Racial Anglo-Saxonisms: from Scholarship to Fiction in England, 1850-1960

Racial Anglo-Saxonisms: From Scholarship to Fiction in England, 1850-1960

(Spine title: Racial Anglo-Saxonisms)

(Thesis format: Monograph)

Michael R. Kightley

Graduate Program in English

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

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1+1 Canada THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

Dr. Russell Poole Dr. D. M. R. Bentley

Supervisory Committee Dr. Michael D. C. Drout

Dr. Allan Pero Dr. Richard Moll

Dr. Vladimir Tumanov

The thesis by

Michael Robert Kightlev

entitled:

Racial Anglo-Saxonisms: From Scholarship to Fiction in England, 1850- 1960

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board

n Abstract

In Racial Anglo-Saxonisms, I examine the role of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the discourses of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research has two main purposes. The first is to plot the development in this scholarship of conceptions of the origins and nature of the English race, particularly in relationship to the so-called

"northern" (Scandinavian and Germanic) and "southern" (Romance) races. The second purpose is to track how these conceptions were transmitted from the domain of Anglo-

Saxon Studies to much wider, popular circles, through historiographical and imaginative fictions.

I identify three main currents of Old English scholarship in this period: the early to mid nineteenth-century histories of the Anglo-Saxons, the mid to late nineteenth- century translations of Old English poems, and the nascent Old English literary criticism

of the early twentieth century. For each current, I select an influential writer both of

scholarship on Old English and of popular fiction addressing Englishness. Using a case

study approach, I demonstrate that these three figures - Charles Kingsley, William

Morris, and J. R. R. Tolkien - function as gatekeepers of the scholarly discourses that

arose around medieval representations of race. I show how these writers actively shape

their medieval sources, both primary and secondary, into intricate (and often problematic)

theorizations of race, which they then adopt into their popular fiction for broader

consumption.

in Keywords: Anglo-Saxonism, medievalism, race, community, nation, Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon literature, Old Icelandic literature, Old Norse literature, nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century literature, Old English scholarship,

Anglo-Saxon scholarship, reception of Old English literature, Charles Kingsley, William

Morris, J. R. R. Tolkien

IV Acknowledgements

I wish to begin by thanking the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program and the

School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Western Ontario, whose assistance made this research possible.

I am fortunate to have been influenced by a number of quality professors in my years of graduate study. At Queen's University in Kingston, George Clark and Paul

Stevens exposed me to ideas that led directly to this doctoral research and, furthermore,

sparked the passion to follow those ideas through to the finish. At the University of

Western Ontario, Allan Pero deserves particular thanks for his careful reading,

considered comments, and encouragement at key moments. My appreciation also to Jane

Tolmie, Jane Toswell, and Richard Moll for giving so generously of their time in helping

a latecomer to Medieval Studies learn the tools of the trade. My heartiest thanks are

reserved for Russell Poole, who demonstrated from the very beginning a reassuring and

supportive faith in the worthiness of this project; moreover, his willingness to delve into

ideas, texts, and movements both in and out of his (impressively wide-ranging) fields of

speciality deserves extra recognition and gratitude.

For treasured hours of conversation, feedback, distraction, and support, I wish to

thank Karen Bourrier, Mike Buma, Anne and Brian Clark, Alex Conde, Robin Crozier,

Cheryl Dudgeon, Conrad van Dyk, Kaya Fraser, Allison Hargreaves, Dave Ko, Ambrose

Lau, Chris Lobban, Andrew Moore, Selma Purac, Karis Shearer, Mark Smith, and

especially Leif Einarson and Sean Henry, whose influence on this project was far greater

than they probably know.

v Finally and most importantly, to my loved ones, Laurel Ryan, Kristin Kightley,

Woden Kightley, Kish Kightley, and Gord Kightley: accept my simplest and deepest thanks, and in lieu of words insufficient to the task of gratitude, I dedicate this effort to you.

VI Table of Contents

Page

Certificate of Examination ii

Abstract and Keywords iii

Acknowledgements v

Table of Contents vii

Introduction. The Developing Image of the Anglo-Saxons 1

Chapter 2. "The Viking of the New Age": Charles Kingsley

and the Anglo-Saxon Histories 25

Chapter 3. Translation, Socialism, and the Germanic Folk:

William Morris's Old Nothernism 89

Appendix to Chapter 3. Opening Lines to Nineteenth-Century

English Translations of Beowulf 170

Chapter 4. J. R. R. Tolkien, Literary Criticism, and the

Sorrowful Anglo-Saxons 177

Conclusion. Their Image and Ours 261

Works Cited 268

Vita 291

vn 1

Introduction:

The Developing Image of the Anglo-Saxons

T. A. Shippey has argued that the Anglo-Saxons are an "undeveloped image," that

in the past two centuries "there have been only hints and fragments of a popular image of pre-Conquest or Anglo-Saxon history" ("Undeveloped" 236). He contrasts "the oblivion

that has overtaken Anglo-Saxondom" with two related sources of imagery: on the one hand, the much more robust image of the Viking in modern popular culture, an image

which "has remained clear and powerful right up to now" (217), and on the other, the

even more ubiquitous images of Arthurian England. "[I]n the process of English

linguistic victory and political domination," Shippey suggests, "something got lost: one

part of that loss was Anglo-Saxon England" (225). These insights compose the most

direct motivating impulse behind this dissertation, in which I track the changing and

contested image of the Anglo-Saxons in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

England. As perceptive as Shippey's argument is, however, equally significant to this

project are its limitations, the issues raised at its edges.

These limitations are threefold, all of which Shippey acknowledges. First, his

argument is relative, rather than absolute. The image of the Anglo-Saxons may indeed be

undeveloped when compared to the pervasive cultural presence of the Vikings, whose

ahistorical horned helmets have achieved a distinct, almost iconic, resonance. But in

absolute terms, the image of the Anglo-Saxons was also pervasive, particularly in the

wake of the scholarly work of Sharon Turner at the beginning of the nineteenth century

and of the publication in 1819 of Walter Scott's highly influential Ivanhoe. This leads

into the second limitation of Shippey's argument. This limitation is chronological: the 2

Anglo-Saxons may be fairly indistinct in current popular consciousness, but that does not mean that they were always so.1 It is difficult to gauge precisely how deeply the works of

Scott and those who followed him affected the popular discourse around the Anglo-

Saxons, but that the influence was indeed deep is equally difficult to deny.2 That this influence is no longer obvious does not mean that it is no longer present. After all, many of our current notions of the English race have their roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the evocative power of the Anglo-Saxon image was at its peak.

The third limitation of Shippey's argument is that he confines his analysis to popular writings, consciously excluding the scholarly works of the period,3 in which the origins

and natures of the Anglo-Saxons were hotly disputed. This raises the question of how

distinct these two discourses actually were: to what extent did the image of the Anglo-

Saxons as constructed in scholarship disseminate into the popular consciousness?

Shippey's argument and these issues at its margins are all central to the two main

purposes of this thesis. The first of these purposes is to plot the function of late

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship in theorizations of the

origins and nature of the English race, particularly in relationship to other related racial

groups. What, for example, did English scholars in this period mean when they used the

term "Anglo-Saxon" or related terms like "Germanic," "Northern," and "Teutonic"?

How were these other racial labels employed, in contrast or otherwise, to reconstruct an

1 Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons have made significant inroads into the popular consciousness since Shippey published his arguments, with the production of two feature film adaptations of Beowulf. Sturla Gunnarsson's Beowulf and Grendel (2005) and Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf'(2007). This popularity is in turn largely due to the success of Peter Jackson's film versions of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. 2 See Andrew Sanders's '"Utter Indifference'?" for more on the influence of Ivcmhoe; perhaps the most extreme statement of its significance came from Mark Twain, who believed that it contributed to the outbreak of the American Civil War, calling it "a curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm" (quoted in Sanders 158n.). 3 In this article only; Shippey's work on the development of the Anglo-Saxon image in scholarly discourses is extensive. See in particular his introduction to Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. 3 image of the Anglo-Saxons? The second purpose is to track how the images of the

Anglo-Saxons were transmitted from the domain of Anglo-Saxon Studies4 to much wider, popular circles, through historiographical and imaginative fictions. I pursue these aims via three case studies, specifically Charles Kingsley, William Morris, and J. R. R.

Tolkien, whose combined work roughly covers the period of 1850 to 1960. Each of these writers has one foot in Anglo-Saxon Studies and the other in popular fiction, making them, in Allen J. Frantzen's words, "gatekeepers" of the medieval, writers who preside over the "process of filtering, of admitting into discussion some aspects of the past and prohibiting others" (124). Moreover, these three writers go beyond this passive function by actively molding their medieval sources into intricate (and often problematic) theorizations of the Anglo-Saxon and English races, which they then adopt into their popular fiction for broader consumption.

Ironically, the very lack of a clear image of the Anglo-Saxons in current popular culture is what makes such work necessary. As Frantzen and John D. Niles suggest,

"[t]he adjective Anglo-Saxon is one of those terms with vigorous emotive power that derives from its rather vague substantive content" (2). I would suggest that this very ambiguity, along with the lack of development that Shippey refers to, is one of the reasons that this word has appealed so strongly to writers over the past two centuries, including the three case studies examined in this dissertation. In effect, the term was (and perhaps still is) a relatively blank canvas waiting to be filled - a tempting and powerful

4 It should be noted that this term is somewhat anachronistic since, as Andrew Wawn has shown, some nineteenth-century scholars such as George Stephens believed that "Anglo-Saxon" asserted inappropriately a Germanic (i.e. versus Scandinavian) origin for the English people (Vikings 236-37). That said, since the admittedly more neutral "Old English Studies" tends to refer exclusively to language and literature (thereby excluding historical and racial connotations), I believe the convenient generality of "Anglo-Saxon Studies" justifies its use. 4 opportunity to be sure, especially in an age when national and racial identities were (and certainly still are) being created, disputed, and recreated. By examining how certain particularly influential writers engaged themselves in these processes, this study will help clarify the contributions made by the Anglo-Saxons, and by the scholars that recreated them, to current perceptions of "the English" and the races of "the North."

The Two Phases of Medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism

In the past forty years, a shift has occurred in Medieval Studies towards an

acknowledgement that the field has the responsibility to examine not only the medieval period but also manifestations of the medieval in more recent periods. In the early 1970s,

Leslie J. Workman began holding sessions at the annual International Congress on

Medieval Studies that focused on medieval/sm, which he referred to as "the Middle Ages

in the contemplation of contemporary society" (2).5 Similarly influential was Umberto

Eco, who pointed to essentially the same phenomenon: "a period of renewed interest in

the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and

responsible philological examination" (63).6 The term "Anglo-Saxonism" is somewhat

harder to pin down, having two different referents, the first more specific and the second

more general. Following the work of Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny:

5 Workman went on to found the scholarly journal Studies in Medievalism in 1976 and to establish the International Conference on Medievalism in 1986. 6 Shippey provides a more comprehensive definition on the Studies in Medievalism website: Medievalism is the study of responses to the Middle Ages at all periods since a sense of the medieval began to develop. Such responses include, but are not restricted to, the activities of scholars, historians and philologists in rediscovering medieval materials; the ways in which such materials were and are used by political groups intent on self- definition or self-legitimation; and artistic creations, whether literary, visual or musical, based on whatever has been or is thought to have been recovered from the medieval centuries. The Middle Ages remain present, moreover, in the modern consciousness, both through scholarship and through popular media such as film, video games, poster art, TV series and comic strips, and these media are also a legitimate object of study, if often intertwined with more traditionally scholarly topics. 5

The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, the term has come to refer to the use of notions of Anglo-Saxonnness specifically for the establishment of Anglo-American racial superiority. The term has, however, also developed a more general meaning, through analogy with the ever more popular "medievalism." From this perspective, "Anglo-

Saxonism" is simply medievalism as defined by Workman or Eco with a particular focus on the Anglo-Saxon period, and not necessarily exploring issues of race or racism.

Frantzen and Niles offer a middle ground between these two definitions, calling "Anglo-

Saxonism" "the process through which a self-conscious national and racial identity first

came into being among the early peoples of the region that we now call England and

how, over time, through both scholarly and popular promptings, that identity was

transformed into an originary myth available to a wide variety of political and social

interests" (1). This definition acknowledges "Anglo-Saxonism" as a subset of

"medievalism," but also nods towards Horsman's work by agreeing that "Anglo-

Saxonism" is a term loaded with inherent racial and racializing associations. When I

employ the term in this thesis, it is to this final definition that I refer, with particular

emphasis on the interactions between the "scholarly and popular promptings."

The scholarly study of medievalism has, since its inception, been regarded warily

by other academics, and while the value of the field has now generally been conceded,

there are still challenges facing its proponents. I would suggest that most prominent

among them is the need to move from what I call Phase 1 to Phase 2 medievalism. Phase

1 medievalism is characterized by identification of texts (or other objects of study) that

should be brought under the microscope of medievalism, as well as by identification of

the medieval sources of those texts; Phase 1 says, in effect, "look, this text is using the 6 medieval!" Phase 2 medievalism, on the other hand, is characterized by the attempt to answer the "so what?" question that so often follows this exclamation; Phase 2 is criticism that is aware that identification of sources is only a departure point, that the study of medievalism needs to interrogate how and why texts persist in engaging the medieval despite being centuries removed from it. From this perspective, the most important aspect of Frantzen and Niles's definition of Anglo-Saxonism is their emphasis on the availability of the Anglo-Saxon image to "a wide variety of political and social interests." A heightened understanding of such interests is what a study of medievalism can offer not only to scholars of traditional Medieval Studies but also to scholars of a wide range of fields, from literary critics of all periods to political scientists to

sociologists, and so on.

