Introductory Resources For Anglo-Saxon Studies (Again)

In response to the Goblin’s desire for some background reading recommendations, may I recommend these five books:

History

* Frank Stenton, Anglo Saxon England. This is *the* book.  It’s about fifty years old, is a veritable brick (better for bashing people with than most bibles), covers names and dates in meticulous detail. If you have trouble staying awake while reading Lord of the Rings, this book is not for you.

* Edward James, Britain in the First Millenium (also covers the later Celtic period). A relatively new book, and not a Canonical Great by any means. However, it’s engaging, clearly laid out, and in accessible language. I road-tested it on my father and he found it good, ergo, it will probably not put noobs to sleep. One caveat: his ideas about the dating of Beowulf are very unconventional.

Literature

* Primary Texts: any of the student editions by Elaine Treharne- sometimes in conjunction with others, sometimes not. For an example, Old and Middle English c.890-c.1400 : an anthology ed. Elaine Treharne, some of which is reprinted in Old and Middle English Poetry, ed Duncan Wu (based on the Treharne ed.). Treharne’s editions are lovely, with parallel translations which are broken up into lines but don’t sacrifice accuracy for the sake of modern poetics. They’re also clearly laid out and simply introduced.

* To continue with the Treharne fangirling, I cannot possibly over-recommend Treharne’s introductory guide to Old and Middle English literature- Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature ed Treharne and Johnson (which has a good intro essay on the Gawain poet, incidentally). The essays are simple, clear, and provide broad introductions to the most common scholarly approaches in the field.

* Paul E. Szarmach, Old English Prose: Basic Readings. The level of these essays is considerably more advanced than the Treharne introductions, and they provide original scholarship rather than simply background readings. However, if there’s something awesome in Anglo-Saxon prose that isn’t covered in this book, I have yet to find it.

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On a completely unrelated note: OMG SQUEE EMMA OF NORMANDY IS, LYKE, TOTALLY AWESOME. *fangirls a little bit* Since I’ve discovered that the best way for me to internalise Boy History is by writing character-based narratives, expect a special feature on Queen Emma as soon as my sleep cycle rights itself. Today, in the middle of writing a sentence about AEthelred and Thorkell the Tall, I apparently got up or fell off my seat and fell sound asleep, sprawled across the library floor and partly under the table, for around half an hour.

St AEthelthryth, Naysayer

It’s hard to improve on the AElfrician narrative for sheer weirdness, sometimes.

We will now write, miraculous though it is, regarding the holy St AEthelthryth, the English virgin, who was with two men and nevertheless remained a virgin.

It doesn’t get odder than that. But wait, it does! Her father, a man unfortunately named Anna, was king of the East Angles (which possibly makes AEthelthryth a distant cousin of St Edmund), and Anna was a bit of a god-botherer. His daughters, at least, inherited this trait, and none more so than AEthelthryth. Of Anna, AElfric informs us solemnly that ‘all his team was honoured by God’ (team- ‘line’ of descendants, progeny, family, etc).

This Anna married AEthelthryth off to a fellow named Tondbyrht, as his wife. Who knows what AEthelthryth thought about this at the time, but if she was determined at that stage to avoid hanky-panky, Tondbyrht didn’t put up any resistance. Quite possibly he wasn’t in a state to put anything up, because he carked it not long afterwards, and AEthelthryth was summarily handed off to King Ecfrid of Northumbria.

For twelve years AEthelthryth kept King Ecfrid hanging, and- even more bizarrely- for twelve years King Ecgfrid kept waiting for her to come around. He must’ve been a nice guy, King Ecfrid, and not inclined to enforce his conjugal rights. He stuck it out for twelve years, begging the Archbishop Wilfrid,¹ AEthelthryth’s spiritual adviser, to convince her to ‘have enjoyment of his marriage’, with no luck. He promised Wilfrid lands and money and what have you in return for a compliant wife, but no luck.

