The art (and danger) of inference

I’m currently reading David Woodman’s new book The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom. It’s excellent so far, despite Woodman having to do a significant amount of the endemic hazard of Anglo-Saxon history: parsing, in sometimes excruciating detail, the available sources, squeezing them for every drop of potentially helpful information. This is always a laborious bit of reading, but where some books make this a chore, Woodman keeps it moving and interesting.

One of the difficulties of reconstructing the past in a period like Anglo-Saxon England is the incompleteness of the literary record. The historian must place great weight on documents originally intended for specific limited purposes, like royal writs (letters to members of local courts), diplomas (short records of land grants made by the king), and law codes. Early in the book, Woodman points out that in the typical diploma

[t]hose who were present at the meetings of the royal assemblies at which various grants of land were made are listed as witnesses at the end . . . These lists are set out hierarchically, beginning with the name of the king himself, from the form of whose title (known as his ‘royal style’) various kinds of important information can be gleaned; then there follow, most often, the names of the archbishops of Canterbury and York, then the bishops of the kingdom, then the ealdormen and thegns (both types of royal officials). Because of this hierarchical structure, and because the diplomas themselves are dated, they provide crucial detail for the realpolitik of tenth-century England, of the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers.

It is possible to note, for example, that a particular family member may be listed higher than another in a witness list in one year with their positions reversed later—or one of them disappearing entirely. This suggests—one can infer—a change of status or favor. Æthelstan himself shifted up and down in his father Edward’s lists, and Woodman gives attention to a bishop from the north who, judging from his presence in such lists and the broader political situation at the time, must have gone over to supporting northern rivals to Æthelstan for a time.

This kind of thing is not stated outright, of course. Woodman points out that, as important as Æthelstan’s reign is, there is no good contemporary narrative source for it. Much must be reconstructed from later sources—like William of Malmesbury, writing after the Conquest—or the spotty annual narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or simply inferred from documents like these.

You can learn a lot this way. Inference is a powerful tool, especially with a large body of such legal texts to work from. But it also has dangers. Here’s Woodman later, first recapitulating the potential use of diplomas before exploring their dangers:

From the lists of attendees included in royal diplomas . . . quite a lot of detail can be reconstructed about the composition of the royal assembly, not least the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers, since the lists are set out hierarchically according to status. But these lists require a certain circumspection. Most of the diplomas in question survive only in later copies, made long after the original grant of land had been issued. The copyists responsible could make mistakes—for example, in the spelling of names, in the order in which the names should have been listed, or in the omission of names that should have been recorded. We should also be aware that there may have been individuals present who went unrecorded.

One might also add: individuals who were not present but were still important.

The modern historian has a wealth of tools at his disposal, but his most important may be judgment. He can only infer so much from the composition of such a document, and he should not press his inferences further than the documentary evidence will allow. Less prudent historians have read entire imaginary histories into such sources. Woodman avoids that, which is one of the things that has, so far, made The First King of England a valuable read.

A good reminder of why, despite all the technical tools available now, history is an art, not a science.

Intelligence in 1066

Harold Godwinson listens to a messenger in the Bayeux Tapestry

This morning on my commute I listened to the latest Rest is History Club bonus episodes. Among the questions Holland and Sandbrook fielded was one about the intelligence networks available during the Norman Conquest. Could William have known what Harold was doing before he sailed from Normandy?

Such questions are ultimately, per Holland, “unanswerable,” though it is not quite true that, as Sandbrook says, there is “no evidence.” The following passage from Wace’s Roman de Rou, which I cited and expanded upon in my master’s thesis, comes immediately to mind. From Glyn Burgess’s translation:

One of the knights in the area [of Pevensey] heard the noise and the shouting coming from the peasants and villeins, who saw the great fleet arrive. He was well aware that the Normans were coming with the intention of taking possession of the land. He took up position behind a mound so that no one could see him; he stood there watching how the great fleet arrived. He saw the archers emerging from the ships and afterwards the knights disembarking. He saw the carpenters, their axes, the large numbers of men, the knights, the building material thrown down from the ships, the construction and fortification of the castle and the ditch built all around it, the shields and the weapons brought forth. Everything he saw caused him great anguish. He girded on his sword and took his lance, saying he would go to King Harold and give him this news. Then he set out, sleeping late and rising early. He travelled extensively night and day in search of Harold, his lord, and found him beyond the Humber, where he had dined in a town. Harold was acting with great arrogance. He had been beyond the Humber and defeated his brother Tostig; things had gone very well for him. . . . Harold was returning joyfully and behaving with great arrogance, when a messenger gave him news of the sort which made him think differently. Suddenly the knight who had come from Hastings arrived.

