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The Language of the Night: Let's Talk About Anglo-Saxon [1]

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Date: 2024-06-17  

Not long ago, Angmar, who keeps an eye out for interesting news and bits, sent me an article by Nick Cohen at the Spectator (through Archive.today, whose existence I greatly appreciate) titled “There’s nothing racist about the Anglo-Saxons.” It resurrected a conflict in me that’s been bubbling for a long time, and the more I thought about it, the more it angered me. (That’s not on you, Angmar, it’s on Cohen, who is more than a bit of an idiot and doesn’t know what he’s writing about.)

If you don’t feel like following the link, this is Cohen’s thesis in brief: Political correctness has taken over academia in Britain and, bowing to scolds in the US, Cambridge University Press is renaming its journal Anglo-Saxon England to Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, because the term “Anglo-Saxon” has become racist. Cohen then outlines the many reasons why “Anglo-Saxon,” referring to the various kingdoms of Britain like Wessex, Essex, Mercia, Northumbria, etc., is a perfectly sound term that denotes the Germanic cultures of Britain before 1066 and why Cambridge University Press is staffed by a bunch of weenies who tremble at the shadow of the mean American purity patrol.

Cohen joins other outrage addicts like Dominic Sandbrook, whom he cites, to decry the sacrifice of true Britishness on the altar of “wokeness.” He saves his particular vitriol for Dr. Mary Rambaran-Ohm, an accomplished Old English scholar, in an attack that should be a career-ender it’s so slanderous, mean-spirited and unprofessional. It’s also deep inside-baseball and we can talk about it if you like but, for my purposes tonight, it’s beside the point (it made my blood boil because Rambaran-Ohm has been treated shamefully both by academia and by racists, and has demonstrated more than a little grace throughout the ordeal). Besides, Cohen is a few years late to the party.

The fact is that the term “Anglo-Saxon,” durable as it has been over the years, is now firmly in the racist column. No one can blame language police for the co-option of an academic phrase and its deployment as a slur (and for those who would try, Critical Race Theory would like a word). The corruption of Anglo-Saxon in the US started with WASP in the 1960’s, and probably earlier than that, certainly earlier than that in Europe, traveled the racism underbelly to emerge with Tucker Carlson and the America First movement, and blossomed into a term that means “wyteness” in the same way that a swastika might have started life as a Chinese good luck symbol but most certainly is not that now. Academia is just beginning to catch up.

I might mention that Cohen uses Anglo-Saxonism as a club to beat up contemporary academia in general, and in all fairness, with some small justification (I said some). Language police roam among us, all too eager to pick nits in phraseology and attitude, all too eager to demonstrate greater purity than thou. It’s tiring, and kind of small-minded. After all, there’s a middle ground between the theory patrol and Bill Maher, and most of us occupy it and sleep peacefully at night, untroubled by the linguistic lapses of others. We’ve all seen otherwise smart people we generally think agreeable find molehills to make into mountains upon which to die, and it’s never a pretty sight.

I might also mention that Cohen, as a Brit, sneers at American sensitivity to racism. As if Britain has never experienced racism itself. Right. No racism. The country that gave us the East India Tea Company, the London Company, the tobacco trade, and the sugar plantations of Barbados. But the US is oversensitive about racism: what was Brexit about, or Windrush, or the relocation to Rwanda proposal, and those examples are drawn just from the past couple of years. As I read the essay, the thought, Dude, have you never looked in a mirror? kept running through my head.

All of that is negative, I know. As there are changes to scholarship with the term Old English replacing Anglo-Saxon, changes that some (ignorant) individuals consider a negative, there are positives to draw from the diminishment of Anglo-Saxon as a term of use, and a concurrent widening of the cultural lens. I have to pull from a little personal experience to make the point, so please bear with me.

When I was training as a medievalist, medieval studies was mostly male and all white, and Anglo-Saxon studies were even more so; Nordic heroes like Beowulf vanquishing Grendel, the spawn of Cain, dark mearc-stapa (marsh-stepper) were the norm. The scholars (auctorites) were male and white and old. They spent their lives studying Latin, French, Old English, and German, scouring old textual versions published between 1880 and 1920, many from the Early English Text Society, and commenting on each other’s work. Being admitted to their ranks — well, sneaking in through a side door was more like it — but it was heady because it was hard. Not everyone could juggle all those languages and balance the poetry and the theology (because there was always theology involved); so what if the writers of the source texts thought that a woman was destined for hell because she could read and maybe some of her own teachers privately agreed? I had never charted my career based on what other people thought. So I overlooked the misogyny.

And the racism? When I was training, the dominant social theories held that Western Europe broke into small insular kingdoms after the fall of Rome, nobody traveled and therefore, everyone in England was either Celtic or Germanic. Until they also became Nordic. White people, all.

What I didn’t know was that race is a social construct that didn’t rise until the transatlantic slave trade began. It wasn’t until I started to follow Mary Rambaran-Ohm on Twitter (she’s Axel Folio if you want to look her up) that I realized that in my 20+ year absence from scholarship, things has changed fundamentally. As in: literacy is a relative term; the church was less a monolith than a collection of entities pursuing a common interest; there were many more early cultural contacts between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Western Asia than had been acknowledged in my time; people traveled widely, undertaking pilgrimages that brought them from Northern England to Constantinople and Jerusalem and back; women had been erased from the historic record the same way they had been erased from scripture (see Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, for more on that, as well as a mini-course in textual scholarship). Yes, there were black people all over Europe during the Middle Ages, and guess what? they were just people. In short, everything was different. Sexuality was different, as was religious belief, faith in the numinous and the occult more common, and life more complicated, more nuanced, richer, that I had been taught, and I’ve been grateful to have started the process of un- and re-learning.

And all it took to resurrect this conflict was an essay wherein a British snob picked the wrong scapegoats for the wrong argument. Anglo-Saxonism is a construct that started in the 17th century; during the period people mostly referred to themselves as Angelcynne; in fact, I think there are only two 9th century references to Ongle-saxons that aren’t later translations out of Latin. Although records are scarce (it’s the Dark Ages we’re talking about, the 5th — 10th centuries) it appears that mostly, when people referred to themselves in their own languages, they referenced their kingdoms of origin. And even if Anglo-Saxon had been a term in use before the 11th century, its time has passed and it lies dead on the altar of White Supremacy, both in the US and in Europe; Early Medieval England and its Neighbours casts a wider net, anyway. After all, early medieval England was a part of Europe; its insularity, like its racism, is a social construct born of its post-medieval imperial past and the sooner gotten over, the better.

So thanks, Angmar. As you can tell, I haven’t been writing a lot, or reading much, either. But I am spending a lot of time with a small delightful human. Yesterday we were cats. Tomorrow? Who knows? We might be Old English knights.

Note: I make a number of overbroad statements above and leave them unsupported. I’m babysitting to help out the family and my time is limited, so please forgive me. If there’s something you would like a reference on, let me know and I’ll look it up, but today was a heavy lift just to get this much written. Thanks.

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