Anglo-Saxon erasure

The colonial mindset of British academics

Sea-thieves messenger, deliver back in reply,
tell your people this spiteful message,
that here stands undaunted an Earl with his band of men
who will defend our homeland,
Aethelred’s country, the lord of my
people and land. Fall shall you
heathen in battle! To us it would be shameful
that you with our coin to your ships should get away
without a fight, now you thus far
into our homeland have come.
You shall not so easily carry off our treasure:
with us must spear and blade first decide the terms,
fierce conflict, is the tribute we will hand over.

So speaks Byrhtnoth, hero of the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’, telling of an epic clash of arms in Essex against Viking raiders in 991.

Essex derives from ‘land of the East Saxons’, one of many geographic legacies of the two main Germanic tribes who arrived in Britain as Rome fell. Just to the north was the region which had once been the Kingdom of the East Angles, the other major grouping in the invasion of the fifth century (the poor Jutes, smaller in number, rather get overlooked).

Ethelred, the rather hapless ruler whose policy of paying off the invaders became an eternal lesson in bad policy, was the great-nephew of the first ruler to unite the people long referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and who by the time the poem was written had a sense of themselves as one people.

The Anglo-Saxons lost that great battle, with Byrhtnoth heroically slain, and the only original manuscript was destroyed in the Ashburnham House Fire of 1731, although a copy was found much later, so that most of the poem has been saved. His people famously suffered a far greater catastrophe the following century when defeat outside Hastings in Sussex (land of the south Saxons) led to foreign rule and the suppression of their language. Today, though, the Anglo-Saxons face a new humiliation at the hands of a force far more insidious than the Normans – North American academics.

Just as the once vanquished Vikings returned in force during Ethelred’s time, sensing weakness, so the assault on the Anglo-Saxons has begun again, with Cambridge last week renaming its Anglo-Saxon England journal ‘Early Medieval England and its Neighbours’. Dominic Sandbrook, for one, was not impressed.

As Samuel Rubinstein writes in the Critic: ‘Since its foundation in 1972, the journal Anglo-Saxon England, published by Cambridge University Press, has been the most prestigious in the field… The rebrand, its ironically Anglocentric name notwithstanding, promises a “broader approach” and “interdisciplinary scope” alongside the “same high quality” as Anglo-Saxon England. Few who are familiar with the journal in its former guise would accept the implication that Anglo-Saxon England was ever lacking in “breadth” or “interdisciplinarity” (whatever this actually means).’

The battle began in 2019 when Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, two years earlier elected vice president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS), where she called herself a ‘woman of color and Anglo-Saxonist’ in her victory speech, resigned her position on account of its supposedly racist name.

That year, and sensing the approaching longships, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, ‘in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”’. The society concluded that the name ‘has sometimes been used outside the field to describe those holding repugnant and racist views, and has contributed to a lack of diversity among those working on early-medieval England and its intellectual and literary culture.’

Dr Rambaran-Olm later declared that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is one of ‘inherent whiteness’, and wrote in the Smithsonian magazine that: ‘The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be “native” to Britain.’

In response, in December 2019, several dozen scholars wrote a letter defending the use of Anglo-Saxon, declaring that ‘The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere. In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years.

‘The term “Anglo-Saxon” is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent.’

Tom Holland, one of the signatories, wrote ‘The term “Anglo-Saxon” is inextricably bound up with the claim by Alfred to rule as “rex Angul-Saxonum”, his use of Bede to back-project a shared Anglian-Saxon identity and the emergence of England. Scholars of medieval history must be free to use it.’