It has been almost a year since my last post, a year dedicated to another project I will hopefully blog about soon (“Medieval Worlds: Muddling through the Middle Ages”).  Aldred feels neglected, perhaps, but is not far from my thoughts even if those are not committed to writing in his fictional story. 

In the meantime, here I sit in Leeds waiting for the start of the International Medieval Congress, emulating Johnathan Jarrett’s A Corner of Tenth Century Europe by posting something from way back that has never seen the light of day but to which I keep returning to pull ideas. 

This piece comes from 2011, so more than a decade ago, and shows my nascent thoughts about bringing into conversation my early medieval research on Britain with my location in Oceania.  I gave it or parts of it as oral presentations and submitted versions to journals, but the peer reviews rightly pointed out areas that needed work, after which it languished on a back shelf while I moved on to other endeavors. 

Nonetheless, I find myself invoking bits of it in my current work, including the panel presentation for IONA here at Leeds on Tuesday.  Its presence here, warts and all, may serve as a backstop in case anyone wants to know more about the main characters.

Before you read on, please note three caveats about this mostly unrevised and lightly edited paper:

1. This was researched and written in 2010-11 and has not been updated with more recent work on the subjects, including my own work on Aldred and new approaches to studying early medieval Britain.  As a consequence, I am omitting from the essay the now well out of date historiographic overview, and have added a few but not all more current references in footnotes with “see now.”
2. The journal peer reviewers made some cogent observations that have not been addressed (thank you to the readers and my apologies for not following through).  This includes the overblown rhetoric about the medieval-modern divide, about which I have written elsewhere on this blog, and the uncomfortable switching between the two protagonists.
3. I am a settler scholar in Hawai‘i but not a researcher in Pacific Islands studies.  Rather, I am a Euromedievalist turned global medievalist, with an ear listening to Indigenous voices in Hawai‘i and in the field of early medieval English studies.

Finally, I should note that my blog title with the question mark echoes the review essay by Neil Price and John Ljungkvist,“Polynesians of the Atlantic? Precedents, potentials, and pitfalls in Oceanic analogies of the Vikings,” Danish Journal of Archaeology (30 July 2018), which offers a more current and insightful critique of the problems of comparative histories.

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Vikings of the Pacific:  An Oceanic View of the Early Medieval British Isles

May the letter, faithful servant of speech, reveal me.

Salute all my brothers with your kindly voice.[i]

            Sometime in the middle of the tenth century, a Northumbrian priest named Aldred penned these lines as part of an extended, and quite self-revealing, colophon he wrote in the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript, a treasured relic at the community of St. Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street, slightly north of present day Durham in Northumbria.  Aldred had just finished glossing in Old English the Latin text of the four gospels and now with a considerable flourish, he memorialized his handiwork by adding himself to the list of illustrious original designers of this eighth-century gloriously decorated manuscript.  His enhancement—bringing the Northumbrian dialect of Old English into dialogue with the Christian language of Latin—places him as a translator and mediator between local and global.  Accordingly, the colophon is also bilingual, alternating between Latin and Old English in a way that reveals Aldred’s cultural hybridity as well as unique view of Viking-era English Christianity.

The old net is laid aside;

A new net goes afishing.

            In the early decades of the twentieth century, a Maori-Irish doctor from New Zealand closed his masterful account of Polynesian societies, Vikings of the Pacific, with an epilogue quoting this Maori proverb and offering a poignant query:  “The old net is full of holes, its meshes have rotted, and it has been laid aside. What new net goes afishing?”[ii]  For Te Rangi Hiroa, Sir Peter Buck, “the glory of the Stone Age has departed out of Polynesia,” its “regalia and symbols of spiritual and temporal power…scattered among the museums of other people,” including the one where he served as director, Bishop Museum in Honolulu.  Hiroa/Buck was uniquely positioned by his dual heritages and education to bring into dialogue old and new worlds in collision.

            Both Aldred the priest and Te Rangi Hiroa speak in quite personal terms about the academic work they performed.  Each stands at a temporal, geographic, and cultural nexus, but seemingly unrelated to one another except through the accident of a title, Vikings of the Pacific, that attracted the attention of a contemporary historian of [early medieval Britain] working in Honolulu. It is highly unlikely that anyone other than the author of this essay would have connected these two historical figures or would make this comparison.  The voice adopted in this essay is therefore autoethnographic:  the juxtaposition of two unrelated historical figures is made possible by exposing the traditionally invisible position of the historian as outsider and mediator, who joins them as the third point in a triangular interpersonal and atemporal relationship.[iii]  Consequently, this article offers a unique mediation between disparate worlds—medieval and modern, pre-and post-contact, English and Polynesian—and of necessity begins with an explanation of this conjunction and ends with its potential meaning for the role of the historian.  

            As a medieval European historian in the middle of the Pacific, my research is often seen as arcane both here and in England, where I am often asked, “why would someone in Hawai‘i be studying Anglo-Saxon society?”  My answer, depending on the interlocutor, is sometimes “as an anthropologist, studying the natives,” turning the tables as it were.  And yet there is a deeper issue imbedded in the question and my answer: in Hawai‘i, I have learned new ways of seeing medieval Europe through the lens of world history and comparisons to Pacific historiographies.  Deliberately making this comparison between pre-modern England and the contemporary Pacific calls into question the way that Oceanic cultures have been “medievalized” by a colonizing modernity that created this temporal landscape of historical evolution.  Reversing perspectives to give a Pacific view of the British Isles in the early Middle Ages is one way of undoing this process, in contrast to the more usual vice-versa of European history as the measure of civilizational “progress.”

            Nonetheless, the comparison remains dangerous in the sense that it suggests, given the lingering nature of the modern narrative of progress, that Pacific cultures were in some cases “pre-historic” or in other ways “medieval,” with all of the baggage those labels imply.[iv]  For example, the human history of Hawai‘i includes some generic similarities to the early medieval British Isles, including waves of migration, local territories defined by diverse ecosystems (valley cultures running from the wooded highlands down to the sea known as ahupua‘a), a long period of separate island governance, and eventual unification of the islands under one dominant military leader, Kamehameha the Great, all prior to the cataclysmic events of modernity—catastrophic depopulation and cultural genocide—precipitated by European and American colonial ventures, up to and including the imposition of this historical narrative of progress toward unification and centralization.[v]  Such colonial narratives of the Pacific often rely on a limited number of historical voices in what M. Puakea Nogelmeir has labeled “a discourse of sufficiency” that ignores Hawaiian language sources.[vi]  Resistance to, as well as negotiation with, that western colonial narrative is widespread in the Pacific.  For example, Linda Tuhiwai Smith in pointing out how “research” has been a western colonizing project calls into question aspects of western historiography, such as the tendency toward temporal binaries and the colonial trap of modernity.[vii]  These and other postcolonial voices from the Pacific supply grounds for querying the colonial-era medievalization of earlier European history.

            Thus the broader aim of this essay is to highlight the instability of the term medieval in relation to its analogue, modern, but from a Pacific Islands view.  This Oceanic perspective not only can help reimagine the medievalized European past but also offer a new way of doing history free of some of the invisible constraints imposed by modernity. [….] From its European intellectual inception, modernity of necessity imagined a medieval past reduced to a static condition of “not modern” that can occur subsequently in any time or place.  By its very name, post-modernism has not escaped this paradigm; its deconstruction of modernity as progress neither marks a return to the medieval nor offers a way to reconceptualize these temporal divides.  Carol Symes in her essay surveyed the problematic medieval and asks a question echoing Te Rangi Hiroa’s what new net goes afishing:  “What new historical paradigms could we develop?”[viii]   This essay offers some possible answers by triangulating between the historian, her object of study in tenth-century Northumbria, and  a Pacific sense of place found in her academic home.  In particular, this essay challenges modern assumptions about secularity in the academy by analyzing the hybrid voices of cultural translators, Aldred, Hiroa/Buck, and the author as historian.

            The first part of this essay, “Post Mortem on Modernity,” exposes this problematic historiographical landscape in order to pursue a geographic and temporal reorientation, but is here edited out except for the conclusion.  The second section, somewhat redacted, examines a medieval case study, the Northumbrian world of the Venerable Bede’s tenth-century heirs at the community of St. Cuthbert, specifically Aldred’s expression of an Englishness marginalized by the Viking disruptions and the rise of West Saxon linguistic and political hegemony.  Pacific historians’ negotiations between pre- and post-contact eras offer other ways of telling the story of this cultural disruption and continuity across cultural divides.  The third section then analyzes ways of doing history from a transoceanic perspective through the eyes of Maori-Irish ethnographer Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck), and his articulation of Polynesian identity in Vikings of the Pacific.  The conclusion returns to the autoethnographic in search of historiographic implications.

Post Mortem on Modernity

[…]

            The combined colonial legacy of secularism and ethnic nationalism leaves us with a lingering historiographical bias toward political centralization and expansion, such that we remain insensitive to other, more diffuse and shifting notions of power and hybrid identities.  Traditional accounts of Anglo-Saxon England, assuming this vision of progress moving toward singularity and unity,  usually trace the seemingly inevitable rise of Wessex, symbolized in the turn around victory of King Alfred the Great over the Viking Guthrum.[ix]   For similar reasons, King Kamehameha the Great is lauded by many modern historians for uniting the Hawaiian islands right on the cusp of western colonial contact, and his heirs, like King Alfred’s, followed the Great King’s lead in the consolidation and centralization of military, political, economic, and legal control of lands and human resources that modernity marks as progress.[x] In particular, modern secularization makes us blind to spiritual power, an incommensurability particularly hard to address in the secular academy and one with which Pacific historians regularly struggle.[xi]  And yet it is precisely the spiritual authority and physical location of a dead saint that wields considerable power in the English community imagined by Aldred and his peers in the late tenth century.

The Community of St. Cuthbert:  Bede’s Tenth-Century Heirs

            The lands north of the Humber river stretching beyond Hadrian’s wall to Scotland retain a distinctive heritage and identity to this day, intertwined with the long course of “English” history.  Northumbria  in the early medieval era (c. 600-1100) is nonetheless marked by a rise and fall trajectory in relation to the master narrative of Anglo-Saxon history.  Its heyday in terms of contributing to English history was in the eighth century, the so-called golden age of Northumbria, with its hybrid Irish-English legacy, highlighted in the brilliant artistic achievements of the monastic community of Lindisfarne and its satellites still visible in sculpture and manuscript illumination as well as memorialized in the Venerable Bede’s ecclesiastical history of the English people.[xii]  Arguably the most celebrated English artifact of eighth-century Northumbria besides Bede and his work is the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript with its colorful carpet pages and evangelist portraits, prominently on display in the British Library in London.[xiii]  Both Bede and the Lindisfarne Gospels serve as exemplars defining “Englishness,” but both have this eighth-century Northumbrian heritage embedded in them that was appropriated after the golden age by south of the Humber West Saxon royals who sought legitimacy for their political hegemony in the spiritual legacy of Lindisfarne, symbolized by its most famous saint, Cuthbert.  Indeed, the living presence of Cuthbert presides over this whole history in ways nearly invisible to modern secular eyes.

            In contrast to its glory days and the rising power of Wessex, the late ninth and tenth-century history of Northumbria is marred by a fragmented political landscape of competing bands of Vikings and local elites.  In this narrative, the beleaguered Lindisfarne religious community abandoned its famous tidewater location, carrying their relics and treasures with them to one of their lesser estates at Chester-le-Street, where they held on through the turmoil for a century, rescued ultimately by the patronage of the West Saxon monarchs and monastic reform after the community’s move to a new site at Durham in the eleventh century.[xiv]  Meanwhile, translated from Latin into the West Saxon dialect of Old English, Bede’s history became the foundation for a vernacular English historical tradition sponsored by King Alfred (r. 871-899).[xv]  To Chester-le-Street came his heirs, Wessex Kings Athelstan in 934 and Edmund in 945, seeking to honor Saint Cuthbert with gifts and gain his approval, while back home in the south they enhanced the liturgy celebrating this Northumbrian English saint.[xvi]  By the tenth century, then, Northumbria’s value lay in its past.

            The deadest of the dead zone in the histories of this period in Northumbria occurs in the second half of the tenth century, precisely when Aldred lived and worked on the Lindisfarne Gospels and other manuscripts at the Chester-le-Street community of St. Cuthbert.  Even the local histories preserved at Durham have little to say about the community’s activities and scant artifactual evidence survives—certainly nothing like the eighth-century Lindisfarne treasures they preserved—except the odd handiwork of Aldred and his fellow scribes.[xvii]  Consequently, Aldred sticks out as a lonely figure in a dreary time.  Yet he may have seem himself and his community’s history a bit differently, given that he did not know how activities begun in his time played out over the next century:  the successful centralization of an English monarchy, a sweeping monastic reform of the church, and the  incorporation of Viking communities into the realm. 

            Thus Aldred’s uniqueness gives us a perspective on tenth-century England from a different temporal and geographic angle.  For Aldred, the Northumbrian past was a living and present thing, vital to the English future.  He, with the community of St. Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street, saw himself as a link in this temporal chain.  Northumbria still had resources of value to all of the English:  for the rise of Wessex, they had the body and spirit of Cuthbert as patron saint; for church reform, they offered liturgical experimentation, albeit their efforts went virtually unrecognized; and for the Viking presence, they offered a pattern of integration into the Christian community. But perhaps the best historiographical insight comes from what Aldred did in the manuscript now housed as a national treasure in London, his Old English gloss and bilingual colophon in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

            To most eyes, Aldred’s contribution to the Lindisfarne Gospels appears static and backward looking, something that modernity undervalues in favor of forward-looking change to the new.  His script is old-fashioned, his dialect local, and his Latinity questionable, all evidence used to demonstrate the low point reached by the Lindisfarne survivors at Chester-le-Street in the late tenth century.  Nonetheless, his colophon at the end  of the manuscript reveals that his local and old-fashioned preferences may have been deliberate archaizing.  He places himself, rather cleverly, in direct connection to the eighth-century golden age preserved in the Lindisfarne Gospels, and values his own contribution as equal to theirs.  The colophon is actually quite complex, code-switching between Latin, the universal language of Christianity, and the local vernacular Old English.[xviii]

            The brief poem cited at the outset Aldred wrote into the right margin of the last section of the gospel of John he had recently finished glossing: 

+May the letter, faithful servant of speech, reveal me; greet, O kind one, all my brothers with [your] voice.[xix]

These Latin verses address the present and future members of his religious community in a personal way:  he wants to be remembered after his death by the fruits of his labor, as a wordsmith.[xx]  Aldred’s fixation with the power of words continues in the main colophon below the end of the Gospel.  [….][xxi]

            Much more can and has been said about this colophon, usually focused on what it tells us about the original construction of the manuscript in the eighth century, rather than the tenth-century community of St. Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street or Aldred himself.[xxii]  But by revealing, however briefly, his identity and motives to his community—past, present, and future—Aldred also reveals himself to us; and in reverse, we see his community through his eyes, a lens with a very different sense of time and place.  Aldred acknowledges the golden age production in his hands and its creators, but he does not seem to acknowledge the reduced circumstances of the community at Chester-le-Street, to which he paid admission with both money and this skillful work.  Moreover, the glossing in Old English is seen as an enhancement to the manuscript, not as a concession to weak Latinity.  He was probably commissioned to do the task based on his expertise:  able to translate Latin into Northumbrian Old English, able to write in an older script appropriate to this legacy manuscript. 

            In short, this is not a moribund community barely hanging on in a time of turmoil but one full of pride in its heritage.  Why, given the material poverty so obvious to us?  Because of the spiritual, atemporal riches they possessed, which we are less able or willing to measure.  Aldred is quite clear on the powers that sustain his community in his dedication to God and St. Cuthbert.  To Aldred and his community, the spiritual presence of a “dead” saint is worth more than gold and silver.  Arguably Wessex kings thought so also, in bringing their gifts of books and gilt liturgical furnishings to honor the saint and win his favor.  To understand how powerful the living presence of the past can be to a medieval community long dead to us moderns, I turn to the contemporary Pacific, where resurrecting the pre-contact past in the post-colonial present is a matter of vital importance to the future.[xxiii]

The View from the Pacific

            The Pacific as a geographic and cultural zone has a similar, though not identical, temporal divide to medieval and modern running through it:  pre- and post-contact. This Euro-American colonial marker has generated a second divide into the post-colonial present.  In turn, postcolonial historiography, with postmodernism, addresses the question of “what now?” as voices from former colonies around the globe struggle to reclaim their own sense of history while wrestling with the hegemony of a western narrative of progress. Contemporary scholars of the Pacific, speaking as mediators from within their respective cultures and from within the academy, highlight colonialist destruction and desecration of their lands and histories.  These scholars are exploring a sense of place in the unique histories of distinctive island groups amid a pan-Pacific identity that cuts across time, based on shared stories of origin and migration as well as linguistic and artifactual similarities that speak to the interconnections between zones of settlement (currently divided into Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia).[xxiv]  This ongoing process of ethnogenesis—both recovery of almost lost ancient ways of thinking and the creation of new forms of connection to the past—offer perhaps the best in new historiography from which all historians could benefit.  In particular, Hawaiian and other Polynesian societies have a rich notion of living and feeling history that stands in stark contrast to the dead, objectifying historical discourse of modernity.

            At the heart of history in almost any culture, including “Anglo-Saxon” as well as Pacific societies, is the notion of storytelling linked to genealogy.  Ethnogenesis is more than a recent theory, but a very human way of thinking:  Who are we and how do we belong to each other and to this place?[xxv]   The Hawaiian word mo‘olelo (“story”) in practice conveys a sense of kinship between land and people, the dead and the living.  Indeed, ka wā ma mua in the Hawaiian language defines the past not only as the time before but as in front.  Similarly, ka wā ma hope is the time after or behind, that is the open and unknowable future.[xxvi]  In essence, the past is before us and the future is behind us in a way that Aldred would understand as he looked back in the Lindisfarne Gospels colophon while speaking forward.  In this conception of history and memory, one faces the past while moving backward into the future because, unlike the future which we cannot see and which is not fixed, our eyes can survey and interpret what came before as a guide to the future we are backing into.  In some ways, this view mirrors Kierkegaard’s assertion that “life can only be understood backwards,” but the philosopher’s actual emphasis was on the limitations of that truism because life must also be “lived forwards;” it is impossible to “rest” in the backward-looking position except perhaps through the illumination of a life-view, so that “life is lived backwards through the idea.”[xxvii]  This resonance between a western philosopher and Hawaiian historiography may be because Kierkegaard’s views are more medieval Christian than modern and secular:  his view of time is similar to Bede’s Incarnational history.[xxviii]  Kathleen Davis points to Bede’s open and unfixed view of future time, in contrast not only to some of his contemporary Christians but also in contradistinction to the modern progress view of history resolutely facing toward a foretold future that medievalizes a dead past.[xxix]  While Davis compares Bede’s historiography to Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land, this essay draws a different parallel with Pacific historiographies as a way out of the modern/medieval conundrum Davis exposes but does not resolve.[xxx]  To do so, I turn to an early twentieth-century bicultural historian of the Pacific who offers some other ways of reading tenth-century Northumbria.