‘The Normans have arrived’, he said, ‘and established themselves in Hastings. They intend to take the land from you, unless you can defend it. They have already built a castle with brattices and a ditch.’

Later, in a passage I’d forgotten about until rereading it this morning, Duke William benefits from similar intelligence:

In the land there was a baron, but I do not know his name, who had loved the duke greatly and become one of his close advisers; he would never have wanted things to go wrong for William, if he could manage it. He sent him word privately that he had come with insufficient forces; he had few men, he believed, to accomplish what he had undertaken. There were too many people in England and it was very difficult to conquer. In true faith he advised him, and in sincere love sent him word, that he should withdraw from the country and go back to his land before Harold arrived; he was afraid that things would go badly wrong for him.

Wace is a late, poetic source and is problematic for reasons both obvious (his portrait of Harold as a hubristic usurper) and subtle (using post-Conquest feudal terms like “baron” and “knight” and “villein” in an Anglo-Saxon context), but here he presents a plausible picture of what is now called HUMINT or human intelligence. It jibes with many, many other stories from the world before signals intelligence and aerial and satellite surveillance, a world of eyewitnesses desperately offering actionable information to their side’s leadership—something they can only do as quickly as the fastest horse can carry them—not to mention a world of rumor, uncertainty, and, in the case of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon lord who feeds information to William, secret betrayal.

Further, it jibes with the Bayeux Tapestry, which several times shows messengers bringing word to Harold, William, and others and the recipients listening intently, and other sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the Chronicle writes, over and over in every extant version, that Harold “was informed” or “came to know” of some new development, we should probably picture something like what Wace describes.

The evidence is extremely limited and raises as many questions as it answers, but it gives us enough for reasonable inferences. It also—and this is why I remembered the story so many years later—offers a rare glimpse of the men involved in these campaigns at the ground level. Who can read Wace’s account of that anonymous thegn, alerted by the people fleeing in terror and watching from behind a hill as the invasion proceeds unopposed, and not feel his “great anguish”?

You can read the whole passage of Wace in an older translation at Project Gutenberg here.

I swear we are not making this up

Anglo-Saxon infantry vs Norman cavalry at Hastings in the Bayeux tapestry

The Rest is History, after a short series on the reigns of Æthelred, Cnut, and Edward the Confessor and a side trip through the life of Harald Hardrada, released a four-part series on 1066 this week. I finished the third episode, on the Battle of Hastings, on my commute this morning. The series is very good, so naturally I’m going to gripe a little about historiography.

The less-well remembered battle of the three in England during the fall of 1066 is Fulford Gate outside York. Here, Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, with Tostig Godwinson—a deposed and exiled eorl and brother of the King of England—landed with his fleet and fought with the fyrd of Mercia and Northumbria under Eorls Edwin and Morcar. Our sources on Fulford Gate are pretty thin, and include the much later and heavily embellished King Harald’s Saga of Snorri Sturluson.

Sandbrook introduces the battle by noting that “the saga’s descriptions of this battle are exceedingly confusing, and historians who claim they know what happened are obviously talking balderdash.” Fair enough. Snorri is a colorful but late and problematic source. Sandbrook goes on:

What seems to have happened is this. Basically, at first, Harald Hardrada’s men are going slightly uphill through all this mud, the Saxons are throwing spears and firing arrows at them, bodies pile up, people are stumbling in the ditch and whatnot. The right hand side, the right wing of Hardrada’s force where Tostig’s mercenaries are, they start to waver we’re told. Now it may be—is that because everyone hates Tostig? Or is this the saga just trying to buttress Harald Hardrada’s reputation dissing Tostig? Who can say.

