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.