            Te Rangi Hiroa or Sir Peter Buck (1877-1951) was a Maori-Irish medical doctor, anthropologist, author, and director of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, whose collection of Polynesian artifacts and histories he helped built.  Hiroa/Buck—the slash an admittedly awkward way of recalling his hybrid heritages—was an early proponent of a pan-Pacific identity traceable in islander stories of origins and migration, although his views on kinship “blood” are heavily colored by early twentieth-century racial genetics derived from his western academic training.  Author of Vikings of the Pacific (1959; originally Vikings of the Sunrise, 1938), the title and introduction of this book invoke a comparison between the maritime history of the Vikings and that of the Polynesians.[xxxi]  His overview of world maritime history traces the center of gravity swinging from the Mediterranean, to the North Sea, to the Atlantic, then finally the Pacific to highlight his Polynesian Vikings of the “sunrise,” whom he designates the “supreme navigators of history” in line with a romantic and Victorian conception of the Norsemen as “bold, intrepid mariners,” not marauders.[xxxii] 

            In terms of methodology, his book combines “more human” oral histories gathered from fellow Polynesians with the western (and arguably less humane) methods of “measurements, measurements, and yet more measurements.”[xxxiii]  Ironically, the latter scientific measurements he offers are now completely out of date and even racially offensive, while the former, the primary accounts and personal stories, continue to provide valuable ethnographic information from native informants.  In his consideration of cultural diaspora in the Pacific, Buck identifies Polynesian mariners as “Europoid” (i.e., Caucasian) and not “Negroid” or “Mongoloid,” based on stature, head measurement, skin tone, hair type, and nose width (Maoris have “the narrowest noses in Polynesia!”), concluding: “Sufficient for the day is the fact that a tall, athletic people without woolly hair or a Mongoloid eyefold had the ability and courage to penetrate into the hitherto untraversed seaways of the central and eastern Pacific.” [xxxiv]   This precocious Polynesian strain, even when mixed with Mongoloids or Negroids, he portrays as superior, particularly to the Melanesians, views contrasting starkly with his sympathetic portrayal of Polynesian islanders with whom he feels kinship through his Maori heritage.

            The tensions over identity and ways of thinking that Hiroa/Buck reveals about himself in Vikings of the Pacific challenge our notion of what it means to “belong” to a community and also highlight the instability of the medieval/modern and pre-/post-contact divides.  Instead, Hiroa/Buck offers some possibilities for spiritual kinships that cut across human-constructed boundaries of time and geography in a way that may help us understand Aldred’s spiritual community in tenth-century Northumbria.  Both situations reveal a complex mediation occurring between a distinctive local identity that ties genealogy to land and a larger atemporal conception of belonging to some global migratory community, whether Christendom or pan-Polynesia.  Neither one is accommodated by the modern nation-state construct with its secular materialist underpinnings and ethnic nationalisms.

            First of all, linguistic and emotional senses of community are inextricably linked in Vikings of the Pacific.  Like many bicultural translators and writers, Hiroa/Buck functions as a “go-between,” a label Kathleen Biddick also applies to Bede in the conversation she imagines he has with a modern Chicana feminist scholar about bilinguality.[xxxv]   Hiroa/Buck, “writing in English and thinking in Polynesian” wrestled with his linguistic hybridity.  His father from the north of Ireland, his mother Maori, he describes himself as “binomial, bilingual, and inherit[ing] a mixture of two bloods that I would not change for a total of either….  My mother’s blood enables me to appreciate a culture to which I belong, and my father’s speech helps me to interpret it.”[xxxvi]  Here language and rationality are linked in opposition to blood and feeling, with the scientific operating as the interpreter of the genetic and emotional.  This racialized view of genealogy is not from his Maori side, but a modern construct from his medical education imposed on Polynesian senses of blood and kinship, in a way similar to nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to establish ethnic nationalities in Europe based on medieval linguistic constructions of identity.

            Nonetheless, despite or because of his scientific training, the incommensurability of language in translation cuts deeply into Hiroa/Buck’s interior dialogue between his two halves.  In one instance he retells the voyaging story of Ru in the Cook Islands, a story his hosts offer him because he was “blood of our blood and bone of our bone.”[xxxvii]  As recording ethnographer he then wrestles with the translation of Ru’s invocation of the god Tangaroa:  “‘Tangaroa i te titi,/ ‘Tangaroa i te tata” he translated in his own bilingual mind as “Tangaroa in the titi, Tangaroa in the tata,” thinking it a “mere” play on sounds.  When he asked the meaning of titi and tata, the elderly chief indicated with the sweep of his arm the whole horizon and replied:  “Can we find words?  Are not titi and tata as good as anything else to represent what we cannot express?”  Hiroa/Buck then moves through his two linguistic modes of thinking.  First he translates the phrase into English and western conceptual terms, using his father’s speech to render the lines as “the immensity of space.”  Then he code switches back and says to the chief:  “‘Yes…Tangaroa in the titi, Tangaroa in the tata.  It could not be better expressed,’” adding in the book (emphasis mine) “I thought so then, and I feel more so now.” 

            That sense of incommensurability of thought and feeling lurks also in the bilingual glossing work of Aldred, but in some ways reversed: the Latin language is the measured, formal terms that Aldred seeks to express in his native Northumbrian language, often using calques, alternative words, and in some cases offering literal followed by interpretive glosses reflecting a range of theological meanings available in medieval Biblical exegesis.[xxxviii]  Aldred as a “go-between” negotiated the boundary between the universal Latin language of Christendom and the Northumbrian-inflected English of his community.  Like Hiroa/Buck it is Aldred’s native language that runs deeper in “feeling,” an aspect historians tend to psychologize rather than see as part of real systems of meaningful connection.

            Hiroa/Buck’s emotional commitments to his communal heritages also illustrate a western binary of belief as feeling versus rationality, with a colonial twist on Irishness.  Throughout the book, he exhibits considerable ambivalence about his mixed genetics, saying early on “with all my love for my mother’s stock, my father’s unbelieving blood gives me pause,” and yet he credits his historical empathy to both:  in discussing a particular chant, he notes that “the words are simple, but perhaps only the Polynesians and the Irish [my emphasis] can feel the depth of poignant grief expressed in simple words.”[xxxix]  This comment actually replicates a Victorian, as well as British colonial, notion of the emotional Irish, where loquacious feelings and storytelling displace rationality and underlie the Catholic superstition associated with a lingering medievalness in the Irish.  For example, in 1926 Charles Plummer compared the prolific and self-revealing colophons of medieval Irish scribes to encounters modern travelers to Ireland might have with an Irishman who “will discuss his most intimate private affairs with any casual stranger whom he may happen to meet;” while “the relief which the modern Irishman finds in this kind of conversation” is given as an ethnic trait which the presumably stiffer Englishman finds uncomfortable.[xl]  Embedded in these remarks are a set of encoded social and scholarly values about Irish difference:  that scribes normally should be subservient to the text they copy and not insert their personal lives into the manuscript; that real scholars remain emotionally distant from their subjects to retain a scientific objectivity; and that the Irish, then and now, transgress social as well as scholarly boundaries, at least from the perspective of their cultural superiors as represented by Plummer.  The upshot is that the Irish remain medieval and colonized. 

            Unsurprisingly Aldred’s colophon in the Lindisfarne Gospels fits this Irish mode of intimate and revealing colophon writing Plummer describes so paternalistically.  Consequently, Aldred also speaks from a historiographically and socially marginalized position, in the eyes of early modern historians at least, as emotionally “too Irish” and not West Saxon enough, textually “too superstitious” in his Catholic liturgy and not sufficiently proto-Protestant enough, and altogether too medieval for the modern, forward-facing imagination.[xli]  Curiously, Hiroa/Buck performs the same action as Plummer on himself, but with different results:  the combined Maori and Irish capacity for feeling stands in contrast to the cool (modern, western) scholar with his tools of measurement.  That scientific detachment must be, then, only a veneer on his Maori/Irish self, useful measures to deploy at will, but also to discard, as well we might today in reading Vikings of the Pacific with its distasteful racial categories. In many ways, Hiroa/Buck was living in limbo between colonizer and colonized, with the latter doubled, perhaps invisibly to him, since both Irish and Maori were colonial subjects of the dominant British and western academic sciences.

            Although Hiroa/Buck imagines himself as bicultural, his hybridity is actually more complex, reflecting layers of historical memories:  Maori and New Zealander, Irish, English, and even Viking. The overall tenor of Vikings of the Pacific suggests that Hiroa/Buck’s emotional affinities ran deeper than the scholar-speak he adopts.  In one instance, he notes that he could not take skulls as museum artifacts because he says, “I have a feeling—a superstition, if you will—that if I did, I would destroy the sympathetic relationship that exists between their past and me.”[xlii]  Insofar as superstition is a belief inconsistent with one’s worldview, Hiroa/Buck has a problem for he has two worldviews operating simultaneously that he tries to meld but which leave him in the dubious position of finding a rational belief in one system appear inconsistent and  therefore superstitious in the other:  the scientific belief in genetic determinism stands in opposition to the Maori sense of kinship with the dead.[xliii]  Thus the cataloging scientific approach threatens to break the bond that allows him to extract vital cultural data from his informants. He chooses the feeling, superstitious as it may appear from the science side of himself, and in so doing, he shows that the imagined community of Polynesianness is stronger than the adopted western heritage of scientific analysis. 

            In this instance of “skulldudgery,” Hiroa/Buck could just as easily have drawn not only on his Polynesian sense of place but also his Irish roots to access medieval Christian views of the sacred dead in the landscape—except that Hiroa/Buck’s understanding of his Irish heritage is so heavily colored by layers of British, Protestant, and modern rationalism that he was not able to make that connection in the way he did with the Polynesians and the Vikings as master navigators.[xliv]  In fact, his father’s family was Anglo-Irish Protestant with clerical ancestors at Trinity College, Dublin; he had little contact with the Irish side of the family and never visited Ireland, although he married a “fiery” Belfast born Irishwoman.[xlv]  Given the very Anglican name of Peter Buck at birth, Maori tribal elders granted him in his teens the ancestral name Te Rangi Hiroa.[xlvi]  This genealogically based naming and renaming illustrates a sense of continuity:  the presence of the dead in the living demonstrates how the past confers meaning on the present.[xlvii]  Western honorifics occurred later in life.  New Zealand belatedly conferred knighthood in recognition of his achievements for his homeland, at a time when he was living and working in Hawai‘i as director of Bishop Museum (from 1936 until his death in 1951).  When the King of Sweden awarded him the Order of the North Star in 1946, a physician friend, Dr. Nils Larsen, at the ceremony in Honolulu engaged in a fake Viking blood brother ritual with him, a joke probably only apparent to the two men.[xlviii]  The Irish blood Hiroa/Buck claimed to be a part of his emotional makeup may be as fictive a kinship as the Viking blood he exchanges:  it is notional more than actual, relying on a trope of Irish character as represented through the lens of British colonialism. 

            If he had been able to tap the medieval Irish roots obscured by his British Protestant birthright, he might have noted not only the Viking-Irish foundation of Dublin but also the spiritual sensibilities that echoed faintly in his sense of common feeling between his Irish and Polynesian blood and that prevented him from removing the skulls to a museum. The repatriation of bones today, like the medieval translation of a saint, is a serious political act, often as not intending to redress or undo colonial damage.  But in emphasizing the political as secular in our modern way of seeing things, we often overlook the spiritual power and emotional bonds connected to the dead as these subject cultures resist not only the colonizer’s political agency but also modernity as a historical colonizer of their past.[xlix] 

            Similarly for our understanding of tenth-century Northumbria, Cuthbert’s bones are a vital clue to cultural relations with Ireland and Wessex.  At one point as the community of St. Cuthbert moved away from the Viking-induced political turmoil around Lindisfarne, they attempted to take the saint’s body to Ireland for safety.  However, the saint at the pleas of his people turned them back so that Cuthbert stayed on Northumbrian land.[l]  Moreover, over the next century with the assertion of Wessex control of Northumbria, no records suggest that any Wessex king attempted to move the body of Cuthbert away from Northumbria into Wessex.  The saint was, and is, immovable, his permanence in the landscape based on a spiritual potential.  Thus it is that Northumbria in the person of St. Cuthbert was not to be colonized by anyone and maintains a distinctive identity tied to the lands north of the Humber to this day.  I daresay if someone from outside Britain tried to move Cuthbert’s bones from his Durham Cathedral tomb today, there would be a political uproar, and perhaps even invocations of the curse of Saint Cuthbert, a superstition excused by feelings of local or national pride.[li]  Yet, the casual manner in which EuroAmerican researchers acquired and displayed Pacific islanders’ bones ostensibly justifies itself based on a modern secular and materialist view of death as inconsequential and therefore of the past as dead; but this view apparently only applied to other people’s histories, not one’s own.  Caught on the fence between these views, Hiroa/Buck’s Maori sense of kinship to the past won out.  Indeed, Hiroa/Buck’s imagined Polynesian community stretching across the Pacific was solid enough to undercut the western scientific rationalism impinging on islanders’ historical memory, although he was unable to do so with his Irish heritage medievalized by modern secularism.

            Hiroa/Buck’s cultural conflict between his Irish and Maori affections and his western intellectualism also correlates with the historiographic temporal divide Davis exposes, where thought is modern and feeling is pre-modern or not modern, a dream of the past that is unreal.[lii]  While musing on the “virile branches” of Polynesians in the Marquesas, he asked “Can we ever see the throbbing past except in dreams?  I do not wish to awake, for when I do, I will see but a line drawing in a book that conjures up a lone terrace overgrown with exotic weeds, and sad stone walls crumbling to decay.”[liii]  His Maori sense of history, similar to the Hawaiian mo‘olelo, is rooted in the oral transmission of stories:  what links him to other Polynesians he visits are the ritual exchange of genealogies and “ancient traditions,” which he first had to master in his Maori homeland from his grandmother and other elders.[liv]  In another revealing passage on Maori history and identity from his twin perspectives, he concludes by leaving them “to work out their own salvation in the firm conviction that the stamina and mentality inherited from their stone-age ancestors will enable them to make good in a changing world.”[lv]   After these allusions to a Christian and then a scientific view of historical progress, he then ends the chapter by bidding farewell to the land of his birth with a translation of a dirge for a chief that has a distinctly ubi sunt feel to it.

            Such hybrid passages point to an interesting feature of Hiroa/Buck’s historiography:  when he speaks from within his Polynesian sense of history, his views are firm and real; when he is caught in the modern/scientific progress view facing the future, his uncertainty and dislocation toward the past is palpable.  From this conflicted position, what Hiroa/Buck offers us is a way to tap a more vital, living sense of history in contrast to the deadening and objectifying of modern, secular historiography, one that connects the living and the dead and is tempered with a dose of humility. In some ways, the stories Hiroa/Buck recounts capture the same communal sense of identity and deference to ancestors found in early English historical narratives like Bede’s ecclesiastical history. 

            This “feeling” is precisely what is lacking in many ethnographies and histories of migration:  the way that a communal sense of place has a spiritual dimension in the formation of cultural identities in “non-modern” societies.  A sense of connectedness is most evident in the evocative style of first person narrative Hiroa/Buck uses in Vikings of the Pacific.  When he is telling Polynesian stories he understands from within his Maori upbringing, his voice is rich with a sense of intimacy, the color of his language deep hued compared to the black and white of dialectical scientific analysis. Similarly, Aldred played across the linguistic boundary between impersonal, universal and timeless Latin and the intimacy of the local vernacular of his contemporary community, done as part of a spiritual act of worship.  Go-betweens like Hiroa/Buck and contemporary Pacific historians can teach us how to break out of the objectifying mold of academic language (even, and maybe especially, the trap of postmodern theory speak) by drawing on a personal sense of connection to people of the past through narratives of encounters and continuities, not just analyses of spatial and temporal dislocations found in medieval/modern or pre-/post-contact.

            Thus despite or because of his mixed legacy of western colonial racism and islander perspectives, Hiroa/Buck offers some lessons for decolonizing the Middle Ages.  For example, his Viking and Polynesian comparative historiography is instructive, inviting us to rethink the maritime zones of the Atlantic and North Sea.  On a larger, world historical scale, he describes an oceanic sense of place at odds with the western nation-state with its terrestrially bounded seas.  Next generation Pacific historian Epeli Hau‘ofa has articulated how, for Polynesian societies and their mariners, the ocean is their home and the islands simply locations within that landscape, in contrast to the western explorers’ sense of the ocean as a vast, empty space through which one must traverse to get “to” someplace.[lvi]   Similarly, the British Isles can be seen through the lens of waves of migration inhabiting coastal zones that faced water.  Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that over the longue durée of this Atlantic and North Sea zone, various people groups came to its shores, often as not facing outward, not inward toward unifying the landmass.[lvii]  When the Vikings roamed this same zone and beyond, they saw the world as shores connected by water: with globe rotated to place the North Atlantic at the center, the seaways connecting Scandinavia westward to Scotland and Northumbria, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland, on to North America are obvious.[lviii]   That was, in effect, Aldred’s world, defined by overlapping zones of contact and interacting people groups more so than the rise of a central monarchy that he, unlike us, would have seen as a temporary phase in a longer spiritual history of his community.

            Later, Captain Cook mapped the same terrain as the Vikings in Newfoundland and Labrador, not to mention archipelagos in the Pacific.  Today, Cook is memorialized with statues and museums at his home port of Whitby, in Newfoundland, and on the Big Island of Hawai‘i where his death is the subject of competing historiographical narratives.[lix]  Hiroa/Buck mentions Cook as a “rediscoverer” of islands and the source of contemporary names assigned them, siding for example with the “peaceable and industrious people” of Niue objecting to Cook’s renaming of their home as Savage Island because someone threw a spear at him—and missed: “Why should an individual failure be perpetuated on the descendants of a bad marksman?”[lx]  Because names tell a story, renaming, like the removal and restoration of bones and artifacts, is a political act of disempowerment or re-empowerment.  Hiroa/Buck’s ironic query puts Cook in his place within a larger and longer history of Polynesian peoples. 

            Because Hiroa/Buck stands at a geographic and temporal nexus, he can speak from within multiple stories, albeit not always harmoniously.  Yet Vikings of the Pacific contains alternative models more inclusive of the spiritual dimension so absent from modern and even postmodern discourse about identities and communities.  Hiroa/Buck traces different versions of Polynesian origins for the islands and its people groups.  Some, like the Sāmoans, focus on a sense of their island as a sacred center from which they emerged, seemingly in denial of the western constructions of their migration history from elsewhere.  This leaves the outsider historian pitting a “religious” legend against an evidence based and seemingly objective account that therefore must be “really true,” at least from a western scientific view.  The same might be said of trying to reconcile Bede’s account of English history with the archaeological record: which is more truth-telling depends on your view of what is essential.  

