Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

Poetry of reinforcement

From Tom Shippey’s preface to his new translation of Beowulf, in which he notes some of the strange poetic artifacts of the poem’s alliterative form and explores their deeper implications—both for the poem’s original audience and for us:

King David as Anglo-Saxon bard in the Vespasian Psalter

One may sum up by saying that, rather oddly, the words in the poem which receive the greatest sonic emphasis are sometimes the ones which carry the least information. They are there to help the poet with the first of his major aims: which is, one might say, to maintain the beat and the meter of his poetic lines.

This seems a rather humble aim to us, for our idea of poetry is that its wording should be exact, unexpected, provocative—to paraphrase the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who has just been introduced to Shakespeare—words which make you feel like you'd sat on a pin. But we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet's second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.

The modern vision of the poet as an outsider speaking truth to power and challenging norms is not only historically recent but a sadly narrow and limiting vision of what poetry does. It requires a posture of continuous antagonism to everything that grows both tedious and phony. The stereotype of the tiresome and hypocritical modernist poet and his or her predictably transgressive free verse exists for a reason.

But worse, this vision of poetry and the poet warps the interpretation of the great poetry of the past. People go galloping off in search of the hidden subversion in Homer or Beowulf and, having searched long enough and screwed their jeweler’s loupe of critical theory tightly enough into their eye, find it. Turns out these poets were just like the longhairs at the campus poetry slam. But, satisfied with presentist political interpretations, they miss what’s actually going on—and the chance to encounter people radically unlike themselves.

Good poetry can challenge, certainly. But I’d argue that the most effective and lasting prophetic verse challenges from within a culture—thus the entire power of the Old Testament prophets—rather than from some self-congratulatory political margin. But just as often, if not more so, good poetry reminds its audience of who they are. Remember, it says, This is us. This is what we love. This is what we must protect. And, with striking frequency, This is what we have lost. Consider the worlds in which the Iliad and Beowulf were composed and the poetry of reinforcement and shared love and loss makes much more sense.

Recovering the ability to “feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition” may prove a crucial part of the modern man’s great spiritual task.

Shippey has an online Beowulf “masterclass” coming up at the beginning of December. I’ve already signed up. It should be well worth your while if you’re interested in this period and its poetry. You can find information about the class here.

The Lost King

Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) with Richard III (Harry Lloyd) at Bosworth Field

Over the weekend I watched two movies that, though quite different in nearly every respect, where both about kings in crisis. My aim is to review both this week. Here’s the first.

Few kings have a worse reputation than Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. His death at the Battle of Bosworth Field after a reign of just two years marked the end of the Plantagenet line, the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. And lest you think death in battle would at least leave Richard to rest in peace, a little over a century later Shakespeare came along and made him the central villain in one of his most intricate and celebrated tragedies, a play that cemented the popular image of Richard right down to the present—a cunning, hunchbacked usurper, coldblooded murderer of kin, and failure on the battlefield.

It’s one thing to have a bad reputation. Pray you never have someone of Shakespeare’s talents turn that gossip into entertainment.

But not everyone has been content with the Richard provided by Tudor drama. The Lost King tells the story of one person whose suspicion that there’s more to Richard than the legend bore unexpected fruit.

The film begins with Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), a divorced mother of two and weary Edinburgh office drone, taking one of her sons to a school performance of the play. Langley, who suffers from ME or chronic fatigue syndrome, finds herself intrigued by the disabled man at the center of all the conniving and bloodshed. Surely he is not evil just because he has a hunchback? Glib assurances of the “everybody knows” variety that Richard was evil—everybody knows he murdered his nephews!—and the potted image of Richard from schoolbooks and Shakespeare don’t convince her. An obsession is born.

Langley buys every book she can find on Richard and pores over them on breaks at work or while waiting up for her ex-husband (Steve Coogan) to bring their sons home. She contacts experts and enthusiasts online and attends meetings of the Edinburgh chapter of the Richard III Society, a group dedicated to rescuing the “real” Richard from his popular image. Not only was Richard not a usurper, she learns, he (probably) didn’t murder his nephews and had used his brief time on the throne to enact serious legal reforms. Far from being a villain, he was admirable.

As Langley’s obsession deepens, she neglects her work, spends all her spare time on studying Richard’s life… and begins seeing Richard everywhere she goes. He takes the form of the actor who had played him onstage (Harry Lloyd) and appears, glum and silent and with soulful eyes, sitting on park benches or standing in alleyways. Langley comes to believe she has a purpose to serve for him.

She finds that purpose when she decides to visit Richard’s grave and learns that he has none. No one knows what became of his body after he was cut down at Bosworth Field. If his body wasn’t disposed of in a river, he was likely buried somewhere in nearby Leicester. She learns that the leading candidate for his burial place is Greyfriars, a Franciscan house—which was dissolved by Henry VIII and demolished. No one even knows where it used to be. But, after a visit to the Leicester neighborhood where it once stood, she has a feeling.

Langley’s mission to find Greyfriars and, possibly, Richard’s grave takes her out of the world of cranks and amateur researchers and bewigged reenactors into that of tenured historians, underfunded archaeologists, and university administrators. The rest of the film chronicles her effort to fund a dig, to convince the powers that be that her feelings are born of solid research and intuition and not wishful thinking. Along the way she wins skeptical allies like the archaeologist in charge of the dig (Mark Addy) and battles dismissive obstructionists in high places, like a University of Leicester registrar (Lee Ingleby) who mocks her feelings, tries to block her project and, later, steals the glory when, against all expert predictions, the dig turns up Richard’s bones.

The Lost King is a fun film that tells its story briskly and engagingly. It boasts an excellent cast, with Hawkins and Coogan bringing a real poignancy to their strange, separated-but-cooperative relationship, and I especially liked Mark Addy as the put-upon archaeologist. The film also does a good job presenting the essentials of the debate over Richard III and his legacy, covering several of its sprawling sub-controversies on the way to focusing on the search for his body. If you like historiography, the art of juggling and judging disparate historical sources, or just a good historical mystery, The Lost King will introduce you to a perennially interesting topic.

But while the object of Langley’s quest is Richard’s bones, the movie is really about Langley. Suffering from ill-health and the misunderstanding or outright hostility of others, she sees herself in Richard, and to find and restore him to a royal tomb is also to find and redeem herself. Once she has done this, her apparition of Richard—clothed, at last, in the royal arms—can depart, and she can accept a humble life of telling others her story.

