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.

Spring reading 2023

At various times this spring, weighed down and dragging inch by inch through the semester, even my reading felt unfulfilling—like I was plodding through book after book with nothing to enjoy or take away from them. But then I opened up my Goodreads reading challenge and started looking back through the 39 books I finished and was surprised—so many of them were excellent! It was an unusually rich season of reading.

This is why we reflect on the past. We need that perspective. Suddenly, my spring semester doesn’t look so much like the slog it often felt like, and I look forward to sharing the best of what I read.

So without further ado, my ten favorites in the broad fiction and non-fiction categories, plus some rereads and children’s books that I enjoyed. I hope y’all will find something good to read below.

Favorite fiction

For years I’ve fiddled with what order to put these in, usually falling back on “no particular order,” and only this spring did it occur to me to arrange them alphabetically by author. So please enjoy these ten favorites novels from this spring:

The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard—An absorbing, atmospheric, and brilliantly written historical mystery featuring one of my favorite real-life writers that is fatally compromised by one storytelling decision. Still glad I read it, though. Full review here.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie—I’ve mentioned here before that Agatha Christie’s work has been a strange gap in my reading for much of my life. Prior to last year, the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express, and that was more than twenty years ago in high school. I’m starting to fix that. This is Christie’s debut novel as well as the first appearance of the great Hercule Poirot, and even beyond starting the career of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most popular novelists, it’s rightly regarded as a classic of the mystery genre. I greatly enjoyed it.

Paths of Glory, by Humphrey Cobb—French soldiers assigned an impossible objective fail and are punished for it by a glory-hungry commander. I was prepared for Paths of Glory to be a straightforwardly cynical antiwar story, but it turned out to be a brisk, well-written, psychologically complex, and hard-hitting novel peopled with interesting characters and a subtle but sophisticated study of how morally compromised people take advantage of institutions to the detriment of everyone else. Considering how good Kubrick’s film adaptation is, I was surprised to find Cobb’s novel even better.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A dark, thematically rich, and tragically moving story of a family of prehistoric Neanderthals coming into fatal conflict with a band of strange, technologically sophisticated, and cruel Homo sapiens. Almost certainly the best novel I read this spring. Full review from earlier this month here.

Trigger Mortis, by Anthony Horowitz—A newer James Bond novel written as a direct sequel to Goldfinger, which is both a daring experiment by Horowitz and the novel’s only serious flaw. It has an interesting plot, a good villain, and some excellent action and suspense, but Horowitz’s need to “fix” one of the outcomes of Goldfinger causes the pacing in the first half to lurch awkwardly. Otherwise excellent. Full length Goodreads review here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—An English hunter sets himself the challenge of seeing if he could, just hypothetically, get close enough to a certain unnamed German dictator to get him in his gunsights. He can, and does, and gets caught. This is the story of his escape, his slow and steady recovery from torture, and his flight, all of which have to occur at the same time and hundreds of miles inside a hostile central European country preparing for war. Imagine a whole thriller with the continuous action, breathless pacing, and survivalist improvisation of the middle third of Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps. Rogue Male is that novel.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Tess Lewis—Part fable, part allegory, part fantasy, part satire, this is a typically unique and unclassifiable novel by Jünger. Set in a timeless coastal paradise called the Grand Marina, On the Marble Cliffs follows two brothers, world-weary former soldiers who have settled into a tranquil life of botany and zoological research. But throughout, a looming threat grows from the forests to the north, where a jovial and contemptuous brute known as the Head Forester rules an aggressive warrior society. Dark rumors reach the brothers of the rites practiced in the north and of the Head Forester’s intentions toward the Grand Marina and its people. Jünger published this shortly after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and though parallels with the rise and aggression of the Nazis will suggest themselves even from this brief description, Jünger intended the book as a more broadly applicable warning. It’s well worth reading—and heeding. I wrote about it earlier this year here.

Massacre at Goliad, by Elmer Kelton—A short, well-paced, and finely crafted historical adventure about two brothers from Tennessee making a new start in a region of northern Mexico called Texas. Nicely dramatizes the complexity of Anglo migration to Texas and the relationships between the new arrivals and the native Tejanos, and subtly works in a lot of great detail about the move toward revolution in Texas. Goodreads review here.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson—I realized after reading so much John Buchan last year that my own taste for Buchan had been prepared by a lot of childhood reading and watching of abridged Stevenson novels and their Disney adaptations. I have reread Treasure Island since then but had never read another childhood favorite, Kidnapped. I decided to fix that. While its second half never quite recovers the suspense and intensity of the betrayal, kidnapping, sword fights, shipwreck, and assassination in the first, it has strong and enjoyable characters and a sharp and satisfying conclusion. A great adventure novel, one of the quiet masterpieces of the genre.

This Thing of Darkness, by KV Turley and Fiorella de Maria—Grieving war widow Evi Kilhooley, who is making ends meet by writing for a Los Angeles magazine, accepts an assignment to interview the dying film star Bela Lugosi. All is not as it seems—most obviously in the case of Lugosi, who continuously lies about his past, but of Evi and her relationship with Hugo, a fellow British expat, as well. Imagine a mixture of 10% Ed Wood, 10% LA Confidential, and 80% The Exorcist.

Special pre-summer mentions:

I read two John Buchan novels in preparation for the second John Buchan June: Huntingtower, Buchan’s first Dickson McCunn adventure, and The Dancing Floor, a Sir Edward Leithen adventure that takes him to a Greek island to thwart a murder plot by desperate neopagans. I excluded them from consideration for my top ten here, but be on the lookout for reviews in the first week or so of next month.