            Similar to these contrasting accounts of human migration and origins, stories of the formation of Pacific island chains vary.[lxi]   The more widespread Polynesian account of the emergence of island chains is the story of Maui fishing up the islands.  But as in many cultures, including the accounts of creation in Genesis or the origins of the Anglo-Saxons, several alternative storylines are available.  In Hawai‘i, one account has Papa-hanau-moku giving birth to the islands fathered by Wakea or made directly by his hands.[lxii]  But the nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian David Malo (1795-1853) found the competing oral accounts from the ancients contradictory, preferring the genealogical Kumulipo creation account of the islands emerging on their own, without the birth narrative, as easier to synchronize with the “speculative” geologic theories of volcanic origins.[lxiii]  Interestingly, Hiroa/Buck questions Malo’s westernizing syncretism:  “Yes, who knows?  Probably the geologists will support David Malo and the Kumulipo, for the like of Wakea and Papa are not to be seen today.”[lxiv]  Hiroa/Buck’s doubt, and sense of loss, opens the way for a different epistemology that can accommodate seemingly incommensurable “truth-telling” narratives.  We can choose, then, to put these accounts on a level playing field without marking them on a temporizing scale of less to more truth, from primitive oral myth through medieval superstition to the modern rational.[lxv]  Instead, we might consider the spiritual connections Aldred and his community felt as more than imaginary.

            We return then to Hiroa/Buck’s epilogue to Vikings of the Pacific quoting the Maori proverb “the old net is laid aside; a new net goes afishing” and ending with the poignant query “What new net goes afishing?”  Although he laid the foundation collecting and storing oral histories during his time as Director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hiroa/Buck did not live to see the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s and the recreation of Pacific navigation by the Polynesian Voyaging Society that saw the old nets repaired.[lxvi]  The double-hulled sailing canoe Hōkūle‘a made the roundtrip from Hawai‘i to Tahiti with startling “scientific” accuracy (in terms of modern instrumentation) using “traditional” wayfinding methods derived from chants, oral histories, and most crucially, from the memories and experiences of one living Micronesian navigator, Pius “Mau” Piailug (1932-2010).[lxvii] 

            Hiroa/Buck would undoubtedly find in this and subsequent recreated voyages validation for his Vikings of the Pacific narrative of Polynesian migration, perhaps even happy to see the “scientific” racial theories within which he operated discarded, overturned by the accuracy of cultural information contained in oral histories that he had a hand in preserving.  But he might also be stymied, as many contemporary Pacific writers are, by the continuing devaluation in secular academic discourse of the power of spiritual communities across time and place.   Similarly, hybridized Northumbrians like Bede and Aldred might be both gratified at what survives from their era of the Irish, English, and Viking heritages and chagrined at the loss of spiritual community between the living and the dead they valued so highly.

            These spiritual communities in Hiroa/Buck’s Polynesian ethnography and Bede’s Anglo-Saxon history are more than emotional communities; they are not imagined or theorized, but narratives breaking out of the dialectic of colonizer and colonized, medieval and modern, religious and secular.  Imbedded in that dialectic are more subtle but pervasive values drawn from modernity and still infecting the academy, where the subjectivity of lived experience, beliefs, and personal connection to the past belong to literary studies of fiction and autobiography, while scholarly historical writing retains a preference for scientific observation that is “objectively more true,” at least based on a materialist worldview.[lxviii]  Hybrid voices from the twentieth-century Pacific, like Hiroa/Buck, offer us a way out of this dualism and entry into the medieval past and its “pre-modern” worldviews.  When marginal figures like Aldred are moved from the periphery into the center, at the point of contact between times and places, they allow us to hear the polyphony in what often becomes a monophonic historical narrative.  The Hawaiian word kaona conveys this sense of  unwrapping layers of meanings through dialogue, both transmitted orally and in cross-cultural translation efforts.[lxix]  This essay similarly has been structured around unwrapping layers of meaning in the way we relate to the past and therefore concludes with an examination of those wrappings.

Conclusion and Colophon

            The Pacific view of Northumbria sketched in this essay has at least three implications.  First, echoing Davis’ work, all historians need to be wary of the lurking medieval/modern divide in western colonial discourse that affects our understanding of both the European past and the global present.  Second, we need to query the secularization theory of modernity while paying more attention to the spiritual powers at work in historical memory, by evoking feelings of connection as well as valuing thoughtful objectivity.  And third, in order to do both of these, we should consider the world/comparative possibilities for developing a Pacific historiography that can help rewrite European history out of its periodization mire. 

            The previous paragraph does the expected work of a conclusion in academic discourse:  it makes generalized recommendations in the invisible third person, in which the author remains an omniscient narrator.  But in so doing, the conclusion fails to take its own advice and apply the lessons gleaned from Pacific historians.  At the outset, this essay proposed an authoethnographic mode to escape the colonizing and secularizing influence of the modernist project.  The author-historian who brought Aldred and Hiroa/Buck together needs to acknowledge her own position in relation to the two subjects in order to generalize to other historians the lessons she derived from serving as a go-between bridging tenth-century Northumbria and the twentieth-century Pacific.  Like Aldred, I have erased the “I” from the main narrative history but am prepared to add some personal genealogy into the margin.

            In terms of  heritage and identity, I cannot claim to be either Northumbrian or Hawaiian.  While some of my ancestors came to the Americas from the British Isles and perhaps even Northumbria, my Englishness is indirect and distant, derived from Anglo-American Protestant culture.  As a consequence, my relation to Northumbria is studied more than lived, although the boundary between the personal and scholarly experience is more blurred than most historians will admit:  I have come to know Aldred and his tenth-century community through time consuming, arguably obsessive, scrutiny of manuscript artifacts; and while conducting research on site, I have interacted with and received support from contemporary scholars who are also Northumbrians.[lxx]  Meanwhile, I have lived in Hawai‘i for over thirty years where I remain a haole (foreigner) in relation to the Kānaka Maoli (indigenous Hawaiians), but also a kama‘āina (child of the land) in the inclusive understanding of residency fostered by the Hawaiian kingdom.[lxxi]  

            Thus despite my outsider status in relation to both geographic zones, I experience a “sense of place” in both the contemporary Pacific with its ways of looking toward the past and tenth-century Northumbria as it manifests itself today in the surviving artifacts and landscape north of the Humber river. As a consequence, I feel some kinship with Aldred analogous to Hiroa/Buck’s connection to his Polynesian informants.  Living as a kama‘āina and observing Kānaka Maoli both recovering and establishing their historical voices has enriched my own understanding of culture and identity, while raising serious questions about the methods of history.  From this position in a triangular relationship with cultural translators Aldred and Hiroa/Buck, I become like them, a go-between writing a colophon addressed to fellow historians about our scholarly pursuit—our calling, if you will.  

            If we as historians stand outside of any time and place, we are also simultaneously seeking to be within a particular time and place.  Pacific historiographies offer us a way of negotiating that dual role.  In a sense, they suggest discarding the newer net of modern, objectifying dialectic for an old net, repaired and made whole and usable for understanding the past as something intimate and alive.  Two sets of challenging questions emerge:

            Can we evacuate the dialectic historiography of modernity that presently takes up so much space that we have no room to tell a story with feeling?  Can we get beyond the nation-state frame of reference and colonialist periodization?  To undo the medieval/modern divide, we need to reach back further, learn to narrate history over again, to tell a story as Bede or Hiroa/Buck did, finding a voice from within our hybridity while revealing, like Aldred in his colophon, our go-between status as cultural translators. 

            Are we willing to allow the dead to be a part of us, include them in our story, and allow them to speak to our present, postmodern condition?  Are we willing to stop taking the past apart and begin constructing whole narratives?  Our ancestor historians from across time and place call us to feel as well as analyze who we are as we turn our face toward the past and listen to them a bit more intently. 

            This essay’s title, “Vikings of the Pacific:  An Oceanic View of the Early Medieval British Isles,” may merely serve to expose a particular historian’s perspective, looking back at a community almost half way around the globe over a millennium ago, but it also asks all historians whether that temporal and geographic distance adds to or subtracts meaning from the past.

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[i] A free translation of Littera me pandat sermonis fida ministra./ Omnes alme meos fratres voce salvta.  London, British Library, Cotton Nero D.iv (Lindisfarne Gospels), fol. 259r.  For a facsimile, see the British Library website Turning the Pages: Pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon Art (http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html).

[ii] Peter Buck, Vikings of the Pacific (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 325.

[iii] Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12.1 (January, 2011), Art. 10 (http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589).  Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 15, 285, on the sublimation of historians’ selves in relation to their subject.

[iv] See now Neil Price and John Ljungkvist, “Polynesians of the Atlantic? Precedents, potentials, and pitfalls in Oceanic analogies of the Vikings,” Danish Journal of Archaeology (2018) DOI: 10.1080/21662282.2018.1498567; Michael W. Scott, “Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missions and the Anglican Melanesian Mission” in Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, ed. Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), 2022, pp. 190-216; Madi Williams, Polynesia, 900-1600 (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021); and James L. Flexner, Oceania, 800-1800CE : a Millennium of Interactions in a Sea of Islands Cambridge: (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

[v]  For perspectives on Hawaiian history, see Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires:  Pehea Lā E Pono Ai? (Honolulu:  Bishop Museum, 1992); Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter:  Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu:  University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993, rev. ed. 1999); Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo`ole Osorio, Dismemebering Lāhui:  A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1877 (Honolulu:  University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); and Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed:  Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham : Duke University Press, 2004); and now Noelani Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019); and a more recent overview in Karen Louise Jolly,“Anglo-Saxons On Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred” in Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, ed. Jolly and Brooks, pp. 217-44.

[vi] M. Puakea Nogelmeier, Mai Pa‘a I Ka Leo:  Historical Voice in Hawaiian Primary Materials, Looking Forward and Listening Back (Honolulu:  Bishop Museum Press, 2010), points to the large body of nineteenth-century Hawaiian language newspaper sources, the product of one of the most highly literate populations in the world.

[vii] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 31, 34.   See also Paul Lyons, American Pacificism:  Oceania in the American Imagination (New York : Routledge, 2006) on the distorted perceptions of the Pacific in American literature and culture.

[viii] Carol Symes, “When We Talk about Modernity,” AHR 116 (2011): 715-26, at p. 725.

[ix] Still detected in textbook master narratives, while historians of “Anglo-Saxon England” increasingly emphasize the diverse and problematic nature of English identity and its political formation;  most recently Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome:  The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 (London:  Penguin, 2010) has eschewed narrative sources  in favor of material evidence.  But see now the vast literature, some cited in Jolly and Brooks, eds. Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, Introduction.

[x] Take a look at the 1867 Alapaki Ka Nui biography right after Kamehameha I. See also L.No‘eau Peralto, ‘Portrait. Mauna a Wākea: Hānau Ka Mauna, The Piko of our Ea’, in A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, ed. N. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, I. Hussey, and E. Kahunawaika‘ala Wright (Durham, 2014), pp. 233–43; and essays in Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i, ed. H. K. Aikau and V. V. Gonzalez (Durham, 2019),

[xi] See for example, David Hanlon, “Sorcery, ‘Savage Memories,’ and the Edge of Commensurability for History in the Pacific,” in Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations, ed. Brij V. Lal (Canberra: The Journal of Pacific History, 1993), pp. 107–128.  See now also Hanlon, “Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World,” The Contemporary Pacific 29.2 (2017): 285-318.

[xii] For an overview of Northumbrian history, see David Rollason, Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003); for the eighth century, see Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills, ed., Northumbria’s Golden Age (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1999); and for the Lindisfarne  legacy, St. Cuthbert, His Cult and Community to AD 1200, ed. Gerald Bonner, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge, 1989).  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is available in Latin (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors [Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1969]), Old English (The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Thomas Miller, EETS 95 [London:  Trubner, 1890-91]), and in modern English editions (Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins [New York:  Oxford University Press, 1994]).

[xiii] Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library Cotton Nero D.iv, c. 710-25); see Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels:  Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London:  British Library, 2003).

[xiv] For this era, the main primary sources are the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto,  A History of Saint Cuthbert and a Record of his Patrimony, ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South (Cambridge:  D. S. Brewer, 2002) and Symeon of Durham, Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis, ecclesie (Tract on the origins and progress of this the Church of Durham), ed. and trans. David Rollason (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000).

[xv] On King Alfred’s era see David Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007) and on the Old English Bede, see Sharon M. Rowley, The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (Woodbridge:  Boydell and Brewer, 2011).

[xvi] On King Athelstan’s donations to the community, see Simon Keynes, “King Athelstan’s Books” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 143-201; on his donation portrait portrait, see Catherine E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge:  Boydell and Brewer, 2004), pp. 53-83; on the liturgy, see Christopher Hohler, “The Durham Services in Honour of St. Cuthbert,” in The Relics of Saint Cuthbert, ed. C. F. Battiscombe (Oxford, 1956), pp. 155-91; Gerald Bonner, “St Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street” in St Cuthbert, ed. Bonner, et al., pp. 393-94 and David Rollason, “St Cuthbert and Wessex:  The Evidence of Cambridge, Corpus Christi college MS 183” in St Cuthbert, ed. Bonner, et al., pp. 413-24.

[xvii] The wooden church of Aldred’s day has not survived, while stone monuments of  local carvers influenced by Viking styles are deemed a cruder type than that produced at Lindisfarne.  Meager manuscript production seems not to have included illuminations. See Rollason, Northumbria, pp. 13-19 and Rosemary Cramp, “The Artistic Influence of Lindisfarne within Northumbria,” in St. Cuthbert, ed. Bonner, et. al., pp. 213-28.

[xviii] For detailed analysis of the colophon, see The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Tenth Century, forthcoming.

[xix] + Littera me pandat/ sermonis fida/ ministra ./ Omnes alme/ meos fratres/ voce salvta:,

[xx] Normally the religious community recorded its members in a Liber vitae, although in this case the surviving Durham Liber vitae does not have records for this period, a curious lacuna in a genealogically based  historiography that Aldred’s colophon only tangentially remedies.

[xxi] See now Karen Louise Jolly, The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 (The Ohio State University Press, 2012).

[xxii] See Richard Gameson, The Scribe Speaks?  Colophons in Early English Manuscripts (Cambridge, 2001),  items 14 and 15, discussed pp. 10-11, 14-21, 29-32;  Lawrence Nees, “Reading Aldred’s Colophon for the Lindisfarne Gospels,” Speculum 78 (2003): 333-77; Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels, p. 95; and Jane Roberts, “Aldred Signs Off from Glossing the Lindisfarne Gospels” in Scribes and Texts in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Alexander Rumble (Cambridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 28-43.

[xxiii] See now Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy, eds, Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts, English Language Notes 58.2 (2020), Introduction (pp. 1-17).

[xxiv] See Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean:  Selected Works (Honolulu:  University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).  See now Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

[xxv] On ethnogenesis theory, see the summary article by Andrew Gillett, “Ethnogenesis:  A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe,” in History Compass 4/2 (2006):  241-60.  For 25 indigenous modes of research, from claiming and storytelling to negotiating and sharing, see Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, pp. 142-62.

[xxvi] Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, p. 22; Osorio, Dismemembering Lāhui, p. 7.  See now: Baker, C. M. Kaliko., Tammy Hailiʻōpua. Baker, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole. Osorio, Kaipulaumakaniolono. Baker, Kahikina de. Silva, ku`ualoha. ho`omanawanui, Kamalani. Johnson, Kekuhi Kanae Kanahele. KealiʻikanakaʻoleoHaililani, Larry. Kimura, and Kalehua. Krug, Moʻolelo : The Foundation of Hawaiian Knowledge (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023).

[xxvii]  Kierkegaard, quoting Daub: Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers:  A Selection, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (London:  Penguin, 1996), pp. 161 and 63.  The imagery is also reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s mystical reflections in his ninth thesis on “the angel of history” in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, as well as his sense of a theological base lurking behind the puppet of historical materialism in his first thesis: “On the Concept of History/Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in Illuminations,  ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York : Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 255, 259-60.

[xxviii] Other medieval moderns, like G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien (notably both Catholic), provide a fascinating bridge across the periodization gap; see Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers (New York:  Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), pp. 1-13.

[xxix] Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, pp. 106-114, 123-31.

[xxx] See now Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse : Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2021).

[xxxi] The  new title is reminiscent of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), although it is unclear what influence his work may have had on Hiroa/Buck.  Curiously, there is an earlier, 1905 book called Vikings of the Pacific describing western explorers traveling east into the Pacific:  Agnes Christina Laut, Vikings of the Pacific:  The Adventures of the Explorers Who Came from the West, Eastward  (New York:  Macmillan, 1905; reprint 1914). See now also Price and Ljungkvist, “Polynesians of the Atlantic,”p. 3.

[xxxii] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 5-6, 13, x.

[xxxiii] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. ix, 14. 

[xxxiv]Vikings in the Pacific, pp. 17-19  See also Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds:  An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2002), pp. 24-27. See now  Moira White, “Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa: Scholarly Discussion of Polynesian Racial History, 1920-49,” The Journal of Pacific History 47, no. 3 (2012): 369–387.

[xxxv] Kathleen Biddick, “Bede’s Blush:  Postcards from Bali, Bombay, Palo Alto,” in The Shock of Medievalism (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 83-101 at 96-99. See also Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, pp. 196-99, on her own position as a Maori and a researcher studying Maori.

[xxxvi] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. x, 268.  Hiroa/Buck’s biological mother was Rina, who birthed him for her childless cousin, Ngarongo, wife of William Buck and the mother who raised Hiroa/Buck (Rina died shortly after his birth, but this Hagar-like arrangement was not uncommon).

[xxxvii] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 101-02.

[xxxviii] See Community of St. Cuthbert, chapter 5, forthcoming.

[xxxix] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 26, 212.  In another instance (p. 269), he notes the similarity between Maori mourning the dead by weeping (tangi) and an Irish wake, and comments “on such occasions my two halves could unite as one.”

[xl] Charles Plummer, “On the Colophons and Marginalia of Irish Scribes,” Proceedings of the British Academy 12 (1926): 11-44, at 11.  The Irish gift for storytelling appeared in remarks by President Barack Obama on a recent trip to Ireland where he received a copy of Irish author Padraig Colum’s children’s book Legends of Hawaii (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1937), commissioned as part of a series by the Hawaii legislature in 1922:  “It just confirms if you need someone to do good writing, you hire an Irishman ” (probably in reference to his two Irish American speech writers); “The Gifts:  Hawaiian Children’s Stories,” Irish Times, May 24, 2011 (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0524/1224297638360.html); see also “`Ireland carries a blood link with us,’ says Obama,” Irish Times, May 24, 2011 (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0524/1224297638367.html).   Colum overtly compares the Hawaiian stories to medieval European, as well as ancient near eastern stories (Legends of Hawaii, pp. xii-xiii, 215).

[xli] liturgy:  Durham A.IV.19.

[xlii] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 215.  On the history of skull collecting and measuring, see David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars:  Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York:  Basic Books, 2000).

[xliii] On the European intellectual history debating the concept superstition, see Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe:  Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250-1750 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010).

[xliv]  Although in one aside, he compares resistance to conversion:  “Thus in the Pacific, as well as in the Atlantic, religious intolerance played its part in causing the settlement of new lands” (Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 90).