That is not to say that Phase 1 medievalism is unimportant. In fact, the direct

opposite is the case: Phase 1 work is the very foundation upon which Phase 2 work takes

place.7 Moreover, the Phase 1 project is far from complete - perhaps it never will be -

and so most medievalism projects must continue to incorporate at least some Phase 1

work. The key is that more students of medievalism need to push themselves to engage

in their research the questions posed by Phase 2 and, in the future, perhaps even an as yet

unknown Phase 3. This current dissertation follows this methodological imperative by

pushing towards Phase 2 in two main ways. First, following the general approach of

Horsman, my research adopts as its first focus a socially relevant aspect of Anglo-

Saxonism: the co-option of the Anglo-Saxon period, texts, and race for inclusion in

7 An excellent example is the work of Andrew Wawn, whose Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain is distinctly Phase 1, identifying and cataloguing a wide array of nineteenth-century writers that draw on Old Norse sources. Wawn only occasionally moves into Phase 2, and yet his work has advanced our understanding of the reception of Old Norse literature perhaps more than any other single study, making the path much clearer for subsequent Phase 2 analyses. racializing discourses. Second, my research explores an issue of growing importance

within broader academic circles: the relationship between scholarly and popular

discursive circles, as well as the nature of the movement of ideas from the one to the

other.

Two Methodological Problems

This project is, in effect, an examination of influence: first, on the microscopic

scale, it examines how medieval texts and medieval scholarship influenced the three

writers that I have selected; and second, on the macroscopic scale, it traces the influence

of Anglo-Saxon scholarship on popular consciousness. But influence is easier to claim

than it is to prove, which creates problems for my research on both the micro and the

macroscopic scales. I would suggest, however, that while these problems are worth

noting, they are not insurmountable.

On the microscopic level, it is often difficult to prove positively the debt of

influence of one writer to another; moreover, it is often questionable whether a writer

encounters an idea first-hand, directly from its first composer, or whether he or she

encounters it second-hand, through a third party. But while it is usually impossible to

track the step-by-step movement of an idea, it is nonetheless worthwhile to show that a

certain influential idea was well circulated, that it was being accessed even by individuals

who may have been unaware of its specific origins. The fact that a writer has

encountered an idea is actually of much greater significance than the idea's source, if

such a source can even be said to exist; after all, the fact that a given group considers an

idea worth circulating often says more about that group than do the simple facts of how 8 they may have first come across it. With this in mind, the notion of "discourse" is central to this research. That said, "discourse" is not one single concept but rather a web of interrelated notions used differently by different writers, and so some clarification is in order. When I use the term "discourse" (or related terms such as "discursive field"), I am referring specifically to the range of ideas that are being expressed (and by extension that can be expressed) amongst a certain group of individuals, usually either scholars of the

Anglo-Saxon period or writers of popular fiction. I have been particularly influenced by

Michel Foucault's work on the relationship between discourse, the subjects who utter it,

Q and the institutions that create and regulate it. Foucault ends his essay "What Is an

Author?" by pushing for a shift away from an over-emphasis on the individual author and his originality (and by extension his influences) and towards a focus on the role of such authors within their discourses. He puts forth four questions to further this end, including most importantly for my thinking, "[w]here does [a discourse] come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?" (1636).

Not only does this approach to the notion of discourse address the microscopic problem of how to trace influence between writers, but it also suggests a method of solving the macroscopic problem of how to track the influence of one discourse on another. By tying the question of how a discourse is "circulated" to "who controls it,"

Foucault suggested to me that in order to understand the flow of discourse, one need not examine the discourse as a whole (a virtually impossible task), but rather strategically target one's examination at key individuals within the discourse, people in positions that empower them to influence, consciously or otherwise, the flow of ideas within and between discursive fields. This was one of the main motivating factors behind my

8 Most influential on my thinking are Foucault's "What Is an Author?" and The Archaeology of Knowledge. 9 selection of a case study approach. The question became, of course, one of identifying these individuals, which led me to Frantzen's discussion of the "gatekeepers" of the medieval. Frantzen's full description of these individuals reads as follows:

How the past is received, how aesthetic response shapes the reception of

the past, is a process of filtering, of admitting into discussion some aspects

of the past and prohibiting others. Presiding over this process of selection

is a figure of cultural significance - a scholar or politician - for whom the

past has its uses. This figure functions as a gatekeeper, first as the author,

and later as the readers who rewrite the text sometimes literally,

sometimes figuratively by means of interpretation. (124)

Such a figure is one answer to Foucault's question of who controls a discourse and as such is ideally suited to tracing how an idea moves from an Anglo-Saxon text through

Anglo-Saxon scholarly writing and into popular fiction. That said, no discourse is unified but rather has sub-sets and variations; with this in mind, I realized that in order to

identify influential gatekeepers, I needed first to identify the specific currents that I wished to track within the broader discourse of Anglo-Saxon Studies.

Three Historical Currents of Anglo-Saxon Studies in England

One need only look to Humfrey Wanley's 1705 catalogue of Anglo-Saxon

manuscripts9 or to Elizabeth Elstob's 1715 The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-

Saxon Tongue to see that Anglo-Saxon Studies had its origins well before the nineteenth

century. Nevertheless, it was not until the publication of Turner's four volume History of

9 Wanley's catalogue was published as the second volume of George Hickes'sLinguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archaeologicus. 10 the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805) that the field truly gained momentum in England. This momentum, strongly accelerated by the rise of Germanic Philology on the continent, initiated an era of significant scholarly interest in the Anglo-Saxon period, not only in

England but also (and perhaps particularly) throughout modern-day Germany and

Scandinavia. Tracing the entire breadth of this scholarship is clearly impossible, so this dissertation focuses on the developments in England. With this narrower focus in mind, I believe that the subsequent century or more of scholarship following Turner can be

constructively divided into three main currents: the writing of histories of the Anglo-

Saxon period and people, the translation of Anglo-Saxon texts, and the literary criticism

on those texts.

The first current obviously begins with Turner's History, which by the very fact

of it being the first major work of its kind emphasized how little scholarly information

was available about the Anglo-Saxons. With this lack of information, this initial

scholarly impulse in England toward the Anglo-Saxon period was primarily historical

(rather than, for example, literary) in nature; the dominant motivation was a desire to

know who the Anglo-Saxons were, where they came from, what principles underlay their

social and political structures, and so on. Such answers as were found (or created) were

published in a handful of lengthy histories. The most relevant to this study are those of

Francis Palgrave, antiquarian and archivist, who published his History of the Anglo-

Saxons in 1831; John M. Kemble, perhaps the most influential English Anglo-Saxonist of

the nineteenth century, whose The Saxons in England first appeared in 1849; and E. A.

Freeman, who published the fifth and final volume of his The History of the Norman

Conquest of England in 1876. In order to access this first current of the broader Anglo- 11

Saxon discourse, I have selected Charles Kingsley as the focus of Chapter 2. Kingsley, best known as a clergyman, novelist, and activist, was also Regius Chair of Modern

History at Cambridge during the 1860s, during which time he delivered a series of lectures on Anglo-Saxon history, subsequently published as The Roman and the Teuton in 1864. The fact that he published in 1864 and 1865 a novelization of the English resistance to the Norman Conquest suggests the intimate connection between his scholarship and his popular fiction, which makes him an ideal case study.

As the Anglo-Saxon histories were providing more and more information about the origins of the English race, there was a parallel increase in the demand for access to the literature of that period. This demand forms the impulse behind the second of the three currents that I have identified: the translation tradition that had its peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Beowulf in particular attracted great attention from

English translators, beginning with Kemble's 1837 version. The last three decades of the

nineteenth century alone saw no less than seven different Modern English translations,

not including the translation of the second of my case studies, William Morris. While

Morris was a jack-of-all-trades - his creative interests included poetry, furniture,

wallpaper, romances, typefaces, and more - perhaps his most abiding interest was in the

literature and culture of the Old North. This interest manifested itself in his translation of

numerous Old Icelandic sagas and of Beowulf, each in conjunction with a scholar from

their respective fields, as well as in a series of romances dealing with the races of the Old

North. These two bodies of work make Morris a particularly influential gatekeeper of the

translation tradition and, therefore, the topic of Chapter 3. 12

Once a critical mass of texts had been made available, a shift towards specifically literary criticism occurred within Anglo-Saxon Studies. This is not to say that Anglo-

Saxon texts had not been analyzed prior to this shift, but rather that the purposes of the

early analyses had tended towards the historical or linguistic, with the aesthetic or thematic concerns often considered secondary. The need for the shift towards analyzing the literature as literature was expressed most famously by J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1936

essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in which he argues that scholars had

focused on Beowulf primarily because it seemed "such an attractive quarry" to be mined

for information about the pre-Christian North, and that it caused "disappointment at the

discovery that it was itself and not something that the scholar would have liked better -

for example, a heathen heroic lay, a history of Sweden, a manual of German antiquities,

or a Nordic Summa Theologica" (7). While Tolkien was certainly not the first to engage

in literary criticism of the poem - in that very essay he engages other literary critics, such

as W. P. Ker and R. W. Chambers - his argument nonetheless accelerated the change in

Anglo-Saxon scholarship towards reading the literature as literature, rather than as

historical "quarries." Given his position as a focal point for this shift, and the fact that he

engaged the works of these early literary critics in both his own criticism and in his

immensely influential fantasy fiction, Tolkien was the clear choice of case study for

Chapter 4.

There are drawbacks to dividing Anglo-Saxon Studies of this period into these

three currents. Most importantly, it suggests that these three subsets of the overarching

discourse were entirely discrete, which of course they were not. They were intermingled,

both in terms of content and in terms of chronology. While the writing of histories may 13 have been the dominant impulse of the first half of the nineteenth century and the writing of translations that of the second half, there was certainly a significant amount of overlap; one need look no further than Kemble, whose translation of 5eoww//"preceded his history of the Anglo-Saxons by more than a decade. Likewise, there was a similar overlap between the translation impulse and the literary critical impulse around the turn of the century.10 Nonetheless, I believe the divisions to be both generally accurate and most certainly useful. The task of Chapter 5 is to reintegrate these three currents to offer a unified picture of how ideas were moving between these three currents and into the discursive field of popular fiction. That all three gatekeepers function in a similar manner - co-opting ideas drawn from their own current of Anglo-Saxon Studies, interpreting them to serve as evidence for specific theorizations of the Anglo-Saxon and

English races, and then subsequently transmitting their theories to broader audiences via their fictions - only serves to demonstrate that while these currents were distinct in form, they shared many of the same ideological concerns in essence.

From Schleswig-Holstein to WWII

These three currents of Anglo-Saxon Studies not only helped me select my case

studies but also contributed to my decision to focus on the period from approximately

1850 to approximately 1960. On the one hand, by 1850 the history-writing tradition was well established but not yet on the decline, while the translation tradition was beginning

but had not yet peaked. On the other hand, by 1960 the shift towards literary criticism

10 The other problem with my division of Anglo-Saxon Studies is that it ignores the impulse towards editing Anglo-Saxon texts, which was a major occupation of Anglo-Saxon Studies throughout the period under discussion. While it would make sense to include it as a fourth current, I have not done so because the motivation behind editing - increasing the availability of Anglo-Saxon texts - is very similar to that of translation, and translation offers a clearer avenue for transmission to popular audiences. 14 was being embraced by the vast majority of Anglo-Saxonists. The fact that two relevant historical events map reasonably closely onto these two dates made this decision all the more logical. These events were the beginning of the First Schleswig War in 1848 and the end of the Second World War in 1945, each of which took Anglo-Saxon Studies out of the realm of the purely intellectual and planted it firmly into the realm of the political, national, and racial. Focusing on the discourses between and immediately following these wars was, therefore, logical not only in terms of the internal development of Anglo-

Saxon Studies but also in terms of its interactions with external events on the political stage.

While I would suggest that Anglo-Saxon Studies has never been apolitical, the growing importance of the Schleswig-Holstein question throughout the middle of the nineteenth century (culminating in the two Schleswig Wars of 1848-51 and 1864) certainly emphasized the significance of the field to political discourse.11 The "question" revolved around the problem of determining Danish and German national loyalties in a region of conflicting linguistic and racial identities. Was, to choose just one example, a

11 Shippey rightly states that "summarising the Schleswig-Holstein question is notoriously impossible," but he nevertheless does an admirable job: one may perhaps say that the root of the matter was that the king of Denmark ruled the two duchies of Schleswig (or Slesvig) and Holstein (or Holsten), but not as king of Denmark. One may also say, very roughly, and across the evidence of decades of referenda, boundary shift and 'ethnic cleansing,' that Slesvig (to use the Danish form) was on the whole Danish-speaking, and Holstein (in the German form) German-speaking. Large numbers of German-speakers, therefore were also quasi-Danes. For some time this seems not to have mattered: when, for instance, the British bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, loyal Holsteiners protested that all 'brave Danes' felt the same indignation, and auch wir sind brave Ddnen, 'we are brave Danes too' (Carr 1963: 31). Forty years later the cry in Lubeck was, Wir wollen keine Ddnen sein, wir wollen Deutsche bleiben, 'We don't want to be Danes, we want to stay German' (Carr 1963: 256). The matter was settled in 1864 by the Austro-Prussian invasion of the two duchies and forcible take-over of both Holstein and Slesvig, including large areas ancestrally and linguistically Danish, a take-over reversed only in 1920, after World War I, and to become at least open to negotiation again in 1945, after World War II. (Introduction 16-17) For a full depiction of the development of the Schleswig-Holstein problem and its role in the rise of German nationalism, see W. Carr's Schleswig-Holstein 1815-1848. 15

German-speaking individual in Holstein actually a Dane because that duchy happened to be under the rule of the King of Denmark? The implications of such questions of identity were not isolated within Denmark and the German Confederation; they also held significant ramifications for the English, at least in the minds of Anglo-Saxon scholars.12

As Shippey indicates, "[a] critical point in making the connection is that the ancestral homeland of the Angles, or English, is thought to lie in the district of Angeln in southern

Schleswig, i.e. now just to the south of the Danish-German border" (Introduction 17).

The identities of the inhabitants of Schleswig and Holstein, therefore, were intimately connected to the identities of the original Anglo-Saxons and by extension the modern

English as well. Shippey uses the work of F. C. Dahlmann and Nicholaus Outzen, two scholars with at least partial Danish heritage but writing in German, as an example of how "tendentious" this type of scholarship became, paraphasing their thinking as follows:

"if Anglo-Saxon were really a German language; and if the early inhabitants of

Schleswig had really all spoken Anglo-Saxon; then Schleswig would be historically a

German state" (17-18). One side-effect of the Schleswig-Holstein problem was, therefore, to add a sense of immediacy to Anglo-Saxon scholarship, a belief in its direct relevance to the modern world.

