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.
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]
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]
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.
[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; 2nd ed 2014; revised and expanded 3rd 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, 3rd 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, 2nd 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/> [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.
Revealing Words 
Hi Karen I was really interested in this post as it has so many resonances with what I tried (and mainly failed) to do in my two novels set in seventh-century Britain. (Murder in Mercia and Death in Elmet) The dominant perspective of the period is heavily derived from Bede, and this has multiple unfortunate consequences, along the lines that you suggest. Bede discounts the version of christianity that was current in western Britain, and especially Wales, for the best part of 200 years before he was born. This has led to all manner of distortions, such that, St Alban notwithstanding, generations of English children were brought up believing that the arrival of christianity in Britain had something to do with St Augustine. Although I am half Welsh, it is only in the last decade or so that I have begun to uncover the astonishingly rich traditions associated with the sixth and early seventh-century Welsh saints. But it is your thoughts about language that resonate with me most strongly. Britain before the Norman conquest was strongly multi-lingual and I would argue that it is only really after the Norman conquest that it makes much sense to talk about ‘England’ as a united polity, and even then there were more than the three languages of Anglo-Saxon/early English, Latin and Norman French. In your period, let alone in mine (the 7th century), early Welsh/British was surely still spoken very widely, and not just in the far west, especially amongst those with British heritage. Anglo-Saxon was the language of the ruling class, but how far down the hierarchy that extended, what sort of creoles were evolving and how far the various dialects of British/early Welsh were mutually intelligible are matters for speculation. The lack of impact of British vocabulary on Anglo-Saxon is well known, of course, but I find it very hard to believe that British/early Welsh had completely disappeared from Mercia or Wessex, let alone places like Elmet, before the ninth century. And language carries culture. This is a very live debate here in Australia, where generations of First Nations children were stolen from their parents and forbidden to speak their own languages. So I would like to ask you two questions that I have played with mentally over the last decade or so: Is there any possibility that Angle or Saxon rulers forbade their British subjects to speak British/punished them for doing so? And did Latin play a similar culture-erasing role among the educated British elites? Kind regards Sally (And keep up the good work!)
>
By: sallywilde on August 18, 2021
at 4:19 pm
Many thanks, Sally, for your insights from a similarly colonized space where recovery from language oppression is a central issue. I appreciate the two great questions at the end, especially the first one on rulers forbidding languages, on which I have varied thoughts but no answers.
On the one hand, the idea of banning a language in some systematic and official way may be a modern monolingual thing that would not occur to early medieval rulers in cultures with greater respect for multilingualism. Insofar as Bede represents an official and elite church view, he highlights five languages in the island of Britain without any overt denigrating comments on their status.
On the other hand, we do have the Old English legal use of wilh/weale for slave, a seemingly derogatory reference to the Welsh (see Bosworth-Toller Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary). This suggests ethnic discrimination from English-speaking social elites might have extended beyond impatience to looking down on or forbidding members of their household servants and slaves from speaking a British language around them.
Insofar as subordinated persons of necessity learn the language of their oppressors, they are more likely to become bilingual and bicultural than the dominant group. But would British-speaking children removed at a young age as slaves lose their mother tongue? Does this account for the relative lack of linguistic influence on early English from these British tongues? How do we account for the converse in ninth- and tenth-century Viking zones where English prevails with Scandinavian influence?
As for Latin culture-erasing, I think that argument could be made in a limited sense for elite religious zones and the texts they produce. Things that remain in Latin or are written only in Latin are the preserve of the Latin literate (Aldhelm’s riddles, for example), and putting energies into those texts arguably could lead to a lacuna of similar writings in vernaculars. But early medieval Britain and Ireland seem to have a lot of countervailing evidence for creative storytelling (Caedmon and Bible poems), vernacular riddling, translating (Alfred’s project), and macaronic texts (the Irish love weaving Latin and vernacular, but so does Aldred). Why does Aldred gloss in Northumbrian Old English Latin liturgical texts that the clergy only performed in Latin and that the Latin-illiterate laity were used to hearing (and maybe enjoyed hearing) in that “elevated” language of prayer?
A number of these indicators suggest an attitude toward multilingualism as a desirable thing, even if there were language hierarchies for what language is used when and where and with whom.
Thanks for asking such thought-provoking questions. Maybe others will have some suggestions.
By: kljolly on August 19, 2021
at 3:33 pm
[…] 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 […]
By: Re-imagining Re-imagining Early Medieval Britain | Revealing Words on August 21, 2021
at 11:55 am
[…] 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 […]
By: 975 Comet: Old English Medievalism | Revealing Words on August 22, 2022
at 2:20 pm