Despite what could have been a silly conceit—a ghost king following the protagonist around—this is all wonderfully written and movingly executed. As a movie, The Lost King offers wonderful light drama. But I couldn’t avoid asking some questions about its own treatment of the past.

The filmmakers use most of the standard based-on-a-true-story techniques to fit Langley’s story into a movie-shaped narrative. The timeline, for instance, is heavily compressed. Not every step in Langley’s search is dramatized and she was not the first person to posit Greyfriars as Richard’s resting place. I remember my undergrad British History professor suggesting a parking lot as Richard’s grave years before Langley and the team uncovered it. And you might be forgiven for thinking these the events of one busy autumn in Langley’s life when the real Langley’s interest in Richard began fourteen years before the discovery of his grave. Again—these are standard techniques.

But when the movie premiered in the UK last year the University of Leicester protested the way it was misrepresented in the film. Particularly, the administrator played by Lee Ingleby, who helped fund the dig and is thanked by the real Langley in her book, is depicted as a flippant mansplainer who elbows Langley out of the limelight when it comes time to take the credit—and the filmmakers use the man’s real name for this character. The University and the administrator justifiably argue that the filmmakers, in the way they chose to simplify and massage the story for dramatic effect, have streamlined the story into falsehood, crafting a narrative about one plucky outsider woman against a host of stodgy establishment men.

This kicked off a predictable he-said, she-said, with the filmmakers standing by their dramatization, the University countering with documentary and film evidence, and Langley falling back on her “experience.”

None of which necessarily detracts from the film as a film, but it is good for the viewer to be aware of. I’ve been concerned with filmic character assassination for a long time because, as Chesterton once noted, a film’s version of events could “be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had . . . only seen the film.” For a movie about rescuing not only the body but the reputation of a man unfairly maligned and mischaracterized by his enemies to have unfairly maligned and mischaracterized others in its turn is an almost Shakespearean irony.

The Lost King is well worth your time, and Langley’s efforts to exonerate Richard and see him properly buried are laudable, but watch the film remembering more than usual that it is entertainment, and that both feelings and facts matter.

More if you’re interested

You can get the basics of the controversy over the film from this BBC News article. If you’re interested in the investigation into Richard’s life and purported crimes, check out The Daughter of Time, a mystery novel by Josephine Tey about a bedridden detective’s quest to uncover the truth about Richard. Its trajectory of interest and obsession matches Langley’s quite closely. I reviewed it here last year.

The Vinland Sagas on City of Man Podcast

It’s a been a somewhat slow month here on the blog. Work, travel, illness, and some exciting personal developments have conspired to keep me from blogging much apart from announcing the publication of The Snipers and my commitment to John Buchan June. Fortunately there is plenty of that, and I hope y’all have enjoyed that as much as I have my reading and writing for it.

But mercifully I did find time last week to record another episode of City of Man’s ongoing Medieval Times series with my friends Coyle and David. The subject: the Vinland Sagas, concerning the family of Eirik the Red and their discovery and brief, violent settlement of North America around the year 1000.

In the episode we cover the background, including a refresher on just what exactly sagas are as a genre of literature, the Norwegian and Icelandic antecedents to the continuous westward sailing of the Norse, the personalities involved, the events of The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga, what to make of the sagas in historiographical terms, and geography, outlawry, ghosts, polygamy, religious conversion, sword-wielding pregnant women, and much, much more.

We conclude by asking why it was that the Norse settlements on Iceland lasted while those in Vinland didn’t. We also make plenty of recommendations for further reading and viewing, both good and bad.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Sticher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by listening in the embedded player in this post. You can find the episode’s page at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site, including links to our viewing recommendations, here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

Further notes on the term Anglo-Saxon

The first page of a 16th-century manuscript copy of the Welsh priest Asser’s 9th-century Life of King Alfred in the British Library. The term “King of the Anglo-Saxons” is visible in two places on this leaf.

Late last year I finally got a long-gestating post on the term “Anglo-Saxon” into writing. For several years now, a cadre of leftwing academics has striven to purge the disciplines of medieval history and literature of the term on the specious grounds that it is either racially loaded or straightforwardly racist. I disagree strongly, and set out my reasons why—with an assist from Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook—in that post. You can read that here.

Earlier today the cover story The Critic’s June issue went up on the magazine’s website. Titled “Anglo-Saxon extremists,” it’s an essay by Samuel Rubinstein that covers some of the same ground and makes similar arguments as mine from last year, including the intellectual sleight of hand required to make anti-Anglo-Saxon arguments plausible and even some points regarding the intense racial neuroses that seem to be my country’s chief export nowadays. Rubinstein also helpfully digs into the genesis of the controversy, which has mostly been stirred up kept going by a small number of academics with ulterior motives. A few choice excerpts:

On the cultural chasm separating British perceptions of the term from those of the rare American who has even heard it:

“What are you studying at the moment?”, an American student asked me once, as we ambled back from a seminar. “The Anglo-Saxon paper.” She gave me a disapproving look, told me she was more into “global history”, and mumbled something about “WASPs”. I wondered what St Boniface or St Dunstan might have made of the “P” in that acronym.

From this interaction I learned of an important cultural divide. Insofar as Americans encounter “Anglo-Saxons” at all, it is in this “WASP” formulation. When Britons encounter “Anglo-Saxon”, meanwhile, it is in Horrible Histories, Bernard Cornwell, or Michael Wood on the BBC. The Anglo-Saxons appear to us as a benign link in the chain of Our Island Story: they come after The Romans, coincide with The Vikings, and abruptly transform into The Normans at Hastings in 1066. Peopled with colourful characters, it is an exciting, murky part of the story.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the trans-Atlantic house of “Anglo-Saxon studies” cannot stand. Americans laugh at “it’s chewsday, innit”, and, in a similarly imperious vein, they judge us when we use language which, though anodyne to us, seems “problematic” to them.

A deeply unfortunate state of affairs, and one, for reasons of background and a somewhat eccentric education, I only recently became aware of.

On the use of the term among 19th-century scientific racists, whose definition was and should still be regarded as a secondary or even tertiary usage:

It is doubtless true that “Anglo-Saxon” abounds in the lexicon of nineteenth-century scientific racism, and it seems that these resonances reverberate more in North America than here. It is not true, however, that this is the only value-laden use of the term, or that “whiteness” is the only political meaning that its users have historically wished to conjure up. Again, such “misuses” of the term are by the bye, and historians should be permitted to use it in their correct way regardless. But although terms such as “Anglo-Saxons” have been invoked in support of this or that agenda, it is worth pointing out that this has not been the sole preserve of racists and bigots.