Favorite non-fiction

From this spring’s excellent and plentiful history and general non-fiction reading, my ten favorites arranged alphabetically by author:

The Nicene Creed: An Introduction, by Phillip Cary—I was excited to come across this book, as the creeds are a fascinating and important topic and Cary’s earlier book Good News for Anxious Christians proved helpful to me at an crucial time in my life. In this short handbook, Cary introduces the Nicene Creed to a lay audience with a good short historical overview followed by a line by line, article by article march through the statements of the creed. His explanation is deep but accessible and clearly, concisely written, making this book an ideal introduction to the history of Christianity and its theological core. I’m always looking for book recommendations on complicated but important subjects for students and this will be on the short list from now on. As a bonus, it’s beautifully designed and bound; another great offering from its publisher, Lexham Press.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—A brisk and readable 200-page history tracking the story of the Finns and Finland from the first rumors-of-rumors mentioned by Tacitus through the Viking Age, Christianization, the Reformation, successive control by the Swedes and Russians, its 20th century civil war and wars of self-preservation, to Finland’s application to join NATO in 2022. Clements covers a lot in this short book, giving time both to the political tides that have ebbed and flowed over Finland—and occasionally broken on it—as well as the development of the Finns themselves and the growth of their national self-awareness. His examination of Finnish culture and the Finnish attitude is one of the book’s strong points. Another is his care with nuance, especially with controversial topics like the three wars Finland fought within World War II. As with any short history, there were subjects I was left wanting to read more about, but Clements allocates his limited space well and includes a detailed bibliographical essay for anyone wanting to dive deeper.

Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, by Eric H Cline—An excellent short guide to the history of the discipline of archaeology (why I read it) as well as the modern state of the field. Cline’s clear, solid writing, even on complicated concepts, and evenhanded approach to controversial topics make this well worth reading. Another one I’ll gladly recommend to students.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A very good dual biography of two antebellum Georgia politicians and friends, a real odd couple who paired powerhouse oratory and a truculent and dynamic personality (Toombs) with chronic ill health and a studious intellect (Stephens). Davis follows their political evolutions from unionist Whigs left behind by the shifting political situation of the 1850s through secession (Toombs pro, Stephens anti), their renewed friendship as framers of the Confederate constitution, their almost immediate frustrations with the government they helped to create, and their roles, both active (Toombs) and passive (Stephens) in the waging of war and the defeat of the Confederacy. A short, well-researched, and readable book about the political side of the war.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—When Johnson died earlier this year, I began his mammoth Modern Times—which I still haven’t finished—and this, his short, punchy entry in the Penguin Lives series. Johnson approaches Bonaparte with the same bracing attitude that he brought to the subjects of Intellectuals. It’s incisive, blunt, elegantly written, and hostile without being unfair. Exactly what I think Napoleon deserves, and a very good short biography.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer, by Edmund Morris—Johnson’s Napoleon set me off on a jaunt through several short biographies I’ve had waiting on the shelf. This was another excellent one, narrating the life of a childhood hero about whom I didn’t actually know much. Morris’s good writing, good research, brisk pacing, his ability to explain what is so special about Beethoven’s music and why to a technical naïf, and his admiring, charitable, but not uncritical feel for Beethoven the man all make this a worthwhile read. I posted a short excerpt about a critically ill-regarded composition here.

Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945, by Thomas R Nevin—A meticulously researched and informative but sometimes dry intellectual biography of the first half of a long, dramatic, and complicated life. I strongly recommend this if you have more than a passing interest in Jünger or the interwar intellectual world. For a sample of the kind of detail and surprises it contains, see this post from January.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another volume from the Penguin Lives series. Remini was one of the great historians of the Jacksonian era and he brings an expert understanding of the context of Smith’s life to this short biography. Situating Smith in his time and place—a world of democratic populism, commercialism and self-promotion, post-Enlightenment mysticism, highly emotive and apocalyptic revivalism, and even fortune hunting through dowsing—helps make a lot of sense of his life and the movement he spawned. One of the best such biographies I’ve read, and one I’ve already recommended to my US History students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson, trans. Agnes Broomé—Part memoir, part science history, part naturalist essay, Svensson’s Book of Eels is the biggest surprise of my spring. I picked this up on a whim and was riveted from the first chapter. I was passingly familiar with the European eel from its occasional appearances in medieval history and literature (e.g. the death of Henry I), but I had no idea that so much about them was still mysterious. Though the book drifts into climate alarmism near the end and Svensson sometimes stretches a bit too far to connect the eel to major events and intellectual trends (e.g. was the adult Freud really fascinated with the unconscious because he spent a summer as a biology student dissecting eels looking for testicles?), the chapters on the eel’s life cycle, habitat, and behavior and the researchers who spent centuries—from Aristotle to the present—trying to learn more about them were worth the read. The additional memoir material, Svensson’s reflections on growing up fishing for eels with his father, make this an uncommonly rich and moving book.

The Legacy of the Civil War, by Robert Penn Warren—A fascinating and elegantly written centennial reflection on the place of the Civil War in the American imagination, politics, and character. Earlier this month I posted a short reflection on ideological moralism and political extremism inspired by Warren’s essay here.

Honorable mentions:

On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden & Gift of Living, by Alan Noble—A helpful, compassionate, but honest short reflection on pain, suffering, and mental anguish and the goodness and necessity of living life despite them.

If You Survive, by George Wilson—A lesser known World War II memoir by a ninety-day-wonder, a replacement officer who joined the 4th Infantry Division shortly after D-Day and fought through Normandy, across northern France, in the Hürtgen Forest, and finally in the Battle of the Bulge. Blunt, unembellished, and therefore powerful. Goodreads review here.

Rereads

Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis—The first Bond “continuation” novel written after Ian Fleming’s death. Bond journeys to Greece to rescue M, who has been kidnapped by a Chinese intelligence operative plotting to escalate tensions between the Soviets and the West. A slower burn than most of Fleming’s books, but Amis captures much of Fleming’s tone and world-weariness and very presciently creates a scenario in which Communist China is more dangerous than Russia.

Norwood, by Charles Portis—Portis’s first novel. Not my favorite of his five books, but a fun, short picaresque following the title character on an unpredictable cross-country jaunt with a lot of good individual episodes.