At the other end of my timeframe, the relationship between scholarship of the Old

North and modern politics had become even more tendentious. The role of medieval literature (such as the Nibelungenlied or the Eddas) and of medievalism (such as Richard

Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen) in the development of National Socialism is well known. In The Crisis of Germanic Ideology, for example, George L. Mosse demonstrates

12 For British responses to the situation in Schleswig-Holstein, see Keith A. P. Sandiford's Great Britain and the Schleswig-Holstein Question 1848-64, as well as Wawn {Vikings 232-34). 16 the function of images of the Old North in the "Volkisch" fascination with the origins and essence of the Germanic people and in the Nazi racial theories that emerged from that movement.13 As Chapter 4 will discuss in relationship to Tolkien, this misuse of the medieval had a significant effect on Anglo-Saxonists. Stefan Goebel's study of the invocation of the medieval in World War I and interwar memorials (The Great War and

Medieval Memory) concludes that "[medievalism was the ultimate casualty of the

Second World War," becoming "[inappropriate if not obscene after 1939-45" (13).14

Goebel is referring primarily to memorials, the semiotics of which felt the influence of the war particularly strongly; the effect of the war on literary medievalism was perhaps not quite so extreme, but it was nevertheless significant, especially for Anglo-Saxonism and other Old Northernisms. The romanticization of the Old North that those movements espouse had, after all, been directly connected to the greatest horror of the modern world.

There is a progression between these two historical events: on the one hand the

Schleswig Wars called attention to the relevance of Anglo-Saxon Studies to modern political movements, while on the other hand World War II called attention to the dangers to which that relevance can lead. With this progression in mind, I would suggest that the period framed by these two events was a particularly significant time for the development of the field; as this dissertation will show, it was a time of excitement, at least in certain quarters, for the potential of the field, with little critical concern for the direction that that excitement was taking. Rather than exploring the wars directly, therefore, this study takes the discourses between them as its object; moreover, I extend my field of analysis to 1960, specifically in order to include some discussion of the way

13 See in particular Chapter 4, "Ancient Germans Rediscovered" (67-87). 14 See also pp. 291-301 of Goebel's study. 17 that Anglo-Saxonism initially reacted to the Second World War. At the end of his survey of Beowulf scholarship, Shippey raises a question that would not have been far from the minds of Anglo-Saxonists of this period: "how much responsibility, or guilt, should the early Beowulfians and their colleagues in Germanistik bear for the development of Nazi ideology? As one reads on in these pages [...], one can see patriotism turning to increasingly aggressive nationalism; and racism is not far away" (Introduction 71). This question is too large for this project to answer, but an understanding of the nature of the discourses surrounding the Anglo-Saxons between and following these wars is an important step in the right direction. In combination with the timing of the three currents of scholarly work identified above, 1850 and 1960 were therefore the clear choices for the initial and terminal dates of this study.

Anglo-Saxon in England, Anglo-Saxon Abroad

Within the context of the two international events mentioned above, it is obvious

that the study of Anglo-Saxon history, language, and literature was of interest to scholars

of the medieval Old North in general; by extension, so too was the theorization of the

Anglo-Saxon race. In fact, the scholars from Scandinavia and particularly Germany were

quite dominant in studies of the medieval North, sufficiently so that much of the work

done in England seems far less professional by comparison, particularly in terms of

philological grounding. Shippey states that "[b]y the later nineteenth century German

scholarship in this area had induced in England something like an inferiority complex";

he points to a characteristic example in "the 1887 edition of Henry Morley's English

Writers [. ..], which devotes two pages to [Beowulf], thirty-two to a paraphrase of it, and 18 thirty-seven to the opinions of commentators" (Introduction 55). This problem was known to these scholars themselves; Henry Sweet, author of possibly the most influential

Anglo-Saxon primer to date, was compelled by the dominance of German scholars to complain "that no English dilettante can hope to compete with them - except by

Germanizing himself and losing all his nationality" (v). Meanwhile, the Americans may not have attracted as much attention as did the German philologists, but Anglo-Saxon was nonetheless accumulating followers in the New World. As Frantzen demonstrates,

no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson himself championed the study of the language

and laws of the Anglo-Saxons, and through his and others' efforts the field did gain

ground in American schools (203-13). The importance of both German and American

contributions to the field is perhaps demonstrated most effectively by Albert

Stanburrough Cook (1853-1927), an American who trained under the highly influential

German scholar Eduard Sievers (most famous for his work on early Germanic verse

patterns) before returning to the United States for a highly productive career, including

editions of Judith (1888), Elene (1919), and numerous other important Anglo-Saxon

texts.

The discourses of Anglo-Saxon Studies, therefore, were most certainly not

isolated to England, nor even to Europe. With this in mind it would be ideal if this study

could take an international perspective on the transmission of images of the Anglo-

Saxons from scholarship to fiction, but such an endeavour is far too great in scope for a

project of this size. I have, therefore, chosen to focus on the Anglo-Saxonisms in

England itself, where the debate over the interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon image had its

most immediate ramifications, without forgetting that those ramifications would also 19 have been felt on a much larger scale. In certain cases this means that the scholarship I have chosen to focus on is less rigorous in nature, but as Hans Aarsleff has shown, "[t]o the historical understanding, the pseudoscience of an age may be as important as its

science" (3).

Relevant Criticism

The body of criticism directly focused on Anglo-Saxom'sw as defined above is not

yet large, particularly in terms of book-length projects; there are, however, exceptions.

Most notable among them is Clare A. Simmons' Reversing the Conquest: History and

Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Simmons uses a series of historical

pairings (Richard I and John, Henry II and Thomas a Becket, William of Normandy and

Harold Godwinson, and Alfred the Great and Queen Victoria) to evaluate how

nineteenth-century writers constructed the difference between the Saxons and the

Normans, as well as how they placed the modern English in relation to that binary.

Simmons' work influenced this project particularly in terms of its attention to patterns of

history. She demonstrates the importance of paying attention to how modern writers

orient the Anglo-Saxon period in relationship to their own: do they construct the

relationship in terms of continuity and progression or in terms of rupture? While

Simmons' work focuses on different particulars than the current study, this line of

thinking was nevertheless quite influential on my own.15 Also important is Literary

Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited

by Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, which traces the manifestations of the Anglo-

15 For an article-length work that influenced me in a similar manner, see Rosemary Jann's "Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism," which describes three types of medievalism (the conservative, the Whig, and the socialist), each of which orients the medieval and the modern differently. 20

Saxon image in specifically literary contexts. Also of interest are texts that deal with the representations of race and other identifiers of community in Anglo-Saxon texts themselves, as opposed to modern appropriations or adaptations of them. Two such works have been produced in recent years, specifically Hugh Magennis's Images of

Community in Old English Poetry and Stephen J. Harris's Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-

Saxon Literature.

There is a natural blurring between studies of medievalism and studies of the history of Medieval Studies as a discipline; if anything, this blurring is even stronger with

Anglo-Saxonism and the history of Anglo-Saxon Studies, and so many of the most influential texts on this project have sat astride this boundary. The self-reflexive analysis of Anglo-Saxon Studies gained particular impetus following E. G. Stanley's series of short articles in the 1960s (subsequently published together as The Search for Anglo-

Saxon Paganism), which detail the discipline's historical fascination with the potential

"pagan" origins of Anglo-Saxon literature, as well as the flawed methodologies often employed to "find" those origins. Particularly important among the texts that followed over the subsequent decades is Frantzen's Desire for Origins, mentioned above, which is perhaps the most theoretically aware of all the examinations of Anglo-Saxon as a field;

Frantzen warns that "[t]he search for origins is never disinterested," such that "the origin

[scholars] have found has often been an origin they have produced" (xii). Meanwhile,

Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity is a collection of essays edited by

Frantzen and Niles on the reception and development of Anglo-Saxon Studies and Anglo-

Saxonism in a variety of contexts, from the Early Modern period through the early twentieth century. The Recovery of Old English, edited by Timothy Graham, is 21 composed of essays that focus primarily on the development of the field in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon

Culture (eds. Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal) includes papers on a variety of aspects of the reception of Anglo-Saxon, all drawn from the 1991 meeting of the

International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. Among doctoral dissertations, Julie Ellen

Towell's "The 'Rise and Progress' of Anglo-Saxonism and English National Identity" is particularly relevant, tracing primarily the scholarly stream, but switching to popular fiction in her final chapter.16

Also relevant are studies from other branches of medievalism, particularly studies that explore the relationship between medievalism and racial/national identity or those that examine representations of the other races of the Old North. The most important book-length project in the former category is Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth,

a collection of essays edited by Andrew Wawn (with Graham Johnson and John Walter)

in honour of Shippey. In the latter category are two works by Wawn. One is a collection

of essays titled Northern Antiquity that addresses the reception of the Old Norse sagas

and Eddas throughout Europe, but with particular attention to Iceland and Britain. More

important, however, is Wawn's The Vikings and the Victorians, a highly influential study

of the image of the Old North in nineteenth-century Britain. This volume details a wide

array of sources - from translations from the Old Norse, to romances, to travel books, to

lectures, and so on - in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the extensive

presence of the Old North in the Victorian British consciousness.

16 Histories of related scholarly fields are also important, especially Hans Aarsleffs The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860. Chapters 4-6, which deal with the rise of philology in England, are of particular interest. 22

There are, of course, a number of theoretical works that have contributed to my methodological approach. I have already discussed the importance of Foucault's work on discourse to my thinking. I was also influenced in general terms by Hans Robert Jauss's

Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, which argues that "[i]n the triangle of author, work, and public the last is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but rather itself an energy formative of history" (19). Even more important for my purposes are theorists of race, nation, and community; while Benedict Anderson is not the most recent of these theorists, I have found his definition of nations as "imagined communities" to be particularly useful. Such a community, he argues, "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (6).

Current definitions of terms such as "nation" or "race" apply only problematically to the medieval period, however, which raises the danger of anachronism: does the application of such terms, so heavily loaded with modern denotations and connotations, actually clarify or rather distort our understanding of how medieval groups identified their communities?17 While I am aware of this danger, I will nevertheless use "race" (and to a lesser extent "nation") throughout this dissertation. I see this choice as justified for two main reasons. First and foremost, "race" is a term used regularly by my case studies and by the writers they engage - so, regardless of whether their theorizations are historically valid, they themselves constructed their image of the Anglo-Saxons as a race

17 Anthony D. Smith addresses this potential problem with regards to nationalism in The Ethnic Origins of Nations, pointing to what he calls the "modernist" approach to the origin of nations: this critical approach, he suggests, maintains that "the nation is a purely modern phenomenon, a product of strictly modern developments like capitalism, bureaucracy and secular utilitarianism" (8). Smith points out the problems with this modernist position and argues for "the durability of ethnic communities," seeing a connection between "earlier ethnic identities and later national ones" (16). 23 and they are the primary focus of this study. Second, numerous Anglo-Saxon texts

(Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, King Alfred's preface to the Cura

Pastoralis, The Battle of Brunanburh, and The Battle ofMaldon, to name just a few) provide ample evidence that the Anglo-Saxons were indeed active in constructing, in their literature if not also in reality, a sense of identity that suggests that terms like "race"

and "nation" may be somewhat applicable to the period after all. As Stephen J. Harris

has demonstrated,

The models through which we imagine Anglo-Saxons understood race are

filtered through - and thus further distorted by - twenty-first-century

notions of culture, society, self-determination, political boundaries, and

race. With sufficient empathy and imagination, we can partly reconstruct

some of their models, notwithstanding the difficulty of isolating the effects

of our own cultural filters. (16)

I agree with both Harris's optimism about the feasibility of discussing Anglo-Saxon

notions of race and with his warning about the dangers of "our own cultural filters," and

so, as important as theorists such as Anderson are to my work, equally important are

those who either integrate the medieval into their theorizations or explore directly the

applicability of notions of community specifically to the medieval. In this category, I

include such works as Anthony D. Smith's The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Joep

Leerssen's National Thought in Europe, Patrick J. Geary's The Myth of Nations, and

Barbara H. Rosenwein's Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages.

It is amidst these various studies, as well as many article-length projects, that I

find the niche for my research. As more and more work is done on how Anglo-Saxon 24 texts have been received over the past two centuries - what ideas were extracted from them and what ideas were interpreted into them - it will become more and more important that we understand the impact of that reception. As I turn to the first of my three case studies, Charles Kingsley, and to the first of my three currents of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, the writing of histories, I would like to reiterate the two governing questions for this project: first, how are Anglo-Saxon texts co-opted for ideological ends, namely the theorizing of the Anglo-Saxon and English races; and second, how are these racial theories transmitted from the realm of academic discourse into a broader awareness via popular fiction? 25

Chapter 2:

"The Viking of the New Age": Charles Kingsley and the Anglo-Saxon Histories

Frances (Fanny) Kingsley's collection of her husband's letters indicates that

Frederika Bremer, Swedish writer and feminist, gave Kingsley a copy of Esaias Tegner's

Frithjofs Saga with the inscription, "To the Viking of the New Age, Charles Kingsley, this story of the Vikings of the Old, from a daughter of the Vikings, his friend and admirer, Frederika Bremer" (F. Kingsley 1: 350). In the letter that Fanny transcribes,

Bremer explains further her notion of a Vikingness that transcends history: "(It is strange but it seems to me to be so) the old Viking's greatness was that he wanted to conquer the whole world and make it his own. The mission of the spiritual Viking seems to me the higher one to conquer the world to God. So is yours" (1: 351). This letter, despite being

written in 1851, more than a decade before Kingsley's most prominent work on the

Vikings, constructs him in a most intriguing way as an embodiment of medievalism.

Kingsley himself, in Bremer's description, is a transplantation of her notion of a medieval

racial type into a nineteenth-century Christian ethos. Even more to my purposes,

however, is that this letter demonstrates that Kingsley was already engaged in defining

the natures of the races of northern Europe and, moreover, that the influence of his

thoughts was remarkably wide-ranging.