Further, on the fact that, despite the prevalence of the term WASP and the abuses of scientific racism, the modern use of Anglo-Saxon still mostly reflects its technical meaning:

Like plenty of terms which have a specialist definition, “Anglo-Saxon” has been deployed over the centuries to convey all manner of different things. Since none of this is inherent to it, it would be perverse for historians to cede ground altogether to any of these disparate groups. Indeed, Anglo-Saxonists should feel fortunate that the specialist sense is the dominant one, at least in British English. They are luckier in this respect than their colleagues who study the Goths or the Vandals.

A great line with which to end that paragraph. I’ve always taken great pains, when teaching late antiquity or the Early Middle Ages, to be clear about what Goth and Vandal mean. As one long ago student helpfully put it, Goths are are people group, not “a phase.”

In Rubinstein’s conclusion, he returns from the sound arguments in favor of keeping and using the term to point out that, in this contest, these scholars are not actually engaged in scholarship: “[Rambaran-Olm] and Wade’s arguments are the stuff not of academic history but political activism. And for all the veneer of scholarship, it seems to me that they know this and are proud of it.” Very clearly, if you have ever read their stuff. And, the conclusion of the whole matter: “The moral of the story is this. Don’t let American idiosyncrasies disrupt sound history. Don’t let scholarship give way to activism.”

Hear hear.

An excellent essay, much more detailed and elegantly put together than my own post about it last year, and worth taking the time to check out. I encourage y’all to read the whole thing at The Critic here.

Room to swing a cat

This week Law & Liberty published an ambivalently positive review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis, a book I enjoyed when it first came out. The reviewer, James M Patterson, takes Davis to task for romanticizing the Middle Ages, in the course of which Patterson writes this:

[Davis’s] criticisms of journalism and technology are good, though a little naïve. For example, he says, “It was the peasants, in their simplicity, piety, and common sense who saw through all the made theories” of their day. These same peasants also massacred cats because of their association with evil and witchcraft.

Okay, but what this blog presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?

This is a story I’ve been meaning to dig into for years now. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me, especially because it is always brought up to denigrate medieval people or illustrate their credulity and primitive violence. Like the term “Dark Ages,” if a story, factoid, or anecdote is always brought up to achieve the same effect, and if that effect is always to cut the subject down, double and triple check it, starting with primary sources. So consider this post a set of notes toward a deep dive sometime in the future.

Patterson, above, is making an offhand allusion. Again, the flippancy should arouse suspicion. If it’s this easy to demonstrate the stupidity and superstition of the medieval peasant why is there any difference of opinion? But the broad outline of the story in its various forms usually falls back on these points:

• In the Middle Ages, cats were closely associated with the Devil and devil worship

• The association was so strong that in June 1233 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) issued a bull titled Vox in Rama condemning cats as servants of the devil

• As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

• The lack of cats caused growth in the rat populations of Europe, leading to the Black Death

That last point is usually the Paul Harvey twist to story, really driving home the consequences of such brute stupidity and violence toward cats. That’s what you dummies get! seems to be the implied moral. Cat people twitch their whiskers and purr.

If you want the most elaborate and self-congratulatory version of this that I’ve run across, see this World History Encyclopedia article on “Cats in the Middle Ages.” The author is not an historian but a “freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy” and lards his treatment of the subject with a lot of stuff about the position of respect and honor accorded cats in the ancient world (supported by a Victorian classicist painting of Egyptian cat worship), the way medieval “religious bigots” attempted to undermine that position, and—on the other side of Middle Ages chronologically—how the Protestant Reformation “broke the power-hold of the Church over people's lives and allowed for greater freedom of thought.” Citation needed.

That article is a pile of bad research (seriously, look through the bibliography at the bottom), whiggish clichés, and Dark Ages mythology, but it is just about the Platonic ideal of the medieval cat massacre story.

Now, a fair-minded person, one not content to accept any old slander of medieval people that comes his way, should be able to see problems with this story or at least points that are open to question. A few that have occurred to me every time I’ve heard some version of this:

• Were cats really that closely associated with the Devil? Why?

• A papal bull condemning cats? Why would a pope bother with an official pronouncement on something like this?

• How did the pope’s condemnation result in popular massacres of cats? Are there not several steps missing between an official letter from the pope and peasants programmatically butchering animals?

• Vox in Rama was written in 1233. The Black Death, so-called, arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the late 1340s. Was there really a lack of cats in Europe for that long? Are these events related at all?

Accepting a story that leaves itself open to questions like these is predicated on uncritically believing that medieval people were stupid. (It also relies on a Tom & Jerry-level understanding of zoology.) But our hypothetical fair-minded person, having asked the questions above, might be tempted to ask one more:

• Did this even happen?

The answer seems to be No, not really. At least not in the way laid out above and as popularly regurgitated over and over and over.

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

• Here’s a Medium article that accepts rather more of the myth of medieval cat hatred than I prefer but does a good job of demolishing the proposed connection between purported cat massacres with the arrival of the plague.

• Here’s a broad look at cats in medieval society. Though regurgitating the Gregory IX papal bull/Black Death myth as a side note, the article does a good job showing the recognizable role cats played as pets and ratters in medieval communities, from common farming families to abbeys and royal households.

• Here’s a Medievalists.net gallery of medieval depictions of cats ranging from 8th-century manuscript illuminations and marginalia to 16th-century paintings. Note that most of them are either purely naturalistic or playful in that genuinely sweet medieval manner, showing cats doing human things.

• Also from Medievalists.net, here’s a short review of a scholarly journal article on cats’ bad reputations in medieval Europe. Note the chronological range of sources it draws from and the distance it has to reach for examples of medieval “hatred.”

• Here’s a Quora answer to a question about Vox in Rama provided by someone who has actually read and understood medieval literature, understands what a papal bull is and how it worked, gives attention to the bull’s context, and quotes it at length.

• Finally, here’s a 2020 article from Museum Hack on the specific question of Vox in Rama.

The last two items above are the strongest, so if you look at any of these, look at those two. A few of the things Tim O’Neill on Quora and Alex Johnson at Museum Hack do well in rebutting the story of the cat massacres:

• Both present the actual passages of Vox in Rama that deal with cats. If you’re expecting a rabid churchman’s spittle-flecked denunciations, prepare to be underwhelmed, as cats are only incidental and are featured alongside toads and zombie-like specters as part of a rite of initiation. The “animals” in the rite are also clearly shape-shifters—demons taking on physical form—rather than actual toads and cats. This points to the bull’s broader context.