Gringos, by Charles Portis—I reread this in the Yucatan, where it takes place, and took it with me to the Mayan city of Tulum. A fantastic novel, and slowly overtaking True Grit as my favorite of Portis’s works. It is certainly his most complex and maybe his best-written. No description can suffice—go read it yourself. I blogged about it twice this spring, here and here.

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, by Alexander McCall Smith—Two longer Prof Dr von Igelfeld misadventures, taking him to Oxford in one and South America in the other.

Children’s books

The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A solid young adult historical adventure about French Canadian fur trappers on the Great Lakes. A great surprise.

The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A historical fantasy concerning Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion from Troy as told by Nicostratus, Helen of Troy’s son. A good old-fashioned retelling of some events late in the siege from an unusual perspective.

You Are Special, by Max Lucado, illustrated by Sergio Martinez—A beautifully illustrated children’s picture book with a good story and powerfully moving message. This is apparently one of Lucado’s best known books but was new to me. I loved it, and I loved reading it to my kids.

The Easter Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Nicely illustrated Bible stories covering the life of Christ, one for each of the forty days of Lent. We picked this up after enjoying the Advent book by the same author-illustrator team.

Indescribable, by Louie Giglio, illustrated by Nicola Anderson—Another nightly read with our kids, this is a 100-chapter devotional on scientific topics—nature, animals, geology, astronomy, and more. Our kids are especially interested in animals and space, so this was an exceptionally enjoyable part of our bedtime routine for several months.

Conclusion

The summer is young but already passing swiftly away. I’ve started some good new books and am trying to finish up a few leftover from the spring, and I’m looking forward to more. I hope something on this list sounds good enough to check out in the coming months, and that you’ll enjoy both the read and your summer. Thanks as always for reading!

Tell them...

I think about mortality a lot—possibly too much. This is the elegiac streak that has caused everything from the Iliad and Beowulf to True Grit and The Inheritors to resonate so strongly with me. And one particular aspect of death that I often reflect on is last words, whether famous or not.

Wikipedia has a marvelous collection of last words—hundreds and hundreds of examples. As with all things Wikipedia, especially bulk lists of information, you should certainly check the source of each quotation before you plow ahead with it, but simply reading through them one after another is a powerful opportunity for reflection.

Death catches people at unpredictable times, and a person’s last words have a way of freezing each speaker’s final moment in all its particularity and, often, peculiarity. Tellingly, Wikipedia’s list includes a subheading for “Ironic last words” like the example par excellence of General John Sedgwick. Warned of Confederate sharpshooters during the fighting at Spotsylvania Courthouse, he said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” He was shot in the head moments later.

But I’m particularly interested in the last words of people who knew what was coming, that their time was short. What is that like? I often wonder. The knowledge of their approaching death seems to have sharpened their speech. It is poignant in an almost literal sense. These words fall into several varieties.

A certain kind of poncey literary type seems to go out with a sniffy quip. Thus Lytton Strachey, author of the dishonest and low-minded Eminent Victorians: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” Or, in perhaps the most famous example, the last words of Oscar Wilde. Others offer proto-Oprah pablum, as in the case of William James: “These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Pure treacle. There are others who greet death with defiance, especially among those who were executed, like Breaker Morant (“Shoot straight, you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it.”), or who plead for mercy, or who scorn their killers.

But two other kinds of last words strike me especially deeply. The first are those who, in their final moments, were more concerned for others than themselves. Among these are New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall, on the phone with his pregnant wife as he froze to death on Mount Everest: “I love you. Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Or Abigail Adams, to her distraught husband: “Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long.” There are many more examples among soldiers killed in battle like Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, who is most famous for coining the phrase “Retreat, hell!” but, upon being gassed at Belleau Wood, told a corpsman, “Don’t bother with me. Take care of my good men.”

These lay dying and tried to tell those around them it would be all right or to look after someone else. I can only pray to have the courage and clarity and simple goodness to emulate them when my time comes.

The other kind, which often overlaps with the above, are those who use their final moments to send messages—asking someone to tell others something for them. I started paying close attention to this when I noticed a lot of such last words among men killed in the Civil War.

Some of these can seem petty, or at least spiteful. When Union officer George Dashell Bayard succumbed to a mortal wound from a ricocheting cannonball at Fredericksburg in December 1862, he took his final moments to say this: “Tell McClellan that my last regret as a military man is that I did not die serving under him.” That’s General George McClellan, former commander of the Army of the Potomac, whom Lincoln had replaced with General Ambrose Burnside a few months prior. Bayard’s last words were a dig at Burnside. You did this to me. I don’t know what to make of that.

Confederates seem especially concerned with sending a final message. At Gettysburg, Mississippian General William Barksdale was severely wounded leading in an attack on the second day. I’ve seen a few slightly different versions of his final words, but here they are as reported in Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion: “Tell my wife I fought like a man and will die like one.”

Even John Wilkes Booth, a noncombatant, felt something of the same instinct. While his two final words, “Useless, useless,” spoken as he stared at his paralyzed hands, are well-remembered, just before this he told a nearby soldier, “Tell Mother I died for my country.” What might have been moving in a uniformed man on the battlefield feels laughably self-serving in this context—the classic egotism of the assassin. Maybe that’s why the clearer, sharper final words are more famous. They’re more honest.

Perhaps the two most famous Confederate generals, both in delirium on their deathbeds in 1863 and 1870, asked others to tell someone something. Stonewall Jackson, dying of pneumonia, was issuing orders. Just before saying his famous last words, he trailed off with, “Order AP Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks…” And General Lee, seven years later, half a decade after the war, also had AP Hill on his mind just before his most famous final words: “Tell Hill he must come up!”

Colonel Isaac Avery’s dying note

But the two that really get me are lesser-known, ordinary men—a junior officer and a common soldier. Another fatality at Gettysburg, Colonel Isaac Avery of North Carolina, was struck in the neck on July 3 and apparently bled to death. Before he died, he scribbled the following note lefthanded: “Major, Tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.” The note is in the North Carolina state archives.