AEthelthryth, meanwhile, spent twelve years begging for permission to enter a nunnery, which Ecfrid steadfastly refused. Eventually, he gave up, and Wilfrid took her to Coldingham and veiled her as a nun.

There are a few things I wonder about, at this point in the story, and I think it all comes down to one man: Wilfrid.

Q: Why didn’t Ecfrid repudiate AEthelthryth from the day dot? An unconsummated marriage is grounds for annulment, yes?

A: Wilfrid. You don’t get far in your appeal for annulment if your local bishop wants you to stay married. (There could be political reasons here, like not wanting to alienate Anna, and I bet Wilfrid, an astute politician, would have brought them all out whenever the King spoke to him.)

Q: Why didn’t Ecfrid let AEthelthryth go into a nunnery when she first asked?

A: Wilfrid, surely. Was Wilfrid playing one off against the other? Was he telling Ecfrid he’d talk AEthelthryth around, and telling AEthelthryth to ask just one more time? Was he taking Ecfrid’s bribes, smiling, and then taking whatever AEthelthryth was offering him as ’spiritual adviser’ in her celibacy? (No, not like that. Well, ok, maybe like that. If it amuses you….)

AELfric relies heavily on Bede here, and having poked around in Bede, and Eddius Stephanus,  his biographer, Wilfrid strikes me as a very, very wily politician. I wouldn’t put it past him to be pulling all the strings in the King’s marriage… the question is: why?

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1. Have I mentioned my giant crush on the Archbishop Wilfrid of York (or really, of Ripon and Hexham, but his diocese included York)? Um. In case you can’t tell, my taste in dead men runs to powerful reformist prelates…
Yes, I do realise it’s a bit odd.

The Hilarious (After)Life of St Eadmund, with still more apologies to AElfric.

King Eadmund lived a boring life full of piety, generosity and justice. Things hotted up when Vikings stalked in his land and ran off with his head. But wait, it doesn’t stop there! What Eadmund’s life lacked in action and adventure, he made up for in the afterlife.

Last week, we left the East Angles as they ventured into the forest in search of Eadmund’s missing head. Off they went, into the deep dark forest, and, as sensible woodsmen do, they shouted out to one another as they went:

Where are you, comrade?

Where are you, comrade?

And the head shouted back to them:

Over here! Over here!

As often as one of them shouted out Where are you, comrade?, the head of King Eadmund shouted back: Over here! Over here! And soon enough they came across the head, nestled between the paws of a slavering, ravening wolf. This wolf really, really, desperately wanted to eat the head. Om nom nom, tasty head. However, luckily for the East Angles, God had given the wolf divine orders not to eat the head of king Eadmund. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny snacking around the ears. (Unlike the Wolfish stalking Hinguar, real wolves obey God. Vikings are mean and nasty and diabolical. Subtlety and tolerance? Not Aelfric’s cup of tea.)

The East Angles were quite pleased to have the head back, and they grabbed it out of the wolf’s paws and scurried back to the castle. The wolf followed them all the way back to the town, and, realising that it wasn’t going to get even a nibble of the head, finally gave up and went home. Poor wolf.

Delighted with the way things were going (despite the obliteration of their king and most of their countrymen), the East Angles got together and put up a church over Eadmund’s body. Some time later, (in 869) their descendants decided that a shoddy job and been done, and built a grand shiny new church. Predictably, when they pulled out Eadmund’s body, it was all perfectly intact, head attatched, wounds healed, the whole works. (’Now, if I were a skeptical person,’ says a devout audience, ‘which I’m not, that might suggest to me that it wasn’t the same body.‘) What’s more, there’s a nice silk thread around his red throat. (’If I were a skeptical person,’ says my devout listener, ‘I might be inclined to think it was the body of a recently hanged man…’)

The ruins of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, est. 869.

At any rate, miraculous preservation of body achieved, King Eadmund is set up in a brand spanking new church, with a holy widow to keep him company and clip his fingernails. (Her name was Oswyn, and her fondness for barbering and manicuring dead saints is all we know of her.) All the locals brought gifts and offerings in Eadmund’s honour, and Bishop Theodred decked the church out in gold and silver. The afterlife was going well for King Eadmund, but a rich church will attract unwonted attention, and one night, eight ‘unblessed’ theives turned up, bent on knicking off with the offerings.