• Both explain well what a papal bull is, its specific function as official papal correspondence, and its reach and effects. Vox in Rama was written and delivered to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, inquisitor Konrad von Marburg and others for a specific purpose and was not a universally applicable diktat. Misunderstandings of this kind point to the limits of the modern imagination, shaped as it is by centralized government and totalitarianism, and to the bull’s original broader context.

• Both note that Vox in Rama does not at any point call for the killing of cats and that, even if it did, the plague arrived far later than the bull, so a connection between the two is nonexistent, and that even with cats around the plague would still be able to spread among humans because it was fleas rather than rats that spread it. And, as Johnson notes specifically, fleas don’t mind living on cats. In fact, a flea living on cat might have a better chance of biting a human.

• Finally but most importantly, the context. Both point out that Vox in Rama was written to warn about and combat a supposed satanic cult then operating in central Germany and that the bull is narrowly focused on this.

Knowing this and reading the actual text of the bull should be enough to scuttle the myth of the pope-ordered cat massacres. Why, then, does it persist? O’Neill sums it up well:

Despite there being no evidence to support any of these claims, they are repeated uncritically because they have found their way into a couple of badly researched books and because they appeal to people's prejudices about the Middle Ages.

Emphasis mine.

Again, consider these notes toward a deeper dive. (I’m especially intrigued by parallels between the satanic rites described in Vox in Rama and those cooked up by Philip the Fair as an excuse to liquidate the Templars a decade earlier.) I’m most grateful to O’Neill and Johnson for quoting the actual text of Vox in Rama, as its lack of availability foiled my attempts to look into the primary sources behind this story some years ago. I aim to look deeper still and write all this up in a more presentable form someday, though the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the source at the root of the story seems to settle the question pretty conclusively.

If I am to end this post with any peroration or call to action, let me simply repeat this: If you run across any story repeated context-free purely as a cudgel to denigrate a past period and its people, look into it. Deeply. Whatever you do, don’t accept it because it confirms your prior impressions or prejudices, and definitely don’t breezily repeat it to dismiss someone else’s arguments. Real history is done on purpose.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.

On the term "Anglo-Saxon"

Last week, when I took exception to the great Tom Shippey’s arguments for the continued use of the term “Dark Ages” to describe post-Roman or early medieval Europe, I had in mind a counterexample for a follow-up post: “Anglo-Saxon,” a term that tends not to suggest much to the ordinary person and to which very few preconceived notions are attached.

Unless you’re a particular kind of academic.

Briefly, in a technical sense the term Anglo-Saxon is most commonly used three ways:

• Describing a period, it applies to England from roughly the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest in the late 11th century.

• Describing people, it applies to the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain during the “migration period” c. AD 450 and who originated in modern-day Germany, Denmark, and Frisia.

• As a noun, it is synonymous with Old English, the language spoken in many regional dialects by the people described above.

Other uses, such as for the material culture found at sites like Sutton Hoo or the literature produced by these people, are elaborations on these three basic uses. But Anglo-Saxon as a term for a period in a particular place and the people typical of that period and place has been in common usage for a very long time, right up until today. Just looking at the shelves I can see from my desk, I can see the great medieval historian Frank Stenton’s volume for the Oxford History of England, Anglo-Saxon England (1943), Hilda Ellis Davidson’s great study The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England (1962), Kevin Crossley-Holland’s literary anthology The Anglo-Saxon World (1982), John Blair’s Very Short Introductions volume The Anglo-Saxon Age (1984), and Marc Morris’s excellent The Anglo-Saxons (2021). Even the Nature study regarding Anglo-Saxon genetics that I linked to above uses the term to describe the migration, the period, and the cemeteries excavated as part of the study. This is a respectable term with a long history.

There has, recently,* however, been a move to stop using the term “Anglo-Saxon” within the study of the Middle Ages because of some of the ways the term has been used outside the field. I almost said “popularly used” but, again, I’ve found that very few people have any firm associations with the term. A vague, historical sense of Englishness attaches to it sometimes, and a very few might think of the term WASP, about which more below, but that’s about it. Nevertheless, because the term was sometimes used to designate certain subsets of “Nordic” or northern European racial types by 19th century scientific racists or casually used for people of a certain ethnic background (like the much, much, much vaguer and more insulting “white people” today), it is now “problematic.”

You can find all the kinds of arguments for this view that you’d expect in this piece from Smithsonian last year, which is where I first learned that there was any controversy about it. A few points raised in the essay:

• The Anglo-Saxons didn’t use the term Anglo-Saxon “much.” The authors try to have this both ways, pointing out that they did use it, but mostly in Latin documents like charters (or the Welsh chronicler Asser’s Life of King Alfred, which uses it in the very first sentence) and hoping you don’t realize that if someone uses a specific term of themselves in a second language they are still describing themselves using that term.

• The Anglo-Saxons more commonly called themselves Englisc or Angelcynn. True, but historians refer to historical peoples using terms they didn’t themselves use all the time. Witness the Egyptians or Greeks. There are even whole civilizations for whom we have had to make up names, like the Minoans. (It’s also worth noting that the cynn in Angelcynn is our word kin, as in kinship, raising the dread specter of blood-relationship that these authors clearly abhor. Naturally they don’t dwell on this.)

• The “Saxon” part of Anglo-Saxon is inaccurate because it “was not widely used and only for the Saxon groups,” not all the related Germanic peoples who invaded Britain in the 5th century. Flatly false, as any Welsh or Scottish person (or binge-viewer of “Outlander”) could tell you. The Welsh refer to their Angle enemies as “Saxons” in the 7th-century poem Y Gododdin and, to this day, the Welsh and Scots Gaelic words for “foreigner” or “English” are Saesneg and Sassenach. Who’s being ethnocentric now?

• The term obscures or erases ethnic minorities living in Britain at the time. There are whole libraries’ worth of controversy about the specific example the authors cite, of the presence of some sub-Saharan Africans in Britain during the period in question, but any argument along these lines is specious. Marginal cases cannot define the whole, and the presence of outsiders among a people group doesn’t make terms describing the predominant people or culture inaccurate. This is akin to some arguments I’ve seen that the term “Norse” is inaccurate because Scandinavians occasionally intermarried with the Sami.

• There are “more accurate” terms available. There are not. All the terms on offer in the essay are actually less precise and more awkward than Anglo-Saxon. And I’m astonished that one proposed alternative is “early medieval English,” since although “Anglo-Saxon” was never a problem when I was in grad school (see note below) I was specifically cautioned away from the term “English” for this period because of its anachronistic connotations.

