the joys of his former life, and both dream and memory are part of the private meditations or reflections that form the poem: ‘Swa cwæð snottor on mode, gesæt him sundor æt rune’ (line 111) (So spoke the one wise in mind as he sat by himself in meditation). The epilogue to Elene consists of the poet’s reflections (and one can question whether he is dreaming or pondering) and echoes the words and images of Constantine’s dream that sets the events of the poem in motion.101 Finally, it is unclear whether one of Old English’s most famous dreamers, the narrator of The Dream of the Rood, is awake or asleep. He calls his vision a dream but then says that it came to him in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep: Hwæt ic swefna cyst   secgan wille, þæt me gemætte   to midre nihte, syðþan reord-berend   reste wunedon. (lines 1–3) (Indeed I wish to tell the choicest of dreams, that I dreamt in the middle of the night after the speech-bearers were asleep.)

The Cross that the dreamer sees tells him the events of the crucifixion, mediating between the distant past of Christ’s death and the present of the dreamer in something of the same way that the clerics who speak to Alfred in his internal dialogue mediate between the distant golden age and the present of the king and his memory and, like the Cross, they lead the daydreaming Alfred to a clear path for the future. All three of these waking dreams are meditations on the past and have the production of a narrative of the past in English at their core. Cædmon’s dream too was about the production of texts in English. The royal dream/visions are concerned with kingdoms, their defence 100 See Michael Lapidge’s translation of Lantfred’s Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni, in Lapidge, ed., The Cult of St Swithun, Winchester Studies 4/2 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 252–3. 101 I thank Catherine Clarke for pointing this out to me.

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and the power of the king. Both subjects connect them to Alfred’s daydream, which brings the production and dissemination of texts in English into the service of king and kingdom. Unlike all these other dreams, however, Alfred dreams of a national social utopia, a living rather than an otherworldly paradise or an exclusively religious utopia like Augustine’s City of God.102 And while he looks to the past he does not simply convey a nostalgic longing for what is lost, as does The Wanderer, but uses the past both to critique the present and as the basis of a plan for the future. Alfred is not resigned to accept the world as it is.103 Alfred’s dream allows him to imagine that he has (or ‘we’ have) lost a kingdom, a golden kingdom filled with wealth and wisdom, and this fills the Preface with a sense of melancholy. While melancholy might be a mental state, it is also something ‘one does: longing for lost loves, brooding over absent objects or changed environments, reflecting on unmet desires, and lingering on events from the past’.104 The structure of the Preface allows Alfred to do just this. The first three sections of the prose Preface chronicle what has been lost, even as they leave open exactly when and where and what this lost kingdom was. They effectively create a sense of having been exiled from a communal past, and this is augmented and made more acute by the fluctuation between singular and plural pronouns. Alfred moves back and forth in time from dreaming of the distant past to remembering the more recent past to contemplating the problems of the present. From this activity a plan for the future emerges, and this is outlined in the final two sections of the prose Preface. By the end of the Preface we have moved from private dreams and thoughts of the loss of a past and a unity, that are now detectable only in traces, through a series of internal dialogues, into what seems to be a realm of collective thought and communal history that makes possible the realisation of utopia future. While that utopia was never to be realised – no utopia can be – Alfred’s promotion of the English language and the significant body of writing in English that was produced during his reign not only helped to cement a sense of English identity, but also to keep that language and identity alive through the Conquest of 1066 and beyond. His programme for translation succeeded in developing the largest corpus of vernacular literature to survive from early medieval On The City of God as utopia see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, II, pp. 502–9. Not accepting the world or the present as it is is a central element of utopian thinking – see further Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, pp. 146–7; Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY, 1990). 104 Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, p. 2. 102 103

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Europe and created what has been described by many scholars as a culture of translation.105

WRITING UTOPIA There is no reason to believe that Alfred’s melancholia and a shared sense of having been exiled from a communal past were not real, especially as brooding over the past or something lost in or from the past pervades so much of early medieval English culture from the Franks Casket to the poems Beowulf or Durham. But the way in which Alfred writes about that loss and recovery is carefully contrived, convincing, and coercive in equal measure. His choice of select bits of the past to ‘remember’ creates a realistic yet always only partial history and there is a tension between the ecclesiastical and monastic learning of the past and the secular and explicitly hierarchical plan of learning and governance that he is formulating. Like More’s Utopia, Alfred’s utopias – whether past or future – can only be known through description and will always remain for him and his contemporaries unreachable elsewheres. His modulation of pronouns and his blending of Gregory’s voice with his own create a fictional space within the text that crosses the temporal borders between past, present, and future just as the physical borders of the Thames and the Humber will be crossed. Alfred’s translation is intended to be carried into the future, performing that crossing, as the voice of the book makes clear. It (Đis ærendgewrit) had been written by Gregory and carried north by Augustine, and it (me) had been translated into English by Alfred. Many separate books – the one written in Rome, the one carried north by Augustine, Alfred’s English translation, and the copies that will be made of it by his scribes – become one in each copy of the text that the king sent to his bishops. This temporal displacement is as much a part of utopia as is its more conventional geographical displacement, as utopias are usually intended to hold

105 See further Robert Stanton, ‘The (M)other Tongue: Translation Theory and Old English’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, MI, 1997), pp. 33–46; idem, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2002); Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2007); Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001).

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out the promise of escape from the problems of the present.106 Alfred does not accept the world as it is, a present at odds with itself. It is also a colonising move, writing into being a future into which the king’s plan and West Saxon rule can move. As the ‘chronicle of the creation of an author’, and read alongside the images of Alfred becoming a learned author and translator provided by the Vita Alfredi,107 the Preface is unusual in establishing the king as both a power to be obeyed and an intellectual figure, the king who writes English history in English for the English people. This is an image of kingship that will be taken up by subsequent kings (and queens), and one that sets ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rulers apart from those of other early medieval territories,108 although Alfred remains unique amongst them for his personal engagement in and commitment to writing and translation. ‘Intellectual passion’, Frederic Jameson writes, ‘is one of the drivers of utopia’ specifically as regards translation, the ‘reappropriating [of] the original text, whether in Greek or in Hebrew … this is the intellectual vocation at its most feverish and committed, at the very height of its potential excitement, in a mission that more than any other seems to concentrate what defines the intellectual as such, namely the relationship to writing. Not the Socratic committed to ideas, but rather this one of the text and its translation.’109 Alfred’s intellectual work and commitment may be bound up inextricably with his sovereign nationalist agenda, but they are present nonetheless. The love of English, of letters, and of learning given to him as a child by his mother, grows into the ability to translate, to teach, and to rule that emerge under the tutelage of Asser and the other wise men of the court and are what will translate the Angelcynn into a utopian future. But utopia is always located in the book, even though it may not be limited to it, a place or space that is both a ‘happy-place’ and a ‘no-place’. As Marin describes it, it is the writing of space and place.110 Alfred’s utopian vision is based in and moves across real history and geography, but it is only in his text that England as a happy peaceful nation, past or future, emerges. It is also only in his text that the limits of time and geography are broken down in the creation of an island united to yet distinct from both Rome and the eighth century. Moreover, they are narrated by an authorial voice 106 Daniel Birkholz, ‘Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (2006): 585–618, at 591. 107 See above, n. 60. 108 Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England. 109 Jameson, ‘Morus’: 438. 110 Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces.

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that is both identifiable and impossible to pin down. Time and place shift and morph repeatedly as Alfred’s mind wanders back and forth in time, across continents, seas, and rivers from the word of God to the Holy Land in which the law was written, to early Christian Rome, to Britain. It traces and takes the reader along a path of multiple exiles into one lost promised land and on towards the reclaiming of all that has been lost from it, or at least all that Alfred is willing and able to imagine. It writes into being a lost land and a linguistic community that must remain imaginary places or spaces no matter how based on historical facts and events they might be, and it writes into being a not-yet England, an uncanny home into which the Angelcynn and their language can expand. It ends where it began, in the middle, looking simultaneously to the past and future that are the focus of the next two chapters of this book. Both Alfred’s idea of a utopia that looks simultaneously backwards and forwards and that both exists in and traverses an uncanny combination of real and imagined territories would be developed by later authors and artists. In a national context we can see it at work in the tenth-century programme of reform and refoundation promoted by Alfred’s great grandson Edgar (that king to whom we are told that all the Scots, Britons, Welsh, and Danes submitted) and his bishops and archbishops. Like Alfred they looked back to the age of Bede, in part for a model of monastic learning but also in part for a claim to land on which a utopian vision of a reformed church could be built, a church that, as the New Minster Charter of 966 (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.viii) makes clear, existed in the exceptional border space between heaven and earth.111 The Scots and the Welsh, of course, saw things rather differently, and it has been suggested that Welsh animosity towards the picture of the close Anglo-Welsh relationship that Asser had portrayed in his Vita Alfredi was, along with the submission of the Welsh to the kings that succeeded Alfred if not to Alfred himself,112 the motivation for the composition of the tenth-century Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr, which describes the English as treacherous and pagan foxes in contrast to the Christian

111 London, BL, Cotton MS Vespasian A.viii. For a discussion, text, and translation of the charter see Alexander R. Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and its Minsters, Winchester Studies 4.iii (Oxford, 2002), pp. 65–97. 112 Asser describes the submission of the Welsh to Alfred in ch. 80 of the Vita Alfredi, but what exactly this meant is not clear.

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Welsh, and which calls for the English to be driven from the island.113 These are the descendants of the ghosts of conquest and colonisation, the silence that Alfred hides beneath his story of English loss and Viking colonisation. We can see the success of Alfred’s colonising agenda at work both ideologically and geographically in the mid-eleventh-century Cotton Map contained in British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v (fig. 1). The island of England, identified by its Roman name Britannia, lies at the lower-left corner of the map. Wales sits just under the word Britannia and is labelled with the name Morenwergas (the ‘w’ represented by the letter wyn), which Martin Foys has identified as a form of the Welsh Morgannwg or Glamorgan,114 but which it is also possible to read as, or possible that the spelling of the place-name can be read as, an allusion to, Old English mor (moor) and wearg/ werg (criminal, monster, evil spirit), terms that establish the Welsh as evil or monstrous. Rory Naismith has asked if the name should be translated as ‘moor-dwellers’, a term that conjures up Grendel and his mother, monstrous inhabitants of the moors and wastelands that I will discuss in Chapter 3,115 while Neil McGuigan translates the name as ‘wild men of the moors’.116 The map, as Foys has demonstrated, celebrates the origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture at the same time that it projects a colonising agenda not only inward but outward onto the Continent and beyond. Across the Channel from England is the area of Brittany labelled suðbrytta (South Britain) in Old English.117 Of course England was shortly to be absorbed into the expanding Anglo-Norman empire, but that event was still in the future, and anyway the map is not about political or historical realities. On a much grander scale, the map projects the angular shape of the island outward, mirroring and expanding it across the waters by repeating it in the shape of both the European continent and the giant land mass composed of Africa, India, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and 113 Rebecca Thomas and David Callander, ‘Reading Asser in Early Medieval Wales: The Evidence of Armes Prydein Vawr’, Anglo-Saxon England 46 (2019): 115–45. 114 ‘Morenwergas (Cotton Map, BL Cotton Tiberius B v, f. 56v)’, Virtual Mappa, ed. Martin Foys, Heather Wacha et al. Schoenberg Institute of Manuscript Studies, 2018: http://sims.digitalmappa.org/workspace/#965fe731. I thank Martin Foys for directing me to further suggested interpretations of the name. 115 https://twitter.com/rory_naismith/status/973146027736825856?lang=en. Accessed 4 August 2019. 116 Neil McGuigan, ‘Neither Scotland nor England: Middle Britain c. 850–1150’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015, p. 110. 117 Martin K. Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville, FL, 2007), pp. 138–42.

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FIG. 1.  ANGLO-SAXON WORLD MAP. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS TIBERIUS B.V, FOL. 56V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

Asia that fills the upper-right-hand side of the map, an appropriate way of visualising the idea of England’s exceptional place within the larger geographic and temporal order of the world. It is once again both at the edge of the known world and entirely central. Like Alfred’s Preface, it lays claim to time and space, but a much larger time and space. It also exists in the middle. It is an image but it is based almost

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entirely on texts, on the descriptions contained in Orosius’s Historia adversus paganos of 417–18 (translated into Old English in or around the time of Alfred’s reign), and the biblical account of the journey of Moses and the Israelites in Exodus. However, the map, like Alfred or Bede before him, combines that fictionality with surprisingly accurate details of places and features and suggestions of coastlines.118 It reaches out across the waters and gathers back to England the AngloSaxons’ legendary origins in the Old Testament Exodus and imperial and Christian Rome to create an uncanny utopian space that is partly real and partly imagined. Asa Simon Mittman has observed: ‘In order to link disconnected individuals, groups and events, English illuminators had to collapse differences in time and space, they thereby reconstructed their kingdom so that England became everywhere and the present moment became everywhen.’119 Mittman is referring in this passage to later medieval English maps but we can see very much the same thing happening both here on the Cotton Map and in the Old English word her as used by both Alfred and the makers of the Franks Casket to be discussed in Chapter 2. Alfred’s vision and that of the Cotton Map have a structural composition to them that expresses very specific ideas about expansion. They place precise images of England at their ideological centres, even if England is physically decentred on the Cotton Map. While travelling outwards in space and backwards in time they position the island as an ever-changing place repeating, or attempting to repeat, itself across the world, as it would eventually do with the creation of the British Empire. But emptiness remains at its heart. The map locates England’s cities along its coastline looking out over the water, but at the centre of the country is emptiness, the seemingly uninhabited area in which the name ‘Brittannia’ floats above Wales, while at the centre of the map as a whole, as Martin Foys has pointed out, is an empty space and not the usual Jerusalem.120 In the post-Conquest period the image of England that Alfred created was picked up and expanded by both chroniclers and poets, and Alfred himself became an important link to both the past and the image of the past. Immediately following the conquest of 1066, the Normans began re-creating past and place to suit their own needs 118 Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print, p. 126. 119 Asa Simon Mittman, ‘England is the World and the World is England’, postmedieval 9.1 (2018): 15–29, at 16. 120 Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print, 225 n.66.

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and vision. Henry I married Matilda, daughter of Malcom III and Margaret of Scotland, and a direct descendant of King Alfred, as a means of writing himself into the pre-Conquest past and popularising, if not legitimising, himself in the eyes of the now ‘native’ AngloSaxons. Old English texts were rewritten to suit a Norman agenda, as the Alfredian era had rewritten the texts they translated to suit the agenda of the ninth-century court. St Cuthbert’s Life, for example, was rewritten turning him into an angry and aggressive saint defending the now Norman stronghold of Durham against all would-be intruders, especially any English with nationalist tendencies. Figures such as Symeon of Durham, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Henry of Huntingdon were retrospective, taking an interest in pre-Conquest history and updating its documentation and narrative as well as its mythology. Symeon (d. after 1129), for example, provides the earliest surviving account of the loss and miraculous rediscovery of Cuthbert’s gospel book in the sea,121 a way of affirming the power of Cuthbert and the Cuthbert community in a new order, yet another invocation of the crossing of water, and a story likely to have been his own invention. His success in rewriting the past is measured by the number of scholars who continue to assume that the miracle was recorded in Cuthbert’s own day despite there being absolutely no evidence of this. The half-Norman Henry of Huntingdon (ca. 1088–1157) rewrote the history of the island as a succession of legitimate governments from the Romans to the Normans, each of its chronological periods or geographic regions eventually growing weak and succumbing to a stronger and more violent culture. Henry was clear that there was warfare and violence and that the English had gained control of the island through warfare and not through peaceful settlement. He saw the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as invaders and occupiers of a foreign land, but no matter what their flaws they were not as bad as the Normans, the most savage of all the island’s invaders. Despite all the violence, however, Henry portrayed each conquering culture as having a right to conquest and sovereignty.122 William of Malmesbury (ca. 1095–1143), also half-Norman, composed a more straightforward rewriting of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, updating and extending it into his own time. Like Bede (and Alfred) he maintained England’s isolated specialness while at the same time emphasising its multiple 121 Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis, ed. and trans. David Rollason (Oxford, 2000), pp. 112–21. 122 Henry of Huntingdon, Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 78–137, 338–411.

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historic and contemporary connections with the Continent and Scandinavia, and even beyond, including reports that Alfred sent envoys to Armenia and India,123 stories that would be taken up in the nineteenth century by Sharon Turner and others to create an image of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England as a nascent British Empire.124 For William, the arrival of the Normans was not a conquest but in the self-fashioned image of more modern empires just a civilised progression of sovereignty that was especially necessary given the chaos of places like Yorkshire, which was a stronghold for the barbaric Danes and Saxons.125 Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1095–1155) produced a very different history in which the island was inherently beautiful, again a kind of paradise, but it was also isolated by violence and subject to cycles of conquest and brutality due largely to the weakness of human nature. He was concerned with the oppression of the Britons, and rewrote the pre-Conquest story of migration to the island so that it began not with the arrival of the Saxon brothers Hengest and Horsa but with the arrival of Brutus from Troy,126 a story that has its roots in the earlier Historia Brittonum and Isidore’s Etymologiae, but that is greatly embellished in Geoffrey’s account. For him, British civilisation reached a high point under King Arthur and Camelot but, though noble, the Britons became weak and corrupt, leading to their own conquest by the Saxons, just as Gildas had recorded. At the same time, he was clear that the English were barbaric invaders interrupting a glorious British past and preventing its development into a new golden age – which was now to come under Norman rule – replacing the demonisation and erasure of one group with that of another. Geoffrey’s writings were much more blatantly fantastical than those of 123 William of Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury. Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thompson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), I, pp. 190–1. MS F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains an entry for the year 883 stating that Alfred sent men with alms to the shrines of St Thomas in India and St Bartholomew, though it has also been claimed that India (Indea) is a scribal error and that the alms were sent to Judea, though most accept that a journey to India was perfectly possible. See for example Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 192; Daniel Anlezark, Alfred the Great (Bradford, 2017), p. 54. 124 Chris Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in NineteenthCentury Poetry (Oxford, 2018), p. 112; Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, p. 23. 125 William of Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury. Gesta Regum Anglorum, I, pp. 462–3. 126 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 8–30.

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his contemporaries including, for example, an account of the invasion of Britain by an African king, Gormundus, who chastised the Britons for their weakness.127 He also included a section on the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’ in which the red dragon of the Britons triumphed over the white dragon of the Saxons, a sign that the Britons would eventually overcome the violent intruders and recover the island.128 Like Alfred, each of these Anglo-Norman chroniclers of England had his own particular agenda. Each produced a combination of what he wanted to project as more or less accurate history taken from Bede, Gildas, and others, with a few fictional or anecdotal additions. Each is also somewhat contradictory in his attempt to simultaneously suggest a good or noble people(s) and to justify violence, invasion, and conquest. That is hardly surprising given the immediately post-Conquest time in which – and Anglo-Norman readership for which – they were writing, but they helped to keep alive the ethnicism that would eventually be picked up by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians who studied these sources as part of their justification of modern colonisation and racism. For these early authors the past was not a dead and distant object of history but part of a living and teleological progression in which they were caught up, a way of thinking that is also present in the writings of many, if not most, of these same modern historians, as discussed in Chapter 4. What is noteworthy, however, is that at least three of the four authors wrote about the conquest of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and others as a conquest, no different in nature from those of the Romans and Normans, rather than as a peaceful process of migration and settlement. Their modern heirs still argue over the accuracy of these terms. The location of England in an exceptional space at the margins of the world continued to be celebrated in world maps and texts such as Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.129 Its otherworldly paradisiacal nature features in the Faerie Queene, and its lush landscape is reproduced in miniature in monastic gardens, aristocratic parks, and manuscripts such as the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter (London, British Library, Add. MS 42130), and in a rather different form in the agrarian and communal landscapes of Langland – even if the latter also expressed concerns over the enclosure of traditionally communal 127 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain, pp. 256–7. 128 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain, pp. 144–7. 129 Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000–1534.

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land and the loss of a way of life. Oppression of and violence towards the Celtic languages and peoples continued, with Spenser, for example, arguing that the Irish language and way of life should be exterminated by any means possible. His description of the Irish is reminiscent of Gildas’s description of the Britons or the Beowulf poet’s description of Grendel, although the Irish do not have the strength or resilience of either of their predecessors: ‘Out of everie Corner of the woodes & glennes they came creeping forth upon their hands, for theire legges could not beare them, they looked Anatomies of death, they spoke like ghostes cryinge out of their graves, they did eat of the dead carrions.’130 It is a trope of settler colonialism that indigenous populations or previous settlers of a territory must be made into ghosts.131 England’s geography, history, and its ability to either repel or assimilate invaders and foreign peoples to its white Christian order were celebrated in the Middle English romances of King Horn and Havelock the Dane,132 keeping the spirit of nationalism and exceptionalism alive. Perhaps its ability to reach out from its marginal position and make itself central on the world stage was expressed most definitively in Henry VIII’s split from Rome and the events of the Reformation, events that are often taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages, but they can also be seen to be replayed to a certain extent today in the debates surrounding ‘Brexit’ and the nationalism and religious, ethnic, and racial prejudice that are so much a part of it. The view that England can withdraw from the European Union (EU) but still remain a privileged trading partner, or end freedom of movement for EU citizens in the UK but expect UK citizens abroad should retain their freedoms, are indicative of the continued belief in English exceptionalism, a topic to which I will return in Chapter 4.

130 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (London, 1934), p. 135. The pamphlet was originally written in 1596 but not published until 1633. 131 Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’: 6. 132 Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, pp. 145–51.

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T

he Franks Casket (figs. 2–6) was made in what Alfred believed to be England’s lost golden age and in what in more recent times has come to be known as the ‘Golden Age of Northumbria’. It demonstrates the multilingualism and interest in translation that Alfred believed were so definitive of the period, bearing inscriptions in two different languages and two different alphabets, along with carved figural panels that constitute a third system of signification. Whether it is representative of the peaceful and united community in which Alfred imagined learning and translation took place, however, is another matter as there are multiple ways in which the casket and each of its panels have been read and interpreted; however, as the meaning of any text or thing is always plural, a ‘stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers’ rather than a coexistence of different readings, the casket ultimately moves beyond any individual’s capacity to read it.1 The casket is itself also a reader of sorts, reaching back geographically and temporally to carry and narrate stories that were part of or related to the multiple origin legends of the gens Anglorum back to England. It gathers floating pieces of narratives into one place, but it leaves the gaps between those narratives in place. They are transformational but they do not come together as a single narrative. The construction and materiality of the casket structure the way it narrates its stories but do not impose any narrative order on its readers. It is important, however, to understand the casket’s composition, imagery, and texts before moving on to its function as a heterotopia and a crypt, and to 1 Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), pp. 155–64, at 159–60, italics author’s.

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FIGS 2–6 THE FRANKS CASKET 2  FRONT PANEL. 3 LID. 4  BACK PANEL. 5  LEFT SIDE PANEL. 6  RIGHT SIDE PANEL. FIGS 2–5 REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. FIG. 6 REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF ASA SIMON MITTMAN AND DEL MINISTERO PER I BENI E LE ATTIVITÁ CULTURALI – MUSEO NAZIONALE DEL BARGELLO.

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get a sense of its order before I go on to explore it as a site of disorder, split selves, and disrupted meanings. The casket is a small (23x19x13cm) box made from the jawbone (or jawbones) of a whale (or whales) in the early eighth century somewhere in Northumbria – the Northumbrian coast, Ripon, Wearmouth-Jarrow, and Whitby, or the area between Whitby and Wearmouth-Jarrow have all been suggested.2 Whalebone as a material is important to the meanings of the casket and the way in which it conveys those meanings, as we shall see, but the value and meaning of whalebone as a material more generally was contradictory and this should be borne in mind in any study of the casket. While there is no physical evidence that whales were hunted in early medieval England, the opening description of the island in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica suggests that they might have been,3 and that they might have been valued in the same way that seal pelts or pearls were. On the other hand, the fisherman in Ælfric’s Colloquy (written in the tenth century) states quite firmly that he would not want to risk hunting a whale because it could kill him and his companions with a single blow.4 Archaeological evidence shows that stranded whales were resources to be exploited, their bones providing the raw material to make combs, gaming pieces, fishing floats, and other such mundane 2 A. S. Napier, ‘Contribution to Old English Literature’, in An English Miscellany Presented to Dr Furnivall in Honour of his Seventy-fifth Birthday, ed. W. P. Ker and A. S. Napier (Oxford, 1901), pp. 355–81, at 380 (Napier also considered Whitby as a possibility based on its location on a steep coastal cliff ); Ian Wood, ‘Ripon, Francia and the Franks Casket in the Early Middle Ages’, Northern History 26 (1990): 1–19; E. A. Lowe, ‘A Key to Bede’s Scriptorium: Some Observations on the Leningrad Manuscript of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum’, Scriptorium 12 (1958): 182–90; Malcolm B. Parkes, The Scriptorium of Wearmouth-Jarrow, Jarrow Lecture 1982 (Jarrow, 1982); Gaby Waxenberger, ‘Date and Provenance of the Auzon or Franks Casket’, in Life on the Edge: Social, Political and Religious Frontiers in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Semple, Celia Orsini, and Sean Mui, Studien zur Sachsenforschung 6 (Wendeburg, 2017), pp. 121–33, at 125 (Waxenberger prefers Whitby or the area between the abbey and Wearmouth-Jarrow based on comparison of the casket’s runes with those of the Whitby comb and dialectical similarities with the Leningrad Bede’s version of Cædmon’s Hymn). 3 HE, i.1, pp. 14–15: ‘Capiuntur autem saepissime et uituli marini et delfines nec non et ballenae, exceptis uariorum generibus concyliorum, in quibis sunt et musculae, quibus inclusam saepe margaritam omnis quidem coloris optimam inueniunt, id est et rubicundi et purpurei et hyacinthini et prasini sed maxime candidi.’ ‘Seals as well as dolphins are frequently captured and even whales; besides these are various kinds of shellfish, among which are mussels, and enclosed in these there are often found excellent pearls of every colour, red and purple, violet and green, but mostly white.’ 4 Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, Colloquy, ed. George Norman Garmonsway, new ed. (Exeter, 1991), pp. 29–30.

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objects, but that whalebone was much less frequently used for luxury objects like the Franks Casket. When it was used it is assumed that it was employed as a substitute for elephant ivory when that material was scarce or unavailable, as it was in the eighth century.5 While the same word, ban, was used for both bone and elephant ivory, it does not necessarily follow that they were considered to be identical. Equating two such different and differently sourced materials is problematic, and we should perhaps let the whalebone speak more loudly. Materials were far from inert matter for the early English as their riddles make clear. Isidore of Seville, whose writings were popular throughout the period, wrote about the qualities inherent in and agency of materials and creatures. The astrion, for example, was a stone able to catch the light of the stars and cast it back.6 Moreover, materials from once living animals retained something of the nature of the living animal, haunting the objects into which they were made long after the death of the living creature. The quill pen in the riddle cited in Chapter 1, for example, still left tracks just as its living counterpart had done.7 Elephant ivory was associated with purity and the Virgin Mary because living elephants were believed to be the enemies of serpents and to be chaste because (it was thought) they rarely reproduced, and the pure and protective nature of the living creature was retained in the material taken from it, making it especially suitable for objects like reliquaries or the covers of sacred books,8 both of which contained their own versions of the living dead in the form of the remains or traces of the dead saints or folios made up of the skins of animals. Whales (ballena), on the other hand, were classed as sea monsters (bellua or ceta) and were linked to the underworld and hell via the biblical story of Jonah,9 as well as a lengthy classical and medieval tradition, and the things made from their bones are thus much trickier to associate with virtue or the sacred. There is no consensus on why the casket was made, what its purpose was, or how it was meant to be read. It is a collection of stories from different times and places juxtaposed with each other around the void, or imagined void, in which something is coming 5 Ian Riddler, ‘The Archaeology of The Anglo-Saxon Whale’, in The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons, ed. Stacy S. Klein, William Schipper, and Shannon LewisSimpson (Tempe, AZ, 2014), pp. 337–54. 6 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge, 2006), p. 326. 7 Above p. 39. 8 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, p. 252. 9 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, p. 260.

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into being at the heart of this single object and the empty space that is now the casket’s interior. Like Alfred’s Preface it is concerned with travel to and from the island of England, but in a much more varied and multilayered way and, like the Preface, it is inherently concerned with place. It is once again concerned specifically with travel across water, but these are very different and far more dangerous waters than those of Alfred’s Preface and Epilogue, or of Asser’s Vita. This chapter focuses on the casket as whale(bone), and as place and as space (the two cannot really be separated from each other), as well as on the casket in relation to the multiple places and spaces from which it gathers and assimilates (or fails to assimilate) its stories, and in which it is known to have existed over the centuries. As a creature that crosses the water the whale provides us with a passage through, a way of navigating the literal and metaphorical waters that lie beneath it – the chaos of the abyssal ocean and the chaos of meaning and interpretation. The materiality of the casket matters deeply. Like a whale moving through the ocean it provides a poros, ‘a passage opened up across a chaotic expanse’, which it ‘transforms into an ordered, qualified space by introducing differentiated routes, making visible the various directions of space, by giving direction to an expanse which was initially devoid of all contours, of all landmarks’.10 Materiality provides a passage through the casket’s endless puzzles, but it is not the only passage. As passage the casket is a placeless place – at once singular and multiple – that encloses a space from which multiple voices emerge. In contrast to previous studies of the casket, this chapter explores the Franks Casket through place and space as a counter-site for England as it may have been perceived at the time in which the casket was made, and as an archive for the stories that are told in, through, and around it. As a box the casket encloses a space in which something was meant to be placed. In terms of its nature as a place of representation and narratives of other places it is a heterotopia. It creates a world within a world that is isolated yet relates to the rest of the world in which it floats – in fact it creates worlds within worlds. It is contradictory, displaced, disturbing, turbulent, and transformative; a placeless place that is different from yet still a mirror for the outside world in which it exists. Like utopia, heterotopia is generally understood as a modern concept, but the idea of heterotopia existed long before the word was coined either in medical practice or by Foucault in refence to spaces 10 Sarah Kofman, ‘Beyond Aporia?’, trans. David Macey, in Post-Structuralist Classics, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London, 1988), pp. 7–44, at 9.

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and places outside the body. Foucault himself stated that heterotopias existed amongst all human groups and were formed in the founding of societies.11 Made up of the Greek prefix hetero- and topos, the word literally means other or different places. In medicine it refers to matter out of place within the body,12 while Foucault used it to refer to institutional or social spaces that were in one way or another set apart while still coexisting within the larger world of which they were a part. Spaces he identified as heterotopias included the brothel, asylum, prison, mirror, cemetery, and ship, although his list was meant to be a guide only and not proscriptive. The literature on the heterotopian space of the cemetery in particular is extensive, with studies ranging from the architectural deathscapes of ancient Egypt to Highgate Cemetery in the twenty-first century.13 Eric C. Smith has employed Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to reveal the ways in which the Cubicula of the Sacraments in the Callistus Catacomb in Rome, begun in the late second or early third century CE, functioned as a contested space in which a community articulated its relation to the might of Rome variously as ‘critics of, foreigners to, and even opponents of the Roman ideology that surrounded them’.14 The Cubicula, unlike the casket, is a monumental architectural space, but Smith’s analysis of the role of its images is relevant to an understanding of the casket as a heterotopian space. He argues that the painted images within the Cubicula are heterotopias because they are spaces of representation that exist in their own right but that also come together to constitute a heterotopia within the larger architectural space that reframes them. The same is true of the casket’s panels. Moreover, like the visual narratives of the panels, the catacomb images are more than just the episodes they depict, they expand out into the larger literary and social spaces to which they are linked.15 While heterotopias are usually spaces that can be inhabited, like the Cubicula, this is not always the case. Heterotopias can be fictional Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’: 4. F. Lax, ‘Heterotopia from a Biological and Medical Point of View’, in Other Spaces: The Affair of the Heterotopia, ed. Ronald Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay (Graz, 1998), pp. 114–23. 13 Kari Jormakka, ‘Post Mortem Eclecticism’, in Other Spaces. The Affair of the Heterotopia, ed. Roland Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay (Graz, 1998), pp. 124–53; Paul Clements, ‘Highgate Cemetery Heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space’, Space and Culture 20.4 (2017): 470–84. 14 Eric C. Smith, Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome (New York, 2014), p. 3. 15 Smith, Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome, pp. 39–71. 11 12

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or imaginary spaces. Tom Bristow, for example, has written about the heterotopias of Iain Sinclair’s fiction, and John Miller has explored the ‘zooheterotopias’ of cryptozoology, which extend back to and beyond the Middle Ages.16 ‘What is Beowulf ’s Grendel’ he asks, ‘but a cryptid avant la lettre.’17 One can ask the same question about many of the beings that inhabit the panels of the Franks Casket, and indeed of the medieval whale. A cryptid is defined literally as a creature whose existence is legendary, disputed, or unproven, a definition that extends as easily to many of the casket’s creatures as it does to Grendel. Romulus and Remus are legendary half-human, half-divine beings; the whale was simultaneously a type of fish, an island and a supernatural or legendary sea-monster as much as it was a real animal; the human figures carved from its bones might be read as part sea-creature, partaking of the nature of that from which they are formed. As place/ space the casket finds common ground with a number of modernity’s heterotopian spaces such as the zooheterotopia, but also the ship, the mirror, the library, the cemetery, and the crypt. It provides passage for its creatures and stories over the sea, from the cities and lands in which their narratives took place, to England. It holds up a mirror to England at the time in which it was just beginning to define itself as a nation. It is a sort of library in that it is an archive of stories and it is itself a story of the dead as well as a dead body. It is possible that it was an enclosure for the dead. It imagines and locates England differently. It encrypts: physically, linguistically, and psychically. I argue that it is important to encounter the casket as a heterotopia because it allows the multiple simultaneous and sometimes contradictory ideas to emerge about what the island of Britain was before it became a single united territory and home to Alfred’s idea of a single united English people; it encourages us to think about the movements and processes of time, people, and stories; and it demonstrates that the idea of narrating England-in-formation through other places, spaces, and voices was not confined to written texts. It also allows us to think about the multiple meanings and functions that have been suggested for the casket in a non-exclusionary and non-hierarchical way, at the same time that it is a site of contestation between competing 16 Tom Bristow, ‘“An Occult Geometry of Capital”: Heterotopia, History and Hypermodernism in Iain Sinclair’s Literary Geography’, in The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia, ed. Mariangela Palladino and John Miller (London, 2016), pp. 29–47; John Miller, ‘Zooheterotopias’, in ibid., pp. 149–64. 17 Miller, ‘Zooheterotopias’, p. 150. He cites B. Regal, Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads and Cryptozoology (New York, 2011), which includes a discussion of medieval bestiaries and other such sources as cryptozoological texts.

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narratives, religions, and readings. Indeed, the overturning of established hierarchies is at the centre of several of its narrative panels. There are utopian and dystopian elements to the casket, but that is in keeping with the nature of so many heterotopias.18 The five panels of the Franks Casket are carved with scenes identified as Weland the Smith working at his forge and the Adoration of the Magi (front, fig. 2), a battle scene that includes an archer labelled Ægili (lid, fig. 3), the sack of the temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews (back, fig. 4), Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf (left side, fig. 5), and an enigmatic scene involving human, animal, and hybrid figures (right side, fig. 6).19 With the exception of the lid, which is fragmentary, each panel is surrounded by an inscription, two in verse, and two in prose, with no two inscriptions presented identically. The Old English runic verse inscription on the front panel reads: fisc flodu ahof  on fergenberig warþ gas:ric grorn  þær he ongreot giswam. hronæs ban.20 (The fish beat up the seas [or rose by means of the sea] onto the high hill [or cliff, or burial mound]. The king of terror [or one strong in life or power] became sad when he swam aground onto the shingle. Whale’s bone(s).)

Ban can refer to the entire skeleton and not just an isolated bone or bones, and Gaby Waxenberger has stressed the importance of such an interpretation for the ban of the casket, although for very different reasons.21 While it might seem odd to associate a small box with the entire skeleton of a huge sea-creature, the labelling of the whale as gas:ric (‘strong in life or power’, or ‘king of terror’) suggests that aspects of the immensity and life force of the living whale were indeed understood to be retained in the thing made from its skeleton; its essential whaleness is very much still there, matter out of place. I will refer to the whale as Gas:ric throughout this chapter, in part because several of the whales that appear in the literary sources to be discussed below were given names closely identified with their natures, and in 18 See for example Diane Morgan, ‘The “Floating Asylum,” the Armée du salut, and Le Corbusier: A Modernist Heterotopian/Utopian Project’, Utopian Studies 25.1 (2014): 87–124. 19 This last panel is in the Bargello, Florence, while the rest of the casket is in the British Museum. 20 My translations of the casket’s inscriptions are based on those of Webster, The Franks Casket, unless otherwise stated. 21 Waxenberger, ‘Date and Provenance of the Auzon or Franks Casket’, p. 127.

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part because I want to think more about the possible implications of the presence of that name, or label, split in two by its central ‘:’. The second line of the verse, warþ gas:ric grorn þær he ongreot giswam, is carved retrograde across the bottom border panel, an arrangement that may be meant to convey the whale’s reversal of fortune and/or its evil nature,22 although this may not be the only way we should think about this arrangement of the script. As the translation of the full text makes clear, there are multiple ways of translating some of its words and phrases, opening out this inscription to multiple possible readings, and alerting the reader to the fact that this is also likely to be true for the inscriptions of its other panels. It proceeds by twists and turns rather than linear narratives or reasoning, leaving a trail of turbulence in its wake. On the back the prose inscription surrounding the scene of the sack of the temple reads ‘her fegtaþ titus end giuþeasu. hic fugiant hierusalim afitatores’ (Here Titus and a Jew [or Jews] fight. Here the inhabitants flee Jerusalem). In this case the inscription begins in the Old English language and the runic alphabet on the left side of the panel, changes into Latin and the Roman alphabet for the description of the flight of the Jews (top right), and then switches back into runes but remains in the Latin language for the final word afitatores (inhabitants), which is carved down the right side of the panel. As discussed in Chapter 1, the Old English word her can mean either or both ‘here in this place’ or ‘here in this time’, and I will consider in detail below the implications of this double meaning for the casket, as well as the importance of understanding two of its inscriptions as the discourse that deixis such as her imply rather than as impersonal historical narrative. The dual language and script of the inscription demonstrate not only that language is central to the casket’s meaning, but also that the passage across or between languages and cultures is as well. On the left side the inscription is again in Old English prose and the runic alphabet. It reads ‘romwalus and reumwalus twœgen gibroþær afœddæ hiæ wylif in romæcæstri oþlæ unneg’ (Romulus and Remus, two (or twin) brothers, a she-wolf nourished them in Rome far from their native land). In this case the phrase afoeddæ hiæ wylif in romæcæstri (a she-wolf nourished them in the city of Rome) in the bottom border panel is carved upside down in relation to the main scene. It is not immediately clear what the meaning (if any) of 22 Leslie Webster, ‘The Iconographic Programme of the Franks Casket’, in Northumbria’s Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills (Stroud, 1999), pp. 227–46, at 233.

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the arrangement of this text might be. A change in fortune? A new beginning with the founding of Rome? The question remains open for the moment. As far as I can discern, with the exception of Waxenberger all previous scholars have maintained that the arrangement of the Romulus and Remus inscription is unique on the casket,23 but this is not in fact the case, the inscription on the right side is arranged in exactly the same manner although it is encrypted, and so different in that respect. It is possible, then, that the arrangement was meant to correspond to the different clauses of the sentence or actions of the characters, and/or to achieve a circular arrangement in which the top and bottom and left and right bands of the inscription mirrored each other and enclosed the central figural imagery. The inscription on the right side of the casket is the most problematic. Like that on the front it is in Old English runes and in verse. Most, following Ray Page, read: Her Hos sitiþ  on harmberga agl· drigiþ  swa hiræ Ertae gisgraf sarden sorga  and sefa torna. (Here Hos sits on the sorrow mound; she suffers distress as Ertae had imposed it upon her, a wretched den [or wood] of sorrows and torments of mind.)

Tom Bredehoft, however, reads: Her Hos sitiþ  on hæumberga agl· drigiþ  swa hiræ Eutae gisgraf sæuden sorga  and sefa torna.24 (Here Hos sits on the high hill; she endures agl· as the Jute appointed to her, a sæuden of sorrows and troubles in mind.)

The presence of a Jute in this reading of the inscription would add a specific historical and geotemporal context to the verses that might not otherwise be present. But Gaby Waxenberger has proposed yet another and far more complex transcription and translation for the lines. She reads: Her hos sittaþ  on harmberg a æglæca drigiþ  swah (=swac) irri Ertae egi sgrf (=scrf)

For example, Webster, The Franks Casket, p. 14. Thomas A. Bredehoft, ‘Three New Cryptic Runes on the Franks Casket’, Notes and Queries n.s. 58.2 (2011): 181–3, at 181–2. 23 24

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sar den sorga  ænd sefa torna.25 (Here/listen, the company presides over the harmful burial place/ mound (always). The awesome opponent/ferocious fighter always performs/acts/endures. Anger has left Ertæ assigned/decreed by means of the horse: distress, the grave of sorrows and the sad mood.)

On this side the inscription is complicated by being encrypted using a vowel substitution code.26 In addition to the inscriptions carved in the borders, single-word inscriptions appear in four of the panels. On the right side the words bita (‘biter’, or ‘bitter’, or ‘poisonous’, or ‘hostile’, or ‘sorrowful’), wudu (wood), and risci (‘reeds’ or ‘rushes’) surround the horse at the centre of the panel. On the back the words dom (‘judgement’ or ‘law’) and gisl (hostage) are carved in the lower left and right corners respectively. On the lid the name Ægili (Ægil, or ‘for Ægil’, or ‘belonging to Ægil’) is placed next to the shoulder of the archer. On the front, ‘magi’ (wise men) has been incised in runes on a panel above the second wise man. This is the only inscription to be incised into rather than carved out of the bone of the casket. It sinks into rather than emerges from the bone, inscribing something to do with wisdom within it. I have no intention of attempting to determine how and why all the images and inscriptions fit together, although I will tease out some of the suggestions and possibilities, but it is important to bear in mind throughout that both the casket and its texts are plural. From this brief description, however, it should be clear that like Alfred’s Preface the casket is concerned with travel across times and territories, with language and peoples with the relationship between England and Rome, with origins and beginnings, and with the idea of the other. 25 Gaby Waxenberger, ‘Date and Provenance of the Auzon or Franks Casket’, p. 127. See also eadem, ‘The Cryptic Runes on the Auzon/Franks Casket: A Challenge for the Runologist and Lexicographer’, in More than Words: English Lexicography and Lexicology Past and Present: Essays Presented to Hans Sauer on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday – Part 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), pp. 161–70, at 165. The word æglæca or aglæca (awesome opponent, formidable or ferocious being) is also used in Beowulf to describe Beowulf, Sigmund, Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the sea monsters. See below p. 179. 26 Webster, The Franks Casket, p. 14. See further, Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman, ‘Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket’, in A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy, ed. Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim (London, 2017), pp. 49–64. Marijane Osborn (‘The Grammar of the Inscription on the Franks Casket, Right Side’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73.3 (1972): 663–71) translates the inscription as ‘Here the hos sets upon the taster of harm. Affliction prevails, so that to her the earth-isle is a grave, a sore den of sorrows and of torments to the mind’, although her reading has not been generally accepted.

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While it holds up a mirror to the island, it reflects back a world that is far more fragmented, mysterious, contested, and far less peaceful than the one we encountered in the previous chapter, but a world at whose centre is again an empty space – the empty space in which England creates an image of itself, the empty space of that nationalistic image, the empty space of its manifestation in the modern world, the empty space of those histories that cannot be assimilated. In The Order of Things Foucault sought to establish a framework for understanding the way in which classifications and cultural codes are produced. Heterotopias are particularly helpful for identifying such codes because they expose and disrupt assumptions and familiar patterns of thought. Citing in particular Borges’s famous taxonomy from the Chinese encyclopaedia, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, as a potent literary heterotopia, Foucault observes that in such spaces ‘fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately’.27 According to Borges’s list, animals can be divided into the following classifications: Those that belong to the emperor Enbalmed ones Those that are trained Suckling pigs Mermaids (or sirens) Fabulous ones Stray dogs Those that are included in this classification Those that tremble as if they were mad Innumerable ones Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush Et cetera Those that have just broken the flower vase Those that, at a distance, resemble flies28

The Franks Casket may not shatter accepted classifications as completely as does the Chinese encyclopaedia but it does adamantly refuse classification and is thus a similar type of heterotopic space – perhaps this is why Borges was so fascinated by the casket and the

27 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 2002), p. xix. 28 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘John Wilkins’ Analytic Language’, in The Total Library: Nonfiction 1922–1986, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Harmondsworth, 2007), pp. 229–32, at 231.

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puzzles of its meaning.29 With its still mysterious and open-ended juxtapositions of scenes, texts, and languages it exposes the partially real and partially imaginary codes and hierarchies that underlie the foundation of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England and those we use to write about it, as well as the limits of the language we use to write about it. Ultimately, I am arguing that the casket encrypts – language, bodies, history, the reader’s desire – in its placeless place but in multiple different ways. It entombs, and it buries, and it ciphers, and it keeps present the narrative gaps that cannot be spoken in the narratives that surround it along with the ghosts of a colonising culture. The crypt is an especially appropriate heterotopia and psychic space through which to think about the Franks Casket as it is not only a placeless, undiscoverable place, but also ‘a spatial problematic’, both exterior and interior.30 The casket as crypt also incorporates elements of other heterotopias such as the archive, the ship, and the mirror. While I read the casket as a crypt and a heterotopia, I do not read it as having any specific meaning or order, but rather multiple possible meanings and orders. Like other types of heterotopia, and like Borges’s encyclopaedia, the casket is a place in which ‘fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately’, and as a crypt it cannot prevent its ghosts from haunting and escaping.

