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.

2022 in books

I read a lot of good books in 2022, and I had a hard time narrowing them down in the “best of” categories I typically use for these posts, and once I had done that I still had a lot to say about them. So let me end these introductory remarks here and get you straight into the best fiction, non-fiction, kids’ books, and rereads of my year.

Favorite fiction of the year

This was a fiction-heavy year of reading thanks in no small part to two wonderful series recommended by friends, about which more below. I present the overall favorites in no particular order:

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—A really charming and witty mystery from the early 1950s in which the mystery is not who killed the narrator’s awful Uncle Titus but who is going to. A genuinely romantic will-they-won’t-they love story, a variety of humorous and farcical plot complications, and a dash of small-town political shenanigans round out this fun story. Long out of print and probably hard to find, but worth seeking out.

John Macnab and Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—This year I declared my birth month John Buchan June and read and wrote about as many of his novels as I could. I squeezed eight in, and these two were my favorite new reads. One a high-spirited outdoor heist caper set in the Scottish highlands, the other a moody and contemplative outdoor odyssey through the furthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies, both are excellent, gripping, absorbing reads, albeit in dramatically different ways. You can read my full John Buchan June reviews of John Macnab and Sick Heart River here and here.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris—A Kripo detective in Berlin investigates the murder of an obscure Nazi Party functionary as the city prepares to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday—in 1964. I’m not usually one for alternate history, but Fatherland approaches a fantasy world in which the Nazis won World War II through a brilliantly structured mystery-thriller, giving the reader two levels of investigation and discovery that interlock with and complement each other. It’s vividly imagined, plausibly detailed, and briskly written. “I couldn’t put it down” is a hoary cliché, but in this case, for me, it was true.

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—A strongly written and hard-hitting novel about two soldiers—one experienced, one green—in the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—The story of a buffalo hunt in a remote pass of the Rockies, Butcher’s Crossing balances a gritty, sweaty, bloody plot with intense character drama, pitting the naïve and sentimental New England boy Will Andrews against the Captain Ahab-like Miller, the guide and trigger-man leading the expedition. Beautifully written and gripping. I blogged about Williams’s use of the senses in Butcher’s Crossing here.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey—A severely injured police inspector tries to solve a 450-year old mystery from his hospital bed. It’s better than it sounds—astonishingly good, in fact. Full review from last month here.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—The work of Agatha Christie is a weird lacuna in my reading, and until this year the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express way back in high school. I fixed that this fall with one of her other most famous books, And Then There Were None. This review will be short: it’s regarded as a masterpiece for a reason.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe—Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym purports to be the journal/memoirs of a New England youth who stowed away on a ship and got considerably more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a final voyage into terra incognita, violent encounters with undiscovered peoples, and… something far worse. Poe combines Moby-Dick-style kitchen sink realism, a Robinson Crusoe-style spirit of adventure, and plenty of his own trademark feel for the uncanny and terrifying for an engaging and uniquely thrilling tale. I had only ever heard bad or dismissive comments about Pym up until this time and was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy—Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road sixteen years ago starts as a sort of New Orleans No Country for Old Men in which Bobby Western, the brilliant son of a Manhattan Project physicist who is now a salvage diver, starts his own investigation into the mysterious crash of a private jet in the Mississippi River only for terrible unseen forces to array themselves against him. This storyline is interspersed with that of Bobby’s sister, a child prodigy afflicted with intrusive schizophrenic hallucinations, whom we know from the opening pages eventually hangs herself. But neither storyline goes anywhere, exactly. Long, talky, meandering (none of which are intended as criticisms), The Passenger is as vividly written as any of McCarthy’s other work but clearly has much more going on in it thematically than the straightforward plot elements, and I knew even while reading it that it would stick with me and reward me more later through simply letting it sit in the back of my mind for a while, and that has proven to be the case. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying read. So, caveat lector. The companion volume focusing primarily on Bobby’s sister and her institutionalization, Stella Maris, is already out but I haven’t gotten to it yet. We’ll see how this informs and recasts the events of The Passenger in the new year.

Witch Wood, by John Buchan—I read this just a week or so ago, so you can expect a full, thorough treatment this coming John Buchan June, but for the time being let me recommend it as a strongly written, engaging, atmospheric, suspenseful, and genuinely spooky historical novel in which a young minister discovers the existence of a devil-worshiping cult in his seemingly upright Scottish parish. A favorite of CS Lewis, who wrote of it, “for Witch Wood specially I am always grateful; all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish. That's the way to do it.”