Sandbrook, who is not typically given to deconstructing sources at this level, excludes an important alternative: Maybe this is simply what happened?

Later, Sandbrook and Holland suggest that Snorri’s account of Harald Hardrada’s death at Stamford Bridge, having been shot in the throat with an arrow, may have been “modeled on” Harold Godwinson’s supposed death at Hastings a month later (as they also suggest stories of bad omens being wittily spun by Harald and William the Conqueror were “modeled on” Caesar in Suetonius). I’d suggest deaths by arrow wound are more easily explicable in unusually large all-day battles like Stamford Bridge and Hastings. As The Battle of Maldon reminds us, “bows were busy.”

Much more sensible is a point Holland makes in the Hastings episode about two very early Norman sources: William of Poitiers’s Gesta Guillelmi and the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, a Latin verse epic attributed to Guy of Amiens and written probably within a year of the battle. After Sandbrook jokes that a few of the Carmen’s laudatory details about William the Conqueror sound like heroic formulae of the kind Snorri used of Harald Hardrada, Holland avers:

I think it’s unlikely that they would just make up details that everyone would have been able to scoff at. The details may be slightly spiced up. I think that probably the details we’re getting from the Carmen and from William of Poitiers in the main are fairly accurate because there are so many people who’d be reading them that they would know if they weren’t.

Sharp, and broadly applicable. In their postmodern focus on ancient and medieval sources as instruments of control over narratives, modern historians often lose sight of the fact that sources don’t appear in a vacuum, that their authors had contemporaries who could contest self-serving accounts and outright fabrication.

As I’ve written here before, I think ancient and medieval sources simply recorded what happened more often than we, hairsplitters and tweet-parsers, are inclined to believe. Cf. my notes on the modern habit of pooh-poohing anything interesting in a source, on whether the term “propaganda” is really appropriate in the ancient and medieval worlds, and on Tolkien’s observation that an event need not be fake because it feels literary.

Again, a very good series. The greatest praise I can give it is to say that Holland, in narrating King Harold’s death at Hastings—the mystery of which was the subject of my undergraduate thesis—convinced me that some version of the story in the Carmen, with Harold hacked down by Norman cavalry and possibly William the Conqueror himself, is more likely true than the arrow in the eye mentioned in later sources. And on that bombshell…

Maturity and evolution in military history

A friend with a deep interest in Celtic and specifically Welsh history recently shared this passage from a popular book on ancient Celtic warfare, in which the author tries to see through legendary material relating to Irish warbands:

If the Fianna of the Irish epics are actually celebrated in epic verse as a heroic archetype, an in-depth and disillusioned examination can recognize their historical characters as unruly elements and promoters of endemic political unrest, taking part in conflict only for the sake of conflict and, due to the absence of alternative adversaries, maintaining an obsolete, un-evolving developmental phase of warfare.

Elsewhere in the same book the author describes Celtic warfare in the British Isles as not “mature” compared to the warfare of their Continental cousins. My friend was puzzled by this passage (and wryly noted that it “sounds like it was written by a Roman colonial governor”) and its suggestion that geographic isolation left British Celtic warfare moribund and pointless.

That language of maturity and evolution and development—even the simple noun phase—is a giveaway. There is a whiggish approach to military history that views warfare as progressing linearly, from the primitive, ritualized fighting of the tribe to the pragmatic modern professional army in the employ of a nation-state pursuing rational material objectives. As Jeremy Black puts it in his introduction to The Age of Total War: 1860-1945, which I serendipitously picked up just after seeing my friend’s posts on this topic, this “teleological” approach describes history as “mov[ing] in a clear direction, with developments from one period to another, and particular characteristics in each. This approach is an aspect of modernization theory.”

I’ve written on this topic before, and with reference to another book by Black, coincidentally, but what I didn’t get into as much in that post was the dangers of this view of linear historical progress.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that it encourages an assessment of historical subjects as good or bad, better or worse, primitive or modern, depending on how closely they approximate what a modern person recognizes as warfare. A culture’s warfare, in this view, is “mature” insofar as it resembles us, the implicitly assumed endpoint. Judgments according to modern standards are sure to follow.* The condemnation of “endemic political unrest” gives away the author’s assumption that “rest,” so to speak, is the norm. Ancient people didn’t see it that way.