ARCA-TECTURE Ban-cofa: a bone dwelling, the body; cofa: cove, cave, repository, inner room, chamber, arc, ark, arca.31 ‘The crypt is not a natural place … but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artefact: of a place comprehended within another, but rigorously separate from it, isolated from general space by partitions, an enclosure, an enclave.’32 What is the architecture of this crypt, this box, ark, arca? As a physical artefact, the casket has been identified with the arcula containing relics of St Julian mentioned in an inscribed plaque on the tomb of the

Webster, The Franks Casket, p. 5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, 1986), p. xii. 31 Bosworth-Toller, sv bancofa, cofa; DOE, sv bancofa, cofa: https://0-tapor-library-utoronto-ca.wam.leeds.ac.uk/doe/. See also the compounds ban-fæt, ban-hus, ban-loca, ban-sele. 32 Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xiv. 29 30

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saint in the church of St Julian the Martyr at Brioude,33 but whether or not it was that particular arca is not as relevant to its nature as it is to its possible history as there is no evidence that the casket was originally intended to be a reliquary.34 Moreover, an arca is not just a box. According to Isidore, ‘A strongbox (arca) is so called because it prevents (arcere) and prohibits seeing inside. From this term also derive archives (arcivum, i.e. archivum) and “mystery” (arcanum), that is a secret from which other people are fended off (arcere).’35 Building on Freud’s work on transhistorical trauma, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok define the crypt as something constructed around the secrets and silences – personal, national, institutional – that cannot be spoken or assimilated, that we prohibit from being seen or heard, like the colonial violence at the origin of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England or of Anglo-Saxonism.36 Psychic crypts fend off, but the casket fends us off literally by preventing us from seeing both that mystery that was inside it and that empty space that is inside it. As an arca it is an assemblage of bone panels, panels that also archive its narratives and voices, the signs that reveal its ghosts and tell us of its own emptiness. Its narratives and voices are directed out at us, both turning their backs to the space inside and forming a defensive wall between us and it. There is an order to the archive only in the sense that it has been assembled in this particular way; there is no inherent hierarchy to its panels and their various parts, and no linear order in which they are to be read. Ordering, however, is a colonial gesture and the fact that the casket is the product of a colonising culture is reflected in the subjects brought together. There have been many suggestions for

33 Webster, The Franks Casket, p. 28. Leslie Webster, ‘Le coffret d’Auzon: son histoire et sa signification’, in Saint Julian et les origins de Brioude, Actes du Colloque Internationale de Brioude, 22–25 Septembre, ed. A Dubreucq, C. Lauranson-Rosez, and B. Sanial (Almanach de Brioude, 2007), pp. 314–30. There is also a record of an ivory box filled with relics in the church archives (ibid). 34 The Franks Casket has been exhibited as a reliquary on numerous occasions, even though it has also been argued that it could have been designed to hold jewels or other treasures, or even a small manuscript. See for example Martina Bagnoli et al., eds. Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London, 2011), p. 59; Alfred Becker, ‘Franks Casket Revisited’, Asterisk, 12.2 (2003): 84–128. James Robinson is amongst those who suggests that while it might not originally have been meant to hold relics it was converted into a reliquary at some point in the later Middle Ages (Robinson, Finer than Gold: Saints and Relics in the Middle Ages [London, 2011], p. 105). 35 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, p. 401. 36 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand with a foreword by Jacques Derrida; Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand.

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ordered readings of the panels over the years,37 but really all we can say for sure is that no element of this archive can now be dissociated from any other. The angled placement of the panels, which dictates that they are both isolated from as well as juxtaposed with each other, keeps them facing away from while still existing in relation to each other. Like the multiple meanings of the words of the inscriptions and of the material from which they are carved, the arrangement of the panels dictates that we progress by twists and turns rather than in a straight line. Let’s begin our exploration of this crypt by considering the historical narratives that emerge from its walls, each one of which is both a site of death and a cipher, both of which, along with place, are key elements of Derrida’s crypt. The front panel juxtaposes an episode from the story of Weland the Smith with the Adoration of the Magi. On the left, the hamstrung and imprisoned Weland is working at his forge. Beneath his feet lies the body of a murdered prince, his severed head gripped in the tongs held in Weland’s left hand. With his right hand he offers a drugged cup to the princess Beadohild. The woman behind her may be a companion, or perhaps Beadohild has been represented twice in order to emphasise her movement towards the forge, the place of creation and of death. Behind her a man is catching and killing birds. As I have argued elsewhere, one must already know the larger story from which this scene has been excerpted in order to decipher even this much.38 Weland will go on to exact revenge for his mutilation and imprisonment by making jewels and precious cups out of the eyes, teeth, and skulls of the princes (matter out of place, secrets encrypted within 37 See for example Webster, The Franks Casket; eadem, ‘The Iconographic Programme of the Franks Casket’, in Northumbria’s Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills (Stroud, 1999), pp. 227–46; James Lang, ‘The Imagery of the Franks Casket: Another Approach’, in ibid., pp. 247–55; Carol Neumann de Vegvar, ‘Reading the Franks Casket: Context and Audiences’, in Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach, ed. Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck (Tempe, AZ, 2008), pp. 141–59; Richard Abels, ‘What has Weland to do with Christ?: The Franks Casket and the Articulation of Christianity in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, Speculum 84.3 (2009): 549–81; Katherine Cross, ‘The Mediterranean Scenes on the Franks Casket: Narrative and Exegesis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 78 (2015): 1–40; Catherine E. Karkov, ‘The Franks Casket Speaks Back: The Bones of the Past, the Becoming of England’, in Postcolonising the Medieval Image, ed. Eva Frojmovic and Catherine E. Karkov (Farnham, 2017), pp. 37–61; James Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester, 2017), pp. 98–138; Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Empire and Faith’, in Imagining the Divine: Art in Religions of Late Antiquity across Eurasia, ed. Rachel Wood, et al. (London, forthcoming, 2020). 38 Karkov, ‘The Franks Casket Speaks Back: The Bones of the Past, the Becoming of England’.

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objects), and will rape Beadohild (who subsequently gives birth to the hero Widia) before making a flying machine from the wings of the captured birds and flying to safety. Whatever his skills, then, Weland is both a murderer and a rapist, although the narrative suggests this is an appropriate revenge for his mutilation and enslavement. On the other side of the central interlace border the three Magi approach the Virgin and Child with their gifts. They are labelled Magi in the runic plaque placed above them so there is no mistaking this narrative. This episode too will be followed by death and flight, the Massacre of the Innocents and the flight of the Holy Family from Jerusalem. The inscription introduces a third narrative, that of the whale, Gas:ric, who swam ashore and was stranded, and whose ban became the cofa in which this archive is preserved. It tells us of the passage from life into death, of exile, and of the transformation of matter. It draws our attention simultaneously to the living organic substance that is bone and to interior emptiness, the absence of the body for which it once provided the architecture, and the emptiness of the violent sea out of which it was cast. Death, murder, rape, and Christianity: what exactly is this panel saying about eighth-century Northumbria and England to come? In the lower left quadrant of the back panel the emperor Titus (presumably) is enthroned amongst soldiers and other figures. The one-word inscription in the lower left corner, dom (‘judgement’, ‘law’, or ‘justice’), indicates that this is a scene of judgement or justice. In the upper left quadrant Titus’s troops are shown looting the temple in Jerusalem, which fills the panel at centre. In the two registers on the right of the panel the Jews are led away into exile and captivity, as the word gisl (‘hostage’ or ‘prisoner’) in the lower right corner indicates. The inscription surrounding the panel provides a historical context for the action but again juxtaposes events rather than explaining them. Alphabet and language are used to denote two different but related sets of actions. In Old English runes running up the left side and across the top to the left of the temple is the phrase ‘Here Titus and a Jew (or Jews) fight’. To the right of the temple the inscription switches into Latin and the Roman alphabet for the phrase ‘Here the (or its) inhabitants flee Jerusalem’, with the word ‘inhabitants’ carved in the Latin language and in runes down the right border. This arrangement with the initial words of the two clauses, her and hic, repeated in two different languages and alphabets, separates as much as it unites the actions of Titus with that of the fleeing Jews. It is also a sign that it is important that we know where ‘here’ is – Rome and Jerusalem in terms of geographical place. The hybrid Latin word carved in runes

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(afitatores) subverts any easy interpretation of the scene as an old order replaced by a new one. Indeed the change in language and script could just as easily be a sign of the conflict between cultures, the battle between Rome and Jerusalem in which Rome triumphed but over one million people were killed, Jerusalem was emptied, and the temple destroyed.39 Alternatively, the combination of script and language could be a means of appropriating or claiming culture and history. Rome claims Jerusalem, but through language England claims Rome and Jerusalem beyond it,40 just as through shape the later Tiberius B.v map laid claim to the world. There is a lot more to be said about the voice, tense, and encryption of this inscription, but I will come back to that. For the moment I want to stay focused on the arca-tecture. In addition to the violence and death encrypted in the place of this panel there is also empty space at its centre: the emptying and destruction of the temple that is in progress, the void where the ark of the covenant once stood, and the absence of the law in the form of the stone tablets bearing the ten commandments that it once held. On the left side of the casket the twins Romulus and Remus are suckled by the she-wolf just as the surrounding inscription tells us. It identifies the central figures and the place they inhabit (as yet an empty wilderness, a not-yet-place) while leaving nameless the home from which the twins have been exiled, but it does not explain the visual narrative. Why have the twins, uniquely in the art historical record, been turned upside down and made to face away from each other? There is an emptiness between them. Why are they discovered by two pairs of shepherds? Or, as they seem to be carrying spears, are they soldiers?41 Why is there a second wolf? The inscription mentions only one wolf and says nothing about the armed men. There is also a tension between place and its absence. The twins are far from their native land, but where is that? They are represented here as being in Romæcæstri (the ‘settlement’, ‘fort’, ‘stronghold’, or ‘city’ of Rome) but there are no traces of fortification or architecture aside from the bone out of which they have been carved. The city of Rome is in the 39 Titus Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, ed. and trans. G. A. Williamson (Harmondsworth, 1959), bks. vi and vii. 40 This move might be compared with that of the runic poem on the Ruthwell Cross, which uses language to translate the events of the crucifixion from Jerusalem to Northumbria. See below n. 132. 41 Carol Neumann de Vegvar has suggested that the spears may reflect the reality of a shepherd’s life in early medieval England where wolves were dangerous predators: ‘The Travelling Twins: Romulus and Remus in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Northumbria’s Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills (Stroud, 1999), pp. 256–67, at 262.

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future, founded again on death and violence, the murder of Remus by Romulus, war, conflict, and the rape of the Sabine women.42 Rome will be Remus’s crypt and Romulus will remain forever foreign to it, as indicated by the form of his name inscribed here, Romwalus, literally ‘Rome foreigner’. Both the right-side panel and the lid remain more or less mysteries (arcana). Their stories are archived and encrypted in the bone of the casket but we do not know exactly what their stories are. The right panel may represent an episode from some now lost story about a person or creature named Hos, and/or a company gathered around a burial mound. The only thing we can say for certain about the panel is that this is a scene of death, sorrow, and distress set in a woodland, and that the language suggests that it is Germanic rather than Roman or British, although that would not rule out a story involving the conquest or colonisation of Britain. Emptiness is here signified by silence. The inscription has been encrypted using a substitution code that many contemporary readers would have been as unable to decipher as we are now – perhaps more so given the low rate of literacy in any language in the eighth century. It fends us off. We cannot unlock its secrets. The creature sitting on a mound on the far left has been silenced by the serpent wrapped tightly around its muzzle, a silenced cryptid. I use the word here in a double sense. Cryptids are creatures that are fictional or legendary to some but believed by others to exist, like Bigfoot. Presumably the story depicted on the casket was known to at least the maker and/or patron of the casket and it is impossible to say now whether they would have understood this being as real or legendary. But were Romulus and Remus real or legendary? The same could be asked of Weland, or even Christ for that matter as belief in his existence or nature could have varied enormously at the time the casket was made. With the exception of scene of the sack of the temple on the back panel, all of the beings depicted on the casket hover in an uncanny space between the real and the legendary, divine, or supernatural. For us today the figures of this particular panel are encrypted. We do not know exactly who or what they are or what stories they are meant to tell. They are silent figures of encryption. The person in the burial mound near the centre is doubly encrypted, both a puzzle and a being buried beneath the earth, silenced by death – or maybe one of the living dead. The central hooded figure in the group of three on the right stares silently out at us, the only one of the casket’s carved 42 See further Karkov, ‘The Franks Casket Speaks Back: The Bones of the Past, the Becoming of England’.

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figures to confront us in this way.43 In fact, the only one of the casket’s inhabitants to make a direct appeal to the viewer. Emptiness, absence, or loss are often expressed by silence in Old English poetry, even if they are relatively unexplored aspects of it. There is the silence of Grendel and his mother who have lost their homeland to the Danes for example, or the silence of those not present to hear the voices that call out to them as do the voices in the poem Wulf and Eadwacer. Silence is a sign of empty space, the incomprehensible space between those who can and cannot speak and those who may be able to speak but cannot be heard. We cannot hear the central hooded figure, but he or she appeals to us from the space of the casket through pose and expression, the gestures of a confined body, just as the protagonists in the poems Wulf and Eadwacer or The Wife’s Lament cry out to the reader with their voices. On the lid may be Weland’s brother Ægil, who was said to be an archer but the written evidence for his existence is much later than the date of the casket,44 and even if it is meant to be that Ægil we know nothing of the battle in which he is involved or the nature of the place in which it takes place. While the name is usually read as identifying the archer, the form in which it appears here can also be translated as ‘to Ægil’, ‘for Ægil’, or ‘belonging to Ægil’,45 so it may not be meant to identify the archer at all. Only one-third of the lid survives, and the missing sections might have carried other scenes or inscriptions giving us more insight into the story and/or the making of the casket, but even if we did have the complete casket it would still resist definitive readings or interpretations. The battle on the lid takes place around a central circle that originally held either the handle of the casket or perhaps a decorative boss. It is a bit of the arca-tecture and not a part of the story of the battle that rages around it, but it is also yet another reminder that we are unable to see beyond it into the 43 The eyes of the little figure are difficult to see in the replica of the panel on the casket in the British Museum, but are quite clear and expressive on the original panel in the Bargello. 44 The earliest written evidence for the story of Weland is in the Völundarkviða, which seems to have been composed in the late tenth or eleventh century, but was no doubt based on earlier traditions. John McKinnell, ‘The Context of Völundarkviða’, in The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology, ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (London, 2002), pp. 198–212, at 200. The earliest surviving manuscript version of Völundarkviða is thirteenth century. McKinnell argues further that the Völundarkviða was composed in Yorkshire, even though it is written in Old Norse (ibid., 200). 45 Austin Simmons, The Cipherment of the Franks Casket Woruldhord, http://poppy. nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/items/show/144.

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empty space that lies beneath. It is literally an empty space within the place of the casket, a site from which something has been removed, leaving only the empty holes for the fittings that once held it in place.46 The archival stories of the casket’s panels encircle the void that is England as it is beginning to identify itself as a unified place, the dwelling place of Bede’s gens anglorum,47 but any sort of unification is as yet in the realm of the imaginary. The other places of its narratives do not speak directly of England but they tell its origins through the elsewheres and other times that are the foundations of its self-imagining: the world of the Germanic north, the Holy Land, Rome. These are the places from which the English derive some of their most powerful myths and founding narratives. There are the exiles and migrants – the Jews, Romulus and Remus, Weland – chosen peoples and exceptional figures inhabiting the borders between the human and divine. There is the founding city of Rome, the remains of whose empire still stood across large sections of England, and whose imperial buildings were dismantled and redeployed in the architecture of places such as St Andrew’s Hexham, St Martin’s Canterbury, or Bede’s own Wearmouth-Jarrow. There is ongoing debate about how to interpret these remains.48 There are the stories of Weland the Smith, and Christ adored by the Magi, stories from the two religious traditions of early Northumbrian history, yes, but also stories of demiurgic figures, of creation, of craft, of coming into being itself – perhaps also of the skill or wisdom (metis) that gives birth to the passage through (poros). Weland will also appear in Beowulf, that great founding text of Old English literary studies, as the maker of Beowulf ’s miraculous mail shirt, the armature that kept him safe from the attacks 46 There is a record of the casket’s metal fittings being removed in the nineteenth century, at which time it had come to be used as a sewing box by the Auzon family in whose possession it was discovered, though of course the fittings removed at that time may not have been the original ones. Webster, The Franks Casket, p. 25. 47 Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’; idem, ‘Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance’; idem, ‘The Making of England’; Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’. 48 On Hexham see Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Alternative Histories: The Truth in Stone’ in ‘Vera lex historiae’?: Historical Truth and the Emergence of the Event in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Catalin Taranu (Punctum Books, forthcoming); Paul Bidwell, ‘A Survey of the Anglo-Saxon Crypt at Hexham and its Reused Roman Stonework’, Archaeologia Aeliana 5th ser xxxix (2010): 53–145; Paul Bidwell, ‘Wilfrid and Hexham: The Anglo-Saxon Crypt’, in Wilfrid Abbot, Bishop, Saint: Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conference, ed. N. J. Higham (Donington, 2013), pp. 152–62. On Canterbury see Eric Cambridge, ‘The Architecture of the Augustine Missions’, in St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson (Stroud, 1999), pp. 202–36. On Warmouth-Jarrow see Rosemary Cramp, et al, Wearmouth and Jarrow Monastic Sites, 2 vols (Swindon, 2005–06).

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of the water monsters as he descended through Grendel’s mere into the cave where the mother lived. There are the twins Romulus and Remus, sons of the god Mars, grandsons of a king, and founders of a new empire in a new land. They have sometimes been interpreted as doubles for the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (Stallion and Horse) who were amongst the mythical fifth-century conquerors of the island of Britain, and a terror to the Britons living on the island.49 They simultaneously mark England’s identification with and distance/ difference from Rome, but perhaps also the origins of all nations in violence, death, and the masculine warrior-hero, the meta-narratives in which England’s own violent settlement, its coming into being, can be encrypted. Romulus will be sovereign, but he is nourished by the wolf, the beast that is always already inseparable from sovereign power. This is a she-wolf, lupa in Latin, the word for both a she-wolf and a whore. Michel Serres reads Romulus and Remus as ‘false sons of a whore, true sons of a vestal and Mars, legendary sons of violence and rape, sons of the god of war and a chaste and savage priestess’,50 but as a fallen vestal virgin their mother, Rhea Silvia, may also have been a lupa. The Old English wylf, the word used in the inscription might not literally mean whore, but it could mean a wolfish person or a devil. Romulus will kill Remus, his wolfish twin.51 The figural narratives are themselves encircled by the twinned yet different languages and scripts of the inscriptions. Cofa: cove, cave, repository – a place in which things are deposited. Writing about the collecting of antiques, ruins, and the collections of museums, Ernst Bloch stated that, ‘Collecting is a particularly complicated way of departing, has always been so. It draws together, keeps everything with it, borders on acquisitiveness and greed, to this extent it remains quite narrowly at home.’52 The collected words, narratives, and voices of the casket are signs of the acquisitive exceptionalism and colonialism of England that are inseparable from its creation, an isolated island home that attempts to contain the world.53 We see a 49 Bredehoft, ‘Three New Cryptic Runes on the Franks Casket’: 182. On Hengest and Horsa see Bede, HE, i.15, pp. 48–51. 50 Michel Serres, Rome, trans. Randolph Burks (London, 2015), p. 9. 51 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, I, esp. pp. 9–10. See also Kofman, ‘Beyond Aporia?’, p. 16. 52 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, p. 381. 53 One can see this idea of collecting and containing the world continuing not only in the British Empire, but in the British Library, which until recently boasted of containing ‘the world’s knowledge’ (see https://archive.is/OsP51, accessed 23 August, 2019), or the British Museum’s History of the World in 100 Objects (https://www. britishmuseum.org/explore/a_history_of_the_world.aspx, accessed 23 August 2019).

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similar collection in the famous mound 1 burial at Sutton Hoo, with its assembled grave-goods intended as a sign of a ruler and a culture’s power laying claim to the British past, to Frankia, Byzantium, and the Scandinavian north.54 The narrative content of the Mound 1 burial has been highlighted by Martin Carver, who has described the Sutton Hoo cemetery and others like it as ‘an imaginative view of North Sea ideologies, a “dreaming out loud” using grave goods as statements which owe as much to poetry as to the realities of life’.55 It is important to note here that the Franks Casket (along with Sutton Hoo) represents a conception of space and place that would go on to characterise England as the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – and indeed the later English – imagined it. It does work similar to that of the poem Widsith, a catalogue of rulers and places to which the narrator Widsith (whose name means ‘far traveller’) has travelled. He has journeyed over most of the earth (mæst mægþa ofer eorþan) and across time, collecting stories of kings and peoples including Caesar, Gefwulf of the Jutes, and Alexander the Great; he has been with the Vikings, the Saxons, the Angles, across Germania, with the Israelites, and with Weland’s son Widiu (Widga). As Nicholas Howe has argued, the poem both rescues the past from oblivion and transforms time into territory as Widsith collects one place after another and brings them back to his lord in England.56 Homi Bhabha described the collection of modern refugees and migrants at the edges or in the marginal spaces of nations and cities as ‘Gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge of “foreign” cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gathering in the ghettos of cafés and city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language.’57 The Franks Casket enacts the opposite process, it gathers together exiles and emigrés at its edges and in its languages, pulling them towards but keeping them always on the edges of its colonial centre. It deflects the violence of its own past, the violence that took 54 For a fascinating account of the colonial/imperial relationship between the collection and burial of such assemblages and their excavation and recording by modern antiquarians and archaeologists see Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, ch. 3. 55 Martin Carver, ‘Ideology and Allegiance in East Anglia’, in Sutton Hoo Fifty Years After, ed. Robert T. Farrell and Carol Neuman de Vegvar (Oxford, OH, 1992), pp. 173–82, at 173; idem, ‘Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon Graves’, in Treasure in the Medieval West, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (York, 2000), pp. 25–48. 56 Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 144. 57 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, p. 291.

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place on the geographical island of Britain, onto the foundation stories and origin legends of those other times and places that lie deep within its own history and sets them afloat on the bones of the whale.

THE CRYPT A crypt ‘implies topoi, death, cipher’.58 The Franks Casket collects and encrypts topoi, but it is also topos (place) and death (not place). It is a dead body, a dead whale, Gas:ric, and the whale is a placeless place. Ban-cofa: bone, chamber, ark, arca. Arca gives us casket but it also gives us ark, as in the Ark of the Covenant (that empty space on the casket’s back panel) and Noah’s Ark. Cofa is the word used for Noah’s Ark in the Old English poem Genesis (line 1464), while arca was the word used in the Vulgate Bible to translate the Hebrew teva or tebah that was used both for the basket that carried Moses on the Nile and for Noah’s Ark, a suitable vehicle for exiles and emigrés.59 The story of Noah and the Ark was one of a journey towards rebirth and a new promised land, and this is no doubt one of the reasons that the West Saxon genealogies included Sceaf, son of Noah, who ‘was born on Noah’s Ark’ (wæs geboren on þære earce Noes).60 Noah’s Ark was an archive of animal life on earth, a heterotopia though not a crypt. The Ark turned inward away from death, but medieval archives were sites of death. Written records were preserved on the skins of dead animals. The casket’s narratives are preserved in bone rather than on skin, but both are the remains of dismembered creatures. The whale was a creature of incorporation, one that could be inhabited temporarily, like the Ark, but one that always incorporated rather than externalised death. The whale in biblical, classical, and medieval stories was a vessel or ship carrying those inhabiting its stomach or sailing on its back as a ship carries its passengers from port to port. In the story of Jonah and the whale Jonah traded one vessel for another when he dove or Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xiii. See further Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Drown’, in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis, 2017), pp. 246–67. For a larger consideration of Noah’s Ark see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates, Noah’s Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge (forthcoming). 60 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 5, MS C (Cambridge, 2001), p. 57. See also Anlezark, Water and Fire: The Myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 245–72; Thomas D. Hill, ‘The Myth of the Ark-Born Son of Noah and the West Saxon Royal Genealogical Tables’, Harvard Theological Review 80 (1987): 379–83. 58 59

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was thrown from a ship into the ocean where he was swallowed by the whale. In his fantastical tale of interplanetary travel and strange worlds within worlds, the Vera Historia, written in Greek in the second century CE, the Syrian author Lucian of Samosata included an episode in which he and his companions were swallowed by a 150-mile-long whale. Lucian and his men were able to look out through the teeth of the whale in which they passed over the sea, observing the passing of many islands, some of them being sailed like ships by giant men.61 In the whale’s belly they found an island inhabited by men and races of fish-people. They defeated the fish-people in battle, killed the whale by lighting an enormous bonfire, and escaped the island with its hellish flames through the whale’s mouth.62 In Lucian’s story the whale incorporated an island, while islands could also sail the seas like whales. There is no evidence that this story was known in early medieval England, but similar tales were. The whale was a wily and cunning creature and the tradition of whales disguising themselves as islands and luring unsuspecting sailors to their deaths has its sources in the Greek Physiologus, which was in circulation in Europe in a Latin translation as early as the fourth century.63 Island, ship, whale; place, not-place, space, thing. In the eighth-century Navigatio Sancti Brendani (one of Bloch’s examples of a utopian text),64 Brendan and his fellow sailors mistake the whale Jasconius (or Iasconius; Old Irish iasc = fish) – he has a name – for an island and land on his back.65 The whale threatened to drown them but they survived and returned to the whale/island to celebrate Easter eve during each of the seven years of their voyage. In the Life of Brendan the whale rises up out of the sea as a gift from God (a passage through the chaos) and allows the sailors to celebrate Easter on its back every year.66 It also transports Brendan and his men from place to place, the exact details varying in different versions of 61 Lucian, Lucian with an English Translation, ed. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge, MA, 2014), pp. 285–303. 62 Lucian, Lucian with an English Translation, pp. 285–303. 63 This is a phenomenon that has continued well into the modern era according to the stories archived by institutions such as the Icelandic Sea Monster Museum, Skrímslasetrið. 64 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, II, pp. 762–72. 65 The earliest extant version of the Navigatio is late eighth century, but it is likely to have been in circulation orally prior to that. 66 For variations in surviving versions of the two texts see Séamus Mac Mathúna, ‘Contributions to a Study of the Voyages of St Brendan and St Malo’, in The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Jonathan M. Wooding (Dublin, 2000), pp. 157–74.

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the text. But it is clear that the whale is also a site of judgement and damnation as the Navigatio includes an episode in which Brendan meets Judas, who is living in isolation on a rocky island and who tells Brendan that a whale (Leviathan) waits nearby ready to swallow the damned. Brendan’s journey from the island of Ireland in search of the land of promise is also a circular one and this is perhaps mirrored in the constant attempts of Jasconius in the Navigatio to bite his own tail. In other words, the whale is both a stopping point on the journey and a figure for the journey itself. The double nature of the whale, at times a means of salvation, at times a site of damnation, is a prominent feature of all medieval whale stories. The old English poem The Whale preserved in the (ca. 1000) Exeter Book has its source in the same Physiologus tradition, but perhaps brings out most clearly the nature of the whale as the placeless place of the crypt. The poem describes the whale Fastitocalon, whose name is thought to be based on a corruption of the Greek Aspidochelone (asp- or shield-turtle) of the Physiologus.67 Is þæs hiw gelic  hreofum stane, swylce worie  bi wædes ofre, sondbeorgum ymbseald,  særyrica mæst, swa þæt wenaþ  wægliþende þæt hy on ealond sum  eagum wliten, ond þonne gehydað  heahstefn scipu to þam unlonde  oncyrrapum, sælaþ sæmearas  sundes æt ende, ond þonne in þæt eglond  up gewitað collenferþe;  ceolas stondað bi staþe fæste,  streame biwunden. Đonne gewiciað  werigferðe, faroðlacende,  frecnes ne wenað, on þam ealonde  æled weccað, heahfyr ælað;  hæleþ beoþ on wynnum, reonigmode,  ræste geliste. Þonne gefeleð  facnes cræftig þæt him þa ferend on  fæste wuniaþ, wic weardiað  wedres on luste, ðonne semninga  on sealtne wæg mid þa noþe  niþer gewiteþ 67 Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture, p. 132. In the Physiologus Aspidochelone was a giant sea turtle, but it was frequently confused with the whale in later texts.

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garsecges gæst,  grund geseceð, ond þonne in deaðsele  drence bifæsteđ scipu mid scealcum… Þonne se fæcna  in þam fæstenne gebroht hafað,  bealwes cræftig, æt þam edwylme  þa þe him on cleofiað, gyltum gehrodene,  ond ær georne his in hira lifdagum  larum hyrdon, þonne he þa grimman  goman bihlemmeð æfter feorhcwale  fæste togædre, helle hlinduru;  nagon hwyrft ne swice, utsiþ æfre,  þa þær in cumað, þon ma þe þa fiscas  faraðlacende of þæs hwæles fenge  hweorfan motan.68 (lines 8–31, and 71–80) (Its appearance is like a rough stone such as floats (or crumbles) by the water’s edge surrounded by sand dunes, mostly seaweed, so that seafarers believe that their eyes are looking at an island; and then they tie the high-prowed ships to that un-land by anchor ropes, settle their sea-steeds at the water’s edge, and then go up onto that island bravehearted, their ships stand fast by the shore, surrounded by streams. Then the weary seafarers encamp, not expecting harm; they kindle a fire on that island, build a high blaze, worn out and longing for rest. When the one skilled in treachery feels that the sailors are securely settled upon him, have made a camp and are longing for clear weather, then suddenly into the salt sea the ocean spirit dives down with his victims, seeks the depths, and in the death-hall drowns ships with their crews… When that evil one has led into that fastness, with evil craft into that fiery whirlpool, those who cleave to him, stained with guilt, those who had eagerly followed his teachings during their lives, then he after their death, those grim jaws snap fast together, the gates of hell; they are unable to leave nor escape, to depart ever, those who enter there, any more than the swimming fish can escape that whale’s grasp.)

In this poem the whale is both place (ealond) and not-place (unlond), as are the whales in the other stories summarised above, although they do not make this idea of mirror opposites as explicit in their language. It is also both place and not-place, the passage that leads those who cling to it to hell rather than to the land of promise.

68 Bernard J. Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501 (Exeter, 1994), 2 vols, I, pp. 272–3.

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These stories also reveal the contradictory nature of the whale as both place of death and the placeless space of the journey – literal or metaphorical. Jonah emerges from the belly of the whale into a type of paradise, while in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Brendan sets out in his boat in search of the land of promise. Fastitocalon carries doomed souls to hell. The casket’s Gas:ric was also on a journey over the waves, the hranrad (whale’s road or riding) in Old English, and the inscription on the front of the casket memorialises the end of that journey on the shores of England. As the bones or skeleton of a whale, the Franks Casket is both suffused with and haunted by its island nature. Its bone provides a place in which the figures carved into it dwell, and each panel can be perceived as an island enclosing its single story and place. Each narrative is set apart, at an angle to and isolated from the others, yet also set in relation to the others, and the larger place of the casket as a whole. It is possible to see the two natures of the whale and its island state set out in miniature in the two scenes on the front of the casket. On the left, King Nithhad has imprisoned the hamstrung Weland on an island, while on the right the Adoration of the Magi takes place within a space set apart from the world around it by the divinity of Christ and the light of the star. Bethlehem itself was a walled city set off, like an island, from the world around it. In Hebrew, Bethlehem means ‘House of Bread’, but in this particular story it is a house that is not a home. It is a temporary stopping point, an asylum, a brief island of refuge in the larger journeys of exile and onward travel in which the Holy Family and the Magi are engaged. As Diane Morgan has stressed in relation to other more modern places of refuge, ‘the focal places for those seeking this elusive “asylum” are often islands of exception, both symbols of hope and scenes of appalling tragedy’.69 This is also true in the case of the casket’s panels (as well as of England past and present). The Adoration of the Magi will be followed by the Massacre of the Innocents, as noted above, and the tragedy of Weland is recorded in the poem Deor: Welund him be wurman  wræces cunnade, anhydig eorl  earfoþa dreag, hæfde him to gesiþþe  sorge ond longaþ, wintercealde wræce;  wean oft onfond, siþþan hine Niðhad on  nede legde, swoncre seonobende  on syllan monn. Þæs ofereode,  þisses swa mæg. 69 Diane Morgan, ‘The “Floating Asylum,” the Armée du salut, and Le Corbusier: A Modernist Heterotopian/Utopian Project’: 92.

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Beadohilde ne wæs  hyre broþra deaþ on sefan swa sar  swa hyre sylfre þing – þæt heo eacen wæs;  æfre ne meahte þriste geþencan,  hu ymb þæt sceolde. Þæs ofereode,  þisses swa mæg.70 (lines 1–13) (Weland himself by worms [or swords?] knew torment, the stronghearted noble endured troubles for his companions. He had sorrow and longing, winter-cold torment. He often found woe after Nitthad lay fetters on him, slender sinew-bonds on the better man. That passed away, so may this. Beadohild was not as sad at heart for the death of her brother as for her own trouble, that she had clearly realised that she was pregnant. She could never think about how that should turn out. That passed away, so may this.)

The poem provides hope that those caught up in spaces of tragedy, like Weland and Beadohild, will eventually find asylum, as Weland does in his escape from the island. Related types of enclosed spaces, islands in the sea of activity around them can be identified in each of the other panels. On the lid there is the fortified enclosure defended by the archer, and a second enclosure within that represented by the arch under which the female figure behind him stands. On the back the temple in Jerusalem is a special place set apart and enclosing the temple creatures and the empty space where the Ark of the Covenant once sat, even if its human inhabitants have fled or been exiled. The right side of the casket remains a mysterious and isolated island of meaning, while on the left side Romulus and Remus are founders of the enclosed city, Romæcæstri. Although Rome itself is not represented, the twins are shown having come safely to shore after having been set adrift on the Tiber and are enclosed at the centre of the panel by the bodies of the two wolves and the surrounding foliage. I have discussed the casket elsewhere as a gathering or assembly in the Heideggerian sense of the word, a counter-site for England in terms of its postcolonial content (which must be differentiated from its colonising moves) and its focus on conquest and exile.71 James Paz has discussed the casket in terms of movement and assemblage, reading both its construction as an assembly of parts and its narrative panels as an assembly of people in relation to, or as a mirror for, the 70 Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, I, p. 283. 71 Karkov, ‘The Franks Casket Speaks Back: The Bones of the Past, the Becoming of England’.

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foundation of the kingdom of Northumbria through ‘movement and assemblage’, the gathering of people and places.72 The concept of an assembly of people inherent in the Germanic word ðing (meeting, council, assembly) is central to both readings. Heidegger developed the theoretical relationship between a thing in the modern sense of the word, an object, and an assembly or gathering of peoples and/or places – judicial or religious assemblies, for example, which were in the Middle Ages spaces in which the human and the divine met, in addition to places in which groups of people came together. Things, then, be they places of assembly in the landscape, courts, or a thing like the Franks Casket have a vital force, gathering other things to them, creating new meaning, and speaking across the boundary between the human and the non-human. There is an uncanniness to things, but for Heidegger there was also a fundamental uncanniness to the human condition ‘panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected inwardly, reverberating, reticent awe’, but one characterised by a basic and underlying violence.73 Being human is always ‘Being-towards-death’, and this produced an equally fundamental angst, or anxiety, to being human.74 Heidegger’s initial exploration of the uncanny and anxiety is in the section on angst in Being and Time, but he went on to develop his ideas in two later and highly political seminars on metaphysics and on Hölderlin’s hymn, Der Ister,75 in part through a close reading of the ‘Ode to Man’ from Sophocles’s Antigone. Like uncunnan (or the Old Irish ingnáth), deinon, the Greek word that features in the Ode, can mean both wonderful and terrible. Anxiety emerges in his analysis as a dread that is both familiar and utterly strange, always present in Being (consciously or not) yet unspecific as still in the future and hence unknown, and through the violence that is expressed on a mythic or pan-religious level that frames the individual. Anxiety makes life itself strange, causing human beings to feel not completely at home in the world in which we live. As a result, things fall away and turn back towards us as strange and uncanny things.76 This phenomenon can Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture, p. 101. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, revised, expanded and trans. by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, 2nd edn (New Haven, 2014), pp. 166–7. 74 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), p. 310. 75 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics; Hölderlein’s Hymn “The Ister”, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington, 1966). 76 Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London, 1978), pp. 41–58. 72 73

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take many forms, for example a deep despair or boredom that makes the most ordinary things seem completely other. Heidegger’s observations are not that far removed from those of Augustine of Hippo when he wrote of his own despair after the death of a friend, lamenting that everything became strange to him including himself.77 The double nature of the Franks Casket, both whale and not-whale, place and not-place, ealond and unlond, effectively materialises one form of this process, both in the sense that it is a thing that turns back towards us as an uncanny thing, but also because it visualises and embodies Being-towards-death as something fundamental to the world and not just to the human beings with whom Heidegger was concerned. This is spelled out on the front of the casket in the inscription’s account of the turning of the one strong in life into the melancholy stranded creature that became whalebone, and in the turning of that part of the inscription that records this turn in being to read retrograde in the lower border.78 The crypt is constructed through violence, in this case literally through the physical death and dismemberment of the whale. The whale is encrypted in the casket as both living and dead, the living dead.79 On a very literal level being-towards-death and the inherent violence of humanity are enacted on the crypt and in its bone panels. To be born a warrior like Ægil is to live with the anxiety of ever-present death, as is made clear by the warriors of Beowulf waiting anxiously within the hall as Grendel roams the world outside,80 and by the need to tell one’s own violent warrior past through stories of violence in other places and other pasts. The twins Romulus and Remus replay the story of fratricide that goes back to the biblical Cain and Abel, the first appearance of death in the fallen human world. Their story (and the others on the casket) also encrypt the violence towards and death of the Britons who inhabited the island kingdom at the time of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ conquest, but they also allow its ghosts to emerge. Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. Carolyn J.-B Hammond (Cambridge, MA, 2014), Book IV.4. 78 Of course, ga:sric can also be translated as the ferocious fighter or the awesome opponent, but these names too suggest a similar turn as a fighter must fight against something and an opponent be in a place or state of opposition to something. 79 Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, pp. xv, xxi. 80 Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (The Art of ‘Beowulf ’ [Berkeley, 1971], p. 90) has described this as a description of ‘death on the march’, while Alain Renoir (‘Point of View and Design for Terror in Beowulf’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 63 [1962], 154–67, at, 160–5), has analysed the way in which the scene produces a growing sense of anxiety and terror. 77

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Beowulf and Hrothgar, or Romulus and Remus, figure the AngloSaxons, but they do so in a way that keeps them safe behind narratives of former times, places, and religions. To be a settler colonial or an empire builder is always to be-towards-death. But the twins were also said to be the sons of the god Mars, and the awe that Heidegger identifies in the uncanny is also fundamental to humanity in the face of the mythic or the religious, and thus could also be said to be a presence in all of the casket’s panels. From a narrowly Christian point of view, to be Jewish or to practice one of the northern polytheistic religions that governed the world of Weland and (presumably) the creatures of the Hos panel is to live always in a teleological march towards death – either physically, or spiritually through the act of baptism for those who converted to Christianity. Christ’s death is figured in his birth, with the cross in the halo behind his head on the casket indicating the inevitability of that death along with his divine nature. His ever-present death was also commonly represented by details suggesting the Virgin Mary’s foreknowledge of his death at the moment of his birth.81 It could, of course, be argued that for a Christian patron or audience anxiety was not fundamental to Being as salvation could not be achieved without death, indeed this is one of the messages of the story of Jonah and the whale, but belief may not always be enough to counter anxiety in individual humans; moreover, there is no evidence that the casket was intended as a Christian object or that its owner was Christian. The Adoration of the Magi is the only explicitly Christian scene on the casket, and it is but one of six very different narratives involving at least four very different religions. In the Weland panel with which it is paired we see death come unexpectedly but quite definitively to the young prince whose body lies beneath Weland’s feet. Like the whale, however, he will be encrypted in the form of the uncanny things the smith makes from his remains. All three of the front panel’s narratives – inscription, Adoration, and Weland – are centred on the turn back of something familiar as something uncanny. On the right the Christ child turns towards 81 The Virgin’s sadness is represented by the contemplative sad look on her face as she holds the Christ child and/or by the presence of the cross in Early Christian and Byzantine icons. The English would have been familiar with these images through the icons they saw in or brought back from Rome. The icon of the Virgin in Santa Maria Trastevere is one example that medieval travellers would likely have encountered. The image of the Virgin and Child on the casket, with the child held on the Virgin’s lap and the two curving lines that frame the pair at top and bottom suggest that it was based on an icon of this type.

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us (not towards the wise men who approach him) as a figure of both the divine and the human, the uncanny mystery (arcanum) at the heart of Christian belief. On the left Weland the Smith is busy turning the head of a prince into jewels and a goblet, things that will turn back strangely as soon as the materials from which they are made are revealed. The turn of the whale in the inscription has already been discussed, but I will emphasise here that the nature of the casket as both the bone of a living creature and a crafted thing is always at the heart of its uncanniness, locating it in an ambiguous space of in/animateness. The dead haunted not only by ghosts, but by its former living self – an apt metaphor for both Anglo-Saxon England and Anglo-Saxonism. As such it is a site of anxiety and a place of confrontation between self and other, the placeless place of the mirror. The mirror confronts us with our uncanny double present in a place where we are not. I am there in my reflection yet I am not there because I am here. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the mirror is that in which we first recognise ourselves as a sort of thing that can be perceived from outside of ourselves, an experience of self-alienation that remains with us permanently.82 In its self-alienation the reflected self feeds the development of Heidegger’s uncanny anxiety, but it also creates an encounter with otherness in which the disorganised body of the self can find an image of coherence in the body that appears in the mirror. The casket presents just such an image of coherence (but at the moment only a possible coherence that still circles an empty space) for the emerging England – all its different originary parts drawn together and juxtaposed in a single geometric form: the specificity of Rome, the Holy Land, and Christianity, and the more amorphous worlds of the ‘Germanic’ and polytheism. In its journey over the sea and in the narratives of travel and exile carved into its bones the casket mirrors the migrations of the Angles, Saxons, and other peoples and replays the ever-present exodus myth in which the history of conquest and colonisation is always both encrypted and mirrored, mirrored this time in the narrative reversal that makes the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ the people fleeing from violence rather than the violent invaders. The casket articulates its place as mirror over and over through the compositional and thematic mirroring that runs through its panels. The Romulus and Remus panel on the left 82 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, and ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (Abingdon, 2001), pp. 1–8, and 323–60.

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side is all about mirror doubles: the twins, the wolves, the two pairs of men discovering them, the mirror arrangement of the inscription in the upper and lower panels in relation to the centre. It is also a story of unity – the twins are abandoned, nourished, and found together, and together in their desire to found the city of Rome, and of conflict in their disagreement over where the city should be founded and the resulting murder of one twin by the other – the destruction of the other, the wolfish twin. The panel is arranged into three groups of doubled figures, the two pairs of shepherds/soldiers flanking the central basically circular arrangement of wolves and twins. Its composition is loosely mirrored by that of the Hos panel on the right side. In this case, the central space contains the figure literally encrypted within a burial mound (eyes still open, the living dead), the flying bird, the horse, and the figure holding a stick-like object that rises to meet the descender of the rune Tir in the word bita. The three words (bita, wudu, and risci) carved within the panel further help to define this space. To either side of the central group are figures carved against a much less busy and more open background: the hybrid figure with a serpent wrapped around its muzzle confronted by an armed soldier to the left, and two cloaked figures grasping a third figure on the right. The mirror arrangement of the inscription is identical to that of the Romulus and Remus panel, although encrypted. It is possible that the encryption can be understood as another form of mirroring as it uses ‘a systematic substitution of older runic forms for all the vowels … [that] are ingeniously derived from the runic forms of the consonants that end the Old English names of the normal runic symbols’,83 though whether the substitution is consistent throughout is an open question. It uses the runic alphabet to mirror the Old English language, in the sense that the runes and Old English reflect and echo each other across the space of those final consonants. Language in this panel, like so much else on the casket, is both strange and familiar. The two halves of the front panel are mirror images of each other. On the right the three wise men and a bird approach the motionless Virgin and Child. On the left the motion is in the opposite direction with the two women and the flock of birds moving towards Weland, who occupies the mirrored position of the Virgin and Child. The scenes both involve the giving of treasure (for opposite reasons), mothers and sons, kings and heroes, and wisdom from two different and opposing traditions. Thematically things also move in opposite directions. On the Weland side they move towards death and 83

Webster, The Franks Casket, p. 14.

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violation, while on the other side they move towards the life and salvation represented by Christ. Weland tramples the dead prince beneath his feet and the Virgin raises the Christ child up in her arms. The inscription mirrors this pattern by running normally from left to right across the top but running retrograde from right to left in the lower border. One would literally need to hold the casket up to a mirror for this part of the inscription to be read properly. On the lid two groups confront each other to either side of the central space. On the right Ægil, if it is Ægil, calmly prepares to fire an arrow from within his neatly built fortification. On the left is a somewhat disorganised group of soldiers who are in the process of defending themselves, falling to the ground and dying. The naked shield-bearing warriors above and beneath the central circle for the handle are mirror images of each other. We see them and the fortification in bird’s-eye view while the rest of the figures are in profile, reminding us that this is a space of illusion. On the back is another scene of armed conflict, this time between Titus and his troops and the Jews. On the left are the triumphant Romans, and on the right the defeated Jews. The inscription highlights the arrangement through its repetition of her/hic at the beginning of the two clauses that identify the action. In the middle of the panel are the mirrored and entwined pairs of animals that represent the temple’s fittings and surround the empty space for the Ark of the Covenant at its centre – the empty space of the casket and, ultimately, the empty space of England. The England in the process of formation that the casket mirrors was a place of multiple cultures, religions, languages, dialects, and alphabets all existing alongside each other, sometimes competing or conflicting, sometimes influencing and acting on each other as they do on the casket. In addition to (an)other England there is another kind of othering taking place in and around the casket. The religious world that the casket mirrors is one that is distinctly other to the one about which we so often read. It should not be reduced to a case of religion (i.e. Christianity and Judaism) versus myth or legend. To dismiss the stories of Weland and Ægil, Hos, and Romulus and Remus as parts of ‘myths’ or ‘legends’ rather than religions, or to read the stories of Romulus and Remus and the sack of the temple in Jerusalem only in relation to a possible Christian typological content is to empty them of the belief systems in which they were composed and at least traces or spectres of which they still convey. Similarly, to describe any or all of these stories as ‘pagan’ or ‘pre-Christian’ rather than polytheistic is both to define them only in terms of their relationship to Christianity, and to collapse what were multiple belief systems into one.

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Moreover, there is other content to these stories, they are stories about craft, creation, giving, gifts, conquest, destruction, death, exile, and torment. Even the Christian content can be read in terms of conquest and the establishment or attempted strengthening of political order. Most obviously, the sack of the temple in Jerusalem can be understood as a telling differently and attempt to ‘legitimise’ the devastation brought to the island by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ after the departure of the Romans.84 Gildas likened the ruin of Britain by the Saxons to that of Jerusalem by the Romans, and compared the defeat of the Britons to that of the Jews. He quotes Psalms 74 and 79 in his description of the period: ‘They have burned with fire your sanctuary to the ground, and they have polluted the dwelling place of your name’ (Ps 74.7); ‘God, the heathen have come into your inheritance; they have desecrated your holy temple’ (Ps 79.1).85 In his study of the modern nation, Homi Bhabha, following Rudolph Gasche, has explored ‘the forgetting – the signification of a minus in the origin – that constitutes the beginning of the nation’s narrative’.86 The Britons are the casket’s and AngloSaxon England’s encrypted and silenced other, figured only as others, as exiled foreigners in the Jews, and perhaps also in the dead and/ or captive figures of the Hos panel. They are that about which the casket refuses to speak, the ghosts that haunt the emptiness encrypted at the casket’s centre just as the Welsh gibberish-speaking demons that haunt Guthlac’s mound, ghosts of the Welsh killed in battle with the Mercians in Felix’s Vita.87 In saying this I do not mean to equate emptiness with the violence of English origins, that would be yet another form of forgetting, but rather to reiterate that the AngloSaxon exodus myth that replaces conquest with righteous exile and migration, and figures the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as a chosen people, has no legitimacy and can therefore only ever have emptiness at its core.