[xlv] J. B. Condliffe, Te Rangi Hiroa: the life of Sir Peter Buck (Christchurch, N.Z.:  Whitcombe & Tombs, 1971), pp. 23, 183.  Often characterized as either hot-tempered or warm-blooded, his wife Margaret is accounted a force behind Buck’s ambitions, despite her illness, perhaps alcoholism, toward the end of her life.

[xlvi] His mother initially named him Te Mate-rori (Death-on-the-road) after his maternal uncle, Te Rangi Hiroa, died.

[xlvii] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 267.

[xlviii] Condliffe, Te Rangi Hiroa, pp. 198-99.

[xlix] Every time new building construction in the islands disturbs the bones of the dead, it is an affront to a local sense of history that faces the past with respect for the presence of the ancestors among us, rather than facing forward toward some mythical or hypothetical future.  The clash of beliefs over the place of the dead has recently come to a head at Kawaiaha‘o Church, the early mission site on Oahu (http://www.kawaiahao.org/).  While digging the foundation for a new building they discovered graves of Hawaiians, ostensibly Christian burials in the churchyard, but other voices claiming a living connection to these dead believe they should remain undisturbed according to Hawaiian traditions.  What were the intentions of the dead and their families at their burial?  Similar questions arise about the meaning of changing burial practices in Anglo-Saxon England as explored, for example, by Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome.

[l] HSC 20; Johnson South, Historia, p. 59.

[li] Cuthbert defended his community’s lands from theft, once transfixing a Viking doubter of his spiritual prowess with an iron bar on the threshold of a church (HSC 22-24; Johnson South, Historia, pp. 60-63).  For a general history of the cult of St. Cuthbert and its promotion, see Dominic Marner, St Cuthbert:  His Life and Cult in Medieval Durham (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2000).

[lii] He described Tongareva: “the scene was modern, and the atmosphere throbbed with the spirit of the past” (Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 131).

[liii] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 168.  Later, he was unable to dream of Rapa because he had not been there:  “Had it been my fortune to visit Rapa, I might, perchance, have sensed an affinity that personal contact may convey with more subtlety that the written words of others” (Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 184).  Umberto Eco likewise evoked “dreaming” of the European Middle Ages as something Americans feel compelled to image and imagine in the absence of a sense of place, or presence—a geographic, temporal, and dare I say spiritual separation and incommensurability that modern historians struggle to overcome.  Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality:  Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 61-72.

[liv] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 270-71. 

[lv] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, p. 291.

[lvi] Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” reprinted in We are the Ocean, pp. 27-40; and Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing added above.  See also Greg Dening, “History ‘in’ the Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific (Spring/Fall 1989):  134-39; Ben Finney, “The Other One-Third of the Globe,” Journal of World History 5 (1994): 273-97, and Katrina Gulliver, “Finding the Pacific World,” Journal of World History 22 (2011):  83-100.  See also Christopher Connery, “Sea Power,” PMLA 125 (2010):  685-92 on the effect of the Pacific on western conception of the sea as a source of power.

[lvii] See, for example, Barry Cunliffe, Europe between the Oceans, 9000 BC-AD 1000 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2008), p. 419, map 12.9; Fleming, Britain After Rome, throughout shows a distinction between eastern and western Britain in terms of material culture and settlement patterns. 

[lviii] See Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, Westward Vikings:  The Saga of L’Anse aux Meadows (St. John’s, NL:  Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2006) and accompanying maps.  Only gradually and later were Scandinavians integrated into the southern world of Latin Christendom, ironically due to their own adventurous trade networks and chameleon-like acculturation traits.

[lix] See Samuel M. Kamakau (1815-76), The Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (1961), rev. ed. (Honolulu:  Kamehameha Schools, 1992), pp. 92-104; Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck), “Cook’s Discovery of the Hawaiian Islands,” Report of the Director for 1944, Bishop Museum Bulletin 186 (Honolulu, 1945):  26-43 at 26-30; Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook:  European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 75-77; Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think:  About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago:  Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 117, 144; and reviews of the latter two by Greg Dening, Review of Books, William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1977): 253-59 and Clifford Geertz, “Culture War,” New York Review of Books 42.19 (November 30, 1995):  4-6. 

[lx] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 292-93.

[lxi]Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 294-95.

[lxii] John Charlot, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Religion, unpublished typescript and personal correspondence.  See the Kumulipo, translated by Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1897, at http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/lku/index.htm

[lxiii] David[a] Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (Moolelo Hawaii), trans. N. B. Emerson in 1898 (Honolulu:  Hawaiian Gazette Co., 1903), chapter 2, pp. 21-22, the translation known to Hiroa/Buck (reprint Bishop Museum Press, c.1951, 1971).  See also, Silva, Aloha Betrayed, p. 11 on adaptation of Hawaiian  ideas to Euro-American concepts as a form of resistance to colonization.

[lxiv] Buck, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 248-49.

[lxv] On a sense of “lostness,” see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “Modernity:  The Sphinx and the Historian,” AHR 116 (2011):  638-52, at 651.  On truth-telling narratives, see Jeremy Downes, “Or(e)ality:  The Nature of Truth in Oral Settings,” in W. H. F. Nicolaisen, ed.  Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages (Binghamton: CEMERS 1995), pp. 129-44.  The modern progress myth of magic-religion-science has a long half-life; see n. 17 above.

[lxvi] As a symbol of hope more valuable to him than his degrees and books, Hiroa/Buck kept in his office the canoe paddle given him by his Maori grandmother (technically great aunt) Kapuakore who had instructed him in Maori lore; see http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/buck.html

[lxvii] See Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery:  A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1994) and the Polynesian Voyaging Society website at https://hokulea.com/ .  More recently, seven canoes sailed to Maui from various Pacific islands: Gary T. Kubota, “Pacific Islanders Sail to Summit in Canoes:   the gathering unites indigenous people and scientists to discuss ocean issues,” Star-Advertiser, June 22, 2011 (http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/20110622_Pacific_islanders_sail_to_summit_in_canoes.html); in 2017 Hōkule‘a went on a worldwide voyage and in 2023 is currently circumnavigating the Pacific on the Moaninuiākea voyage for earth.

[lxviii] Next generation Hawaiian and Pacific historians are often located in literature, political science, or area studies departments.  Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010), insists on a very anti-materialist historiography (and anti-Marxist, given his perspective on his Cuban childhood) advocating for the power of ideas (p. 16); he also credits early modern Protestantism with killing the medieval connection between the living and the dead (pp. 100-56). 

[lxix] Silva, Aloha Betrayed, p. 8.  In her analysis of missionary William Richards’ acculturation in Hawai‘i, Noelani Arista recommends kaona as a comparative historical method of reading and understanding the past:  Noelani Arista, “Navigating Uncharted Oceans of Meaning:  Kaona as Historical and Interpretive Method,” PMLA 125 (2010):  663-69.  See also in the same issue Teresia Teaiwa, “What Remains to Be Seen:  Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature,” PMLA 125 (2010):  730-36, on the academic silences surrounding oral transmission and contemporary Pacific literature.

[lxx] Gracious hosts from Durham University include historians David and Lynda Rollason and archaeologist Dame Rosemary Cramp.

[lxxi] Silva, Aloha Betrayed, pp. 12-13.  See also discussions of “local” in Jolly, “Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit,” p. 236 and references in note 44.

Some examples:

Paying attention to historic languages while writing fiction takes time and experimentation, a slow process as James Paz noted in his translation of The Order of the World. I take courage from his confessional:

“One poem in particular – The Order of the World – has led me to contemplate what it means to convey an ancient poem slowly, across a long stretch of my own lifetime but also across a long stretch of historical time.  What can be gained and what gets lost through the act of ‘slow’ translation?  What happens when my own time – however you want to understand that ambiguous phrase – is expanded?”

James Paz, “Slow Words: Translating The Order of the World in My Own Time,” in Slow Scholarship, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 31-51, at p. 34.

In the same volume as his essay, I reflected on an early stage of my historical fiction project, based on a paper delivered in 2012, when this blog began, and then published in the Slow Scholarship volume in 2019, and here we are in 2022. . . .

Like Paz, my own time spent on this project over ten years, which itself is a culmination of earlier studies as well as continuing research, changes what I write and how I write about Aldred.  It is not just a problem of discontinuities developing in the novel’s timeline, or weaving back new characters into earlier, or earlier written, chapters—although that is a big deal, too, meaning that about once a year I have to read through all of the chapters to see what is going on. 

The most recent chapter is set in the year 975 with a comet, but serendipitously its writing intersected with my transcription of Aldred’s glosses on St. Michael and his angel thegns (see previous blog post), so I connected St. Michael’s feast day to the comet and other events in Aldred’s life.  Along the way, a new character named Owun emerged as Aldred’s spiritual brother, so the story of that relationship needs to be told earlier.  Meanwhile, another character developed early on who disappeared from my narrative shows up—Culfre, the little girl silent and bookish now becomes a spiritual leader at Easington when Bega, Aldred’s sister and Culfre’s mentor, dies.

In this same chapter, I have also experimented with language use, refining my method for creating “authentic” dialogue between characters.  Here is where I return to Paz’s inspiration, to play with words and see what works, how it sounds.  Or as Paul Kingsnorth says about The Wake,<a href=”http:// “I couldn’t make the words fit, and I gradually began to see why: the language that we speak is so utterly specific to our time and place.” Unlike Kingsnorth, who invented his own anglisc to make it work, I am highly self-consciously trying to use modern English words rooted in the languages spoken by the historical figures whom I am fictionalizing.  This experiment is also an outgrowth of another Leeds paper-turned-essay, about which I blogged earlier (Reimagining Early Medieval Britain I, II: Emerging Insights, and Re-imagining Re-imagining).  The essay, “Reimagining Early Medieval Britian: The Language of Spirituality,” is soon to appear as a chapter in Old English Medievalism: Reception and Recreation in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries, ed. Rachel A Fletcher, Thijs Porck, and Oliver M. Traxel, pp. 135-53.

Back to the recent chapter, “975 Comet,” written primarily this last summer:  recently I have gone through all of the dialogue to evaluate the word choice and phrasing for that elusive “authenticity.”  I developed a premise and procedure, with some caveats, that resulted not just in selective word changes but rethinking what the characters say as well as how they say it.  Granted, much of the novel is in the voice of an omniscient narrator, so I feel less obliged to choose only early medieval vocabulary there, hence my focus on the spurts of real-time dialogue.

The starting premise for checking all conversations:  We will assume all characters are speaking to each other in English but with some of them sprinkling in Latin words, which I put in italics as “not English.” All the rest of the dialogue words not italicized have to be modern English derived from or with roots in early medieval Englishes (including Scandinavian or other loan words).  This meant excluding modern English vocabulary that came from post-Conquest French, later Latin, or other post-medieval language importations.  In cases where Aldred or others threw in a Latin word or phrase, I debated whether to decline/conjugate it appropriately or just use the English equivalent in italics to show their clerical habit of macaronic speech interweaving Latin and English.

The procedure:  Online Bosworth-Toller (BT) is my friend. The advanced search allows us to enter a modern English definition lacking an early medieval root and reverse engineer it to find an equivalent that still had a modern form.  I also made liberal use of the Thesaurus in Word for alternatives, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for historic linguistics.  Admittedly, our knowledge of Old English speech is limited to the written texts of elites and churchmen, as well as Latin-English glossaries that may not reflect actual use.  Heck, even Aldred’s glosses are suspect as a source for Northumbrian Old English because he makes up the preponderence of known Northumbrian vocabulary and isn’t even writing syntactical Old English in sentences, just putting English words above Latin ones.

Why go to all this trouble?  Hitherto I have used my gut-level instincts as to words that “sound” right.  But I am no Tolkien—my knowledge of early medieval languages is much more limited and not as philologically aware.  So I have to make it a conscious process, rather than rely on intuition.

The bonus is that I have had to rethink what some of the characters are saying because there was in fact no equivalent.  This is a level of incommensurability that I have to take seriously in order to achieve some kind of authenticity that is both readable (unlike The Wake, which is too much work for some readers) and yet also challenges the reader to hear different ways of thinking and speaking about the world.

Zentangle Spinner: When you don’t know what tangle to do next.

1.  A conversation on the road:

            “Have you ever seen Satan or his thegns?” Aldred asked Owun abruptly. …

            Owun rode thoughtfully for a bit before answering Aldred.  “I have seen men slaughter innocents.  That looked like the devil’s thegns to me.”  Owun used the Norse word for slaying, slahtr, that had become common in the north after the coming of the vikings, and not just in reference to their taking of cattle, but also the way they slew people like animals.  His use of innocents also brought to mind cilda mæsse-dæg, the slaughter of the children by King Herod after the birth of the Savior, the Hælend or Healer.

            Owun uses the Latin for innocents because I did not really find an Old English equivalent, but also because he is invoking Childermas, or the festum innocentium on Dec. 28.  Note also that the narrator uses italics for Latin and Old English words, unlike the dialogue rule I just established, but gets a bit pedantic with Savior/Hælend/Healer.

            The omniscient narrator also expands on the word choice I was forced to make in the use of “slaughter” instead of massacre, which allowed me to bring in the comparison with butchering.   The OED locates the origins of slaughter in Old Norse slahtr, a likely enough Scandinavian loan word in Northumbria, although similar words exist in OE for smite, slay, strike, etc.[1]  I am not a linguist and have not done a secondary search for insights, other than Sara Pons-Sanz discussion of the infinitive “slaa” (slay, strike) as a possible Scandinavian loanword in the LG glosses, which she doubts.[2] So is the OED right that slaughter is a Scandinavian loan word?

            If you look at the footnotes, you will see that this was quite a labyrinthian research rabbit hole with inconclusive results.

2.  About Aldred’s sister Bega’s death:

            Gytha murmered to him. “She did not thole much or long. After taking the corpore et sanguine of our Hlaford at the Mass, she sank down on her knees and bowed forward.  We thought she was overcome by the Spirit [Spiritus sanctus, or Holy Ghost, halga gast?].  Perhaps she was.” 

            She paused and then went on, “but when we saw her shaking, we lifted her up and brought her here to her bed, where she lay with a crooked smile on her face, her eyes fast on the angel of the Lord.”

            For “suffer,” I stole  “thole” (OE geþolian) from Seamus Heaney.  This insider readerly joke may or may not work well for those unfamiliar with Heaney’s Beowulf and his discussion of this word choice bridging his Ulster upbringing and his “right of way” to translate an Old English epic.[4] 

            This passage also shows how a religious laywoman might incorporate familiar liturgical Latin (corpore et sanguine) along with OE Halford, understandable as Lord and used frequently enough in the novel to be understood.

            But I am debating what she might say about being “overcome by the Spirit” (which resonates with contemporary Pentecostal and African-American religious experiences).  Gytha probably would know the Latin, spiritus sanctus, and the Modern English Spirit in italics shows its Latin origin. But maybe to express such an intimate spiritual experience, she might use the English halga gast, Modern English Holy Ghost.  I am inclined toward the latter.

3.a.  A later passage wrestles with how to describe the crooked smile and dimple on Bega’s face.

            They [Aldred and Owun at her coffin] gazed at her face, peaceful but with that crooked smile. 

            Aldred reached out with his other hand, touching the small dimple on one side of her face, and smiled.

            He said softly, “she always had an uneven smile,with this one little hole-pit on the right cheek,” his finger resting in her dimple. “As a small child, I loved to touch it when she smiled down at me.”

            Smile is not attested in Old English but has roots in Middle High German, Scandinavian languages, and North Frisian according to the OED. BT “smile” definitions lead to smearcian, which has a pejorative meaning in Modern English smirk.  So I left “smile” in their conversation.

            I could find no word for dimple, so I invented hole-pit combined with cheek, which comes from OE ceace. If anyone has an alternative for dimple in Old English, let me know!

3.b.  The conversation continues, with Owun and Aldred mixing Latin with English.

            Removing his finger from her cold face, he [Aldred] went on more soberly,  “Who will call to mind such things, or anything, about her?”

            “Look around at Easington,” Owun said.  “These women and children, safe and beloved.  They know. Not only that, but she has geared and girded them up to carry on loving one another amidst their sorrow.  Even today, they shoulder the undertakings she gave them to do, in imitation of her love for each other, welcoming anyone who comes to the gate, as one poor family did this morning.  That is Bega’s memorial.”  He said this while staring at the dead woman’s face.

            Aldred nodded, “and not just the offspring of her life, but that of our mother Tilwif and our godmother Bega, who together founded this refuge.”

            He sighed.  “Unless I write their story, I fear no one will know.  Not even the bishop of Chester-le-Street, much less the archbishop of York, name Bega an abbess, which she surely was.  Even I called her mother at times!”

            Owun smiled.  He thought of Bega as a spiritual mother himself, even though they were about the same age.

            “Maybe,” he said, “but I believe she intercedes even now on our behalf and that of every woman and child here.”

            “You think,” said Aldred, “that she is a saint already purged and seated in Paradise?” Eagerly Aldred leaned forward toward his sister’s face.  “Would she bring miracles in our midst if we ask?”

            “I think,” Owun replied slowly, “that we should keep speaking to her as we did while she was alive in this world, and she will keep bidding God for us as she did when she walked with us here.  Surely she will provide answers in our hearts.”

            Straightening, Aldred waited a moment, and then said, “Gytha told me something that Bega said lately, that she might miss when she takes her last breath because she will just keep seeing the eyes of Jesus looking into her as she fares forth from earth to heaven.”

            Owun nodded. “Look at her face.  Is that not true?”

            He added, “whether she answers our bidding for miracles or not, the true signal of her holiness is all around us.  What greater wonder-sign is there than these folk whose lives she gladdened, even or most of all our own?”

            Aldred agreed, “we should imitate her imitating Christ and teach others. That will be her memoria, whether her gravestone, this church, and this tun-land last many generations or not.”

            Initially in this passage, I used the Latin word in italics (imitatio, refugium, miracula, etc) but then I had to figure out whether to decline the nouns in the English sentence and decided that putting the Latin rooted Modern English word in italics to indicate its relation to the Old English worked well enough.

            The other word that gave me difficulty was Bega’s “legacy”: what “successors” would remember and continue her work?  I had a modern English word there that I cannot remember now, because I rewrote the sentence to say the “offspring” (OE ofspring) of her life.

4. As in other places, Aldred and Culfre engage in Latin-English wordplay:

Diva Dance Rock n’ Roll
Via Divina Franciscan Way Walk 3 Clare Contemplation and Community

            Aldred took her left hand and held it in his open right hand, looking at the creases and ink stains on her fingers.  “Your scribal hand.  You were always wiðerweard.”

            Culfre smiled, despite her sorrow. “It is my wyrdto be contrary,” she played on the words.

            Then she sighed. “I know what you have come to ask.”

            “You could keep silentio…” Aldred said softly.

            “Such was my oath,” Culfre replied, “then and now.”