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—This was a reread, but it was a special reread for me. This was the first novel by McCarthy that I read as a callow college student more than fifteen years ago, and I was unprepared for it. (I’ve described starting McCarthy’s corpus with Blood Meridian as “jumping into the deep end first.”) But it stuck with me, haunting me, and steadily grew in my regard, and within a year or two I had read almost everything else McCarthy had written up to that point. This year it was finally time to revisit Blood Meridian, and with the intervening years and maturity and experience it was like reading a different novel, or the fulfilment of the novel I struggled with one summer in college—gripping, bleak, and overwhelmingly powerful. So I’m including this reread among my favorite fiction reads of the year, and giving it a stronger recommendation than ever.

Discoveries of the year

Let me here thank my friends Dave Newell and JP Burten (whose novels Red Lory and Liberator y’all should check out) for introducing me to the following two series, of which I read too many volumes to include in the usual “favorites” format above but which I have to acknowledge as highlights of the year:

The Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments, by Alexander McCall Smith—An absolute hoot, these short stories and novellas follow the marvelous philologist Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an aristocratic German scholar of the Romance languages and proud author of the seminal 1200-page study Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Von Igelfeld is a brilliant creation, simultaneously pompous and polite, rigid and kindhearted, humorless and eager to please, tone-deaf to social niceties but ostentatiously courtly, jealous of his own honor and childishly naïve. (He does not understand, for instance, why so many other prominent professors have such attractive graduate assistants, or why so many students are so obliging about coed room assignments on what is supposed to be a scholarly reading retreat in the Alps.) This is a charming combination of foibles that consistently lands him in uncomfortable situations ranging from awkward silences to high farce, situations from which he is either too proud or too oblivious to extricate himself. Pure, unalloyed fun.

• Volumes read: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

• Volumes remaining: Your Inner Hedgehog

The Slough House series, by Mick Herron—An excellent series of spy thrillers featuring the outcasts, losers, and screwups of MI5 who, rather than being fired and creating public embarrassment, are shunted into dead-end jobs at a site called Slough House under the management of the slovenly former “joe” or field operative Jackson Lamb. Each volume is intricately plotted, engagingly and suspensefully written, and—what sets it most apart from the novels the series is most often compared to—funny. I’ve enjoyed these so much that I’ve forced myself to space them out so that I can squeeze in other reading.

• Volumes read: Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country

• Volumes remaining: Slough House, Bad Actors, and Standing by the Wall

Best of the year:

My favorite fiction read of the year is, for the first time in one of these lists, a reread. I had thought that rereading The Road in 2019 was my favorite that year, but it turns out I had misremembered. The novel is James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Deliverance is notorious in my hometown because John Boorman’s film adaptation was shot there and the movie hangs brooding over us like a specter. Plenty of cultures have to live with unflattering stereotypes, but toothless hillbilly sodomites has to be among the worst. Certainly, the “paddle faster, I hear banjos” bumper stickers got old pretty quick.

But as I discovered when I finally read it during grad school, Deliverance the novel is something else entirely—an involving, horrifying, thrilling, deeply and disturbingly beautiful novel with a rich narrative voice and strong, poetic writing.

If you’re familiar with the movie you already know most of the story; the film adapts the novel quite faithfully. But by the nature of its medium, the film has to deal in visuals, actions, and sounds—externals, surfaces. Dickey’s novel is internal, with deep, swift, very cold currents flowing beneath the surface. Its characters, chief among them narrator Ed Gentry, are all psychologically rich, and the seemingly simple actions of the plot—the drive north, the canoe trip, the horrible encounter with the moonshiners, the flight downriver, ambush, killing, and the final lie meant to flood and hide the events of the canoe trip forever—are complicated and intensified by the characterization and by Ed’s transformation from soft suburbanite to killer, a transformation we witness.

Deliverance is a brilliant novel, an intricately crafted prose poem, a haunting evocation of real environments, a thrilling tale of survival, and a weighty morality play concerning sin, guilt, and the thin layer of civilization far too many trust to keep them from the darkness in their own hearts.

Rereading Deliverance after well over a decade of reflecting on it made this the best fictional read of my year. Though it is not for the faint of heart, I strongly recommend it.

After finishing it this summer, I blogged here about John Gardner’s principle of using vivid, concrete detail to create a “fictive dream” in the mind of the reader and used Deliverance as a major example, comparing it to several other favorites from the spring and summer—Blood Meridian, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River. You can read that post here.