While Anglo-Saxonism may not be central to Kingsley's fame, it is my contention

in this chapter that he actually occupies a distinctly powerful position within the

overlapping discursive circles of this field. He is neither primarily an Anglo-Saxonist

who also wrote novels, such as Tolkien, nor primarily a craftsman and poet whose work

happened to include contributions to Anglo-Saxon scholarship, such as Morris; on the 26 contrary, Kingsley resided somewhere in between these two poles and so will serve as a useful first case study for examining the transmission of Anglo-Saxon ideas of race from the primarily scholarly domain to the primarily creative one. More specifically, I will

examine Kingsley's engagement, as both scholar and fiction writer, with the first of my three strains of Anglo-Saxon scholarship: the by then vibrant tradition of Anglo-Saxon

histories, including those of Sharon Turner, John M. Kemble, Francis Palgrave and the

like. Kingsley was no mere passive recipient of this tradition but rather an active

contributor to it.

Perhaps the notion of Kingsley as a historian, let alone an Anglo-Saxonist,18

requires some demonstration, since he is more generally known for his novels, his

vitriolic debates with a famous clergyman,19 or even his work on improving sanitation

practices. Despite his fame in these other circles, it should not be forgotten that Kingsley

was also a Cambridge professor, holding the Regius Chair of Modern History for nine

years, from 1860 to 1869 (Vance). Kingsley was admittedly not the first choice for the

post - Lord Palmerston first offered the position to J. W. Blakesley, vicar of Ware and

once fellow and tutor at Trinity College (Chadwick 2). Moreover, Kingsley's credentials

were not overwhelming, consisting primarily of Alexandria and Her Schools (1854), a

collection of essays that he delivered at Edinburgh; however, Owen Chadwick argues

with overt passion and some validity that challenges to Kingsley's qualifications are

"anachronistic" (8), since Oxbridge professorships had not yet been fully

It would actually be inaccurate to refer to Kingsley's work in Medieval Studies as specifically Anglo- Saxonist, partially because it might be considered anachronistic, but also because he tends to deal with more broadly Germanic (particularly West and North Germanic) issues. 19 Kingsley openly attacked certain aspects of the Roman Catholic Church in general, and Cardinal John Henry Newman in particular, charging them with deceit and distortion of the truth; Newman responded famously with his 1864 Apologia Pro Vita Sua. 27 professionalized, and, furthermore, that many of these challenges "arose, not from any knowledge of better possibilities, but from the hindsight that Kingsley's tenure of the chair was not in all respects a success" (5). Making a slightly contradictory but nonetheless important point, Chadwick suggests that the proof is in the metaphorical pudding, since "Kingsley did far more for history in Cambridge than his contemporary

[Goldwin Smith] did in Oxford" (8), specifically the production of a significant, if controversial, work of history: The Roman and the Teuton, a series of lectures that

Kingsley subsequently published in book form in 1864.

The Roman and the Teuton is primarily a text on early medieval history,

Kingsley's purpose being, in his own words, "to sketch as shortly as I can, the state in which the young [Teutonic] world found the old [Roman], when it came in contact with it" (18) - Kingsley, therefore, focused much of his teaching and research at Cambridge on the early medieval branch of Modern History. My purpose, however, is not to argue a claim for Kingsley as a medievalist; it is sufficient to demonstrate that he was aware of, and directly involved in, the discourses of Anglo-Saxon Studies, Germanic Studies, and

Philology. A close relationship with the noted philologist F. Max Muller placed him in contact with these discourses even before he assumed his Chair. According to Susan

Chitty, "[h]e had recently been moving in historical circles at Oxford, since Max Muller,

Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages, had married his niece [...]. The young couple had borrowed the rectory for their honeymoon and through Muller

Kingsley met [Leopold von] Ranke and many distinguished Germans" (204). Between

Ranke, author of Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Volker von 1494 bis

1514 {History of the Roman and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514), and Muller, who 28 eventually wrote a Preface to a later edition of The Roman and the Teuton, Kingsley's access to philological and historical discourses would have been extensive.

As well as these associations with philologists, Kingsley was certainly familiar with at least a portion of Anglo-Saxon, or broadly Germanic, literature, both primary and secondary. For example, in terms of the former, The Roman and the Teuton refers to

Beowulf on two occasions (70, 218), while his lectures and sermons make use of Tacitus and Bede (e.g. "Grots" 274, "Fount" 114). That said, with certain important exceptions, such as his primary sources for his romance Hereward the Wake, it is difficult to determine the depth of Kingsley's exposure to these texts. It is unlikely - though not impossible - that he read Beowulf'i n the original Old English, for example; he was probably exposed to the poem through references in other texts, through the abstracted passages in Turner's history, or through an early translation, such as that of Kemble.

This chapter will show, however, that Kingsley's involvement with secondary works of the field, particularly the histories of the Anglo-Saxon people and period, was extensive and involved, culminating not only in The Roman and the Teuton but also in the intimately connected Hereward. For example, a letter about his course on Early English

Literature at Queen's College20 indicates that he was familiar with the French historian

Augustin Thierry's work on the Norman Conquest (F. Kingsley 1: 201), while Hereward refers to the works of Francis Palgrave (e.g. on the effect of William's construction of fortresses in England [2: 125]) and of E. A. Freeman (e.g. on "the facts of Godwin's life"

[1: 9]). Moreover, Hereward is dedicated to the antiquarian Thomas Wright, who

A London school founded in 1848 by F. D. Maurice for the education of women. 29

Kingsley asserts "first disinterred" the historical Hereward "when scarcely a hand or foot of him was left standing out from beneath the dust of ages."21

While Freeman's work was certainly influential on Kingsley (their conceptions of both the medieval and the modern races coincide in some significant ways), Freeman's voluminous text The History of the Norman Conquest of England was not completed until after the first editions of Hereward and The Roman and the Teuton, and so this chapter will focus on the histories published earlier in the century. Edward Gibbon's The

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) spurred a series of such histories by early nineteenth-century Englishmen, beginning with Turner's The History of the Anglo-

Saxons (1799-1805). Turner's contribution is followed by Palgrave's History of the

Anglo-Saxons (1831), Kemble's The Saxons in England (1849), and other histories.

These texts constitute a major early movement in the still young Anglo-Saxon Studies; in conjunction with the more philological work being done abroad, particularly in Germany, these histories lay the groundwork for the abundance of translations and literary criticism that the field produces in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As this

chapter will demonstrate, Kingsley not only knew these histories but conceived his

theories in direct response to them, particularly his theories about the origin and nature of

21 Kingsley is presumably referring to Wright's 1846 "Adventures of Hereward the Saxon." Kingsley claims in his dedication that Wright has taught him how to reconstruct the Hereward story, and this is probably not an exaggeration: Wright's version includes references to some of his key sources for the Hereward story, specifically the Gesta Herewardi, the Peterborough Chronicle (Wright 9In.) and the account of Geoffrey Gaimar (Wright 119n.). The central importance of the first and third of these sources to Kingsley's own version of the story indicates that Kingsley may have begun his research by following these leads. 22 Prominent among these other histories would be Wright's 1852 The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon. While Kingsley was almost certainly familiar with this text given his admitted debt to Wright's version of the Hereward story, it was not nearly as influential on his racial thinking as were the other histories mentioned above. This is probably due to the fact that Wright's text focuses almost entirely on material culture and on archaeological evidence, avoiding broader ethnographical or racial theorizations; in Wright's own words, his purpose was simply "to supply the want of a manual of British archaeology" (viii). Kingsley does seem to draw on Wright's text for certain details, but he had to turn elsewhere for larger ideas on race. 30 the English and of the "Teutonic" races in general. It should be noted that the bare fact

that Kingsley engaged directly with these texts does not mean his understanding of them

or of the Anglo-Saxon period was beyond reproach. For example, when you consider

that the aforementioned letter recommends Edward Bulwer-Lytton's romance Harold:

The Last of the Saxon Kings as a valid historical teaching text,23 it would be overly

optimistic to suggest that Kingsley's familiarity with Anglo-Saxon literature and criticism

made him much more than a generalist, albeit a well-read and talented one, in a field that

was becoming far more technical and specialized. At the same time, his awareness of

this limitation, and the nervous problems that it exacerbated,24 did not significantly hinder

his willingness to contribute to the field, and to its growing discourse on race.

"The Preservation of Favoured Races": Kingsley and the Scientific Community

Kingsley's position straddling the border between Medieval Studies and historical

fiction is complemented by a considerable, and problematic, interest in racial issues in

general. A letter written while visiting Ireland in 1860 reveals the darkest side of these

opinions: "[b]ut I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles

of horrible country. [...] But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black,

one would not feel it so much" (F. Kingsley 2: 107). Kingsley also supported the defence

Bulwer-Lytton aggressively asserts the historicity of his Harold: "I consulted the original authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if intending to write, not a fiction but a history. And having formed the best judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true course and true causes of the great political events, and the essential attributes of the principal agents" (1: xiv). The confidence that allows Bulwer-Lytton to claim knowledge of "the true course," "true causes," and "essential attributes" of events eight centuries before his time demonstrates clearly the faith held by some in the power of narrative to access historical fact. 24 Kingsley suffered from a series of nervous breakdowns almost yearly from 1848 through 1859 and was in the midst of one while deciding whether to accept his post at Cambridge (Chitty 204). The problem recurred in 1864, unfortunately right in the midst of his confrontation with Cardinal Newman (Chitty 239). 25 From the full title of Darwin's The Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 31 of Governor Eyre's violent suppression of the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, which

Bernard Semmel argues was seen by the British troops themselves as part of a "racial war" (5). Kingsley's interest in race was far more than simple bigotry, however. It was inflected not only by the philological influence of the famous Max Muller but also by the convergence of these discourses with those of natural history.

The complexity of his views on race is made clear from the fact that while, as

Michael Banton suggests, Kingsley "took the Old Testament record seriously" in his belief in the original human pair (23), he followed the work of Charles Darwin and other biologists with enthusiasm and vigour. Kingsley was on friendly terms with George

Rolleston, Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, whom he consulted on his understanding of the relationship between the soul and the biological form (F. Kingsley

2: 143),26 as well as with Charles Lyell, author of the enormously influential Principles of

Geology (1830-33) (Beer 127). He also held an extended friendship with T. H. Huxley, accomplished biologist and educator, later to be nicknamed "Darwin's bulldog." Charles

S. Blinderman has argued that Kingsley and Huxley's friendship may have provided "a forum for the cordial debate of ultimate issues," but "ideological differences, however obscured by social amenities, [may have] prevailed] as barriers to the reconciliation of

irreconcilable world-views" (28). Blinderman is probably quite correct, but the important point, at least for my purposes, is not whether Huxley and Kingsley agreed about the

"ultimate issues" of creation and evolution, but rather the fact that they engaged each

Kingsley believed that "the soul of each living being down to the lowest, secretes the body thereof, as a snail secretes its shell, and that the body is nothing more than the expression in terms of matter, of the stage of development to which the being has arrived" (F. Kingsley 2: 143-44). More work could be usefully done on Kingsley's belief in this idea and its influence on his notions of race, particularly his attitudes towards the Irish and the slave populations. 32 other in what Blinderman characterizes as "cordial debate" - or, in other words, that they formed a mutually informative dialectic.

Kingsley engaged not only with the bulldog but also with Darwin himself. He corresponded eagerly with Darwin, even bestowing on him the honorific "Master"

(Chitty 215). Kingsley wrote effusively of the Master to his friend F. D. Maurice (whom he also called "Master" [Thorp 39]): "Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by the mere force of truth and fact. The one or two who hold out are forced to try all sorts of subterfuges as to fact, or else by evoking the odium theologicum" (F.

Kingsley 2: 171). Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots has re-situated Darwin's work into the literary world, defining The Origin of Species as itself a narrative, firmly ensconced in the

literary tradition. She demonstrates that in contrast to the intense specialization of the modern scientific community, "[i]n the mid-nineteenth century [...] it was possible for a reader to turn to the primary works of scientists as they appeared, and to respond directly

to the arguments advanced" (5). While Beer's analysis focuses more on the writings of

George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, she makes clear that Kingsley was a prime example of

an avid amateur naturalist who engaged the discourse around evolution in his literary

works and, moreover, that this engagement was reciprocated.

As Beer demonstrates, Kingsley's most direct foray into evolutionary discourse

comes in The Water Babies. Beer points to Tom's encounter with Mother Carey:

And, when he came near it, it took the form of the grandest old lady he

had ever seen—a white marble lady, sitting on a white marble throne.

And from the foot of the throne there swum away, out and out into the sea,

millions of new-born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever 33

dreamed. And they were Mother Carey's children, whom she makes out

of the sea-water all day long.

[...]

"I heard, ma'am, that you were always making new beasts out of old."

"So people fancy. But I am not going to trouble myself to make

things, my little dear. I sit here and make them make themselves."

"You are a clever fairy, indeed," thought Tom. And he was quite

right.

That is a grand trick of good old Mother Carey's, and a grand answer,

which she has had occasion to make several times to impertinent people.

(313,315)

While Beer characterizes The Water Babies as an "unguarded and unanalytic response to

Darwin's ideas and rhetoric" (129), I would suggest that the opposite is true, that

Kingsley demonstrates in this passage a thoughtful understanding of at least some of the specific mechanisms of Darwin's theories. Kingsley's description, for example, of the

"millions of new-born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed" invokes two key concepts for evolution by natural selection, namely variation27 and superfecundity. Kingsley, therefore, is engaging the concepts that underlie Darwinian evolution on their own terms, accepting the mechanisms, but offering an alternative master narrative or "grand answer" to explain them, specifically that natural selection is not necessarily a godless process, that on the contrary it itself is a logical method of

27 One need only look a few pages into Darwin's Origin to find the first of many references that might be behind Kingsley's description of the seemingly limitless varieties of creatures: "the number and diversity of inheritable deviations of structure, both those of slight and those of considerable physiological importance, is endless" (1st ed. 75). 34 divine creation. I am not, of course, suggesting that this idea was unique to Kingsley, but simply that Kingsley was far from "unguarded and unanalytic" in his response to Darwin.