And then there’s Richard Rowland Kirkland of South Carolina, still remembered as “the Angel of Marye’s Heights.” At Fredericksburg, Sergeant Rowland had voluntarily gathered canteens and taken them over the wall into no-man’s-land to give water to the wounded and dying Yankees scattered all over the open fields below the heights. Less than a year later, at Chickamauga in north Georgia, the situation was reversed, and the recently promoted Lieutenant Rowland was shot leading an attack uphill against dug-in Union infantry. Before he died, he told his men to save themselves and concluded with one request: “Tell my father I died right.”

You feel the weight and meaning of these words instinctively, on the gut level, and yet it is hard to articulate what makes them so powerful.

There are the factors one can describe sociologically—honor, courage, chivalrous masculinity, and all the other things modern scholars write so scornfully about but that meant so much to that generation. There are also what we rather weakly call “human factors”: Thinking of family in one’s final moments, the parallel concern to give them some consolation that their death was a good death, that their memory—all that will be left of them—can be cherished unsullied.

But I think the crucial factor is distance. These men realize they are dying and think of family, and I imagine they have never felt farther away. It’s the particularity of their deaths—the when and where—frozen in their words. Tell them… may be the most terrible and beautiful and revealing phrase in the war.

The Inheritors

Years ago I wrote here about Chesterton’s definition of bigotry as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” Chesterton wrote of contemporaries refusing to see one another’s political or religious perspectives—a distance that is difficult enough to bridge at any time. But what about perspectives separated by millennia? The Inheritors, William Golding’s second novel, attempts to reaching deep into prehistory to imagine a mind far more alien than any political or cultural opponent we resent today.

The Inheritors follows Lok, a Neanderthal man who is one of the junior males in a dwindling family group. The group is led by Mal, the eldest male; the old woman, who the reader gradually infers is Lok’s mother; Fa, Lok’s mate; Liku, their young daughter, to whom Lok is affectionate and devoted; Ha, another young man; Nil, his mate; and the new one, Ha and Nil’s infant boy.

When the novel begins, Lok’s group are returning inland from a winter by the sea. In the first of an series of troubling complications, Lok’s group discovers that the log they have always used to cross a river in their path has gone missing. They find another shorter, thinner log and lay it over the water and all cross safely except Mal, their capable but aging patriarch. He falls off as he crosses and though he is able to crawl out to safety, the chilly river, swollen with snowmelt, breaks his health. By the next evening, as the group shelters under a cliff overhang by a large waterfall upriver, Mal lies dying. And Lok has begun to notice that their group, despite the precautions they take against wolves and big cats, are not alone.

Snatches of strange voices and glimpses of figures and fires through the trees alarm Lok, who tries both to investigate the strangers and to warn the rest of his group about the “new people.” But Mal’s sickness, death, and burial, the delay in their journey, and their constant need for food distract and disperse them. When the scale of the threat the new people pose finally becomes clear, it is too late. The new people kill several of Lok’s band and kidnap Liku and the new one.

Lok and Fa are able to escape and observe the new people from high in a tree for one long, terrible night. The new people not only use fire—like Lok and his band, who relied upon the old woman to carry live coals from stage to stage on their journey upriver—but make it. They build roaring bonfires around which they gather, eat, and argue. They make artificial caves to shelter in at night. They can cross the river at will in hollow logs. They wear skins and furs and jewelry. They make honey-smelling liquids that provoke wild and violent behavior. The men and women intrigue with and against each other. And they carry bent branches with which, when they catch sight of Lok, they attempt to “give” him sharp flint-headed twigs.

The middle and end of The Inheritors follows Lok’s epiphany that, with Mal dead, he is the new Mal, a startling and terrifying realization of responsibility in the face of danger. The Inheritors is, then, a coming-of-age story of a kind. With Fa, Lok, the newly minted leader of their threatened group, determines to save Liku and the new one from the strangers. It is not a spoiler to say that their rescue attempt does not end well.

The final chapter shifts perspective from Lok to one of the new people—a group of modern man, Homo sapiens, in flight after their leader stole another man’s woman—and ends the novel with a note of tragedy and a deep sense of foreboding. After all, for the modern men who encountered Lok and his band by the river, this only the beginning of the story.

The Inheritors does several things I really love in a novel. First, it drops the reader into a completely foreign time, place, and mindset and trusts the reader to keep up and figure it out. Golding narrates this world in a stripped-down, direct, and forceful style with a deliberately limited vocabulary. He involves the reader in Lok’s perspective immediately—it is totally absorbing. Golding makes this alien world comprehensible and carefully prepares the way for the reader to understand while never spoonfeeding information. It’s expertly crafted.

This is because, second, Golding commits totally to telling this story from the point of view of Lok, who has an alien mind. The Neanderthals, in Golding’s telling, are intuitive rather than rational, relying on mental “pictures” that they can communicate to each other through minimalistic callbacks and shared memory. Their world is a flux of habit, play, affection, fear, and hunger. This attempt to bring the reader into the Neanderthal mind could have gone horribly wrong—but Golding executes it brilliantly.

That’s because, third, Golding uses the immense dramatic irony of this perspective to provoke suspense, horror, and above all a deep sympathy. I’ve written before about how the irony of a past person’s limited knowledge and understanding is a tricky, distancing authorial tool, one more often used to scorn or belittle characters than to understand them, but Golding evokes nothing but pathos for Lok and his people. He treats them and their situation seriously, and their fates as genuine tragedies. Lok may not have a word for the love he feels for Liku, but Golding makes us feel it as Lok feels it. And the dread—a far more powerful emotion to me than mere horror—that Golding generates is nearly unbearable. Fa, who sees more and understands quicker than Lok, is perhaps the most compelling character in this regard. The conclusion of their night watching the new people from the tree, in which Fa turns Lok’s face away from the fire in the clearing while she watches the new people with wide, unblinking, tear-shining eyes, is the stuff of nightmares.

