Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxon King Rex in full regalia (Order of the Bathrobe) with his two sons Ed and Ward

A former student who studied Old English with me forty years ago or more has written me to ask “What’s with this war on the Anglo-Saxons?”  You may not know what he is talking about, but I do.  The term “Anglo-Saxon” has been declared politically offensive, as it supposedly offers aid and comfort to white supremacists.  Vigilant academics have resigned from obscure scholarly organizations with names including “Anglo-Saxon”; and the societies themselves are encouraged to change names.  Believe me, I hesitate to write about topics of political correctness.  In general, my idea of fun does not run to fruitless arguments with humorless adversaries.   Such arguments generate much heat and little light.  This is a risky topic, and I do not claim any special insight into it, but as it primarily manifests itself in linguistic terms, it does fall into a category that has long interested me and has occupied a good deal of my work. 

Political correctness aspires to sanitize language according to certain political canons rather as euphemisms aspire to sanitize language for other social purposes.  Most people don’t actually rest in a restroom, for example.   Contested terms currently include candidates for erasure such as slave and illegal immigrant.  According to the woke, the first should be replaced by enslaved person.  The latter should not be used at all since “a person cannot be illegal.”  The trouble with “Anglo-Saxon” is that the term “is being used by” white supremacists to advance a hateful agenda.  I don’t know whether that is even true, but it is the argument for censoring the term, and it is just as dumb as it looks.  Cars are “being used by” bank-robbers to pull off heists, but that is not a reason to get rid of cars or even to resign from the American Automobile Association.

White supremacy is no laughing matter, but a reaction founded in equal parts of ignorance and self-righteousness is nonetheless ludicrous.  The current academic leftist advocates of “identity politics” are of course not the first group to come up with spurious interpretations of ancient racial groups.  A good deal of German Romanticism indulged in semi-mystical attitudes toward an imagined originary ancient Teutonic race.  With Hitler the idea would move from the realm of the poetic to that of the homicidal.  The whole idea of “fascism”, to the extent that it can be coherently defined, is visually summarized in the rod-bundled axe (in classical Latin fascis, plural fasces), symbolic of the ancient Roman magisterial power to punish and execute criminals.  Mussolini thought his fascism had recovered the spirit of his imagined imperial Roman forebears.  

Who were the Anglo-Saxons?  They were a Germanic people (the Saxons), part of whom in the early Middle Ages migrated to southern England (Anglia, in Latin) and part of whom remained in Germany.  In time the “English” Saxons came to call their continental relatives the Ealdseaxe or “Old Saxons”.  The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons was English.  Since it was an early form of a language that has undergone very significant historical mutation, scholars usually refer to it as Old English.  The Anglo-Saxons were people; the language they spoke was English.  Nobody told them it was Old.  I continue to think that the distinction between “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” (one a people, the other a language) is a useful one.  But both in common and scholarly discourse “Anglo-Saxon” has long since often been used to denominate the language as well; and it is no big deal.  It is preposterous that the term “Anglo-Saxon” should be indicted for crimes of “racism,” for that is the charge it faces.

            Practically all the societies of the old European world were slave societies, especially that of imperial Rome; but the English were freer than many others.  Nowhere in England was there the match of the slave exchange of Dublin.  The great engine of ancient slavery was military conquest.  The English word slave and its European counterparts recall the fate of the conquered Slavonic peoples (the Slavs).  Similarly in early English wealh means both a Welshman (i.e., a native Briton of the populations conquered by the migrating Saxons) and a slave, among other things.  Of course, Anglo-Saxons were often themselves slaves.  Perhaps the most famous early literary appearance of the “English” is the story of Pope Gregory coming upon some Anglo-Saxon children on offer in the Roman slave market.  “Who are these bonny kids?” asked the Pope in his native tongue, Latin.  Answer: Angli.  No, said Gregory, who was among other things one funny guy.  Not Angli but Angeli, angels, messengers, missionaries!  The rest is history.

            From the time of the earliest Germanic migrations to the British Isles there never can have been an Anglo-Saxon “race,” let alone a “pure” one.  The history of early England, written not only in but on its language, is one of persistent Celtic and Scandinavian admixtures.  After the eleventh-century Norman Conquest (remembering always that the Normans were originally North-men, i.e. Vikings) English monoglotism became an index of social inferiority.  There was not much social cachet in being an Anglo-Saxon at the court of Henry II.

            Nor did the supposed latter-day descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons always do all that well, incidentally, in the American migration that began in the seventeenth century.  It has been estimated that around half the English stock that settled in early Virginia arrived as indentured servants.  Indentured servitude—though far from the horror of chattel slavery—was hardly a privileged status.  It was a kind of contracted short-term bondage.  A person unable to pay for the sea passage from England could gain passage in exchange for agreeing to a seven-year period of uncompensated labor.  The model for this system would appear to be the biblical story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel.  The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished chattel slavery, implicitly continues to recognize voluntary servitude.

            A happy New Year to all.