Controversies 1: What do we do with the Anglo-Saxons? Part 1

 

Perhaps the most famous symbol of Anglo-Saxon England, the Sutton Hoo helmet excavated in 1939 and possibly worn by King Raedwald of East Anglia (560 - 624)

Just over a week ago, on 30 September, the Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed the explosion of the Nordstream 2 pipeline on “Anglo-Saxon”powers. “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved onto sabotage … It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipeline.” By “Anglo-Saxons”, Putin almost certainly meant the USA, the UK and their NATO allies. He said this in the context of a speech justifying his plans to annex Ukrainian territory, condemning Western “Satanism”, imperialism and hypocrisy and casting the war in Ukraine as a holy war to defend the Russian people from spiritual degeneration, sexual deviancy and, the favourite bogeyman of the far-right, transgenderism.

Perhaps it was the Anglo-Saxon saboteurs again who behind the Russian bridge in Crimea catching fire

A just over a year ago, US Republican congresswoman and far-right conspiracy theorist (she believes in QANON and “white genocide”) MarjorieTaylor Greene established an America First Caucus that would protect “Anglo-Saxonpolitical traditions”, and in their seven-page manifesto they hashed out thefamiliar anti-immigrant talking points and cliches. They also insisted that “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” had nothing to do with race.

Over this summer, the palace of the early kings of East Anglia, which included Raedwald, the wearer of the ultra-famous Sutton Hoo helmet, wasunearthed at Rendlesham in Suffolk. The palace was found to have been occupied between 570 and 720 AD – it was recorded in the writings of the Venerable Bede (d.735) as the place where King Aethelwold of the East Angles stood as godfather at the baptism of the erstwhile pagan King Swithelm of the East Saxons in 662. Its great hall was found to be 23 metres long and 10 metres wide (just over a fifth of the area of an Olympic swimming pool). Back in June, an Anglo-Saxoncemetery containing over 140 graves from the fifth and sixth centuries was discoveredat Wendover in Buckinghamshire. And in August, the eighth century monastery ofCookham in the Thames Valley, which played an important role in the Mercian kingsexpanding their power south of the Chilterns, was excavated by a team of archaeologists from the University of Reading including Gabor Thomas, who I’vementioned here before. And last year, the largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxoncoins was discovered in Norfolk by an amateur metal detectorist. Some feel justified in saying we’re living in a golden age of Anglo-Saxon archaeology.

All these different examples reflect the different meanings of the term Anglo-Saxon. The first, most popular in Continental Europe, is touse that term to decry perceived British and American imperialism and maligncultural influences – the French president Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO in 1966 in attempt to free it from “Anglo-Saxon” domination. Putin is following in that tradition. The second meaning is mostly confined to the US, and is used to essentially mean white Americans of predominantly English ancestry, though anyone of Protestant Northern European descent – Dutch, German, Scandinavian – can find inclusion with the label as well. Thomas Jefferson, who taught himself Old English, hugely admired what he saw as the proto-democratic traditions of Anglo-Saxon government, and tried to frame the new American republic he’d helped found as a kind of successor state to Anglo-Saxon England. The American Revolution certainly helps explain why Anglo-Saxon rather than English American caught on – the former associated with a lost golden age of primitive democracy in the old country, the other with the imperial centre (technically called Great Britain) they’d just seceded from. The term Anglo-Saxon has been used since the nineteenth century as a rallying cry by racist groups in the USA like the Ku Klux Klan to incite hatred and violence not only against African Americans but also Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, Catholics generally and anyone who wasn’t of English/ Germanic ancestry and Protestant. When Marjorie Taylor spoke of “Anglo-Saxon” political traditions, she probably meant them in that sense despite claiming she hadn’t brought race into it. Then the third sense is what’s most familiar to us in the UK. That is to designate a historical period between the fifth and eleventh centuries, in which lowland Britain (what we now call England) was dominated by kingdoms founded by Continental Germanic migrants and also to refer to the culture and peoples associated with it.

Pro-KKK, anti-Catholic propaganda from the 1920s

Popular newsprint outlets didn't like it when JFK, a practicing Catholic of Irish ancestry, challenged the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ascendancy that had dominated US politics until the 1960s