            Culfre is a left-handed female scribe, as revealed in an earlier chapter where she is a small child rescued by Aldred.  Here Aldred uses wiðerweard in a humorous way to refer to her character, and she plays it back with Latin-rooted contrary.  Both wyrd and wiðerweard are OE words I have used elsewhere in the novel.  I hope they have enough archaic resonance in Modern English for readers to feel the word play.

5.  Aldred encounters Owain, a younger son of King Dyfnwal whom Aldred had met many years ago when on pilgrimage with Cathroe.

            Here Owain turned to Aldred.  “Do you not know me?”

            Aldred answered, “I recall your father well on that peregrinatio with Cathroe. He was a good king who tried to do well by all, slaves and freemen, even an outsider like myself.”

            Owain looked down, “I am ashamed to say I was one of those over-mod wæpnedmen who besmeared nidlings.  One you took with you was a young theow with a shriveled arm.  My father’s chiding stayed with me, and I bettered my deeds.  What became of the cniht?”

            “Frith.” Aldred said, and his eyes grew misty.  “Cathroe freed him and gave him to me as a son.  He was baptized here soon after, and then became a thane of Earl Thored of Brandsby, where he died shielding the Crayke folk during a viking onslaught, leaving behind his wife Beonna and unborn child, a son.”  Aldred thought about his godson Aldfrith, a young man with a family of his own at Crayke, caring for his mother in the same house where as a new priest he had blessed the young couple so many years ago.

            “So,” Owain said, “he died a bolder wæpnedman than most of those who held him in thrall and besmeared him.”

Via Divina Franciscan Way Walk 5 Rebuild, Repair, Restore

            I had several difficulties in this passage. 

            One was how Aldred might identify himself as feeling like a foreigner or stranger, so I used newcomer, but then thought about “outsider,” both components rooted in OE but not attested, although “outlaw” is. Most of the OE words for stranger have the prefix el- (ell-þeodig, æl-fremd), but I don’t see a Modern English descendant unless we cheat and use “alien” from Latin and/or Norman French. “Wanderer” is tempting just because of the OE poem so named in Modern English, but its use of anhaga for solitary person doesn’t have an easy modern equivalent (nor do an-stapa or eard-stapa, and wrecca implies an exiled person) .  For outsider, BT offers ut-wæpnedmann, which I could use, since here and elsewhere I have introduced wæpnedman, but it seems a bit repetitive.

            A second difficulty was something to indicate how the warriors mocked or taunted slaves like Frith.  The one OE rooted Modern English word I could find was besmeared (besmearian). Owun’s speech gets overloaded with archaic words (over-mod, wæpnedmen, nidlings, theow, chiding, cniht), but that is in some ways appropriate because his first language is Gaelic (Cumbric), and English a second language.

            A third occurred with having Owun “repent” of his earlier behavior.  The OE verb is dæd-betan, so I rendered that more clumsily as Modern English “bettered his deeds.”  Initially I had “turned” toward better deeds to get my own sense of “repent” as an about-face change of direction, but even “turn” is not OE and the OE words remain distant.

6. And more Latin-English wordplay, reflecting a recent article I read with great interest:

            After the Mass, sitting in the cloister walk, Aldred asked Owun.  “What did you see when the cup was lifted up?”

            Owun smiled.  “You will think it outlandish, but I saw angels over the altar as you consecrated the bread and wine. Circumvolant, hwearfiað.”  Spinning his fingers in the air, he used the Latin and the English to indicate that the angels were dancing. 

            “Perhaps,” Owun added, “I saw only motes of dust playing in the sunlight.”

            Aldred nodded. “I had in mind the vision of the archangel Michael slaying the dragon.  But I like your hwearfian angels better.”

            Owun said, “I was calling to mind what I heard as a child, a priest who said that the angels are present at the consecration,circlingover the altar.”

            Aldred added, “rightly so—it is their angelic hands, not ours, that sanctify and transform the bread and wine into body and blood.”

            After a pause, Aldred touched Owun’s hand, “so let’s call your dust motes angels, since we know they are all around us even when we have no light to see them by.”

“Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne”)

I did create “outlandish” from two OE-rooted words, instead of “odd” or “strange” (which circles back to the problem of stranger, see above).  It took me a while to settle on “dust motes.” 

However, there is a famous painting “Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams” by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi Ordrupgaard (1900, “Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne”).

The idea that OE “hwearfiað” suggests circling in dance-like fashion over the consecration comes from Thomas D. Hill,  “The Eucharistic Dance of the Angels: 1 Cnut, IV, 1-2.” [5] Thanks, Tom!

So this is how what I am transcribing from Aldred and reading in contemporary scholarship ends up intersecting in what I am writing, and how I am more self-consciously wrestling with language.  Suggestions more than welcome!

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[1]  BT defines slihtan as “to smite or slay,” and cites as origin O. H. German slahton; however, the only example is Matt. 4:9 in the Lindisfarne Gospels where Aldred offers it as an alternative gloss of Lat cadens (falling down): ðu fallas ¬ slæhtas. This is odd for a verse in which Satan tempts Jesus by saying he will give all the kingdoms of the world if he will “fall down and adore me.”  Aldred reads cadens as second person you, and equates sliht with falling down (feallan is the verb used in the other Gospel translations, including the MacRegol gloss).  The OE noun sliht is more common especially in compounds across the corpus of Old English, most commonly mansliht and wælsliht, murderer. The use of -slæht- with an æ is less frequent, and half are from the Gospel glosses of Aldred or MacRegol. Slihtan may be related to OE slitan, to slit, tear, rend, cleave, etc.  Aldred uses -slitan in Durham AIV. 19 to gloss Lat discordare (slitendum, fol. 81rb13);Lat. rumpere (geslita, fol. 86ra14); andLat. disrumpere (toslito, fol. 1r10) or Lat. lacerare (tosliteno, fol. 17v10).See also BT slaga. 

[2] Sara María Pons Sanz, Analysis of the Scandinavian Loanwords in the Aldredian Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels (Valencia: Lengua Inglesa, Universitat de Valencia, 2000), 4.3.3.4, pp. 111-12, citing Björkman and Ross about the disyllabic <a> where <æ> is expected before “h” and the absence of a final “n” in the infinitive. See LG Matt 1:6 marginal note (David ofslaa Uriah), Mark 14:1 (the religious leaders looking to kill, occiderent glossed of-slogon ¬ hia mæhton of-slaa, Jesus) and 14:65 (Jesus beaten by the soldiers, caedere glossed with geslaa ¬ geðearsca); Luke 12:45 (parable of bad servant strking others, percutere glossed miððy slaa) and 22:49 (disciples asking at Jesus’ arrest if they should strike with a sword, percutimus glossed woe gealas ¬ huoeðer moto we geslaa); the latter three are also in MacRegol.  Later in life, in his gloss to DAIV19, Aldred uses -slæð glossing occidere (fall, die, kill, slay, knock down) and percutere (strike down, kill).

[4] Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. xx-xxi.

[5] In Lindy Brady, ed., Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall (Tempe: ACMRS, 2021), pp. 135-41, at p. 137.

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But I wondered…

While transcribing Aldred’s gloss to the Durham Ritual on folio 34r, I came across a curiosity, one of many that I highlight to savor now or later.  As often happens, this one took me down a research rabbit hole.

Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19, fol. 34r

On lines 1 and 2, Aldred has twice glossed Latin “angels” with Old English “thegns,” where ordinarily he and others would use the anglicized form englas or engelas (variously spelled).

The passage is a capitula or chapter reading from Revelation 12:7-8 as part of a celebration of St. Michael the Archangel’s festival on 29 September.  Maddeningly, the first part of the series begins on the page missing between folio 33 and folio 34, so it picks up mid-sentence.  I add the missing bit first [Corrêa, item 437] and then the transcription of the Latin (Lat.) with Old English (OE) above, followed by a Modern English (ModE) translation:

III Kal. Oct. (29 Sept.) Capitvla in festivitate sancti Michaelis Archangeli

Factum est proelium in caelo; Michael…

OE	7	ðegnas	his	gifvhton	mið vel við ðæm	dræcce		7	se dræcca
1	et	angeli	eius	proeliabantur	cum	dracone	.	et	draco	pu-

OE	gifæht vel	7	ðegnas	his	7	ne	mæhton vel		ne æc	stove
2	gnabat	et	angeli	eius	et	non	ualuerunt	.	Neque	locus	in-

OE	gimoeted	is	hiora	f’ðor	in	heofne
3	uentus	est	eorum	amplius	in	caelo	.

ModE: And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels:  And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. [Rev. 12:7-8 Douay-Rheims]

In this passage from the Apocalypse (Revelation), Archangel Michael with his angels is facing off against the dragon and his angels (traditionally understood as the fallen Satan and his demons).

The Old English word þegen has a high frequency across a range of meanings rooted in the idea of service, the most obvious one being a member of the military social class in service to a lord, surviving in modern English as thane. 

As with other religious authors, Aldred in the Durham Ritual uses ðegnas for famulos (as servants of God), and in his gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, he uses it for discipuli, servos, apostoli (Luke), ministri (John 7:46, 18:36) and milites (John 19:2, in reference to the soldiers placing the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head). [In John 1:51 the angels ascending and descending on the son of man is glossed angla.]

However in his gloss to Matthew 25:41, Aldred uses thegn as an alternative for the devil’s angels in the division between those sheep bound for God’s kingdom on the right of Christ and those goats disposed of on the left [ Lindisfarne Gospels fol. 80rb5-10 ].

London, British Library MS Cotton Nero D.iv, fol. 80rb (Lindisfarne Gospels)

• Lat:  tunc dicet et his qui ad sinistris erunt discendite a me maledicti in ignem ęternum qui praeparatus est diabolo et angelis eius
• OE: ða coeðes & ðæm ða ðe to winstrum[1] biðon ofstiges gie from me awoergedo in fyr ecce seðe fore-ge-gearuuad is diwle & englum vel ðegnum his.
• ModE: Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. [Douay-Rheims]

Here Aldred hedges with a “vel” alternative to englum by adding ðegnum, perhaps to emphasize that these are the devil’s servants, demons in thrall to Satan.

Thus in the context of the passage in Revelation describing a battle of angelic hosts under two archangelic foes, it makes sense for Aldred to use the militaristic sense of “thegns” for both those angels serving under Michael and those under the satanic dragon. 

if thegn occurred elsewhere as a way of describing angelic warbands, good or evil.

Not really very much, which surprised me.  Most of the instances are of less militaristic uses of angelic thegns as ministering servants.  To give two examples:

            1.  The Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History uses the related noun ðegnung (service) to translate the ministering spirits who escort Cuthbert and his friend Herbert to heaven:

• Lat. atque angelico ministerio pariter ad regnum caelieste translati [Colgrave & Minor, p. 440]
• OE: midd þa engellican ðegnunge ætgædere to ðæm heofenlican rice gelædde
• ModE: “by the ministry of angels were together led to the heavenly kingdom” [Miller, EETS 95, pp. 372-73].

            2.  The Junius Old English poem Genesis uses it poetically to describe first the angel who ministered to Hagar and then the angel who stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac:

• Hagar (lines 2268-69)
  • OE: þær hie wuldres þegn, engel drihtnes [ASPR 1, p. 68]
  • ModE: “There a thane of glory, an angel of the Lord” [trans. Hostetter]
• Abraham and Isaac (lines 2908-10)
  • OE: Þa metodes ðegn, ufan engla sum, Abraham hlude stefne cygde. [ASPR 1, p. 86]
  • ModE: “Then a thane of the Measurer, a certain angel from above, called Abraham with a loud voice.” [trans. Hostetter]. 

Metod (fate, death), as in most Old English poetry where this word occurs, is understood to refer to the Creator God, so the angel is one of God’s messenger-servants coming from heaven to deliver this directive.

Similarly, the use of thegn-words for ministri (pl) occurs in two Psalter glosses and in a hagiography of St. Michael (discussed further below).  All three are passages where ministri refers to angelic messengers (a redundancy since aggelos means messenger in Greek, similar to the Hebrew mal’akh).

• Psalm 102:21 (103:21), a series of blessings that culminates with the angels:
  • Lat.:  Benedicite Domino, omnes virtutes ejus; ministri ejus, qui facitis voluntatem ejus.
  • OE: Bletsiað dryhten ealle mægenu his ðegnas his ge ðe doð willan his [Junius Psalter, also Vespasian Psalter gloss[2]]
  • ModE: Bless the Lord, all ye his hosts: you ministers of his that do his will. [Douay-Rheims]
• Psalm 103:4 (104:4), the Paris Psalter and the Vespasian Psalter translate ministros with ðegnas:[3]
  • Lat: Qui facit angelos suos spiritus et ministros suos ignem urentem.
  • OE: Se doeð englas his gastas & ðegnas his fyr bern[en]de [Junius, Vespasian, and Paris Psalter].
  • ModE: Who makest thy angels spirits: and thy ministers a burning fire. [Douay-Rheims]

In several of these examples, ðegen is used to translate minister in an angelic context where the word angel is already in use, glossed engel.  In all, the operative aspects of thegn is more service as messengers rather than as warriors.  When the characterization of angels as a warband does occur, we find the OE word weorod (see Bosworth and Toller and the DOE corpus for examples from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, poetry, and various homilies).

To return to the Archangel Michael…

we find that his attributes and accomplishments are quite extensive beyond just military command of angelic thegns.

An Anonymous Old English Life of St. Michael found in the margins of the manuscript CCCC41 lists the archangel’s accomplishments, both Biblical and extra-Biblical.[4] [Anon OE Lives, pp. 442-51]. The fight against the dragon in Revelation is summarized:

• OE: þis is se halga heahengel, Sanctus Michael, se ðe ær þisse worulde ende ofslihð þone ealdan feond þæt is se micla draca se ðe æt frymðe middangardes gesceapen wæs to ðam beorhtestan engle.
• ModE: “This is the holy archangel Saint Michael, who before the end of this world will slay the ancient enemy, that is, the great dragon who at the beginning of the earth was created as the brightes angel.” [Anon. OE Lives, pp. 448-51].

            In addition, Michael is credited with protecting the three youths in the fiery furnace from the Book of Daniel.  It is Michael who gave them the words of the famous Benedicite, a prayer/hymn deployed for many protective purposes, which also echoes Psalm 102 (Benedicite Domino, omnia opera ejus). [Anon OE Lives pp. 444-45]

In Blickling Homily XVI To Sancte Michaheles Mæssan, the homilist quotes Paul on angels as ministering spirits, translating ministrum as ðegnunge gæstum:

• OE: Ond ðæs engles mægen on his mægen ond his wundor þær þonne weorðod bið, ond oftost æteowed on þæm dæge, swa cwæð Sanctus Paulus, ‘Qui ad ministrum summis…’ ‘Englas beoð to ðegnunge gæstum fram Gode hider on world sended, to ðæm ðe þone ecean eðel mid móde ond mid mægene to Gode geearniað, þæt him sýn on fultume ða þe wið þæm awergdum gastum syngallice feohtan sceolan.’
• ModE: “The archangel’s power and miracles are venerated there, and are most frequently shown on that day (St Michael’s Day), as St Paul said, ‘Qui ad ministrum summis… ‘ ‘Angels are as ministering spirits sent into the world by God to those, who with desire and virtue, merit from God the eternal kingdom, so that they (the angels) may be a help to those who constantly contend against the accursed spirits.’ “ [Kelly, p. 144 lines 189-94]

The quote from Paul is probably a paraphrase of Heb. 1:14:

• Lat:  Nonne omnes sunt administratorii spiritus, in ministerium missi propter eos, qui haereditatem capient salutis? [Vulgate]
• ModE: Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to minister for them, who shall receive the inheritance of salvation? [Douay-Rheims]

However, the next section concluding the homily on St. Michael is derived from the Visio S. Pauli, the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul [see Kelly, pp. 190-92; also  Johnson, pp. 54-55, and Sowerby, pp. 176-83].

Notably, the demonic crew in the homily are described with many epithets, but not with ðegnas. 

So what about demonic angels as thegns of Satan…

as in the dragon of Aldred’s gloss of Revelation 12:7-8? 

This does seem even more rare, the only other instance being the Matthew 25:41 passage cited above. Again, Aldred’s handiwork. Otherwise, I did not encounter any correlation in the OE corpus between deofol and thegn.[5] 

But there is an interesting representation of Satan as ealdordeofol in apocryphal homilies, including another CCCC41 marginal homily from the Gospel of Nicodemus [Hulme, pp. 610-14].  DOE cites them:

• Nic (D) 2: ure drihten, hælend Crist … astahg niðer to helwarum to þan, þæt he wolde … þæt ealdordeoful oferswiðan.
• Nic (D) 6: þæt dioful is geciged and nemned Satanas, þæt is, ealdordeoful in wite.
• Nic (D) 48: ða se stranga wið þæne stranga geræsde, þa ure Drihten acom and þæt ealdordioful geband.  Nic (E, different MS) 5: se deofol is geciged & genæmned sathanas þæt is ealdordeofol on wite, & he rixað & wunað on helle nyoðeweardre.
• HomU 12.2 60: se ytemesta draca, þæt is þæt ealdordeoful, se <lihð> gebunden onbecling mid raceteage reades fyres … in hellegrunde. [Apocalypse of Thomas in Willard].
• HomS 5 31: þonne cweð sum deofol, mare þe is toweard þonne þu gesyxt þone ealdordeofol þe lið onbæc gebunden on þære neowelnesse hellegrundes.
• HomS  5 56: and syþþan heo bið gelæd to þam ealdordeofle Satanas.
• HomS 31 47: mare þe is toward, þonne we ðe gebringað mid urum ealdredeofle, se is gebunden in þam nyðemestan hellegrunde. [3^rd Sunday after Epiphany in Willard]

Apocryphal literature of this type does not mean these evocative vernacular representations are unorthodox (unless you are the homilist Ælfric, who was quite the purist).  Personally, I think ealdordeofol for Satan makes a good opposite to hehangel (archangel) Michael.  I almost wish Aldred had used it in Rev. 12 for the dragon with his thegns. 

I also note reference to the devil as witherweard (contrary, perverse, oppositional, like the archaic widdershins).  Three examples:

1.  The wiðer wearðan engel sátán in the the Egbert penitential [Confessionale pseudo-Egberti 1.4 28  (London, British Library, MS. Cotton Tiberius A.III, fol. 53v15); Logeman, pp. 515-516]. 