Favorite non-fiction of the year

While fiction threatened to take over my reading this year, I plugged away at a number of good works of history, biography, literary study, and cultural commentary. In the best of these those categories overlapped generously. The following handful of favorites are presented, like the fiction, in no particular order:

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and warmly-written literary, philosophical, and theological look at the meaning and significance one of the most perplexing characters in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Full review from earlier this year here.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—A very good short history of the German Empire (1871-1918) with attention to its origins in post-Napoleonic nationalist movements, political intrigue, and military victory; its politics, finances, and imperial ambitions; its culture and key personalities; and, inevitably, its downfall in the catastrophe of the First World War. Well-structured and balanced and highly readable, this is the best book of its kind that I’ve come across.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples—An engaging and insightful short study of the life of Edgar Allan Poe and the chaotic, striving, rumbustious landscape of antebellum America through the prism of the cities where Poe lived most of his life. Full review from October here.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins—Two elegantly written short biographies of Poe that complement each other nicely. Collins’s biography gives extraordinarily good coverage to Poe’s work for such a concise book, and Ackroyd’s gives greater depth to Poe’s tragic personal life. I’d readily recommend either of these to someone looking for an introduction to Poe that cuts through the manifold myths (insanity, drug abuse, etc etc) and fairly represents the man’s life and work. Short Goodreads reviews here and here.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, by CS Lewis—I have tried and failed many times to love Paradise Lost, so I’ll let CS Lewis love it for me. This is an outstanding introduction not only to Milton’s great epic, but to the origins and history of epic poetry generally and to Milton’s place in the story of this genre. Being a fan of epic from Homer to Dante, I most savored the earlier chapters that explain its history and contextualize Milton’s work, but the entire short Preface is an excellent piece of scholarship and worthwhile whether you love Milton or not. (Side note: While I have a very old paperback copy of this book from Oxford UP, I read the nice recent hardback reprint from HarperOne. My only criticism is some slipshod typography, which turned the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ) in Old English quotations into Œs and Ps.)

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—A bracing look at the climate of skepticism and outright hostility to Western civilization and the past, with many thoroughly documented examples and a strongly argued case for preserving, maintaining, and celebrating our inheritance. Would pair well with a read of Murray’s longer, more detailed, but more general The Madness of Crowds, one of my favorites of 2020.

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—Both a summary and extension of the key themes and arguments of Trueman’s longer and more scholarly The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—which is high on my to-read list for this year—Strange New World is an excellent guide for general readers to how we got to where we are today, a world in which the transcendent is regarded as an oppressive myth and personal identity and sexuality are market commodities subject to infinitely recursive individual self-revision. A demonstration that ideas have consequences.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin—A trenchant reappraisal of World War II with Stalin and the USSR as its central focus. McMeekin reminds the reader that Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler—indeed, the two allied to invade and divide Poland, a fact that was memory-holed during the war and has only seldom returned to public consciousness since—and demonstrates that even when Stalin could justifiably claim to be a victim following Nazi betrayal in the summer of 1941, he was a master manipulator who brazenly played the Allies to get what he wanted. And he got everything he wanted. Most damning are the book’s long middle chapters recounting in punishing detail the Lend-Lease bounty continuously heaped upon Stalin, entirely on Stalin’s terms, with Stalin offering almost nothing in return but contempt and ever larger demands, all while dealing high-handedly with Allied leaders and waging war with the same brutality he had brought to the invasions of Poland and Finland. FDR turned a blind eye and forced all around him—from anticommunist members of his administration who found themselves ousted all the way to Churchill himself—to do the same. Stalin’s War both reinforced some conclusions I had already intuited from years of studying and, especially, teaching the war, and placed Stalin at the center of a truly global picture of the conflict and how its results guaranteed decades of Cold War and continued bloodshed. A worthwhile corrective to rosy pictures of World War II—its aims, and prosecution, and its results.

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann—Sharply observed, unflinching, disturbing, and utterly exhilarating, this is one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Like Blood Meridian, this is a reread of an old favorite that has exercised a profound influence on me, but the rereading experience was so gripping, so bracing, that it deserved to be among my other top non-fiction reads of the year. At the beginning of December I typed up some thoughts, observations, and reflections inspired by this second reading, which you can find here.

Best of the year:

If I cheated a bit by naming a reread as my favorite fiction of the year, I’ll do same here by picking two titles to share a best-of distinction for non-fiction. In this case, both books are fascinating, readable, deeply-researched works of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.

The great Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is a short monograph that makes a strong case on a contentious topic.

Less than a century ago, Beowulf was wrongly looked at as a difficult, fatally flawed historical source for the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, a frustrating farrago of myth and vague allusion to things 19th-century scientific historians wanted straight data about. This viewpoint changed with Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which argued that Beowulf is first and foremost a work of great poetic genius and unsurpassed thematic power, and that the historical elements are there to ground a fantastical story in what, for its original audience, felt like a real world.