Darwin himself took Kingsley's responses to his work seriously, even quoting, as Beer notes, a letter from Kingsley in the third edition of The Origin. Darwin considered

Kingsley's "grand answer" to be worthy support for his claim that there is "no good reason why the views given in [The Origin] should shock the religious feelings of anyone" (3rd ed. 515), a fact that indicates, perhaps clearer than anything else, that

Kingsley's participation in the discourse of evolution was given serious attention.

This interest in evolution (and natural history in general) combined with

Kingsley's involvement in the discourses of philology and medieval history, as well as with his nationalistic and ethnic pride in his "royal race, [...] destined to win glory for all time to come" (Roman 6). This convergence of interests and beliefs found their most potent outlet for expression in Kingsley's fiction, particularly his historical novel on the

English hero Hereward the Wake.

"Following Facts": The Sources of Hereward

Hereward the Wake: Last of the English first appeared in serial form in Good

Words throughout the course of 1865, followed by publication as a book in 1866, right in the midst of Kingsley's tenure at Cambridge and shortly after the publication of The

Roman and the Teuton. As popular as the original lectures were among the undergraduates at Cambridge, the response to their publication from the academic

28 For this project, I have decided to use the 1866 book version rather than the serial, because it more fully engages historical discourse, particularly in terms of his footnoting. As Larry K. Uffelman points out in reference to the conversion from serial to book, "[although Kingsley did occasionally simplify historical material in the novel, he added more than he subtracted. For instance, he deleted six footnotes, but added thirty-five others" (150). Uffelman's article effectively summarizes the changes between the two forms. 35 community at large was far from entirely positive, including a particularly harsh review from Freeman. Following a challenge to Kingsley's merits for his post, Freeman states that "Mr. Kingsley once could, and still can by an effort, write good sense and good

English, but there are pages and pages of these lectures which are simply rant and nonsense - history, in short, brought down to the lowest level of the sensation novelist"

(quoted in Chitty 249).29 Such a response to his scholarly work probably reinforced any lingering doubts about his worthiness for his professorship; it is not hard to imagine how such insecurities, along with his breakdown of 1864, could have strongly encouraged

Kingsley to channel his considerable narrative powers into striving for accurate historical detail in Hereward. Kingsley makes clear his desire for an air of historicity in the opening paragraph of the novel by making an offhand reference to John Lothrop

Motley's The Rise of the Dutch Republic; he then follows this reference up a few pages later by providing a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's brief account of the first

arrival of the Danes in 787 (1:5). Kingsley's initial description of Hereward makes this

attempt at historical credibility explicit: "I have, in this story, followed facts as strictly as

I could, altering none which I found, and inventing little more than was needed to give

the story coherence, or to illustrate the manners of the time" (1: 17). Whether or not

Kingsley succeeded in constructing a historically accurate text, the importance of his

intense desire to do so should not be underestimated. After all, he is not merely

transmitting the "facts" of Hereward's life, he is also transmitting cultural assumptions

about those facts - certainly the assumptions of his own culture but also to some extent

those of the cultures of his sources. Moreover, Kingsley's (perhaps naive) faith that it is

29 See Catherine Hall's "Men and Their Histories" for further analysis of the reception of Kingsley's lectures, specifically the scathing response of Edward Spencer Beesly, Professor of Modern History at University College, London. 36 indeed possible to adapt a story while altering no facts, inventing little, and so on, only goes to show how insidious this transmission can be. A brief consideration of the representations of Anglo-Saxonness in Kingsley's sources will therefore allow us to understand better the nature of his depictions of that race in Hereward; what aspects of his sources is Kingsley transmitting, what is he interpreting, and what is he inventing out of whole cloth?

Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Holmgren dismiss Kingsley's novel as "simply an engrossment" of the most extensive source of the Hereward material, the Gesta

Herewardi (634), but this is somewhat of an over-simplification. Kingsley draws on, refers to, and even quotes from an impressive array of primary sources throughout

Hereward. As Knight and Holmgren's dismissal indicates, by far the dominant of the

Hereward sources is indeed the twelfth-century Latin prose Gesta Herewardi but it is certainly not comprehensive. The Gesta ends, for example, with Robert of Herepol's facilitation of Hereward's escape from a Norman prison and his reconciliation with King

William, which leaves out a vital incident in the life of Hereward, namely his death, which Kingsley describes in some detail. Kingsley acquainted himself with a variety of medieval sources, particularly the chronicles, in order to fill in such gaps in the Gesta.

Not all of these sources have extensive information on Hereward himself, but Kingsley did not shy away from drawing out of them information about the figures and events that form the periphery of the core Hereward story. Specifically, other than the Gesta and the closely related Liber Eliensis, the sources that Kingsley directly refers to or quotes from

include, but are not limited to, Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastica, the Chronicle of

John or Florence of Worcester, the Peterborough Chronicle, the histories of William of 37

Malmesbury, the Domesday Book, the Croyland Chronicle,30 and Geoffrey Gaimar's

Anglo-Norman verse L 'Estoire des Engles. The last of these was perhaps the most significant of these lesser sources for Kingsley.

The Liber Eliensis, a mid twelfth-century collection of various materials pertaining to the Isle of Ely, compiled by an unnamed monk, includes a version of

Hereward's defense of the Isle (Book 2: Chapters 102-7) that is closely related to the

Gesta. This monk ends his version by providing his readers with a source for further details about the hero, stating that "[i]n libro autem de ipsius gestis Herewardi, dudum a venerabili viro ac doctissimo fratre nostra beate memorie Ricardo edito, plenius descripta inveniuntur" ("they are to be found, however, more fully recounted in a book about the deeds of the same Hereward, written some time ago by Richard of blessed memory, a venerable man and a most learned brother of ours") (188).31 Considering the close textual relationship between this version and that of the Gesta, it is probable that this

"venerabili viro" refers to the author of the Gesta as it currently survives or of its proximate source. The Gesta itself provides further information about the nature of its production. Richard, if indeed it is he, says in his opening chapter that he based his version in part upon personal interviews with witnesses to the events and in part upon the unfortunately damaged remains of the writings of Hereward's deacon, Leofric, who

decided to preserve the deeds of the hero, "ob memoriam Angliae Uteris commendare"

("to commit them to writing for the memory of England") (339).32 Richard's emphasis

that he has translated some of this material from specifically English sources serves

30 Also known as the Ingulf or Pseudo-Ingulf. 31 Translations from the Liber Eliensis are from Janet Fairweather's 2005 translation, with modifications. 32 Translations from the Gesta Herewardi are from Michael Swanton's Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, with modifications. 38 multiple functions. First, it claims a certain authority based on proximity to Hereward himself through first-hand accounts both written and verbal. More importantly to my purposes, however, Richard's choice of words is one of the first indications of a strongly racialized tone running through the Gesta. He emphasizes that the original stories of

Hereward were spoken in English and inscribed in English, and while the Latin Gesta may be history's central source, Richard makes sure to point to the English behind it.

Richard's interest in Hereward's Englishness is affirmed shortly afterwards in the first of two scenes in which Englishness in general is insulted. When the young

Hereward visits the court of a Cornish prince, he encounters a braggart hero, Ulcus

Ferreus, from "duabus gentibus Scottorum et Pictorum" ("the two nations of the Scotts

and Picts") (345), who derides the English as a race: "[i]llo autem hoc saepe ante regales

et ipsum regulum faciente, quodam tempore Anglorum gentem nimis exprobrabat absque

virtute virium esse, et in bello nil valere, confirmando se ex multis uno impetu quadam

vice tres occidesse" ("he often did this before the royal family and the prince himself. On

one occasion he was greatly disparaging the English nation for lacking the virtue of

strength and being useless in battle, declaring that once he had killed three out of a

number of men with one blow") (345). This scene is the first instance of a racial outsider

insulting and, in the process, essentializing the English race as a whole. Moreover, not

only has the braggart impugned Hereward and his heritage on a personal level, he has

done it in public, and in front of royalty; by choosing this locale for his boasting, Ulcus

has committed himself to something bordering on a flyting. Unsurprisingly, Hereward

proves triumphant in the verbal contest and in the physical combat that follows, proving

33 Hereward's witty response suggests that it is suitable that three men born of Ulcus's mind would be defeated by one blow of Ulcus's mouth. Interestingly, this response not only rebuts Ulcus, but also 39 that at least one Englishman is not lacking in "virtute." This early scene, therefore, functions to establish Hereward as the public defender and public face of English virtue

(for at least three audiences - the Cornish court, the broader audience that hears the rumours about Hereward, and Richard's readers).

Ulcus's derision of the English is mirrored later in the Gesta when Hereward finally returns home from his travels. Upon arriving at his ancestral home, Hereward discovers that certain Frenchmen have slain his brother and mounted his head over the gate. Hereward infiltrates the building where the French are celebrating:

post hostium domus explorare convivas accessit, ubi secus ignem ebrietati

deditos omnes conspexit, ac milites in sinu mulierum recumbentes.

Quidam enim joculator intererat psallendo, exprobrans genti Anglorum et

in medio domus incompositos quasi Angligenos fingens saltus.

(he advanced through the entrance of the building to search out the guests.

He saw them all by the fireside overcome with drunkenness, the soldiers

reclining in the women's laps. Among them was a jester playing a lute,

abusing the English race and performing antics in the middle of the hall

meant in imitation of English dancing). (366)

Again we have racial outsiders, this time French rather than Scottish or Pictish, who are

mocking Englishness - something that Hereward finds intolerable.34 Even more

interesting in this instance is the depiction of the French, which functions as a

challenges the value of such verbal competitions, since they can kill only imaginary foes. Needless to say, Hereward eventually manages to defeat Ulcus in a more corporeal manner as well. 34 In contrast to the scene with Ulcus, this mockery takes place in a more private setting. It is Hereward's very own home, making the insults all the more unbearable. Interestingly, Hereward chooses to make his response public by mounting the heads of the fourteen Frenchmen over the gate where his brother's head had previously been fixed. 40 counterpoint to Hereward's Englishness. The actions of the French are tainted by physical excess, specifically in the suggestions of drunkenness and debauchery. This sense of excess is reinforced when the leader of the French revelers impugns Hereward's honour for recently distributing spoils of war to common soldiers rather than hoarding them for the nobility. This rather unnecessary reminder (the event in question occurred mere pages before) allows Richard to place the generosity of Hereward, representing the

English, in direct contrast with the excesses of the French, be they in terms of treasure, drink, or women.

Looking at these two scenes more generally, though, some observations about the

representation of the English race in the text become clear. First, they suggest that while

the loss of the country to the Normans can, and frankly must, be tolerated in the long run,

there are certain insults, such as mockery, that English pride cannot and should not bear.

Hereward, then, may not be successful in driving the Normans from England, but he is

successful in the long run in defending the right of the English to a certain measure of

pride and dignity in their Englishness; Hereward and his resistance gives the English a

sense of their own heroic value even in defeat. Second, unlike in Kingsley's text where

Englishness is subdivided, here the insults of Ulcus and the French paint the picture of a

homogeneous English nation; because the insults come from racial outsiders, Hereward is

defending not only his own particular portion of the English race but rather the unified

entirety of it. Moreover, the repetition of these scenes clearly indicates that it is not only

Ulcus and the French who see the English in this unified manner, but also Richard

himself, who could have chosen a more racially specific term. This is, perhaps, to be

expected, since Richard is writing within living memory of the Conquest, after which the 41 subdivisions within the English were overshadowed by the greater racial and class divisions between the Normans and the English. This sense of the unity of Englishness

(if not England) in the aftermath of the Conquest is something that Kingsley targets in his

Hereward, perhaps drawing on the Gesta.

Needless to say, given that the Conquest of England is always in the background, the Gesta represents racial tension in more ways than mockery of the English. Richard suggests that one of the most insufferable afflictions brought on by the Normans was a religious one. He argues that Ely resists the French "quia ipse rex quemdam externum monachum super eos constituere voluerat, ex eis pro quibus jamdudum miserat de gente

Francorum monachis, ut in omnibus ecclesiis Anglorum decanos constitueret et praepositos" ("because the same king [William] intended to set a certain foreign monk over them - one of those monks for whom he had already sent from the French nation, to

set as deans and priors in all the churches of the English") (374). It seems that it is not so much that a foreign secular ruler has the authority to assign a new abbot for Ely that

Richard cannot bear, but rather the prospect of being ruled by an "externum monachum,"

a foreign religious authority. From Richard's perspective, then, racial tension and

religious authority are tied intimately together, an understandable opinion for a monk in

troubled times. Richard further demonstrates that this problem has ramifications for the

nobility as well, since he makes it clear that Hereward is keen to be knighted in the

"Anglico more" ("English manner") (368), which is to say by a cleric rather than a

layperson, a practice which the French deemed "adulteratus [...] et abortivus" ("corrupt

and untimely"). As Rolf H. Bremmer points out, both of these words raise the issue of

disruptions in procreative purity (39), which further emphasizes the racial aspect of this 42 political issue. Moreover, this short chapter ends with a sentence stating that Hereward would later defend Ely, which makes clear that the French disrespect for the validity of

English religious authority and tradition is one of the direct motivations for Hereward's rejection of the Norman yoke.

While an exhaustive analysis of the remaining sources is beyond the scope of this project, particularly pertinent in terms of race is the Hereward episode in Geoffrey

Gaimar's L 'Estoire des Engles. This episode begins at line 5457 and continues for

approximately 250 lines, covering the period from William the Conqueror's assault on

Hereward's stronghold at Ely to Hereward's violent death. Charles Trice Martin argues

that Gaimar "is quite independent of the Gesta. He knows nothing of Hereward till the

revolt of Ely, nothing of his parentage, nothing of his first wife, Turfrida, but he tells us,

what the Gesta does not, of his accompanying William to Maine in 1073, and of his death

in England at the hands of the Normans after he had made peace with the Conqueror" (2:

xxxiv). While the death of Hereward is certainly the most obvious difference between

these sources, as well as the area in which Kingsley draws most closely on Gaimar, there

is also a significant difference in their characterizations of the hero's opposition to the

French, which is most evident in Gaimar's description of Hereward's defense of Ely (or

in this case, lack thereof):

Apres comanda co li reis

Ke hom feist punt ultre le mareis;

Si dist ke tuz les destruereit,

la nus nel echapereit.