• Racists used it. This is what the authors really want to argue—the kind of guilt-by-association cooties talk that somehow gets respect today—and most of their Smithsonian essay is taken up with examples of Bad People using the term. They even use the phrase “dog whistle,” and you know what I think of that. But the authors’ problem with many of the examples they offer is, tellingly, not really with the use of the term itself but with the motives of the people using it. The authors are practicing Bulverism.

Well, I didn’t intend to get into that much detail here, but that essay annoyed me so much when friends sent it my way last summer that it was hard not to.** I could go on, but I’ll conclude with its crowning stupidity, the opening sentence of what the authors clearly believe to be a trumpet blast of a final paragraph: “Historically speaking,” they write, “the name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has more connection to white hoods than boar-crested helmets.”***

Let us now turn to intelligent people, and the reason I’m returning to contested terminology a week after I mulled over the Dark Ages.

This week on The Rest is History Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook presented a wonderful two-part series on Alfred the Great, and among the many topics they touched on was the term Anglo-Saxon. What began as an aside early in the episode, when Holland noted out that the term could not have been invented as a racist codeword because it was in use in Alfred’s lifetime, turns into a more pointed discussion later on (at approximately 39:45 if you listen here) regarding why there would be any controversy about the term in the first place:

Sandbrook: So, you mentioned earlier on—some people might have found that a bit weird if you don’t follow academic disputes on Twitter—which I advise you not to do—is you mentioned the phrase “Anglo-Saxon” which has now become… incendiary in America. In American academia. People don’t want to call them, they don’t even want to call them the Anglo-Saxons, do they?

Holland: Yeah, so, the word “Anglo-Saxon” has different significations in different countries. So, here it means the Anglo-Saxons. It’s the period—

Sandbrook: Yeah.

Holland: It’s shorthand for the period between the Roman withdrawal from Britain and 1066. It’s been that for a long time. And in France or Germany or the Continent Anglo-Saxon basically means the English-speaking world—

Sandbrook: Well in France it means Margaret Thatcher and McDonalds, doesn’t it? [laughs]

Holland: Exactly. Kind of liberal free-market economics. But there is the use of Anglo-Saxon as, you know, Britain, American, or Australia, New Zealand, and so on, Canada—“the Anglosphere” might be another way of putting it. In America, the word WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, um, there’s a sense there that it is used to connote a kind of 19th-century, well, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant hegemony. And because that is now seen as something oppressive, therefore there’s a desire to get rid of the very word. It’s seen as providing succor to racists in America. But because America is an imperial country and preponderant, there is an absolute assumption among, I think, too many American academics that their use of a word should have global resonance, and they don’t acknowledge the fact that, firstly, in England “Anglo-Saxon” has the connotation that it does. It does not connote racist supremacy.

Sandbrook: No no no.

Holland: We have the English Defence League, we don’t have the Anglo-Saxon Defence League. And they want to call it “early English.” English is a much more problematic word in the context of Early Medieval History. But the other problem with banning the word Anglo-Saxon is that it ignores the fact that, as we said, that Alfred is using Anglo-Saxon in his charters, and its a word that underpins his entire sponsorship of the entire idea of the Angelcynn, the idea of Angles and Saxons being part of a unitary kingdom, a unity people, that in the long run will give birth to England. And this is looking forward to the future, but it’s also rooted in the past because it’s drawing on Bede’s great work, you know, and he’s writing in Northumbria, the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, a long time before Alfred. So the word Anglo-Saxon seems to me to be by far the best description of this very complicated period and it seems insane to try to get rid of it. Anyway, that’s my rant.

Sandbrook: No, no, Tom, I couldn’t agree with you more. You’ve never had a better rant on this podcast in this series. As so often, why get rid of—it’s bonkers to get rid of the term that is natural to most people.

Holland: It think there’s a certain, a kind of cultural cringe on the part of too many academics in Britain to truckle to American hegemony. They are—in a way, they need to decolonize themselves, to coin a phrase. They need to stop behaving like colonial subjects, and assuming that what happens in America should automatically determine what happens here.

Sandbrook: I couldn’t agree with you more, Tom.

Me neither.

Anglo-Saxon poses a problem nearly the opposite of Dark Ages—it’s a term not commonly used by ordinary people, allowing it to retain most of its technical precision, but objected to by academics on grounds that only bother academics. These are not good reasons, and the continued American export of American neuroses to other countries and, worse, to the past should not extend to the Anglo-Saxons.

My favorite passage of Mark Twain comes from A Tramp Abroad and is a footnote to the phrase “pretty much”: “‘Pretty much’ may not be elegant English, but it is high time it was. There is no elegant word or phrase which means just what it means.” Anglo-Saxon may not be the preferred term of the elegant in American Humanities departments but it means something specific in a way no other term quite does, and most especially to people outside the university.

Let me conclude by heartily recommending any of the books I mentioned at the top of this post, and by commending to you Part I and Part II of The Rest is History’s Alfred the Great series. It’ll be well worth your time.

Footnotes:

*How recently, I wonder. While I’m sure you could trace objections to Anglo-Saxon further back than the last few years, when I wrote and defended my MA thesis in 2010 neither the two medievalists nor the military historian on my committee ever raised even a question about the term, which I not only used throughout but included in the subtitle to indicate the time, place, and culture I was researching.

**I’ve also been horribly sick all this week, so caveat lector throughout.

***Let me here urge the formulation of a corollary to Godwin’s Law for stupid invocations of the Klan.

On the term "Dark Ages"

Tom Shippey, in his recent book Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, which I’m currently reading and enjoying mightily but have not finished yet:

Modern historians do not like the term “Dark Ages” for the post-Roman centuries. Oxford University Press has even banned its authors from using the phrase, presumably because it seems disrespectful. There are two good reasons for keeping it, however. One is that it’s dark to us. We know very little about the post-Roman period in western Europe: one of the first casualties of the failure of empire was widespread literacy.

The other is that it must have felt pretty dark for many people, as the result of—to quote Professor Ward-Perkins of Oxford’s book The Fall of Rome—“a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries.” Many voices will be raised immediately, pointing for instance to the discoveries at Sutton Hoo, and saying, “how can you say such a thing? Look at all that lovely jewelry!” Ward-Perkins’s point, however, is that civilization does not depend on an ability to produce aristocratic luxury items, but on low-cost, high-utility items like pots, tiles, nails, and, of course, coins—all of them familiar in the Roman world but scarce, poor-quality, or non-existent in places like Britain for centuries after.