84 Karkov, ‘The Franks Casket Speaks Back: The Bones of the Past, the Becoming of England’. 85 Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, p. 27. 86 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern’, p. 310 (see also p. 305). 87 Bertram Colgrave, ed. Felix’s Life of St Guthlac (Cambridge, 1956), ch. 34; Alfred K. Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building’, in The Postmodern Beowulf, ed. Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey (Morgantown, WV, 2006), pp. 199–257, at 206–7.

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THE CIPHER ‘To crypt is to cipher, a symbolic or semiotic operation that consists of manipulating a secret code, which is something one can never do alone.’88 It involves an internalisation of something external but also an externalisation of the internal. The whale, Gas:ric, is a participant in its own ciphering. It encrypts. The Franks Casket has been described repeatedly as a riddle because the inscription on the front ‘riddles’ on its being whale/bone, its material and materiality, and while it might very generally be cast as a riddle in the sense that it is a mystery or puzzle it is more productively understood as a cipher. A riddle has an answer and Old English riddles (many of which do incorporate ciphers) tended to ask their readers for the answer, demanding ‘saga hwæt ic hatte’ (say what I am called). The Franks Casket has no answer, nor does it ask us to say what it is called. It tells us what it is called. To approach it as a cipher, on the other hand, shifts our focus to its narratives, codes, languages, and voices – what comes out of it rather than what we might want to put into it. The figural images and the inscriptions of the Franks Casket have been analysed in terms of how they explain each other, the ways in which each adds to the other’s meaning. But the inscriptions do not necessarily add to or explain each other or the panels they surround, or in which they are embedded. They also leave or create gaps in meaning, deforming, and disrupting language, grammar, and meaning, something we see in their shifting languages, alphabets, hybrid or corrupt words, the pulling apart of language: Gas:ric. This sort of disrupted/ive language is an aspect of Abraham and Torok’s crypt on which Derrida expands, noting that the crypt, or at least traces of it, becomes visible in these gaps and deformations, this haunted language.89 Together and separately these different fragments of haunted and disrupted language carry traces of what is encrypted at the same time that they conceal it. As Gabriele Schwab explains: Haunted language refers to what is unspeakable through ellipsis, indirection and detour, or fragmentation and deformation. A whole range of rhetorical figures may be mobilized to perform the work of crypts in language: metaphor, metonymy, homophony, homonymy, puns, semantic ambiguities, malapropisms, anagrams, and rebus and Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xxxvi. 89 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, pp. 152–3; Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’. 88

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similar figures that all combine concealment and revelation. This is not to say that the use of these rhetorical figures is always in the service of the crypt but rather that they lend themselves for linguistic encryptment because of their ability to conceal yet retain a revealing trace.90

What does the rapist and murderer Weland have to do with Christ? What has Gas:ric to do with either of them? Who is the ‘biter’ on the right-side panel? Why the corrupt Latin of afitatores (the inhabitants)? There are also words and things included in the different narrative elements that are encrypted in and mirror and echo each other across its surfaces. Repeated words and images, for example, establish connections between panels but at the same time make it clear that meaning is always escaping, always being displaced elsewhere, encrypting a larger narrative of land, death, and emptiness. Beorg (mountain, hill, cliff, headland, barrow, burial mound, mound) and ban (bone, a bone, rib, relic, splinter, ice, skeleton, the dead) are two such encryptions. Beorg on the casket is a constantly shifting space of both fullness and emptiness. As a hill it is a defining element of the specific sites identified in the casket’s panels. Bethlehem was located on a hill that Bede, summarising Adamnan, described as ‘a narrow ridge, surrounded on all sides by valleys’ (in dorso sita est angusto ex omni parte).91 The temple was built on Temple Mount, a hill within Jerusalem identified with Mount Moriah, while Rome was founded on the Palatine Hill. But Bethlehem was also the site of the Massacre of the Innocents, the emptying of male children from the city and a tomb for their dismembered bodies, while the Palatine Hill was a tomb for the murdered Remus, an empty space for a body empty of life, and perhaps also a crypt for Remus’s desire to found Rome on the Aventine Hill. The same duality exists in the feregenberig on which Gas:ric gives up his life. This is the land that will become England, a new Rome and a new Jerusalem, but it is also a monument to the whale’s death, a burial mound overlooking the sea, just like Beowulf ’s barrow, and we know that Gas:ric’s bones are no longer there because they are here. The beorg is also an empty place in which something is not only assembled (a country, a people, a thing – Heidegger’s ðing) but also a space in which the human and divine can meet. Clearly this is true of the burial mound or tomb as these are the places in which the human 90 Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Traumas, p. 54. 91 HE, v.16, pp. 508–9.

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meets the afterlife, places set apart, the heterotopia of the cemetery. But it is also true of the casket’s other beorga. The human and the divine meet in the temple and its ark and on the hills of Rome on which the infants Romulus and Remus, already semi-divine by birth, are saved from death. The human and divine also meet in the hybrid partially human creature that sits on its mound on the right-side panel, and perhaps also in the little figure that seems to hover between life and death at the centre of this same panel. The casket’s hills are ciphers for the presence of the divine in the places that are gathered together to encrypt the origins of England and not just in the land that will be named England. This geographical acquisitiveness and creation of the exceptional foundations of England is apparent in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the later authors, like Alfred, who used it as a source for their own visions, so we should not be surprised to find the same way of imagining England encoded in the narratives of the casket. Beorg, which is in essence just a hill, shifts in meaning depending on its appearance. Location, or the use to which it is put, becomes a cipher through which the foundation of nations and peoples, of religions, death and rebirth, conquest, and the island of Britain are encrypted. The whale, Gas:ric, is also a beorg, a hill, an island rising up out of the ocean and attracting living beings to it, the mound in which some become entombed. Gas:ric’s bones are both encrypted in the casket and the material that does the encrypting. His bones are the carrier of meaning and encryption, the conveyer of a message. Gas:ric does not speak in the first person as does the Ruthwell Cross,92 nor do we hear his voice, but he is a figure of voice. The casket is made from the jawbone,93 the mouth, which is such a crucial part of so many 92 The Ruthwell Cross, also an eighth-century Northumbrian monument, translates the events of the Crucifixion onto Northumbrian soil through its runic inscription, which recounts the death of Christ in the first-person voice of the True Cross. Anyone reading the inscription would then become one with the monument, witnessing and participating in an event from biblical Jerusalem, distant in both time and place from the ground on which they stood, but nevertheless made present in the here and now as they read. The Ruthwell Cross was also a monument to and mapping of the processes of conquest through which the kingdom of Northumbria was expanding to the north and west, having been erected on land that had previously been part of British territory. See further Catherine E. Karkov, ‘The Arts of Writing: Voice, Image, Object’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 73–98, at 89–90; Fred Orton and Ian Wood, with Clare A. Lees, Fragments of History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (Manchester, 2007). 93 It is worth noting that while it has not been scientifically proven that the bone used is jawbone, it is only the jawbones of a whale that would provide sections big

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whale stories. It is that which consumes humans but also that through which some, like Jonah, are able to escape, a figure of an uncanny internal externality that is also always present in the voice.94 The ban, the skeleton usually hidden within a being but here the external arca-tecture of the casket, is thus an appropriate vehicle for the voices whose traces remain in the casket’s inscriptions. Writing is always a sign of alterity, a trace of a being from which it has been dislocated. There is no point in searching for a human body behind the casket’s inscriptions even though logically we know that there must have been one. It is a situation something like that of the famous parable of the puppet and the dwarf with which Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ begins.95 The puppet played chess but was controlled by a dwarf, an expert chess player concealed beneath the table. The fact that we know the puppet is a mechanical thing renders its apparent animation and life uncanny. Unlike the mechanical puppet, the casket was a living thing whose presence still haunts its bones, rendering it equally uncanny but in a different way. The fact that we know this is a box does nothing to dissipate the haunting effect as every time we return to the front panel we are reminded of the enormous presence of the whale. Voice on the casket emanates from the bone, the jawbone, the mouth of the whale, and, like the skeleton itself, exteriorises the interior and echoes down the centuries. Bhabha observes that the object of loss, the heim, is written across the bodies of migrant peoples, as an encrypted and melancholic discourse. It opens a void in which the lost home is repeated in uncanny forms.96 The casket writes this encrypted discourse in figural narrative, the bodies of the exiles and migrants carved across the body of the exiled whale. It repeats their multiple losses and melancholia (yet another reminder of being-towards-death) but cannot speak of the losses that took place within Britain, within the void at its centre in the act of speaking them. There are two types of utterance carved into Gas:ric’s bones, one of historical narrative (on the front and left side panel) and the other of discursive enunciation (on the back and right side panel).97 The enough to yield panels of the size and thickness of those on the casket. 94 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, p. 96. 95 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and with introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 253–64, at 253. 96 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern’, p. 315. 97 On narrative and discursive voices see Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique Générale, 2 vols (Paris, 1966), I, pp. 239–43; II, pp. 82–5.

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narrative voice is impersonal and uses the simple past tense: ‘the fish beat up the sea … became sad … swam aground’; ‘the she-wolf nourished them’. In these inscriptions there is no sense of a narrator and the events of the inscriptions effectively narrate themselves. The whale came to shore and the wolf nourished the twins and from the bodies of both beasts historical narratives were constructed and juxtaposed. The discursive voice, by contrast, uses deixis such as ‘here’ or ‘now’, the present tense, and is addressed to someone, whether real or implied. There might not be an identifiable narrator but it does identify the narrator’s location: ‘here Titus and a Jew fight…here the inhabitants flee’; ‘here Hos sits’ (or ‘the company presides’),98 here ‘she suffers’ (or ‘the company endures’). This type of voice creates place and time, her carrying the sense of both ‘in this place’ and ‘in this time’ in Old English. This is happening in Rome, in a woods, here on the casket, here in the time and space in which the reader stands. Moreover, it establishes a multi-temporal if not universal present and a placing of worlds within worlds that are both uncanny and typically heterotopian. Gas:ric does not speak but the casket’s enunciations emanate from his jawbones, his ban-cofa as if from a mouth like the sweet but deceptive breath of the whale in the Physiologus. He is present in them and the inscriptions address the reader out from them, from his ban-cofa. The Old English poets located language specifically in the breast, the breost-cofa.99 In their poetry to speak was frequently described as unlocking one’s word-hoard. In Beowulf, for example, when the Danish coastguard asks Beowulf from where he and his men have come Beowulf replies by unlocking his word-hoard (wordhord onleac, line 259). The phrase implies that language is locked away in the ban-cofa and must be deliberately unlocked in order to emerge. It would be easy to move from this act of unlocking to the prominent and likely very decorative lock that once secured the casket, but it is not language that would have been locked away. Language emerges from the ban-cofa but it is there for all to see. Yet while the casket’s words are not concealed, they are encrypted, written in ways that make them difficult to read, and they thus require a different kind of unlocking and a different kind of key than the one that would have opened the casket. All ciphers require a key. There is no answer or solution to the 98 Waxenberger (‘The Cryptic Runes on the Auzon/Franks Casket: A Challenge for the Runologist and Lexicographer’, p. 165) notes that her on this panel could also be translated as ‘listen’, an imperative addressed to a listener and so equally discursive. 99 Eric Jaeger, ‘Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality and Pectorality’, Speculum 65.4 (1990): 845–59.

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casket’s ciphers just as there is no single interpretation that can be attributed to the casket – it is always plural – nevertheless it may be said to have a key in Gas:ric. As material, Gas:ric, the ban, is that in which language, words, and figures are bound together and that out of which they emerge. He is that which is our only secure passage from one inscription or panel to another. As whale he is plural and singular, one place and many, a land and an un-land, a placeless place and a divided self. As a whale he moves across the sea giving passage to his travellers while being a traveller himself, a seafarer ferrying seafarers. Benjamin identified seafarers as chief amongst the ‘masters of storytelling’ (think of the melancholy Ishmael in Moby Dick) because they brought stories of faraway people and places home to tell.100 As a figure of voice this is exactly what Gas:ric does.101 As name Gas:ric is both the cipher and the key for all the contradictions inherent in the divided selves of whale and casket. He is both ‘king of terror’, and the sovereign and the beast united, a figure for the sovereign whose terror is unleashed in so many of the casket’s narratives. He is ‘the one strong in life or power’ emptied of life yet still haunting the bones of his former self invoked in the inscription on the front panel. He figures language yet he is silent. He is the crypt and the name that seals the crypt. Gas:ric. Of course, this is the name that someone has given him not his name for himself, but then a name is always given by another. According to Hegel, to name is to express power over another being, as when Adam names the animals,102 which is something different from having actual power over them. As the fisherman in Ælfric’s Colloquy makes clear, one attempts to have power over a whale at one’s own peril.103 In his study of the language of all things, Benjamin considered the muteness of nature in relation to the God-given power of man to name, a power that was in fact ‘overnaming’ as God had already called everything but man into being by naming it. ‘Because she is mute’, he writes, ‘nature mourns. Yet, the inversion of this proposition leads even further into the essence of nature; the sadness

100 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and with introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 83–109, at 85. 101 Numerous travellers over the sea or other types of water populate Old English poetry, think of Beowulf, Andreas, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, Widsith, and the storm, ship, ice, and fish of the Exeter Book Riddles. The whale of the Franks Casket fits easily into this tradition. 102 G. F. W. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, ed. and trans. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany, NY, 1979), p. 221. 103 Above n. 80.

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of nature makes her mute.’104 The passivity of being named, even by God, brings sadness and mourning, but it is more melancholy yet to be named by one of the many languages of man. Gas:ric’s trauma, then, is also held within the crypt. Expanding on this observation, Derrida writes that ‘every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity of a name that survives whoever carries that name’.105 Naming brings with it an awareness of mortality, an awareness of being-towards-death, and this is reflected in the positioning of Gas:ric’s name on the casket. The inscription in the lower border reads retrograde and begins warð gas:ric grorn… (Gas:ric became sad). It is at the moment of naming that the whale’s fortune and emotions change. Gas:ric the name is carved into the lower right-hand side of the front panel centred just beneath the vertical arrangement of bird, cup, and star, and divided by two carved dots: Ga:sric. Like the physical seal that seals the message (the ærendgewrit) it is carved retrograde. It must be held up to a mirror or impressed into wax like a physical seal in order to be read the right way around. The final ‘c’ is placed just beneath the lead magus and the final ‘i’ of the word magi incised beside the empty hole for the lock. Are we meant to think of Gas:ric as wise? The name is retrograde so are we meant to think of him as un-wise? Or is he wise and wily, double or duplicitous in nature? Are we meant to think of him as magical? Or is this yet another sign of the split self? The living being that turns back at us as a ghost? The ship that conceals one group of exiled peoples by turning back at us with a collection of others? The sovereign that turns back at us as the beast (or vice versa)? Gas:ric is a key that opens up meaning and unlocks more questions at the same time that it may provide answers for others. It is a sign of the ultimate impossibility of decrypting, but also of the human necessity of attempting to do so.106

104 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 62–74, at 73. 105 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York, 2008), p. 20. 106 Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xii. Kofman (‘Beyond Aporia?’, pp. 11–12) notes that in the abyssal ocean of discourse we discover nothing by standing still, we must swim and hope we encounter a miraculous dolphin to rescue us.

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CONCLUSION Heterotopias are created in the formation of societies and in this regard at least early medieval England may be no different from any other early society – ancient Egypt, or Early Christian Rome, for example. As with the architectural funerary and memorial monuments of these other cultures,107 the heterotopia of the Franks Casket reflects the nature of the social and cultural context in which it was produced. When we now look back to the early eighth century we do so through the centuries of history that have passed between that period and the present day. We also, consciously or not, look back at it through the nationalism and imperialism inherent in the Anglo-Saxonist scholarship to which I will return in Chapter 4. We know how the kingdoms and the nation developed. We know that Christianity became the national religion. We know who won and who lost, and we often know why. We know that Weland would be invoked in the Alfredian translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae in an ubi sunt topos that rhetorically locates the murderer/rapist/ smith within court and kingdom: ‘Hwær synt nu þæs foremeran ⁊ þæs wisan goldsmiðes ban Welondes? Hwær synt nu þæs Welondes ban, oððe hwa wat nu hwær hi wæron’ (Where are now the bones of that famous and wise goldsmith Weland? Where are now the bones of Weland, or who knows where they were)?108 Weland is here even if the king might not wish to find the secret of his remains himself. We know that this Christian nation became the foundation of a modern empire that built upon its legends and silences to encrypt yet more silences and ghosts. In other words, we have established a grand and linear historical narrative. The makers of the Franks Casket knew none of these things. They were piecing things together at different angles and twisting and turning stories as they tried to put together an image of themselves. They are revealed in the gaps they left in their narratives as much as they are in the flow of the narratives they put together. There was no England in the early eighth century, there was only an assemblage of kingdoms that at times collaborated with each other and at other times competed with each other, a kingdom in formation that as yet had no centre. Some regions, like some kings, 107 Jormakka, ‘Post Mortem Eclecticism’; Smith, Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome. 108 Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds, The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Version of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009), I, p. 283. In these lines Weland is substituted for the Fabricius of the Latin original.

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were Christian, and some were not, however neither religious nor ethnic differences prevented an alliance between the Christian Welsh King Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd and the polytheistic Anglian King Penda of Mercia when they invaded Northumbria in the 630s, leading to the separation of that kingdom into the two sub-kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. Some kingdoms, like Kent or Northumbria (or at least parts of it) became closely allied to Rome and the Roman church, while others did not. Divisions remained. Even at the abbey of Whitby, home to the 664 Synod that decided in favour of the Roman rather than the British/Irish church, and one of the proposed homes of the casket, there was difference and dissent. After the synod the abbey retained many of its earlier British practices,109 and this was expressed in the art produced there, and importantly in what the abbey chose not to represent explicitly in its art even more than what it did.110 In the late seventh and early eighth century, Wilfrid, bishop of Northumbria and abbot of Ripon, another possible home of the casket, was exiled and reinstated and exiled and reinstated according to the changing hierarchies of power and allegiances of the court. For the women and men living through this period there was no one clear story of either church or country, both were in constant states of development and fluctuation. But the cooperation between the Welsh and the Mercians or the British sympathies of Whitby that I have just cited were fleeting moments dictated by political expediencies, only temporary, disruptive fragments in a larger narrative. This was a messy and disorganised place that could see a vision of itself made whole in the mirror of the casket. But as Dolar points out, the mirror is a narcissistic device,111 and the casket is by no means a neat and ordered whole, it simply tempts us with the possibility that one might be read into it. It spreads itself across time and space, reaching outwards and gathering in, speaking in and to different languages and traditions. Gas:ric, the bone, the box may encrypt all these things together in one placeless place, but it cannot fully contain them. It cannot limit them only to what we see in front of us, nor keep all the ghosts from escaping. Despite providing a passage across their 109 Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge, 1992). For the wider Northumbrian context see also Claire Stancliffe, ‘The Irish Tradition in Northumbria after the Synod of Whitby’, in The Lindisfarne Gospels: New Perspectives, ed. Richard Gameson (Leiden, 2017), pp. 19–42. 110 Rosemary Cramp, ‘A Reconsideration of the Monastic Site of Whitby’, in The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and Ireland, ed. R. Michael Spearman and John Higgitt (Edinburgh and Stroud, 1993), pp. 64–73. 111 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, p. 39.

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perplexing meanings the casket remains a ‘stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers’.112 Foucault wrote of heterotopias that they are places outside of all places, places in which other real sites are both represented and inverted. This is the place of the casket – many places yet a single place that is outside of them all. I have approached the casket as a place that figures England, although strictly speaking perhaps I should have written that it figures Northumbria, and Northumbria was but one kingdom on the larger island. However, it was the expansionist agenda of Northumbria as represented by both Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the way in which the casket expands out to contain other places that would eventually develop into the England that would be imagined, picked up, and deployed by Alfred and his successors as we saw in Chapter 1. Moreover, as others have demonstrated, Bede already had an idea of England as gens anglorum, as its inhabitants, and an idea that reached out beyond its shores towards Rome, establishing its location as both central and on the edge in the process.113 In the early eighth century, the time in which the casket was made, Northumbria was like Gas:ric, ‘strong in power’. For those outside its borders, and indeed for many within them, it was also a kingdom of terror. There was internal rebellion and instability after the death of Osred in 716, and the late seventh-century reassertions of independence by the Scots, the Picts, and the Britons of Strathclyde were followed by renewed Northumbrian aggression beginning in the 730s. The casket too is a place of discord, dispute, violence, and coexistence. It places the religious and the secular up against each other, sometimes merging them and sometimes allowing them to coexist separately, much as they might have been encountered in the Northumbrian landscape in the early eighth century. But the casket and England/Northumbria are not identical. The casket is a mirrored England, an encrypted England, and both are ultimately empty at their centres. In Benjamin’s thesis on the puppet and the dwarf the puppet was historical materialism and the dwarf Christian theology. In the case of the casket it could be argued that the dwarf is English exceptionalism and the puppet history, as expressed in the acquisitiveness and expansionism of the casket’s narratives. But it is equally possible to turn that statement around and argue that the dwarf is unacknowledged Note 1 above. Mehan and Townsend, ‘“Nation” and the Gaze of the Other in Eighth Century Northumbria’; Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000–1534. 112 113

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violence and the puppet the exodus myth and the retellings of English exceptionalism that it spawns. We are left with a double and conflicting scenario that is much like the nature of the whale itself. In its casting of the English as a chosen people there is a clear Christian myth being built but let me emphasise once again that this is not to say that the casket is a Christian object intended to house some sort of sacred object or text or made for an ecclesiastical space; rather it is to say that the embedding of the idea of the island as an otherworldly inherently sacred place that hovers between the human and the supernatural is at its core, as it was at the core of Bede’s description of the paradisiacal island and the Angle/angel boys in Rome. Exceptionalism is of course an empty idea without any basis in reality; neither the island nor its people were or are special or exceptional or somehow nearer the divine than anywhere or anyone else. It is also an empty exceptionalism that is manifested both in medieval and early modern colonialism and in the later British Empire that, like, in fact based on Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, imagined itself without limits while still attempting to maintain strict boundaries and a firm distinction between itself and its others. While colonialism and imperialism do have tangible and lasting impacts on colonised peoples and lands, they too are empty at their centre, relying on false hierarchies and empty notions of what constitutes strength or power: crypts haunted by many, many ghosts. One product of that imperialism was the British Museum in which the casket (or most of it) is now housed,114 a physical location that collects other places to it and in which the casket provides us with a reminder of the violence and trauma that have accompanied English exceptionalism from the moment of its origin. It is the emptiness of this idea of an exceptional place without limits, and not the loss of the casket’s contents, that places emptiness most firmly at the centre of the casket. However, our modern desire to know, to reconstruct, to assign the casket a specific meaning, function, or narrative, or to pin it to ambiguous textual references in the historical record also place emptiness at its centre. It may be an emptiness of another kind but it renders the casket a no less undiscoverable place. It has become a receptacle for the desires and imaginings that we continue to put into it. In this respect, Gas:ric is not that different from that other ivory-coloured whale, Moby Dick, a floating signifier, an empty space into which we put the different and discordant meanings we wish to. 114 The right-side panel was found in the same Auzon house as the rest of the casket, but separately and at a later date. It eventually made its way via the antiques market into the collections of the Bargello Museum in Florence.

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Its location within the heterotopia of the modern museum makes it a crypt encrypted,115 and in this case that encryption replays the myth of origins about which the casket speaks, the emptiness it encloses. Derrida’s crypt is itself a heterotopia, it is ‘not a natural place … but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artefact: of a place comprehended within another, but rigorously separate from it, isolated from general space by partitions, an enclosure, an enclave … [a place] built by violence’.116 His words, as we have seen, are perfectly applicable to the Franks Casket, but no less applicable to the theologically driven exceptionalism that lies behind its meanings, nor to the place and function of the casket as displayed in the British Museum today.

115 Theodor Adorno famously wrote of museums as akin to family sepulchres; ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), pp. 175–85. 116 Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, pp. xiv–xv.

UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: HUMANITY AND ITS OTHERS IN THE BEOWULF MANUSCRIPT

T

he Beowulf manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv) is composed of two unrelated codices, the Southwick Codex (fols 4–93v), which contains Old English translations of the Soliloquies of St Augustine, The Gospel of Nicodemus, the Debate between Solomon and Saturn, and a fragmentary homily on St Quintin written in the second half of the twelfth century; and the Nowell Codex (fols 94–209v) consisting of a fragmentary Life of St Christopher (fols 94–8), The Wonders of the East (fols 98v–106v), The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle (fols 107–131v), Beowulf (fols 132–201v), and the fragmentary poem Judith (fols 202–209v), written in the early eleventh century. The two portions of the manuscript are believed to have been bound together in the seventeenth century. While it is the Nowell Codex that is the subject of this chapter, it is important to remember that the Beowulf manuscript had a life between the composition of its most famous texts and the fire that nearly destroyed it. The addition of the Southwick Codex with its unrelated texts continues the process of compilation through which both codices were originally created and, when read as a whole, its devotional texts change profoundly the way the Nowell texts are encountered. Read together, Southwick and Nowell create an overwhelmingly religious manuscript conveying a message of solace, redemption, and an implied teleological narrative of Christian triumph that the Nowell Codex on its own does not explicitly convey. Christian belief is present in but far from central to the Nowell texts, the texts with which this chapter deals, although it is

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certainly possible to see the dwarf of Christian theology manipulating the puppet of English exceptionalism at work in its production. Like the Franks Casket the Nowell Codex contains a combination of prose and verse and a collection of stories that take place in the past and elsewhere. England is never mentioned, but the texts circle around it, leading many to attempt to find unity, or a reason why they were written or translated and preserved at this time and in this form. Its stories are set variously in Africa, India, Assyria, Babylon, Denmark, and Sweden, and the narrative action ranges in date from the Old Testament world of Judith to the sixth-century Scandinavian setting of Beowulf. With the exception of Beowulf they are all translations or, in the case of Judith, a poetic paraphrase, of Greek or Latin sources. While primarily in Old English, some Latin words are preserved, for example in the names of some of the wonders in The Wonders of the East. There is ongoing debate about almost every aspect of the manuscript, from its date and place of composition to the original order and unity – or lack thereof – of its contents. Kenneth Sisam was the first to suggest that monsters were the unifying theme of the manuscript, while Andy Orchard identified a dual unifying focus on pride and the marvellous or remarkable, and Kathryn Powell on rulers and their actions.1 Nicholas Howe suggested the manuscript’s texts were united by a concern for place and elsewhere.2 Donald Scragg believes that a credible unifying theme still eludes us, while Simon Thomson believes that the manuscript was planned as a single project from the start and that its texts are not united by any single given theme, but rather by the multiple themes and meanings that play across them.3 My interest in this chapter is on several themes that recur in the manuscript’s texts, but not in the unity of the manuscript per se. I am interested in what the manuscript’s different narratives have to say about place and the relationship between places, about language and naming, about the relationship between man and beast, and about the limits of the human, but these are themes that could be identified Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript’, in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 75–96, at 96; Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge, 1995); Kathryn Powell, ‘Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript’, Review of English Studies 57 (2006): 1–15. 2 Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 47–74. 3 Donald Scragg, ‘Old English Homiliaries and Poetic Manuscripts’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: vol. 1, 400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 553–62, at 556; Simon C. Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex (Leiden, 2017), pp. 15, 65. 1

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in many other manuscripts (the Lives of Guthlac, or the illuminated early English Psychomachia manuscripts, for example) and so may not necessarily have directed the compilation of this manuscript. Like the Franks Casket, the Beowulf manuscript tells stories of violence, conquest, and invasion that encrypt the Angelcynn’s own violent colonial past, projecting it back into the past and onto other lands. I argue that, like the disrupted narratives of the Franks Casket, when taken together the texts of the Beowulf manuscript construct an image of early medieval England as a place divided against itself and looking to the past to retrieve a lost sense of unity, but perhaps one also beginning to confront some of its own historical ghosts – although I readily admit I remain ambivalent about this last point. That the manuscript’s five texts were intended to be read together is clear from the fact that it is the work of only two scribes, one of whom (Scribe A) was responsible for the whole of the manuscript through line 1939 of Beowulf, and the second of whom (Scribe B) was responsible for the remainder of Beowulf and Judith. I read the manuscript as a work of dystopian fiction, a work that sets up a series of flawed or failing worlds or visions (in two of which we may be able to catch a glimpse of disappearing utopias) that had always contained the seeds of their own destruction. In this sense emptiness in the form of both annihilation and the failure of the human social order are at its centre. While, like the Franks Casket, it is about past times and elsewhere, these other places and times are much clearer in what they have to say about the conflicted and unhappy world in which they were written into their present form. Their stories of invasions and wars in foreign lands may have resonated deeply both with the state of the kingdom in the eleventh century and with the history constructed around it. Having lived with two kings, Æthelred II and Cnut, over whom opinion was deeply divided, stories of good and bad leadership may have been deemed especially relevant;4 however, it may well be that no reference to a specific king or specific historical event was intended, and that the manuscript was compiled as a more general reflection on identity, leadership, land, and social order – or lack thereof. Connections with specific historical individuals and events have been and continue to be made by modern scholars. We want the past to make sense and we want manuscripts to have identifiable contexts and 4 See for example Powell ‘Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript’: 6, 9–10; Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex, p. 54.

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audiences, but the Beowulf manuscript – like any text, and again like the Franks Casket or Alfred’s Preface – is plural, allowing for multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations and imaginings depending on which path or paths the reader decides to follow through it. It may not provide comfort or closure, but it does provide warnings and lessons in both social and moral order as peoples rise or fall or simply exist, and seemingly utopian worlds collapse into, or are threatened by, failure and dystopia. Dystopia is by definition an unhappy place or an inverted utopia. It has often been linked with colonialism and empire. More’s Utopia was dystopian in that it was built on the colonisation and oppression of others, and the word was used by John Stuart Mill in an 1868 speech to the House of Commons to describe both British land policy in Ireland and the failure he believed to be inherent in all utopias. According to George Claeys, it is now most commonly used in reference to failed utopias.5 Two of the most prominent forms of medieval dystopias are the tales of monstrous races or The Wonders of the East, and the stories of Alexander the Great’s exploits and the Alexander romances that developed from them. Translations of both The Wonders of the East and The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle are included in the Beowulf manuscript, although I am not entirely convinced that this version of the Wonders is necessarily dystopian. Nevertheless, the inclusion of these two texts suggests that the rest of the manuscript could fruitfully be read with the dystopian theme in mind. Each of its texts does deal with monsters or the monstrous as well as with the outcome of human encounters with the monstrous and, as Claeys points out, ‘monsters inhabit the primordial terra incognita of the earth … they define the original dystopian space in which fear predominates’.6 The stories collected in the Beowulf manuscript, however, do not just contain monsters, they ask us to question exactly who or what is monstrous and what exactly causes the fear and oppression within these stories. In Derrida’s study of the beast and the sovereign he explored the relationship between animality and sovereignty that is crucial to so many myths and texts. The animal and the sovereign are united in that both function outside of or above the law, but they are also united by their opposing yet complementary natures, each haunting the being of the other in a relationship also frequently seen to exist between coloniser and colonised. Derrida was concerned primarily 5 6

Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford, 2017), p. 5. Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History, p. 58.

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with the texts and societies of modernity but, as he noted, ultimately these rested on much earlier traditions such as the myth of Romulus, Remus, and the she-wolf.7 The wolf is one of the creatures most commonly identified with sovereignty, and the motif of twins also features prominently in many stories and legends: the twin brothers, the human and his wolf brother, the wolf and his brother the dog. Gender and language are also crucial to this construct and Derrida opens with reference to the gendering of the French words la bête and le soverain. Because of his focus on modernity and modern languages not all of Derrida’s observations are relevant to the early medieval period; nevertheless, the fact that his analysis is based on cultural traditions that go back to the world of Rome and beyond makes his work a useful starting point for thinking about the texts of the Beowulf manuscript and the way in which they explore models of leadership, gender relationships, language, law, and social order.8 Utopias may be a human fantasy, but dystopias are very real human social orders that are commonly populated with beasts and/or the bestial in one form or another. Because my interest is in the different dystopias and the varying social orders of each of the texts I am going to discuss them in the order in which they now appear in the manuscript rather than thematically, although there are, as noted, many themes that echo across them. Moreover, I want to reiterate that I do not want to force any potentially artificial coherence on the manuscript. I am not interested in unity, but rather in the multiple forms of dystopia that the different texts suggest either on their own or read alongside other of the manuscript’s contents and the ways in which each conceals and maybe at moments reveals encrypted historical violence.

THE PASSIO OF ST CHRISTOPHER The manuscript now begins in the middle of the Passio of St Christopher, the end of what was certainly a lengthier if not complete Vita, though exactly how much of the text has been lost is a matter of disagreement.9 R. D. Fulk has suggested that the Vita began with Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, I, p. 9; above p. 20. It would be equally applicable to an analysis of the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 burial or the Staffordshire Hoard, but that is beyond the scope of the present chapter. 9 Many now follow Peter Lucas in believing that Judith, now the last text in the manuscript, originally preceded the Vita of Christopher; see Peter J. Lucas, ‘The Place of Judith in the Beowulf Manuscript’, Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 463–78. Simon Thomson (Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript: 7

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Christopher’s mission to convert the territory ruled by King Dagnus (sometimes given as the emperor Decius) of Samos, rather than with his own conversion.10 Whatever the case, Christopher is an Old English translation of a Latin Vita, versions of which were popular throughout the Middle Ages. Abbreviated versions of the Passio of Christopher now survive in the tenth-century Old English Martyrology, which is possibly based on a lost Life of the saint composed by Bishop Acca of Hexham in the eighth century, and in an Anglo-Latin text from ca. 900.11 The ending of an additional Old English Vita survives in the mid-eleventh-century London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho B.x. While the evidence for interest in the saint and his Vita in medieval England is largely ca. 900 or later, a gloss in the eighth-century Irish Leabhar Breac containing the saint’s Passio is close to that in the Old English Martyrology,12 perhaps mediated through Acca’s lost work, and suggests the text may have been more popular in earlier centuries than surviving evidence indicates. The entry for Christopher’s feast day (28 April) in the Martyrology includes the saint’s conversion. Christopher comes from an unnamed country ‘þær men habbað hunda heafod, ond of þære eorðan on ðære æton men hi selfe. He hæfde hundes heafod, ond his loccas wæron ofer gemet side, ond his eagan scinon swa leohte swa morgensteorra, ond his teþ wærron swa scearpe swa eofores tuxas’ (where people have dogs’ heads, and from a land in which people eat each other. He had a dog’s head, and his hair was extensive beyond measure, and his eyes shone as bright as the Morningstar, and his teeth were as sharp as boars’ tusks).13 He could not speak human language but prayed to God and was granted the ability to do so. The king has Christopher brought to his court where he is astounded by his appearance, and he offers him gold and silver to renounce his faith, but Christopher remains faithful and is martyred. The version of the Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex, pp. 88–95) suggests that the manuscript began with a lost religious poem, then Judith, then another lost religious text, and then Christopher. Kevin Kiernan has suggested that Judith was cut from its original manuscripts because of its non-canonical content and added to the Nowell Codex by a sixteenth-century Reformer, and that the beginning of Christopher and the texts that preceded it were cut from the Nowell Codex by the same hand due to the Reformation stance on the veneration of saints (Kevin Kiernan, ‘The Reformed Nowell Codex and the Beowulf Manuscript’, Anglo-Saxon England 46 [2019], 73–95). 10 R. D. Fulk, ed. and trans. The Beowulf Manuscript (Cambridge, MA, 2010), p. x. 11 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. x. 12 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 72–3. 13 Old English text from Christine Rauer, ed. and trans., The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 90–1.

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Vita in the Beowulf manuscript now starts in the middle of Christopher’s refusal to convert and the beginning of his tortures. While the existing fragment makes no mention of his dog’s head or former life as a Cynocephalus, there is no reason to believe that some mention of these elements of his life would not originally have been included in the Beowulf manuscript text, especially as beast–human hybrids appear in every single one of the manuscript’s other texts. In the full Latin Vita Christopher is a giant dog-headed cannibalistic Cynocephalus named Reprobus, who cannot speak and can only bark like a dog prior to his conversion and renaming. He is granted the gift of language, as noted above, and is either given or takes the name Christopher (Christ-bearer), a name that aligns him with the Virgin Mary. While much could be said about the acts of naming versus taking a name, the Old English versions of the saint’s Life do not include this episode, he is simply named Christopher throughout. Nevertheless, it is the moment of naming and the acquisition of the ability to speak human language that mark Christopher’s entry into human mortality and his inevitable being-toward-death in this story. In some versions of the Vita his dog-head is transformed into that of a human but in others he retains it. He begins his mission of conversion and travels to a land ruled by a pagan king Dagnus (or Decius) and plants his staff, which immediately blossoms, claiming the country for Christianity. He begins to convert the people, and news of his activity and his marvellous appearance is brought to the court by a woman who has seen him outside the city. Dagnus orders him to be brought before him seemingly as much for his appearance as for his missionary activity, and Christopher converts the soldiers sent to fetch him. When he is unable to convince him to renounce Christianity, the king orders him to be tortured in various ways including being imprisoned with two prostitutes, those bestial lupa, who are charged with seducing them. Christopher of course converts them to Christianity and they are martyred. This episode is not in the text that survives in the Beowulf manuscript, which begins with the king ordering the saint to be burned on an iron bench that melts away like wax – a wonder to behold, just like the saint himself. The king then orders the saint to be bound to a giant stake and shot full of arrows, but some of the arrows turn on the king instead and blind him. Before his final martyrdom Christopher instructs the king that after his death he should mix earth from the site of his martyrdom with his blood and then apply it to his eyes. He does so, his sight is restored, and he is converted along with all of his people. The text introduces several themes that will echo throughout the manuscript:

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travel to or in, and conquest of, foreign lands (in this case religious conquest), failure, language, the hybrid canine–human being, and the relationship between and fluidity of human and bestial identity. As noted above, colonial or imperial expansion often creates dystopias, and the expansion of religions is as prominent in that scenario as is the expansion of political empires, the two indeed often going hand in hand. For the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, Christian hagiography, Christopher included, would certainly have been read primarily as providing lessons in proper Christian behaviour and belief, and a path towards salvation rather than as a narrative of conquest per se. Indeed, the text of Christopher’s Vita ends with the saint’s prayer ‘Drihten min God, syle gode mede þam þe mine þrowunga awrite, ond þa ecean edlean þam þe hie mid tearum ræde’14 (Lord my God, give good reward to whoever writes about my suffering and eternal reward to those who read it with tears). However, the spread of Christianity as a violent conquest of other religions was well known to the English within their own territory and history as well as across Europe and the growing Islamic world. Both Gildas and Bede had chronicled the early battles between the Christian but lapsed Britons and the invading pagan ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and the Christian ‘AngloSaxons’ and ‘pagan’ Britons and other peoples respectively. Both authors described the conflict in terms of religion and the progress of Christianity rather than as a secular military conquest or ethnic conflict per se, which is hardly surprising as both were monks. Gildas described the Saxons invited to the island by the Britons as dogs or wolves (those two intimately related brother-creatures) invited into the sheepfold, hateful to God and men. And when the Saxons were successful in their conquest, another company of ‘wolfish offspring’ joined them from their homeland.15 Similarly, Asser described the Vikings that confronted Alfred at Reading as ‘like wolves’ when they burst out of all the gates of the city.16 The tenth and eleventh centuries had also witnessed attacks on the church by the Danish Svein and charges of paganism against his son Cnut. Christopher’s act of planting his staff, a symbol of the cross, in the earth of the people he intends to convert is an act of conquest, a claiming of the country for the rule of the church above that of the earthly king, just as the erection of the Ruthwell Cross by the Northumbrians in the eighth Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 12. Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and other Documents, pp. 26–7. 16 Keynes and Lapidge, eds. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other Sources, p. 78. 14 15

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century was a claim to previously British land. Christopher’s actions are a literal enactment of the idea that non-Christians were a kind of less-than-human ‘other’ to whose lands the church had a right,17 and the author of the Vita depicts Dagnus as in almost every way other to Christopher, a narrative strategy that also characterises Judith. Cynocephali had long been considered appropriate creatures for royal hunts in the Insular world,18 so on one level Christopher is an appropriate opponent for Dagnus, and arrows are an appropriate form of weapon to use against him. While Christopher’s staff blossoms, Dagnus’s weapons, the iron bed, the prostitutes (in the full Vita), and the arrows fail, and, as Orchard has noted, the two men exchange places to a certain extent. The more he wars against the saint the wilder and more like the beast that Christopher once was he becomes. His final failure is when the arrows of his soldiers spectacularly turn against him, blinding him physically as a means of underscoring his religious blindness – just as Christopher was once blind to Christ – which only the saint’s blood and mud from the spot on which he was martyred can restore. Through the application of Christopher’s blood the king becomes one with the saint, like him converting from non-Christian beast to Christian man, a true and worthy sovereign. The incorporation of the double, in this case the beast turned saint into the beast turned human, being necessary in order to complete the metamorphosis. Barbarians bark or make gibbering noises while civilised humans have language, and the acquisition of language is an important part of the story of Christopher that is emphasised in some versions of his Vita more than others.19 The account in The Old English Martyrology, for example, specifies that Christopher asked (bæd), spoke, or prayed inwardly, for language, and his prayers were granted when a man dressed in white appeared and breathed or inspired (eðode) language into his mouth,20 literally breathing new life into him along with language. Christopher’s gift of language is a sign of his baptism, a rebirth that moves him from the monstrous to the human, from one who consumes life to one who saves it, but it also marks him as always 17 Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature, pp. 27–8. 18 Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 16. 19 Joyce Tally Lionarans, ‘From Monster to Martyr: The Old English Legend of Saint Christopher’, in Marvels Monsters, and Miracles, ed. Timothy Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo, 2002), pp. 167–82. 20 Rauer, The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation, and Commentary, p. 91.

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having had an inherent Christian humanity within him (He wæs Gode geleaffull on his heortan), in the same way that the Angles had always had some inherent angelic quality within them.21 In the context of the Beowulf manuscript, however, that movement from gibberish to language is complicated by the texts that follow, especially the Wonders and the Letter of Alexander, both of which contain episodes that call into question the association of language with humanity and civilisation. As Benjamin established, all creation, animate or inanimate, has language, but only man has ‘a naming language’, a language in which knowledge and power over the natural world are enacted.22 The Cynocephali as a race were confusing in the early Middle Ages as they called into question exactly what it was that separated the human from the animal. Isidore of Seville believed that they were more beast than human and placed them in Book XII of his Etymologies, De animalibus. Interestingly he discusses them along with apes rather than dogs or wolves, even though the latter creatures, especially in werewolf form, also blurred the line between man and beast. He says that Cynocephali are similar to apes but with faces like those of dogs and that, along with apes, pregnant women should not look at their ‘repulsive animal faces’.23 In Ratramnus of Corbie’s mid-ninth-century Letter on the Cynocephali, on the other hand, the dog-headed creatures are described as being both rational and human in their behaviour, peaceful creatures who live in villages with legal and social codes, dress modestly, keep domestic animals, and are productive members of society.24 The letter was written in response to a request from a fellow monk for advice on whether or not to preach to Cynocephali – and Ratramnus, citing the case of Christopher, responds that he should. There is no evidence that Ratramnus’s letter was known in pre-Conquest England, but Augustine of Hippo, whose works were known, had also written somewhat positively about the Cynocephali. In The City of God, he wrote that he was confused by the Cynocephali who were both beasts and men, but concluded that they demonstrated that we should not believe all that we hear about all Above, p. 42. Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, pp. 62–4. 23 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, pp. 253, 251. 24 Paul Edward Dutton, ed. and trans. ‘Ratramnus and the Dog-headed Humans’, in Carolingian Civilization: A Reader, ed. Paul Edward Dutton, 2nd edn (Ontario, 2004), pp. 452–5; Scott G. Bruce, ‘Hagiography as Monstrous Ethnography: A Note on Ratramnus of Corbie’s Letter Concerning the Conversion of the Cynocephali’, in Insignis Sophiae Arcator: Essays in Honor of Michael W. Herren on his 65th Birthday, ed. Michael W. Herren, Gernot R. Wieland, Carin Ruff, and Ross Gilbert Arthur (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 45–56. 21 22

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types of men (omnia genera hominum) no matter how unusual their appearance might be in terms of ‘bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or any natural endowment, or part, or quality’.25 As Karl Steel points out, the most problematic feature of the Cynocephali for all three of these authors was their barking, which could not be considered a form of rational expression.26 They lacked man’s naming language. During Christopher’s conversion, he gains language from God, the breath of the divine creative force, as did Adam in the beginning.27 But he actually converts before he is given the power of language, so the inability to speak is no barrier to personal devotion, rather it is a barrier to establishing power over others. The connection between speech and rational behaviour is complicated further by the rest of the texts in the Beowulf manuscript, as I will show below. In the context of this manuscript what the story of Christopher demonstrates above all is the fluidity of identity between beast and human – or perhaps bestial and human behaviour. It forces readers to think about what it means to be human and to act humanely, and what it is exactly that defines humanity in this pre-humanistic world. However, it also demonstrates the dystopian belief that humanity resides in the Christian conqueror and those who convert to his beliefs (be they Britons, ‘Anglo-Saxons’, or distant kings) become men.

THE WONDERS OF THE EAST In addition to Vitellius A.xv, illuminated copies of The Wonders of the East survive in two other late pre-Conquest or early Anglo-Norman manuscripts, indicating that it was highly popular at the time. The illustrated copy in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v of ca. 1050 contains both the Latin text and an Old English translation, while the early twelfth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 614 contains only the Latin. Both of these later manuscripts can be classed as scientific or pseudo-scientific collections and would 25 Augustine of Hippo, Augustine City of God, ed. David Knowles (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 662; see also Karl Steel ‘Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali: Medieval Scholarly Teratology and the Question of the Human’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle (Farnham, 2012), pp. 257–74, at 266. 26 Steel, ‘Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali: Medieval Scholarly Teratology and the Question of the Human’, p. 270. 27 As Benjamin notes, God’s breath instilled ‘life and mind and language’ (‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, p. 67).