I have to point out that the Neanderthals as described by Golding don’t match what we know of Neanderthal life today. Unlike Lok and his group, Neanderthals made and used tools, hunted and waged war, built dwellings, ate meat, and wore clothes. (My own, personal, non-expert suspicion based on Neanderthal archaeology is that Neanderthals were really just a funny-looking subgroup of modern man.) I actually wondered a few times if Lok’s people were not some yet earlier form of man and the new people Neanderthals, but these modern scientific terms are not used and it doesn’t ultimately matter. The Inheritors may not be a textbook description of Ice Age early man, but as an invitation to imagine ourselves and our nature from a radical and unflattering alternate perspective it is unmatched.

I began Griswoldville with three epigraphs, one of which was this favorite line from an essay by Richard Weaver: “It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who are left behind.” The Inheritors is perhaps the ultimate such imaginative alliance, one that not only shocks and moves but should cause us to consider the cost and meaning of progress.

History must be written forward

From the introduction to the late Steven Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People, in which Ozment briefly recapitulates several conflicting approaches to the study of German history. Against one widespread approach that sees all of German history as preparation for the arrival of Hitler and explains everything with that destination in mind, historian Thomas Nipperdey

believed that reliable history must be written forward chronologically, from past to present, not from present to past, as so much postwar historiography was inclined to do. It is one thing to know the end of a story and to be moved by it to learn the whole story, and quite another to tell that story from its known outcome. “In the beginning was Napoleon,” Nipperdey deadpanned in the first line of a multivolume history of Germany. . . . If 1933 is taken as the first page of modern German history, it will most likely be the last word on it.

One could think of this German historiographical situation as a shadow form of Anglo-American “Whig history,” which views all of history as a providential march toward the democratic institutions, liberal laws, free markets, and individualism of Britain and the United States.

But as Herbert Butterfield pointed out almost a century ago in his critique of Whig history, the basic mistake to such an approach is to search for and synthesize only those historical elements that contribute to that linear, progressive narrative. It’s too tidy. The real picture is much, much more diffuse and contingent. Ozment, again summarizing Nipperdey:

The larger lesson of these critiques of post-World War II historiography is twofold. Reading history from present to past is reading into it rather than learning from it. And equally distorting is the belief that history can be read as black and white. It is, as Nipperdey described, “homogenous, ambivalent [and] filled with contradictions that can never be resolved. Reality is not a system in which everything is uniformly arranged [but is] moved along by conflicts other than those a ‘continuity perspective’ selects—conflicts that do not fall neatly into progressive/anti-progressive or democratic/undemocratic categories.” 

Or, as I constantly take pains to remind my students, “History is complicated.” Good stuff from a valuable introduction. I look forward to the rest of the book, especially since Ozment embraces “the Tacitus challenge” to provide a view of Germans and Germany that reaches back two millennia to their encounters with Rome.

I’ve written about Whig history here many times before, in the context of presentism here, on useable pasts and what historians are actually good for here, and most recently here.

Robert Penn Warren on political extremism

Today is the birthday of John Brown, who was born in 1800. By coincidence, about a week and a half ago I picked up a used copy of The Legacy of the Civil War, by Robert Penn Warren. Originally subtitled Meditations on the Centennial, this is a long, elegantly written, and insightful essay on how and why the Civil War still mattered in 1961. It still works in 2023, most especially in its observations about polarization and extremism.

Early in the essay, in considering the roots of American pragmatism, which can be simultaneously cold-bloodedly ruthless and weepily sentimental, Warren suggests that the pragmatism of a Lincoln or an Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr may have originated as “a reaction” against “two types of absolutes, the collision of which was an essential part” of the origins of the war. Warren calls these the “higher law” and “legalism.”

The “higher law” pole is that of the radical abolitionists, who discovered the universal solvent of divine mandate and rejected anything bearing the taint of slavery—constitution, commerce, their fellow man, all but their righteous selves. Warren quotes representative passages of Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Fales Newhall, James Redpath, and others celebrating lawlessness, violence, and treason in pursuit of abolition. For “the higher-law man,” Warren writes, “in any time and place, must always be ready to burn any constitution, for he must, ultimately, deny the very concept of society.” The radical activist is so certain and sets standards so stringent that in the end “all that was left was ‘the infinitude of the individual’—with no ‘connections,’ with no relation to ‘dirty institutions,’ and ideally with none of the tarnishing affections of wives and children.”

This is Rousseau; this is warmed over American Jacobinism. Warren continues:

Not only would one dirty oneself by trying to reform the local system. One would have to deal practically and by piecemeal; one would, clearly, have to work out compromise solutions. But with slavery all was different. One could demand the total solution, the solution of absolute morality; one could achieve the apocalyptic frisson.

In addition to a divinely ordained mission, this philosophical stance grants the adherent great self-regard and a warm and satisfied conscience—but precludes actually fixing things. However:

But social problems are rarely to be solved by men totally outside of society—certainly not by men not merely outside of a particular society but outside of the very concept of society. For if all institutions are “dirty,” why really bother to reform them? Destruction is simpler, purer, more logical, and certainly more exciting. Conscience without responsibility—this is truly the last infirmity of the soul.

A recognizable type, resurgent today. Especially when striking a morally upright pose becomes an excuse to ignore specifics (in favor of the “morally true”) and intentionally escalate the debate:

Nor are all social problems best solved by an abstract commitment to virtue. Before delivering his famous speech on “The Crime Against Kansas,” Senator Sumner might have meditated on a passage from Aristotle’s Ethics, with which, in his great learning, he was certainly familiar: “In discussions on subjects of moral action, universal statements are apt to be too vague, but particular ones are more consistent with truth; for actions are conversant with particulars; and it is necessary that the statements should agree with these.” . . . But to Sumner, the angry Platonist, too many “particulars” about the situation in Kansas, or too much concern for “the practical matter,” might embarrass Truth; and might lower the rhetorical temperature.