There is much to both admire and quibble with here, but mark me down at the outset as one of those modern historians who hates the term “Dark Ages.” An old friend once told me about a professor of his at Western Carolina who threatened to dock any student a letter grade for using the term. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good start.

Nevertheless, Shippey is indisputably correct about these two technical points: there is a clear economic and material downturn during the later centuries of the Roman Empire and the centuries following the Western Empire’s demise; and the period’s dearth of sources, or the simple incompleteness or inherent limitations of our surviving sources (e.g. Gildas, who tantalizes as much as he informs), makes this period dark to us. The latter of these is the stronger argument for using the term.

But again, these are technical points in favor of the term. I think it should also be indisputable that this is only rarely how ordinary people use or understand it. That’s because, in both its origins and its continued common usage, “Dark Ages” is straightforwardly and intentionally pejorative. It is a slur, a fact given away every time the “Dark Ages” are invoked as a byword for everything bad. How often, when a political candidate promises us that his benighted opponent’s policies will “send us back to the Dark Ages,” does that candidate mean “We will return to a period covered by few or no primary sources”? When the devoutly religious are accused of “living in the Dark Ages,” do their attackers mean “You do not produce enough tiles or nails and you use debased or badly minted coins”?

Oxford UP is right—it doesn’t just seem disrespectful, it is.

I admire Shippey for being brazen enough to argue for the continued use of the term (he goes to bat for it at least once in Laughing Shall I Die, one of the best books I read last year), but this is a case where any value the term has for technical precision is cast into impenetrable shadow by its popular usage.

In the meantime, Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an excellent study of Beowulf as a much-neglected historical source so far. I hope to review it here once I’ve finished it.

Elementary historical mistakes

Anthony Hopkins, Danny Huston, and Disney with wildly different takes on King Richard I

During the spring semester I picked up a used copy of John Gillingham’s Richard the Lionheart, the first of his two biographies of the great English king. Gillingham engages vigorously in the many debated aspects of Richard’s reign—among them, a few I’ve blithely assumed in that opening sentence: In what sense was this French-speaking heir of the Angevin throne English? Was he great? And was he homosexual?

I don’t intend to answer the first two questions here, but for the last the short answer is No. Gillingham notes that “the earliest reference to Richard’s homosexuality dates from 1948” and, despite this suspiciously recent vintage, had within thirty years (Gillingham’s Richard the Lionheart was published in 1978) become “generally accepted as fact and often referred to in passing—as though it were common knowledge—by historians,” including many prominent ones who should have known better but simply picked up and repeated this salacious new tidbit. “[S]uch thoughts did not occur to earlier generations of historians—though they knew the evidence better than anyone else.”

If it isn’t true, then where did this idea come from? In digging into the historiography of this controversy, Gillingham not only debunks the myth but also makes broader points about mistakes in the study of the past.

The primary piece of evidence presented for this relatively recent interpretation is the alliance and friendship Richard formed with Philip II, King of France in 1187, while Richard’s father Henry II was still on the throne. Here’s medieval chronicler Roger of Howden reporting Richard and Philip’s public procession to Paris:

Philip so honoured him that every day they ate at the same table, shared the same dish and at night the bed did not separate them. Between the two of them there grew up so great an affection that King Henry was much alarmed and, afraid of what the future might hold in store, he decided to postpone his return to England until he knew what lay behind this sudden friendship.

Aha! a prurient modern cries. Richard and Philip spent all their time together and slept in the same bed! But this, Gillingham notes, was clearly political theatre: “Gestures of this kind were part of the vocabulary of politics.” Richard was actually fighting a war with his own father at the time and the meaning of this public display—the King of England’s eldest and most warlike son allying with the King of France—was abundantly clear to Henry, as Roger himself indicates. Further, it was not at all uncommon for people of the same sex to share beds in the Middle Ages (Gillingham also points out that Henry II and William Marshal are known to have slept in the same bed when staying together), and Roger would have “had no fears that his audience would misunderstand him” on this point. .

The other bit of evidence also comes from Roger, in a story he relates about the visit of a hermit sometime around 1195. The hermit rebuked Richard, now King of England, for the childlessness of his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre, admonishing him to “[r]emember the destruction of Sodom and abstain from illicit acts, for if you do not God will punish you in a fitting manner.” Aha again! Sodomy, plain as day! But what the medievals meant by sodomy was far broader than modern legal definitions (as John Ciardi writes in his notes to Inferno, Canto XV, Dante “would probably have classed as sodomy oral and anal sex between heterosexuals”), and note as well that the hermit invokes not the sin of Sodom but its destruction.

Gillingham elaborates on the reception of such a warning by a medieval rather than a modern mind:

[T]he magnificent maledictions of the Old Testament prophets are rarely complete without a reference to the destruction of Sodom and, more often than not, this phrase carries no homosexual implications. It refers not so much to the nature of the offences as to the terrible and awe-inspiring nature of the punishment. The picture which chiefly interested the prophets and preachers who followed in their footsteps was the apocalyptic image of whole cities being overwhelmed by fire and brimstone. In the days when people read their Bible all the way through and when they appreciated the value of a good sermon no one understood the hermit’s words to mean that Richard was a homosexual.

The source of Richard and Berengaria’s childlessness, as far as the hermit was concerned, probably owed more to the frat house than the bath house. Richard had at least one bastard son, and Gillingham notes near the end of his book that he had women brought to him on his deathbed (dying of an infected crossbow wound on his neck!) against doctor’s orders. Richard’s appetites were well known, and so, Gillingham writes, “Thirteenth century opinion was in no doubt that his interests were heterosexual.”

And there are other yet weaker bits of circumstantial evidence: the childlessness of Richard’s marriage per se (as if infertility is not a thing), or his male-only coronation banquet (the usual form for such things in England up to that time).

Looking over the errors that led to and sustain this spurious story about Richard, one notes several recurring tendencies:

• Ignorance of or indifference to the ideas and attitudes of medieval people

• A reading of medieval sources through strictly modern interpretive schemes

• Interpretation of medieval customs and gestures based on false modern equivalents

There’s a lot of overlap between these items. All of them prove a judgment on the modern historian and his own society rather than the historical subject. “In the last thirty years,” Gillingham notes, “it has apparently become impossible to read the word ‘Sodom’ without assuming that it refers to homosexuality. This tells us a good deal about the culture of our own generation: its unfamiliarity with the Old Testament, and its wider interest in sex.”