Some of them slogged at the door haspe with sledge-hammers; some filed around it with files; some of them got spades and tried to dig under the door; and some of them brought ladders and tried to get in by the windows. For a mere eight thieves, they were swarming all over the place like flies. But for naught- St Eadmund, it turns out, was the best kind of saint: better than a closed-circuit video camera. He froze those theives in their tracks, and held them there all night. When the townspeople (and presumably the monks) turned up in the morning, they found eight thieves- some hanging from ladders, some frozen over spades, and so on, stuck fast in their tracks. They picked them up (apparently without un-freezing them) and dragged them off to Bishop Theodred.

Now, Bishop Theodred was a pretty good bishop, but not the best bishop around. He was good about donating silver and gold to churches, not so good on his canon law. And so he (conveniently?) forgot that he, as a bishop, shouldn’t be sentencing anyone to death, and ordered the poor frozen thieves to be hung. And hung they were, nowhere does AElfric mention any un-freezing.

After the thieves were good and dead, Bishop Theodred thought to look in his books¹, and suddenly remembered that he was a churchman, and not supposed to be orchestrating hangings. He was properly sad, and feared for his immortal soul, and ordered the East Angles to fast with him for three days and pray for his salvation. (Salvation: so much easier if you have minions!)

Next up, a fellow named Leofstan, of a more skeptical bent than was generally good for you in Anglo-Saxon England, came along and demanded to see the intact body of St Eadmund. The monks were obliging, and opened up the tomb for him to have a looksee. Leofstan looked, and saw, and went barking mad and ran off and committed suicide. I’ve no idea what was going on there, but AElfric assures us it was a copycat miracle, in the model of St Lawrence, who sent mad seven men who dared to look upon his intact body.

Apparently many more hilarious miraculous things happened to St Eadmund in his afterlife, but AElfric didn’t feel like writing them down for us, and so we don’t get to find out what they were.

~

1. Look, look, books! AElfric and Wulfstan seem to be on common ground here: books (ie, canon law books) are crucial to proper bishoply behavior.

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, part two

Firstly, allow me to gloat about three things:

1. I finally finished the dratted chapter. It was supposed to be half a chapter but blew itself out to around 4000 words. I sat down to write 800 or so concluding words last night and ended up writing 2500 words. But I think they’re bloody good words, so that’s happy.

2. I have been relieved of the deadline (which, to be fair, I nominated in the first place) for my Anglo-Saxon essay. Apparently since there’s only me in the class, I can write whatever I want and hand it in whenever I want.

3. The University appear to have put five hundred dollars in my bank account without warning or explanation. This is exciting (pays for flights to the Australian Early Medieval Association conference in October…), but also somewhat disconcerting (what if I wasn’t meant to get five hundred dollars?). I am supposing that it is the same prize I won last year, and that information to that effect will turn up eventually.

And now, on to

The Hilarious Death of St Eadmund, with apologies to AElfric:

Last week, Stalking Hinguar and his ravening Vikings were on their way to take King Eadmund of East Anglia captive. Scary stuff.

King Eadmund stood in his royal hall, resolute and noble, and completely without backup. Into the hall came Hinguar and his Vikings, and Eadmund raised up his weapons and….

Hurled them. Not at the Vikings; just away. This, AElfric opines, is because he was imitating Christ, who wouldn’t let Peter defend him with weapons, when Christ was under attack. Christ’s example or no, this is not a good way to deal with Vikings.

Hinguar and his Vikings marched straight up to the dais, grabbed King Eadmund and trussed him up like a christmas ham. They poked fun at him and battered him with cudgels, and then stuck him under their arms, dragged him out of the hall, and shackled him to a tree. Then, moderation not being a traditional virtue of pillaging Vikings, they proceeded to whip him with scourges. AElfric tells us that King Eadmund ‘cried out to the Savior Christ’ the whole time. I’m not sure why this is surprising, really. If someone was thrashing me with a scourge, I would certainly be shouting ‘JESUS CHRIST!’, and every other swear word I knew.