Warren is careful, later, to note that “[i]n setting up the contrast between the ‘higher law’ and legalism, I have not intended to imply that the Civil War was ‘caused’ by the extremists on both sides. That is far too simple a notion of the cause, and far too simple a description of the situation.” But it is worth remembering that “both ‘higher law’ and legalism were reactions to a situation already in existence. But they did aggravate the situation and they did poison thinking about it.”

And that polarization—with the sanctimonious on one side and the legalists and apologists on the other—as ugly as it was, as corrupting as it was, laid the path for far worse. Writing that the hanging of John Brown was “folly” and that Brown should have been committed to an insane asylum, Warren concludes this section by noting “that a crazy man is a large-scale menace only in a crazy society.”

Food for thought—especially that chilling phrase “conscience without responsibility.” And there is much more in Warren’s essay that is worthwhile.

Writers can and should enjoy writing

Exams and final grades are in, and I’m looking ahead to in-service and the summer semester with a mixture of exhaustion and gratitude. I’m also planning on more writing, including here.

Speaking of writing, after turning in final grades this afternoon I ran across this wonderful short piece from Fredrik deBoer: “If You Don’t Like Writing, Do Something Else.” An excerpt:

For as long as I can remember, these complaints—writer’s block, imposter syndrome, procrastination—have been key elements of writerly self-deprecation. They’re ubiquitous. And, in a sense, the author is correct to suggest that these are tools for identifying those humans who define themselves as writers. Get writers together in a room and soon they’ll be competing to be the one who likes writing the least. But none of it ever meant anything to me. I find the constant invocation of not-writing as core to the writer’s life to be self-indulgent and annoying, whether coming from the heights of literary success, whatever that might now mean, or from a complete amateur. No one is impressed that you ostentatiously struggle to write. Being a writer is hard because it’s hard to earn enough money to live. Writing, itself, is not hard. Not like digging ditches. It can take effort and focus and discipline, sometimes, and doing it particularly well is difficult in the sense that it’s a hard thing to achieve. But nobody not in the profession weeps any tears about how hard of a job writing is, nor should they. And I’m sick to death of this bizarre affectation that a writer is that creature that hates writing the most. I love to write; that’s why I have sacrificed to make it my profession.

“No one is impressed that you ostentatiously struggle to write.”

— Fredrik deBoer

Long ago, in college, I noted the way some fellow writing students would publicly, performatively talk about how “bad” the characters in their works-in-progress were being, messing up their plots, making wild decisions, and behaving like they have minds of their own. If there’s anything I despise it’s tweeness, and though I now repent of the contempt I felt for those friends and classmates I stand by the decision I made never to talk about writing that way.

But since then the much more common in-group writer tweeness that I’ve seen, that has, indeed, proliferated on the internet, is what deBoer describes several times in his piece: public, performative complaining about how hard writing is and how little you’re getting done, or even talking about the writing process as if it is an intolerable burden. Writers talking about hating writing.

Rubbish. DeBoer again:

I wish people would drop this act; it’s corny and tiresome. If you don’t enjoy the process itself, writing itself, then I don’t know why you’d bother to do this for a living. . . . You’re free to say that I’m overreacting to a harmless cultural quirk of people who write, but I am quite tired of it and find it an actively destructive impulse. It exaggerates the burdens of a way of life that’s quite pleasant if you’re lucky and talented enough to secure it, it teaches young writers that to belong to the category of writer you must constantly evince distaste for the act of writing, and it serves as a floating excuse for not working—hey, every writer hates to write, so if I dick around all day [it’s] just me being a real writer! It’s snide. It’s performative. I’m not a fan.

Likewise.

Read the whole thing. DeBoer opens with a really beautiful meditation on doing things because you enjoy them that is worth reading by itself. And last fall Ben Sixsmith had a similar short essay at The Critic that is also worth reading. Like DeBoer—like myself—Sixsmith is tired of the “writing life” tweets and memes because he loves and always has loved writing and, while it’s not always easy, it’s not hard enough to complain about. A sample:

What really ticks me off, though, is how they both trivialise and dramatise “being a writer”—dramatising it as some kind of constant agonising struggle . . . and trivialising it because that is so evidently silly. “Writing a story isn’t that hard. The only thing that’s difficult is writing the beginning. Well, and ending, those are always a nightmare. Also, the middle is basically thousands of words of utter agony.” That can be true. It can also be true that words flow like a mountain stream. If writing were like pulling teeth nobody would do it.

And, more to the point, “The problem is people who want to be writers far more than they actually want to write.”

Thankful to have another semester under my belt. Looking forward to the summer.

Theatre chauvinism

Back in February I wrote in praise of an episode of the military history podcast School of War in which film critic Sonny Bunch appeared as a guest and talked about war movies for an hour. This morning, Bunch popped up on another show I sometimes listen to, The Charles CW Cooke Podcast, to talk about film, film criticism, and the state of filmmaking and cinema-going. It was an enjoyable short discussion and I commend it to y’all.

The part I was left thinking most deeply about during my morning and inter-campus commutes today concerned movie theatres. Bunch, in the course of talking about the artistic difference between films produced to be shown in theatres and those produced for streaming services, says: “Look, I’m a theatre chauvinist, in the sense that I think that if you don’t see a movie in theatres, it is—you’re watching TV.”

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as Bunch, but I endorse the basic sentiment.

Like Cooke—who says something on the topic near the end of the discussion—I’ve been hearing about the death of movie theatres for a long time. I’ve also been thinking a lot about why I hope that doesn’t happen.

First, we may not put on suits and ties for a trip to the cinema any more, but there is something special about seeing a movie as an event. I don’t mean the mindless blockbuster “event” movies that studios have built their budgets around, I mean making an event out of seeing a movie—any movie. Watching a movie at home with my wife is different from taking her to a movie, and I hope the latter remains an option.