The first two senses are deeply pungent. But the third seems innocent and neutral enough, doesn’t it. Well, apparently, not anymore. In September2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in the USA dropped theAnglo-Saxon from their name – they are now the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. This was precipitated by their second ever vicepresident (the society was only founded in 1983), Mary Rambaran-Olm resigned earlier that year, at the Race4Race event held at Washington’s FolgerShakespeare Library. She resigned on the grounds that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies was rife with bullying, elitism, sexism, racism, lack of concern for the struggles of graduate students and early career scholars and sexual harassment. Rambaran-Olm of course welcomed the decision of the members to have the name changed, as a step in the right direction to tackle the field’s multitude of problems and a gesture of solidarity to the victims. Since then, she and a group of other US medievalist literary scholars, have called for the term Anglo-Saxon to be dropped from academic books and journals, university courses, museums and heritage sites, claiming that is both historically inaccurate and racially-charged. You can read their arguments here. All of this is essentially an off-shot of a of a broader crisis in academic medievalist circles in the Anglosphere. The use of various medieval symbols and motifs at the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville in 2017 has raised all kinds of uncomfortable questions about how to deal with the abuse of the medieval European past by neo-fascists, white nationalists andother far-right types, who clearly see medieval Europe as an ultra-macho, whites-only place and idolise Viking warriors and other people from the medieval past they see as warrior role-models and exemplary of white Nordic superiority. Here ofcourse it must be said that ancient Greece and Rome have also been misappropriated on a colossal scale by racists going back to the eighteenth century, and that at the forefront of the Neo-Nazi/ white supremacist historical conscience are the American Civil War and WW2. There’s also a huge concern, in both the UK and the US about the lack of ethnic diversity in the humanities, especially among professors and other senior scholars. This raises important questions about how we make the field more open, accessible and comfortable to people from non-white backgrounds.

Nazi propaganda poster in occupied Norway encouraging Norwegian men to join the Wehrmacht to follow in the footsteps of their Viking warrior forbears. What the alt-right was doing at Charlottesville goes back to their OG fascist forerunners.

Jake Angeli, the Shaman of QANON at the Capitol Insurrection on January 6 2021. Though he's dressed like a Native American, he does have lots of Norse symbols including the Valknut of Odin, Thor's hammer Mjolnir and Yggdrasil, the world tree. St Boniface please help us against these nutters!

The campaign to abolish the term Anglo-Saxon has gained some momentum in the United States, but has been met with mixed reception on this side of the Atlantic. Here all of us, except for a substratum of far-right lunatics, think of the term exclusively in the third sense. Some academics have welcomed this move and called for similar stuff to happen here– Stewart Brookes, who taught me palaeography at Oxford, is one of them. Michael Wood, the celebrated TV historian whose “In Search of the Dark Ages” brought Anglo-Saxon history to a wider public than ever before, has basicallychosen sit on the fence in relation to it, instead just reminding us to be nice to each other and try and make the field as inclusive to ethnic minorities as possible, which no one other than a chauvinist could disagree with. Those in the historical profession who don’t like controversies, have simply kept their heads down. Others, however, have rushed to defend the term Anglo-Saxon from the charges levelled against it, and have argued that we can promote a visionof the Anglo-Saxon past that doesn’t pander to racist fantasies while notabandoning the term to the racists. They have also pointed out the various inadequacies of the alternative term being proposed by Rambaran-Olm et al – “early medieval England.” An open letter was signed by a team of UK academics led byarchaeologist John Hines arguing in defence of the term Anglo-Saxon whilst committing themselves to opposeracism and abuse of the early medieval past by the far-right. Some UK academics also wrote online articles in defence of the term Anglo-Saxon, and were then harassedfor it by a particularly crass and vicious group of American medievalistliterary scholars whom I won’t name (they don’t deserve publicity here). Indeed, Howard Williams, an archaeologist at the University of Chester, was libelled in an academic journal by some of them, and the journal’s editorsrefused to retract their statements despite the fact they broke the law and allthe rules of academic engagement. Medieval history is often renowned for being behind with the times, but eventually the culture wars with their associated nastiness were going to catch up with it. Underlining all of this is a sense of mistrust between European and North American academics, that I’ve come to be quite aware of, which you can see a perfect example of here (scroll down to the comments section especially).

Do Anglo-Saxons make you think more of this?

Or this? 

So where does that leave me in all of this. Some of you might think I shouldn’t comment at all for I have no skin in the game. I am after all a Continental early medievalist (Carolingianist) not an Anglo-Saxonist, so why should I be pontificating about this. I am however going to be teaching Anglo-Saxon England to a year 7 class in my first placement school. And as an early medievalist this controversy fringes on so many things that are relevant and of interest to me, namely the construction of ethnic identities in the middle ages, historiography and memory and the relationship between the early medieval past and the politics of the present, which has been there since the high middle ages. In a subsequent post (the part 2) I will be arguing that we should retain the term Anglo-Saxon, that the racists have no real claim over it, that it is not irredeemably tainted with racism and that the term “early medieval England” is thoroughly inadequate because there was nothing that could really be called England before the tenth century without a huge degree of anachronism and teleological thinking. But that will unfortunately have to wait till next week at the earliest. In the meantime, have a lovely weekend!