The second, related problem is that, with this viewpoint in place, you need not actually understand a given culture and why it would fight the way it did on its own terms. You can simply slot it into place in a linear scheme of technical and/or tactical evolution and ignore their own viewpoint on the subject.

The result, which has been pointed out as far back as Herbert Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History, is that you train yourself either to dismiss or simply not to see anything falling outside the thread of development you’ve chosen to follow and you blind yourself to what’s actually going on with that culture. The search for through lines and resemblances warps the overall view. This is, at base, a form of presentism.

There’s quite a lot of this in the older historiography of Anglo-Saxon warfare. Like the ancient Britons and Irish, the Anglo-Saxons were geographically isolated from related cultures like the Franks for centuries following the Migration Period and continued to fight in recognizably older ways than their cousins. So a common whiggish approach to the story of the Conquest was that the outdated (notice the use of obsolete in the quotation we started with) infantry levy of Harold Godwinson was quite naturally defeated by the combined arms of the Normans, who deployed infantry, cavalry, and dedicated archers at Hastings. It’s a step in evolution, you see, the end of a “phase.” It’s easy to detect a faint tone of contempt for the Anglo-Saxons in a lot of those old books.

This is, of course, to ignore the entire history of this culture, its past enemies and conflicts,** and the good reasons they had to develop and use the military institutions and methods that they did. And so a historian can blithely describe a culture’s unique response to the situations it had found itself in as simply stuck in a rut—until the inevitable triumph of something more modern. No further investigation needed.

Not only is this approach presentist, it fosters an incuriosity that is the bane of good history.

* And the modern always gets the benefit of the doubt, which is morally questionable. Tribal warriors fighting for prestige on behalf of their king is “primitive” and bad but a state nuking civilians in the name of democracy is “modern” and therefore good.

** As well as the fact that William the Conqueror’s victory was down more to luck than to battlefield performance.

Sandbrook, Anglo-Saxons, and mad Americans

I think I’ve said all that I want to say (here and here) about the academic controversy surrounding the term Anglo-Saxon, but I wanted to acknowledge one more news item about it and an appropriate response from a favorite historian.

Earlier this month Cambridge announced that Anglo-Saxon England, the preeminent academic journal in the field, was changing its name to Early Medieval England and its Neighbors. This comes, as Samuel Rubinstein noted at The Critic, during a seeming lull in the Anglo-Saxon wars, one that had suggested to Rubinstein that the controversy had finally petered out.

But after Grendel comes Grendel’s mother, and between institutional inertia and the unsleeping restlessness of intersectional ideology, such a name-change—even if too late to please the activists originally fulminating against the term—was probably inevitable. Perhaps we can look forward to academic presses changing the titles of the thousands of old studies, monographs, and histories using Anglo-Saxon on their covers.

But as Luther said, in a line used by Lewis as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” And so Rubinstein linked to this great response to Cambridge’s Twitter announcement from Dominic Sandbrook:

Hear hear.

“A handful of mad Americans” is exactly right. As I noted in my original post on this subject, the chief activity of the small, insular, pettifogging, puritanical, ruthlessly status seeking, and ideologically captive American academy today seems to be to export American neuroses to the rest of the world—ideologically colonizing foreigners and demanding conformity and obedience. This observation isn’t original to me, but it aptly describes the situation. It’s embarrassing. More mockery and an occasional firm “no” to the tiny number of activist scholars who push this kind of thing could help tremendously.

I remarked recently on the irony of mentioning Sandbrook and The Rest is History here only when I had a problem with him, which is rarely, so I wanted to make sure I noted this model reaction to academic nonsense. May his tribe increase.

Read Rubinstein’s latest on the controversy here. And get yourself a good book about the Anglo-Saxons that doesn’t dither over the term Anglo-Saxon. Here’s a good recent one, and here’s a great old one.

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.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

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.