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thus have been read in very different manuscript contexts than the Wonders in the Beowulf manuscript,28 where it sits alongside poems and stories of saints, peoples, places, and creatures from the past.29 The Wonders is the only one of the Beowulf manuscript’s texts to be illuminated and, as has been pointed out on a number of occasions, the text should not be read without its images,30 not only because they were designed to be integral to it, but also because of the Old English translator’s obvious interest in the visual and because the images contain details that direct our reading of the text in different ways. The work of the artist(s) has frequently been described as poor but, as Mittman and Kim note, the style of the images is well-suited to the text.31 Like the obscure but seemingly exact measurements between the places named in the text they draw the wonders tantalisingly near to us while at the same time keeping them forever beyond our reach. The Vitellius Wonders has also come in for its share of criticism. E. V. Gordon found it ‘greatly inferior’ to the Tiberius B.v version of the Wonders,32 while Andrew Scheil described both it and Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle as very bad translations from the Latin, ‘rife with

28 London, British Library, Tiberius B.v (part 1) contains: a calendar, computus, historical texts, a mappa mundi, lunar tables, signs of the zodiac, Cicero’s Aratea, and the Wonders of the East. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 614 contains: a calendar, signs of the zodiac and constellations, tables of the winds, a drawing of an astronomer, and De Rebus in Oriente mirabilious. 29 Curiously A. J. Ford suggests that the Wonders fails in the Beowulf manuscript, though it is not quite clear at what it is meant to have failed. See Ford, Marvel and Artefact: The ‘Wonders of the East’ in its Manuscript Contexts (Leiden, 2016), p. 58. 30 Scragg, ‘Secular Prose’, in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford, 2001), pp. 268–80, at 272; Ann Knock, ‘Analysis of a Translator: The Old English Wonders of the East’, in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of her Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson, with Malcolm Godden (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 121–6; Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (Tempe, AZ, 2013). 31 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 7, 11, 15–22. For criticism of the images see M. R. James, ed. Marvels of the East: A Full Reproduction of the Three Known Copies, with Introduction and Notes (Oxford, 1929), p. 51; Sisam, ‘The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript’, p. 78; Elżbieta Temple, ed. Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 900–1066, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 2 (London, 1976), p. 72; Susan M. Kim, ‘The Donestre and the Person of Both Sexes’, in Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Benjamin C. Withers and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown, WV, 2003), pp. 162–80, at 170–1; Dana M. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2010), p. 36. 32 E. V. Gordon, ‘Old English Studies’, The Year’s Work in Old English Studies 5 (1924): 66–67, at 67.

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errors and clumsy syntax’.33 R. D. Fulk draws attention to what he describes as the scribe’s carelessness and lack of regard for the Wonders text, suggesting that it may be evidence of his or her disbelief in the material being copied,34 while David Dumville describes the quality of the entire manuscript as poor and the hands of the two scribes as ‘disharmonious’.35 Whatever modern scholars might think of the abilities of the scribe and illuminator(s), however, Middle English glosses within the text of the Wonders indicate that it continued to be read in the post-Conquest period, while there is no such definitive evidence for any of the other Vitellius A.xv texts. The marvels of India and the so-called monstrous races were described by numerous classical and later authors including Ctesias (Indika) and Pliny the Elder (Historia naturalis), as well as Isidore of Seville, who included monstrous creatures in his Etymologiae.36 The classical and late antique accounts were also criticised by those who found them too fantastical to be believed, including Lucian in the preface to his Vera historiae discussed in Chapter 2.37 The Old English text of the Wonders, however, has its more immediate origins in De Rebus in oriente mirabilibus, which takes the form of a letter supposedly written by the king of Iberia (Pharasmenes or Faramanes) to the Roman emperor and recounting travels through multiple lands. The late seventh- or eighth-century Liber monstrorum written in Britain or Ireland,38 one of the most frequently cited sources for the Wonders, derives from the same tradition. The travel-narrative format of the original text quickly developed into a catalogue of wondrous creatures and things after its framework as a letter was lost, but fragments of its epistolary tone survive in the language of its now anonymous narrator. In the English copies of the Wonders there is no clear narrative or topographical or temporal progression that we can follow. The Wonders describes its marvels in relation to place, and it includes stories about some of those who have intruded into its 33 Andrew P. Scheil, ‘Bodies and Boundaries: Studies in the Construction of Social Identity in Selected Late Anglo-Saxon Prose Texts’, unpub. PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1996, p. 12. 34 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. xi–xii. 35 David N. Dumville, ‘Beowulf Come Lately. Some Notes on the Palaeography of the Nowell Codex’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 225 (1988): pp. 49–63, at 55. 36 See above, n. 23. 37 Lucian, Lucian with an English Translation, pp. 250–1. 38 On this text see Michael Lapidge, ‘Beowulf, Aldhelm, the Liber Monstrorum and Wessex’, in Anglo-Latin Literature, 600–899, ed. Michael Lapidge (London, 1996), pp. 271–338.

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places, or warnings aimed at those who might wish to do so, but there is no longer a linear journey from place to place that can be followed, any more than there is on the Franks Casket. Nor is it organised by the classification of its wonders, as is the Liber monstrorum with its tripartite division into the books of monstrous men, monstrous beasts, and monstrous serpents.39 The places it includes are scattered across Africa, India, and the Near and Middle East, beginning near Babylon and moving around the Red Sea, Persia, the Nile River, and ending up in Ethiopia. Distances between places are given in two seemingly exact systems of measurement, miles stadia, and leagues, but the two systems do not add up – making any attempt to chart a journey through its fantastic geography ultimately impossible.40 The territory in which the wonders dwell is thus an unreachable nowhere, even if it does seem to exist near, and even include, known locations such as the Nile, Armenia, or Babylon. The wonders are made even more inaccessible by the miniatures, which are very small and a bit blurry, requiring the reader to hold the manuscript close in order to make out their detail. This has led Mittman and Kim to make the logical suggestion that the manuscript was meant to be read by an individual rather than read aloud to a group.41 Some of the wonders appear to be confined neatly within their frames, some are depicted with no frames at all, some seem to move themselves across the page, and some appear to be escaping from partial frames that fail to surround or contain them. The result is that the emphasis is clearly placed on the interaction of the image with the text, and this draws the reader’s attention to the manuscript page and the existence of the wonders in and on it in a way that no other text in this manuscript does. The world of the Wonders is in many ways a utopia that we see turning to dystopia as we come into contact with it. Much like More’s Utopia it is impossible to reach or even to locate precisely on a map, despite all the exact measurements we are given. It lies between the 39 Thomson (Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex, pp. 299–302) groups the wonders according to location, danger level, and whether they are human, animal, or plant, but does not consider the wondrous things mentioned that don’t fall into any of these categories, such as architecture. 40 Mittman and Kim (Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 239) provide a comparative chart of the two systems of measurement and attempt to map the journey based on the Cotton Tiberius B.v text (ibid., pl. 8), but gaps in the itinerary remain. 41 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 7, 11.

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old-world civilisations of India, Africa, and the Near and Middle East and the new world of Europe. It does not have the precisely defined social structure and laws of either the island of Utopia or of early medieval England, but this could also be read as a utopian feature allowing it to exist free from the law of any one king or people or religion. It is a rich and fertile area of the world with pepper (a valued commodity in the Middle Ages),42 balsam (se deorweorðesta ele),43 and with golden vineyards and trees bearing precious gems. In fact, it is filled with all the world’s wealth (‘þe beoð eallum worldwelum gefylled’, fol. 100r), a utopian fantasy if ever there was one. It is perhaps not surprising that the riches, the few details of social structure provided, and the more ordinary or seemingly ordinary things to be found in the places described have not received as much attention as have its so-called monsters, but they are integral to establishing both the nature of those places and their relationship to the manuscript’s readers. They show that it is much like ‘here’ but in many ways perhaps even better. The opening of the text tells us that very many merchants dwell in the land (swyðust cepemonnū geseted), and apparently they dwell peacefully with its more fantastical inhabitants as there is no mention of any separation from or violence between them. There is magnificent architecture both in the form of the great wonders that Alexander the Great ordered to be built,44 and in an ancient temple constructed in the days of King Beles, and built of ironwork and molten glass (‘temple of isernum geworcum ond of glæsgegotum’, fol. 104v), which would certainly have been familiar as architectural form but wondrous in its materials to an English reader in the early eleventh century. There is a bishop (bisceopes) named Quietus, whose title could be taken as implying the presence of Christianity depending on how this passage is interpreted.45 The 42 ‘On þam landū bið pipores genihtsumnis’, fol. 99v. Pepper was amongst the treasures that Bede gave away on his deathbed (HE, 584–5). 43 ‘that most dearly valued oil’, fol. 103v. 44 ‘þa miclan mærða þa syndon þa weorc þe se micla macedonisca Alexsander’, fol. 99r. 45 Fol. 104v: ‘on þære ilcan stowe is æt sunnan upgange setl quietus þæs stillestan bisceopes’. Mittman and Kim (Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 68) translate ‘And in that same place, at the rising of the sun, is the place of Quietus, the most gentle bishop’. Fulk (The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 26–7) interpolates the words ‘ðanon eac oþer templ sunnan halig, to þam is sum geþungen ond gedefe sacerd to gesett, ond he ða hofa gehealdeð ond begymeþ ond’ from the Tiberius B.v text into the passage and translates ‘And in the same place there is in the direction of the rising sun also another temple sacred to the sun, to which a certain virtuous and proper priest is dedicated, and he maintains the tabernacle and the seat “Quiet” of the most serene bishop.’

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accompanying miniature shows a man looking out from a structure with architectural components not unlike those of images representing churches in contemporaneous manuscripts, with what might be a cross at the centre of the roof but also with a bright orange sun disk beneath him.46 There are kings (cyningas), hospitable men (gæstliþende men), and tyrants (leod).47 There are in the text enough details of familiar sorts of things, people, and activities to make the land of the Wonders simultaneously familiar and strange, an uncanny place. There is no mention of war or hostility amongst these people, between them and the creatures with whom they share their territory, or even amongst the most fantastical and dangerous of the wondrous creatures. There is no indication that when left to itself the land is anything other than a peaceable kingdom. As has been pointed out many times before, many of the wonders flee from anyone trying to approach them, the lethal creatures – like the flammable hens – will only harm you if you catch them, and the most lethal creature in the text is the human sovereign and coloniser Alexander the Great, who may or may not have exterminated the race of giant boar-tusked women discussed further below. In fact, one could ask if Alexander is meant to be read as an outsider or as another of the wonders – albeit an anomalous one. However, regardless of how we read Alexander, outsiders are a definite problem. There are foreign people amongst the wonders and they are identified by their language: Đonne is oþer stow elreordge men beoð on, ond þa habbað cyningas under þara is geteald .c. Þæt syndon þa wyrstan men ond þa elreordegestan. (fol. 103r) (Then there is another place where there are foreign-speaking people, and they have kings under them who are reckoned 100. Those are the worst people and the most foreign speaking.)

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the existence of foreigners, but they are singled out in this passage as the worst of people. Elreordig is routinely translated as barbarian or a speaker of a barbaric 46 The whole of the manuscript has been digitised and is available online on the British Library website: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_ MS_vitellius_a_xv (accessed 22 August 2011). For depictions of churches see, for example, the structures in which the evangelists Mark and Luke sit in the late tenth-century Boulogne Gospels (Boulogne, Bibl. Mun., 11, fol. 55v) and the ca. 990–1000 Arenberg Gospels (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 869, fol. 83v) respectively. 47 Fol. 106r.

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tongue, though literally it translates simply as a speaker of a foreign tongue, ele- meaning strange or foreign and reord meaning language or voice.48 The last sentence in the passage quoted above suggests that the worst people are those whose language is the most foreign and, by extension, that virtue or vice can be equated with the language one speaks. The issue of language, who speaks and who speaks in what manner, runs through all five of the manuscript’s texts and will be discussed in more detail below. In the Wonders, it is a marker of the strangeness of a people out of place within this already strange place, especially because language of any kind in the Wonders is always strange. We do not actually hear the voices or sounds made by the wonders. We are told that there are speakers of foreign tongues, but we never actually hear those tongues. Nor do we hear the voice(s) of the infamous Donestre (fig. 7) who appears on the very next folio from the elreordge men, though we are told about this creature in some detail. Đonne is sum ealond in þære readan sæ þær is mancyn þæt is mid us donestre nemned. Þa syndon geweaxene swa frihteras49 fram þam heafde oð ðone nafolan, ond se oðer dæl bið mennisce onlic, ond hy cunnon mennisce gereord. Þonne hy fremdes cynnes mannan geseoð þonne nemnað hy hyne ond his magas cuþra manna naman ond mid leaslicum wordum hy hine beswicað ond hine gefoð, ond æfter þan hy hine fretað ealne buton þon heafde ond þonne sittað ond wepað ofer þam heafde. (fols 103v–104r) (There is a certain island in the Red Sea where there is a race of people that is amongst us named Donestre. They are shaped like soothsayers from the head to the navel, and the other part is like a human, and they know human language. When they see a person belonging to a foreign people then they name him and his kinsmen with the names of familiar people and with false words they snare him, and they grab him, and after that they eat him, all but the head, and then sit and weep over the head.)

The narrator is very clear here that the Donestre is human (mancyn), even if the upper half of its body is in the shape of a ‘soothsayer’,

It is used here and elsewhere to translate the Latin barbarus (foreigner, stranger), which could also carry the meaning of a speaker of a foreign language but did not necessarily always have that meaning. In other words, the term was not always defined by language as it is in these Old English texts. 49 The manuscript reads frifteras. 48

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FIG. 7  DONESTRE, THE WONDERS OF THE EAST. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS VITELLIUS A.XV, FOL. 103V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

which in this manuscript is depicted as being similar to that of a dog.50 While it is possible that the artist’s interpretation of the Donestre’s appearance is purely coincidental, the dog-head does echo that of 50 Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, p. 45. Compare it with that of the dog-head Conopenas, fig. 11. In the Tiberius B.v Wonders the Donestre is depicted with the head and torso of a lion, and the Old English swa frihteras translates the Latin quasi diuini (as if divine). Christopher Monk (‘A Context for the Sexualization of Monsters in The Wonders of the East’, Anglo-Saxon England 41 [2013], 79–99, at 79) has linked this description of the Donestre to the biblical account of angels mating with human women.

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Christopher before his conversion and prayer, a beast who came to be able to use human language, though to use it for completely opposite purposes. Like the Donestre, the Cynocephali were also said to be cannibals. The Donestre is a complete contradiction, a category crisis between the human and the beast. It is human but it is a cannibal, the prime example of inhumanity, the human reduced to the level of a beast. It can name others, a power reserved exclusively to mankind, but it is unable to name itself. The Wonders is a translation of a Latin text, and in its description of the Donestre and in its narrative voice it also raises questions about translation. The narrator says that there is a creature that ‘among us’ is called the Donestre, and the Donestre’s deceiving of travellers by calling out to them in their native tongue draws attention to the absence of, or perhaps the limits of, translation. If ‘we’ call it the Donestre – and who is ‘we’ to an Old English reader as Donestre is not an Old English word – then what do others call it, or what does it call itself? And its mimicking of other languages signals a lack of real understanding between languages. Perhaps that is why it refuses to eat the head of its victim and weeps over it instead. The head is the place from which human language enters the world and from which human power over the world – the power to name and control – emanates. The Donestre seems to use the tool of human control against human intrusion, but then to regret its inhuman actions, or perhaps the fact that it cannot really converse but only mimic. It can never have and incorporate language. Its victims are consumed and encrypted, ‘buried without a legal burial place’,51 and their voices, that which the lifeless head can no longer supply, haunt the Donestre’s body. It is noteworthy that the Donestre is only able to speak in the foreign tongues of the intruders and it thus becomes an apt metaphor for the split self of the colonised indigene who mimics the tongue of the incomer and encrypts the trauma of the invasion.52 Many other interpretations of the Donestre’s actions have been proposed, but false language, the failure of language, the subversion of language, and the relationship between language and identity rather than a real understanding of either language or translation, is at the heart of many discussions. Nicholas Howe reads the episode in relation to the Old English translation of the Latin text and the uneaten head as a textual The quotation is from Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 141. They refer in the passage to psychic encryption and the ghosts that haunt what we attempt to silence or repress. 52 Mary-Louise Pratt, ‘Linguistic Utopias’, and above p. 36. 51

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remainder of the foreign that cannot be translated.53 The Donestre is itself a foreign remainder in the English text, its name left untranslated along with those of several of the other wonders such as the Hostes, the Conopenas, and the Lertices.54 Heather Blurton identifies the Donestre as a hostile force that blocks and removes travellers from the map, thereby eliminating any communication between cultures,55 while Amanda Lehr suggests that, ‘the familiar voices emanating from the Donestre’s own body could easily be those of travellers [it had eaten and] whose encounter with the creature reformed their own flesh into something unrecognizable’.56 In this scenario the Donestre consumes, absorbs, and projects back languages rather than understanding or translating them – at least not in the conventional sense. Roslyn Saunders suggests that the Donestre’s false speech marks it as effeminate because dishonesty was considered feminine, while men were expected to keep their word.57 In the Junius 11 Genesis, for example, it is Eve’s failure to understand the truth of what the satanic messenger says to her and the ultimately faulty account of what has happened that she then gives to Adam that lead to the Fall.58 The issue of gender raised in Saunders’s interpretation, like language itself, is a sign of the Donestre’s and other of the wonders’ inability to be confined within conventional categories. Most of the wonders are depicted with no genitalia at all and, while usually interpreted as male unless it is specifically stated otherwise, the Old English words ‘man’ or ‘mancyn’ used for many of them mean person and people and are not gender specific. In the case of the Donestre, however, the matter is more complex. In the Beowulf manuscript the Donestre is shown with what appear to be male genitals drawn over a female pubic triangle, and is in the process of consuming a woman. Is the creature male or female, both or neither? Does it change gender Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 172–6. Ann Knock (‘Analysis of a Translator: The Old English Wonders of the East’, p. 124) interprets the retention of these Latin names as a sign of interest in preserving the original text, but it also has the result of making them doubly strange and foreign in the exclusively English text of Vitellius A.xv. 55 Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval Literature (New York, 2007), p. 48. 56 Amanda Lehr, ‘Sexing the Cannibal in The Wonders of the East and Beowulf’, postmedieval 9.2 (2018): 179–95, at 187. 57 Roslyn Saunders, ‘Becoming Undone: Monstrosity, leaslicum wordum, and the Strange Case of the Donestre’, Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 2 (2010): http://www.differentvisions.org/Issue2PDFs/Saunders.pdf, at 17. 58 Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript, pp. 109–14. 53 54

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depending on the gender of its victim? Both Saunders and Susan Kim read the Donestre as hermaphrodite, the Old English word for which would be bæddel,59 while Lehr describes it as intersex and links its sexual nature to its absorption of multiple identities through its cannibal diet;60 however, the Blemmye appears to be similarly intersex and does not consume its victims. Oswald, and Mittman and Kim, also focus on the Donestre’s inability to fully assimilate its victims, attributing its cannibalism to its desire either for human community or to become fully human,61 a state that, as demonstrated by the Life of Christopher, is characterised by language. The way the Donestre contains its victims and their different voices within its skin can also be compared to the manner in which this manuscript contains its different stories about beings and the places to which they travel within its skin. Its body is a dystopian space in miniature in which there is discord without hope of resolution, and into which all intruders violently disappear. The Wonders repeatedly draws our attention to skin as a surface, a site of language, and as something that contains in multiple ways. Perhaps the most significant difference between the Vitellius A.xv wonders and those of the other two early English manuscripts is their skins. Mittman and Kim have pointed out that many of the wonders seem to be wearing their skins like wonder-suits.62 The skin of the Donestre seems to have a neckline, while those of the Blemmye (fig. 8) and the giant boar-tusked women (fig. 9) also have what appear to be hemlines at the wrists. There are odd folds on the legs of the Donestre and the boar-tusked woman that could be either cloth or flesh, and the Blemmye seems to be both naked and clothed at the same time. We see its face staring out at us from the centre of its chest, but there are lines at the neck, wrist, and level of its knees that suggest a tunic. It could be argued that this is the result of poor draughtsmanship on the artist’s part, but like 59 R. D. Fulk, ‘Male Homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore’, in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston (Tempe, AZ, 2004), pp. 1–34. 60 Saunders, ‘Becoming Undone: Monstrosity, leaslicum wordum, and the Strange Case of the Donestre’; Susan M. Kim, ‘The Donestre and the Person of Both Sexes’, in Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Benjamin C. Withers and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown, WV, 2003), pp. 162–80; Lehr, ‘Sexing the Cannibal in The Wonders of the East and Beowulf’. 61 Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, pp. 45–6; Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 18–20, 148. See also, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1999), pp. 3–4. 62 Mittman and Kim use the term ‘monster-suits’ (Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 85–101).

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FIG. 8  BLEMMYE, THE WONDERS OF THE EAST. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS VITELLIUS A.XV, FOL. 102V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

the cannibalistic Donestre, the details raise questions in the reader’s mind about surfaces, and about skin and its relationship to identity. The Old English words lik-hama and flæsc-hama can be translated as ‘skin-garment’, with hama being the garment of the body or flesh.63 It 63 Sonja Daniëlli, ‘Wulf, min Wulf: An Eclectic Analysis of the Wolf-Man’, Neophilologus 90 (2006): 135–54, at 146.

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FIG. 9  BOAR-TUSKED WOMAN, THE WONDERS OF THE EAST. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS VITELLIUS A.XV, FOL. 105V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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is thus equally possible that a wonder-suit was exactly what the artist intended to depict. In his story of the werewolves of Ossory from the Topography of Ireland, a different sort of a wonder story written in the 1180s for Henry II, ‘our western Alexander’, Gerald of Wales recounts the meeting of a travelling priest with a werewolf couple in the woods. The male werewolf requests the priest accompany him to his sick companion so that she can receive last rites. The priest agrees and when they reach the dying female the male werewolf folds back her werewolf skin to reveal the woman underneath.64 Monstrosity, or the bestial, in this case is explicitly conceived of as a clothing over the body. Similarly, warriors in Old Norse sources were said to adopt the skins and identities of wolves when they were filled with battle rage.65 Skin and skins in the form of clothes are then the surfaces on and through which difference is both signified and performed. They are the signs of transformation, of the animal as a human-like being and the human as an animal. As many have noted, the skins of the human-like wonders in the Vitellius manuscript are the plain parchment of the page. While the same has been said of the Tiberius wonders, especially the Blemmye, they are in fact painted with a pigment that matches the hue of the vellum with white highlights and other pigments used for details of the skin (fig. 10), meaning that on the whole they stand out from the page, their skins painted on top of it rather than consisting of it, in contrast to their Vitellius counterparts. Moreover, the Tiberius wonders, with the exception of the Blemmye, are all in motion, many set within scenes or miniatures with backgrounds and landscape details. The Vitellius wonders seem pinned to the page in comparison. They keep our attention on the page whether they appear frozen against it, or merged with it, or coming out of it, or perhaps retreating into it. This process is arguably best embodied by the text’s final image, that of the Ethiopians, one of whom emerges from the frame as if stepping out of a doorway, and the other of whom stands completely outside it. The frame is drawn in red ink and next to it a later reader has written the word wurbasa

64 J. J. O’Mearra, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographie Hibernie: Text of the First Recension’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 52 (1948–50): 113–77, at 143–4. The werewolves are the first story in the section ‘The wonders of our own times’, and like The Wonders of the East can be read in the context of colonialism. See further Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland’, in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York, 2003), pp. 93–109. 65 Daniëlli, ‘Wulf, min Wulf: An Eclectic Analysis of the Wolf-Man’.

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FIG. 10  BOAR-TUSKED WOMAN, THE WONDERS OF THE EAST. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS TIBERIUS B.V, FOL. 85R. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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(red ink),66 as if to remind us that the wonders are contained within a world of ink from which they can only threaten to emerge. They dwell in the book and remind us that it is a book, something that is different from but yet not wholly other to us, and that utopias always ultimately reside within the book. Much has been made of the way skin can unite a reader with a book, skin touching skin as we read, and this is often clearly the case, although it is also possible that this connection can be made too easily, or too much can be made of it. However, the Vitellius Wonders suggests, I think, something very different. In his The Skin Ego, Didier Anziou developed the idea that skin is the material reality through which the self emerges, an idea that has been taken up by a number of medievalists, most notably Sarah Kay in her recent book Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries.67 Reading any manuscript is an encounter between skins and selves that challenges but also defines the boundary between the human and the animal, as well as the boundary between the space in which we read and the spaces on and of which we read, whether this is acknowledged consciously or not. The Vitellius Wonders is no different in that respect from many other manuscripts. But its strange beings with their wonder-suits animate that space of encounter differently. They suggest that the human, the wondrous, or the monstrous are identities that can be put on or taken off like a suit of clothes thereby questioning established ideas of difference between the human and the non-human – and perhaps also between genders, races, and ethnicities. They alert us to the need to think about these same issues as we read through the other texts contained in the manuscript. At the same time, however, they maintain their difference. Encountering the other in one’s own space, the space of reading in this case, is in Kristeva’s words to confront one’s own alterity to that other space.68 The Vitellius Wonders demonstrates to us the fact that we may all emerge from within skin, we may encounter each other really only through skin, but one can choose the skins one wears and the behaviours and communities they generate. They suggest that while there is basic sameness within difference this does not collapse differences

66 See Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 162–3 for their reading of the word. 67 Didier Anziou, The Skin Ego: A New Translation, trans. Naomi Segal (London, 2016); Sarah Kay, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago, 2017). 68 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York, 1991).

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between beings so much as force us to think about how we encounter, interpret, and categorise them.69 As creatures that exist in the book and whose skin is the book the wonders refuse our attempts to classify and catalogue them. Most of them are human-like, but that is not the same thing as being human. Mittman and Kim note the repeated use of phrases such as ‘in the likeness of ’ or ‘in shape’.70 The homodubii (‘doubtful’ or ‘maybe’ people) are ‘oð ðone nafolan on menniscum gesceape ond syþþan on eoseles gelicnesse, ond hy habbað lange sconcan swa fugelas’ (‘as far as the navel in human shape, and below in the likeness of an ass, and they have long legs like birds’, fol. 103r). In Ciconia people are born who have heads maned like lions (swa leona heafdu), which is something different from having actual lions’ heads. They are 20ft tall with mouths like fans and they sweat blood as they flee from intruders. They are gewende (‘transformed’, ‘translated’, or ‘thought to be’) people. The result is that we cannot even classify these creatures as hybrids, creatures made up of two or more distinct types of beings or states, as their body parts are only like those of other creatures rather than actually being those creatures.71 They are cryptids, quite literally creatures whose existence is unproven or disputed, but also creatures that, like the Yeti, make the reader think about the possibilities and complexities of life forms and identities. Elsewhere, the idea of likeness raises questions about just how different the world of the wonders is from our own. The hens that burst into flames when caught live in Lentibelsinea but are ‘like those that are amongst us of a red colour’ (onlice þonne þe mid us beoð reades heowes, fol. 99r) – they are like our hens, but they are not our hens, the ‘like’ here simultaneously emphasising their categorical difference from those hens that are amongst us (and who is us?) and suggesting the possibility of a breakdown of that categorical difference, the possibility that with their red colour, the colour of glowing coals and fiery gems,72 our hens too might be capable of bursting into flames. The passage again locates the problem of identity at skin – or in this case 69 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘The Werewolf ’s Indifference’, In the Middle, 26 October 2011: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2011/10/werewolfs-indifference.html. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York, 2005), p. 160. 70 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 13. 71 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 13. 72 See below p. 179.

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feather – level. We need to pay attention to surfaces as well as what is beneath them, which of course was also one of the lessons of the Weland the Smith panel on the Franks Casket. Geography also raises questions of here and there, us and them. The unidentified Lentibelsinea is located somewhere as one travels towards the Red Sea from Archemedon (the city of the Medes), which is located somewhere near Babylon, so clearly an unfamiliar elsewhere to an English reader. However, Nicole Guenther Discenza points out that there is much repetition of the names of places and peoples both within the Wonders and across the Wonders and the Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle so that by the time the reader was finished with both texts the strange might have become rather more familiar. Babylon, for example, is mentioned nine times, and only 25 of the 106 different names in the Wonders text are unique to it.73 But no matter how familiar these places become in the reader’s mind, and no matter how frequently the author locates them in relation to more familiar places like Babylon, the Red Sea, or the Nile, they ultimately remain beyond our reach, both because of their strangeness and because of the breakdown in the systems of measuring geographical distance. Moreover, some places remain either nameless or confusingly identifiable with multiple places depending on how the text is translated. For example, the Donestre lives on a certain unnamed island in the Red Sea (‘Đonne … um ealond in þær readan sæ’; restored as ‘Đonne is sum ealond’ … from the Tiberius B.v text), while the 15ft-tall people with red knees and two noses on one head travel to India to give birth but it is not clear where exactly they travel from. As laid out in the manuscript the text reads: (101r) Betwih þysson twam ean is londbunis . loco theo hatte þæt is betwih nile ond bryxontes geseted seo nil is ealdor fallicra ea . ond heo floweð of egypta lande . ond hi nemnað þa ea archoboleta þa is hatan þa micle wæter (101v) on þyssum beoð acende þa miclan mænego olfenda . Đær beoð cende men hy beoð fiftyne fota lange . ond hy hab bað hwit lic ond twa neb on anum heafde fet ond cneowu swyðe 73

Discenza, Inhabited Spaces, pp. 81–2.

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reade ond lange nosa ond sweart feax . þonne hy cennan willað þonne farað hy on scipum to indeum . ond þær hyra gecynda in world bringaþ Ciconia in Gallia hatte þa land þær beoð men a cende on drys heowes … (Between these two rivers is a settlement called Locotheo that is set between the Nile and the Brixontes. The Nile is the head of all rivers, and it flows out of the land of the Egyptians. And they call the river Archoboleta, that is called the great water. In these places a great many camels are born. There are born people who are fifteen feet tall, and they have white bodies and two noses on one head, very red feet and knees, and long noses, and dark hair. When they want to reproduce they travel in ships to India, and there they bring their kind into the world. That land is called Ciconia in Gallia where men are born in three colours …)

It could be that the ‘there’ where the 15ft-tall people are born is to be equated with Locotheo, but it is also possible that it is meant to be identified with Ciconia as the miniature containing the image of the 15ft-tall man with two noses is placed alongside this passage. Alternatively, the way it is set off with a capital letter could mean that ‘there’ is a completely different place altogether. In this instance the mise-en-page (or better mise-en-skin) of the text maps an ambiguous and confusing geography. Time is also difficult to establish in some instances. The giant boar-tusked women (fig. 9) refuse to be confined within conventional conceptions of time. They too live – or lived – somewhere around the Red Sea. Đonne syndan oþere wif þa habbað eoferes tuxas ond feax oð helan side, ond oxen tægl on lendunum. Þa wif syndon þryttyne fota lange, ond hyra lic bið on marmorstanes hiwenesse, ond hy habbað olfendan fet ond eoseles teð. Of hyra micelnesse hi gefylde wæron from þæm miclan macedoniscan Alexandre. Þa cwealde he hy þa he hy lifiende oferfon ne mehte, forþon hy syndon æwisc on lichoman ond unweorþe. (fols 105v–106r)

The passage again causes problems of translation. I translate: Then other women are born who have boar’s tusks and hair down to their heels, and ox’s tails on their loins. Those women are thirteen feet tall and their bodies are the colour of marble, and they have camel’s feet and ass’s teeth. For their greatness they were killed by the great

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Macedonian Alexander. Then he killed them when he could not capture them alive because they are foul in body and unworthy.

The passage implies that Alexander killed all of the women, they gefylde wæron, but also describes them in the present tense. They have (habbað) boar’s tusks, hair that reaches to their heels, and ox’s tails. They are (syndon) 13ft tall and the colour of marble, and they have camel’s feet and ass’s teeth.74 Both the Vitellius A.xv and Tiberius B.v copies of the Wonders state that Alexander killed them because of their micelnesse, their greatness, not their unclennesse (filthiness), which is often substituted for micelnesse on the assumption of scribal error.75 The original Latin text has obscenitate, which would indeed translate as filthiness, but the Vitellius Wonders does not contain the Latin, and The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle that follows it describes many of the peoples, creatures, and natural elements against which Alexander battles as micel. It thus puts the women in a very different relationship to Alexander. They are great – and they literally are 13ft tall – and threatening, as anyone of their size would be. They threaten the king’s own greatness. And how should we translate æwisc? I’ve translated it as ‘foul’, but it could also mean ‘shameless’ or ‘indecent’. The Vitellius A.xv woman who breaks out of the frame with her blotchy parchment skin, open toothy mouth, and the large club held in her hand might well push a viewer towards a reading of foul rather than shameless or indecent, especially if compared to her Tiberius B.v counterpart (fig. 10) with her clear skin, classically derived contrapposto stance, tiny delicate tusks, and hair-smoothing gesture. On the other hand, the pose of the Tiberius woman also works to hide her supposed indecency from us as it denies her breasts and genitals to the viewer’s gaze. She may also be arranging her hair in order to further conceal her body from us, so perhaps the Tiberius B.v artist intended to depict an equally great, less foul, and no more shameless figure. And how exactly are the women unweorðe (unworthy)? In honour? Class? Esteem? Merit? Value? Their unwillingness to be captured by Alexander suggests that they are worthy opponents, and also that foulness and unworthiness are located in the eye of Alexander, the imperial intruder who the beast-women with their apparent defiance of death effectively resist. 74 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 30. Thomson (Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript, p. 61) interprets them as having been only partially exterminated and reads them as a lesson in the error of violent behaviour. 75 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 28, 348.

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FIG. 11. CONOPENAS, THE WONDERS OF THE EAST. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS VITELLIUS A.XV, FOL. 100R. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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The Conopenas (fig. 11), a type of Cynocephalus, which is the first of the wonders in human-like form that we encounter, sets the human and the animal in a similar sort of ambivalent if not critical relationship, as does the encounter between Alexander and the boar-tusked women. In this case the text says nothing about their character or about how dangerous they might be, it simply describes them. They are half hounds (healfhundingas) with horses’ manes, boars’ tusks, dogs’ heads, and their breath is like fire (swylce fyres leg). There is no suggestion that they will burn you with their breath and they are not said to be cannibals, as is so often the case with the Cynocephali. The Vitellius A.xv artist has depicted the Conopenas standing quietly within his frame, holding an orb and sceptre, and dressed like a king in crimson, blue, and yellow (for gold). He even wears what appears to be a Sutton Hoo style golden shoulder-clasp on his right shoulder.76 They live in the south of Egypt near the cities that are filled with all worldly wealth (eallum worldwellum). Mittman and Kim suggest that the monstrosity of the Conopenas resides in its ‘monstrous civility, indeed, perhaps monstrous kingship’,77 but is either its civility or its kingship necessarily monstrous, especially when compared with the conduct of Alexander? Might the message of the Conopenas be that, as was the case with Christopher, true nobility can exist within what might at first glance appear to be a monstrous exterior? Moreover, if the single examples of the wonders that we see accompanying their textual descriptions are representative of their entire race or species, does that mean that all Conopenae are noble (again, like Christopher)? Derrida emphasises that the beast, like the sovereign, lives outside the law,78 but he means that they live outside of human law. The Vitellius B.v Conopenas signals the possibility that sovereign beasts might live by their own rule of law, just as Ratramnus of Corbie maintained was the case for the Cynocephali. I described the Vitellius A.v wonders as appearing ‘pinned to the page’ in comparison to those of the Tiberius B.v manuscript and I want to return finally to the idea of fixity that the phrase implies. Mittman and Kim develop the notion of fixity in the Wonders in the context of postcolonial theory, citing Said’s observation that ‘Anglo-Saxonism is its [orientalism’s] ideological partner … Orientalism suppressed and exploited the East, whereas Anglo-Saxonism glorified the West 76 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 17. 77 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 18. 78 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, I, pp. 17, 32.

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as English civilization constituted it’.79 This is undeniably true and remains a problem with the deployment of ideas of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and Anglo-Saxonism today. But, as they note, the binary division that this scenario implies is often more complex, indeed paradoxical: An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/ racial/ difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition.80

In their being, the Vitellius A.xv wonders are neither fixed nor unfixed, they continuously subvert any form of order we try to impose on them. Mittman and Kim quite rightly argue that in appearing fixed and exposed, the wonders serve to expose the way those categories signify. ‘And thus as they confront us with the dynamics of such signification, they reflect our gaze, even sometimes directly returning it, thereby showing us as well the limits of the very categorizing impulses by which we create, represent, and understand them.’81 But it is possible to extend the way the wonders expose and disrupt categorisation beyond the text of the Wonders itself. Though appearing fixed to the page individual wonders continuously break out of their frames (fig. 9) or are incompletely framed, sometimes confronting the text (the Homodubii on fol. 102v) or attacking it (the Catinos on fol. 106r), or even slithering across it as if escaping altogether (the serpents on fol. 99v). Their interactions with page and text, like the parchment skin of so many of the human-like wonders, draws our attention to the book and the page. They remind us that we are holding animal skins, the remains of a living creatures, and that the book, like the Franks Casket, remains haunted by that former life. It mediates between the world of the human and the world of the beast. Confined yet not confined to page or text, its wonders also encourage us to think about the larger book of which they are a part and the ways in which we read and classify the races and species of the other texts within it. They ultimately resist exploitation by continuously remaining beyond 79 Said, Orientalism, p. 8. Cited in Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 104 n.6. 80 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), p. 94. Cited in Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 104. 81 Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 105.

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our reach both physically and conceptually. They tantalise us with the riches of their land but provide us with no means of reaching it, warning us of the impossibility of possession and the many forms of death that await all intruders and would-be colonisers. Yet there are intruders, especially Alexander, who threaten to turn their utopian elsewhere into the very real dystopian scenarios explored by Said and Bhabha. Or, again, is the imperial Alexander meant to be read as one of the wonders, a monster in human form far more threatening than any of the text’s other wonders, and one that thus threatens as a settler and not simply an intruder?82 Oswald argues that while Alexander’s behaviour might well be monstrous, ‘action alone is not enough to define a creature as a monster because these actions are not permanent in the way that the possession of a tail or a tusk is permanent’.83 The Vita of Christopher, as well as the story of the werewolves of Ossory, however, demonstrate that such physical signs of monstrosity are not necessarily permanent, while both Derrida and the poem Judith, as we shall see, explore the manifestation of the monstrous in human behaviour as very much a permanent condition.

THE LETTER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT TO ARISTOTLE Alexander’s bestial behaviour continues in The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, a fictional epistle supposedly written during Alexander’s attempt to conquer India while on his prolonged campaign against Darius and the Persians. It contains accounts of some of the same creatures that appear in the Wonders, the Cynocephali, for example, which Alexander writes were intent on attacking him and his men but were quickly driven off by a volley of arrows.84 There are also giant people who live on fish, whales (hronfiscas) in this text, and horned snakes called cerastes, which are likely to be the Homodubii and the corsiae of the Wonders of the East respectively, despite being Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript, p. 52. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, p. 29; Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript, p. 52. 84 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 66. ‘gesawon we betweoh þa wudu-bearwas ond þa treo healf-hundinga micle mængeo, ða cwoman to þon þæt hie woldon us wundigan. Ond we þa mid strælum hie scotodon ond hie sona onweg aflymdon, ða hie eft on þone wudu gewiton’ (we saw between the groves and the trees a great crowd of half-hounds, which came so as to wound us. And then we shot at them with arrows and immediately put them to flight, and they went back into the jungle). 82 83

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described slightly differently. At the same time the Letter includes references to known historical figures, battles, and other events that give it a veneer of historical authenticity that would perhaps also have helped to make the Wonders more believable. Near the beginning of the Letter Alexander expresses his amazement at the world he finds in India and tells Aristotle that he would never have believed such things existed had he not seen them for himself: ‘Ne gelyfde ic æniges monnes gesegenum swa fela wundorlicra þinga þæt hit swa beon mihte ær ic hit self minum eagum ne gesawe. Seo eorðe is to wundrienne’85 (I would never have believed anyone’s account of so many wondrous things, that it could be so, before I saw it with my own eyes. The earth is to be wondered at). Like the Wonders, the Letter is a translation of a Latin text, the Epistola Alexandri ed Aristotelem of the seventh century or earlier, which was in turn translated from a now lost Greek original. It is but one of a variety of stories about Alexander’s adventures that were popular throughout the Middle Ages. The texts divide into two basic positions, one that saw Alexander as a hero and explorer and that had its source in eastern texts originating with Alexander’s own historian Kallisthenes; the other, promoted by the Roman philosophers, that saw him as a proud and brutal tyrant.86 The latter view was more prevalent in the West, although there were exceptions – St Jerome, for example, viewed Alexander as amongst the great rulers,87 while pre-Islamic Persian texts portray him as a destructive tyrant.88 Both the Old English sources that discuss Alexander, the Letter, and the Alfredian-era translation of Orosius’s Seven Books of History Against the Pagans portray him as a brutal and rapacious leader, ‘an micel yst come ofer ealne middaneard’ (a great storm that would come over the whole world).89 If Janet Bately is correct and the Old English Letter was composed in the ninth or early tenth century, the two texts would

Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 34, 36. Hildegard L. C. Tristram, ‘More Talk about Alexander’, Celtica 21 (1996): 658–63, at 660. See also eadem, ‘Die insulare Alexander’. In Kontinuität und Transformation der Antik im Mittelalter, ed. Willi Erzgräber (Sigmaringen, 1989), pp. 129–55 for a more detailed discussion of the Irish and early English texts. 87 Tristram, ‘More Talk about Alexander’: 660. 88 Shahrokh Razmjou, ‘Religion and Burial Custom’, in Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia, ed. John E. Curtis and Nigel Tallis (London, 2005), pp. 150–80, at 154. 89 Malcom R. Godden, ed., The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius (Cambridge, MA, 2016), p. 158. 85 86

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be roughly contemporary.90 As a number of scholars have pointed out, both Old English translations portray Alexander as prouder and more tyrannical than their Latin sources.91 He plunders his way across the world killing friend and foe alike with a thirst for blood that cannot be quenched.92 While Orosius’s History is concerned with war and battles, the Letter devotes more attention to India as a place, and the people and creatures Alexander and his troops encounter there. Much like the Wonders, it presents this area as a sort of utopia. It is full of deadly creatures and hostile environments to be sure, but again these things are presented as hostile only to those who would invade their territory. The scorpions, snakes, and other beasts that attack Alexander’s camp at night are only in search of water, as he eventually realises – although he goes on to kill most of them anyway.93 The water-monsters that live in the river do not trouble the half-naked Indian people who live on an island in that river, but they devour the men that Alexander sends into the river in his desire to reach the island.94 The relative peace of the Wonders, however, contrasts markedly with the carnage of the Letter. Alexander and his army blunder their way through the jungle destroying it, attacking, killing, and subjugating its inhabitants, and claiming its gold, gems, and other treasures. The story suggests that the conquest and colonisation of foreign lands is possible, but Alexander’s men are killed off in their hundreds and, despite the king’s own boasting, the Letter ends with his failure to conquer the land and his learning of his own imminent death. It is dystopian both in its theme of imperial expansion and in its inversion of the idea of an earthly paradise.95 Brian McFadden suggests that the English would have read the Letter in the context of the Viking attacks, social changes brought about by the tenth-century monastic reform, and general eschatological fear of the years around the turn of the first millennium,96 but, as I have argued was the case with Alfred’s Preface, such fears may in fact be the ghosts of their own much longer history of conflict and violence. Moreover, there is an 90 Janet Bately, ‘Old English Prose Before and During the Reign of Alfred’, AngloSaxon England 17 (1988): 93–138, at 113. 91 Tristram, More Talk of Alexander’; Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 121, 137–8. 92 Godden, The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, p. 198. 93 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 54. 94 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 50–1. 95 Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History, pp. 330, and 62–7. 96 Brian McFadden, ‘The Social Context of Narrative Disruption in The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 91–114.

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ambivalence to the Letter that is inherent in the broader tradition of Alexander texts. As Kathryn Powell notes, the ‘foreignness’ of all of the Vitellius A.xv texts might have worked to distance the reader from the events and characters described, or it might have evoked their sympathy, although she too reads the manuscript in relation to specific historical events such as the St Brice’s Day massacre.97 Despite being set in a distant land the Letter connects here to there by presenting the text to the reader as an embedded text: ‘Her is seo gesetenis Alexandres epistoles þæs miclan kyninges ond þæs mæran Macedoniscan, þone he wrat ond sende to Aristotle’98 (Here is the content of the letter that Alexander, the great king and the famous Macedonian, wrote and sent to his teacher Aristotle). The way in which this construction seems to present the text into the reader’s own hand bridges the distance between Alexander’s India and the reader’s present just as the epistolary format of the texts discussed in Chapter 1 was used to unite their authors and readers across time and space. The Letter then shifts into Alexander’s ‘own’ words and a tone that reflects his obvious pride. Susan Kim has argued that the contrast between the written and spoken ‘I’ of the Letter reveals its concern with the establishment of and anxiety over human identity as constructed through language.99 Alexander tells Aristotle that he hopes his teacher will not find him boastful but then goes on to boast that he is writing in part because he wants him to hear of his accomplishments, which he is sure that Aristotle loves (þa þu lufast).100 He is kyninga kyning,101 ‘king of all kings’, a clear statement of the Christ-like image that he projects of himself and that runs throughout the text, though perhaps not in quite such overt statements. His descriptions of himself throughout are also rather like the messianic language of Donald Trump and, like Trump’s language, may well be the boasts of a childish and unstable leader. His army is decked in gold and is bigger and more spectacular than that of any other ruler on earth, and he considers it a reflection of his own glory: Hit scan ond berhte foran swa ymb me uton mid þrymme, ond here-beacen ond segnas beforan me læddon, ond swa micel wundor 97 Powell, ‘Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript’. 98 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 34. 99 Susan M. Kim, ‘“If One Who is Loved is not Present, a Letter May be Embraced Instead”: Death and the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109.1 (2010): 33–51, at 33–5. 100 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 34. 101 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 36.

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ond wæfer-sien wæs þæs mines weoredes on fægernisse ofer ealle oþre þeod-kyningas þe in middan-gearde wæron. Đa sceawede ic seolfa ond geseah mine gesælinesse ond min wuldor ond þa fromnisse minre iuguðe ond gesælignisse mines lifes, þa wæs ic hwæthwugo in gefean in minum mode ahafen.102 (It shone and flashed before me and around me magnificently, and they carried military standards and banners before me and there was such a great wonder and spectacle of my army in its beauty over all other sovereigns who have been on earth. When I myself observed and saw my fortune and my glory and the strength of my youth and the happiness of my life, then my spirits were somewhat joyously raised up.)

As Orchard notes, the arrogance expressed in this passage is in marked contrast to the more subtle emotions of the Latin source.103 His gleaming army, however, is not just meant to impress as a spectacle. The flashing gold is also a weapon of sorts, as dazzling as the stars or lightning.104 It is a troop of truly fabulated warriors of a type that we will meet again in Beowulf,105 and of a type that certainly existed in early medieval England as demonstrated by the highly decorated weapons and trappings of the Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell burials and the Staffordshire Hoard. Alexander and his men wear their glittering warrior identities just as the wonders wore their wonder-suits. For all his belief in his own glory and that of his loyal men, his soldiers are killed in enormous numbers and the Letter ends with his learning that he will be betrayed and die by poison. Orosius adds the detail that this will be at the hands of his own men tired of their leader’s incessant lust for conquest.106 It also ends with a boast very similar to that with which it began as Alexander reiterates the statement that he has written the letter so that Aristotle can know of his great success. But he also desires that the memory of his deeds should stand like a towering tomb preserving his greatness for all eternity:

Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 44. Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 136. 104 ‘Ond eall min weorod wæs on þa gelicnesse tungles oððe ligite’. Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 44. 105 For a discussion of the fabulated warrior see Asa Simon Mittman and Patricia MacCormack, ‘Rebuilding the Fabulated Bodies of the Hoard-warriors’, postmedieval 7.3 (2016): 356–68. 106 Godden, The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, pp. 198–9. 102 103

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Đas þing ic write to þon, min se leofa magister, þæt þu ærest gefeo in þæm fromscipe mines lifes ond eac blissige in þæm weorð-myndum. Ond eac swelce ecelice min gemynd stonde ond hleouige oðrum eorð-cyningum to bysne, ðæt hie witen þy gearwor þæt min þrym ond min weorð-mynd maran wæron þonne ealra oþra kyninga þe in middan-gearde æfre wæron.107 (I write these things to you, my beloved teacher, so that you first may take pleasure in the progress of my life and also exult in the honours. And also likewise may the memory of me stand eternally and tower as an example to all other kings on earth, so that they may know well that my greatness and my honour were greater than those of all other kings who have ever been on earth.)