Quant cil le surent en Ely, 43

Si se sunt mis en sa merci;

Tuz alerent merci crier,

Fors Hereward, ki mult fu ber.

II eschapat of poi de gent.

(Then the king commanded / That a bridge should be built over the marsh.

/ He said that he would destroy them all, / That none should escape him. /

When they knew this at Ely / They put themselves at his mercy. / All went

to cry for mercy, / Except Hereward, who was right brave. / He escaped

with few folk). (5493-5501)35

This is hardly the heroic defence of one of the last outposts of English sovereignty; here the mention of Hereward's bravery is quite literally an afterthought ("Fors Hereward") to what seems to otherwise be a mass capitulation before the force of William's character.

This is in contrast to the Gesta, in which the defence of Ely is presented as the single

aspect of Hereward's resistance that is most worthy of extended attention and praise. The

effect of this is to shift the focus in Gaimar's version onto Hereward's time as a Robin

Hood-like outlaw, raiding from the Bruneswold, where "par plusurs anz / Tint Hereward

contre Normans" ("for many years / Hereward held out against the Normans") (5571-72).

This "par plusurs anz" is repeated at line 5591 to end the description of Hereward's life in

the Bruneswold, thereby asserting that this is where Hereward spent most of the

resistance, rather than at Ely. Gaimar's Hereward, then, is primarily an outlaw, who

chooses the French as the target for his raiding, whereas the Gesta's Hereward is a

general of the resistance, opposing the Norman invasion in a more organized fashion.

35 Translations from Lestorie des Engles are from Hardy and Martin's 1888 edition and translation, with modifications. 44

Each of these characterizations is nationalistically and racially charged, but in very different ways. Gaimar's outlaw Hereward is more individual and, therefore, less historically significant. His most notable deed is the defense of his person against seven foes at once (5581-89) - valiant, to be sure, but hardly the heroic defender of all England.

This tension between Hereward as representative of Englishness, as in the Gesta, and

Hereward as a notable single Englishman is one that is particularly influential for

Kingsley. I would suggest the process of synthesizing these complex source materials, and their notions of the Anglo-Saxon race, may have spurred Kingsley to develop further his own conceptions of his race and, of course, his depiction of it in Hereward.

Hereward the Dane and the English, but not the Saxon

Regardless of his claims to be "inventing little more than was needed to give the

story coherence" (1: 17), Kingsley's Hereward is, unsurprisingly, full of embellishments upon his sources, and it is in these embellishments that the richness of his text resides.

More specifically, it is in these embellishments that his racial theories have the most

room to flourish. To be precise, I would suggest that his novel is one of the most

concerted attempts in the nineteenth century to demonstrate the glories of the Danish

influence on Englishness. In contrast to the Gesta's representation of Hereward as

emphatically English in an almost iconic sort of way, Kingsley takes a rather more

complex, even sophisticated, view of his hero's identity: first, Kingsley is emphatic that

Hereward's heritage is not Anglo-Saxon but Anglo-Dane, and second, as the subtitle

proudly declares, Hereward is put forth as a symbol of English national and racial

identities. The interplay between these different levels of identity provides a structural 45 framework for the narrative that is introduced in the prelude and the opening chapter and eventually resolved in the concluding chapter.

The prelude to Hereward opens with an explanation for why lowlanders rarely get the same praise in literature as do highlanders, culminating in an encomium on the indomitable spirit of those dwelling in the lowland Danelaw at the time of the Conquest:

When the men of Wessex, the once conquering, and even to the last the

most civilized, race of Britain, fell at Hastings once and for all, and struck

no second blow, then the men of the Danelagh disdained to yield to the

Norman invader. For seven long years they held their own, not knowing,

like true Englishmen, when they were beaten; and fought on desperate, till

there were none left to fight. (1:4)

The lowland versus highland binary that Kingsley constructs in the opening pages is,

therefore, quickly reinterpreted into a Wessex, or generally Anglo-Saxon, versus Anglo-

Dane paradigm, with the Norman thrown in as spice. We have here the first suggestion

in the novel that Kingsley does not abide by the traditional use of "Anglo-Saxon" as an

all-inclusive umbrella term for the English of the period; for Kingsley, the Anglo-Dane is

potently distinct, sufficiently so to challenge the Anglo-Saxon for what it means to be

"true Englishmen." The damning by faint praise of the Anglo-Saxon resistance to

William in this passage is made explicit shortly thereafter, when Kingsley suggests that

"[fjor a while [the Anglo-Saxons] had been lords of all England. The Anglo-Saxon race

was wearing out. The men of Wessex, priest-ridden, and enslaved by their own

aristocracy, quailed before the free Norsemen" (1: 6-7). Note here that while "the Anglo-

Saxon" seems to be a fairly stable identity, particularly early in Kingsley's novel, the 46 notion of Anglo-Danishness is blurred by numerous other terms, including "the

Norsemen." For Kingsley, the Anglo-Saxon was localized at this stage in England, epitomized in Wessex, and limited by that localization, while "Anglo-Dane" is able to draw upon the traditions of a much wider cultural geography, from Iceland and

Greenland, to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and even to the Varangians at

Constantinople.

This racialized rhetoric in the first half of the prelude lays the groundwork for the by then unsurprising revelation in the second half that Hereward's family is Anglo-Dane.

Familial racial identity is not simply a matter of biology in Hereward, however; it is also, or perhaps even more so, a matter of politics. Kingsley draws on the historical enmity between the houses of Godwin and Leofric, here Hereward's father, as a way of personalizing the broader racial divide that he has put forth. Kingsley informs his readers that Godwin, "though married to a Danish princess, and acknowledging his Danish connection [...], constituted himself (with a sound patriotic instinct) the champion of the men of Wessex, and the house of Cerdic," first of the West Saxon kings (1: 10). While

Kingsley does express respect for Godwin elsewhere, his reference to the earl's "sound

patriotic instinct" is somewhat tongue in cheek, since it is followed by a reference to the possibility that Godwin had Alfred, son of Ethelred, murdered to further his own agenda.

Leofric, on the other hand, "though bearing a Saxon name, seems to have been the

champion of the Danish party" (1:9). Kingsley goes out of his way in the first chapter to

have a messenger recount a scene in which the self-serving nature of Godwin and the

righteous self-sacrifice of Leofric are demonstrated, when Leofric feels the need to

oppose his own son's misdeeds in open court, which leads directly to Hereward's 47 outlawry (1: 49-54).36 The messenger's tale demonstrates the function of Godric and

Leofric, and their respective families, in the novel: by focusing on these two houses,

Kingsley narrows his depiction of the Saxon-Dane tensions sufficiently for narrative to encompass them. But the tension between them does more than that - the fact that

Kingsley's descriptions of the two both begin with qualifiers ("though married to a

Danish princess," "though bearing a Saxon name") is not insignificant. Kingsley emphasizes that each earl seems to have reasons to belong to the other's camp, and, therefore, that self-determination must play at least some role in their political and racial stances. Each earl is motivated by at least two conflicting racial loyalties and, it appears, is unable or unwilling to reconcile them.

Kingsley actually spends much of the prelude presenting a case that Hereward was Earl Leofric's son, which is based on little historical evidence. History aside, if

Hereward was the son of Leofric, then it is easier for Kingsley to accomplish one of his primary objectives in the early chapters: to situate the young hero within a Danish or

Viking set of cultural expectations. With this relationship established in the prelude,

Kingsley is able to have Hereward take Leofric's association with Anglo-Danishness

even further. Hereward himself emphasizes this racial identity multiple times in his first

scene in the novel (1: 35), but it is later in the chapter that he expresses his identification

with his Viking heritage most clearly. As one of the most intriguing treatments of race in

nineteenth-century medievalism, it is worth quoting at length. Hereward, having learned

that he has been outlawed, is considering the options that remain to him:

36 There is a rather effective moment in which one of Leofric's retainers speaks to him in "broad Danish," while Harold Godwinsson is speaking to King Edward in French (1: 53-54). The association of the Godwins with the Norman Edward is used as an indication of their, and more generally the Saxons', degradation. 48

Where would he go? Where would he not go? For the spirit of Odin the

Goer, the spirit which has sent his children round the world, was strong

within him. He would go to Ireland, to the Ostmen, or Irish Danes, at

Dublin, Waterford, or Cork, and marry some beautiful Irish Princess with

gray eyes, and raven locks, and saffron smock, and great gold bracelets

from her native hills.37 No; he would go off to the Orkneys, and join

Bruce and Ranald, and the Vikings of the northern seas, and all the hot

blood which had found even Norway too hot to hold it; he would sail

through witch-whales and icebergs to Iceland and Greenland, and the

sunny lands which they said lay even beyond, across the all but unknown

ocean. Or he would go up the Baltic to the Jomsburg Vikings, and fight

against Lett and Esthonian heathen, and pierce inland, perhaps, through

Puleyn and the bison forests, to the land from whence came the magic

swords and the old Persian coins which he had seen so often in the halls of

his forefathers. No; he would go south, to the land of sun and wine; and

see the magicians of Cordova and Seville; and beard Mussulman hounds

worshipping their Mahomets; and perhaps bring home an Emir's daughter,

"With more gay gold about her middle,

Than would buy half Northumberlee."

37 The details that Kingsley draws out here suggest that he was at least somewhat versed in the traditions of Irish heroic tales. It would be worthwhile to study the full extent of Kingsley's use of this tradition - one excellent place to start would be the fourth chapter of Hereward, "How Hereward took service with Ranald, King of Waterford," in which much history of Ireland, particularly Viking Ireland, is explored. One point is sufficient for my purposes here, however. While Kingsley was only trying to be true to his sources, it is significant that the Irish (and Cornish) are most present in the early, most heavily romance- influenced, section of the novel; this romance tone gives these racial communities a sense of the otherworldly (despite Kingsley's descriptions of historical events) that distances them from the more realized Saxons, Danes, and Normans, in a way that emphasizes Hereward's dreamy romanticizations of their cultures. 49

Or he would go up the Straits, and on to Constantinople and the great

Kaiser of the Greeks, and join the Varanger Guard, and perhaps, like

Harold Hardraade in his own days, after being cast to the lion for carrying

off a fair Greek lady, tear out the monster's tongue with his own hands,

and show the Easterns what a Viking's son could do. (1: 61-62)

Before engaging the specific details of the passage, it is worth looking at it as a whole.

Hereward is here attempting to map the scope of the Viking world from the settlements on Greenland to the Varangian Guard. Despite Hereward's awareness of the national and ethnic differences between the groups that this scope encompasses, he genuinely believes that there is something, called "Viking" in his vocabulary, that unifies them. This belief is quite similar to Anderson's conception of "imagined communities": Hereward and those he includes in his definition of Vikingness "will never know most of their fellow- members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson 6). This bond, while insubstantial and "imagined," is very real, particularly for the romantic Hereward, who has been regaled with stories of the

Vikings throughout his childhood (1: 65-66). Interestingly, as Hereward is defining the breadth of the Viking world, he is also wiping clear his own identity - he is replacing his identity as resident of Bourne and England, and the limitations thereof, with the broad, almost unlimited, potential that comes along with a racial identity as encompassing as

"Viking." In this way, Hereward takes his father's alignment with the Anglo-Danish party over the Anglo-Saxons even further; in fact, Hereward takes the Saxon versus Dane debate to an entirely different order of magnitude. While Leofric merely aligns himself politically within a broader English nation, Hereward redefines the question onto the 50 international stage. Whereas in England the Saxons and Danes were two distinct ethnic groups but were also still unified within one kingdom, in Hereward's imagined community Anglo-Saxons are merely another group against which the Vikings have pushed. Hereward's choice to define himself racially as Viking is, therefore, also a choice to define the Anglo-Saxon as other.

Saxons are certainly not the only foreign races in Hereward's world-view; as encompassing as "Viking" is for Hereward, it is emphatically not all encompassing.

While even the rumours of the settlements on North America are sufficient to include them in Hereward's definition of the Viking community, Hereward nonetheless incorporates into his definition some representations of otherness, specifically the

"Easterns." This label certainly includes the Christians of the eastern empire, but

Hereward focuses particularly on the "Mussulman hounds worshipping their Mahomets."

It is not coincidental that Hereward chooses Muslims to serve as the outer limit of the

Viking world. Kingsley may very well have been aware of the prosperous trade

relationships between Viking Age Norsemen and Muslims. Moreover, Hereward's focus

on Islam as marking the boundary of the Viking world resonates well with his fascination

with the heroes of romance, in which the encounter with the Muslim is an easily

recognizable motif. Intriguingly, the blanket definition of the romance other as Muslim

actually mirrors Hereward's blanket definition of the Scandinavian cultures as uniformly

Viking.

The "Easterns" are not the only foreigners used in Hereward's act of racial self-

definition. His first impulse, after all, is to find "some Irish princess" to marry. The

inclusion of this desire is anomalous in the otherwise logical structure of Hereward's 51 thought progression. Hereward begins his definition close to home, with the Norsemen in nearby Ireland, and then expands his definition outwards from there in steps, each time adding another, larger layer to the sphere of the Viking world, and eventually reaching the full expansion of that sphere with his description of the Eastern others. Simple enough, except that in the centre of these concentric circles dwells the Irish Princess, an

•jo other very near the core of Hereward's racial schema. There is, however, a connection between Hereward's depictions of the Irish Princess and the Muslim - each is an expression of sexual desire. After all, the focal point of Hereward's description of the

Mussulmen is his intention to "bring home an Emir's daughter." The question becomes, then, what effect these two foreign women, not to mention "the fair Greek lady," have on

Hereward's racial self-definition. The fact that both the Irish Princess and the Emir's

daughter are described in terms of wealth certainly resonates with the Viking spirit of

wild freedom to take what one desires, to plunder, raid, and carry off women,39 but it is

more than that. The fact that Hereward expresses desire for specifically foreign rather

than Viking women indicates that the young hero has gendered his understanding of race.