Second, for purely technical reasons, seeing a film on a big screen and with a theatre sound system is far beyond anything most people can afford or would be willing to set up for themselves at home. Seeing it in theatres makes a big difference, and even if you only see a film that way once and watch it dozens of times on home media later, the theatrical viewing will form the basis of how you see it again later. And if you do only see it once, as will almost certainly be the case, for me, with Glass Onion or the new All Quiet on the Western Front, it’s better to have seen it in a form that allows the filmmakers to make their best case for their work.

Third, for all the understandable complaints about the way people behave in theatres now, there is something good about seeing a film with a large group of strangers. As I noted when I saw Dune, a movie I wasn’t really looking forward to and was pleasantly surprised by, my enjoyment was enhanced by seeing it with an appreciative crowd. Ditto Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman. Ditto my very first visit to a theatre, The Fellowship of the Ring, an experience I still think about. There is something about communal, in-the-flesh entertainment that can’t be attained watching the same film at home in your pajamas. It’s the difference between a live concert and an .mp3 on your iPod.

Finally, and—to me—most importantly for the sake of the art, theatres demand something of the moviegoer. Virtually every other form of entertainment in the Dominion of Content today is tailored to the consumer and his habits and convenience and this, as I’ve mildly suggested, is a bad thing. Seeing a film in a theatre, on the other hand, is a discipline. You see it at the scheduled time, not whenever. You can’t pause it. You can’t leave and come back to it without missing something. And with a big screen and the lights properly dimmed you can’t see or do anything else. It’s one of the few places left to us that demand real attention, and going to a movie and doing so trains you in a liturgy of attention.

It also demands certain behaviors of you vis-à-vis other people. To go back to my third point, the fact that we recognize talking, texting, doom scrolling, or being a general distraction during a movie as rude is a sign that something important is happening to us, something too important to be disrupted, regardless of what the film is. And when it’s a good movie, one worthy of the attention we give it (and there is a give-and-take between filmmaker and audience), that discipline is all the more rewarding.

That’s what I think we risk losing if theatres die, and why I think a little of Bunch’s “theatre chauvinism” is more than justified.

Deliverance: a recommendation and a detail

James Dickey and Burt Reynolds on the set of the film adaptation of Dickey’s novel Deliverance

This morning the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books Podcast dropped and I was excited to see its subject: James Dickey’s first and greatest novel, Deliverance.

Miller’s guest is Cat Baab-Muguira, who has previously appeared for an episode on Poe and written a book about Poe’s unlikely self-help guidance, which is high on my to-read list. Miller and Baab-Muguira have a really excellent discussion not only of the plot and extraordinarily rich characters, writing, and themes of Deliverance, but also of the film adaptation and Dickey’s life and reputation. (I have some secondhand Dickey stories of my own, courtesy of a neighbor and former coworker.) They discuss the novel’s masculinity especially well, refusing to drop into the oversimplification du jour of “toxic masculinity,” and they handle the most infamous elements of the story deftly, not parking on the sensationalism of it but digging into the layers of meaning Dickey applied to his story. This is one of the best episodes of the show I’ve heard.

But—every time they said that the novel takes place in “northwest Georgia” I yelled at the radio, “northeast!”

This was a really strange detail to goof up, but they repeated it five or six times and so confidently that I began to worry that I’d gotten it wrong. But nope, here’s the novel itself, as Ed talks with his wife the morning of the big canoe trip’s departure for the mountains:

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go okay.

Even Wikipedia has this wrong. Which, as I said, is strange, because every carefully chosen detail of the novel suggests the northeast Georgia mountains. (And there’s no disputing where the film was shot.) The drive northward from Atlanta seems pretty clearly to be that toward Gainesville and points north—I’m old enough to remember changing landscapes and roadside scenes very much like those Dickey describes—and the small towns, mountains, rivers, woods, vegetation, and especially the massive gorge described by Dickey match those of my neck of the woods. And this is important because the setting was important to Dickey and the story. Northwest Georgia is my friend Sam at All the Biscuits in Georgia’s territory and, with all due respect to that area, it’s an entirely different region from “the mountains.”

Again, this is an otherwise excellent episode of The Great Books Podcast. I just had to get that down in writing somewhere before I could move on with my day. If you’ve read Deliverance you know us hillbillies can’t let things go.

You can listen to the episode at the link above or in the podcasting app of your choice, and I strongly recommend you do. Baab-Muguira’s book on Poe is called Poe for your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It’s on my birthday wishlist and I hope to read it soon.

I wrote about Deliverance here a couple times last year: first in reference to outsiders’ prurient interest in what Flannery O’Connor called the grotesque; second, having been moved to reread the novel, as an illustration of John Gardner’s idea of the “vivid and continuous fictional dream;” and finally in my reading year-in-review, in which I decided it was the best novel I read in 2022.

Should trouble come

Ethiopian soldiers of the Imperial Army’s Kagnew Battalion in Korea, 1953

Watching the movie finally got me to read SLA Marshall’s Pork Chop Hill. Part II begins with a chapter on a patrol into a hazardous area of the front line known as the Alligator Jaws in the spring of 1953. The small patrol runs into a much larger Chinese force and fights them off from a ditch with a foot of water flowing through it.

But here’s a twist: this patrol is composed of Ethiopian troops sent to Korea by Emperor Haile Selassie. The troops acquit themselves well. One corporal’s arm is blown off at the shoulder by a Chinese grenade, and he calmly hands his weapon off to the man beside him and continues giving orders. This patrol’s performance is especially noteworthy since they are newly arrived in Korea and this is their first combat experience whatsoever.

Here’s how the action concludes as the Ethiopians withdraw to safety.

In that interval, [Lieutenant] Wongele Costa abandoned his position on the left side of the ditch. The casualties were carried to the position on the right flank. But in the darkness, he missed one man, not knowing that [Private Mano] Waldemarian was dead. So he called for lights again to assist the search. When the flare came on, he could see Waldemarian in the ditch. He sat there in a natural position, the rifle folded close in his arms. Wongele Costa crawled over to him, found that he was dead and so returned, carrying the body. Thereby he simply followed the tradition of his corps. Fiercely proud of the loyalty of their men, officers of the Imperial Guard are likely to say to a stranger, “Should trouble come, stay with me, I’ll be the last man to die.”