London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii, fol. 53v

• OE: …drihtne gescilde þe wið ealle deofles costnunga 7 wið þæne wiðer weardan engel satan….
• ModE:  ….the Lord shield you against all devil’s tempations and against the adversary angel satan…

2.  The Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care commissioned by King Alfred uses the term in a passage about how the ruler (ealdormon) should be humble [Section XVII starting p. 106 in Sweet]:

• OE: Buton tweon ðonne se mon oferhygð ðæt he bio gelic oðrum monnum, ðonne bið he gelic ðæm wiðerweardan & ðæm aworpnan deofle. [Sweet, p. 112]
• ModE:  “Without doubt when a man is impatient of being like other men he resembles the perverse and bansihed devil.” [Sweet, p. 112]

3.  The Blickling Homilies also favor its use for Satan or the devil:

• Blickling Homily III
  • Gá ðú onbæcling, wiþerwearda in Jesus’ temptation where he says “get behind me, Satan” [Kelly, BH III Dominica Prima in Quadragesima, p. 18 lines 14-15].
• Blickling Homily IV
  •  OE:  ‘Eala,’ cwæþ Sanctus Paulus, ‘þæt biþ deofles goldhord, þaet mon his synna dyrne his scrifte.’ Forþon þæm wiþerweardan beoþ þæs mannes synna gecwemran þonne eal eorþlic goldhord. [Kelly, BH IV Dominica Tertia in Quadragesima, p. 28, lines 63-65] 
  • ModE:  “’Oh,’ said St Paul, ‘for a man to hide his sins from his confessor is deemed as the devil’s treasure.’ Our adversary (the devil) considers a man’s sins more acceptable than all other kinds of earthly treasure.” [Kelly, p. 29.]

In the Lindisfarne Gospels, Aldred uses witherweard as a gloss for Satan (Mark 1:13, 3:26), for adversary (Matt 5:25/Luke 12:58, Luke 18:3, Luke 21:15), and for the anti-Christ (Matt 24:24/Mark 13:22).  He also uses the adjective in the Preface to Matthew to describe the false seeds sown by heretics (wiðerworda larwas) and their apocryphal lies (wiðer-weardra gedwola glossing apocriforum nenias) [Skeat, Matthew, p. 6, line 16 and p. 8, line 9].

In the Durham Ritual, he uses adjectival forms of witherweard for:

• Lat. aduersus to indicate adverse health (fol. 61r18 Lat. aduerse salutis, OE wiðirwærdo hæles) in the prayer of St. John against poison (reptilian and demonic), for which see Scribe B chapter.
• Lat. hereticus, false teachers glossed wiðirwordvm larwvm, in the alphabet of words on fol. 88vb8
• Asmodeus demon as the wiðirwearda god divl (fol. 67r5, 18), in the field prayers that first got me into studying Aldred and Durham A.IV.19.

Consequently, I think Aldred…

might have enjoyed Fenwick Lawson’s 1956 wood sculpture of the archangel and his nemesis, if it had appeared through some temporal wormhole in Bede’s church of St. Paul at Jarrow when Aldred was there:

Fenwick Lawson, St. Michael and the Devil (1956), St. Paul’s, Jarrow

The imagery, verbal and physical, presents us with a choice:  do we focus our attention on the demonic evil or the overpowering good? 

This rabbit hole exploration of angels as thegns of the archangel Michael and of his adversary the dragon reminds us that ubiquitous as evil may be, good triumphs.  Or, as Mr. Rogers instructs us, in any dire situation, look for the helpers–and I might add, be the helpers, the allies who step forward and speak up for the vulnerable. 

We can call them angel thegns.

Bibliography

• Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints. Ed. and trans. Johanna Kramer, Hugh Magennis, and Robin Norris. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020.
• Arundel Psalter (London, British Library, MS Arundel 60):  Oess, Guido, ed. Der altenglische Arundel-Psalter, eine Interlinearversion in der Handschrift Arundel 60 des Britischen Museums.  Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1910. [Hathi Trust]
• ASPR 1: Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records Vol. 1: The Junius Manuscript, ed. George Philip Krapp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.
• Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the Enlglish People [Latin]. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
• Bede, The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Thomas Miller.EETS 95.  London: Early English Text Society, 1890-98.
• Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online or see the print replica of An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (useful for looking up the explanation of references)
• Corrêa, Alicia, ed. The Durham Collectar.  HBS CVII. London: Boydell for Henry Bradshaw Society, 1992.
• DOE:  Dictionary of Old English and Corpus (University of Toronto)
• Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition of the Bible at BibleGateway .
• Hostetter, Aaron K.  Old English Poetry Project, translation of Junius Genesis.
• Hulme, W.H. “The Old English Gospel of Nicodemus.” Modern Philology 1: 579-614.
• Johnson, Richard F. Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend.  Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005.
• Junius Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 27): Brenner, E. Der altenglische Junius-Psalter: die Interlinear-Glosse der Handschrift Junius 27 der Bodleiana zu Oxford. Anglistische Forschungen 23. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1908.  [Hathi Trust]
• Kelly, Richard J., ed. and trans. The Blickling Homilies Edition and Translation : (with General Introduction, Textual Notes, Tables and Appendices, and Select Bibliography. London: Continuum, 2003.
• Logeman, H., “Anglo-Saxonica Minora.” Anglia 12: 497-518. Confessionale pseudo-Egberti (London, British Library, MS. Cotton Tiberius A.III).
• Skeat, Walter W.  The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Vesions.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1887.
• Sowerby, Richard. Angels in Early Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.
• Sweet, Henry, ed. and trans. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care : with an English Translation.  EETS 50-53. London:  N. Trübner & Co. for the Early English Text Society, 1909.
• Vespasian Psalter (London, British Library, MS. Cotton Vespasian A.I): Kuhn, Sherman M., ed. The Vespasian Psalter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.
• Willard, Rudolph, ed. Two Apocrypha in Old English Homilies. Beiträge zur englischen Philologie 30. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1935; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1967. [not seen, no online access]

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[1] Corrected from wynstrum with a “y” (dot under, “i” above).

[2] The Vespasian Psalter glosses the angeli of v. 20 with englas but the ministri of v. 21 with ðegnas. 

[3] This particular verse is quoted in Hebrews 1:7, showing the superiority of Christ to the angels.

[4] Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41 is a manuscript containing a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Old English, but it has margins full of all kinds of interesting things that I have dabbled in, as well as a selection of homilies with themes related to protection.

[5]  Occurrences of demon in Old English are limited to Aldred’s use in one of the field prayers of the Durham Ritual additions and in a Psalter gloss, Arundel Ps. 95:5 (demonia glossing Lat demonia), arguably transliterations rather than translations.

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Cross-post from Proofed: A Boydell & Brewer Blog, advertising the publication of the volume of essays edited by Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks, Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England.

In the summer of 2007, I visited the Holy Island of Lindisfarne for the first time. I had the privilege of being driven there from Durham by the foremost archaeologist of the region, Dame Rosemary Cramp. She may not remember much of that journey—I am sure she has given innumerable tours to visiting scholars—but I have vivid memories of her regaling me with off-the-cuff but deeply insightful remarks about her changing views of the Chester-le-Street Anker house stone monuments, gesturing out the car window to Roman ruins along the road, giving insights on new discoveries at Bamburgh, and finally, showing me the artifacts of Lindisfarne, where she is the authority on much that is on display in the museum.

But I have one particular visual memory of the landscape as we drove north toward Lindisfarne. That was of the immensity of the horizon and the sky like a bowl over this huge open space of land. When I recounted this vision later to some colleagues, one pointed out, rightly so, that the landscape in that region is not flat but hilly. How can I account for my feeling of immensity?

One explanation is that my perspective is relative to where I come from. I live on an island in an archipelago at some distance from the nearest continental landmass. Britain is also an island, but a much bigger one than where I live on Oahu, a volcanic mountain sticking up from the sea. Although I was raised on the west coast of the North American continent, whenever I visit there after having lived here on this island, I am struck by how spread out everything is and how far I can see over land. I am used to gazing out over the immensity of the seascape, our sea of islands.

On Lindisfarne itself, after I arrived that first time and on subsequent visits, I had this sense of being at home on an island connected to the sea, and also a feeling of reverence for the sacredness of the past. I even blogged about having to wade back through the rising tide from St. Cuthbert’s Isle, feeling like the kind of silly tourist we complain about here in Hawai‘i.

St. Cuthbert’s Isle, Lindisfarne (author photo, 2007)

These personal anecdotes illustrate several of the themes in the volume Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England.

One perspective is from Oceania, which seems counter-intuitive in a volume of essays reflecting on artifacts and texts from a place half way around the globe and disconnected from each other in the early medieval era. Both editors, though, are from Hawai‘i, and many of the essays originated in a 2017 conference held on Oahu exploring this idea of bringing a global perspective to bear on our field of study.

Some essays explicitly address comparisons, connections, and orientations from the Pacific in relation to early medieval England. Jane Hawkes, for example, draws on her own encounters in Oceania to query how “art” is classified in certain modern western ways, considering together both Melanesian and early medieval insular arts. Similarly, Michael W. Scott shows how 19^th century Anglican missionaries to Melanesia drew on early medieval Hiberno-Saxon mission stories–and then how Melanesian Christians appropriated and developed those traditions within their own culture.

While Scott’s essay traced how early medieval Britian came to Pacific Islands, my essay in the volume talks about taking students from the Pacific to early medieval Britain. In the fall of 2018, I escorted eighteen undergraduate students from the University of Hawai‘i for a semester study abroad in London. One course I taught centered on the British Museum, exploring in particular representations of Pacific and Asian cultures familiar to my students. The other course, on early medieval Europe, focused on the stunning Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibit at the British Library, with side visits to the British Museum room 41, Sutton Hoo, and Winchester.

However, the big excursion was to Northumberland, dropping down from Scotland into Lindisfarne, Jarrow, Durham, and York. At Lindisfarne, my Hawai‘i students intuitively felt the sacredness of the place, even though it was not “their island.” In part this response was due to Lindisfarne’s seclusion and relatively protected status, compared to colonized Oahu with its heavy tourism and militarism. But also these students experienced what it meant to be an early medieval pilgrim, that the journey itself made the destination meaningful. As one student of Hawaiian culture said: “the seclusion of the Holy Island made it that much more significant as a holy place, as you really had to journey to get there”. My feeling exactly.

Several followers of this blog are family members who, bless their hearts, read my dense academic prose with forbearance.  In response to my previous post, some asked could I not write without all of the jargon and say the same thing?  My immediate and admittedly defensive response was, well that would be a different essay for a different audience. 

But as I thought about it, I realized I was not practicing what I was preaching.  One of my points was about how western, often Latin-rooted, words and conceptual categories sound objective and scientific, but they actually inhibit our ability to view our world differently, to think outside those boxes.  Indeed, two Indigenous thinkers I quoted were objecting to “ontologies” and here I was going on about them using those same boxes.  In addition, a second purpose of my blog post was to explore ways to “reverbiage” the narratives we tell, with an eye to how I can write a historical fiction novel about Aldred in tenth-century Northumbria with contemporary English words that would convey a different spiritual landscape than our own.

So with thanks to those family members for their graciousness, I humbly offer here a reworking of that blog post without the jargon, which has resulted in a very different essay.  In the process I hope to sound less like the kind of objective expert the post condemns, and more like a human being struggling to listen to the wisdom of others and understand different ways of being in the world.  Perhaps this is a first step in altering my “omniscient narrator” voice in Aldred’s story.

[Post-colonial and Post-secular] Insights from African-American and Indigenous Studies

            Everything seems to be post- something these days:  post-modern, post-colonial, post-secular. But we won’t truly be free of whatever “it” is until we no longer have to talk about how to get over it or after it, that thing that is bothering us–whether the “it” is modernity, colonialism, or secularism, or all three, because they are all tied together.

            “Post” movements engage in what is called “deconstruction,” taking apart or dismantling a system or way of thinking that is thought to be damaging or limiting us.  Usually it is something so ubiquitous that we have accepted it without naming it, and once someone names it, debate begins.  It is, in an analogy popularized by David Foster Wallace, a “fish in water” problem.  In his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, “This is Water,” Wallace tells a joke where a grandfather fish sees a pair of younger fish swimming by and asks, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The young fish ask each other, “what is water?”

Brendan’s Coracle

  It is a dangerous question: like pointing out the emperor’s new clothes, people get uncomfortable at their nakedness.

          However, the goal of naming and taking apart certain beliefs is not to shame or harm, but to heal. Although the process of overturning embedded systems is necessarily messy, the purpose is to produce new ways of thinking and being.  This principle of deconstructing to rebuilt and repair applies to many current debates about such topics as racism, policing, immigration, economic inequality, or Indigenous sovereignty.  To take one example that will surely get me in trouble, recent theories identifying the racist waters in which we swim are being contested by those who deny the existence of systemic racism, in a “what is water” kind of way.[1]  These waters are polluted by certain assumptions rooted in American culture and white evangelicalism that need to be called out, but when called out provoke a defensive response.  

            The “post” being taken apart in this blog post is “secularism.” Secularism is one pillar in these modern assumptions that needs challenging.  The whole notion that there are two separate things called “secular” and “religious,” is a western invention dating back to the Enlightenment era, and also embedded in our American notion of “separation of church and state.”  Many mistakenly assume that separating the institutions of church and state means that we also can separate secular and religious, physical and spiritual in our daily lives, bodies from souls.  These pairs are examples of “binarisms” in western thought: categories that are mutually exclusive (you can’t be secular and religious at the same time) and often hierarchical (visible physical things are more real or important than invisible spiritual things, which are private and relative).  Sometimes this mutual exclusivity harms both sides, as in the false notion that science is opposed to religion and vice versa in the American culture wars over evolution, climate change, and the sacredness of Indigenous lands.  The binary terms of debate have to be overcome first if we are to address these issues.

We need to tell a new story.

            To get outside of these boxes separating bodies from souls, we can turn to cultures that have a different way of seeing the world.  I have found sustenance in more holistic visions from Native American, Hawaiian, and African American thinkers, among others.  One of the divisions in my own experience is between my personal faith life and my scholarly work—a necessary separation of domains of activity at an institutional level (separation of church and state is vital). But ultimately if I am to remain a “whole” person, everything that I see and do, read and hear, say and write are intertwined and influencing each other. 

            This blog is an example of that uncomfortable space of the personal and the professional:  I am a professor of history writing historical fiction (fair enough, others have done so), but I am also infusing matters of heart and faith, as well as activism on social justice issues.  I cannot isolate the process of telling Aldred’s story based on academic research into early medieval Britain from contemporary issues that consume my attention and are changing my thinking and my faith experience as a Jesus-follower, especially this last 18 months at the conjunction of a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the protection in Hawai‘i of Mauna Kea as sacred.[2]

What is sacred? 

That is a question well within both my academic expertise and personal experience as I am listening and learning from those who swim in different cultural waters than my own. Consequently, I have an obligation to speak and act within my circles of influence, whether on campus, in the community, or in scholarly conversations.  Nor am I alone in this endeavor, despite some resistance to the notion of including contemporary and personal beliefs in “objective” scholarly discourse.

            Tarren Andrews, the Bitterroot Salish scholar whom I cited in the previous blog post, defines what it means to have a “good heart” for medieval scholars entering into conversation with Indigenous studies:

            The idea of xẹ st spúʔus is the foundation of Indigenous relationality. Unlike the bēaga bryttan (ring giver) of Beowulf’s world, who gives gifts in exchange for martial loyalty, Indigenous kinship and all other forms of Indigenous relationality are predicated on doing, being, and giving without the expectation of reciprocation. Acting in xẹ st spúʔus cultivates an ethic of relationality and kinship that is contingent not on a regular assessment of exchange or a balancing of scales but on continual proof of intent, motivation, and communal goals. Beginning with something like xẹ st spúʔus destabilizes the Euro-Western epistemologies of capital, property, and the gift economy, creating space for Indigenous ways of knowing and being to have a sincere and material impact on medieval studies.[3]

This potent critique and invitation speaks back into our understanding of early medieval Britain.[4] The elevation of Beowulf as a quintessential representation of the values and beliefs of the people who lived in that time and place, is also a distortion:  whoever composed, modified, and transmitted the story and then the poem between the seventh and the eleventh centuries, the single manuscript artifact we have recording this poem represents only one elite perspective and set of values. Moreover, the selection of Beowulf by early modern English scholars to represent their ancestral culture speaks as much or more to their values as it does those of the early medieval poet and their audience.

            You might detect here that I do not like Beowulf, and frankly I do get a bit tired of its prominence.  I have accustomed myself to teach it by deconstructing its history as a tool for exploring the ways we look at the past.  But my reading of other texts and artifacts from early medieval Britain suggests that Beowulf—and other seminal texts like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, or King Alfred’s translations—are not all that representative of the lived experience of people inhabiting those cultural landscapes.  Many of my colleagues have and are making the same point while studying less well-known materials or by reading between the lines of the famous texts. 

            To give one example related to Tarren Andrew’s point about the nature of gift giving in Beowulf:  Stephanie Clark in Compelling God demonstrates how we misunderstand early medieval gift exchange in prayer because we read it through a lens of capitalism where everything is a commodity for individual possession, rather than seeing prayer as a relational gift between and among people with their divinity, involving reciprocity without a price tag, as it were. [5] Both Andrews and Clark point out to us, “this is the water we are swimming in” and also “here is a different type of water others swim in.”  From these and other thought-provoking essays and books, I realize how the material commodity economy in which I live affects the way I understand both the early medieval people I study and my own understanding of prayer and reciprocity in community.

              Thus, the idea of kinship and community has been on my mind lately in relation to the sacred:  how kinship manifested in early medieval Britain, how we might cultivate it among scholars of early medieval Britain, but also how I live in community locally. These three are inextricably intertwined in this body-soul person.

And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as any ball.  I looked at it and thought:  What can this be?  And I was given this general answer:  It is everything which is made. I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing.  And I was answered in my understanding:  It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God. 
Julian of Norwich, Showings (Short Text Chapter iv).

In the last year and a half, I have participated in a number of virtual pilgrimages, webinars, and discussion groups at various intersections of social justice and spirituality.   Most were quite intense and personal, as we journey together toward healing of broken relationships and repair of unjust systems. I ask myself:

•             How should I choose my words more carefully and thoughtfully?
•             How should I act locally and globally?

As is evident from citations and quotes in previous posts, what I hear and see from African-American, Indigenous, and Native Hawaiian Christians de-colonizing the Gospel and resisting systemic racism looks and feels more like Jesus and the Bible than what is coming out of most contemporary US white evangelical churches.  Moreover, “reading the Bible through non-western eyes” in this way resonates with my own efforts to study early medieval Christianities free of certain modern blinders. I hope to infuse these new understandings of prayer and kinship into my portrayal of Aldred in tenth-century Northumbria.

Aldred at the Battle of Brunanburh, hallowing water:

“why don’t you hold the sieve, while I pour the water.”  He thought the boy’s hands too unsteady to pour, so he took the jug from him and let the boy hold the sieve lined with finely woven flaxen cloth over the basin set on a small table beside them.

            As he poured, Aldred began to chant, “Exorcizo te, aque, in nomine Dei patris omnipotentis….”

            When he was done with the exorcism prayer, timed with the pouring of the water, he set the jug down and motioned the seive away.  Then he began the benediction of water, “Deus qui ad salutem humani generis maxima…,” asking God to purify the water with his divine grace so that wherever it be used, it would bring cleansing and healing, freedom and protection.

            The boy watched him with awe.  The water was now still and clear, the sieve having removed the debris and any remaining impurities sunk to the bottom of the basin.

            Through the whole procedure, it seemed that Aldred and the boy had stepped for a few minutes into another world.  The sound of Aldred’s voice cancelled that of moaning men, the water running and pooling seemed peaceful and comforting.  The two of them remained motionless for several minutes, staring at the water. 