Eadmund’s caterwauling eventually pissed off the Vikings. Taking a few steps back, they shot him repeatedly with spears, until he was stuck all over with them, just like hedgehog’s bristles, not unlike St Sebastian.

Hinguar then got really fed up with Eadmund, who was still kicking up a stink and shouting about Jesus. He waved a commanding Viking hand, and someone lopped off Eadmund’s head. Eadmund died crying out to Christ, and we know this because, conveniently, there was a watching Anglo-Saxon nearby, miraculously hidden from the Vikings.

Soon enough, what remains of Eadmund’s people come along, and, shock and alarm, they find the body of King Eadmund, but Hinguar and co have nicked off with the head. (Leave a body with its head, after all, and it’s only a matter of time before you have a zombie on your hands…) The Mysterious Watcher chooses this moment to unveil himself, and to conveniently announce that he saw the Vikings peg the head off into the forest somewhere.

So off they go into the forest, the remnant of the East Angles, poking around in the bushes for a decorpsed head. What will happen next? Tune in next week to find out!

Gentlemen, man your wives!

No, wait, I can’t not blog this. Welcome to Humourous Translation Mistakes 101, or Idioms You Really Wish Your Dead Language Had.

Misreading of the day: þurh hæmedþing wife gemanan- through sexy things to man (a) wife. Gentlemen, man your wives!

Anglo-Saxon regular verbs end in –an or –ian. So gemanan being the last word I copied out, I instinctively went to treat it as the verb, and wife as the object. What sort of verb would it be? A cognate of the modern ‘to man’, I assumed (“Man the guns!”). Sadly, gemanan is not a verb at all, but a weak noun of some kind (genitive? doesn’t matter, they all look the same…)

The law code V Æþelred says, of priests, þæt hy nagon mid rihte þurh hæmedþing wife gemanan: ‘That they may not have (nagon) with/in justice, through sexual intercourse (hæmedþing), the company (gemanan) of a wife.’

Or possibly through marriage. The definition is a bit circular- hæmed is ‘sexual intercourse, marriage’, and hæmedþing would be… ‘marital activities’? I quite like ‘through sexy things’, myself.

So, these priests aren’t allowed to boink their wives, basically. Which is exactly what my Humourous Translation Mistake said, but said in a much more amusing fashion. (No one bothered to write down what the wives thought about all this…)

The hilarious death of St Eadmund: Part One

I’ve been translating AElfric’s Life of St Eadmund this past week. Which is funny, because it contains very little of Eadmund’s life at all, but a whole lot of hilarity surrounding his death. Tonight, because sleep is for the weak, I present to you: St Eadmund Without the Boring Bits

King Eadmund ruled in East Anglia, and he was the most awesome king you could possibly imagine. He was gentle and generous and just, he was pious and princely, he was faithful and fair. He ruled over his people like a father and a shepherd.

Unfortunately for Eadmund, East Anglia had a sudden case of Vikings. A fellow named Hinguar stalked on the land, like a wolf, and then slew the people. Interestingly, this same Hinguar was Ivarr, son of Ragnar Loðborok (’Hairy-Pants’, or more stodgily, ‘Shaggy-breeches’). Ragnar had been busy sacking Paris, and Ivarr later went on to cause havoc in Ireland. And while Hinguar was stalking around in East Anglia, his brother Hubba was controlling Northumbria. Quite a respectable lineage of Vikings, they were.

But you don’t want to know about Hinguar’s family tree. What you want to know is that he sent Eadmund a message saying:

You are powerless, and my army need somewhere to stay for the winter. Give me all your goldhoards, and I will let you live as my underking.

Eadmund was a little taken aback by this, and he called a nearby bishop. This bishop was a pragmatic sort of fellow, and he said to King Eadmund: ‘Look, your kingliness: you’re outnumbered, you have no army, and you’re going to die. Either agree to his terms or run away.’