Now, Shippey argues, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, with Beowulf viewed only as a poem or myth and neglected as a historical source. Marshaling an impressive array of literary, linguistic, and especially archaeological support from sites like Lejre in Denmark, Shippey argues that Beowulf is not only a great poem but also a broadly accurate and trustworthy window into the region, period, and culture in which it is set—the tribal Germanic peoples of early 6th-century Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an indispensable read for anyone interested in Beowulf or this time period, and a boon to anyone who, like me, intuited Beowulf’s importance and authenticity as a representation of this world but lacked the archaeological clout to make such a strong case for it.

Just as readable and well-researched but probably of greater general interest is Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. In this book Parker, a medievalist who maintained the the excellent Clerk of Oxford blog and has an extraordinary talent for making foreign minds understandable, tackles the nature of time itself—how Anglo-Saxon people thought about and reckoned it, and how they marked and celebrated the passage of it, season by season, year by year.

Parker draws from a huge array of Anglo-Saxon literature—part of the book’s purpose, she writes, is to introduce this literature and encourage people to seek out more of it—to describe first how the heathen Anglo-Saxon peoples’ understanding of time, years, and seasons changed with their conversion to Christianity, and then how they lived their lives within this new understanding. She gives good attention to everything from the number and names of the seasons (originally, it seems, only two: winter and sumor, with spring and fall by many other names imported from the Continent along with Christianity), the months, the work and pastimes of people from all walks of life at different times of year, and, perhaps most importantly, the intricate liturgical calendar and its many, many feasts, rites, and holidays. What emerges through this carefully arranged study is a holistic picture of a lost people and its lost way of life.

Appropriately for a culture whose poetry is so thoroughly tinged with elegy and ubi sunt reflection, I ended this book both delighted and saddened: delighted at the richness of this harmonious yearly cycle and the vividness with which Parker narrated and explained it, and saddened at what has been lost since that time. Winter, and specifically the early days of the twelve days of Christmas, unsurprisingly proved the perfect time to read Parker’s book.

I give my highest and strongest recommendations to both Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings and Winters in the World for anyone interested specifically in the Early Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon England or for anyone willing to venture out and explore times, places, and minds alien to our own. You’ll find both books richly rewarding.

Rereads

In addition to a lot of good reading this year, I did a lot of good rereading. Rather than pick and choose and then burden y’all with more one-paragraph summaries, I’ve simply listed all of them as usual. But by virtue of my having taken the time to revisit these this year, please understand all of them to rank somewhere between good and excellent. Audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

• Greenmantle, by John Buchan

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

• Beowulf, Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff

• Life of King Alfred, by Asser, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge

• Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann

• The Third Man, by Graham Greene

Kids’ books

All of the books listed below were read-aloud favorites for myself and our kids this year. I had a hard time narrowing this selection down, but these are certainly the favorites, and I’d recommend any of them without hesitation.

• Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin. A beautifully illustrated children’s version of an important Anglo-Saxon story related by Bede. Short Goodreads review here.

• Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—An old favorite of mine that proved an excellent introduction to these stories for my seven- and five-year old.

• Alexander the Great and The Fury of the Vikings, by Dominic Sandbrook—Two volumes from Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series that I read out loud to my kids this fall and winter. Perfect for our seven-year old, who thrilled to Alexander’s campaigns and the various Viking Age figures (e.g. Ragnar Loðbrok, Alfred the Great, Leif Eiriksson, and Harald Hardrada), and though our five-year had a somewhat harder time tracking with the stories he still enjoyed them. I strongly recommend both and look forward to other entries in the series.

• Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—A fun, light, nimbly paced adventure with a clever mouse-level perspective on Sherlock Holmes and just enough of the trappings of Conan Doyle’s stories to hook new fans.

• Read-n-Grow Picture Bible, by Libby Weed, illustrated by Jim Padgett—A childhood favorite, a surprisingly thorough and serious illustrated Bible, read to my kids over several months. Short Goodreads review here.

• A Boy Called Dickens, by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix—A delightful and beautifully illustrated short retelling of Charles Dickens’s childhood and the influence growing up among the workhouses and debtors’ prisons of industrial London had on his imagination.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson*—A hilarious and genuinely moving Christmas tale that combines farce, nostalgia, and remarkable depth, especially on one of my favorite themes: the foolish things of the world confounding the wise. My whole family enjoyed this greatly on our car trip to Georgia for Christmas.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you’ve found something enticing to seek out and read during the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best in 2023!

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.