Though not a physical monument, his desire for a towering memorial that will be a sign for future kings is echoed by the burial mound in which Beowulf will be memorialised at the end of that poem.108 But just as Beowulf ’s death brings melancholy and mourning to his people as they realise their vulnerability, Alexander’s turn to thinking of his own certain death could be read as a sign that he has realised the failure of his own fantasy of empire,109 although his lack of tears and inability to grieve could also reflect the construction of a personal ‘intrapsychic tomb’ in which grief is swallowed and encrypted in ‘a secret tomb inside the subject’,110 akin to, or perhaps representative of, the national ones on which I have focused thus far. Such an interpretation would also be in keeping with Susan Kim’s reading of the Letter in which Alexander becomes his own memorial through the written/spoken I of the epistle, and here the Vitellius text differs from other versions of the Letter in which Alexander instructs that numerous monuments be erected to his memory.111 It also has the effect of keeping Alexander both alive (in the ‘I’ of the text) and dead (as we know that he has died by the time the letter is being read), placing him in a state akin to that of the boar-tusked women of the

Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 82. Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge, 2003), p. 37. 109 In his After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London, 2004, p. 108), Paul Gilroy, citing the psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich notes that the loss of fantasies of omnipotence prompts melancholic reactions. While Alexander’s men weep and mourn at the news of his impending death, Alexander’s melancholy, if any, is only that he would be unable to conquer more. 110 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 130. 111 Kim, ‘“If One Who is Loved is not Present, a Letter May be Embraced Instead”: Death and the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle’: 47. 107 108

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Wonders, though through a slightly less uncanny means. A ghost of a lost empire haunting text and tomb.112 Alexander’s towering pride is matched by his violence and cruelty. After his defeat of Darius and Porus he wishes to explore the interior of India. He is warned by the people who live there that it is full of dangerous creatures but insists on proceeding anyway and enlists 250 guides. As they progress and encounter the difficulties and the creatures about which he had been warned he kills off the guides, accusing them of deceiving him and leading him into danger. His men are forced to march through the August heat and burning sands with no water and loaded up not only with their own weapons but with all the gold, jewels, and other treasures that the king plunders along the way, as well as the pack animals needed to help carry it all. When they find water in the hollow of a stone, he pours it on the ground, refusing to drink before his men and animals, but when they eventually find a lake of fresh water he quenches his own thirst before permitting anyone else to drink. He destroys the jungle near the lake to build a camp twenty furlongs long and twenty furlongs wide and then slaughters the local animals who come in the night to drink the water, as noted above. His first response when encountering any creature, human or otherwise, is to shoot at it. Alexander’s approach to India is both colonial and imperial. He is the greatest ruler the world has seen and he views the subcontinent along with its wonders and people as rightfully his to do with as he pleases. The land’s apparently wild disorder contrasts with the military order and obedience of his own troops, and his spectacularly dressed men contrast with the nakedness or strange dress of the indigenous Indic peoples and wonders they encounter. The fish-eaters (ictifafonas) who dine on whales are naked but covered in shaggy hair like wild animals (wildeor). Another group that they encounter en route to find the trees of the sun and moon are dressed in panther and tiger pelts, and the bishop (bisceop) who tends the sacred grove is dressed in animal pelts with gem-encrusted earrings hanging from his pierced ears. The people who live on an island in the water-monster infested river are half-naked and live in houses made of mud and reeds. Yet all the magnificent dress of Alexander and his men is entirely out of place in this world. Their armour and weapons cannot save them from the water-monsters, while the indigenous people float safely above them 112 Donna Beth Ellard explores the ring-structure of Beowulf as a type of narrative barrow (Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, ch. 3. While different in structure, it would certainly be possible to interpret the Letter along similar lines.

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on their wood- and reed-built boats. The army’s weapons fail to kill the island dwellers when they take refuge in their reed-built homes or, in the case of the fish-eaters and the Cynocephali, in the land itself. The Cynocephali retreat into the jungle, while the fish-eaters hide in the water and rocks. Alexander’s description of their behaviour is reminiscent of Gildas’s account of the Britons who lived like wild animals in the mountains, caves, fens, and thickets of the land after the departure of the Romans.113 The contrast between the educated and civilised coloniser and the indigenous savage is a trope of colonial or imperial discourse that will appear again in the relationship between Hrothgar’s court and the cave-hall of Grendel and his mother in Beowulf – as well, of course, as in the much later British Empire and settler-colonialism of the USA. So too is the description of indigenous languages as barbaric, inadequate, or gibberish, which was also a feature of language in the Wonders. Fulk chooses to translate the Old English elreordig as ‘gibberish-speaking’ rather than ‘foreign-speaking’ throughout the Letter, highlighting Alexander’s colonial attitude towards the Indic people he meets. Curiously, Alexander and those he meets are sometimes able to understand each other’s words and sometimes not, although this may simply be due to details such as the presence of translators having been left out. For example, after the water-monster episode he comes across a group of people travelling on the river in reed boats and asks them where he can find fresh water. They answer him in their own language (hiora gereorde), directing him to a lake of fresh water.114 These people are not described as elreordig, unlike the large group he battles and that forces him to change course shortly before he catches up with King Porus. We are not told that Alexander makes any attempt to speak to the group with which he battles, but Porus, who is a gibberish-speaking (elreordigan) king, gives Alexander a letter that he is able to read and understand enough to belittle its contents to his teacher Aristotle in describing it, thereby emphasising the gap he perceives between his educated Greek and Porus’s gibberish

113 Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, pp. 23–4. See also Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018), p. 273. Heng notes that in the Vinland Sagas Scandinavian settlers in north-eastern America described the native Americans they encountered as living in ‘underground cave-habitations or hole-in-the-ground dwellings reinforc[ing] the impression of the native populations as primitive’. Similar descriptions of the Britons and Picts occur in earlier Roman sources, some of which Gildas would certainly have known. 114 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 50.

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Indic.115 The old men who direct him towards the trees of the sun and moon are elreordegan and he cannot understand them but fears that they are making fun of him. On the other hand, the bishop who tends the trees and his people speak in their own language (hiora geþeode) and Alexander seems to understand them and they him without difficulty. Perhaps their noble status renders their speech less foreign and barbaric to his ears. In the trees themselves, however, Alexander apparently meets his match. The tree of the moon speaks in Greek, which of course he can understand, but the tree of the sun speaks in Indic and forces Alexander to confess his own ignorance and turn to the bishop for a translation: ‘Đa wæs ic ungleaw þæs geþeodes þara Indiscra worda þe þæt triow me to spræc; ðe rehte hit me se bisceop ond sægde’ (When I was ignorant of those Indic words that the tree spoke to me; then the bishop translated it and told me).116 Language and translation have been a problem for Alexander throughout his travels in India, and his inability to understand the tree of the sun and its Indic is a symptom of his inability to understand India itself. The English reader, while not placed in the same position as Alexander, might at least have been made aware of the issue of language and the encounter with the foreign by the Latin words left untranslated in the text: dentes tyrannum for the ‘teeth-despot’ (rhinocerous), nocitcoraces for the night-ravens, caput-luna for the ‘head-like-moon’ creature (crocodile), ictifarfones (an Old English corruption of the Latin) for the fish-eating people.117 While most of the peoples Alexander encounters flee from him, especially when attacked, India itself fights back, a trope also found in Roman descriptions of the British landscape.118 The water-monsters and the creatures of land and air repeatedly attack and cause considerable damage to his troops and animals. The land and the elements are 115 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 62:’Swa sona ic ða þonan gewiten wæs ond eft cwom to minum here-wicum, þa ægþer ge ær ðon þe ic þæt gewrit rædde ge eac æfter þon þæt ic wæs swiðe mid hleahtre onstyred. Đas þing ic forþon þe secge, magister, ond Olimphiade minre meder ond minum geswustrum, þæt ge gehyrdon ond ongeaton þa oferhygdlican gedyrstignesse þæs el-reordgan kyninges.’ (As soon as I was gone from there and came back to my own camp, both before and after I read the letter I was greatly overcome with laughter. I am telling you these things, teacher, and my mother Olimphias and my sisters, so that you can hear and understand the overly arrogant presumption of that foreign-speaking king.) 116 Text, Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 76. 117 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 56, 58, 64, 66. 118 Gilbert Markus (Conceiving a Nation: Scotland to AD 900, [Edinburgh, 2017], p. 36) points out, for example, that Dio Cassius wrote about Severus’s army being assaulted by the difficult terrain through which they travelled as if it were itself a ‘barbarian force’ and that this was a well-established topos for Roman writers.

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equally hostile to him and they form a force he is unable to defeat. The water is either undrinkable or home to monsters and wild animals, the sands boil with heat, and each time he seems to have secured his camp from wild animals the environment turns on him. At the lake of fresh water they are struck by a poisonous mist: ‘æteowde þær wol-berende lyft hwites hiowes, ond eac missenlices wæs heo on hringwisan fag, ond monige men for heora þæm wol-berendan stence swulton mid þære wol-beorendan lyfte þe þær swelc æteowde’119 (There appeared a poisonous air white in colour and also marked variously with whirls, and many men died because of the poisonous stench that appeared wherever the poisonous air was). At his final camp in Fasiacen before he reaches the grove of the trees of the sun and the moon, the men are devasted in turn by strong winds, great snows, and a lightning storm that sets the land on fire. There he loses five hundred of his officers.120 Alexander is again and again confronted by forces that are described as great (micel), as were the boar-tusked women of the Wonders, in a way that makes the micelness of him and his army seem very much empty boasting.121 India is a miclan þeode (great land), the Cynocephali appear as a micle mængeo (great group), and the lake of fresh water is swiðe micelne (very great).122 The swarm of animals that attack them are micel mænego (a great group), the lions are as great as bulls, and the bats as great as doves. The boars are of unmætlicre micelnisse (immense greatness), and the deadly snow is overwhelming in its unmætnisse ond micelnisse (immensity and greatness).123 For all Alexander’s insistence on his greatness there is also a longing for his mother and sisters that runs like a refrain throughout the Letter, making him seem, if not a complete mommy’s boy, at least desperately homesick for a court that is represented entirely by women and his old teacher Aristotle. From the very beginning he makes it clear that he is writing to both Aristotle and his mother and sisters. At the end of the Letter he prays twice to the trees of the sun and moon that he will be able to return to Macedonia, his mother, and his sisters, and a third time he asks specifically when he will be able to return to them.124 It is also notable that after driving Porus from his palace the Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, p. 56. Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 66–8. 121 Again, one cannot help but think of the ‘biggly’/biggest language of Donald Trump. 122 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 34, 66, 50. 123 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 56, 68. 124 Fulk, The Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 70, 76, 80. Here I disagree with Thomson who describes Alexander at the end of the Letter as ‘desperately seeking to be a part of 119 120

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only area identified by name that he explores, and the one described in most detail, is the women’s quarters (bryd-buras), which are filled with gold and gems, pearls, crystal, and ivories. The result is that Alexander ultimately appears to the reader as an effeminate figure and the courts of the East as feminine places, a typical orientalist trope. From a western colonial perspective this makes them both ripe for defeat and conquest, and Alexander nothing but a vain and decorative tyrant. It is also possible that Alexander’s monstrosity might also have a source in his effeminacy as pride is a vice conventionally associated with women and, as the feminine is always something out of place, something monstrous, in any male warrior. But it is also important to recognise that there was a very different tradition of the Letter that developed in eastern texts, including Islamic texts, in which the king was both heroic and admired for his spirit of scientific enquiry and exploration.125 Is the western view of him expressed in texts like the Vitellius manuscript Letter or the Old English Orosius simply a way of denying that other cultures can have great heroes, or that there could be such a thing as a legitimate non-western/non-Christian empire? These are larger and far more complex questions than I have the scope to pursue here, but it is important to acknowledge such a possibility, especially in light of medieval England’s own fantasy of its exceptional place in the world. In this specific manuscript context, the Letter encourages us to question the morality and humanity of its protagonist and those of the other texts in the manuscript – heroic or otherwise – and it encourages us to confront the dystopian nature of heroic warrior society itself, wherever it might exist.

BEOWULF In his A Critical Companion to Beowulf, Andy Orchard states that, ‘The tissue of echoes and parallels, both verbal and thematic, that links the Letter and Beowulf is perhaps best explained by the notion that the author of the Letter knew the poem at first hand, and consciously developed hints in his original text in a way which deliberately drew on aspects of Beowulf.’126 It is entirely possible, however, that this could be the result of the working or reworking of both texts any masculine community’ (Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript, p. 59). 125 Tristram, ‘More Talk of Alexander’: 660. 126 Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge, 2003), p. 35.

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to fit the concerns of the larger manuscript as echoes and parallels do also exist with all of its other texts. Simon Thomson offers the alternative suggestion that we should see the Wonders as the heart of the manuscript, the ‘magnet’ that pulled the other texts together. With its explicit questioning of orders, categories, and identities this would make sense. Thomson also draws attention to the importance of diversity and strangeness amongst the texts as a conscious element of the manuscript’s production.127 It is now impossible for us to say which, if any, single text was the kernel around which the manuscript grew, or how or in what order its texts were brought together; however, Thomson is right to note that diversity amongst them is as important as similarity. Land and place are key themes in each text, but the diversity of those lands and places is at least as pronounced as their similarities. What they all have in common, however, is that they are not England but places onto which English histories and anxieties can be projected. Place in Beowulf is as strange as it was in both the Wonders and the Letter, at the same time that it is also more familiar. The action of the poem takes place largely within the homelands of the Angles and Saxons and includes characters and events that would have been familiar from their own history. Beow the son of Scyld Scefing appears in the genealogies of the West Saxon kings, and the names of other individuals or peoples included in the poem appear elsewhere in historical sources. But it is also a dark and unfamiliar world of the past in which nature and the environment are every bit as threatening and full of strange and wondrous creatures as are the more distant lands in which the other texts are set. Unlike the land of the Wonders or the India of the Letter, however, there is nothing utopian that has either been lost entirely or is in the process of being threatened in Beowulf. The poem is set in a dystopian world in which all established orders are flawed and doomed to decline. There is both failure from within and destruction from without. The courts are dysfunctional because the codes through which they are organised and operate are dysfunctional, and the world outside the courts is unremittingly hostile. It is, then, very much like England, an England mirrored in a past that is, like those of the Franks Casket, elsewhere across the sea. I begin with the world outside the courts, with the wilds of forest, fen, and sea, and with Grendel and his mother’s mere. I do this because, unlike Scyld or Beowulf, neither Grendel nor his mother 127 Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript, pp. 28 and 46.

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arrive in Denmark; they are there from the beginning, descendants, the poet tells us, of the race of Cain. As far as the poet is concerned, they, like the wolves and water-monsters that inhabit the forests and mere, are the indigenous inhabitants of the land. As Fabienne Michelet and Alfred K. Siewers have demonstrated, both their half-human half-animal nature and their underground lair in the wilderness beyond civilisation are similar to the way the Britons and their habitations are characterised in texts such as Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica or Felix’s Life of Guthlac, and this encourages us to understand them as figuring the Britons in this poem, with the land itself a hostile home for the dehumanised Other.128 Similarly, their home beneath the mere is not constructed but has seemingly also always been there, like a prehistoric entrance to the underworld or an ancient barrow.129 As such, Grendel and his mother become the living dead, silent ghosts that refuse to remain buried and return to haunt those who would silence them. But despite being a cave-like space beneath a monsterfilled mere, the Grendelkin live in a hof (‘house’, ‘hall’, or ‘dwelling’, 1507b) or sele (hall), albeit a niðsele (‘hatred-filled hall’, 1513a). While he is in their hall, Beowulf becomes a selegyst (‘hall guest’, 1545b). In other words, while it may be hellish this is a court, like that of Heorot, from which Grendel and his mother rule, and in which the rules of human warrior society both apply and are turned on their head in the ensuing battle between the male warrior and the female beast occupant, a battle that is reminiscent of Alexander’s campaign against the giant boar-tusked women, and that looks forward to Judith’s battle against Holofernes. Although not constructed like the hall of the Danes, the mere-hall is a homely space. The poet specifies that it has a roof and is warmed and lit by a fire. It is filled with arms and treasure much like Heorot. Despite seeing maðmæhta ma … monige (‘many more treasures’, 1613), Beowulf leaves with only the hilt of the sword that he used to kill Grendel’s mother and decapitate the dead Grendel, who lies in his mother’s hall as if a sleeping child (he on ræste … licgan, 1585–6b). It 128 Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature, pp. 27–8; Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building’, in The Postmodern Beowulf, pp. 199–257, at 231, 236; Adam Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’, below p. 238. 129 Both Patrick Geary and Howard Williams interpret the cave of the Grendelkin as a barrow, but it is much more than simply that. See Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), p. 67; Howard Williams, Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain (Cambridge, 2006), p. 172.

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is uncanny space, both a home and unhomely, a hall and a cave-like dwelling deep beneath a mere, ‘neither wholly water nor wholly land’,130 the home of la bête. Both Estes and Siewers have discussed the hall and mere as a feminine space, which only strengthens the cave-hall’s identification as an anti-hall. The mere through which it is entered is filled with water-monsters, one of which, when killed, is identified as a wægbora, which is translated by Bosworth-Toller as ‘a wave-bearer’, a creature that lives beneath the waves, but by Klaeber as ‘lake-birth’ or ‘offspring of the waves’.131 Both Estes and Siewers cite Kristeva’s discussion of menstrual blood and feminine pollution in their analysis of the blood-filled mere as a feminine space that gives birth to monsters and through which Beowulf must pass.132 But it is also important to note that the hall is home to a beast (la bête) who is also a sovereign in this realm. In Kristeva’s analysis menstrual blood is both a reminder of feminine difference and a threat to patriarchal order,133 and women in Beowulf are all either direct threats to the patriarchal order of heroic warrior society through their refusal to function within its codes (like Grendel’s mother, a female warrior-beast), or indirect threats through their repeatedly reminding us of its fragility (the failure of the peace-weaver, for example). In the case of the peace-weaver, it is not the woman whose role it is to weave peace that fails, but the institution of peace weaving that is always doomed to failure. Estes suggests that the cave-like hall of Grendel and his mother is also a space outside of the nature that surrounds it because even the forest animals refuse to enter the mere,134 but strictly speaking this is not the case. The poet specifies that the creature that will not enter the water is an antlered hart (heorot-hornum, 1369a) pursued by hounds, an image that signifies patriarchal order both in its Christian symbolism of the soul and in its similarity to Hrothgar’s horn-decorated hall Heorot. As the natural world throughout the poem is a place of darkness and danger, the mere is really very much a 130 Heide Estes, Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination (Amsterdam, 2017), p. 45. 131 R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds, Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edn (Toronto, 2008), glossary sv. wægbora. They also list ‘wave-roamer’ and other possible translations of the term. 132 Estes, Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination, p. 47; Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building’, p. 236. 133 See further Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982), p. 71. 134 Estes, Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination, p. 83.

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part of that larger world, and as mearcstapa (‘border-wanderers’, 103a, 1348a) Grendel and his mother are both uncanny and melancholic enemy-doubles of the heath-roaming hart. The mere can therefore be read as a type of the womb of nature, a nature that fights back against intruders, as it did in the Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle. That it is simultaneously a tomb is in keeping with both the threat posed by the female,135 and with the dystopian world of the poem. Despite Beowulf ’s ‘rebirth’ from the womb/tomb after his fight with Grendel’s mother, he is ultimately doomed to be buried in the earth, the wilds beyond the civilisation for which he battles, the womb/tomb that provides the culminating image in Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’. Heorot is a mirror image of the hall beneath the mere, both like it and its opposite. The one is defined by and could not exist without the other,136 just as the sovereign cannot exist without the beast. It towers high over the earth rather than lying deep within it, floating like an island above the damp darkness of the home beneath the mere, forever in opposition to it.137 Heorot has all the prestige trappings of the warrior culture for which it was built. It is impressive, built on high ground and dominating the land around it. Its roof and walls gleam with gold and are reinforced with iron, visually proclaiming its strength. It has outbuildings, including a chamber for the queen to which Hrothgar retires before Beowulf ’s battle with Grendel. Its interior is decorated with gilded benches, a throne and other trimmings, including gold-patterned wall-hangings. But after the attacks of Grendel and his mother it is decorated with blood and gore. It is filled with music and poetry, the noise of celebration and the ringing of mail-shirts and armour, but it is also filled with the wailing and lamentation of those mourning the dead whose armour-skin failed to save them. It is an unstable place, and famously its destruction is mentioned in the same lines as its construction. It is ultimately no defence against the forces that threaten it. Both Grendel and his mother easily penetrate the hall, though in the end it succumbs not to them but to the flames of human warfare – destined to destruction by the same conquering ethos through which it was built in the first place. It is amongst other things the product of, and a towering symbol of, human vanity. After Hrothgar enjoys success in battle: 135 Estes, Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination, pp. 47–8. 136 Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building’, p. 216. 137 Edward B. Irving, Rereading Beowulf (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 150.

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Him on mod bearn þæt heal-reced  haton wolde medo-ærn micel  men gewyrcean þonne yldo bearn  æfre gefrunon (67b–70) (It came into his mind that he would command men to build a hall, a greater mead-hall than the children of ancestors had ever heard of).

It is from its very inception meant to be greater than all other halls, a statement that is reminiscent of Alexander’s boasts about his own greatness and that of his army. It is also the product of violence, built as a monument to the conquest of other peoples, and thus a fitting crypt for the society that built it. Michelet suggests quite rightly that what really motivates Grendel’s attacks is not the noise of song and celebration coming from within the hall but the fact that the hall and all it contains represent a new and intrusive political authority materialising its claim to and reorganisation of the land and its existing order.138 The marshes are not borderlands until Heorot becomes the centre in relation to which they then must be defined, and Grendel and his mother are not originally inhabitants of the marshy borderlands, they are pushed into that melancholy existence by Hrothgar and the construction of Heorot. It is therefore appropriate that the final fight against Grendel’s mother, the insubordinate indigene, occupies the centre of the poem.139 But the occupation of and claim to the Grendelkin’s land are also reflected in the story of Creation sung by the scop. It is in Creation that man gains the power of naming through which he stakes his claim over all the other creatures in the world, and it is at this moment in the poem that we learn that man has named the beast Grendel: wæs se grimma gast  Grendel haten mære mearc-stapa,  se þe moras heold fen ond fæsten. (lines 102–104a)

(the grim ghost/guest, great stepper in the borderlands, was called Grendel, he who held the moors, fen, and fastnesses.)

138 Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature, pp. 22, 150–2. 139 Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, p. 53; Eileeen A. Joy, ‘Exteriority is Not a Negation, But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf ’, in Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, ed. Eileen A. Joy, et al. (New York, 2007), 237–67.

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Grendel may be a cursed male being (wonsæli wer, ‘unblessed or evil male’, line 105),140 a descendant of Cain, but the descendants of Cain include elves, giants, evil spirits, and other beings who war against God. As something so much less than human, Grendel (and his mother) cannot have human language. Neither Grendel nor his mother ever speak. Grendel is Beowulf ’s wolfish double, the beast twin that the sovereign/warrior must destroy. But like his mother he is also a sovereign, mearcstapa, mearcweard (warden of the borderlands), wolf, wearg (outlaw), utlaga (‘outlaw’, literally ‘outside the law’, ‘beyond its borders’).141 Grendel prowls the borderlands and watches over his dark kingdom, but Beowulf also watches it, steps into it, and claims it. The uncanny triangle of identity in which the Grendelkin and Beowulf are caught is also reflected in the word gæst and its compounds. Gæst can be translated as either ghost or guest depending on whether the vowel is long or short, but the manuscript itself gives no indication of vowel length, leaving the three ghostly guests caught between the word’s two meanings. It is the humans in Beowulf who are the perpetual outsiders and invaders. Scyld, founder of the dynasty from which Hrothgar descends, arrives in Denmark as a foundling washed up on the shore and proceeds to expand his polity through the conquest of the peoples he finds there.142 The first thing we learn about Scyld is that he battled many opponents and deprived many people of their mead-seats. He made the nobles fear him (egsoda eorlas, 6a). Hrothgar proudly continues his ancestor’s military success and, as noted above, Heorot is constructed as a result. Beowulf too is an outsider who arrives in Denmark to aid Hrothgar in the fight against Grendel and his mother. Unlike Scyld and Hrothgar, however, Beowulf is always uncannily both in and out of place. His very name suggests an animal element to his nature that exists alongside the human. He is larger and stronger than any man, equally matched in strength if not in size with the monster Grendel, and his lord, Hygelac, is identified as a monster in the Liber monstrorum. He arrives from the sea and the first thing that we really learn about 140 Wer need not be translated as human man. It can indicate the male gender of an inhuman or not fully human creature as in the Old English compound werewulf. See also Eileen A. Joy, ‘Exteriority is Not a Negation, But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf ’. 141 On borders see further Elaine Treharne, ‘Borders’ in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. Jacqueline Stodnick and Reneé Trilling (Oxford, 2012), pp. 9–22. 142 Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf, p. 22; Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature, pp. 49–50.

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his past and his nature is that he took part in an ill-advised swimming competition in the sea with his companion Breca. As man he is as out of place in the sea with his gilded mail-shirt as he is in the mere, but the mail-shirt is also what saves him from the water-monsters that assail him in both cases. On the other hand, as beast he is at home enough in the sea to survive in it for seven nights, and he is the only human able to enter the mere and the hall beneath it. Like the beast and the outlaw he exists outside of the laws that apply to ordinary humans. Beowulf ’s repeated crossing of bodies of water replays the tropes of exile and migration and is also a colonising action. The swimming competition establishes the superiority of his strength over other warriors, albeit in a way that simultaneously calls into question his honesty and integrity. His journey through the mere and defeat of Grendel’s mother cleanses the land and water of their threats, ‘civilising’ the territory for the Danes. His journey to and success in Denmark leads to Hrothgar offering him his colonial kingdom. His journey back across the water to Geatland will ultimately result in his taking the crown of that kingdom – though his delay in accepting the throne leads to further strife (lines 2373–96).143 Of course he fails to maintain control of or order in any of the kingdoms in which he triumphs or over which he rules. Heorot will burn and Beowulf will die without heir, leaving his kingdom without a king and open to attack. In this respect he is much like the Alexander of the Letter, right down to his glittering armoured warband, though on a much smaller scale. Like Alexander in the Wonders, Beowulf is also a lethal creature. The wolf was one of the beasts of battle, and the ‘wulf ’ element of Beowulf ’s name both connects him to this creature of the battlefield and is a sign of the violent bestial nature within him. Like gæst, it also connects him with Grendel, the outcast living amongst wolves and other wild beasts in the wulf-hleoþu (‘wolf-hills’, 1358a), and with Grendel’s mother who is twice referred to as a sea-wolf (brim-wylf, 1506a, 1599a), a term that recalls the image of Beowulf swimming in the sea. It also connects him to the manuscript’s other texts, the wolf being very much the wild ancestor of the dog.144 In fact he could be understood as a type of werewolf, a wer-wulf, wer being the Old English word for man, in the tradition of the Irish fénnid, fighting Stephanie Hollis, ‘Beowulf and the Succession’, Parergon 1 (1983): 39–54, at 46. Aleksander Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 15. See also David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago, 1991). 143

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men who were described as fáelad (wolfing) when they were in battle, pillaging, or hunting.145 The wolf challenges human dominance over animals,146 but in the form of the man-wolf monster it also challenges human order and the category of the human – as of course does the Cynocephalus. As a she-wolf Grendel’s mother then becomes doubly threatening, doubly other to the poem’s masculine order. Women in the poem exist as signs of the gaps and flaws in the social order. Their function as peace-weavers continually fails to bring peace. Wealhtheow’s misplaced trust in the succession of blood relatives, and the loyalty of her nephew Hrothulf, will cost her sons their kingdom after Hrothgar’s death.147 These human women may, as Stacy Klein suggests, point towards a new model of heroism based on the strength of internal moral victories rather than on external violence,148 but moral victories have no place in this world. Whatever the case, according to the laws of heroic warrior society, women do not enter into battle as does Grendel’s mother, and this indicates her existence outside of any order, her place outside the law. It is with Grendel rather than his mother, however, that Beowulf has the closest connection. They are equally matched in strength if not in size, and both are hyper-masculine beings.149 Both are intruders in Heorot, though for diametrically opposed reasons, and each is a ghost-guest in the other’s hall.150 Both are æglæcan/aglæcan (‘awe-inspiring’, 159a, 1512a), as are Beowulf and the dragon (2592a). Hilderinc (warrior) is used to describe Grendel (986b) and Beowulf (1495a, 1576a) as well as Hrothgar (1307a), and Beowulf ’s troops after the battle with the dragon (3124a). Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe has discussed the way in which Beowulf and Grendel become one 145 Karkov, ‘Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland’, p. 99. 146 Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages. 147 While Wealhtheow’s trust is misplaced it is within the traditional expectation of primogeniture, and she is by no means a foolish or merely decorative figure, pace Orchard who describes her as meddling, ineffective in her speech, a giver of baubles, and someone who simply bustles about (A Critical Companion to Beowulf, pp. 220, 222, 226, 246). Wealhtheow, along with the other women of the poem, indeed along with the other women of the manuscript, plays a crucial role in both demonstrating and speaking to the doomed nature of the social order. 148 Stacy S. Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), pp. 88–9. 149 Dana Oswald identifies the werewolf as ‘perhaps the most fully hypermasculine figure’ (‘Monstrous Gender: Geographies of Ambiguity’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle (Farnham, 2012), pp. 329–63, at 348). 150 Above, p. 174.

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body during their fight, drawing attention to their mutual existence at the edges of the human. She sees a permanent separation between the two, however, that is based in Grendel’s fully inhuman nature and Beowulf ’s fully human one.151 But Grendel is not fully inhuman. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, on the other hand, sees Beowulf and Grendel as the same being, although his main point is that the two figures serve to reveal the limits of the self rather than the troubled nature of sovereignty or conquest.152 However we choose to interpret them, there is no doubt that they ask us to consider not only the relationship between the human and its others, but also the relationship between what we consider ‘civilisation’ and its others. As an indigene dwelling in a colonised land Grendel is fully justified in fighting back, but as a representative of the coloniser Beowulf also claims his battle is justified. The conflict between the two was set in motion the moment Scyld began to build his kingdom and underscores the conflicted way in which rule over a land or people is established and maintained. Citing Aimé Césairé’s observation that the coloniser’s figuring of the colonial as an animal has the ‘boomerang’ effect of transforming the coloniser into an animal himself, Gabriele Schwab notes that the psychic deformation that results generally remains buried in the subconscious , both haunting the coloniser and leading to the ‘ghostly return of violent histories’.153 This is exactly what happens in the Beowulf poem as well as in the Anglo-Saxonism and scholarly and physical violence that surround its study and appropriation in the modern world. It is perhaps Grendel and Beowulf ’s function as uncanny doubles of each other that has led to the enormous range of ways, sometimes contradictory, in which they have been interpreted over the years.154 Grendel has been read as pure evil, an ogre, a figure of sloth,155 a representation of the dark side of human nature,156 and more recently Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, ‘Beowulf, Lines 702b–836: Transformations and the Limits of the Human’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature 23.4 (1981): 484–94. See also Manish Sharma, ‘Metalepsis and Monstrosity: The Boundaries of Narrative Structure in Beowulf’, Studies in Philology 102.3 (2005): 247–79. 152 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1999), p. xv. 153 Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, p. 48. 154 It is important to note that Grendel is described as uncanny (uncuð) multiple times throughout the poem: see lines 276b, 960a, 1410b, 2213b–2214a. 155 For a representative range of interpretations of Grendel see Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, Klaeber’s Beowulf, xliii–xliv. 156 Joy, ‘Exteriority is Not a Negation, But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf ’; O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Beowulf, Lines 702b–836: Transformations and the Limits of the Human’. 151

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as a figure of the indigenous Britons.157 Beowulf has been understood as a hero of some variety by, amongst others, Tolkien, Earl, Overing, and Hostetter,158 while yet others question his heroism and/or the heroic nature of the poem in general.159 Some, such as Powell and Orchard,160 see him as a hero but a deeply flawed one, acknowledging that he is at the very least guilty of pride. Beowulf ’s pride and his contradictory nature are manifested materially in the gryre-geatwum (‘terror-ornaments’, 324a) that adorn him and his men and that continue to pile up around him to the end of the poem. The gleam of the Geats’ war-gear, its gilding, strength, and animal imagery are described multiple times during their stay at Hrothgar’s court. As they make their way from the shore to Heorot: eofor-lic scionon ofer hleor-bergan  gehroden golde, fah ond fyrheard (303b–305a)

(boar-images shone over cheek-guards, covered with gold, ornamented and fire-hardened).

And as they approach Heorot, the iron-rings of their mail-shirts sang (323a) and rang (327b). As Beowulf speaks to Hrothgar his mail-shirt, the work of the wronged yet criminal Weland, gleams (405b). After killing Grendel, Hrothgar presents Beowulf with a golden sword, decorated banner, helmet and mail-shirt, and a saddle decorated with jewels, while Wealhtheow gives him even more golden treasures. The poet also lingers on Beowulf ’s appearance as he readies himself to descend into the mere: scolde here-byrne  hondum gebroden, 157 Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’; Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature, pp. 27–8; Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building’, pp. 231, 236. 158 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95; James Earl, Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford, 1994); Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale, 1990); Aaron Hostetter, ‘Disruptive Things in Beowulf’, New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 34–61. 159 Michael Lapidge, ‘Beowulf and the Psychology of Terror’, in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo, MI, 1993), pp. 373–402, at 373–4, questioned the heroic nature of the poem rather than Beowulf ’s heroism; Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf, passim. 160 Powell, ‘Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript’; Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript.

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sid ond searo-fah,  sund cunnian … ac se hwita helm  hafelan werede se þe mere-grundas  mengan scolde, secan sund-gebland  since geweorðad, befongen frea-wrasnum,  swa hine fyrn-dagum worhte wæpna smið,  wundrum teode, besette swin-licum … … him on ðearfe lah  ðyle Hroðgares; wæs þæm hæft-mece  Hrunting nama; þæt wæs an foran  eald-gestreona; ecg wæs iren,  ater-tanum fah, ahyrded heaþo-swate. (1443–60) (his mail-shirt braided by hand, wide and skilfully ornamented was to know swimming … but the bright helmet protected the head, which was to stir up the mere-bed, seek the surging water, decorated with jewels, encircled by a splendid band, just as the weapon-smith had worked it in days of old, wondrously formed, beset with boar-images … Hrothgar’s spokesman lent him in his need that hilted sword. Hrunting was its name; it was foremost of ancient treasures, its edge was iron decorated with poison twigs, hardened in battle-sweat.)

As Mittman and MacCormack have suggested, gryre-geatwum, with their shining gold and jewels and animal ornament have the effect of turning whoever wears them into a ‘fabulated’ body, part human, part animal, part metallic war-machine, a ‘posthuman teratological creature’.161 Covered in his war-gear the warrior was a visual spectacle both beautiful and deadly, truly aglæca (awe-inspiring). The word is used to describe Beowulf (1512, 2592), Sigemund, and the dragon, but it is used far more frequently for Grendel or his mother.162 The ability to elicit terror and awe are features that unite the warriors and their opponents, indicating that they are not only equally matched, but that they can be perceived as split-sleves, two of a kind. In Beowulf the warriors wear their armour and weaponry like the wonder-suits of the Wonders of the East, turning them into wonder-like fighting machines that both intrigue and terrify. Perhaps this is the reason so much

161 Asa Simon Mittman and Patricia MacCormack. ‘Rebuilding the Fabulated Bodies of the Hoard-warriors’. See also Caroline Brady, ‘Weapons in Beowulf: An Analysis of the Nominal Compounds and an Evaluation of the Poet’s Use of Them’, Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979): 79–141, esp. 86–7. 162 Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 33; idem, A Critical Companion to Beowulf, p. 197. It is also used to describe the whale on the Franks Casket, see above, p. 88.

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attention is paid to helmets in the poem.163 The helmet surrounds or covers the face of the warrior, and putting it on or taking it off changes entirely the way a human being looks. It is the face and not the shape of the body that is the outward assurance of the human.164 That Beowulf fights Grendel without armour or weapons may then be yet another indication of their entangled identity, the human twin facing and defeating his wolfish animal brother. But for all Beowulf and his men’s glittering gryre-geatwum, their weapons and ornaments fail them again and again. Swords are useless against Grendel. Hrunting proves equally useless to Beowulf in his fight with Grendel’s mother, and even the ancient giant’s sword with which he eventually kills her and decapitates Grendel fails to survive as a functional weapon as its blade is melted away by Grendel’s blood. Its hilt does remain, however, to tell the history of the death of the giants in the biblical flood, the first indigenous giants whose deaths the deaths of Grendel and his mother beneath the mere replicate. The marvellous neck-ring that Wealhtheow gives to Beowulf, and Beowulf passes on to Hygelac, is lost to the enemy when Hygelac dies in battle in Frisia. In his final battle Beowulf ’s sword fails to kill the dragon, his shield is burnt away, and even his miraculous mail-shirt fails to protect him when the dragon bites his neck and its poison surges into his breast. The hoard around which the final battle is fought is also useless. The dragon is none the better for his treasures (ne byð him wihte ðy sel, 2277b), and the cup that is stolen from it brings only death. The poem’s houses and halls all perish and burn. Beowulf wants to gaze on the great golden hoard before he dies but, although there is much gold, the hoard is also decaying and falling into bits. Pitchers have been stripped of their ornament and helmets are rusting (lines 2760–2769b). And the wealth that Beowulf believes he has acquired for his people also fails. Wiglaf ’s final speech to his cowardly comrades draws attention to the failure of both things and the people who possess them. Nu sceal sinc-þego  ond swyrd -gifu eall eðel-wyn  eowrum cynne, lufen alicgean;  lond-rihtes mot þære mæg-burge  monna æghwylc idel hweorfan,  syððan æðelingas feorran gefricgean  fleam eowerne domleasan dæd. (2884–2890a) 163 164

Gillian R. Overing, ‘Beowulf on Gender’, New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010): 1–22. Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, pp. 105–18.

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(Now the receiving of treasure and sword gifts, all the enjoyment and comfort of home shall fail for your family; every one of your kinsmen will go deprived of land-rights after the nobles learn from afar of your flight, dishonourable deeds.)

He then goes on to list the people who will now attack them before he and the Geats build a barrow for their dead king and fill it with the useless treasures from the hoard. Hi on beorg dydon  beg ond siglu, eall swylce hyrsta  swylce on horde ær nið-hedige men  genumen hæfdon; forleton eorla gestreon  eroðan healdan, gold on greote,  þær hit nu gen lifað, eldum swa unnyt  swa hyt æror wæs. (3163–8) (They placed in the barrow rings and jewels, all such ornaments as afflicted people had previously taken from the hoard, they left the earth holding the nobles’ treasure, gold in the ground, where it now still lives, as useless to people as it was before.)

As Hostetter and Paz note, the things in Beowulf are deliberately disruptive. They have a mind of their own, as for example when Hrunting fails in the fight with Grendel’s mother: se beado-leoma bitan nolde (‘the war-gleaming sword did not want to bite’, 1523).165 The rune-incised hilt that Beowulf brings back from the lair is also a warning about becoming monstrous and the retribution that inevitably follows, though he fails to grasp its message.166 But Beowulf ’s similarities with Grendel indicate that he is already monstrous. Both men and monsters (or the war-leader and the beast) are trapped in a social order that demands a wrong be righted with revenge and violence, and a psychic order that demands the return of violence. Grendel seeks revenge for the intrusion into his land; his mother seeks revenge for the killing of her son; Beowulf exacts revenge for the killing of Æschere. Even the dragon, like Grendel, a creature from within the land, avenges the theft of his cup and Beowulf is forced to avenge the destruction wrought by the dragon. The poem ends with the suggestion that the Geats will descend into the same dystopian chaos that the Danes endured before the arrival of Scyld.167 Only Hostetter, ‘Disruptive Things in Beowulf’: 40–1; Paz, Nonhuman Voices in AngloSaxon Literature and Material Culture, p. 46. See also Overing, ‘Beowulf on Gender’: 11–12, on the independent will of Beowulf ’s armour as he dresses to enter the mere. 166 Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture, pp. 34, 55. 167 Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf, p. 104. 165

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Beowulf ’s tomb remains on the headland, a reminder to passing seafarers of the destruction of a king and his people and the failure of a dystopian society.

JUDITH On the surface Judith, like The Life of St Christopher, might not appear to be a dystopian text, but it is deeply disturbing on a number of levels. It is a poem that deals with conquest, war, brutality, rape, and greed, and also one in which gender, gender roles, and the human are all unstable categories. War is always dystopian, so however we interpret the poem as a whole it is set in the dystopian context of a clash of cultures and peoples and the threat of violent conquest. Holofernes, as the instigator of political and sexual violence, embodies the dystopia that would spread itself across peoples. But Judith is also a troubling figure. There is something inhuman and wondrous about her beauty, and she uses her beauty as a weapon just as effectively as Beowulf uses his strength and his sword. She uses Holofernes’s own sword to kill and decapitate him, and after the defeat of the Assyrians she accepts his personal armour and treasure. By assuming his trappings as a war-leader she has assumed his position of strength and authority, but has she also assumed his greedy and violent character? The poet leaves this question open, and it thus remains a possibility in the reader’s mind. It is possible that the poem tells the story of a successful defence against the threat of dystopia, but it is also possible that it suggests that one violent ruler has simply been exchanged for another. It is undeniable that the poem shows us a strong and intelligent woman in a position of power, but it also leaves open the question of at what cost. Or might the poem be read as questioning the very nature and power of power itself? However the poem is read, it is important to remember firstly that it is a paraphrase of the Old Testament book of the same name and that it differs significantly from that text (just as the Junius 11 Genesis differs significantly from the biblical book), and secondly that the Old Testament, as Ælfric emphasised in his Preface to Genesis, was a dangerous and troubling text. The beginning of the poem is missing, but there is no agreement as to how much is missing, nine fitts or just a few lines.168 As it survives it begins four days into Judith’s stay in the Assyrian camp with the 168 For a discussion of the different opinions that also read the fragmentary text through the fragmented body of Holofernes see Susan M. Kim, ‘Bloody Signs:

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drunken feast of Holofernes. The Old Testament Book of Judith begins with Nebuchodonoser who wants to bring all the world into his empire, much like Alexander, and so sends his general Holofernes out to wage war to that end. The Bethulians, secure in their mountain stronghold, refuse either to submit or do battle with the Assyrian forces so the Assyrians cut off their water. The beautiful widow Judith ends the siege by travelling to the Assyrian camp, accompanied by her maid, in order to lure Holofernes to his death with her beauty. She beheads the general in his bed when he passes out after too much drink, and she and her maid travel back to their own people with the head as a sign of their victory. The sight of the head rouses the Bethulians to fight, just as the sight of their leader’s decapitated body causes the Assyrians to flee. The Bethulians claim all the treasure that the Assyrians leave behind and present it to Judith, who refuses it and offers it to God instead. The poem Judith follows that basic narrative but makes some significant changes to the characters involved, as well as to details of individual events. As is generally acknowledged, it elevates Holofernes from a general to a prince and makes him far more brutal and monstrous than he is in the Bible, while at the same time making Judith more virtuous and less seductive than the biblical heroine. Otherwise there is significant disagreement over the nature and message of the poem. Some see it as a straightforward religious allegory, some as a political poem intended as a model of heroism for the English defending their country against the Viking invaders, and some see it as a poem that destabilises ideas of heroism and virtue, humanity, and also poetic genres. It is neither a saint’s life nor a heroic epic though it contains elements of both genres, and it could be read as both religious and secular or neither clearly one nor the other. As noted above, some believe that it originally preceded the Life of St Christopher in the manuscript, while others see it as logically in place after Beowulf. Whatever its original position, it certainly echoes themes in both these texts. Like the texts that now precede it, Judith deals with the invasion of a foreign territory. Holofernes is the invader and Judith and her people the threatened population who fight back and in this case win. There is nothing heroic about Holofernes. He is the devil’s kin (deofulcunda, 61), mad with mead (medu-gal, 26a), and a heathen hound (hæðenan hund, 110a). Christopher was also quite literally a heathen Circumcision and Pregnancy in the Old English Judith’, Exemplaria 11 (1999): 285–307.

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hound before he converted to Christianity but, unlike Christopher, Holofernes sinks deeper and deeper into depravity, and this poem is not specifically about religion anyway. Holofernes is a warrior, connected to Alexander and Beowulf not by his military abilities, as he does no fighting in this poem, but by his accumulation of shiny golden treasure and his dispensing of treasure to his troops. He is a goldwina gumena (‘gold-friend of men’, 22a) and a distributor of treasure (‘sinces brytta’, 30a). Like Grendel and his mother, Holofernes never speaks directly, although we are told that he does order people about. In fact, no one in the poem other than Judith speaks until after Holofernes is killed, a point to which I will return. Holofernes and his men do, however, make a lot of inarticulate noise. … Holofernes… hloh ond hlydde,  hlynede ond dynede, þæt mihten fira bearn  feorran gehyran hu he stið-moda  styrmde ond gylede, modig ond medu-gal. (21–26a) (… Holofernes… laughed and clamoured, yelled and roared, so that the children of men could hear from afar how the stout-hearted one stormed and yelled, vain and mad with mead.)

Judith, on the other hand, does almost all the speaking, both to God and to her people. She is described as blessed (35a), prudent in mind (‘ferhð-gleawe’, 41a), wise (55a), holy (98a, 160b), and clear-sighted (171a). But the poet also uses some words to describe her that are more ambiguous in their meaning. For example, she is searoðoncol (145a), a word that can mean wise, but can also mean wily or cunning. She is ælfscinu (‘shining like an elf ’, 14a), which could be a way of describing her incomparable beauty but could also imply that there is an element of the threatening or the monstrous about her. Belanoff points out that the compound suggests a sense of the dangerously seductive, as the only other place it is used is in Genesis A to describe Sarah when Abraham, worried about the power of her beauty, asks her to pretend she is his sister (1827), and when Abimelech realises that the plagues sent to punish him are due to his having attempted to take her for his wife (2731).169 Estes suggests that another term used to describe her, 169 Patricia A. Belanoff, ‘Judith: Sacred and Secular Heroine’, in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo, MI, 1993), pp. 247–64, at 250–51; Heide Estes, ‘Feasting with Holofernes: Digesting Judith in Anglo-Saxon England’, Exemplaria 15 (2003): 325–50, at 344; see also Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, p. 346.