Eadmund thought about this for a while, and then he said to the bishop: ‘Hang on, bishop! I’ve never run away from my enemies yet, and I’m not about to start now!’

So king Eadmund went back to the messenger and said:

You’re an arrogant bastard of a Viking, and I ought to kill you, but I won’t defile my hands with your blood. You tell your chief Hinguar to bugger off- I won’t serve him, unless he converts to Christianity first.

So the messenger trotted back the way he had come, and along the way, he met Hinguar, with his bloodthirsty band of Vikings, all ready to take Eadmund down.

‘No luck,’ says the messenger. ‘The snotty little English king is going to be all honourable about things.’

Whereupon Hinguar smirks, and gives orders that his henchmen go after the unprotected Eadmund and take him captive.

What will happen next? Tune in to the Naked Philologist for talking heads, miraculous uncorrupted bodies, bumbling theives, and a madman.

Basic resources for Anglo-Saxon studies

Obviously it’s essay time, somewhere in the world. I keep getting search hits asking interesting questions like ‘Why did the Anglo-Saxons come to England?’ and ‘What happened to the Anglo-Saxons?’. Someone has a cultural relativity task asking them to compare Anglo-Saxon and Australian customs, and they’re clearly not getting very far with it. Because I am a helpful person, I will provide you with these recommendations:

For a basic introduction to Anglo-Saxon history, you want

* Edward James, Britain in the first millennium
or
*Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England.

These will both tell you why the Anglo-Saxons came to England and what happened to them once they got there. Stenton is more comprehensive, but James is more modern and easier to follow.

If you want to know about daily life, you might try

*David Wilson, The Anglo-Saxons, a nice little book I just picked up yesterday and so can’t swear for its quality. But it has lots of archaelogical information in it.

You won’t find many decent sources online, so I suggest you stop looking. The first chapter of Peter Baker’s Electronic Introduction to Old English is the only secondary source I can recommend, and it won’t have enough information in it to help you write a whole essay.¹

For primary sources, there’s an old translation of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle online, and same for Asser’s Life of King Alfred. If you want to know ‘what happened to the Anglo-Saxons’ or why they came to England, try looking at these and finding out what *they* thought was happening to them.

Good luck!

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1. No, I am not a source. Blogs are not sources. Nothing hosted on WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot or Livejournal can be used in an essay. Consider this a friendly warning from a senior student, before your marker strangles you for poor research.
You can’t use blogs because they’re not peer reviewed research. If that doesn’t make sense to you, or you want some advice on how to find reliable resources online, and how to cite them when you find them, I have a post on that here.

Word of the Day!

Hello and welcome to ‘Highly has a new favourite word and will wander around muttering it under her breath for the next week’!

bestealcian

Say it nice and slowly. be-ste-al-kee-an¹ It means ‘to move stealthily, to stalk’, and it has the most fabulous past tense form you could imagine:

Hinguar færlice swa swa wulf on lande bestalcode and Þa leode sloh…²

Hinguar (that’s particularly nasty Viking) suddenly, like a wolf, stalked on (the) land and then slew (the) people.³ Bestalcode. Isn’t it… sinister?

All the sinister effect is ruined by the fact that Hinguar’s fellow-scary-Viking-Chief-dude is named Hubba. Sorry, can’t afford you any respect at all with a name like Hubba.

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1. I think. In three years I still haven’t internalised the c/ch rules. I think, from peering at Alex Jones’ Guide To Everything, that that’s how it goes. And then you have to deal with the fact that my phonetic description may not match your phonetic description. No, I don’t know IPA, but I probably should learn it sometime.
2. Which is from AElfric’s Life of St Edmund, around l. 156 in the Mitchell & Robinson textbook edition.
3. Or ’stalked on the land and slew the people’. Leod being a feminine singular accusative, Þa could be the accusative definite pronoun. Or not. I like it better not.