But the thing that most clearly connects and unites these errors and fuels stories like the one in question is superficiality. Such an interpretation of these sources (n.b. two short passages in one chronicler, a problem of its own) is only possible through a shallow, surface-level engagement with the past. In relation to the last of the three items I noted above—the kisses, affection, ceremonial processions, and shared beds of the young Richard’s trip through France with his new ally Philip—Gillingham writes:

“It is an elementary mistake to take it for granted that an act which has one symbolic meaning for us today possessed that same meaning eight hundred years ago. ”

This superficiality is not a technical or even ideological distortion of the evidence, but an elementary mistake, and either because of or despite this it has become an exceedingly common one. Precisely the same accusation based on sharing a bed has been made about Abraham Lincoln, for instance. Ideology only makes it easier to make this mistake. Why bother understanding context when you have an ideological framework that will make sense of a few pieces of evidence for you?

Witness the persistent attempts of moderns to read Joan of Arc—a fervently religious Catholic peasant girl who sometimes attended Mass multiple times daily and, as a general, banned blasphemy among her men, expelled prostitutes from her camps, and even threatened to attack the Hussites for their heresy, sacrilege, and vandalism—as a gender-bending warrior against not England but the patriarchy. The most recent manifestation is a play to be performed at the Globe in London in which Joan uses they/them pronouns and appears in a chest-binder. All of which should be an obviously inappropriate imposition of the modern on the pre-modern, and all of which, presumably, rests upon Joan’s practicality in wearing men’s armor, something she insisted she was commanded to do by God. It would be easy to populate a very long list of such elementary misinterpretations. You can find just such a sample list here.

The point of all of this should be pretty clear. Think of it as a hermit’s warning. If historical difference is to matter, if it means anything that “the past is a foreign country,” a certain humility and openness is required of the student of history. The key is to avoid superficiality, which in history as in anything else is the death of understanding.

Drink deep, or taste not.

More if you’re interested

Gillingham’s biography of Richard is good—now over forty years old, but excellently researched and well-written. More recent is Thomas Asbridge’s Richard I: The Crusader King, a concise biography for the Penguin Monarchs series (for which Gillingham wrote the entry on William II, another English king commonly accused of homosexuality). Asbridge offers the same answer to the question of Richard’s sexuality as Gillingham. Both are good historians, and I strongly recommend their books.

I’ve been fiddling with this post since February, and the play I, Joan is a recent development that paralleled some of what I’d been sorting through in this post. Regarding the Globe’s new play, this week I read two interesting pieces by quite different writers—Madeleine Kearns and Victoria Smith—both of whom arrive at similar conclusions about the the play, its ideological motives, its elementary historical mistakes, and what it means for women. Also, I’ve been dipping into medieval military historian Kelly DeVries’s Joan of Arc: A Military Leader this week, which is an excellent look at Joan in her own terms: as a devoutly religious soldier.

And I’ve written before about the way even elementary mistakes about historical figures can enter the popular consciousness and become ineradicable thanks to pop culture. You can read that here.

Virtue twisted

Siegfried’s death in a promotional still for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)

For the past several days I’ve been rereading the Nibelungenlied in Burton Raffel’s verse translation. This Middle High German epic, the story of the hero Siegfried, his marriage to Kriemhild and murder at the hands of her brother Gunther and his henchman Hagen, and her ruthlessly exacted revenge, is an adaptation of ancient Germanic legends for the age of chivalry. An earlier Norse version is preserved in The Saga of the Volsungs. But more on that below.

People rightly emphasize the roles of honor, vassalage, loyalty, and treachery when they look at the story of the Nibelungenlied. Knowing Siegfried’s fate from the beginning—the author makes heavy, Moby-Dick-style use of foreshadowing—it is easy to read Gunther, Hagen, and company as thoroughgoing villains, evil from the start. But what has struck me most on this reading are the admirable qualities of virtually everyone—at first. Even the awkward confrontation between Siegfried and Gunther’s court upon his arrival in Worms, when Siegfried greets the man whose sister he hopes to marry by asserting that he will take over his kingdom, is resolved without bloodshed. Game recognize game. Genuine friendship, celebration, and chivalrous and honorable victory over old enemies is the result.

Only later, when Gunther enlists Siegfried’s aid in a hopeless attempt to win Brunhild as his wife, do things start to go wrong. But what exactly, other than the famous hatred that erupts between Brunhild and Kriemhild, has gone wrong? And why do things continue worsening right up until the slaughter that ends the poem?

Here’s the passage that really got me reflecting, the opening quatrain of Adventure 16, “Wie Sîfrit erslagen wart”—How Siegfried was slain:

Usually bold, now brazen, Gunter and Hagen set
their treacherous trap, pretending a hunting trip to the woods.
Their knife-sharp spears were meant for boars and bears, they said,
and great-horned forest oxen. Clearly, these were courageous men!

“Usually bold, now brazen” is the half-line that caught my eye. It turns out to be Raffel’s gloss or amplification of the original (“Gunther und Hagene, || die réckén vil balt” is straightforwardly “Gunther and Hagen, the very bold knights”), but it neatly underscores the role of perverted—that is, twisted—virtue in the Nibelungenlied.

The villainy that runs through the poem runs through it from beginning to end, but only because the villainy morphs out of what begin as the characters’ virtues. When we meet them, Siegfried is powerful, courageous, and a loyal friend; Gunther is a generous and trusting (and trustworthy) lord and host; even Hagen’s bluntness is an asset. And all of them are mighty men, not only physically strong but vil balt, as they demonstrate over and over.

But these virtues, improperly subordinated, begin to twist and warp with the poem’s central act of deception—the winning of Brunhild. Gunther, like Siegfried, has heard of a beautiful and wealthy woman far away whom he desires to marry. Unlike Siegfried, Gunther has neither the confidence nor the abilities necessary to survive the warrior triathlon the superhuman Brunhild demands of all her suitors. And so he asks Siegfried for help, implying that he will allow Siegfried and Kriemhild to marry if he does. Once arrived in Brunhild’s kingdom, Siegfried pretends to be Gunther’s servant and dons his cloak of invisibility, beating Brunhild handily at all her games while Gunther pantomimes the actions required. An aggrieved Brunhild returns to Worms to be married to Gunther, and Siegfried and Kriemhild happily wed.

You can already see a downward spiral here, and, sure enough, this deception requires yet further deceptions—not only on Gunther’s embarrassing wedding night but for years to come. The heroes’ virtues buckle and twist under the pressure of their repeated bad choices until they become vices.