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wundenloc (‘curly-haired’, 77b, 103b), has sexual connotations as well as serving to identify her as Hebrew in the context of this poem.170 Judith was a popular figure in pre-Conquest England, a type of Ecclesia and an example of chastity for women in the writings of Aldhelm, Alcuin, and Ælfric, and of heroism for men in Ælfric’s letter to Sigeweard that accompanies the Old English Hexateuch. But there is also something ‘not quite right’ about Judith; her beauty is lethal and her heroism destabilises traditional medieval ideas about heroism.171 Both Aldhelm and Ælfric had reservations about her adornment, though for different reasons, and Ælfric also seems to have been at pains to reassure his readers that she was not a liar.172 As ides ælfscinu, Judith could, in fact, be described as the ultimate terror-ornament. She is brought to Holofernes’s tent covered with rings and jewellery (beagum gehlæste, hringum gehrodene, 36b–37a), as shining with gold and silver and as much a fabulated creature as the male warriors of Beowulf or The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle. Like the warriors in Beowulf, she too wields a decorated sword (104b), becoming an unsettling combination of the image of passive elite feminine beauty and male killing machine. In the biblical text Judith prays to God for the strength to behead Holofernes but she does not do so in the poem. She prays for mercy (85a, 91a) and for victory (89a) but not for strength or courage. The poet writes that God gives her strength (95a), but nowhere does she ask for it, nor do her words suggest that she was ever lacking in it. The scene of the beheading is similar in many ways to Beowulf ’s battle with Grendel’s mother and his beheading of Grendel, although Estes, ‘Feasting with Holofernes: Digesting Judith in Anglo-Saxon England’: 348. Erin Mulally, ‘The Cross-Gendered Gift: Weaponry in the Old English Judith’, Exemplaria 17 (2005): 255–84. See also John P. Herman, Allegories of War (Ann Arbor, 1989), pp. 181–98; Karma Lochrie, ‘Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith’, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington, IN, 1994), pp. 1–20; Mary Clayton, ‘Ælfric’s Judith: Manipulative or Manipulated’, Anglo-Saxon England 23 (1994): 215–27. The identification of something ‘not quite right’ about the poem goes back to Burton Raffel, although he was referring primarily to the poem’s hypermetricity: Burton Raffel, ‘Judith: Hypometricity and Rhetoric’, in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (Notre Dame, IN 1975), pp. 124–34. 172 In the prose De virginitate Aldhelm admits that her adornment leads to the ruin of men, while Ælfric had concerns about her acceptance of Holofernes armour (in the poem) and her assuring Holofernes that she would bring him into Bethulia (in the Vulgate). See Aldhelm, Aldhelm the Prose Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 126–7; Stuart Lee, ed. Ælfric’s Homilies on ‘Judith’, ‘Esther’, and the Maccabees, lines 339–55, and 357–8 http://users.ox.ac. uk/~stuart/. 170 171

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its destabilisation of identity and merging of opponents is actually more complex. Judith pulls the drunken Holofernes to her so that she could most easily have power over him (swa heo ðæs unlædan eaðost mihte / wel gewealdan, 102–103a) in a reversal of the sexual conquest Holofernes had imagined would take place.173 The poet lingers over the beheading, devoting fourteen lines to an event that in the Old Testament book takes up only two. In both versions it takes two strokes of the sword to sever the head. This is stated simply as a matter of fact in the Vulgate, but the poet expands on the gory details of both the attack and Holofernes’s death Sloh ða wunden-locc þone feond-sceaðan  fagum mece, hete-þoncolne,  þæt heo healfne forcearf þone sweoran him  þæt he on swiman læg, drunken ond dolh-wund.  Næs ða dead þa gyt, ealles orsawle;  sloh ða eornoste ides ellen-rof  oðre siðe þone hæðenan hund,  þæt him þæt heafod wand forð on ða flore.  Læg se fula leap gesne beæftan;  gast ellor hwearf under neowelne næs  ond ðær genyðerad wæs, susle gesæled  syððan æfre. (103–14) (The curly-haired one then struck the fiend, the hostile-minded one with a decorated sword so that she carved half-way through his neck, so that he lay unconscious, drunk, and wounded. He was not dead yet, completely soulless; the brave woman then struck the heathen hound courageously a second time so that the head rolled away on the floor. The foul trunk lay behind lifeless; the soul turned elsewhere under a deep cliff and was condemned there, bound to torment ever afterward.)

In the Vulgete Judith also cuts the golden net that surrounds Holofernes’s bed. That cut and the two that she makes to the neck serve a larger narrative purpose of connecting the beheading to the acts of castration and circumcision. Framed by the figures of the eunuch Vagao who leads her to Holofernes’s chamber, and Achior who converts and is circumcised after seeing Judith’s victory, this symbolism is much clearer in the Vulgate than it is in the poem, 173 Hermann (Allegories of War, p. 192) discusses Judith’s ambivalence as both an object of desire and destroyer of those who would desire her, the mother who castrates the child who desires her in his interpretation.

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though it is present in the poem nonetheless.174 In the context of the manuscript, the two cuts to the neck resonate with the two blows of the sword it takes Beowulf to dispatch Grendel’s mother and decapitate Grendel. Beowulf seizes Grendel’s mother by the hair (1537a) and throws her to the floor, although she fights back, and he kills her with a blow to the neck from the giant’s sword – a sword that belongs, like Judith’s, to his doomed opponent. Grendel, though dead, is lying as if asleep (1586b–1587a) when Beowulf severs his head with a strong stroke (heoro-sweng heardne, 1590a) of the same sword. Beowulf carries the severed head back to Hrothgar in his hands, while Judith instructs her maid to place the bloody head of Holofernes in her food basket, which they then carry back to Bethulia. Holofernes’s head thus becomes reminiscent of the head of the intruder left uneaten by the Donestre in the Wonders, and perhaps like it a metaphor for the split self. Similar readings have been suggested by others. Holofernes is both a feminised, or emasculated, figure and a helpless childlike one, while Judith is both the phallic woman, or a female-become-male warrior, and a maternal one, bearing the head back to the Hebrews as a form of spiritual sustenance. Susan Kim notes that Judith’s claim to Holofernes’s head creates a particular relationship for her to her own body as well as to that of the dead Holofernes, in which the head that is cut from the latter is redeposited to be included within the space of the former, becoming a symbolic and perverse pregnancy.175 Heide Estes, on the other hand, reads the carrying of Holofernes’s head in the food basket and its subsequent display to the Hebrews as a meal that cannot be digested and representative of ‘the poem’s ultimate incapacity to transform the biblical figure of Judith into a fully acceptable Anglo-Saxon Christian heroine’.176 Each of these readings demonstrate the extent to which the poem resonates with other texts in the manuscript. The secreting, carrying, and revealing of the bloody head as a type of pregnancy has echoes in Beowulf ’s travel upwards through the bloody mere, his rebirth, carrying the head of Grendel. In his case it is he and Grendel that are reborn as one, but Judith’s (re)birthing of Holofernes can also be understood 174 Hermann, Allegories of War, pp. 175, 189–90; Kim, ‘Bloody Signs: Circumcision and Pregnancy in the Old English Judith’, Exemplaria 11 (1999): 285–307. 175 Kim, ‘Bloody Signs: Circumcision and Pregnancy in the Old English Judith’: 289, 301–4. Mary Dockray-Miller (‘Female Community in the Old English Judith’, Studia Neuphilologica 70 (1998): 165–72) also reads Judith as a mother figure, though her focus is on the relationship between Judith and the daughter figure of her maid. 176 Estes, ‘Feasting with Holofernes: Digesting Judith in Anglo-Saxon England’: 350.

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as part of her becoming Holofernes, a point to which I will return. Reading the head as the meal that cannot be digested, resonates, as noted, with the story of the Donestre in the Wonders of the East, who consumes its victims all except for the head over which it weeps. There is no weeping over Holofernes’s head, although the Assyrians do weep over his headless body. As was the case with the Donestre the unconsumed head in Judith raises the issue of language, though again in a rather different way. Holofernes is said to communicate with his troops in the poem but we do not hear him speak and he is certainly not in control of language. Neither do the Assyrians speak until the discovery of the headless corpse. As the Hebrew’s attack, the Assyrians run to Holoferenes’ tent, making noises and grinding their teeth outside it until one of their number summons the courage to venture in. On discovering the corpse he falls to the ground tearing at his hair and clothes (details also in the Vulgate), a conventional image of female hysteria that goes back to antiquity.177 He is also now able to read the Assyrian’s doom in the headless corpse. Her ys geswutelod  ure sylfra forwyrd toweard getacnod  þæt þære tide ys mid niðum neah geðrungen,  þe we sculon nyde losian, somod æt sæcce forweorðan.  Her lið sweorde geheawen, beheafdod healdend ure. (285–8) (Here is made known our own destruction that is to come, our future betokened, that the time is drawn near when we will with violence be oppressed, when we shall of necessity be lost, perish together in conflict. Here lies our lord hewn by a sword, beheaded.)

The Assyrians then throw down their weapons and attempt to flee. Judith, now the head of her people, reads much the same message in Holofernes’s severed head, calling on the Hebrew men to prepare for battle against the doomed Assyrians.178 Berað linde forð, bord for breostum  ond byrn-homas, 177 See, for example, the descriptions and depictions of the Vices in the pre-­ Conquest illuminated Psychomachia manuscripts; Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Broken Bodies and Singing Tongues: Gender and Voice in the Cambridge Corpus Christi College 23 Psychomachia’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 313–31. 178 See also the useful discussion of the intersection of gender, class, and violence in the reading of these body fragments in Karma Lochrie. ‘Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith’, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington, IN, 1994), pp. 1–20, at 12.

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scire helmas  in sceaðena gemong; fyllað folc-togan  fagum sweordum, fæge frum-garas.  Fynd syndon eowere gedemed to deaðe,  ond ge dom agon, tir æt tohtan,  swa eow getacnod hafað mihtig Dryhten  þurh mine hand. (191b–198) (Bear forth your linden shields, before your breasts and mail coats, bright helmets into the enemy company; fell their commanders, doomed leaders, with decorated swords. Our enemies are doomed to death, and you will have glory at that battle, as the mighty Lord has revealed to you through my hand.)

Judith has now been transformed into a military leader, the position Holofernes once occupied, a version of la bête as sovereign, both alike and unlike Grendel’s mother. She is beautiful but she is just as deadly as Grendel’s mother, perhaps more so as her beauty is part of her deadliness. The Hebrews swiftly defeat the Assyrians and carry their treasure and their weapons back to present to Judith, amongst them Holofernes’s own personal war-gear, making her transformation complete. Hi to mede hyre of ðam siðfate  sylfre brohton, eorlas æsc-rofe,  Holofernes sweord ond swatigne helm,  swylce eac side byrnan gerenode readum golde,  ond eal þæt se rinca baldor, swið-mod sinces ahte  oððe sundor-yrfes, beaga ond beorhtra maðma,  hi þæt þære beorhtan idese ageafon gearo-þoncolre. (334b–340) (As a reward to herself they brought from that journey, spear-famed nobles, Holofernes’s sword and bloody helmet, and likewise his broad mail coat trimmed with red gold, and all that the violent prince of men had owned of riches and heirlooms, rings and bright treasures, they gave that to the prudent bright woman.)

This final transformation highlights the way in which bodies and identities continually transform throughout the poem as Judith and Holofernes oppose, merge with, and finally transform into versions of each other, Holofernes ending his life as the passive penetrated female and Judith morphing from the gold-adorned woman into the

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fabluated warrior and sovereign bête.179 The fact that the Judith of the poem, unlike the Vulgate Judith, does accept Holofernes’s war-gear leaves her a very problematic figure associated at the end not only with Holofernes and male sexual and military violence but also with the sin of avarice.180 The fact that she accepts the bloody helmet, the ultimate mask and sign of male warrior identity, makes the transformation of role and identity unmistakable. She can put on or take off her armour, her warrior-suit, just like Beowulf and his men, but she is ælfscinu by nature, always a wonder and a danger. The Old English poet also expands the account of the plundering of the Assyrian camp and the description of Holofernes’s treasure to create an atmosphere very different to that of his source. In addition to Holofernes’s personal treasure Rum wæs to nimanne lond-buendum  on ðam laðestan, hyra eald-feondum  unlyfigendum heolfrig here-reaf,  hyrsta scyne, bord ond brad swyrd,  brune helmas, dyre madmas. (313b–328a) (There was opportunity for the inhabitants [the Hebrews] to take from their most hated, lifeless, ancient enemies, bloody plunder, extraordinary ornaments, shields and broadswords, bright helmets, dear treasures.)

Looting of the battlefield was not an activity that the English described themselves as engaging in, though of course the reality was certain to have been very different. Tyrants and invaders (like Alexander or the Vikings) were plunderers, not heroic Christian men – even Beowulf takes only the sword hilt from the treasures that he finds beneath the mere. Estes suggests that the avariciousness of the Hebrews and expanded description of the beauty of the gold and jewelled objects in Judith could be read as an expression of anti-Jewish sentiment because avarice was a vice stereotypically associated with the Jews.181 Mulally, on the other hand, sees the collection of goods and their gift Gillian Overing (‘Beowulf on Gender’) explores the similar role of armour and the wearing of identities in Beowulf. 180 Lochrie (‘Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith’, p. 14) notes that the beheading scene ‘exposes the interchangeability of war and sexual violence in Anglo-Saxon cultural codes’. 181 Estes, ‘Feasting with Holofernes: Digesting Judith in Anglo-Saxon England’: 338–41. Belanoff, (‘Judith: Sacred and Secular Heroine’, p. 248) claims that the poet ‘never recognizes that Judith and her people are Jews’. 179

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to Judith as rather less problematically increasing the value of both ‘in the eyes of warrior society’.182 Like the nature of the whale from which the Franks Casket was made, the poem points us in two very different directions. If read with the text of the Vulgate in mind, readers might assure themselves that Judith would go on to be a good leader and role model. However, Judith is a paraphrase and not a translation, and as such the poet might well have wished to tell a very different story. Read in the context of the larger Beowulf manuscript, it becomes much more ambiguous and troubling, and its possible dystopian nature more apparent. No matter how it was read, however, it is certain that the end of the poem is troubling, a reflection on the instability of meaning and identity and the nature of power that, I suggest, may well be the true subjects of the poem. It is a deeply disturbing poem in which there is much that is ‘not quite right’. If not actually dystopian, the world it constructs alerts us to the changeability of all things, and the idea that dystopia may always be present if we look beneath a culture’s glittering surfaces.

CONCLUSION Gregory Claeys writes that dystopian novels present the reader with ‘imaginary futures where much has gone wrong, though sometimes ways out are indicated’.183 The Beowulf manuscript presents the reader with imaginary pasts in which much has gone wrong and what seem to be ways out are usually dead ends leading either to death and the annihilation of peoples and ways of life, or to a return to the same old system of control or governance simply with a new face – which is one way of reading Christopher and Judith. Cycles of violence and destruction replay themselves over and over again. The manuscript may well be an exploration of the Augustinian vision of a fallen and corrupt world. Siewers does an excellent job of demonstrating how just such an interpretation works for the Beowulf poem but, as he also points out, Augustine’s vision was used to provide justification for the English political and ideological conquest and the subsequent imperial attitudes that would be built upon them, becoming yet another text that encrypts ‘Anglo-Saxon’ colonial violence.184 While Mullally, ‘The Cross-Gendered Gift: Weaponry in the Old English Judith’: 279. Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History, p. 269. 184 Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building’, pp. 201–2. 182 183

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it is also certainly possible to see the manuscript as a response to the political turmoil of the late tenth and eleventh centuries, what the poem and manuscript conveys in the end is the ultimate emptiness and failure of political and ideological conquest through history. It exempts the Christian church to be sure, but if Christopher suggests that humanity resides in the Christian conqueror or the Christian sovereign, the day-to-day experience of those living in England in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries certainly proved otherwise. A Christian English king (or queen) could be just as destructive as a non-Christian Scandinavian one. Moreover, Christopher, along with all the other texts in the manuscript, demonstrates a fluidity of identity that extends into the Christian world. Nothing is stable as beasts become saints or sovereigns (the Conopenas) and sovereigns become beasts (Beowulf, Holofernes, and perhaps Judith). Christopher also demonstrates that the beast is always present within the sovereign and the sovereign within the beast. Being always outside of human law they are reminders of the limits of that law and the social order that rests on it. As scholarship on each of the manuscript’s texts has shown, it is possible to read them in different and contradictory ways. Some have interpreted Alexander, Beowulf, and Judith as heroes and strong leaders, while others have read them as either deeply flawed or failures. The unmappable world of the Wonders has been seen as a dystopia and as a utopia – a place beyond, or at least resistant to, colonial order, though of course the written text is inevitably a product of that order. Christopher is hagiography but it is also a wonder tale and, especially read alongside Judith, it reveals the problems that can exist in trying to order and define genres. There is an ambivalence to these texts and thus to the manuscript as a whole. A reader can bring to the manuscript the ideological framework of their choice and this creates their own individual and unrepeatable passage through it, leaving Christopher, Alexander, the Conopenas, Beowulf, and Judith always already beasts and sovereigns. Ambivalence is a feature of much of the art and literature associated with the conquest of Cnut and with the later Norman conquest,185 and ambivalence reveals an eleventhcentury England divided against itself, a place that could perhaps be characterised as both beast and sovereign, and was certainly 185 Karkov, ‘Conquest and Material Culture’, in 1016 to 1066: New Perspectives on England’s Eleventh-Century Conquests, ed. Laura Ashe and Emily Joan Ward (Woodbridge, forthcoming 2020); Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge, 2007).

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both coloniser and colonised. It was both chaotic and continuously asserting, or attempting to assert control, repeating the idea of its own special place in the world, and constantly deflecting and encrypting its originary violence in its written texts. Like Alfred’s Preface, the texts of the Beowulf manuscript are all about the past and elsewhere but they envisage no future. They circle around England as do the narrative panels of the Franks Casket, and emptiness, albeit a different sort of emptiness, is just as much at their centre. While the Franks Casket was the product of a people assembling its violent origin legends in the formation of a nation, the Beowulf manuscript is about peoples and places being violently pulled apart. If Beowulf, Judith, and The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle might hint at a recognition of the failure and emptiness of conquest or empire, Christopher remains a validation of Christian conquest and the so-called humanity brought by conversion, even if it disrupts certain of its categories. Ambivalence too reveals the emptiness, a division that pulls apart meaning and exposes the empty spaces of what cannot be said and those who cannot speak, as well as the empty space between what is and what is reflected back. Rather than encrypting emptiness, as does the Franks Casket, the Beowulf manuscript’s emptiness spills out onto every page, even as it is kept at a fictional distance. It is deeply melancholic. It does not express nostalgia for the past, for lost treasure, or heroic golden ages, so much as it highlights the sadness and decay that threaten its past times and cultures from within. Unlike the elsewheres and other times of the Franks Casket, the Beowulf manuscript’s heroic ages were doomed to destruction by the very laws and codes through which they were governed and the customs through which they operated, and this leaves the reader with a sense of the hopelessness of any people engaged in violent conquest. There is also the emptiness of silence, which returns us to ambivalence and that which cannot be said. Grendel and his mother are melancholic figures of gloom and ghosts inhabiting a dark and threateningly silent world. Their own silence is part of what makes them so very unknowable and threatening, but it also makes them pitiable figures expressive of great loss. They are marginalised and dispossessed and unable to speak of their plight. Most of the wonders in the Wonders of the East do not speak and flee silently away from the language-bearers, the people who approach and write about them. The beast does not have language, but are the wonders, at least the ones in human form, really beasts beneath their wonder-suits? To be colonised or conquered is to be silenced, as Beowulf and Judith make

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clear. Wendy Brown notes, however, that there are instances in which ‘refusing to speak is a method of refusing colonisation, of refusing complicity in injurious interpellations or in subjection through regulation’.186 It is certainly possible to understand this type of silence at work in the indigenous wonders and perhaps also the silent people who hide from or flee before Alexander. These are peoples who live outside of the regulation of the laws of conquerors, and creatures or beasts who live outside the regulation of human law. In the end, their land speaks loudly enough for them. The Beowulf manuscript, then, provides both a critique of pride, violence, and colonialism, and a demonstration of their historical omnipresence. It deflects dystopia to elsewhere and long ago, but it cannot help but retell dystopia from the perspective of eleventh-century England, the silent and unmentioned place at the manuscript’s centre. In doing so it writes England into its history of failure, silences, and silencing. It would be going too far to suggest that the manuscript provides a critique of or even a recognition of the English peoples’ own history as violent colonisers, even if some of its texts might hint at that, and even if Grendel and his mother do figure the colonised Britons. But they were undeniably aware of the facts of that history even if it was repeatedly encrypted and rewritten in stories of other times and places and of migration rather than conquest. Both Bede and Gildas were certainly read in the late tenth and eleventh century. Indeed, this lack of recognition, or perhaps a deliberate forgetting, can be understood as a significant part of the dystopian nature of both the manuscript and pre-Conquest England. A ‘strange forgetting of the history of the nation’s past: the violence involved in establishing the nation’s writ’,187 that gets deflected onto other cultures or people and retold as a suffering of that very nation in the present.

186 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), p. 97. 187 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, p. 310.

RETROTOPIA: ANGLO-SAXONISM, ANGLO-SAXONISTS, AND THE MYTH OF ORIGINS

T

he first three chapters of this book focused on texts or objects produced as the English turned back to the past to create either an image of who they were in the present and/or to find an image that responded to the concerns of the troubled or difficult present in which they found themselves, while at the same time encrypting the violence of their own creation as a culture and nation. The actions of encrypting violence and of looking to the past as a way of creating, justifying, or, less frequently, critiquing a communal identity in and for the present have been repeated throughout history. Many countries and communities turn to the past for a sense of who they are and where they have come from but few, if any, have used those pasts to create phenomena as problematic and haunted as Anglo-Saxonism and the British Empire. The Anglo-Saxon migration myth in particular has been used both to justify colonialism and to exclude unwanted refugees and migrants. The promotion of the English language as a language that unites people, as it did in Alfred’s vision, has been transformed into an often weaponised English used to exclude non-English speakers from nations or communities, as a means of depriving some people of their mother tongue, and as an omnipresence that marginalises and limits the study of other languages.1 In his campaign to become prime minister, Boris Johnson

1 A recent report by the Modern Language Association identified the closure of over 650 foreign language programmes in the US between 2013 and 2016. See Steven Johnson, ‘Colleges Lose a “Stunning” 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3

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pledged to make those immigrants allowed into the country learn English and use it as a first language.2 To learn the language of the country in which one settles is one thing, but to force people to do so is quite another. Moreover, the idea that a language acquired through such a process could ever be a first language erases the cultures, histories, and diversity of those settled in the UK as effectively as did Alfred’s promotion of political unity through English in the ninth century – and, like it, runs the risk of resulting in split selves that become part of, yet always never quite at home in, both the dominant and dominated communities.3 The fantasy of English exceptionalism has driven both empire and the global presence of the English language,4 as well as ongoing racism and violence, as demonstrated most recently by the nationalistic – indeed jingoistic – turn of the USA and UK and the growth in both countries of right-wing nationalist conservatism and extremist groups. In both countries racist policies and violence, colonialism, and imperialism rest on the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ past and the Anglo-Saxonism of the present. Place, topos, remains a central concern of this chapter as it considers how new places appropriated (or attempted to appropriate) and were built upon an imaginary Anglo-Saxon England of the past, an idea of the past exemplified by the texts and objects discussed in the preceding chapters. The place those places established for themselves in the modern world coincided with the rise of Anglo-Saxonism and has kept, and continues to keep, Anglo-Saxon England alive as a new form of placeless place; and the idea of the Anglo-Saxon kept alive in Anglo-Saxonism has been, and continues to be, used to determine who does or does not belong in which places, including academia. Joshua Davies has written on some of the forms that cultural memories of the Middle Ages – and especially of Anglo-Saxon England in the modern world – have taken, pointing out that the medieval is always still with

Years’. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 January 2019: https://www.chronicle. com/article/Colleges-Lose-a-Stunning-/245526?fbclid=IwAR3y2pTuOQbZq0bzCWT8VMqsH4nySLL19bX7viaIgHvik__W7PP-DV2QYZE. Although the numbers in the original report were inflated through the inclusion of individual lost courses along with entire programmes, the picture is still grim. 2 John Halliday, ‘Johnson Pledges to Make All Immigrants Learn English so that They Feel British’, The Guardian, 5 July 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2019/jul/05/johnson-pledges-to-make-all-immigrants-learn-english. 3 Pratt, ‘Linguistic Utopias’; above p. 36. 4 Despite its domination of both the academic and business worlds, at least in the West, English is only the third most spoken language globally, coming after Mandarin and Spanish.

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us, still in process.5 This chapter examines some of the specific forms those memories have taken – as well as some instances of forgetting, the encrypting of guilt and complicity – and the uses to which they have been put in redefining the UK and the USA that continue to identify themselves as the ‘heirs of the Anglo-Saxons’ in the twentyfirst century. As previously stated, retrotopia is a word coined by Zygmunt Bauman to refer to the state of contemporary western society.6 It refers specifically to a world that no longer maintains hope in any utopia to come, seeing the future as holding only the prospect of further decay and inequality, if not catastrophe. Globalisation, our reliance on the World Wide Web, and the omnipresence of social media and neoliberal managerialism have combined to create societies with little or no sense of real physical communities, the types of communities with their sense of belonging and loyalty to community that existed in the past. Happiness and communal identity are now therefore to be found only in the past, a generally imaginary past. The loss of community places an emptiness at the centre of retrotopian desire, and perhaps also a melancholy in the solitariness of contemporary existence that it produces, even though we may be connected to much larger distant and virtual communities than ever before. For Bauman, retrotopia is straightforwardly nostalgic and characterised by a past that is recent enough to remain familiar. The types of retrotopia I discuss here are, I would argue, less the products of nostalgia and more the products of an unacknowledged loss, a loss that for the white English world of empire – and the imagined purity of an ‘AngloSaxon’ past on which it was built – threatens to rise to the surface and demand to be acknowledged with the growth of multiculturalism and BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of colour) activism. Like the encrypted violence of English origins, the encryption of the violence of imperialism and settler colonialism produces a postimperial melancholia characterised by xenophobic responses to immigration and the ghosts of imperial guilt.7 The nationalist and racist groups of today do not want to re-create a lost past so much as declare that we actually still live in a period in which the medieval myths of origin are very much alive and we are dependent on them, and that those who do not belong should stay out or get out, a view also current 5 Joshua Davies, Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester, 2018); idem, ‘The Middle Ages as Property: Beowulf, Translation, and the Ghosts of Nationalism’, postmedieval 10.2 (2019): 137–50. 6 Bauman, Retrotopia. 7 Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, p. 98.

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historically in the Anglo-Saxonism to be discussed below. Racism, white-supremacy, and extreme nationalism have never gone away but the online culture of the twenty-first century has made it much easier for them to be spread widely and rapidly. As is so often the case with nostalgia, retrotopia is both utopian for those who desire it and dystopian for those who do not. It is a place in which elements of Alfred’s utopia, the Beowulf manuscript’s dystopia, and the heterotopia of the Franks Casket float and collide along with the multiplying imaginings and reimaginings of Anglo-Saxon England. I take Bauman’s term and break it into its two constituent parts, retro- and -topos. Retro can have many different meanings, though all relate to a revival or imitation of the past, a looking back to the past, a return to (as in retro-migration), or a contemplation or exhibiting of the past (as in retrospective). It is these latter two senses of retro-, return to and contemplation or exhibition of the past, that are most relevant to the uses of the retrotopia I discuss in this chapter, although I will also use the idea of retro- to think about movement in opposition to a direction of travel. Topos will of course refer primarily to pre-Conquest England, but also to Anglo-Saxon England as it continues to haunt the UK, the USA, and contemporary academia. While retrotopia itself is not necessarily uncanny, in returning to or contemplating the past and medieval England, both past and place become uncanny sites of mirror reflection shaped – like Alfred’s Preface or the Franks Casket – more by what the present desires to see in them than by the reality, if there can ever be such a thing, of what happened there. Moreover, technology has created a retrotopia in which place becomes uncanny, being simultaneously composed of large virtual communities and much smaller local human communities. Retrotopian place is both very specifically ‘here’ and in an infinite nowhere. There are points at which my discussion will intersect closely with Bauman’s analysis, the exclusionary ideologies and violent practices of tribalism for example; but while Bauman explains these phenomena as products of modernity, their sources are far older, as the texts of the Beowulf manuscript demonstrate, and have been kept alive in part by the disciplinary and academic histories of Medieval Studies and of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies in particular. I began this study of Anglo-Saxon England with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its racial overtones. As this chapter deals with the use and study of the AngloSaxon, it is both helpful and appropriate at the outset to consider the definition of the terms ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’. The first definition supplied by the OED concerns language, ‘an

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Anglo-Saxonism’: ‘a word, phrase, or idiom of Old English origin’, or ‘a word that is regarded as vulgar, considered … to be of traditional Anglo-Saxon origin, with allusion to the idea of an earlier, uncomplicated era of language and culture’. The latter definition fits well within Bauman’s definition of retrotopia. But Anglo-Saxonism is also ‘identification with, or belief in the superiority of England (or Britain), the English-speaking peoples, their civilization, culture, etc.’.8 By this definition both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are clearly believers in and promoters of Anglo-Saxonism. An ‘Anglo-Saxonist’, on the other hand, is ‘an expert or student of Old English, literature, and culture’, which seems to place the study of Anglo-Saxon England in a safe and objective academic bubble; however, an Anglo-Saxonist is also ‘a person who believes in the importance or superiority of Anglo-Saxon language, people, or culture (past and present)’.9 This second definition inevitably aligns all those who study Anglo-Saxon England, whether they actually hold those beliefs or not, with the right-wing beliefs and policies of Johnson, Trump, more xenophobic Brexit supporters, and the extreme conservative right. Together the definitions also indicate how inextricable the development of the discipline is from the politics of exceptionalism as it has migrated and been transformed from the age of Bede and Alfred to the present day. The development of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline is then necessary background to the use of  ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage and history in the name of nationalism, imperialism, and racism because it cannot be separated from them. Moreover, academic work, public medievalism, and public uses of the medieval are equally entangled, and I will therefore discuss them side-by-side in what follows. While we may now think of these as separate, medievalism was a mixture of the personal and political, the academic and the public, since it was established as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century.10 I want to emphasise once again that the medieval is not something that is either safe or needs defending. As Sierra Lomuto has succinctly stated: There has … emerged a particular form of public medievalist discourse that focuses primarily on correcting racist misconceptions about the Middle Ages. While certainly useful, as it provides the public with an important education and demonstrates why studying the distant past Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Anglo-Saxonism. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. Anglo-Saxonist. 10 Cord J. Whitaker and Mathew Gabriele, ‘“Mountain Haints”: Towards a Medieval Studies Exorcized’, postmedieval 10.2 (2019): 129–36. 8 9

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still matters in the present, this work has largely been missing the rigor of anti-racist critique … The most popular example of this kind of work is The Public Medievalist’s series ‘Race, Racism and the Middle Ages.’ The series seems to approach the racist appropriation of the medieval as an external problem out there that threatens an innocent love for the medieval past. In other words, the series aims to reclaim the medieval past from white supremacists – placing it in the hands of academic medievalists and cosplayers who hold a non-racist love for the medieval. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this aim, and it is certainly understandable, as no decent person wants to be associated with the same things as white supremacists. But this approach can inadvertently lead to a protection of white innocence rather than an anti-racist intervention.11

Those who identify as Anglo-Saxonists in particular should not be attempting to defend or reclaim a field that implies racism in its very name. It is a field that needs radical change rather than defence because it is a field that remains haunted by conservatism, the ghosts of white privilege, and empire past. As Donna Beth Ellard has shown, it is also a deeply melancholic field in which many, though by no means all, scholars refuse to let go of ‘the so-called fathers of our interdisciplinary field’.12 This also has the knock-on effect of conservative and often nationalistic Anglo-Saxonism being carried over into other fields by the devoted sons and daughters of those fathers. I begin with a look back at some of those so-called fathers and the way they have shaped the field. Neither the assumption inherent in the work of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers discussed in Chapter 1 that history is teleological, or that the movement of time brings progress, is tenable any longer and certainly does not underpin societies in the way that it did for the early English or the later Middle Ages, even if it continues to be the foundation of some religious beliefs. The sense that we have not only stopped moving forwards but are now caught in an inevitable slide backward into, for example, living at the complete mercy of the environment and the rise of right-wing extremism, is part of what fuels retrotopia in Bauman’s terms. Heritage, he points out, is both a refuge and a weapon in the battle to establish a sense of shared 11 Sierra Lomuto, ‘Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique’, In the Middle, April, 4, 2019: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2019/04/public-medievalism-and-rigor-of-anti.html. 12 Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, p. 23.

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community – whether local or more global – and to exclude others from that community.13 He quotes David Lowenthal’s observation that ‘myopic rivalry is … endemic to the very nature of heritage. To insist we were the first or the best, to celebrate what is ours and exclude others is what heritage is all about.’14 Lowenthal distinguishes between heritage and history in a way that Bauman does not, but he also notes that the two often become indistinguishable, particularly at times we identify as crises.15 One can see just such a merging of heritage and history in Archbishop Parker’s use of ‘AngloSaxon’ material heritage, the manuscripts he collected, to rewrite the religious history of England in a way that decentred Rome at the time of the Reformation,16 the point at which something identifiable as the study of Anglo-Saxon England can be said to begin.17 As a scholar and collector of pre-Conquest manuscripts, Parker remains an important grandfather of the field, while his anti-Catholicism tends not to be discussed or even acknowledged. It does, however, find a louder and more popular, and arguably more vehement voice some three hundred years later in the deeply racist Charles Kingsley, who believed in both the ethnic and religious superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ peoples and their culture. Barbara Yorke notes that in his Hereward the Wake: Last of the English, published in 1866, Kingsley gave voice to his firm belief that ‘Anglo-Saxons and Vikings were the best sort of Christians because of their shared pre-Christian heritage and the general health and vitality that was part of their genetic inheritance’.18 His deeply colonial and anti-Catholic novel of 1855 Westward Ho!, the title of which became a catchphrase for settler colonialism and manifest destiny in the USA, is dedicated to the Rajah Sir James Brooke and George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand, who he felt carried Bauman, Retrotopia, pp. 58–60. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1998), p. 239; quoted in Bauman, Retrotopia, p. 60. 15 Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, pp. x–xi. 16 Above, p. 7. See also C. E. Wright, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries and the Beginning of Anglo-Saxon Studies: Matthew Parker and His Circle: A Preliminary Study’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society 1.3 (1951): 208–37. 17 On the study of Anglo-Saxon England in the Elizabethan era see Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English. 18 Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, p. 142. Yorke also points out that the Vikings remained ambivalent figures in the racism and imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were seen to be at one and the same time the sharers of a northern Teutonic heritage and the pagan enemies against whom the Anglo-Saxons – especially King Alfred – fought, and thus models for the imperial subjects of the contemporary world. 13 14

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‘That type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing’.19 His belief in the genetic connection between physical form and virtue or intelligence was shared by many in the nineteenth century, especially as scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shake the security of religious belief and give rise to fields such as eugenics and craniology.20 This is an overly simplistic model but it demonstrates the way in which what we identify as scholarship in one era can lay the foundations for what we also identify as religious bigotry and racism in another, which can in turn inform the scholarship of its own day.

RETROSPECTIVE I In the centuries that followed Archbishop Parker the study of early medieval England, and especially the study of the Old English language and literature, became established academic disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic. During this process history was repeatedly ransacked to create heritage (just as it was on the Franks Casket) and heritage was repeatedly used to rewrite history. Alfred, the migration myth that was retold through objects such as the Franks Casket and texts like the poem Beowulf, and language itself were all a part of this process. Some discussion of the development of Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline is thus both necessary background to, and is implicated in, the use of pre-Conquest heritage and history in the name of nationalism, imperialism, and racism. Allen Frantzen has described William Camden’s collection of essays Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine, the Inhabitants Thereof, their Languages, Names, Surnames, Empreses, Wise Speeches, Poësies, and Epitaphes, first published in 1605, as ‘arguably the most influential of all early discussions of Anglo-Saxon history’.21 It was undeniably popular, going through numerous reprintings and editions. It was also influential in promoting the Anglo-Saxons not only as the people back to whom English culture, law, and language could be traced, but also as the brave, robust, and dominating race led by God promoted by Kingsley and others.22 In Camden too we get the Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (London, 1906), n.p. See below. p. 210. 21 Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition, p. 49. 22 They were a ‘warlike, victorious, stiffe, stowt, and rigorous Nation’. Their fierceness had been moderated by the mildness of the British climate, and their 19 20

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first evidence of the problem that the very name of the island was to become on and off over the following centuries. Camden preferred the name Britain, the most ancient and to his mind inclusive of the options, and his publications are the foundation on which the modern name Great Britain stands.23 His views on race were echoed with varying degrees of stridency by historians, especially of language and literature over the next two hundred years. The Anglo-Saxons became the source of a national character as well as a national language that would come to be seen as a sign and carrier of that character, an extension of the promotion of Old English as a sacred language. Camden also left a permanent mark on the fields of Medieval Studies and Medievalism by endowing the Camden Chair of Ancient History at Oxford University (Roman England was a particular interest of his), as well as through the later learned societies that came to be identified with him through the use of his name. The Camden Society, now part of the Royal Historical Society, was founded in 1838 to publish early historical and literary sources and studies, as well as antiquarian material, while the Cambridge Camden Society (now the Ecclesiastical Society) was founded in 1809 and devoted to the study of Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture, the latter a style of architecture particularly favoured in the confederate south of the USA to locate its racist and colonial politics within a timeless medieval heritage.24 More generally, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the collection and publication of pre-Conquest manuscripts and their contents, the primary sources from which later ideas of the period would be drawn, including Abraham Wheelock’s edition of Bede’s Historia ecclesastica (1643–44), William Somner’s Dictionary of Old superiority had been evidenced by all those peoples the English had subsequently educated or subdued; Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine, the Inhabitants Thereof, their Languages, Names, Surnames, Empreses, Wise Speeches, Poësies, and Epitaphes (London, 1605), pp. 9–11. That Frantzen should have been the one to bring this to scholarly attention is ironic given his later promotion of misogyny and toxic masculinity, discussed further below. By toxic masculinity, I mean a definition of masculinity that is based on the stoic and aggressive masculinity of groups like the warbands of Beowulf or many more modern military groups or sporting teams. It is a masculinity that celebrates the dominance of men and equates weakness with women or behaving like a woman, and that normalises violence and aggression. 23 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 81. 24 Joshua Davies, ‘Confederate Gothic: Medieval Architecture and Modern Identities in the United States’, in Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, ed. Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, Catherine E. Karkov and Anna Klosowska (Punctum Books, forthcoming).

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English, Latin, and Modern English (1659), John Spelman’s Life of King Alfred (1678), Elizabeth Elstob’s The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715), and Sharon Turner’s four-volume History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1799–1805). The latter was arguably the most influential of the lot, championing the moral and intellectual superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race, the direct descendants of the pre-1066 English, and the builders of the British Empire and its racism – though Turner of course saw it as anything but racist.25 Turner’s thinking turned the past into something that could be owned, like its material artefacts, but also constructed an English medieval heritage that remained alive and was ‘stronger, truer, more persistent, than the “branches grafted on it from other regions”,’26 a view very like that held by many extreme nationalists and white supremacists today. Turner’s monumental study popularised Anglo-Saxon history on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was with the development of the cult of Alfred that Anglo-Saxonism really burgeoned politically. With the publication of Alfred’s Life and sources from (or believed to be from) his reign and later – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (published by James Ingram in 1823) for example – the king became a cult figure, representative of all that was great about the English monarchy and government. Alfred had been an important figure in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Chronicle written in the late tenth century by ealdorman Æthelweard for his relative, Matilda, Abbess of Essen, a direct descendant of Alfred’s, describes the king at the time of his death as ‘rex Saxonum, immobilis occidentalium postis, uir iustititia plenus, acer in armis, sermone doctus, diuinis quippe super omnia documentis imbutus’ (King of the Saxons, unshakeable pillar of the people of the West, a man full of justice, active in war, learned in speech, steeped in sacred literature above all things),27 and the AngloNorman Henry I had been eager to unite himself with the Alfredian dynasty, as we have seen. Between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries, however, Alfred’s popularity had waxed and waned and he had certainly not been widely considered to have been especially ‘great’. That was all to change in the late eighteenth century when 25 On Turner see further Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, pp. 59–98. Donna Beth Ellard, ‘Ella’s Bloody Eagle: Sharon Turner’s “History of the Anglo-Saxons” and Anglo-Saxon History’, postmedieval 5 (2014): 215–34. 26 Davies, ‘The Middle Ages as Property: Beowulf, Translation, and the Ghosts of Nationalism’: 138. 27 A. Campbell, ed., Chronicon Æthelweardi. The Chronicle of Æthelweard (London, 1962), pp. 51–2.

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Alfred came to be seen as the founder of the English monarchy, the English navy, of trial by jury, English law, Oxford University, of a proto-parliamentarian system of government, and as the father of English prose. As the ‘unshakeable pillar of the people of the West’ he was also both a prefigurement and an embodiment of the British Empire, as well as an embodiment of the West as a white (English speaking) geography.28 As noted previously, the pre-Conquest era had provided Matthew Parker with what he believed to be an English church free from idolatry and the limitations of the Roman church. He had sponsored an early account of Alfred’s life, the Ælfredi regis res gestae (1574), although it was Spelman’s later publication and its English translation (1709) that really brought the king to national attention. Alfred became one of England’s great historical ‘Patriots’, a model of an enlightened leader able to defend his realm against both internal and external threats, and especially threats from the sea.29 He was celebrated in literature, music, theatre, and the visual arts throughout the century, culminating perhaps in Alfred, a masque written by James Thomson and David Mallet and commissioned by Frederick, prince of Wales. The masque included the anthem Rule Britannia set to music by Thomas Arne, and was intended to link Frederick and his father, George II, with Alfred as both defenders of the country and leaders of a great naval power. Alfred’s wars against the Vikings became equated not only with the defence of Britannia’s shores but also with war against and imperial expansion into the lands of non-Christian peoples. At the same time that the English located the roots of their greatness in the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, they likened their imperial subjects to ‘dark age’ people needing to be brought to light by good Christian rule, as Alfred had brought the Vikings and his own people to Christianity.30 He was both a symbol of and justification for the expanding British Empire, ‘England’s Darling’ in a poem written in 1896 by the poet laureate Alfred Austin, and he remained such throughout the reign of Queen Victoria. Alfred’s cult reached its apogee at the turn of the century, a new millennium, and the millennial celebration of his death, and also the period of the Boer War (1899–1902) that saw the surrender of the gold 28 On Alfred’s cult see especially Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred’, AngloSaxon England 28 (1999): 225–356. 29 Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, pp. 363–4; Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in NineteenthCentury Britain’, p. 132. 30 Hawes, ‘Beowulf as Hero of Empire’, pp. 186–7.

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and diamond-rich South African Republic and Orange Free State (both now part of South Africa) to the British Empire.31 Alfred’s battle against the Vikings was seen as a model for the English fighting in South Africa, and the Durham Cathedral monument to the English who died in the war took the form of an Insular-style free-standing stone cross. It still stands outside the western entrance to the cathedral. Barbara Yorke points out that some critics argued that Alfred was a far more successful military leader and the early English generally more observant of Christian principles and conduct than the English in South Africa,32 but that is simply to leave encrypted the violence of Anglo-Saxon origins. Even so, Alfred remained idealised as the shining example of all that was, or could be, good about the English character and English institutions, including colonial government. According to Bishop Creighton of London: Alfred was a man who displayed all the characteristics which were most true of Englishmen. He drove back the invader by his persistency; he watched over the development of his people in every way; he was great as an administrator, great as a practical diplomatist, great as a legislator, and, best of all, great as a modest Christian man, as one who was most interested in developing the highest and best energies of his people, who was, in every way, in fact, a father of his country.33

Queen Victoria had herself and Prince Albert immortalised in ‘AngloSaxon’ dress at the time of Albert’s death in 1861. An embodiment of the idea of ethnic superiority and the moral right of monarchy and empire, the statue by William Theed stood in Windsor Castle until 1938 when it was moved to Victoria and Albert’s mausoleum.34 On it, Albert stands on a base decorated with shells, waves, and sea-creatures, departing from the shore for the afterlife like a latter-day Scyld or Beowulf, or indeed the British Empire, while Victoria mourns his departure. 31 It is worth noting that both had previously been claimed by The Netherlands and were under white governance. The war was between one white empire and the descendants of another, but saw the devastation of the land with much of the black population forced to become refugees or to take up residence in internment camps. 32 Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, pp. 136–8. 33 Quoted in Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in NineteenthCentury Britain’, p. 141. Yorke takes the citation from Alfred Bowker, The King Alfred Millinary (London, 1902), p. 13: https://archive.org/stream/cu31924027953144/ cu31924027953144_djvu.txt. See also Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, p. 375. 34 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, pp. 344–5.

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The migration legend that featured so prominently in the construction of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origins also allowed for the appropriation of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ past to migrate to other nations. In the USA Thomas Jefferson became enamoured with the Anglo-Saxons while a law student, and used the migration myth to draw parallels between the colonisation of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons and the development of their language and culture, and the colonisation of North America by the English and their bringing of a language and culture that could be traced directly back to the Anglo-Saxons.35 The connections made by Jefferson re-created pre-Conquest England and America in the images of each other, linking them forever as places as well as through a shared language. There are, however, important differences between the two countries and the two acts of settler colonisation to bear in mind. Britain had no indigenous population and was subject only to waves of successive migrations with each successive group coming to dominate the earlier settlers for a lesser or longer time. In North America, on the other hand, there were indigenous peoples, and its colonising by the English and other European peoples was undeniably an occupation of stolen land.36 Regardless of the differences in their colonisation, England was no longer just the island on the geographic margins; it was now multiplying itself in the form of new colonies and nations. Jefferson expressed his desire that the brothers Hengest and Horsa, who featured so prominently in legends of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ migrations, should be represented on one side of the country’s great seal, and that the pillar of fire that led the Hebrews through the darkness in Exodus should be depicted on the other, thereby memorialising the origins of and bonds between the two nations in perpetuity, and perpetuating the idea that their ‘descendants’ were a chosen people, though of course his ideas were never actually adopted.37 Jefferson, like many others, viewed Alfred as a founder of both English law and a representative system of government, and therefore a founder of 35 Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (London, 1774). 36 For an excellent analysis of the practices of and differences between colonising, decolonising, and anti-colonialism see Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’. 37 On Hengest and Horsa, as well as Jefferson and those whose views he influenced, see further Joshua Davies, ‘Hengest and Horsa at Monticello: Human and Nonhuman Migration, Parahistory and American Anglo-Saxonism’, in American/ Medieval Goes North: Earth and Water in Transit, ed. Gillian R. Oering and Ulrike Wiethaus (Gottingen, 2019), pp. 167–88. I am grateful to Josh for sharing a copy of his chapter with me prior to its publication.