Common Ground

Someone has been google-searching ‘Anglo Saxon customs in Australia’. Now, I happen to think we in Australia have some common cultural ground with our Anglo-Saxon forbears, and it is this: booze. Anglo-Saxons liked booze. Australians like booze. Australian social culture revolves around boozing far more than some of us would like.

I give you Wulfstan’s Admonition to Bishops:

And hit is egeslic gewuna, Þæt we eac habbað: sylfe we bysniað oft and gelome Þæt we geornost scoldan ægwær forbeodan… we oferdrucen lufiað to georne and mid ðam huru ðencað, Þæt we us sylfe weorðian wide, Þe we oðre men drecan to swyÞe.
And it is (a) dreadful custom, which we each have: we (our)selves set an example often and frequently which we should most eagerly forbid everywhere… we love drunkenness to eagerly. And certainly think upon that, which we ourselves praise widely, so that we make other men too greatly drunk.¹

Now, to the best of my knowledge neither the Anglican nor Catholic Archbishop of Sydney has lately been accused of ’staying too long on the bench of the ale-house’, as were Wulfstan’s fellow-bishops. I have known a good few ministers of the Word in my time who happily trot down to the pub after church for a beer or two- a perfect example of the moderation Wulfstan advises.

I’m quite sure, however, that Wulfstan would consider the other book-learned members of our society- the politicians and the lawyers, the doctors, the students, and yes, quite definitely the medievalists- likewise responsible for setting a good moral example to the degenerate footballers of the nation. Wulfstan would not be encouraging students to drink their stresses away. Wulfstan might even argue that the inebriated examples of those who should know better are in some way responsible for the antics of, say, Shane Warne. He would certainly have some choice alliteration to describe the kind of drunken embarrassments to the country (let me have a stab at this) which one may find here:

Hooligans and hoons, racists and rioters, misogynists and misanthropes, criminals and crooks, lushes and lechers, and those who, all too often, embarrass the establishment, with drunkenness, which they should defend.²

In conclusion: one Anglo-Saxon custom we cling to very eagerly, O Google Searcher, is that of social drinking, often to excess. Drunkenness as group bonding. Convivial imbibing as the key to ‘networking’. Whether or not this is a good thing, I leave to your discretion.

Finally: when next you’re having a glass before knucking down to write, remember to:

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1. For the persnickety: the Admonition is in Jost’s edition of the Institutes of Polity, p. 262ff, and if from the MS London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i: f. 100v.ff. The translation is mine and shouldn’t be trusted.
2. OK, it’s nigh impossible to keep one’s syntax straight and alliterate a sentence. I am suddenly more tolerant of convoluted Anglo-Saxon expressions.

Myltestran 7 myrðran: infanticides and stillbirths in Anglo-Saxon England

‘Prostitutes and killers of children’. The two form part of a long list of alliterating pairs of social dangers in Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi Ad Anglos. They can be found with man-slayers and woman-slayers, priest-destroyers and church-haters, and so on.

I remarked to the Bocera this afternoon that it was a bit harsh, equating prostitutes with killers of children. Some early form of ‘but think of the children!’ hysteria? The Bocera looked over his glasses at me and pointed out that ‘killers of children’ is probably referring to abortions or child abandonment- and who would be in a worse economic or social position to raise children than prostitutes?

He then went on to tell me that in excavations of Anglo-Saxon settlements, it is not uncommon to find the bones of newborns in the rubbish heap, and that presumably these were the successful abandonments, since they weren’t discovered and given a proper burial.

But what about still-births, I asked. Still-births, he informed me, were always given a proper burial. In the excavation of Anglo-Saxon churches and cemeteries, the graves of children who died before baptism are usually found under the eaves of the church, in the hope that they would be ‘baptised’ by the water running off the sanctuary.

I learn something new every time I see the Bocera.¹ Today: one gruesome, one sweet, and both sad…

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1. Did you know that Neil Ker died by falling out of an apple tree? The Bocera tells me, with his impenetrable Bocera expression, that this is not an uncommon way for scholars to die.