           It seemed silly, in some ways, to take such slow care over this procedure, while men were dying all around them.  And yet, God was there in the water.  It had the power to cool the heat of battle and quench men’s spiritual thirst.

---

[1]  For some excellent guidelines on having these conversations, see Smithsonian Talking About Race  especially Being Antiracist.

[2] See blog posts Silence is not an option, “I Can’t Breathe,” and Reimagining Early Medieval Britain.

[3] Tarren Andrews, “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts: An Introduction,” English Language Notes 58.2 (2020), pp. 1-17 at pp. 2-3.

[4]  See also Catherine Karkov’s “eutopia” in the previous post.

[5] Stephanie Clark, Compelling God: Theories of Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2018).

The following is a continuation of the blog post from virtual Leeds 2020 on Re-Imagining Early Medieval Britain, both posts serving as background for a forthcoming essay on this topic.  These reflections are more autobiographical than is appropriate for a scholarly publication, and also still in progress as I seek to apply them to my historical fiction novel on Aldred chronicled on this blog.  I have inserted some zentangle wood tile images to break up the text. Apologies for special characters in Indigenous words not represented correctly in the WordPress font.

Post-colonial and Post-secular Insights from African-American and Indigenous Studies

            In focusing on magical realism in contemporary fiction, the earlier blog post delved into the effects of western binaries by citing primarily Kathleen Davis, N. T. Wright, and Martin Luther King.  In this post I would like to extend that exploration of ontologies into post-colonial and post-secular studies from African-American and Indigenous studies.[1]  These approaches not only deconstruct modern western ontologies that have constricted our thinking, but they also offer a means of escape for all of us, including scholars of early medieval Britain. 

            As noted in my earlier post, I am a white non-Indigenous person learning to listen to the voices of contemporary Indigenous and African-American spiritualities decolonizing minds, bodies, and souls.  I am grateful for the generosity of spirit found among cultural practitioners here in Hawai‘i and other Indigenous scholars, particularly the thoughtful invitation to medievalists from Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish) to go beyond just “engaging with” Indigenous studies and enter into kinship relationships with a good heart (x.est spúʔus).[2]  In this ongoing process of listening and learning, I am endeavoring to apply these insights to a study of early medieval Britain, mindful of my own cultural limits and the risks of mis-appropriation. I begin with some deconstruction of the western binarisms and ontologies that have limited me.

Flux

            Ontologies, ways of categorizing human experience or perception of the world, easily fall into hierarchical chains.  Even the word ontology and associated categorical terms betray power differentials. Among Indigenous thinkers, Zoe Todd notes that “ontology is just another word for colonialism,” while Edgar Garcia points out that “What some people call myth, or some people call magical thinking — we might just call it ‘theory.’ Or ‘conceptuality.’”^[3] The semantic shifts between terms such as ‘myth’ and ‘theory’ are rooted in western philosophical ontologies contrasting magic with religion or science, in ways applied by colonizers to subjugated cultures whose systems of belief and reason were denigrated or dismissed as irrational. 

            Similarly, scholars of medieval “magic” wrestle to escape the modern progress model of magic-religion-science.[4]  Naming as a means of othering, while categorizing along a system of hierarchical values, is rooted in language itself, particularly the power of Latin-based words with their scientific-sounding objectivity. Post-colonial push back on these linguistic ontologies highlights for those in the field of medieval European studies the need to recognize how deeply embedded this language is in our professional academic narratives, in turn revealing how our supposed scientific objectivity is riddled with inherent materialist biases against various forms of spirituality.[5]

            In response to this materialist bias in modernity, Arturo Escobar notes how “we are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions” and adds:

Given that we cannot be intimate with the Earth within a mechanistic paradigm, we are in dire need of a New Story that might enable us to reunite the sacred and the universe, the human and the non-human. The wisdom traditions, including those of [I]ndigenous peoples, are a partial guide towards this goal of re-embedding ourselves within the Earth.[6]

This call for a New Story should be heard by both historians and fiction authors, but particularly those at the intersection of the two:  those of us writing historical fiction need to break free of the modern western narratives of progress with its ontological hierarchies mapped onto the pre-modern.

            Resistance to these modern storylines comes also from within global Christian communities “decolonizing the Gospel” by reframing or decentering the dominant and hegemonic western Christianity that came to their shores with colonialist missionaries.[7] Liberation theology emerging from Latin American and African American thinkers restores an incarnational Gospel message. For example, Barbara Holmes in Joy Unspeakable, outlines the contemplative practices of the Black Church in the African diaspora.[8] She describes an embodied spirituality that both resists the gnostic-like dualism of modern white evangelicalism in the U.S. but also points us to a larger more diverse set of Christian practices of spirituality globally and historically.[9]

            Likewise, post-colonial Native American, Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islander “Jesus-followers,” to use one circumlocution avoiding the pejorative meaning attached to “Christian,” are working to restore a more holistic understanding of Indigenous Christianities free of western blinders.[10] Contextual theology suggests a dialogue between culture and an imported faith.  Imagine, anthropologist Matt Tomlinson suggests, Jesus as the Pig of God rather than Lamb of God, or consider Tongan theologian Sione ‘Amanaki Havea’s Coconut Theology, embodying Jesus as the Coconut of Life, which provides the bread and the wine for the Eucharist, as does kalo (taro) with fresh water for Hawaiian Jesus-followers.[11]

            Such acculturation of a proselytizing religion like Christianity is clearly evident in early medieval Britain, despite a Rome-centered narrative of universalizing and homogenizing.  Consequently, the emergence of distinctive British, Irish, or English Christianities should be considered normative not aberrant.[12]  For example, the hybridity of liturgical practice in the tenth-century Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 manuscript (the “Durham Ritual” or “Collectar”) that Aldred glossed and the community of St. Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street modified, should not be seen only in terms of its adherence to or deviation from the monastic reform movement emanating from Wessex, as if on the periphery, but viewed at the center of its own assertion of Northumbrian spirituality.[13]

3 Sisters Garden

            Two further aspects of Indigenous ways of thinking are currently influencing my effort to write new stories about early medieval Northumbria.  One is the role of language in terms of word choice among modern Englishes, the subject of a forthcoming scholarly essay, and the second has to do with holistic views of the natural world.  Here I outline my current reflections on these two issues.

            The words we choose have stories embedded in them, connecting current generations to the ancestors.  As a consequence, reviving cultural memories through language education is central to contemporary post-colonial Indigenous movements, particularly the ways in which language is tied to a sense of place:

I ka ʻōlelo ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo ka make (in language there is life, in language there is death). This ʻōlelo noʻeau (wise saying) inextricably links our survival as a people to the survival of our language. Languages convey nuances unique to our own worldviews, cultures, and traditions.^[14]

Imperialist assertions of English dominance suppressing Indigenous languages has done and continues to do irreparable harm to linguistic diversity and cultural identities.  Similarly, pidgin and creole languages developed by people of color under colonialism were and are often dismissed by language purists as “broken” English in favor of “standard” English. For example, Hawaiian Creole (HCE), locally called Pidgin, developed among settler colonialist workers whom plantation owners brought in from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere in competition with one another, but who allied as laborers, but this form of Pidgin English also has roots in an earlier Pidgin Hawaiian (‘Ölelo Pa‘i‘ai). ^[15] Pidgins, along with the Indigenous language ‘Ölelo Hawai‘i, were disfavored or banned even before, but especially after the American overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, in favor of competence in standard English.^[16] 

            In opposition to racist monlingualism (it is usually people of color whose bi- or tri-lingualism is disparaged), we need to move toward a narrative of multiple Englishes and the empowering creativeness of translingual environments.[17]  Despite colonialist English-only prejudices, creole languages are neither ‘primitive’ nor simplistic; rather, they are the opposite of a ‘pure’ or ‘original’ language. They were created and developed in multilingual environments to facilitate communication between groups, as more than likely occurred in early medieval Northumbria between the dominant English speakers in relation to Irish, Welsh, Cumbric, and Scots Gaelic, as well as Old Norse. Such language mixing does not imply equality.  The main lexifer for Hawaiian Creole is English, undoubtedly true also for the dominance of English speakers in early medieval Britain.[18]  Moreover, language hierarchies established by those in power exist within and between various Englishes and Creoles; conversely, for the underclasses, speaking “local” can be a source of pride and resistance. 

            The concept of purity in languages is also applied to culture and religion, notably an invisible standard of what is ‘Christian’ on a sliding scale with ‘pagan’, with either one rated at the top:  either valuing some mythical pure Christianity unsullied by local culture’s retention of pagan practices, or seeking some pure ‘original’ paganism stripped of its foreign Christian accretions.[19]  Whichever way you tip it, this scale is another instance of a linguistic ontology that inhibits our understanding of the past as well as the present.

            A second thread in contemporary Indigenous reactions to modern binaries is an emphasis on a holistic view of the human condition in relation to the Creator and the creation, sometimes linked to the Hebrew construct of shalom and its rich meanings for wholeness beyond just abstract “peace.”[20] So, for example, Keetoowah Cherokee descendant Randy Woodley connects the Biblical concept of shalom to what he and many contemporary Native American tribes in North America summarize from their common stock of stories and values as the “Harmony Way.”[21]  Similarly, contextual theology in Samoa draws on the concept of fa‘asamoa, the Samoan Way as a God-given culture.[22] Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of botany and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, combines the scientific lens of studying nature with a potent sense of connection to the natural world from a variety of Native American tribal storehouses of knowledge.[23]  

Mauna Paradox

            In the same vein, Native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) are exploring the power of aloha for local and global transformations in how humans relate to the environment and one another, embodied in the Lökahi triangle integrating spiritual, natural, and communal dimensions.[24] In ‘Ölelo Hawai‘i, aloha is a rich word that means far more than its usual English translation, commercial misappropriations, and pop culture (ab)uses.[25] The development of kapu aloha (protected or sacred way of loving the ‘aina or land) on Mauna Kea in opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) embodies that worldview.[26] As one colleague summarized in response to the kia‘i, or protectors, of Mauna Kea: ‘Language is a repository of the political ontology of a people. If that is taken, much else can be easily taken as well. Yet, revitalized language can be a weapon of protection’.[27] Aloha and the Lökahi triangle speak to a deep rooted sense of connection between sacred landscapes and humans in ways that bypass the binary of pagan versus Christian imposed on Indigenous and other convert communities who not only absorbed but also transmuted the Christian mission to create their own Christianities. 

            That these same acculturation processes happened in the conversion of European people groups in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages seems to have been forgotten as that particular cultural formation of “Christianity” claimed both exclusivity and universality in global dominance.  One way to restore and contextualize that history is to “reverbiage” our narratives recounting the emergence of various forms of Christianity in early medieval Britain.[28]

            This sensitivity to language in relation to a sense of place also raises questions about what to call the historic place-times we study and write about.  Recently I have taken to using the geographic insular term Britain instead of England.  The Northumbria in which Aldred lived in the tenth century was a place of shifting political boundaries within and around the island of Britain.  Even the island of Britain as a contiguous landmass defined by ocean boundaries somewhat deceptively implies a land-based territorial unity, when in fact connections across water often formed more easily than across diverse terrains within Britain.  Thus regions of Britain north of the Humber from the Iron Age to the eleventh century interacted in a North Atlantic world stretching from Scandinavia to Ireland as much or more than they connected with southwest Britain with its cross-channel continental connections. English-speaking communities in tenth-century Northumbria existed in a historic web of cultural identities and influences from Irish, Scots, Cumbrian, and Scandinavian languages and practices, different from and even resistant to West Saxon hegemony.  In the tenth century, the notion of a singular bordered “England” and a normative or homogenized “English” Christianity emanating from Wessex was not yet inevitable.^[29]  Rather than tracing the emergence and triumph of what becomes hegemonic, we should seek to understand the plurality of experiences and the contested nature of the cultural landscape.

            To end on a positive note:  Deconstruction may seem like a negative enterprise, not to mention messy, but it is necessary in order to move into the stage of writing new narratives. Post-colonial and post-secular theorists and Indigenous scholars are not advocating a wholesale rejection of modernity via a return to some imagined pristine Indigenous or pre-modern culture, but are exposing the unstated philosophical assumptions undergirding western modernity and its globalization. In resisting the body-soul, secular-spiritual binaries, these holistic visions emphasize new ways of living and being that may sound impossibly utopian. But the human desire for a better world than the ones we have made drives most cosmologies and theologies across cultures, so should not be dismissed out of hand in favor of a modern western utilitarianism or pseudo-scientist materialism in our search for understanding the human condition through the study of the past.

            While drawing our attention to many of the dystopian fractures in early medieval Britain, Catherine Karkov offers an updated “eutopia” for our contemplation:

a happy place that can be realised—that would be a place in which diversity, compassion, and inclusion are vital operating methods. Eutopia, like utopia, is in opposition to the world as it is and holds out the possibility of real change. ^[30]

This happy place, for scholars and other post-modern humans, is an invitation to enter into a new set of scholarly and personal relationships.  It may be at times uncomfortable or disconcerting, especially when we recognize the power differentials between those of us with certain privileges and those who are in vulnerable positions. Developing kinships requires compassion and forgiveness, and will take time and patience to reach fruition.

Bridget’s Cross

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[1] On post-secular theory, see Charly Coleman, “Review Article Resacralizing the World: The Fate of Secularization in Enlightenment Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 82 (June 2010): 368–95; David Hanlon, “Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World,” The Contemporary Pacific 29 (2017): 286–318 on Indigenous historiographies and “Deep Time”; and Karen Louise Jolly, ‘Anglo-Saxons on Exhibit: Displaying the Sacred’, in Jolly and Brooks (eds), Global Perspectives, forthcoming.

[2] Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy, eds, Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts, English Language Notes 58.2 (2020), Introduction (pp. 1-17).  See also The Value of Hawaiʻi 3: Hulihia, ed. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘öpua, Craig Howes, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, and Aiko Yamashiro (Honolulu, 2020), which contains diverse reflections on the intersections between Hawaiian activism, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 and other global-local issues.

[3] Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s take on the Ontological Turn: “ontology” is just another word for colonialism’, Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî blog post October 24, 2014 <https://zoestodd.com/2014/10/24/an-indigenous-feminists-take-on-the-ontological-turn-ontology-is-just-another-word-for-colonialism/ > [accessed 5 April 2021]; Len Gutkin, “’Who Gets to Speak in Our Traditions?’: Edgar Garcia on the canon, Indigenous studies and talking with the dead,” Chronicle of Higher Education Opinion (interview), June 29, 2020 <https://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-Speak-in-Our/249089?cid=wcontentgrid_40_2 > [accessed 5 April 2021]. See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London, 2012).

[4] See Karen Louise Jolly, “Magic and Science,” in The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, edited Helaine Selin (Dordrecht, 1997), reprinted in The Encyclopaedia of Classical Indian Sciences, edited Helaine Selin and Roddam Narasimha (Hyderabad, India, 2007); Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,” in The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages (London, 2002), pp. 1-72; and Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990; 2^nd ed 2014; revised and expanded 3^rd edition, forthcoming).

[5] Indeed, some peer reviewers’ discomfort with the use of the first person in scholarly essays reflects this desire for objectivity in academic discourse, the need to be impersonal and distant.

[6] Arturo Escobar, ‘Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South’, Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana 11.1 (2016): 11–32, at 15, 27 <https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.110102e> [accessed 5 April 2021]. Escobar in writing about Epistemologies of the South contrasts a western dualistic political One-World World ontology with relational, holistic ontologies among Indigenous communities.

[7] See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: Rise of Global Christianity, 3^rd edn (New York, 2011; orig. 2002); and Randy S. Woodley and Bo C. Sanders, Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59 p.m. Conversation (Eugene, 2020). On the missonary legacy in Hawai‘i, see Ronald C. Williams, Jr., “Claiming Christianity: The Struggle over God and Nation in Hawai‘i, 1880-1900” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai‘i Mānoa, 2013).

[8] Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, 2^nd edn (Minneapolis, 2017). For black liberation theology, see James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. edn (Maryknoll, 1997, orig. 1975); and Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston, 1996, orig. 1949).

[9] On white evangelicalism in the U.S. and the Black church, see Jim Wallis, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America (Grand Rapids, 2016); Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (Downers Grove, 2018); Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids, 2019); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Black Church: This is our Story, This is Our Song (PBS, 2021) <https://www.pbs.org/weta/black-church/> [accessed 5 April 2021].

[10] See Richard Twiss, Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys (Downers Grove, 2015).

[11] Matt Tomlinson, God Is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific (Honolulu, 2020), pp. pp. 3-6; David Baumgart Turner, “Reconnecting Spiritual Roots in Our Faith Communities,” in The Value of Hawai‘i 3, pp. 178-81, at p. 179 for kalo and fresh water as Eucharist.  See also Michael W. Scott, “Boniface and Bede in the Pacific: Exploring Anamorphic Comparisons between the Hiberno-Saxon Missions and the Anglican Melanesian Mission,” in Global Perspectives, ed. Jolly and Brooks, forthcoming.

[12] Tiffany Beechy has pointed to a similar embodiment in early medieval insular aesthetics that resists the Augustinian neoPlatonism separating material and spiritual: “Consumption, Purgation, Poetry, Divinity: Incarnational Poetics and the Indo-European Tradition,” Modern Philology 114.2 (2016): 149–169.

[13] Karen Louise Jolly, The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 (Columbus, 2012).

[14] Katrina-Ann R. Kapā‘anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira, “Aloha ‘Āina-Placed Ho‘omoana ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i: A Path to Language Revitalization,” in Handbook of Indigenous Education, ed. Elizabeth Ann McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Singapore, 2019), pp. 339–356, at p. 339.  See also Paige Miki Kaläokananiki‘eki‘e Okamura, “He Make‘e ‘Ölelo Hawai‘i, He Make‘e Lāhui: To Lose Our Language Is to Forget Who We Are,” in The Value of Hawai‘i 3, pp. 131-34; and Patricia Espiritu Halagao and Cheryl Ka‘uhane Lupenui, “Hawai‘i Breathes Multilingualism,” in The Value of Hawai‘i 3, pp. 186-93.

[15] See the Charlene Junko Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies at the University of Hawai‘i,  <https://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/&gt; [accessed 19 July 2021]; Katie Drager, “Pidgin and Hawaiʻi English: An Overview,” International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication 1 (2012): 61-73; Christina Higgins, “Earning Capital in Hawaiʻi’s Linguistic Landscape,” in Unequal Englishes across Multilingual Spaces, ed. Ruanni Tupas (New York, 2015), pp. 145-162; and Halagao and Lupenui, “Hawai‘i Breathes Multilingualism,” p. 187.

[16] See Oliviera, “Aloha ‘Āina-Placed Ho‘omoana ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i,” pp. 340-41, and Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu and Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘öpua, “Colonization, Education, and Kanaka ‘Ōiwi Survivance,” in Handbook of Indigenous Education, pp. 49-62.

[17] See A. Suresh Canagarajah, Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (London, 2013), pp. 6-8 and 20-24; and Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford, 1995).