Thus Siegfried’s loyalty to Gunther and love for Kriemhild allow him both to exploit and to be exploited and end with him seeming, to us, hopelessly naïve, literally racing into the trap his enemies have set for him on that hunting trip. The prudent, generous, and courtly Gunther transforms into a cowed, easily swayed, guilt-ridden man willing to countenance murder to appease his wife. Kriemhild’s love for her dead husband leads her to abandon their son and to seek the utter destruction of her brothers’ kingdom. And Hagen’s intelligence and forthrightness twist into power-obsessed cunning and utilitarian cruelty. In the alchemy of the plot, boldness transmutes into brazenness and honor into brutality. The last casualty listed in the poem, even after Kriemhild herself has been struck down, is êre—honor.

The role of virtue, especially the destructive power of virtue twisted, is the thing that most substantially sets the Nibelungenlied apart from an earlier version like The Saga of the Volsungs. This stems from the circumstances of its composition. In The Mind of the Middle Ages, Frederick Artz describes how the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied

worked over early Germanic legends and other tales about the Burgundians and the Huns of the fifth and sixth centuries and combined with these the style of chivalric romance newly introduced from France—a strange mixture. There is more here of court manners, of women, of love, and of Christian ideas than in Beowulf, the Norse stories, or the French chansons de geste. The poet was a man of genius and from these divergent materials he produced a masterpiece.

There is a lot to be said for this summary, but for the purposes of this post I want to concentrate on the role of “Christian ideas.” Where the Norse stories of Sigurð feature doom or fate, an unyielding destiny to which the heroes must conform and willingly surrender themselves when the time comes, the murders and climactic bloodbath of the Nibelungenlied are unambiguously the result of character and choice—of strong men and women whose virtues have been twisted out of shape by deception. pride, and hatred. This is a thoroughly and vibrantly imagined picture of a world that is itself twisted under the weight of sin.

The Nibelungenlied, viewed from this angle, can be taken as a thoroughly Christian synthesis of the old Germanic stories imbued throughout not with the fatalism of the Norns but with an understanding that the world is fallen and sin has tainted everything, even our virtues.

More if you’re interested

Raffel’s verse translation is good, not least since it is one of the only recent attempts to render the odd, complex verse of the original into an English equivalent. I first read the Nibelungenlied in AT Hatto’s prose translation for Penguin Classics, which is still worthwhile and has some good appendices. Most recently I read a new prose translation by William Whobrey for Hackett Publishing, which has more scholarly apparatus than either Raffel’s or Hatto’s and includes the Klage, a short sequel to the Nibelungenlied by another unknown poet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Nibelungenlied, don’t rely on knowledge of the Volsungs or Wagner, both version of the story being quite different from this one, as I mentioned. You might check out this fun summary of the poem I discovered a few years ago, which reenacts the story 1) surprisingly thoroughly and 2) hilariously using Playmobil.

Tom Holland vs undue cynicism

English chronicler Matthew Paris’s illustration of the war between Edmund Ironside and Cnut

Last week brought about one of the best podcast crossovers I’ve ever listened to, as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook hosted Dan Carlin of Hardcore History on their show, The Rest is History. (Repetitious diction, I know, but if there seems to be too much history in that sentence, you will fail to grasp the appeal of these podcasts to their listeners.) Holland and Sandbrook grilled Carlin with ten “great” questions from history, ranging from what-ifs (e.g. What were the CSA’s longterm prospects had it won, or simply not lost, the Civil War?) to amusing would-you-rather questions.

Among the latter was this from Holland (at approx. 22:40 in the second episode): “Dan, you are the ruler of a Eurasian state in AD 1000. So, anywhere in Eurasia. Which one of the following inventions would you choose to have? And you can only have one: gunpowder, the printing press, or the germ theory of disease.”

A fun hypothetical discussion ensued, weighing the pros and cons of having anachronistic knowledge of any of the three, eventually leading to this exchange shortly before they moved on to the next question:

Sandbrook: Germ theory, I mean—I’m thinking about rulers in the year 1000, so, Cnut—
Carlin: Yes.
Sandbrook: Or Æthelred the Unready—
Carlin: Yeah.
Sandbrook: What are they—what are they going to do with the germ theory?
Carlin: Infect the Mercians, you know.
Holland: Well, well, um. Actually, the setting up of hospitals is, uh, caring for the sick is very important.
Sandbrook: I don’t see Cnut doing that, Tom.
Holland: Of course he did!
Sandbrook: Did he?
Holland: He went on pilgrimage to Rome.
Sandbrook: That was for his own purposes. That made—
Carlin: That’s a power move, right there.
Sandbrook: Right, exactly. That’s nothing to do with being kind to people who’ve got smallpox.
Holland: I think you’re being unduly cynical.

And this was after Holland had already pointed out that—contra Carlin’s suggestion that the printing press is necessarily a destabilizing technology that monarchs would only want to suppress—medieval rulers (his example is Alfred the Great) were great proponents and supporters of literacy.

It’s not much, but while I like and respect and enjoy all three of these guys’ work, this is why I love Tom Holland.

History post-Gibbon, post-Marx, and most especially post-Foucault is a deeply cynical discipline, and a certain kind of comfortably modern historian constantly projects that cynicism backward onto his subjects. To stick with the time period in question, pick up a book on Edward the Confessor and you’ll be hard pressed to follow his life story because the narrative will repeatedly bog down in parsing which chronicler is secretly supporting which side of whatever dispute. Further, these assertions about the biases of sources usually have to admit huge caveats later, as when source X, described as obsequiously toadying to Bishop Y, nevertheless strongly criticizes him for A, B, and C. These contradictions or exceptions seem never to raise doubts about whether this elaborate backroom politicking has been perceived accurately—or whether it’s there at all.

Surely it’s best to interpret historical figures’ words and actions as sincere at least some of the time. Cnut wrote a lengthy letter about his purposes for going to Rome, including negotiating ecclesiastical matters for the English church and repentance for his own sins. He must have meant some of that. Probably more than a modern person would guess. Compare my thoughts on modern historians’ judgment of what is and isn’t “likely” from last fall.

At any rate, bully for Tom Holland, and for Sandbrook and Carlin for being serious and enthusiastic students of history, even if they take theirs with a pinch more cynicism than is due. This two-part podcast series is fun, amusing, and wonderfully wide-ranging, and at several times also turns into a serious and thoughtful discussion of the historian’s art. It’s well worth your while.