The Viking is the masculine, adventurous and exploratory, full of "the spirit of Odin the

Goer," while the foreign is the feminine, the valuable prize to be seized.

This gendering of race is not isolated to this passage. It is actually a theory that

Kingsley had held since at least as early as 1849, when he lectured on it as part of a

course on Early English Literature to, intriguingly, women at Queen's College, "which

38 By placing the Irish Princess at the centre of Hereward's racial map, Kingsley is laying the groundwork for his racialized representations of Hereward's two wives, Torfrida, who becomes English, and Alftruda, who makes Hereward abandon his Englishness. Both of these women are discussed below (pp. 63-71). 39 Interestingly, Kingsley has Hereward desire to specifically "marry" the Irish princess, in contrast to the more ambiguous "bring[ing] home" of the Emir's daughter, which could be either for marriage or, more in Viking style, concubinage. 52

Maurice and other professors at King's [College] had established [...] primarily for the examining and training of governesses. Kingsley was ready to share in the unpopular task because he believed in the higher education of women" (Thorp 65). Kingsley had to give up the course, but some of his ideas are preserved in a letter he sent informing his replacement of what he had covered. In it he refers to the Anglo-Saxons as a "female race" who "required impregnation by the great male race, - the Norse" (F. Kingsley 1:

201). Here again, we see the definition of the various Scandinavian races with a single blanket term, this time "Norse" rather than "Viking." And again we see the sexualized

imagery that characterizes Kingsley's descriptions of the Norse /Viking interactions with

racial otherness. Here, even more explicitly than the Irish Princess and the Emir's

daughter, the Anglo-Saxon is passive and dormant, awaiting contact with the masculine

energy of the Norse. Kingsley encourages his successor to

Give them a lecture on the rise of our Norse forefathers - give them

something from the Voluspa and Edda. Show hem [sic] the peculiar wild,

mournful, gigantic objective imagination of the men, and its marriage with

the Saxon subjectivity (as I fancy) to produce a ballad school. Remember

two things. The Norse are the great creators, all through - and all the

ballads came from the North of England and the Lowlands of Scotland,

i.e., from half Norse blood.

I suggest that Kingsley is drawing here on Bulwer-Lytton's Harold, which includes a

"ballad of the Norse, which had, in its more careless composition, a character quite

distinct from the artificial poetry of the Saxons" (1: 10). Bulwer-Lytton goes on to claim

in a footnote that the influence of such Norse ballads on the "early national muse" of the 53

English "may be traced [to] the minstrelsy of our borders, and the Scottish Lowlands," especially under the rule of Canute. The correspondences between these arguments are not, of course, absolute, but they are suggestive enough to think that Kingsley may have been reflecting on Bulwer-Lytton's argument, especially since he refers to "Bulwer's

Harold" earlier in the same letter. "Wild" is not far from "careless," and "superficial" could be a reinterpretation of "artificial." More significant, however, is the sense that both writers have of border culture - places where direct communication between two cultures can take place, where, in this case, Norse and Saxon experience an everyday, routine contact with each other, rather than the more ethereal, even imaginary, notion of the other that an insulated community might hold. It is not hard to see how Kingsley may have been able to reimagine such a border culture as a "marriage" between genders, where the two certainly do become one, but still nevertheless clearly remain two. This is,

of course, the question with such a border culture - does it allow the distinction between the two communities to merge into a state of hybridity or does it do quite the opposite,

serving rather to emphasize their differences?

The gendered construction of the relationship between the Saxons and the Danes

in Kingsley's letter is clearly problematic. On the one hand, it is a symbiotic relationship,

since neither race can produce the desired literature on its own. Symbiotic relationships

are not always equal, however, and in this case it is clear that Kingsley agrees with

Hereward in valuing the Danish significantly over the Saxon. The richness of the string

of adjectives in Kingsley's characterization of the Norse contrasts with the rather

ambiguous description of the Saxons. The Norse's imagination is vital and directed to

the external object, whereas the Saxon is subjective, inward-looking. Perhaps most 54 potent of all is the fact that Kingsley goes on to describe the Norse as "the great creators, all through." So, masculine energy is the creative, active force, whereas the feminine energy is the passive canvas awaiting that creative force. With this in mind, it becomes clear why Kingsley is so insistent that Hereward is Anglo-Dane and not Anglo-Saxon - after all, Hereward is the heroically creative force that will influence the ready and waiting Saxons.

The Priest-Ridden Men of Wessex

Kingsley's conception of the Saxons is almost more interesting than that of the

Danes. We have already seen that Kingsley felt that at the time of the Conquest "[t]he

Anglo-Saxon race was wearing out. The men of Wessex, priest-ridden," were "enslaved by their own aristocracy" {Hereward 1: 6-7). Kingsley is here echoing, directly or indirectly, Palgrave's representation of the Danish raids on England and the racial tensions that ensued:

It is certain that [the Danes] must have recollected their kindred with the

Anglo-Saxons; but this circumstance rather heightened than mitigated

their ferocity. They considered the English, for this familiar name now

began to be in use, as apostates and recreants from the warlike virtues of

their ancestors. They viewed them as cowards - who, contemning the

banquet of Valhalla, had yielded up its joys, for the song of the Priest and

the mummery of the Quire. (105)

The priesthood is something that is eating the Saxons apart from the inside and draining, as Palgrave makes clear, "the warlike virtues of their ancestors." Likewise, Kingsley's 55 phrase "priest-ridden" evokes images of infestation and rot. While Kingsley is engaging here in typical anti-Papist rhetoric,40 these two passages also engage in the discourse that

E. G. Stanley explores in The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism. As Stanley writes, in the wake of Jakob Grimm's influence on the field, "the assumption is made, explicitly or implicitly, that whatever was not touched by Christianity, whatever remained purely

Germanic, purely pagan, was more original and more glorious" (8). The Anglo-Saxon, then, had been too Christianized (or, more properly, Roman Catholicized), rotted out by

"the mummery of the Quire," by the time of the Viking invasions, let alone by

Hereward's day. Note that the solution, a return to one's pagan origins, is one of the first thoughts to strike Hereward, when he conceives of himself as infused with "the spirit of

Odin the Goer." But this solution is problematically presentist. While it is reasonable to suggest that Anglo-Saxons may very well have romanticized their pagan heritage, as

Kingsley's Hereward does, the quasi-holy war nature of Palgrave's characterization of the Viking raids is absurd enough to demonstrate how keenly critics of the time, including Kingsley, desired to reclaim their pagan origins.

Kingsley's contrast of the Vikings with the "priest-ridden" Anglo-Saxons is connected to his notions of the degeneration of races. Degeneration is a common concern

The importance of anti-papal sentiment to nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between Saxon and Norman should not be underestimated. The Protestant-Catholic divide began to be coloured in the nineteenth century by the rise of the new philology and its challenge to the primacy of Latin, with its intrinsic connections to Rome. As Andrew Wawn discusses, the relationship between the classical and Germanic languages had been reorganized: the authority and prestige previously ascribed to Greek and Latin - parent figures watching over unruly younger European languages - was challenged by the discovery of Sanskrit, a language older than either Greek or Latin. Under the revised developmental model proposed by the new philologists, Latin and Greek took their place alongside rather than towering over other tongues, all siblings of a lost Indo-European parent language. (Vikings 62) The religious implications of such a reorganization are clear: for example, destabilizing the pedigree of Latin places it on the same footing as the vulgar languages, including in terms of their validity for liturgical purposes. 56 in Kingsley's fiction, from The Water Babies to Alton Locke. This interest in degeneration was not merely a theory for Kingsley, but was rather a motivating political force, since, as Banton suggests, one of his reasons for lobbying for sanitary reform was his belief "that poor health contributed to the degradation of races" (24). Since such forces as unsanitary living conditions posed this real and dire threat, the progress of humanity was for Kingsley as much about resisting devolution as it was about evolving.

Moreover, Kingsley considered the consequences of racial degeneration dire, not only in terms of morality but also in terms of existence itself. As Kingsley's main example of

degenerate races, the Romans, demonstrates, degradation can lead to destruction.

Lecture II of The Roman and the Teuton takes as its topic "The Dying Empire." It begins with an extended description of the degenerate status of Roman society in the

second half of the fourth century:

Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell you) had vanished long

before. Public morality had, of course, vanished likewise. The only

powers really recognised were force and cunning. The only aim was

personal enjoyment. The only God was Divus Caesar, the imperial

demigod, whose illimitable brute force gave him illimitable powers of

self-enjoyment, and made him thus the paragon and ideal of humanity,

whom all envied, flattered, hated, and obeyed. The palace was a sink of

corruption, where eunuchs, concubines, spies, informers, freedmen,

adventurers, struggled in the basest plots, each for his share of the public

plunder. (18-19) 57

This notion of the Empire as corrupt was not, of course, a new one, having been popularized by Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but it is still worth noting what aspect of this corruption Kingsley focuses on in particular. He is interested, more than in the corruption itself, in the correlation between "private morality," "public morality," and government. I would suggest that the most significant phrase in the above passage is the "of course" - for Kingsley, it is little more than common sense that the degeneration of private morality leads to the degeneration of public morality, and from there to the corruption of the governmental authority. Kingsley resisted the thinking of

Francois Guizot, to whose Histoire de la Civilisation en France he refers; Kingsley felt

that Guizot was "apt to impute human happiness and prosperity too exclusively to the

political constitution under which they may happen to live" (39), perhaps drawing on

some anti-American rhetoric as well. While Kingsley did acknowledge the importance of

a just constitution, he favoured the work of Thomas Carlyle, for whom "private virtue,

from which springs public virtue, is the first and sole cause of national prosperity"

{Roman 39). This distinction is vital in terms of Kingsley's understanding of race. After

all, if the constitution rather than the individuals determines the community's prosperity,

then the degeneration Kingsley fears is the result of a flawed political system, serious to

be sure, but not a reflection of the community on the racial level. But if the community

of individuals are themselves the actual source of the corruption on the political level,

then the degeneration is also a degeneration of the race. 58

"Civilized" and "Nomadic" Races

Not surprisingly given its title, The Roman and the Teuton places the Teutons in opposition to the degeneration of Rome. In order to construct this opposition, Kingsley draws on an important image in the Anglo-Saxonism of the time, the Teuton as forest- dweller. Kingsley actually tells a fairy tale of innocent forest children (allegorically, the

Teutons) who find their way to the garden of trolls (the Romans) and are progressively corrupted by the luxury within; these children defeat the trolls and then fight amongst themselves for possession of the garden. The demonizing of the Romans in this narrative is clear: not only are they at fault for their own vices, but they are also responsible for the loss of the innocence of the hitherto pure Teutons. The story does not, however, end there, as Kingsley refers back to the image of the Teutons as forest-dwellers in later chapters; one of these passages will be examined more closely below. But this image is certainly not Kingsley's alone. Quite the contrary - he is engaging in a well-established tradition in the Anglo-Saxonist criticism of the time. E. A. Freeman referred to the

"German forest" and the "Scandinavian rock" (quoted in Stephens 1: 120), for example, while Palgrave refers to the Germanic tradition as "a fruit of the old oak" that "the

Germans brought with them from their forests" (253). The primitivism of this forest imagery presents the Germanic people as existing outside of the corruptions of civilized life - free, wild, and vital, much like Hereward's notion of the Vikings - in order that their initial purity may be established. Some may have fallen to the temptations of the trolls' garden, but the original and fundamental spirit of the people remains that of the

forest. One of the recurrent themes of Kingsley's writing is an attempt to foster this

original spirit. 59

I would suggest that this forest-dweller versus civilized man discourse draws heavily upon Sharon Turner's notion of "the two great classes of mankind": what he calls the "civilized" and the "nomadic" races (1:9). Turner argues that a people has one of two impulses - either the desire to remain stationary or the desire to wander - and that these impulses have led, throughout history, to a number of racial divergences. Turner goes to some pains to emphasize that, in general, the evolutionary pathway of a nomadic race was not at all inferior to that of the civilized. In some of the nomadic races, he argues, "the alteration was a deteriorating process, declining successively into absolute barbarism. But in more, it became rather peculiarity, than perversion" (1: 8). This statement is a remarkably clever logical move. In one fell swoop, Turner has acknowledged that some nomadic races are degenerate, thereby allowing for the possible justification of certain unpleasant interactions with such races, but has at the same time provided a defense of the nomadic, and therefore uncivilized, ethnogenesis of the English people. The influence of these ideas should not be underestimated. First of all, they assert a functional theory of ethnogenesis, providing an explanation for the divergence of races and thereby defending the single origin side of what was an ongoing debate over the possibility of multiple origins of humanity. It allows, therefore, at the same time for both the unity and the inequality of the races. Furthermore, it engages directly in some of the other discourses discussed above, not least of which is the gendering of the races.

Turner describes the nature of the civilized races first, specifically how they

"exercised mind in frequent and refined thought" and thereby came to the various governmental, religious, and artistic advances that mark their societies (1: 10). "But these civilized nations, notwithstanding all their improvements, and from the operation of 60 some, have degenerated into sensuality; into the debasing vices, and to effeminate frivolities" (1: 11). Civilization, then, is gendered female, or to be more precise it takes on a feminine nature as it degrades into vice. Turner's descriptions of the nomadic races are, not surprisingly, significantly more masculine: "[y]et amid these habits, a fearless and enterprising spirit, and a personal dignity and highminded temper were nourished; and the hardy and manly virtues became pleasing habits" (1: 15). While it is notable that the masculine is described in terms of virtue, in contrast to the feminine vices above,

Turner does complicate such a simplistic reading. His theory quickly throws a wrench into the otherwise direct civilized/feminine versus nomadic/masculine binary by arguing that the "life of constant activity" of the nomads meant that "the female virtues were

called perpetually into action; and their uses were felt to be so important, that the fair sex

obtained among all the tribes of ancient Germany a rank, an estimation, and an

attachment, which were unknown in all the civilised world of antiquity" (1: 15-16). The nomadic lifestyle, therefore, despite its "hardy and manly" qualities, also fosters the best

aspects of the feminine and, perhaps more importantly, fosters an increased societal

respect for its values. Turner's theory, then, is that while the civilized is associated

primarily with the female and the nomadic primarily with the masculine, the civilized

society encourages the vices peculiar to femininity while the masculine lifestyle of

nomadic society cultivates its virtues.