[18] Although note above in Halagao and Lupenui, “Hawai‘i Breathes Multilingualism,” the influence of pre-plantation era Hawaiian and Polynesian Pidgins in which the main lexifer was not necessarily English.

[19] Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), pp. 18-34; Eric G. Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism in Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past (Cambridge, 2000).

[20] See Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (New Haven, 2020), p. 20.

[21] Randy Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids, 2012), Preface, where he gives a brief synopsis of his dissertation research on the variations and commonalities among North American tribes. To summarize a worldview and set of values drawn over a long history of spiritual practices shared among various linguistic communities is no different than the kinds of credal statements found in other world religions, like Christianity, and in no way denies the existence of variations and branches within that religious tradition. 

[22] Tomlinson, God is Samoan, pp. 7-8. See also Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right (New York, 2016); and Escobar, ‘Thinking-Feeling’, 11-32.

[23] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis, MN, 2013).  See her critique of the scientific lens (pp. 341-47) and also her discussion of the Thanksgiving Address of gratitude to Creation shared by the Haudenosaunee across tribes and around the world (pp. 107-118).

[24] For Lökahi as balance and aloha as compassion in a medical context, see “Traditional Health Beliefs: Native Hawaiian Values,” Stanford School of Medicine Ethnogeriatrics (2021) <https://geriatrics.stanford.edu/ethnomed/hawaiian_pacific_islander/fund/health_beliefs.html> [accessed 5 April 2021]; in a social work context, see Thao N. Le and Pono Shim, “Mindfulness and the Aloha Response,” Journal of Indigenous Social Development 3.2 (August 2014): 1-11 (available at 

 http://www.hawaii.edu/sswork/jisd http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/33280); and for one commercialized variation on the triangle, see Lani Kamauu Yamasaki, Live Lökahi™ (2021) <https://laniyamasaki.com/> [accessed 5 April 2021].  Emerging theological variations are not yet public.

[25] The decision to use italics for Hawaiian words is a fraught one because ‘olelo Hawai‘i is considered a primary, not a “second,” language in Hawai‘i. In this essay, I have chosen to use italics in order to emphasize the Indigenous meanings of words like aloha that have been Anglicised or misappropriated.

[26] For more information on kapu aloha on Mauna a Wākea, see Pu‘uhonua o Pu‘uhuluhulu (2021) <https://www.puuhuluhulu.com/learn/university> [accessed 5 April 2021]; and Presley Ke‘alaanuhea Ah Mook Sang, “Pu‘uhonua o Pu’uhuluhulu University: He Kïpuka Aloha ‘Äina no ka ‘Imi Na‘auao,” in The Value of Hawai‘i 3, pp. 265-67.  See also the holistic global vision and insights from Höküle‘a, the Hawaiian voyaging canoe, through the Polynesian Voyaging Society at <http://www.hokulea.com/waamoana/>  [accessed 5 July 2021].

[27] Rachel Kuhn, personal correspondence.

[28] On “reverbiaging,” see Woodley and Sanders, Decolonizing Evangelicalism, pp. 18-20.

[29] See Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks, “Introduction,” in Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, ed. Jolly and Brooks (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming); Barry Cunliffe, Britain Begins (Oxford, 2012); and Martin Carver, Formative Britain: An Archaeology of Britain, Fifth to Eleventh Century AD (London, 2019).

[30] Catherine E. Karkov, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia (Woodbridge, 2020), p. 239.

Last year I finished a draft chapter on Aldred’s pilgrimage with St. Cathroe in the year 941, which I have now posted as a page (warts and all, some typos yet uncorrected): 941 Pilgrimage. Earlier posts explored different aspects of this journey from Govan to Penrith:

• Ubi Sunt, filling in the timeline
• Pilgrimage, sailing, and saints’ lives
• Govan Sarcophagus
• Fabric Art

Mainly I posted this still-rough draft now because I need to reference it in an essay I am writing, rather than quoting from it at length. The essay is a continuation of a paper I presented last year at the virtual Leeds Congress (transcript posted as Re-imagining Early Medieval Britain) and has the same title but continues into a discussion of language in historical fiction.

The 941 Pilgrimage chapter is very long, perhaps too long as I got carried away with saints’ lives recounted amidst the material conditions of a journey by sea and overland. If anyone has the patience to read through it and comment, feel free to put your advice or corrections in the comments section of this post.

Meanwhile, in a COVID bubble in California, I have been learning Zentangle from my artist sister (Ann, who made the Lindisfarne Gospel Luke quilt). I am her un-artistic guinea pig for preparing class lessons. These images, above and below, show one of my recent feeble efforts.

Zentangling not only echoes early medieval arts, it is also very meditative: I highly recommend it.

For those who were at the Virtual Leeds International Medieval Congress session on Fantasies of the Medieval and wanted to see a copy of my paper, and for those who missed the session, here is my script, “as is” with no notes or elaborations.  This is part of a larger work in progress.

For those who asked:  quilt behind me as I spoke.  Artist my sister, Ann Baum.

The focus of this study is on representations of spirituality in popular fictional medievalisms:  I am curious how and why some authors fail and others succeed in representing early medieval worldviews that contain beliefs and practices alien to western secularism.  The key problem impeding modern authors is in fact this western binary of medieval versus modern separating natural and supernatural, science and religion, secular and sacred, body and soul, heaven and earth.  I am arguing for a post-secular approach to primary source evidence, one that listens to decolonizing voices from Indigenous studies and from African-American spirituality. I am advocating for medieval historical fiction that rejects fantasizing and instead injects some “magical realism,” for lack of a better term.

Historical fiction set in the pre-modern past often discounts or explains away miraculous events or sacred encounters. Some authors do so by providing omniscient narrators with materialist, often reductionist, explanations for the events.  Others channeling a medieval person make these beliefs in divine agency personal and relativistic, non-verifiable events.  But the contemporary popularity of medieval fantasy suggests that such modernist historical fiction fails to capture something transcendent that many find missing in a post-modern world.  Medieval fantasy, and futuristic science fiction, both create alternative universes where the supernatural is natural. Similarly, the emergent genre of magical realism “suspends disbelief” according to the rules of modern fiction by naturalizing the supernatural in the experience of the subjective narrator.  While these genres may destabilize the gap, ultimately they often fail to escape the western binaries inherent in secular rationalism and its reactionary counterpart, Victorian-era romanticism. In short, heaven and earth as integrated in holistic early medieval worldviews survives today in fictional history as fantasized by those inhabiting a disenchanted world.

Before unpacking these observations, let me explain where I am coming from.  This presentation, half of my original abstract and session, focuses on fantasy and magical realism in historical fiction, while the other half in a virtual session on August 21 looks more closely at language.  In both, I am illustrating these issues via my own efforts to write historical fiction set in tenth century Northumbria.  On and off for a number of years, I have been writing a fictional biography of Aldred, glossator of the Lindisfarne Gospels and provost of St. Cuthbert’s community at Chester-le-Street.

So, the long and short of my intellectual journey in Braudelian terms. The longue durée of my career as a medievalist, and the formation of my mental landscape, is relevant for positioning myself here and now as a historian of early medieval Britain.  From my early college years, I was attracted to the writings of the Inklings and those who influenced them:  J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, G.K. Chesteron, and George MacDonald.  As an undergraduate, I majored in English literature with vague intentions of becoming a writer like them, and was subsequently drawn into medieval literature, particularly Old English.  So much so, that when I was in the master’s program, I switched from English into a self-designed Interdisciplinary program combining English, Religious Studies, and History.  My M.A. is actually in “Anglo-Saxon England” (more on that term later). I then migrated into the History Ph.D. program where I pursued popular religion in elf charms, which later led me into deconstructing magic, religion, and science.  The notable thread in this biography is religion:  that I am a practicing Christian plays a role in my emerging consciousness of this tension in the modern study of the medieval past.  The disciplinary hybridity also explains my belated return to writing fiction via history.

In addition to this long back story are the conjunctures of my life as a scholar in Hawai‘i: here I began engaging with world historical approaches that challenged western narratives, teaching in a diverse environment to students geographically, temporally, and culturally distant from medieval Europe, and most of all, listening to and learning from kanaka ‘öiwi about native Hawaiian worldviews that resist western binaries.  [should be a macron over the “o” but this font fails to have one]

The three recent événements bearing on this paper are first and foremost the native Hawaiian kia‘i , protectors of Mauna Kea blocking the TMT observatory on the “Big Island” of Hawai‘i.  The kia‘i have developed kapu aloha, strict protocols of care and love as part of a resistance movement that relies on Indigenous holistic ways of thinking about the sacred in the landscape—a view of the sacred much misunderstood by those operating in a binary worldview, such as my university’s administration with its divisions between STEM and “non-STEM” fields.  Second, the pandemic has laid bare the problems of modernity in colonialism, globalism, and tourism that force us to seek other ways of thinking about the human condition.  And third, the Black Lives Matter movement has consumed much of my attention in the last month since the police murdered George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubrey, and Breonna Taylor, among so many others we should name. I firmly believe we are at a transformational moment, a reckoning with the past, and that historians and medievalists need to be actively involved in challenging western-dominated narratives, while toppling monuments to those narratives.

Looking ahead, I am teaching a class this fall on popular “medievalisms” with an ethics focus on issues such as racism.  I aim to challenge myself and my students to be social influencers and agents of change in popular culture.  I am not trying to turn them off to medieval literature or their favorite fantasy games, movies, or books:  they can still enjoy Beowulf, Arthur, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and the Vikings, but in raising their consciousness of embedded images and narratives, I want them to create new visions and write new stories.  As I am doing as well, writing historical fiction that incorporates sacred encounters and imagines embodied souls.

Perhaps my whole career, then, from my master’s thesis on elf charms and popular religion to the present moment teaching about medievalisms and writing Aldred’s story in tenth-century Northumbria has been about me trying to inhabit a worldview in which supernatural and natural, heaven and earth are not mutually exclusive.  In this task, I have been profoundly moved by native Hawaiian and other Indigenous worldviews on the sacred, as well as African-American spirituality.  However, I am saying this as a white non-Indigenous person who wants to listen and speak without appropriating someone else’s culture.  I am neither a scholar of Hawai‘i history or fluent in the language, ‘olelo Hawai‘i, but I am absorbing new ways of thinking, and that has an effect on what I write and say.  Insofar as decolonization and antiracism are local and global movements, they help us undo the colonization of the European past and deracinate our scholarly thinking of its western binarisms.

The question I am confronting in this present moment is this:  What does it mean for me, a western trained, white scholar who studies pre-modern European history, to attempt to write historical fiction about early medieval Britain while living in Hawai‘i and pondering how to be an antiracist?  Certainly my sense of place and displacement helps me be a better historian and writer.  But what am I giving back through my novel? How do I represent the beliefs, values, and behaviors, the good, the bad, and the ugly, of early medieval characters that is historically accurate and empathetic?  How can my novel rewrite the false narratives of the medieval European past in ways that help with decolonizing our minds today?

I offer two avenues for exploring these questions:  first, how historians might overcome western binaries by resacralizing the landscapes of the past using an epistemology of love; and second, how literary authors might sidestep fantasized medievalisms using historical fiction tinged with magical realism.

First, modern western binaries form conceptual boxes we struggle to think outside of. Kathleen Davis and others have highlighted the divide between the medieval as religious and feudal versus the modern as secular, capitalist and democratic, while others have pointed to the western invention of religion.  Theologian Tom Wright describes the Enlightenment’s split level epistemology as a recycled Epicurean philosophy, reflected in Gottfried Ephaim Lessing’s “broad, ugly ditch between the eternal truths of reason and the contingent truths of history,” wherein heaven and earth remain mutually opaque. Lessing’s ditch between the natural and the supernatural, between the present and the past, exists in our minds, a ditch between the medieval and the modern that seems impassable except by resorting to romanticism, relativism, or a gnostic-like dualism, a revived neoPlatonism in which the spiritual exists only on a universal plane separate from our bodies and our lives here and now.

Moreover, as Davis, Wright, and others point out, this Enlightenment ditch is inextricably tied to colonialism, imperialism, and racism.  Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” called out white Christian theologians on this binary:

In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro… I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

King was not the first or the last to note that American racism is rooted in a white slaveholder Christian theology that is dualist, separating black bodies from souls.

Because these binaries are so deeply entrenched in our thinking, we need help to get us out of this divisive and destructive ditch that separates us from understanding the medieval past and ourselves, help that comes not only from re-examining pre-modern histories but from outside the modern western tradition.  In particular, decolonization forces us to re-examine the long nineteenth century of ethnic nation-state formation and its implications for studying early medieval Britain.  Those in the field of “Anglo-Saxon” or early medieval English studies are of necessity becoming experts on the Victorian era in which this field was founded and defined.

And here I should say a word about the displacement of “Anglo-Saxon England” as a deeply problematic term with a long history of racialized notions in the UK and the US, and around the globe via colonialism.  The recent, and long overdue, removal of monuments signals that this message is finally getting through.  The problem for historical fiction set in early medieval Britain is compounded by this racist nationalism, which is tied to the problem I am addressing here, how to escape the Enlightenment ditch between the sacred and secular.

Victorians responded to the Enlightenment rationalist project in part by romanticizing the early medieval past as the basis for Anglo-Saxon superiority, a colonizing of their own histories that cannot be separated from the legacy of imperialist Britain.  Nonetheless, some of my favorite authors, the Inklings, are products of this Victorian spirit of romanticizing as well as racializing the medieval past.  However, the Inklings are also good at resisting the western binaries, probably because of their medievalist Christian faith.  Williams and Lewis lean heavily toward Christian neoPlatonism.  Tolkien, though, is different in regards to divine immanence:  There is no presence of “God” in Middle Earth unless you examine his cosmology in the Silmarillion.  LOTR has an imagined pre-Industrial “beloved community” in the Shire hobbits, who are seemingly those romanticized British shopkeepers. Tolkien offloads the violent and imperialist ventures of that Anglo-Saxon heritage to the Riders of Rohan and the Roman/Byzantine Kings of Numenor and Gondor.  Nonetheless, I love LOTR, the books not the movies, and will continue rereading the Inklings because I think they invite us back to a pre-modern, pre-disenchanted world.

Former bishop of Durham N. T. Wright, whom I cited earlier, stands in that Inkling tradition when he argues against Enlightenment natural theology with what he calls an epistemology of love.  As a New Testament scholar, Wright challenges Lessing’s ditch by examining first century Christian views of the kingdom and parousia in the context of Second Temple Judaism’s understanding of the “world to come” as here but not yet.  This worldview in which heaven and earth were not two separate things is arguably present in early medieval Britain, as Helen Foxhall-Forbes has explored.  Wright asks historians to move away from the cold-hearted objectivity of western scientific history toward an active love of one’s neighbor, dead or alive. This epistemology of love is still living and present among many Indigenous cultures decolonizing their own histories. For example, in Hawaiian aloha is a rich word which, like the Hebrew “shalom” for peace, means far more than “hello” or “love.”  Aloha in Hawai‘i speaks to a deep rooted sense of connection between sacred landscapes and humans.  Hawaiian traditions teach continuity with the ancestors present in land, sea, and space, and concentrated in ritual spaces.  These ways of being can recall for us early medieval views of angels, saints, and other invisible presences made tangible in relics, the Eucharist, and consecrated liturgical spaces.

How do I apply this epistemology of love to writing historical fiction?  In loving Aldred, warts and all, I can begin to see how visible and invisible presences interacted in his every day life, rather than through the lens of prayer versus charm. As a member of a religious community, Aldred has a strong sense of place and of the power of ritual performance to connect heaven and earth.  For example, in a scene where the young cleric Aldred is sanctifying holy water for a priest at the brutal battle of Brunanburh, he and a young boy experience a brief eternal moment of purity as the water is transformed by the exorcism.

This brings me to the second avenue: how magical realism can enliven historical fiction without falling into medievalesque fantasy spirituality.  Both science fiction and medieval fantasy attempt to circumvent the natural-supernatural binary, either by giving a materialist explanation of superpowers located in alien intelligences and evolved post-humans, or by positing fictional histories in alternate worlds in the multiverse. Imagining other worlds can be an instructive exercise for creating better communities here and now, but for many, these fantasies are escapist and not transformative.  Whether utopian or dystopian, these zones let you play out your violent or erotic visions in a virtual reality, cathartic perhaps.  But binary thinking won’t let players cross back over from their magical virtual worlds into the crabbed and cold realities of materialism and scientism. Such fantasies of supernatural powers and presences provide at best faux spiritualities, ungrounded in any worthy epistemology and therefore unsustainable.

Magical realism applied to historical fiction has greater potential for filling in the ditch, despite its unfortunate binarist label of magic versus science.  Even before the emergence of the label, authors like Naomi Mitchisen and Sigrid Undset endeavored to re-enchant classical and medieval legends with a nostalgic paganism, romanticized Celtic spiritualities, and empowering female divinities.  Often such novels present Christianity as the disenchanting force, but I would argue that late antique and early medieval Christianities participated in a similar worldview regarding the immanence of the divine in an incarnate and suffering God.

Recently I have drawn inspiration from African American and Indigenous authors such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ta Nahesi Coates’ The Water Dancer, Liberian author Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King, and Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors.  These stories show body and soul integrated in African and Indigenous experiences of visionary spiritual power, power to overcome, but tied to a strong sense of place, amid the gritty realities of suffering bodies.  For early medieval England, Frederick Buechner in the story of Godric achieves a similar integration of bodily life with an authentic Christian spirituality, demonstrating a deep empathy with the beliefs and practices of his protaganist’s world.  That is what I am aiming for in my novel on Aldred.

I get inside Aldred’s head, and avoid putting a modern mind into a medieval body, by doing what Aldred does:  transcribing texts bilingually, reading books he might have read, praying the Daily Office, visiting places he would have seen, and meditating on crosses and manuscript illuminations. For Aldred, translating Latin prayers with an Old English gloss is an act of listening to the voice of God, while chanting the psalms involves both listening and speaking to God.  As a bibliophile, Aldred reads a lot of the same books I do, so he can wrestle with the problem of evil at the battle of Brunanburh while reading Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.  Aldred’s belief in invisible spiritual agencies is tangible, in the liturgical prayers he performs to clear birds and demons from the fields. Like the Dream of the Rood narrator, Aldred has visions that he must figure out how to interpret within a Christian semiotic.  Even with an omniscient narrator, I don’t actually make God a historical actor in these scenes. Rather, God speaks through creation  to the inner person—not the modern Freudian “self” but the medieval concept of a soul inextricably tied to its body.

If it takes magical realism to re-embody souls and recover an epistemology of love, then that is my plan.  My study of early medieval Britain while living in Hawai‘i has led me to this point of departure. To answer my opening question:  I cannot just stop being a modern white woman in a dominant culture that has drawn sustenance from this early medieval English past.  But I can keep re-reading and re-writing it.

“Christ in Alabama” – Prentiss Taylor. Lithograph. 1932

Langston Hughes, “Christ in Alabama”

 

The Pōpolo Project

 

image credit:  Hawai’i Council for the Humanities