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the new country as well.38 He believed that the study of Old English, the language Alfred had promoted and that now bound the Englishspeaking world together, would aid the development of responsible citizens and leaders, and that the subject should therefore be taught in both schools and universities,39 ideas echoed across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century by figures such as Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle, the latter of whom described Alfred as ‘an educationalist on a scale to which we have hardly attained’.40 He was credited with founding Oxford University, and Alfred University and the town in which it is situated, Alfred New York, were believed to have been founded in the king’s honour, although the truth of this has never been established.41 The university mascot is a Saxon knight, and a statue of Alfred installed in 1990 sits at the centre of the main quad. The Anglo-Saxonism of the university’s foundation legend and the statue are extremely problematic as Alfred was one of the first universities in the country to enrol Native Americans and African Americans, two of the groups that were amongst the non-white, non-English others against whom Alfred’s military victories and Anglo-Saxon racism and exceptionalism were repeatedly invoked. It should be noted, however, that at the time the statue was erected black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Pacific islanders combined made up less than 10 per cent of the student population.42 The statue was divisive from the start with a random poll of students indicating that the majority were opposed to it becoming the university’s symbol. There was also dissent amongst university staff, although many saw Alfred as a symbol of leadership, Christianity, and education. William W. Underhill, the university art professor who sculpted the statue, stated, ‘I realize this may not be “politically correct,” but our language and tradition do 38 Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, p. 377; Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, pp. 268–9. 39 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 269. On the racism and racist associations of the study of Old English in particular see Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’. JStor Daily, 5 March 2017: https://daily.jstor.org/ old-english-serious-image-problem/. 40 Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, p. 373. 41 Susan Strong ‘Alfred’s Town Name’ (1977): https://web.archive.org/ web/20070719034206/http://www.herr.alfred.edu/special/archives/histories/ alfreds_town_name.asp. 42 ‘Alfred; 9th-Century Figure is Focus of Dispute in Search for Logo’: https://www. nytimes.com/1991/12/15/nyregion/campus-life-alfred-9th-century-figure-is-focus-ofdispute-in-search-for-logo.html.

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come from the Anglo-Saxons … The statue is an idealized personification of what the name Alfred meant historically, as a representative of the virtues of leadership, scholarship, and faith.’ Linda Mitchell, a professor of medieval history, was clear that Alfred was ‘a dead white european [sic] male – and if the university is claiming a dedication to diversity it would be foolish to choose a symbol so exclusive and effective in emphasizing the straight white male power structure of history’. The university’s president side-stepped the issue of race altogether by dismissing the controversy by focusing on gender alone. He claimed that ‘women don’t like anything that tries to dominate them, make them feel betrayed’, and problematically declared that adopting the statue as the university’s logo would bring unity to the institution.43 The statue is no longer prominent on the university’s webpage although it still stands at the centre of the campus. The history of Anglo-Saxonism in America from Jefferson forward is generally a history of both contradiction and racism, with some migrations being valued and others repelled, and indigenous peoples and people of colour being marginalised at best, but far more frequently dehumanised and dismissed as barbaric and lawless savages. It is also a history that remains enshrined and encrypted in Anglo-Saxon studies, as Adam Miyashiro and Mary Rambaran-Olm have both documented.44 In both America and England Anglo-Saxonism and its racism were believed to be supported by new scientific discoveries. Some, especially in England, believed Darwin and Huxley to have scientifically proven a racial Anglo-Saxonism,45 and this became yet another justification for empire. The myth of AngloSaxon physical difference and superiority was reinforced by the development of the pseudoscience of craniology, which was itself informed by the antiquarian excavation of pre-Conquest cemeteries and other sites. Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam’s Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginals and the 43 All quotations from, ‘Alfred; 9th-Century Figure is Focus of Dispute in Search for Logo’: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/15/nyregion/campus-life-alfred-9th-century-figure-is-focus-of-dispute-in-search-for-logo.html. 44 Adam Mayashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’, In the Middle, July 29, 2017: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle. com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html; Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘AngloSaxon Studies, Academia, and White Supremacy’, Medium.com 17 June 2018: https:// medium.com/@mrambaranolm/anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3. See also Mary Rambaran-Olm and Eric Wade, Race in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge, forthcoming. 45 Yorke, ‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, p. 372.

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Early Inhabitants of the British Islands, published in 1865, offered a ‘historical ethnology’ of Britain up to the nineteenth century, and claimed to catalogue and distinguish ethnicities based on the size and shape of their skulls and other features of their skeletons. The authors likened the Britons to African and Oriental peoples, all of whom were lacking in technological sophistication; described the Gaelic speakers of the west of Ireland as descendants of ‘a primeval race … wild, superstitious, [and] vengeful’; while the Welsh were ‘sly, insincere, deceptive and cunning’.46 In contrast, the Anglo-Saxons, the ‘purest’ of whom live in the interior of England, are ‘robust, bulky people, with florid complexions, light eyes and hair, and large heads’, and the descendants of the Scandinavians are ‘vigorous conquerors and colonists’. Perhaps not surprisingly, the people of the north of England, the area of heaviest Scandinavian settlement, intermarriage, and cultural cooperation, are deemed the tallest, most powerful, and handsome.47 Similar ethnic (and class) distinctions are to be found in the eugenics and social Darwinism of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. The ethnic labels that became attached to the graves from which some of Davis and Thurnam’s skeletal remains were excavated would go on to have a lasting influence on later generations of archaeologists.48 Science also helped to support the study of Old English language and literature, as well as the ivory tower in which it became the preserve of elite white males.49 In the USA, especially in the southern states, it provided a justification for slavery as well as a model for resistance to tyranny.50 More generally it was also a justification for the doctrine of manifest destiny and the land-grabbing and slaughter of Native Americans and Mexicans that was part and parcel of westward 46 Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginals and the Early Inhabitants of the British Islands, 2 vols. (London, 1865), I, pp. 237, 199, 205. On their work in relation to antiquarian and archaeological activity see Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, ch. 3. 47 Davis and Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginals and the Early Inhabitants of the British Islands, I, pp. 211, 213, 212–15. 48 Howard Williams, ‘“Burnt Germans”, Alemannic Graves and the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology’, in Zweiundvierzig: Festschrift für Michael Gebühr zum 65 Geburtstag, ed. Stefan Burmeister, Heidrun Derks, and Jasper von Richtofen. Rahden, 2007, pp. 229–38, at 230. 49 Jones, Fossil Poetry, pp. 1–7; Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 62. 50 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 4–5; Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey, ‘Byrhtnoth in Dixie: The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville, Fl, 1997), pp. 157–72.

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expansion across the continent.51 Lewis F. Klipstein cast the ‘progress of the Saxons or Anglo-Saxons’ as an ever westward expansion sweeping violently over the Britons, the Irish, and all others they encountered.52 (Westward ho!) In the USA, by the mid-nineteenth century the AngloSaxons were now indivisible from the whites – or certain of them anyway.53 The expansion of the white American westward was viewed not only as a continuation of Anglo-Saxon progress westwards but a ‘morally sublime’ one.54 Although Klipstein’s views were not accepted by many, they were echoed in John Leslie Hall’s 1892 translation of Beowulf,55 and they certainly reflected the reality of manifest destiny as experienced by the Native Americans and Mexicans who stood in the way of Anglo-Saxon progress. Manifest destiny and the slaughter of Native Americans that resulted from it are the examples Schwab cites in her discussion of the encrypting of memories too violent to confront,56 but it is also important to note that this encryption repeats the Angles and Saxons’ own encrypted colonial violence. As both Yorke and Niles note, US identification with the AngloSaxons and racist Anglo-Saxonism only got stronger as a closer relationship between the USA and England developed in the latter years of the nineteenth century.57 They were very much in evidence throughout the Alfred Millenary. In his speech during the millenary celebrations in London, General A. P. Rockwell, the US representative from Yale University, after evoking the spectral purity of the ‘AngloSaxon race’, went on to declare his views on why that race had been so ‘successful’:

51 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, pp. 82–97. 52 Niles (The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 284) points out that Klipstein’s views were also justification for the ethnic oppression of the Irish and non-English speaking whites in the USA. 53 At various times Italians, Irish, and Jewish people have been classed as non-white. 54 Lewis F. Klipstein, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica: Selections in Prose and Verse, from the Anglo-Saxon Literature, 2 vols (New York, 1849), I, pp. 96, 97. 55 John Leslie Hall, Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem (London, 2012), originally published in Boston in 1892; on Hall see Davies, ‘Hengest and Horsa at Monticello: Human and Nonhuman Migration, Parahistory and American Anglo-Saxonism’. 56 Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, pp. 52–3. 57 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 265; Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, p. 145.

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It is a commonplace to say – but none the less worth remembering – that it was because it has carried everywhere with it those principles of self-reliance and individual freedom – inherent in the race – a birthright developed and strengthened during those thousand years. Some three hundred years ago the race planted itself on the eastern coast of North America, and to-day the United States and our good neighbour the dominion of Canada dominate the continent. Your other prosperous and happy colonies, planted all over the world, have too recently given practical evidence of loyal attachment to the home of the race, and for the civilisation which it represents … Is it too much to say that the Anglo-Saxons will be, if they are not already, the dominant race of the world?58

While there were certainly scholars and political figures who disagreed with such views, Rockwell’s speech makes clear that they were supported both academically and in official government circles. It also indicates the problematic role of language in both the appropriation of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ past and in its deployment as a weapon of both popular and institutional racism. Language gained strength as a weapon of nationalism and racism for the English both abroad and at home. It was evidence of both the right to English dominance over the other peoples and languages of Britain and of the unity of the nation in English. In some circles the Celtic languages were considered gibberish, just as they had been in texts such as the Life of Guthlac – as well as in Spenser’s later pamphlet on Ireland – and the Celtic peoples were also judged inferior and, in some instances even monstrous, survivals of demons, Grendel, or Spenser’s ‘anatomies of death’.59 Publications such as Davis and Thurnam’s Crania Britannica purported to prove that the Irish and the Celts were a race apart. The inaugural issue of the journal The AngloSaxon, which appeared in 1849, looked back to Bede and Gregory the Great, proclaiming the goal of ‘enlisting English-speaking people all over the globe to take up a quasi-missionary role not just as Angli but as “Angeli or Messengers” … [and] to unite “all our Race” in the bond of “our Mother Language” … the kindly English Tongue’.60 The idea of an inherent superiority to both Old and modern English was echoed by Benjamin Thorpe in the second edition of his Analecta Anglo-Saxonica published in 1869. In a passage supporting the views Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary, p. 121. Above pp. 112, 76. 60 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 307. 58 59

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of an anonymous contributor to Dolman’s Magazine, Thorpe makes clear the power of the language as a metaphorical sword: About the Anglo-Saxon tongue there was the strength of iron, with the sparkling and the beauty of burnished steel, which made it withstand with success the attacks that the Norman William and his fawning courtiers directed against it, as they tried in vain to thrust their French into the mouths of English people. If the sword of the Normans vanquished the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons’ tongue in turn overthrew the French of the Normans.61

Thorpe was also instrumental in the nineteenth-century challenges to and debates over the ‘Englishness’ of the Old English language and its literature, defending it especially vehemently against challenges from Scandinavia. Nationalism in Scandinavia in particular was strong and Anglo-Saxonism became a significant part of patriotic Scandinavian scholarship. The Icelandic scholar Grímur Thorkelin, one of the prominent early Beowulf scholars, believed that because Denmark and England had at one time been part of a single nation, Old English was a dialect of Old Norse, that Beowulf was originally a Danish poem, that Beowulf himself was a Danish figure, and that the poem had reached England early on and had been translated into Old English by King Alfred.62 He described the poem as ‘our epic’, one that ‘plainly teaches that the Anglo-Saxon idiom is actually a Danish language cultivated and kept pure even to this day by the inhabitants of Iceland, who dwell almost beyond the path of the sun’.63 It is noteworthy that, in Thorkelin’s description, Iceland assumes a similarly exceptional place in the margins to that of England, indeed its special isolation has kept its language ‘pure’. Thorkelin’s Latin translation of Beowulf, the first printed edition of the text, appeared in 1815. Interestingly, Thorkelin was one of the first to link the poem to the processes of conquest, albeit Danish conquest, identifying Grendel as a historical prince of the Jutes angered by Danish expansion into Jutland.64 At around the same time in Germany Jacob Grimm saw Beowulf and

61 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 330. 62 Robert Bjork, ‘Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín’s Preface to the first Edition of “Beowulf ” 1815’, Scandinavian Studies 68 (1996): 291–320 at 304–5. 63 Quoted in Robert E. Bjork, ‘Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Frantzen and Niles, pp. 111–32, at 118. 64 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, p. 207.

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other heroic poems as part of a larger body of Germanic poetry that encompassed both England and the Scandinavian world. While Thorkelin had been most interested in the heroic pagan and what he believed to be the historical aspects of the poem, his younger Danish contemporary N. F. S. Grundtvig was attracted by the poem’s Christian elements as well as its potential to become a national epic for the Scandinavia people and to provide a sense of national unity.65 He published his own translation of Beowulf into Danish in 1820 and went on to study Old English literature more widely and to make transcriptions of both the Exeter Book and Bodleian Library manuscript Junius 11. His plan to publish his Old English texts annoyed at least some English scholars, Thorpe amongst them. Thorpe saw Grundtvig’s work as a Danish intrusion into an English scholarly field and with the help of the Society of Antiquaries of London stole Grundtvig’s ideas and produced his own publications.66 His edition of the Junius 11 poems appeared in 1832 followed by that of the Exeter Book of poetry in 1842. The first English translation of Beowulf was published by John Mitchell Kemble in 1833. Kemble saw the poem as English through and through, brought to the island by the earliest ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settlers and translated into Old English by their descendants. It provided a direct link back to ‘our forefathers’.67 Thorpe and Kemble’s efforts to ‘save’ Old English literature from foreign intrusion were celebrated by S. Humphreys Gurteen, who called on their English scholarly descendants to do the same.68 The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw similar scholarly battles over the national origins and ‘scholarly ownership’ of a number of other early English texts and monuments, including the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross, which was seen variously as Scottish or English, but also deeply indebted to the Scandinavians, the Lombards, Rome, and Carolingian France.69 Such claims were not, 65 T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, ‘Beowulf ’: The Critical Heritage (London, 1998),p. 244; Bjork, ‘Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, p. 116. 66 Bjork, ‘Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, p. 112; Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, pp. 209–10. 67 Davies, ‘The Middle Ages as Property: Beowulf, Translation and the Ghosts of Nationalism’: 141, citing J. Kemble, The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, The Travellers Song and the Battle of Finnesburh (London, 1833), p. xix. 68 S. Humphreys Gurteen, The Epic of the Fall of Man: A Comparative Study of Caedmon, Dante, and Milton (New York, 1896). 69 See further Catherine E. Karkov, ‘The Divisions of the Ruthwell Cross’, in The Wisdom of Exeter (Essays in Honor of Patrick W. Conner), ed. Edward Christie (Kalamazoo, MI, forthcoming).

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perhaps, as public or as influential as those surrounding Beowulf, but they were no less vehement, especially because they so often involved church origins and religious belief. With regards to Beowulf, Joshua Davies has written of Thorkelin, Grundtvig, Kemble, and other scholars of their generation that, ‘There is a “double inscription” in their work … as the poem is remade in the form of the nation and the nation is remade in the form of the poem. Each critic used the idea of translation to displace Beowulf’s – and their nation’s – origins beyond the reach of the present, in the “mists” of time, beyond investigation, beyond question.’70 Kemble reinforced this idea with his interest in archaeology, which he believed supported and supplemented the historical information he read into the literary record. One can also find traces of these same ideas inscribed in and around other AngloSaxon monuments.71 With the availability of modern English translations of Old English poems Anglo-Saxonism and ‘Anglo-Saxon values’ made their way into popular culture, and Beowulf was one of the most popular texts to be retold and retranslated.72 William Morris and A. J. Wyatt published the magnificently illustrated Kelmscott Press edition of the poem in 1895.73 The 1870 Education Act that made elementary school compulsory for all children created a significant new market not only for children’s books, but for those that dealt with English history. H. E. Marshall’s Stories of Beowulf Told to Children was but one of a host of publications that retold medieval texts for children and their parents. Marshall’s version of the poem promoted imperialist ideology to the younger generation, retelling the story as a tale of courtly culture with Beowulf as a chivalric knight,74 and nationalist sentiments were evident in many if not most of these new types of books. As Lise Jaillant argues, the design and format of the books with their emotive illustrations, decorated initials, gilded details, and archaic language and 70 Davies, ‘The Middle Ages as Property: Beowulf, Translation and the Ghosts of Nationalism’: 147. 71 Howard Williams, ‘Heathen Graves and Victorian Anglo-Saxonism: Assessing the Archaeology of John Mitchell Kemble’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 13 (2006): 1–36; idem, ‘“Burnt Germans”, Alemannic Graves and the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology’; Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, Post-Saxon Futures, ch. 3. 72 Anna Smol, ‘Heroic Ideology and the Children’s Beowulf’, Children’s Literature 22 (1994): 90–100. 73 William Morris and A. J. Wyatt, trans, The Tale of Beowulf Sometime King of the Fold of the Weder Geats (Hammersmith, 1895). 74 H. E. Marshall, Stories of Beowulf Told to Children (London, 1908; rpt. Chapel Hill NC, 2005).

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fonts helped to convey the nationalist ideology of their contents, and medievalism as a carrier of nationalist ideology.75 This was a glittering medieval aesthetic that made visual on a very personal level both the foundational nature of the stories and the glory of Victorian culture. Beowulf was also popular in American children’s literature, especially literature aimed at boys, helping on both sides of the Atlantic to instil in the young racism, nationalist pride, and the myth of heroic masculinity, along with a love of the medieval.

RETRO-MIGRATION Beowulf continues to be retold and reissued as a children’s book, and its ‘dark age’ action and aesthetic have been spread exponentially through popular media and immersive gaming environments. It is, of course, also popular as subject matter for films, games, and books aimed at more adult audiences. While some retellings use the poem to address or critique issues such as misogyny or colonialism – Meghan Purvis’s and Seamus Heaney’s different translations of the poem for example – others, like the 1987 science-fiction book, The Legacy of Heorot, continue to promote the colonialism and heroic or toxic masculinity that the poem was used to support in earlier centuries.76 The history of academic and political support for the origin myths of the AngloSaxons (and Vikings), and for Anglo-Saxonism and its ideologies, has given the racist, colonialist, and nationalistic violence behind both an aspect of perceived legitimacy. They are and always have been legends and ideas empty of legitimacy but that has failed to stem their currency in either the medieval or modern worlds. It is vital that those of us who study the pre-Conquest period – indeed the Middle Ages in general – confront the connections between our disciplines, the institutional racism and brutality that are enshrined within them, and their use in Lise Jalliant, ‘“A Fine Old Tale of Adventure”: Beowulf Told to Children of the English Race, 1898–1908’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38.4 (2013): 399–419. 76 Meghan Purvis, Beowulf (London, 2013) retells the poem, bringing out the power and the silencing of women’s voices in it. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Translation (London, 1999) addresses themes of modern oppression and colonialism with specific reference to Ireland. Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes, The Legacy of Heorot (New York, 1987). On The Legacy of Heorot see Alison Killilea, ‘“Die, Defenceless, Primitive Natives!”: Colonialism, Gender, and Militarism in The Legacy of Heorot’, in Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, ed. Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, Catherine E. Karkov and Anna Klosowska (Punctum books, forthcoming). 75

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the furthering of racist and white nationalist violence that have become so much a part of contemporary life. Racism and brutality, especially in the form of academic gatekeeping, misogyny, and toxic masculinity continue to plague Medieval Studies, and the study of early medieval England in particular. They drive away those who have been subjected to its institutionalised systems of oppression and exclude those who, while interested in its subject matter, want no part of its structures and ideologies.77 A field as heavily invested in colonialism and dominated by and tolerant of white male conservative politics as ‘Anglo-Saxon studies’ cannot change until it recognises that it has a problem in the first place. The history of the discipline and the continued denial of or hesitancy in doing something to correct its problems only helps to legitimise its appropriation in the name of racism, white nationalism, and other forms of violence today. The field has encrypted the violence of its own history by treating it as an object, something to be analysed but also something safely in the past, and that history continues to haunt us even if we might not realise it. The Franks Casket encrypted the violence of Anglo-Saxon origins by displacing them into other places, times, and stories. It displayed yet encrypted violence in a way that kept the ghosts of the violence present yet shrouded within its fictions, and it did so through acts and narratives of migration (or exile) and retro-migration. We think of it now as a lifeless object encased within glass, untouchable, and without meaning for the contemporary world other than as a representative of material and linguistic heritage. But its ghosts continue to haunt. In its appropriation and retelling of the past for the English it is a model for the displacement of stories of more modern exile, migration, and retro-migration. As such, it becomes a useful arca (in all its many senses) in thinking about Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxonism, the things they encrypt and, possibly, for the process of unencrypting. It is time to open the crypt, so to speak, and confront and bury its ghosts. As the Franks Casket shows, (mis)appropriation of the medieval past is nothing new, although its appropriation by right-wing and racist groups across the globe continues to shock some and to be ignored by others. Neither response helps to work towards a solution. Appropriation of the medieval in general and the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in particular played a role in the formation of both England and the USA, and continues to be part of the idea of national identity in both countries 77 See, for example, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, ‘Lost in Our Field: Racism and the International Congress on Medieval Studies’, Medievalists of Color, 24 July 2018: https:// medievalistsofcolor.com/public-discourse/.

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in the form of linguistic, economic, and ideological imperialism.78 To be sure, the omnipresence of the news as well as social media have multiplied both the number of appropriations that we see and the speed at which we see them, a development central to Bauman’s concept of retrotopia. I use the term retro-migration (migration back to a place of origin) in this section of the chapter with reference to both metaphorical and literal return journeys. Those who study early medieval England must make the intellectual journey back to the origins of their discipline as part of the process of unencrypting its violence and dismantling its oppressive and repressive practices and structures. It is impossible to dismantle and rebuild a field completely, to really change it, unless the violence, racism, and nationalism on which it was built are acknowledged, and accepted to be a part of the intellectual training and academic history of senior white scholars (and some not so senior ones), whether we have been conscious of it or not. The scholarship of Thorpe or Thorkelin or Grundtvig cannot be separated from their nationalist or religious beliefs because they are part of what motivated that scholarship in the first place. This raises the question of how we can read or use the scholarship of these, and many other problematic authors, including the authors of many of our primary sources. Debate on the subject has been around for a long time. It is impossible to ignore the work of Heidegger, whose Nazi sympathies are well known; or Frantzen, who was one of the pioneers in revealing the nationalism and racism – both popular and academic – of Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-Saxonists; or the ethnic or misogynistic violence of authors like Bede, Felix, or Alfred, on whose writings we still rely for knowledge about the past. The solution I have taken in this book is to continue to use the work but with caution and with full acknowledgement of the ethical problems that it raises for me and the fact that whatever choice I make in including and discussing these texts and their problems will upset some readers. By the same token, I would not include a scholar whose work promotes racism, nationalism, or violence in a conference or edited publication. I also choose to try to read these texts differently. To read the Franks Casket, for example, against the grain of its traditional interpretation as an image of religious synchronism and/or good and bad kingship in order to identify what is encrypted within it. But there is a difference between recognising the problems of the past and actively working to change the practices and structures of the present that they have 78 See especially Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2017).

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produced in order to create a more inclusive as well as a more intellectually rich future. Scholars identification as ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ continues to exist amidst a history of racism that is both enshrined in and perpetuated by very name. The field continues to suffer from intellectual and methodological gatekeeping,79 although there are scholars committed to and working for change. But there are also problems in the larger field of Medieval Studies that show the issues are not limited to the study of early England. Far too many in the audience laughed at the racist ‘joke’ told by a senior white medievalist that opened the 2017 International Medieval Congress in Leeds, and its racist content and the institutional structures that had produced and tolerated it were recognised as a problem only when BIPOC (and other) scholars brought it to the attention of the media and the larger field.80 That the joke was, if not accepted by members of the audience, relegated to embarrassed silence, is due in large part to the white male privilege, academic hierarchies, and tendency to remain silent – even though one might disagree – that continue to exist in both Medieval Studies and academia in general.81 For the large part, silence also remains around cases of sexual harassment and discrimination within academia,82 even though the names of some of the serial offenders are well known, and even though they create an atmosphere of disgust and fear for those of us who continue to work in academia. There is also a difference between recognising and lamenting institutional and disciplinary problems and actively helping those they are used to oppress or exclude both within and outside of academia. Medieval Studies, and study of early England in particular, have problems, but the victims are those who are hurt and silenced by their academic 79 Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’; Rambaran-Olm, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia, and White Supremacy’. 80 Clara J. Chan, ‘Medievalists, Recoiling from White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field’, The Chronicle for Higher Education, 16 July 2017: https://www.chronicle. com/article/Medievalists-Recoiling-From/240666; Medievalists of Color, ‘On Race and Medieval Studies’, Medievalists of Color, 1 August 2017: http://medievalistsofcolor.com/statements/on-race-and-medieval-studies/. 81 David Batty, ‘UK Universities Condemned for Failure to Tackle Racism’, The Guardian, 5 July 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/05/uk-universities-condemned-for-failure-to-tackle-racism; Sally Weale, David Batty, and Rachel Obordo, ‘“A Demeaning Environment”: Stories of Racism in UK Universities’, The Guardian, 5 July 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/05/ uk-universities-condemned-for-failure-to-tackle-racism; Kalwant Bhopal, White Privilege: The Myth of the Post-Racist Society (Bristol, 2018). 82 Rachael Pells, ‘London University Professor Quits over “Sexual Harrassment of Female Students by Staff ”’, The Independent, 9 June 2016: https://www.independent. co.uk/news/education/education-news/london-university-goldsmiths-professor-quits-sexual-harassment-female-students-staff-a7072131.html.

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practices and their public and institutional weaponising. These fields are the problems, not the victims. Silence, as the Franks Casket shows us, is a tool and product of colonialism. Silence, as I have argued it might function in the Vitellius Wonders of the East, however, can also be a means of refusing colonialism and/or complicity by refusing to adopt the language of the coloniser. Rather than remaining silent about racism (and racist ‘jokes’) we can refuse to speak in the way that the structures of academia have trained us to speak. We can create a discipline that speaks and reads differently. In Beowulf too, in fact in the Beowulf manuscript as a whole, the English fictionalised a retro-migration that encrypted the violence and colonialism of their culture by projecting it back into the past. Today, immersive technologies have made it possible to return virtually to the world of Beowulf through gaming, so often another means of encrypting the racism, colonialism, and the resulting violence of the modern world and projecting it somewhere else. Museum exhibitions and catalogues return the past of the Franks Casket or the Beowulf manuscript to us, presenting them as safely distant and idealised places in the sense that they are both the source of a treasured national identity and objects that no longer have the power of affect, and presenting them as safely distant and idealised places that are both objects from a distant past that is no longer with us and objects contained within an ‘objective’ museum environment rather than active agents in the contemporary world. But nationalism today, just as in the nineteenth century, returns time and again to the very national myths and symbols from the past that they carry into the present. Calls for and processes of sending migrants and refugees back to the countries from which they came, or to which governments might think they belong, return us to the backward-looking and nationalist ideas of nations and identities that have their source in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ for both the USA and the UK. Grendel and his mother must be removed from the kingdom. Such actions are especially hypocritical in these two countries in which the migration myth is so deeply embedded, but then contradictions and double standards have always been a part of that myth. The Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the USA in 2016 have created a retreat into white nationalism that actively works to advance its violence and calls ever more stridently for the closing of national borders to all but wealthy or highly skilled white immigrants, and the retro-migration of others, especially people of colour. To be sure, nationalism and racism were problems in both countries before Trump and Brexit, as were fears about immigrants,

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migrants, and refugees, although much, if not most, of the white population of both countries was in the privileged position of being able to ignore it. Indeed, fears about immigration and refugees were one of the factors fuelling the leave vote in the UK and Trump’s election in the first place.83 Fear is the operative emotion in this scenario, a fear that Gilroy convincingly suggests is generated by the fact that ‘incomers’, and one should also add in the case of the USA the people displaced by settler colonialism, are reminders of the encrypted violence and empire of the past.84 Long before Brexit the British National Party (BNP) was calling for a ban on immigration and the introduction of an ‘English’ parliament in the UK, echoing earlier Anglo-Saxonist claims that the English were the inventors of parliamentary democracy in the first place. The Traditional British Group (TBG) also expressed their opposition to immigration and liberal left multiculturalism, as well as their belief in British heritage and customs, including a church rooted in early medieval Christianity.85 The group wearetheenglish.com was registered in 2001, though most of its retail activity seems to have taken place only in the past few years. The group is an example of just the sort of tribalism that populates Bauman’s retrotopia. According to their website, they are of the view that: It is a national tragedy that through political correctness we are unable to instil a sense of pride and belonging into our children. Indeed, in times when many have no sense of direction, when communities are fragmented, our Englishness can provide that identity, pull everyone together and tell us something of who we are and from where we come. Political correctness in this country is used as an instrument of oppression, a weapon in the hands of a small minority to deny the majority their right to express their opinion and culture. As English people we should utterly reject it in all its forms and never allow those in positions of power to dictate to us what is and is not acceptable.86

Typically, the white supremacist oppressors here model themselves on the oppressed. Wearetheenglish endorses their views with quotations 83 On the nationalism of Brexit and the violence that resulted from it see Ian Cobain, Nazia Parveen, and Matthew Taylor, ‘The Slow-Burning Hatred that Led Thomas Mair to Murder Jo Cox’, The Guardian, 23 November 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/23/ thomas-mair-slow-burning-hatred-led-to-jo-cox-murder. 84 Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, p. 110. 85 The beliefs and manifestos of both the BNP and TBG are available on their respective websites. 86 https://wearetheenglish.com/all-about-england-25-w.asp.

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from the television series The Last Kingdom, which is set in the period in which King Alfred rose to power, and from popular historian David Starkey, providing an excellent example of how such groups gain support by taking from both popular and academic – or what they believe to be academic – culture. Specifically, the group claims legitimacy for its views from Starkey’s statements that English history begins with the Anglo-Saxons and not the Romans or the Normans (never mind the Britons who don’t even get a mention), the men who laid the foundation of modern England. Technically, Starkey is correct that you cannot have a place called England until the arrival of the people after whom it is named, but the general lack of precision in the use of the names England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, and the United Kingdom collapses historical and geographical differences between the places and polities that these names represent. The list of ‘English Greats’ on the ‘we are the english’ website begins with Bede and Alfred and ends with Churchill, and their potted history of the island celebrates English poetry and culture, empire, and the English of the Second World War who, it is claimed, ‘bore the brunt of German aggression’. The group is supported in part by the sale of merchandise, including an ‘Angelcynn – English tribe’ T-shirt bearing the white dragon of England. It is impossible to claim a more ‘AngloSaxon’ identity. The Brexit vote in the UK and the US election of Donald Trump have only strengthened these groups by giving white nationalism and racist violence their implicit, indeed sometimes explicit, backing. At the same time that the UK government attempted to assure Europeans settled in the country that they would be welcome to stay (as long as they paid a hefty fee to obtain a residence permit), it began the deportation of people from the Caribbean who had been invited to move to the UK at the end of the Second World War – the Windrush generation – along with their children who have lived here all their lives and may or may not hold British passports. As Kalwant Bhopal has documented, Brexit was driven by an ‘us versus them’ mentality and led to an immediate rise in hate crimes and racist propaganda.87 It has also coincided with a growth in UK Independence Party (UKIP) membership that has moved this already right-wing party even further to the right,88 and the creation of the Brexit Party, a pro-leave Kalwant Bhopal, White Privilege: The Myth of the Post-Racist Society, pp. 11–13. The Guardian, ‘Revealed: UKIP Membership Surge Shifts Party to Far Right’: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/ new-ukip-members-shifting-party-far-right. 87 88

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party that claims to stand for democracy and the future of a Britain that takes back control of its own ‘laws, borders, and money’.89 It is led by the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. In the USA, Trump’s use of racist propaganda and populist fears of migrants and refugees both during his campaign and since his election is well documented, as are his repeated calls for the deportation of or questioning of the citizenship of people of colour, most famously in his promotion of the birther theory about Barack Obama, but most injuriously in his attacks on those without Obama’s position and resources. Equally well documented are his failure to denounce racial violence and his statements that frequently seem to condone it.90 With the exception of groups like ‘we are the english’, there is generally nothing drawn specifically from the history or culture of pre-1066 England in the demands for retro-migration, but they do continue the double-standard of good and bad migration that for both the USA and England has its origins in the ‘Anglo-Saxons’,91 and they do smack of the same white heroic Christian discourse that saw King Alfred invoked in both countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as the most violent attacks tend to be against Muslims or those believed to be Muslims. It is also a continuation of the insular exceptionalism that was so much a part of the AngloSaxon origin myth and the later growth of the English empire. Indeed, many pro-Brexit arguments rest on the spectre of the British Empire, the melancholy generated by its loss, and, of course, the colonising power of the English language.92 The UK believed it had some special status that would allow it to wall itself off from immigration and EU legislation whilst still maintaining preferential treatment in trade and other areas, which is but one example of its continued imagining of its own exceptionalism. As one of the conservative nationalists behind the campaign put it, ‘Anglo-Saxon values made possible the transformation of our planet over the past three centuries, allowing extraordinary numbers of people to enjoy an unprecedented standard https://www.thebrexitparty.org . Accessed 11 September 2019. Trump’s history of racism and his controversial statements are far too numerous to list here. Many of them are publicly available in his entry in Wikipedia. 91 On the idea of good and bad immigration and the universal experience of writers of colour in the UK today see Nikesh Shukla, ed., The Good Immigrant (London, 2016), and perhaps especially Musa Okwonga’s chapter, ‘The Ungrateful Country’, pp. 224–34. 92 See for example Daniel Hannan, How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters (London, 2013). Of course the book invokes Alfred. For Hannan, ‘the birth of England as a nation-state can be dated to Alfred’s wars [against the pagan Danish invaders]’ (p. 73), and Alfred is the true founder of the parliamentary system (p. 84). 89 90

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of living.’93 According to this view, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ lie behind the development of modernity itself. Tweets and blog posts have repeatedly described Brexit as an ideological wall and linked it to Trump’s plans for a physical wall.94 Like the walls of the crypt or the panels of the Franks Casket, Brexit needs to be thought from the inside out as a ‘crypt effect’,95 its walls built by the violence it fails to fully contain. Trump’s call for a wall to close the US border with Mexico has been a prominent part of his agenda from the start. Walls, he stated in January 2019, are a medieval solution to immigration that works.96 His words evoked the spectre of Hadrian’s Wall, amongst others, and generated quite a response from medievalists, including scholars of early England, who pointed out the multiple historical errors and misappropriations in his views.97 He is not the only one misunderstanding the past, however. Democrats in opposition to the wall have also described it as medieval, though they use the term negatively. Both Brexit and Trump’s wall partition off – or would partition off – their respective countries in different ways. They are both ‘designed to keep the topography intact and the place safe’,98 but they can never succeed in doing so. Brexit and the belief that the USA needs a wall across its Mexican border encrypt the violence done by both countries as part of empire (which again rests on Anglo-Saxon England) and settler colonialism by projecting the historical violence on to those against whom it was (and continues

Hannan, How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters, p. 63. See for example Adrián Maldonado, ‘Archaeotrolling the Wall’, @Almost Arch: https://almostarchaeology.com/post/182176393408/archaeotrollingthewall?fbclid=IwAR0cCPIWRn7IWlXW7D_DKlboEdufuc5haRMYRXk0-Ccq9WIdpCnc-oNuK3U. 95 Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xiii. 96 On the Trump presidency and the medieval more generally see Seeta Chaganti. ‘B-Sides: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”’. Public Books, 12 August 2017: https:// www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-sir-gawain-green-knight/. 97 See for example Maldonado, ‘Archaeotrolling the Wall; Paul B. Sturtevant, ‘What Politicians Mean when They Call the Wall “Medieval”’, The Washington Post, 22 January 19: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/22/ what-politicians-mean-when-they-call-border-wall-medieval/?fbclid=IwAR2fvk-HblUYhPW6taCPLZaf9-FU_j7iPFXpyo2ym11NBhIlLkmC4mHILI0&noredirect=on&utm_term=.991eaee704b9; David M. Perry, ‘The Wall Isn’t Medieval’: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/11/opinions/donald-trump-wall-is-notmedieval-perry/index.html. 98 Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, p. xix. As Abraham and Torok demonstrate, the walls of this type of ‘endocryptic identification’ are every bit as real as the secret they encrypt: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘“The Lost Object – Me”: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’, in The Shell and the Kernel, pp. 139–56. 93 94

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to be) used. The real threat and the real violence remains within the national self. Of course, the act of national encryption is not limited to the UK and the USA. Gabriele Schwab explored its presence in post-Second World War Germany, and Paul Sturtevant has pointed out that Trump’s calls for a wall are also appealing to a nationalist public power-base that actively appropriates medieval history and identifies especially with the Celts, Vikings, and Crusaders as holy warriors.99 The toxic twist given to history by nationalist Trump voters and extreme right-wing groups has been linked to the appropriation of Nordic and Germanic history by the Nazis and their supporters, and is reminiscent of, or more precisely simply a continuation of the similar uses of history made by the Victorians and the European colonisers of North America before them. As was the case with those groups, there is an inherent ambivalence and/or contradiction to the way the medieval is interpreted and weaponised. At the same time that the right and the so-called alt-right imagine their own heritage as part of a glorious white ‘Anglo-Saxon’ past, they ‘medievalise’ their opponents as barbaric others still living in a medieval dark age. The Middle East and Islam in particular have for centuries been portrayed as medieval in their traditions and beliefs, religious fundamentalism, repression, and terrorism. Such descriptions also imply that these are people who not only live in the past, in contrast to the modernity of the West, but that violence and terrorism are actions of the past and not part of (post)modernity.100 There is again a clear contradiction here as violence perpetrated by Muslims and other Middle Eastern peoples is equated with medieval barbarity while the violence perpetrated by the USA or Europe is equated with modern justice and human rights. The hypocrisy of both the justification of western violence and the military bravado of the attitude repeats the failed heroicwarrior masculinity of Alexander’s campaign in India, a country that Alexander believed he had every right to invade and colonise, but that he was never able to conquer, or the escalation of violence and death of the poem Beowulf, a poem in which there is no morally right or lasting victory (though of course none of the men in the poem can see that), and one in which Anglo-Saxon violence is encrypted 99 Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma; Sturtevant, ‘What Politicians Mean when they Call the Wall “Medieval”’. 100 Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century, pp. 59–62; Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror (Chicago, 2007); Chris Jones, ‘Is Islamic State Medieval?’: https://researchtheheadlines.org/2014/09/18/is-islamic-state-medieval/.

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by dislocating it to another time and place. As noted in Chapter 3, the messianic language now used by Donald Trump to describe himself and his leadership is also reminiscent of that of Alexander, although he is hardly the only national leader to talk in this way. The otherness of the Middle East in terms of language, religion, and ‘barbarity’, in turn recalls the elreordge people that Alexander encounters in India, that he cannot understand, and towards whom his only response is violence. The spectres of slavery, US settler colonialism and violence, and European empire haunt such actions, which are ultimately as empty as Alexander or Beowulf ’s pride and belief in the superiority of their own strength and their glittering troops. It is also an attitude that locates humanity as residing in Christianity and those who convert to (or who can be converted to) it as narrowly as did the Life of St Christopher. But as that text also reveals, the beast and the sovereign are two sides of the same character, and – though this was not the intention of the text – there is a beast within the evangelical Christian. A prominent part of the right-wing ideological return to the medieval past is the appropriation and weaponising of its monuments and symbols such as the ring-headed cross, the Tyr and Othala runes, Thor’s hammer, and specific swords, banners, or buildings. ‘Camp Excalibur’ was the name of a BNP-organised Hitler youth-style camp that was intended to ‘instil in its members a sense of the British past as a kind of “mythical history that is joined with the everyday”’.101 The weapons and clothing of the shooter in the Otautahi, Aotearoa / Christchurch, New Zealand massacre were covered with medieval symbols and references to medieval battles and crusaders. The Portland, Oregon white supremacist who murdered two men who came to the aid of the women he was threatening praised Vinland, the Viking name for the north-east section of North America that they explored and on which there was a short-lived Viking settlement. Vinland has also been appropriated and even given its own flag by the white supremacist group the Vinland Social Club as a means of creating an imaginary white ‘indigeneity’ and of creating a community around it.102 Norway’s 2018 alpine skiing team faced national and international outrage when they were photographed in their official 101 Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century, p. 180. 102 ADL, ‘Vinland Flag’: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/ vinland-flag; Paul B. Sturtevant, ‘Schrödinger’s Medievalisms’, The Public Medievalist, 28,12,17: https://www.publicmedievalist.com/schrodinger/; David M. Perry, ‘What to do when Nazis are Obsessed with your Field’. Pacific Standard, 6 September 2017: https://psmag.com/education/nazis-love-taylor-swift-and-also-the-crusades.

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sweaters decorated with the Tyr rune, which, while part of the Old Norse language and alphabet, had also been adopted and weaponised by Hitler and the Nazis and has been taken as a symbol by Scandinavian neo-Nazi groups such as the Nordiska Motstandsrorelsen. The emblem of Stormfront, ‘the voice of the new embattled white minority’, is a ring-headed ‘Celtic’-style cross, a symbol also popular as a tattoo amongst members of this and other white supremacist groups for whom it represents a potent combination of Christianity, white supremacism, and tribalism.103 The Stormfront website also displays images of swastikas labelled as Anglo-Saxon symbols and lists Beowulf as essential reading.104 The weaponising of these and other symbols has created a crisis around how at least some of the symbols are to be interpreted. The Irish ring-headed cross and other images from the early medieval Irish past, for example, have been used for centuries as signs of Irish solidarity and resistance to British colonialism and violence without having carried white supremacist or right-wing nationalist connotations,105 although they ultimately remain symbols of a white cultural nationalism. As Maggie Williams points out, there are significant formal and contextual differences between the Irish (and she stresses Irish, never Celtic) medieval originals and the cross symbols used by white supremacists, which are based on symbols developed during the Second World War by the Norwegian Nazi party.106 As she also points out, however, the differences between the two might not be obvious to the non-specialist and also leaves unresolved the problem of how to differentiate between images and meanings, as well as the marketing and representation of such images.107 Unfortunately, appropriating the past redefines the past and changes history forever, and the same is true for its images. Of course this is true of any rewriting or representation of the past, 103 Sierra Lomuto, ‘White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies’, In the Middle, 5 December 2016: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/12/white-nationalism-and-ethics-of.html. 104 Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy’, Medium.com, 17 June 2018: https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/ anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3. 105 Maggie M. Williams, Icons of Irishness from the Middle Ages to the Modern World (New York, 2012). 106 Maggie Williams, ‘“Celtic” Crosses and White Supremacism’, The Material Collective, 8 August 2017: https://thematerialcollective.org/ celtic-crosses-white-supremacism/. 107 Williams, ‘“Celtic” Crosses and White Supremacism’. See also Maggie M. Williams, ‘“Celtic” Crosses and the Myth of Whiteness’, in Whose Middle Ages?, ed. Andrew Albin, Mary Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas Paul, and Nina Rowe (New York, 2019), pp. 220–32.

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as Alfred’s Preface or the panels of the Franks Casket make clear, but it underlines the point that it is impossible to sustain the fiction that medieval objects and images are artefacts with some kind of agreed and objective meaning that reside innocently within museums or heritage sites – that they are safely buried in the past rather than continuing to haunt the present. Whether defining themselves as a tribe (like Stormfront), as a political party (like the British National Party, BNP), or as a gang or social group (like the Vinlander’s Social Club) these extreme right-wing groups are tribal. They are closed groups of like-minded people fighting the diversification and globalism of contemporary society in one form or another. They are often violent and frequently model their violence on – or invoke as part of it – the heroes or gods of the heroic tribal past, as does the Finnish neo-Nazi group ‘Soldiers of Odin’. They appropriate symbols like the ring-headed cross or runic characters as totems of self-identification and membership. Even when not turning to the past for their symbols or calling for violent confrontation, websites and blogposts often call for a tribalism reminiscent of the male warrior society of Beowulf.108 Such groups perform tribalism in very much the same way that Bauman defines it, as a phenomenon in which states, neighbourhoods, or social groups become self-policing, ideologically gated and fortified communities operating on an us-versus-them model.109 The symbols that help them to create a sense of community within the self-policing tribe are terror-ornaments, just like the boar-crested helmets of the warriors in Beowulf. They are also a recruitment tool, creating an aesthetic that is eye-catching, memorable, and has the power to draw potential new members to them. Medievalists have been quick to point out that the symbols have been taken out of their historical context and reinterpreted but, while it is important that people are aware of that, defending the medieval is not what needs to be prioritised. The people and communities that are the victims of the violence perpetrated by white supremacists and extreme right-wing conservatives, and the inequalities created by western capitalist and colonial settler power structures, should be our real priorities, not the Middle Ages. The insularity of western white privilege and its attitudes towards history and art was made clear to the world in the aftermath of the fire that destroyed the roof of Notre Dame, Paris, on 15 April 2019. Within 108 See, for example, Phantom, ‘Tribalism and the Alt-right’, Men of the West: https://www.menofthewest.net/tribalism-alt-right/. 109 Bauman, Retrotopia, pp. 49–52.

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days enormous sums of money had been raised from corporations and individual donors for its rebuilding, far more than is routinely raised to help the far more common and urgent problems and victims of poverty, racist violence, or ecological disasters. Moreover, as a monument of and to western European Christendom, the cathedral received far more mainstream media attention worldwide than the destruction of monuments (and ways of life) sacred to black, indigenous, and people of colour, such as the burning of churches used by black congregations in the southern USA, or monuments sacred to Islam and other religions or cultures such as the ongoing destruction of sacred sites in Saudi Arabia, or the threat to the sacred site of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.110 Conspiracy theorists were also quick to label the Notre Dame fire an act of terrorism perpetrated by Muslims or Jews.111 That is not to say that the damage to the cathedral does not constitute a great loss. It clearly does, but not equally and not to everyone. There are other losses that are just as great or greater, and other views on what the cathedral represents. To some it is a monument that represents the peace, charity, and beauty of Christianity; to some it is simply a beautiful example of medieval art and architecture; to some it is a monument built on religious violence and persecution, and rigid class and ethnic hierarchies; to some it is a national treasure. It is a ‘stereographic plurality of its wave of signifiers’.112

RETROSPECTIVE II The idea that the art of the European past has universal value and also the idea that it is a passive carrier of some sort of universal meaning and no longer a touchstone for political or religious debate or conflict are problematic in the extreme, as both the appropriation of images from the past and the Notre Dame fire reveal.113 Such views are inherent in, if not actively furthered by many – though by no means all – exhibitions of medieval art. Firstly, there is no such thing 110 The destruction of the site of Mauna Kea to build a telescope is in fact funded by North American governments, foundations, and academic institutions. 111 See, for example: https://theblacksphere.net/2019/04/muslim-ties-notredame-fire/; https://forward.com/fast-forward/422630/jews-muslims-blame-notredame-fire-conspiracy/, both accessed 5 September 2015. 112 Above, p. 77. 113 I leave aside here the problem of the whole notion that there is any agreement over what might be meant by ‘the European past’ especially given the changing membership and volatility of the present-day EU.