Chills.

Marshall goes on to note that among the Ethiopians, “in battle, it is the officer invariably who takes the extra risk to save one of his own.” He credits their success in withstanding Chinese attack to pre-patrol preparation, with the leaders carefully familiarizing themselves with their area of operations daily so that they knew their way even in the dark. And, in broken terrain, the Ethiopians would hold hands to avoid losing each other (by this point in the book Marshall has described American attacks falling apart this way at least ten times), a technique that “western troops would . . . scorn as beneath dignity.” The tradeoff, of course, is vulnerability to artillery and mortars, but on this patrol everything worked. Fitness for purpose.

The Ethiopian presence in Korea was a fascinating surprise to me, and I intend to learn more about it.

Room to swing a cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Did this even happen?

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

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emphasis mine.

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

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

Pork Chop Hill

Gregory Peck as Lt Joe Clemons with Woody Strode and Norman Fell in Pork Chop Hill (1959)

Last week was my wife and children’s spring break, and while they spent a few days in Charleston I caught up on a backlog of war movies. The one I most looked forward to was 1959’s Pork Chop Hill. The Korean War is underrepresented in the war film canon and, owing largely to my granddad’s service there in the Air Force, I’ve always been interested in what few films there are about the conflict. As it happens, this is one of the best.

Pork Chop Hill focuses on just a few US Army infantry companies and a few days in the spring of 1953. (By coincidence, the 70th anniversary of the action depicted in this film is this coming week.) As peace negotiations between UN forces and the Communist Chinese and North Koreans drag on elsewhere, American outposts on Pork Chop Hill are overrun and orders come down to Lt Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) to retake the hill.

The hill is tall and steep and the barbed wire entanglements Clemons’s superiors said had been obliterated by artillery fire are still there when his men finally reach the top. Clemons’s company takes heavy casualties; the men start bleeding away in ones and twos well before they reach the trenches. Motivation and exhaustion pose further problems. Officers and NCOs have to urge their men forward and even to fire their weapons. But properly led—and with ample application of automatic fire and grenades—the GIs retake the trenches and bunkers at the top of the hill bit by bit.

Here Clemons’s depleted company consolidates its control of the hilltop and faces further dangers: friendly fire, Chinese holdouts, repeated communication failures, enemy artillery bombardment, lack of ammunition, lack of food and water, and lack of reinforcements. Even the arrival of another understrength company under Clemons’s brother-in-law, Lt Walter Russell (Rip Torn), proves temporary when Russell’s men are ordered back off the hilltop. Heavy Chinese counterattacks prove harder and harder to repulse and each one leaves Clemons with fewer men. By the end, Clemons and his handful of surviving infantry sit stranded atop the hill, waiting. If the Chinese drag out peace negotiations long enough to retake the hill and if Clemons is not reinforced, he and his men will be annihilated.

Pork Chop Hill is a masterfully crafted, no-frills, no-nonsense war film—a true classic of the genre. It tells a specific, narrowly focused story exceptionally well. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the director, Lewis Milestone, made his name 29 years earlier with the original screen adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film is finely staged and shot, balancing the confusion of combat with the coherence necessary to filmmaking in comprehensible but intense combat scenes.

The film also has good performances from an excellent cast. Pork Chop Hill is an amazing who’s-who for movie buffs. In addition to Peck and Torn in the leads (though Torn doesn’t appear until about two-thirds of the way into the film), Martin Landau, George Peppard, Norman Fell, Robert Blake, and Gavin MacLeod play small parts as officers, grunt infantry, and radio men, and the legendary Harry Dean Stanton appears in an uncredited early role. Real-life West Pointer George Shibata plays a Japanese-American officer and Woody Strode stands out as a fearful GI the officers suspect of malingering. Strode’s interaction with James Edwards, a fellow black infantryman who makes it his job to keep an eye on Strode, injects some understated personal and racial drama into the story.

Pork Chop Hill’s technical qualities and its cast are all excellent, but it’s the film’s atmosphere and attention to detail that sells it as a great war film. When Clemons’s company steps off, the march uphill is agonizingly long, and the attempts to breach the Chinese wire frustrating and lethal. The trench warfare is presented matter-of-factly, which only makes it more hair-raising. While there is plenty of rifle and machine gun fire to worry about, artillery and grenades are the real threats. Even throwing a single grenade into an enemy machine gun position can prove hazardous, with one soldier missing and being wounded when his own grenade bounces back and explodes nearby. Less frightening but much creepier is the wry taunting of Chinese political officers via loudspeaker, providing a kind of evil Greek chorus to Clemons’s attacks.

The film also dramatizes the immense difficulty of communication especially well. Clemons has two radio men and uses multiple runners but still can’t relay or receive messages effectively, a problem that only grows worse once he has seized the top of the hill. There is perhaps no better dramatization of Clausewitz’s dictum in On War: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

In The Mask of Command, the late Sir John Keegan presents case studies in four styles of military leadership: the Heroic (Alexander), the Anti-Heroic (Wellington), the Unheroic (Grant), and the False Heroic (Hitler). One could usefully apply the same taxonomy to war movies. In its straightforward, unassuming presentation; its nuts-and-bolts attention to the work of combat; its stoic, uncomplaining reflection on danger and hardship; and its steadfast refusal to exaggerate either the glories or horrors of war, Pork Chop Hill is the Unheroic war film par excellence. I strongly recommend it.

The film is based on the book of the same name by the influential but controversial Brigadier General SLA Marshall, which he wrote based on after-action interviews with the men involved in the real attacks on Pork Chop Hill. I’m ashamed to say I’ve owned a copy since grad school but never read it. I intend to fix that this weekend.