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as universal value – though certainly there should be when it comes to climate change and the destruction of the planet – and secondly, such assumptions help to create a public that views art history as meaningless for the contemporary world and the preserve of elite (and largely white) museum professionals and academics. Exhibitions are inherently retrospective, letting visitors surround themselves with the past, but with what is presented as a safe and often sanitised version of the past that keeps it in a case and at a distance. Exhibitions of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ art are inherently racist because (a) the term AngloSaxon can never be free of its racist baggage, and (b) they are so often designed for and marketed to a largely or exclusively white public, or a public that is believed either to identify with or value the culture and heritage they represent. The British Museum’s 1991 exhibition, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900, like David Starkey, made the origins of England synonymous with the establishment of the early English kingdoms. Again, while the name could not exist before the arrival of the Angelcynn from which it derives, the country as a lived space was something very different than either the name or the title of the exhibition imply. While the Britons and their kingdoms and cultures are mentioned in the catalogue, the scope of their contribution to both art and the creation of the nation was downplayed. The introductory essay to the catalogue begins with the sentence ‘The Anglo-Saxons, whose artistic, technological and cultural achievements in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries are displayed in this exhibition, were the true ancestors of the English today.’114 The sentence not only erases the Welsh, Scots, and Cornish from both past and present, but also erases the presence of all those from elsewhere who have settled in and become citizens of the country. Its implicit racism was also typical of the Thatcherite era in which the exhibition was planned and realised. Its homogenous art reflected the fantasy of the white Anglo-Saxon England that constituted Thatcher’s powerbase and audience. England, Britain, the UK was and always had been a home for migrants and immigrants from other places, having no indigenous population of its own, no population that originated in this place. The Franks Casket was one of the objects included in the exhibition, and the multiple sources of its scenes and stories was emphasised, as one would expect. It brought together the Jewish, Roman, Christian, 114 Nicholas Brooks, ‘Historical Introduction’, in The Making of England: AngloSaxon Art and Culture AD 600–900, ed. Leslie Webster and Janet Backhouse (London, 1991), pp. 9–14, at 9.

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and Germanic traditions; it was a ‘heady’ mix of sources and cultural traditions; it was ‘ostentatiously erudite’, a ‘parade of learning and of epigraphic virtuosity’.115 Its very special place in the British Museum’s collections and the role that it played in the making of early England as a centre of learning were also clear. All that is undeniably true, but the violence and imperial content of its panels were not mentioned other than in a passing reference to the idea that the birth of heroes that is explicit in the Adoration of the Magi and implicit in the Weland the Smith panels on the front of the casket ‘make good sin and suffering’.116 The casket, along with so many of the other objects in ‘The New Learning’ section of the exhibition and catalogue are examples of how much England has always been reliant on the contributions made by those who brought ideas and objects from elsewhere to its shores, and actually demonstrate the ways in which the Angles and Saxons were never the only, let alone the ancestors of the English. The nature of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’’ relationship to the British and Romano-British past, and the relationship of the modern world to the period, were also problems for the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition held at the British Library from October 2018 to February 2019, even though it devoted more space to the Irish and British peoples and to the relationship between the island and parts of Europe. The introduction to the catalogue stated that while small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had begun to form in the sixth century, their structure, territory, and ethnic make-up were uncertain. Moreover, it was also uncertain ‘how long these early political units functioned alongside – or when they displaced other British entities’.117 In this scenario, the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic tribes from the Continent creates a distinct break with the British past (even if we cannot be sure of the exact date or nature of that break) with the displacement of British polities, and implies that there was no continuity, no influence of those pre-existing polities on the incomers even though they are also said to have existed side by side for some time. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic tribes is also treated as a process of migration and settlement rather than as a conquest, despite its having been made possible by the warbands that began to arrive in Britain with the departure of the 115 Leslie Webster, ‘The Franks Casket’, in The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900, p. 103. 116 Webster ‘The Franks Casket’, in The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900, p. 103. 117 Joanna Story, ‘Introduction’, in Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, ed. Clare Breay and Joanna Story (London, 2018), p. 15.

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Romans, and despite the seemingly rapid displacement of the British political/cultural units noted previously.118 It is thus treated as something distinctly different in nature to the later conquests of 1016 and 1066 even though it was made possible only through long-term war and displacement, and even though it led to a more radical and enduring change on the island and the way it has been imagined over the centuries than did either of the latter two events. There is also a problematic lack of continuity or precision in the names used for the island. For example, the Germanic-speaking tribes arrive in Britain in the first half of the fifth century but they begin to settle and bury their dead in England.119 The Britons haunt the catalogue with their simultaneous presence and absence just as they do the Franks Casket and Beowulf. The Beowulf manuscript was of course included in the exhibition, with a section of the Beowulf poem rather than the illuminated Wonders of the East open for display, but then, according to the catalogue, Beowulf is ‘universally acknowledged as the greatest AngloSaxon literary relic of all’ – again the problematic claim to universal value. While the other texts in the manuscript were listed, the poem was located as something in opposition to their ‘less well-regarded’ compositions, their elsewheres and the stories they told, a ‘contrast and balance to’ their external exploits with its great monster-slaying hero.120 The opening displayed during the exhibition and illustrated in the catalogue entry is, appropriately enough, folios 168v–169r, the section of the poem that narrates Beowulf ’s journey up through the mere and his presentation of the head of the indigenous beast Grendel to the colonial sovereign Hrothgar. Reviews of the exhibition in the press were universally positive. Jonathan Jones writing in The Guardian gave it five stars and described it as an exhibition of a world in which ‘the real and supernatural’ entwined, a phrase that comes troubling close to repeating the Anglo-Saxons’ own location of their exceptionalism somewhere between the human and the divine.121 On the other hand, with its 118 Story, ‘Origins’, in Breay and Story, eds, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, p. 65. 119 Story, ‘Origins’, in Breay and Story, eds, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, p. 65. 120 Andy Orchard, ‘Beowulf ’, in Breay and Story, eds, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, p. 230. 121 Jonathan Jones, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Review – Barbaric Splendour and Fierce Vision’. The Guardian, 21 October 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/21/ anglo-saxon-kingdoms-review-barbaric-splendour-and-fierce-vision.

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attention to the relationship between Anglo-Saxon England and other European cultures it revealed a place ‘that was not very English at all. One minute it looks Scandinavian, the next Celtic – but mostly it seems, well, European.’122 Eddy Frankel described it as an ‘up yours’ to Brexit.123 But Brexit is about much more than England’s relationship to Europe; it is also about England’s relationship to a much larger world and specifically a much larger world of immigrants, migrants, and refugees. All in all, the exhibition was a missed opportunity to explore just how problematic ideas about and definitions of AngloSaxon, England, Britain, Europe, and the EU are, and have been historically, and continue to be for many today. It was also a missed opportunity to explore the troubling baggage that the term AngloSaxon always carries with it. Then again, it was a distinctly white England and Europe that were on display, right down to the life-size cut-out of King Edgar that encouraged visitors to take pictures of themselves as an Anglo-Saxon king. It was a very popular gimmick, but is England, and was the exhibition all about elite white Christian males or imagining one’s self as one? It also silently inscribed the idea of exceptionalism into the exhibition as the image is from the frontispiece to the New Minster Charter (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.iii, fol. 2v), which was also the official image for the exhibition used on both its website and for the cover of the catalogue. In the miniature Edgar stands alongside the Virgin Mary and St Peter, his hands rising above their heads to touch the angels who support Christ in Majesty above him.124 Included in the exhibition, but not highlighted in any way, were manuscripts and objects, like the Beowulf manuscript (the manuscript, not just the poem), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Cotton Tiberius B.v miscellany that could have encouraged thinking beyond the white European world. Included 122 Jones, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Review – Barbaric Splendour and Fierce Vision’. The Guardian, 21 October 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/ oct/21/anglo-saxon-kingdoms-review-barbaric-splendour-and-fierce-vision. 123 Eddy Frankel, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Review’. Time Out: https://www.timeout. com/london/museums/anglo-saxon-kingdoms-review. 124 The text of the New Minster Charter locates the monastery’s reform within the same tradition of exceptionalism. The first chapter of its proem states that man was created to fill the thrones of the fallen angels. The fall of the angels and the restitution of divine order are then paralleled by Edgar’s expulsion of the secular canons and replacement of them with Benedictine monks. For a discussion of the image and its relation to the text of the charter see Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of AngloSaxon England, pp. 85–93; see also Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and its Minsters, pp. 65–97. For an image of the frontispiece see: https://www. bl.uk/collection-items/new-minster-charter.

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too were manuscripts or objects that were from (or copied works from) North Africa and Islamic Spain. The catalogue’s discussion of Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian, who came from Tarsus and Cyrenica respectively,125 also provided a missed opportunity to bring experiences surrounding, and important contributions made by, immigrants and refugees from the past (some of those elsewheres of the Beowulf manuscript) into the present day, especially as Hadrian was a refugee from the Arab invasion of North Africa who arrived in Canterbury by way of Naples.126

RETROFIRE Neither The Making of England nor the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition was intentionally racist. Their problems lay in the lack of racial diversity, and theoretical or methodological awareness, and the continued disciplinary conservatism and inherent assumptions of the field more generally. They were not seen as racist because racism was not believed to have been an issue then, i.e. England pre-1066, and it was thus a contemporary issue on which they could take a privileged position of racial innocence. The conference that accompanied Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms consisted entirely of senior white academics, including me, leaving the impression that the field remained comfortably ensconced within its ivory-tower cocoon, ignoring the exclusionary nature of the field we have constructed and turning a deaf ear to the debates that had been going on within it.127 With hindsight I admit that I should have pulled out of the conference after I became aware of the programme’s lack of inclusivity. Instead I opted to use my paper to discuss the problems of alterity and heroic/toxic masculinity, and I failed miserably to make my points clear. I should also have said something more publicly, especially given the universal academic praise for the exhibition and conference in public and the whispered critiques that were kept private. These are conversations that should have been public. I have headed this section retrofire, an astronautical Tarsus is in modern-day Turkey, and Cyrenica in Libya. See Bede, HE, iv.1 on Hadrian. It should be noted that there was an evening lecture on the subject of Theodore and Hadrian by Alison Hudson, one of the curators of the exhibition, though that does not make up for the lack of information in the catalogue and exhibition. 127 Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’; Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’; Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia, and White Supremacy’. 125 126

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term used for the firing of a retrorocket that provides a thrust opposed to the direction in which the rocket is travelling, ultimately changing its trajectory and preventing an otherwise inevitable crash landing. The term is particularly appropriate because the label ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ has placed academics in a ‘retrograde orbit … a static ontology that generates a melancholic scholarly position’.128 I have also used the term because it suggests a fire projecting back into the past, a burning down of something. The study of early medieval England needs to change course, confront and bury its ghosts, dismantle its crypts, and in their place build a different framework for the study of the past. In his discussion of postimperial melancholia and the encrypting of the historical violence perpetrated by the British Empire and its loss, Paul Gilroy writes: before the British people can adjust to the horrors of their own modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home and abroad, and to consider the extent of their country’s complex investments in the ethnic absolutism that has sustained it.129

The same is true both individually and as a field for those of us who study early medieval England. The last few years have demonstrated the continued prevalence of academic and institutional gatekeeping, insularity, and toxic masculinity in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies. I retain the term ‘AngloSaxon’ here not because it is descriptive of a particular historical era or subject of study, and not because of its reference to something that is ultimately empty and imaginary, but because, call it what you will, until it is dismantled and rebuilt it will continue to rest on and perpetuate the oppressive structures on which it was built. In saying that it is not my intention to dismiss the efforts of the many students and scholars who are working hard to change the field (including its name), I simply want to convey the depth of the problems and the multiple forms they take, as well as to reiterate the fact that this is work that should not be seen as ‘not my problem’ and/or left to others to do. Misogyny, racism, gatekeeping, and the tendency of universities and other institutions to sweep these problems under the carpet rather than addressing them head on is called out for what it 128 129

Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures, p. 22. Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, p. 108.

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is more frequently, but that is having little impact on making things better. We are still, for example, suffering the effects of the ‘femfog’ controversy of 2015–16. Femfog began with a blogpost attacking feminism and urging men to grab their balls and fight back.130 While the origins of its masculinist agenda in Old English texts and the heroic warrior culture of medieval England were not stated explicitly, they were identified as having developed directly out of the study of medieval heroic masculinity more generally. Specifically they were linked to the 2003 publication Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, and to the aggressive masculine culture of the contemporary boxing ring.131 It is hard not to see male competitiveness and combativeness, nor the desire to be part of pugilism (defined for femfog as a male team sport) as not related to the ‘heroic’ masculinity and comitatus society of the earlier texts. As Gilroy notes, there is an intimate relationship between sport and war, and both generate the same emotions, and can generate the same sense of solidarity and us-versus-them perspective that fuels nationalism and empire.132 The driving force behind femfog is no less a melancholic and toxic masculinity than that behind the sporting motto and spirit ‘two world wars and a World Cup’ that Gilroy links to popular nationalism and the postimperial melancholia of the UK.133 Its belittling or fear of feminism can be seen to echo across the field in multiple forms from Andy Orchard’s disparaging remarks about Wealhtheow’s actions in Beowulf,134 to Leonard Neidorf ’s methodologically conservative and almost exclusively white male edited volume on the dating of that same poem.135 Such views are retrotopian both in the sense that they originate in scholarly work on heroic male figures and communities from the past and in their implicit or explicit desire to go back to a 130 See Rio Fernandes, ‘Prominent Medieval Scholar’s Blog on “Feminist Fog” Sparks an Uproar’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 January 2016: https://www. chronicle.com/article/Prominent-Medieval-Scholar-s/235014. Frantzen’s original post has since been replaced by excerpts from his self-published book Modern Masculinity: A Guide for Men (2016), but is available via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20151007054954/http://www.allenfrantzen.com/Men/ femfog.html. 131 Allen J. Frantzen, interview on Honey Badger: https://www.bing.com/videos/ search?q=allen+Frantzen+honey+badger&&view=detail&mid=666A4E95DFA833492B73666A4E95DFA833492B73&rvsmid=56298C0FFAEFA6AD7B3756298C0FFAEFA6AD7B37&FORM=VDRVRV. As Paul Gilroy notes, war and sport generate many of the same emotions (After Empire, 118). 132 Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, pp. 117–18. 133 Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, pp. 116–23. 134 See above p. 176. 135 Leonard Neidorf, ed., The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (Cambridge, 2014).

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time before feminism. They can also be classed as retrotopian in their remaining firmly rooted in methodological approaches to the field that turn their back on contemporary critical theory and the diversity of contemporary academic practice. They are also tribal in the exclusionary communities they construct and the defensive language they use to support their views against outsiders. More generally, the gatekeeping that continues in the field, as evidenced by the failure of many publications, conferences, or conference sessions to seek out or even consider contributions from diverse scholarly voices, reinforces the perception that those who work on that place or period some still call Anglo-Saxon England are a closed tribe. The study of early medieval England and its place in and relationship to the wider global Middle Ages has certainly changed and is continuing to change. There is much more that needs to be done to support women and younger scholars in the field, and it is especially pressing that we ensure racial as well as gender diversity and inclusion. Many, perhaps most of us, want the medieval to have meaning in and for the present, and it is useful to speak out about its (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations, and its weaponising by far-right and white supremacist groups and racist individuals and institutions. But there are still the conservative methodological gatekeepers, the believers in elite academic pedigrees, and the retrotopians who long for that fictional simpler time in which these issues are believed not to have existed, didn’t exist, or were not issues that scholars needed to confront. It is both blatantly wrong and an insult to the medievalists working for change to say that ‘People don’t become medievalists because they want to be political … Most of us are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.’136 It is important to make the public aware of the past and its misuses and to encourage them to engage with the work that we do. It is also important to highlight the ways in which the medieval has been used creatively to critique and address contemporary problems such as the plight and dehumanisation of refugees, as Caroline Bergvall did in her poetic performance and book Drift,137 which was inspired by the Old English poem The Seafarer. This and similar types of projects that bring the past and present into creative dialogue – in order both to reveal historical racism, misogyny, and 136 Richard Utz quoted in Jennifer Schuessler, ‘Medieval Scholars Joust with White Nationalists and One Another’, The New York Times, 5 May 2019: https://www. nytimes.com/2019/05/05/arts/the-battle-for-medieval-studies-white-supremacy. html. 137 Caroline Bergvall, Drift (Brooklyn, 2014).

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religious and ethnic violence and to speak out against their persistence in the present – work to unencrypt the violence behind both.138 The need for precision in language and a clear understanding of the different types of discrimination and control that underlie the field have also been the subject of a number of the important articles and blog posts I have cited in this chapter.139 Racial violence, for example, is not the same as ethnic violence, and decolonisation is not the same as anticolonialism or the dismantling of institutional or disciplinary power structures.140 In the study of pre-1066 England (indeed the European Middle Ages in general), it is important to bear in mind that our academic disciplines and their methodologies and paradigms remain western constructs that need unpicking and dismantling in order to make room for ways in which we can both think and do differently.141 What would the Franks Casket look like if we read it as a monument to white racism and read it through the whiteness of whalebone and ivory objects in later medieval English poetry? What would it look like if we read it as the broken French sewing box that it was at one time rather than as a national treasure? What would Beowulf sound like if it was retold in the multiple languages and voices of those who have been colonised by or excluded from the culture that has been built upon it? How does the material we study relate to and how can it be changed by reading it against other points of view, other narratives, and other ways of seeing? (The Medievalists of Color webpage provides some excellent resources for doing just this.142) It is also important, uncomfortable as it might be, for senior 138 I should also cite here the Refugee Tales project part of which uses Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a means of drawing attention to the indefinite detention of refugees in the UK: http://refugeetales.org. Accessed 6 September 2019. 139 Lomuto, ‘White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies’; eadem, ‘Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique’; Chaganti, ‘B-Sides: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”’; Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’; Dorothy Kim, ‘White Supremacists have Weaponized an Imaginary Viking Past: It’s Time to Reclaim the Real History’, Time: https://news. yahoo.com/white-supremacists-weaponized-imaginary-viking-161647650.html; Rambaran-Olm, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy’. 140 I am indebted to Seeta Chaganti, Adam Miyashiro, Carla Maria Thomas, and Anna Klosowska for a discussion of the term decolonisation, and to Adam in particular for making me aware of Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’. See also the contributions to Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures, ed. Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, Catherine E. Karkov and Anna Klosowska. (Punctum books, forthcoming). 141 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, 2nd edn, 2012). 142 http://medievalistsofcolor.com. Accessed 28 August 2019. See also postmedieval 10.2 (2019): edited by Cord Whitaker and Mathew Gabriele.

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white scholars to acknowledge their positions of privilege and the fact that we are part of the problem, however much we might wish or believe that were not true, and even as we work to change the field for the better.143 I began this book with the observation that Anglo-Saxon England has always been an imaginary place, an empty space into which ideas of what England was, or should be, or should have been have been inserted from the arrival of the Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries to the arrival of the self-named ‘alt-right’ in the twenty-first. The time has come to forget ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England and create a field with a less offensive name, but more importantly a eutopian field – not a utopia as those are always imaginary and located in another place, but a eutopian field, a happy place that can be realised – that would be a place in which diversity, compassion, and inclusion are vital operating methods. Eutopia, like utopia, is in opposition to the world as it is and holds out the possibility of real change. For ‘AngloSaxon studies’, the time has come to change the trajectory, to decentre the past with its exclusionary methods and paradigms, to burn things down and start anew.

143 Peter Baker, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies after Charlottesville: Reflections of a University of Virginia Professor’, Medievalists of Color, Blog, 25 May 2018: http://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-the-profession/anglo-saxon-studies-after-charlottesville-reflections-of-a-university-of-virginia-professor/.

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INDEX

Abraham 184 Abraham, Nicolas 91, 113, 224 n98 Acca, bishop 130 Adamnan 114 Adoration of the Magi 85, 92, 93, 97, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 231 Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham 17, 62, 185; Colloquy 80, 118; Letter to Sigeweard 185; Preface to Genesis 182 Æschere 181 æstel (see also Alfred Jewel) 40, 45 Æthelfrið, king of Bernicia 17 Æthelred, king of Wessex 60 Æthelred II, king 21, 127 Æthelred, archbishop of Canterbury 50 Æthelweard, ealdorman, Chronicle 204 Æthelwold, bishop 65 Æthelwulf king of Wessex, 64 Africa 70, 75, 126, 138, 139, 234 Albert, prince 206 Albertus Magnus 40–41 Alcuin 13, 51, 185 Aldhelm 47 n49, 51, 185 Alexander the Great 22, 23, 99, 128, 139, 140, 148, 153, 154, 156, 158–68, 170, 173, 175, 182, 184, 190, 192, 194, 225, 226; in Islamic sources 168 Alfred, king 15–16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27–76, 84, 115, 120, 122, 132, 195, 196, 198, 199, 201 n18, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 218,

222, 223; Domboc 52–6; Pastoral Care 14, 27–76; Preface 7, 11, 14, 15–16, 19, 27–76, 82, 128, 160, 193, 228; verse Preface 46–8, 49, 57, 88; Epilogue 15, 43, 57–9, 62, 63, 82 Alfred Jewel (see also æstel) 45 Alfred, masque 205 Alfred Millenary 205–6, 211–12 Alfred, New York 208 Alfred University 208–9 Alhheard, bishop of Dorchester 45 n44 Angelcynn 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 54, 55, 59, 64, 68, 69, 230 angels 4, 14, 47, 233 Angles 1, 4, 9, 14, 42, 46, 47, 99, 123, 134 Anglican Church 7 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 9, 17, 204, 233 Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition 231–4 ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies 24, 120, 195–239 Anglo-Saxonism 23, 24, 25, 26, 42, 91, 109, 120, 156, 157, 177, 195–239 Antioch 54 Anziou, Didier 150 apes 134 Apostles 54 Aristotle 159, 161, 162, 165, 166 n115, 167 Ark of the Covenant 94, 100, 105, 111, 115

264

INDEX

Armenia 74, 138 Armes Prydein Vawr 69 Arne, Thomas 205 Arthur, king 74 Asia 71 Asia Minor 70 Asser, bishop 28, 32, 35, 44, 62, 63, 68, 69, 132; Vita Alfredi 52, 59–61, 62, 68, 69, 82, 204 Assyria/Assyrians 126, 182–91 Augustine of Canterbury, saint 47, 51, 53, 55, 56, 63, 67 Augustine of Hippo, saint 107, 191; City of God 66, 134 Austin, Alfred 205 Babylon 126, 138, 152 Bangor 17 Bartholomew, saint 74 n123 Bately, Janet 159 Bauman, Zygmunt 24, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 218, 221, 228 Beadohild 105 beast and sovereign 20, 22, 119, 128, 156, 174, 181, 189, 190, 192, 226 Bede 3, 10, 25, 27, 32, 35, 42, 47 n49, 51, 56, 69, 72, 75, 97, 114, 123, 132, 194, 199, 212, 222; Historia ecclesiastica 3, 4, 35, 73, 80, 115, 122, 170, 203, 218 being-towards-death 20, 106, 107, 108, 116, 131 Belanoff, Patricia A. 184 Benjamin, Walter 116, 118, 122, 134 Beornwulf, king of Mercia 37 Beowulf 22, 23, 88 n25, 97, 108, 114, 117, 169, 171–82, 184, 185, 187, 190, 192, 206, 213 Beowulf 21, 22, 23, 25, 67, 76, 88 n25, 96, 97–8, 107–8, 117, 125, 126, 127, 162, 163, 165, 168–81, 183, 191, 193, 202, 203 n22, 211, 213–15, 216, 220, 225, 227, 228, 232, 238 Beowulf manuscript (see manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv)

Bergvall, Caroline 237 Bethlehem (see also Holy Land) 104, 114 Bethulia 183–91 Bhabha, Homi 112, 116, 158 Bhopal, Kalwant 222 Bigfoot 95 Blemmye 145, 146, 148 Bloch, Ernst 5, 98, 101 Blurton, Heather 144 boar-tusked women 140, 145, 147, 149, 153, 154, 156, 163, 167, 170 Boer War 205–6 Boethius 62; Consolation of Philosophy 120 bone (see also ivory, whalebone) 81, 85, 90, 100, 114, 115, 116, 120 Borges, Jorge Luis 89, 90 Breca 175 Brendan, saint 101–2; Life 101; Naviagatio 101, 102 Brexit 25, 76, 199, 220–1, 222, 223, 224, 233 Brexit Party 222–3 Brioude, St Julian the Martyr 91 Bristow, Tom 84 British Empire 15, 24, 25, 42, 72, 74, 123, 165, 195, 196, 204, 205, 206, 209, 223, 235 British Library 231 British Museum 123–4, 230, 231 British National Party (BNP) 221, 226, 228 Britons 1, 2, 4, 8–9, 10, 17, 26, 69, 74, 75, 76, 98, 107, 112, 122, 132, 135, 165, 170, 178, 194, 210, 211, 230, 231, 232 Brittany 70 Brooke, Sir James 201 Brown, Wendy 194 Burton, Robert 12, 16 Byzantium 17, 99, 108 n81 Cadwallon of Gwynedd 3, 121 Cædmon 63, 65 Caesar, Julius 10, 99 Cain 170, 174; and Abel 107

265

INDEX

Camden, William 202, 203; Camden Society 203; Camden Chair of Ancient History 203 Camelot 74 Canterbury 17, 55, 234; St Augustine’s 17; St Martin’s 97; St Peter’s 17 Cassian 13 castration 186 Césaire, Aimé 177 Charlemagne 51 Charles I, king 18 Chaucer 75 Christ 54, 65, 95, 104, 108, 114, 131, 133, 161, 233 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre 226 Christopher, saint 22, 156, 183; Old English Passio of 21, 125, 129–35, 145, 158, 181, 183, 191, 192, 193, 226; Latin Vita 130, 131 church burning 229 Churchill, Winston 222 Ciconia 153 cipher 19, 90, 100, 113–19 circumcision 186 Cixous, Hélène 11 Claeys, George 128, 191 Cnut, king 18, 21, 127, 132, 192 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 177 colonialism 4, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 35, 42, 53, 68, 70, 74, 75, 76, 90, 91, 95, 98, 108, 109, 123, 127, 128, 132, 140, 157, 158, 160, 164, 165, 168, 175, 177, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 201, 203, 207, 216, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232, 235, 238 Conopenas (see Cynocephali) Constantine 65 Cornish 230 craniology 202, 209, 212 Creighton, Bishop of London 206 Crucifixion 65, 94 n40 Crusaders 225

crypt 19, 21, 77, 84, 100, 143, 224; psychoanalytical concept of 5, 8, 9, 23, 38, 91, 92, 95, 100–124, 235 cryptids 19, 84, 95, 151 cryptozoology 84 Ctesias 137 Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury 51 Cuthbert, saint 73 Cynocephali 22, 131, 133, 134, 143, 144, 155, 156, 158, 165, 167, 176, 192 Dagnus, king 130, 131, 132, 133 Danelaw 26, 33, 56 Danes/Denmark 1, 9, 23, 56, 69, 74, 96, 126, 170, 174, 175, 181, 213, 214 Darius, king 158, 164 Darwin, Charles 209 Davies, Joshua 196, 215 Davis, Joseph Barnard 209–10, 212 Davis, Kathleen 29, 34, 57 decolonisation 207 n36, 238 Democritus 12 Denewulf, bishop of Winchester 45 n44 Deor 104–5 Derrida, Jacques 92, 113, 119, 124, 128, 129, 156, 158 digital technologies 24–5, 197 Dio Cassius 166 n118 Discenza, Nicole Guenther 49, 152 dogs 21, 89, 129, 131, 132, 134–5, 142, 156, 171, 175, 183, 184, 186 Dolar, Mladen 121 Donestre 9, 22, 23, 141, 142, 143, 152, 187, 188 Doyle, Arthur Conan 208 Dream of the Rood 65 dream visions 6, 11, 63, 65, 66 Dumville, David 137 Dürer, Albrecht, Melancholia I 12 Durham 73, 206 Durham 67 dystopia 8, 17, 18, 19, 21–23, 26, 85, 125–94

266

INDEX

Ealhswith, queen 15, 28, 60, 62 Earl, James 178 Ecclesia 185 Ecclesiastical Society 203 Edgar, bishop of Hereford 45 n44 Edgar, king 65, 69, 233 Edward the Elder, king 9 Edwin, king of Northumbria 64, 65 Egbert, king of Wessex 37 Egypt 83, 120, 153, 156 Elene 65 Elias III, patriarch of Jerusalem 17 Ellard, Donna Beth 200 Ellendum battle of 37 Elstob Elizabeth, The Rudiments of Grammar 204 empire (see also British Empire) 42, 108, 128, 200, 205 209, 224, 226, 236 encryption, linguistic 19, 87, 88, 90, 94, 95, 110; psychological 8, 9, 12, 15, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 84, 90, 94, 95, 98, 127, 194, 195, 197, 206, 211, 217, 218, 220, 224, 225, 238 English language (see also Old English) 1, 23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 45, 59, 66, 68, 69, 195, 196, 212, 223 Estes, Heide 171, 184, 187, 190 Ethiopia 138, 148 ethnicity 1, 75, 150, 210 ethnic violence 4, 76, 216, 238 eugenics 202, 210 eutopia 18, 26, 239 exceptionalism 3, 4, 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26, 76, 98, 122, 123, 126, 168, 196, 199, 208, 223, 232, 233 Exeter Book 214 exile 13, 20, 24, 66, 67, 69, 85, 93, 94, 99, 100, 104, 105, 109, 112, 116, 119, 175, 217 Exodus 2, 72, 207 exodus myth (see migration myth) Farage, Nigel 223 femfog 236 Foot, Sarah 34

Foucault, Michel 19, 82–3, 89, 12 Foys, Martin 70, 71 Frankel, Eddy 233 Franks 1, 99 Franks Casket 10, 11, 19–21, 23, 24, 26, 62 n90, 67, 72, 77–124, 126, 127, 128, 138, 153, 157, 169, 191, 193, 198, 202, 217, 218, 220, 224, 228, 230–1, 232, 238 Frantzen, Allen 202, 203 n22, 218, 236 Frederick, prince of Wales 205 Freud, Sigmund 10, 13, 20, 23, 91, 172 Fulk, R. D. 129, 137 Galton, Francis 210 Ganze, Ronald 13 Garrison, Mary 13 Gasche, Rudolph 112 Geatland 175, 181 genealogies, West Saxon 33, 42, 100, 169 Genesis 100, 144, 182, 184 gens anglorum 34, 35, 97, 122 Germany 24, 225 Geoffrey of Monmouth 73, 74, 75 George II, king 205 Gerald of Wales, Topography of Ireland 148, 158 Gildas 3, 10, 27, 37, 74, 75, 76, 112, 132, 165, 194; De excidio et conquestu Britanniae 9 Gilroy, Paul 25, 163 n109, 221, 235, 236 glosses 130, 137 Gordan, E.V. 136 Grass, Günther 12 Gregory the Great, pope 4, 14, 34, 35, 42, 45, 46, 47, 50, 53, 58, 59, 62, 67, 212; Regula pastoralis 7, 27, 30, 44, 46, 48–9, 51, 61 Greek 8, 14, 17, 41, 42, 54, 68, 106, 159, 165, 166 Grendel 10, 22, 23, 70, 76, 84, 88 n25, 96, 98, 107, 165, 169, 170–4, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 187, 193, 194, 212, 213, 220, 232

267

INDEX

Grendel’s mother 22, 23, 70, 88 n25, 96, 98, 165, 169, 170–4, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 187, 189, 193, 194, 220 Grimm, Jacob 213–4 Grimbold of St-Bertin 32, 44 Grundtvig, N.F.S. 214, 215, 218 Gurteen, S. Humphreys 214 Guthlac, saint, Felix’s Life of 112, 127, 170–1, 212, 218 Hadrian, abbot of St Peter’s, Canterbury 17, 234 Hadrian’s Wall 224 Hall, John Leslie 211 Havelock the Dane 76 Heaney, Seamus 216 Heavenfield 3 Hebrew 41, 42, 46, 53, 54, 68, 104 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 118 Hehstan, bishop of London 45 n44 Heidegger, Martin 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 218 hell 81, 103 Hengest and Horsa 20, 74, 98, 207 Henry I, king 73, 204 Henry II, king 148 Henry VIII, king 7, 8, 29, 76 Henry of Huntingdon 73 Heorot 23, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178 ‘heroic masculinity’ 24, 25, 98, 168, 170–81, 191, 203 n22, 216, 225, 228, 234, 236 heterotopia 17, 19, 20, 21, 26, 77–124 Hexham, St Andrew’s 97 high crosses (see also Ruthwell Cross) 3, 206 Highgate Cemetery 83 Historia Brittonum 74 Hostetter, Aaron 178, 181 Holofernes 22, 170, 182–91, 192 Holy Land 20, 56, 69, 97, 109, 114 Howe, Nicholas 6, 99, 126, 143 Hrothgar 108, 165, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 187, 232 Hrothulf 176

humanity 21, 26, 125–94 Humber river 32, 56, 59, 67 Huxley, Thomas 209 hybridity/hybrids 85, 93, 110, 115, 131, 132, 151 Hygelac 174, 180 hysteria 188 Iceland 213 icons 108 n81 immigration 95, 196, 197, 221, 230, 233 imperialism 17, 19, 120, 123, 132, 160, 164, 165, 191, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 205, 215, 231 India 17, 22, 70, 74, 126, 137, 138, 139, 152, 153, 158–68, 169, 225, 226 Indic 22, 166 Ine, king of Wessex 54, 55 Ingram, James 204 Ireland/Irish 1, 102, 128, 137, 210, 211, 212, 227, 231 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 74, 81, 91, 134, 137 Irish language 76 Islam 223, 225, 229, 234 isolationism 25 Israelites 72 ivory (see also bone, whalebone) 81, 238 Jalliant, Lise 215 Jameson, Frederic 8, 68 Jefferson, Thomas 24, 207, 209 Jerome, saint 159 Jerusalem (see also Holy Land) 72, 93, 94, 114, 115; sack of the temple 85, 86, 93, 94, 95, 105, 111, 112 Jews 85, 86, 93, 97, 99, 111, 112, 117, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 207, 229 John VIII, pope 50 John, bishop of Ravenna 48 John, the Old Saxon 32, 44 Johnson, Boris 195–6, 199 Jonah and the whale 81, 101, 104, 108, 116 Jones, Jonathan 232

268

INDEX

Judith, biblical heroine 22, 182–91, 192 Judith, old English poem 21, 22, 125, 126, 127, 133, 158, 170, 182–91, 193 Julian, saint 90–1 Jutes 1, 87, 98, 99 Kay, Sarah 150 Kelmscott Press 215 Kemble, John Mitchell 214, 215 Kent 45, 55, 56, 121 Keynes, Simon 55 Kim, Susan 136, 138, 145, 151, 156, 157, 161, 163, 187 King Horn 76 Kingsley, Charles 201, 202, 208; Hereward the Wake: Last of the English 201; Westward Ho! 201 Klaeber, Frederick J. 171 Klein, Stacy 176 Klipstein, Lewis F. 211 Kristeva, Julia 150, 171 Lacan, Jacques 109 Langland, William 75–6 Last Kingdom 222 Latin 8, 14, 17, 18, 32, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 54, 63, 86, 93, 94, 126, 136, 154, 159, 166, 169 Lavezzo, Kathy 4, 5, 9 lawcodes 52–5 Leabhar Breac 130 Legacy of Heorot 216 Lehr, Amanda 144, 145 Lepenies, Wolf 12 Lerer, Seth 62 Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle 21, 22–3, 125, 128, 134, 136, 152, 154, 158–68, 169, 172, 175, 193 letters 48, 49, 57, 67, 137 Liber monstrorum 137, 138, 174 Lichfield 55 Lochrie, Karma 6, 7, 12 Lomuto, Sierra 199–200 Lowenthal, David 201 Louis the Pious 64

Lucian of Samosata, Vera Historia 101, 137 Machiavelli 8 Making of England exhibition 230, 234 Malcolm II, king of Scotland 73 Mallet, David 205 managerialism 197 manifest destiny 201, 210, 211 Mannheim, Karl 6 manuscripts 7, 18, 19; London, British Library, Add. 42130 (Luttrell Psalter) 75; London, British Library, Cotton Nero D.iv (Lindisfarne Gospels) 62 n90; London, British Library, Cotton Otho B.x 130; British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.v 3, 70–2, 94, 135, 136, 138 n40, 139 n45, 142 n50, 148, 149, 154, 156, 233; London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A.viii (New Minster Charter) 69, 233; London, British Library Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Beowulf manuscript) 10, 11, 21–3, 26, 62 n90, 125–94, 198, 220, 232, 233; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl 614 135; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20 30; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11 100, 144, 182, 214 mappa mundi 3, 70–2, 94 Margaret of Scotland 73 Marin, Louis 68 Mars 98, 108 Marshall, H.E. 215 Massacre of the Innocents 93, 104, 114 Matilda, abbess of Essen 204 Matilda of Scotland 73 Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i 229 McCormack, Patricia 179 McFadden, Brian 160 McGuigan, Neil 70 Medes 152 Medieval Studies 198, 203, 219

269

INDEX

medievalism 203, 216 Medievalists of Color 238 melancholia 2, 8, 12–14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 32, 36, 38, 46, 56, 66, 67, 116, 119, 163 n109, 172, 193, 197, 200, 223, 235, 236 Mercia 35, 37, 45, 55, 56, 112 Mexico/Mexicans 210, 211, 224 Michelet, Fabienne 170, 173 Middle East 70, 138, 139, 225, 226 migration 2, 4, 75, 97, 99, 100, 109, 112, 116, 175, 195, 207, 209, 217, 218, 221, 223, 230, 231, 233 migration myth 2, 24, 53, 55, 112, 123, 195, 202, 220 Mill, John Stuart 128 mimicry 22, 143 Mitchel, Linda 209 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margaret 163 n109 Mittman, Asa Simon 72, 136, 138, 145, 151, 156, 157, 179 Miyashiro, Adam 209 Moby Dick 118, 123 monasteries 13, 75; dissolution of 7, 8, 29 monsters/monstrous 21, 125–94 More, Thomas 8; Utopia 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 29, 128, 138, 139 Morris, William 215 Moses 53, 54, 72, 100 Mulally, Erin 190 multilingualism 14, 16, 18, 27, 77 Naismith, Rory 70 naming 20, 21, 22, 118, 119, 126, 131, 134, 135, 136, 141, 143, 173 Naples 234 narrative 77, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 99, 100, 109, 113, 115, 116–17, 118, 120, 121, 186 nationalism 2, 17, 18, 19, 25, 29, 76, 120, 196, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204, 212, 216–17 Native Americans 210, 211 Nazis 225, 226, 227 Near East 138, 139

Nebuchodonoser 182 Neidorf, Leonard 236 Nile river 138, 152 Niles, John D. 211 Nitthad, king 105 Noah’s Ark 100 Nordiska Motstandsrorelsen 227 Norman Conquest 18, 66, 72, 192, 232 Normans 1, 70, 72, 73–75, 222 Northumbria 4, 19, 26, 35, 56, 77, 106, 121, 132 Norwegians 1, 9 nostalgia 27 Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris 228, 229 Nowell Codex (see manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv) Obama, Barack 223 O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine 176 Offa, king of Mercia 54, 55 Old English 7, 9, 14, 18, 24, 43, 44, 45, 86, 87, 94, 110, 117, 203, 208, 212, 213 Old English Hexateuch 185 Old English Martyrology 130, 133 Old Norse 213, 227 Old Testament 21, 42, 126, 182 Orchard, Andy 126, 133, 162, 168, 178, 236 orientalism 23, 156 origin legends 77, 97, 124, 193, 197, 216, 223 Orosius 3; Historia adversus paganos 72, 159, 162, 168 Osred, king of Northumbria 122 Oswald, Dana 145, 158, 176 n151 Oswald, king 3 Otautahi, Aotearoa (see Christchurch, New Zealand) Overing, Gillian R. 178 paradise 6, 104, 160; England as 2, 3, 5, 59, 74, 75 Parker, Matthew 7, 201, 202, 205; Ælfredi regis res gestae 205

270

INDEX

Paulinus, bishop 64 Paz, James 105, 181 Penda, king of Mercia 121 Persia 138, 158, 159 Peter, saint 233 Physiologus 101, 102, 117 Picts 1, 122 Plegmund, archbishop 44, 45 n44 Pliny 3, 137 Portland, Oregon 226 Porus, king 164, 165, 167 postcolonialism 2, 105, 156 Powell, Kathryn 126, 161, 178 Pratt, David 50 Prittlewell 162 promised land 2 Psychomachia 127 Purvis, Meghan 216 racism 2, 4, 75, 76, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 208, 209, 212, 216, 217, 226–9, 238 Rambaran-Olm, Mary 209 Ratramnus of Corbie 134, 156 Rædwald, king of East Anglia 64 Rebus in oriente mirabilis 137 Red Sea 138, 151, 152, 153 Reformation 76, 201 refugees 99, 195, 206 n31, 220, 221, 223, 233, 237 relics 19, 90 reliquaries 81, 90–1 retrotopia 17, 24–6, 195–239 Rhea Silvia 98 riddles 39, 81 ring-headed cross 226, 227, 228 Ripon 80, 121 Rockwell, General A. P. 211, 212 Roman Empire 97 Rome/Romans 1, 7, 11, 20, 47, 53, 55, 59, 67, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 83, 86, 87, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 129, 201, 222, 232; Callistus Catacomb 83; Santa Maria in Trastevere 108 n81

Romulus and Remus 20, 84, 86, 87, 94, 95, 98, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 129 Royal Historical Society 203 Royle, Nicholas 11, 16 Rule Britannia 205 runes 85, 86, 87, 93, 94, 110, 226, 227, 228 Ruthwell Cross 94 n40, 115, 132, 214 Sarah 184 Said, Edward 23, 156, 158 Saudi Arabia 229 Saunders, Roslyn 144, 145 Saxons 1, 46, 74, 75, 99, 112, 132 Scandinavia (see also Vikings) 9, 10, 21, 24, 99, 126, 210, 213–14 Scheil, Andrew 136 Schreiber, Carolin 51 Schwab, Gabriele 5, 113, 177, 211, 225 Scotland 8, 11 Scots 1, 2, 8, 9, 69, 122, 230 Scragg, Donald 126 scribes 127, 137, 174 Scyld Scefing 169, 174, 177, 181, 206 Seafarer 237 Selwyn, George Augustus 201 Semple, Sarah 6 Serres, Michel 98 Shippey, Tom 38 Siewers, Alfred K. 170, 171, 191 Sigemund 88 n25, 179 silence 22, 95, 96, 112, 118, 174, 184, 188, 193, 194, 219, 220 Sinclair, Iain 84 Sisam, Kenneth 126 skin 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 157 slavery 226 Smith, Eric C. 83 Social Darwinism 210 social media 197, 198, 218 Society of Antiquaries of London 214 Soldiers of Odin 228 Solinus 3

271

INDEX

Somner, William, Dictionary of Old English, Latin, and Modern English 203–4 Sophocles, Antigone 106 Southwick Codex 125 Spain 234 Spelman, John, Life of Alfred 18, 204, 205 Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene 75, 76, 212 square minuscule 43 St Brice’s Day massacre 161 Staffordshire Hoard 162 Staley, Lynn 5 Starkey, David 222, 230 Steel, Karl 135 Stormfront 227, 228 Sturtevant, Paul 225 Sutton Hoo 99, 156, 162 Sweden 126 Swiðulf, bishop of Rochester 45 n44 Swithun, saint 64–5 Symeon of Durham 73 Syria 54 Taprobane (Sri Lanka) 3 Tees river 56 Thames river 32, 56, 59, 67 Thatcher. Margaret 230 Theed, William 206 Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury 17, 234 Thomas, saint 74 n123 Thomson, James 205 Thomson, Simon C. 126, 169 Thor’s hammer 226 Thorkelin Grímur 213, 214, 215, 218 Thorpe, Benjamin 213, 214, 218; Analecta Anglo-Saxonica 212 Thurnam, John 209–10, 212 Tibur river 105 Titus, emperor 86, 93, 111, 117 Tolkien J.R.R. 178 Torok, Maria 91, 113, 224 n98 toxic masculinity 203 n22, 234, 236 Traditional British Group (TBG) 221

translation 7, 8, 16, 21, 24, 29, 30–76, 77, 126, 143, 144, 166, 191, 214, 215, 216 trauma 21, 28, 119, 123, 143 travel narratives 6, 53, 82, 99, 137–68 tribalism 198, 221, 222, 227, 237 Trump, Donald 25, 161, 167 n121, 199, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226 Turner, Sharon 74; History of the Anglo-Saxons 204 Uebel, Michael 6, 43, 48 UKIP 222, 223 uncanny 8–11, 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 30, 48, 62, 69, 95, 106, 107, 108, 109, 116, 117, 140, 171, 172, 174, 177, 198 Underhill, William W. 208 utopia (see also More, Thomas) 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 26, 27–76, 82, 85, 127, 128, 129, 139, 150, 160, 169, 192, 197, 198, 239 Victoria, queen 24, 205, 206 Vikings 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 36, 37, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 70, 99, 132, 160, 183, 190, 201 n18, 205, 206, 216, 225, 226 Vinland 226 Vinland Social Club 226, 228 Virgin Mary 81, 108, 131, 233; and Child 93, 110, 111 voice 22, 49, 62, 67, 68, 82, 91, 94, 96, 98, 113, 115, 116–17, 118, 141, 143, 188 Völundarkviða 96 n44 Wærferth, bishop of Worcester 30, 45 n44 Wales 37, 70, 71, 121 Wanderer 13, 65, 66 Waxenberger, Gaby 85, 87 We are the English 221, 222, 223 Wealhtheow 176, 178, 180, 236 Wearmouth-Jarrow 80, 97

272

INDEX

Weland the Smith 85, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 104, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 120, 152, 178, 179, 231 Welsh 9, 69, 70, 210, 230 werewolf 134–5, 148, 158, 174 n141, 175, 176 n151 Wessex 33, 35, 43, 45, 55, 57, 68 Whale 102–4 whales 20, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86, 93, 99–104, 107, 109, 113, 115–16, 117, 118, 119, 123, 158, 164, 191 whalebone (see also bone, ivory) 10, 19, 80–1, 82, 85, 88, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 107, 109, 113, 116, 117, 118, 121, 238 Wheelock, Abraham 203 Whitby 80, 121; Life of Gregory 4, 42 white supremacy 17, 18, 19, 25, 198, 200, 204, 226–9 Widia 93, 99 Widsith 99 Wife’s Lament 13, 14, 15, 96 Wighelm, bishop of Selsey 45 n44 Wiglaf 180 Wilfrid, bishop of Northumbria 121

William of Malmesbury 73, 74 Williams, Maggie M. 227 Winchester 14, 43, 65 Windrush 222 Windsor Castle 206 wolves 20, 85, 86, 94, 98, 105, 110, 129, 131, 132, 148, 170, 175, 176, 180 Wonders of the East 21, 22, 23, 125, 126, 128, 134, 135–58, 160, 164, 165, 167, 169, 175, 179, 187, 188, 192, 193, 220, 232 World War II 225, 227 Wormald, Patrick 34 writ 45, 50, 57, 67, 119 Wulfred, bishop of Lichfield 45 n44 Wulfsige, bishop of Sherborne 45 n44 Wulfstan II, archbishop of York 17 Wyatt, A.J. 215 Yale University 211 Yeti 151 Yorke, Barbara 201, 206, 211 Yorkshire 74, 96 n44