Turner's theory of the "two great classes of mankind" clearly helps to situate

Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton within the nineteenth-century understanding of the

Empire and the Germanic tribes. There is, however, a potential logical problem when

one attempts to apply these critical works to Kingsley's representation of Hereward's 61 aggressive self-definition as Anglo-Dane rather than Anglo-Saxon. Specifically, if

Turner and Kingsley both present the Germanic/Teutonic tribes as the vital and the masculine that opposes the corrupt effeminacy of the Romans, how then does the Saxon come to be the "female race," awaiting "impregnation" by the Norse? The question is related to a persistent problem in Anglo-Saxon Studies: the difficulty in differentiating late Anglo-Saxon culture from its early Germanic roots. The answer can be found, therefore, in the cultural changes that occurred in the centuries separating the proto-

Germanic, "forest-dwelling," "nomadic" Teutons, and the more mature (chronologically, if not morally), "civilized" Saxons of the Viking Age. Herein lies one of the key differences between the words "Teuton" and "Saxon" in Kingsley's imagination.

"Teuton," for Kingsley, evokes the notion of purity and potential, whereas the "Saxon" was one instance of a failure, if only in the long-term, to live up to that potential.

The late Saxon world in Bulwer-Lytton's Harold is represented in part by "an ancient Roman fountain, that now served to water the swine" (1: 5) - the Saxons, inheritors of Roman civilization, were unable to resist the corrupt side of becoming a

civilized race, instead straying further and further from their Teutonic roots. In the

opening lines of Hereward, Kingsley expresses such degeneration in evolutionary terms:

In the savage struggle for life, none but the strongest, healthiest,

cunningest, have a chance of living, prospering, and propagating their

race. In the civilized state, on the contrary, the weakliest and the silliest,

protected by law, religion, and humanity, have their chance likewise, and

transmit to their offspring their own weakliness and silliness. (1:2) 62

The Darwinian influence is obvious here. For Kingsley, civilization has removed from

Anglo-Saxon culture the hardening trials of life in the Teutonic forest; instead of the natural selection for the manly virtues that is inherent to the Northern races, civilization provides an artificial selection for the feminine vices, and hence the possibility of the early, masculine Germanic settlers of England descending into the feminized and "priest- ridden men of Wessex."

The intersections between gender, religion, and the degeneration of races in

Kingsley's thinking are illuminated by his understanding of Muscular Christianity, a term that came to be intertwined with his name. He struggles to define this term in a sermon at

Cambridge in 1865. After expressing strong reservations about the meaning and utility of

the term, he attempts to locate its origin in early Church history. He defines persecution-

era Christianity in terms of "all that is loveliest in the ideal female character," namely

"gentleness, patience, resignation, self-sacrifice and self-devotion" (F. Kingsley 2: 212).

But, as is the pattern in Kingsley's view of history, this exclusive focus on the feminine

characteristics caused "grave defects [. ..] to appear in what was really too narrow a

conception of the human character," this time namely cunning, falsity, intrigue,

cowardice, querulousness, passion and cruelty (2: 212). The solution to such

degeneration was "chivalry," which "asserted the possibility of consecrating the whole

manhood, and not merely a few faculties thereof, to God" (2: 213). He emphasizes

worldly rather than abstract virtues, some of which are overtly masculine, such as martial

excellence. The key word in the above quotation, however, is "whole" - for Kingsley,

Muscular Christianity is not a claim for the preeminence of the masculine or manly

virtues, but rather an assertion of the need for a balance, or in other words, a marriage, 63 between the masculine and feminine virtues. Kingsley, therefore, espouses the same balance for the individual as he does for the race.41

There is an ambiguity in Gaimar's account that allows Kingsley to include in his own Hereward the above notions of the genders of races and the corruptions that plague them. As mentioned above, Gaimar is far more interested in Hereward the outlaw than in

Hereward the resistance leader. The ambiguity lies in how and why Hereward is convinced to abandon his outlaw ways, as well as the role of the beautiful Alftrued (or

Alftruda in Kingsley) in this decision. On the one hand, Gaimar initially says that "si la perneit a muiller, / Bien purreit Franceis guerreier" ("if he took her for wife, / Well could he war against the French") (5597-98) - a manly reason for marriage, if ever there was one. But, on the other hand, mere lines later, Gaimar puts forth a different possibility:

Par plusurs faiz tant le manda

Ke Hereward sen apresta.

Vers li alad od mult grant gent,

Triwes aueit tut veirement,

Al rei se deueit acorder.

(So many times she sent for him / That Hereward made ready. He went

to her with many folk. / Verily he had a truce; / He was about to make

peace with the king) (5603-5).

41 In a discussion of Kingsley's Muscular Christianity with regards to Alton Locke and Westward Ho!, C. J. W. L. Wee asserts that Kingsley desired "to re-create England as a land of rugged warriors far removed from metropolitan life with its unhealthy, politically restless men" (67). Wee is quite right to a point: while Kingsley did desire a reassertion of the "rugged," Wee overstates the case in claiming that he dismissed the contributions that the civilized world could make to an individual or to a race. Wee is much closer to the mark, however, when describing Kingsley's desire for a "primitive vigor [...] unconstrained by modern life" (68) - the modern was indeed constraining for Kingsley, hence his repeated turn to the medieval. 64

Not only are the motives different in each case, but also the agency - in the first,

Hereward is actively furthering his own personal goals, whereas in the second, the agency has shifted somewhat towards Alftruda, to whose entreaties he merely succumbs.

Kingsley seizes upon the ambiguities in this problematic marriage as an opportunity to make it a key turning point for his own novel.

Kingsley's Hereward is, unlike Gaimar's, already married to Torfrida, making his decision to leave the outlaw life for Alftruda all the more problematic. But the true problem with his second marriage goes well beyond the religious and legal implications;

after all, Kingsley is quick to point out that "doubtless, Holy Church contrived that it

should happen without sin, if it conduced to her own interest" (2: 274). The "sin," for

Kingsley, is rather one of degeneration. Despite writing an encomium on outlawry

merely two chapters before, Kingsley describes how Hereward's band, and Hereward and

Torfrida in particular, degenerate because of it:

Away from law, from self-restraint, from refinement, from elegance, from

the very sound of a church-going bell, they were sinking gradually down

to the level of the coarse men and women whom they saw; the worse and

not the better parts of both their characters were getting the upper hand;

and it was but too possible that after a while the hero might sink into the

ruffian, the lady into a slattern and a shrew. (2: 224)

Note here that Hereward and Torfrida are becoming much more like the "forest-children"

of The Roman and the Teuton, minus the innocence, of course - a perfect opportunity for

Kingsley to reinterpret Gaimar's version of the story into an encounter with the

temptations of civilization. This temptation manifests itself in the letters of Alftruda, 65 which catalyze Hereward's degeneration into a "ruffian." She tempts Hereward with the greener grass alternative to the difficult life of a forest outlaw. After all, Hereward's choice is not only about two women - it is also about a choice between the hardy, nomadic, male, forest life of remaining English, and the elegant, refined, civilized, female life of betraying his race in favour of succumbing to Norman rule. Neither option is perfect, certainly, but the former is merely a challenge to Hereward and Torfrida's moral convictions, though an admittedly difficult one, while the latter is a life of corruption and further degeneration.

As the case is, Hereward chooses against his racial, religious, and moral obligations. His marriage with Alftruda proves a disaster, culminating in his imprisonment. But the physical imprisonment is only a shadow of his emotional and racial submission to those he vowed to resist. When Hereward's jailor is surprised at his willingness to fight against the remaining English resistance under Waltheof in exchange for his freedom, Hereward completes his long degeneration: "[w]hy not against him? He is but bringing more misery on England. Tell that to William. Tell him that if he sets me free, I will be the first to attack Waltheof, or whom he will. There are no English left to fight against" (2: 282). The indifference of the opening question indicates how far he has fallen, which is quickly reinforced by his casual reference to doing whatever William

"will"; this devaluation of freedom resounds all the more strongly since "personal independence" is presented in the text as "the peculiar mark, and peculiar strength, of the

English character" (2: 195) and especially of its Anglo-Danish component. The most

significant aspect of these lines, however, is the fact that they are performative.

Hereward, as the subtitle of the novel indicates, is "the last of the English," but when he 66 ceases to define himself as English, when he devalues the sense of freedom that is inherent to Kingsley's sense of Englishness, then there are truly "no English left."

Marriage, Synthesis, and Racial Regeneration

The union of Hereward and Alftruda leads Hereward to degenerate, to borrow

Turner's words, "into the debasing vices, and to effeminate frivolities," but it is important to note that Kingsley did not think ill of marriage or of women - quite the opposite.

Alftruda's effect on Hereward is only representative of the civilized race's potential long- term effects on the nomadic race with which it bonds. As the case is, vital to Kingsley's theory of the "marriage" of races is his belief that such a marriage is actually able to reverse racial degeneration, at least initially and for a certain period of time. Here, again, he was probably drawing on Turner, who describes the process in general terms:

Their mental progress, from all these causes, has been usually checked

into that limited and stationary knowledge, soon becoming comparative

ignorance, into which, even the cultivation and social comforts of

civilization have hitherto invariably sunk; and from which the irruptions,

spirit, and agencies of the Nomadic tribes, or the newer kingdoms which

they have founded, have repeatedly rescued the human race. (1: 11-12)

Perhaps most notable about this argument is its all-encompassing inevitability and applicability. The very settled nature of the civilized nations, with their "stationary knowledge," leads "invariably" to sinking into corruption. Meanwhile, the wild

"irruptions" of the nomadic nations leads "repeatedly" to them rescuing, ironically via invasion, their civilized neighbours. Moreover, Turner is not talking about specific races 67 or historical events, but about the "human race," which gives the argument a sense of universality.

This universality in Turner's model allows it to function as a cycle. After the nomadic race has reinvigorated the civilized, there may be a period of idyllic union, but eventually the hybrid race, being settled, begins to become susceptible to the dangers of

"stationary thought." Turner's model for the interaction between the races can, therefore, be effectively conceived of as a Hegelian dialectic. If the civilized race is the thesis, then the nomadic race is the antithesis: both are lacking, each in certain complementary ways.

Only by coming together in synthesis are these deficiencies overcome. Moreover, no synthesis of races is complete; on the contrary, it eventually requires another reinvigorating synthesis.42 Races, then, like the dialectic, are in continual motion - the difference is that, unlike the dialectical schema, Turner's model for race defines this motion not as progress but rather as cyclical maintenance, the repeated mending of the degeneration inherent in civilization.43

These notions apply well to Kingsley's constructions of race: his Teutons are

obviously the antithesis to his Romans. Likewise, his Norse are the antithesis to his

Saxons, producing a synthesis in the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes of the pre-Conquest

era. This synthesis, and particularly its Anglo-Saxon manifestation, however, eventually

It should be noted that "thesis," "antithesis," and "synthesis" are not actually Hegel's terms; he tended to use "abstract," "negative," and "concrete"; regardless, this style of thinking is a useful model for Kingsley's theorization. 43 These theories mirror quite evocatively the discourses of geological progression in the early nineteenth century, specifically the discussions of whether the world was disintegrating, progressing, or sustaining. Charles Lyell's work is particularly applicable to Kingsley, partially because of their friendly relationship, as mentioned above. Andrew Wawn summarizes Lyell's notion of geological progression as "anti- catastrophic," "essentially cyclical and unchanging, save for the instabilities inherent in the inexorable and necessary processes of repair, whether of land or species" ("Hereward" 365-66). Wawn applies this theory to the hints of progress at the end of Hereward; I would suggest that it may also have influenced Kingsley's thinking on a much broader level, including a reinforcement of his understanding of race. 68 requires a new antithesis, namely William and his Normans. This need for repeated regeneration is partially due to the incomplete integration of the races during their

"marriage." For example, Kingsley attributes the beginning of the degeneration process in Teutonized Rome to the tensions between the pagan Teutons and the still predominantly Roman clergy: "this very difference of race exposed the clergy to great temptations. They were the only civilized men left, west of Constantinople. They looked on the Teuton not as a man, but as a child; to be ruled; to be petted when he did right, punished when he did wrong" (Roman 221). Kingsley goes on to argue how the clergy gave in to the temptation to prey upon the ignorance of the Teutonic rulers, "the temptation to forge; to forge legends, charters, dotations, ecclesiastical history of all

kinds" (221-22).44 The cause of the degeneration, therefore, is that the synthesis between

these two races was not entirely complete: there were remnants of the tension between

thesis and antithesis. Herein lies the reason for the tension between Anglo-Saxon and

Anglo-Dane in Hereward. The Danes partially reinvigorated the Saxons, but not

completely - something of the original Saxon rot survived and then spread, leading

eventually to the need for further regeneration from the Normans.

Just as Hereward's marriage to Alftruda symbolically reenacted the encounter

between the Germanic tribes and the Romans, likewise his earlier marriage to Torfrida

closely parallels the Norman Conquest of England. Torfrida is from St. Omer, a town in

modern-day northern France, though at the time under the influence of Count Baldwin of

44 Kingsley is almost certainly engaging here with Gibbon's theories. While Kingsley calls certain of Gibbon's opinions "the shallow insight of a sneerer" (Hypatia 1: xvii), there are similarities in their arguments. For example, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire attributes many of the problems confronting the late Empire to the influence of Christianity: "[t]he clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity: the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister" (3: 636). Note also that like Kingsley, Gibbon views "the active virtues of society" as gendered masculine, in contrast to "a servile and effeminate age" (3: 636). 69

Flanders. Kingsley gives little attention to her father but indicates that her mother was a

Provencale - Torfrida, then, while not Norman, is definitely continental and at least partially French. Because of this cultural difference, their courtship is not without difficulties: despite her love for Hereward, Torfrida fears the implications of his lack of courtly manners:

Gradually she found out that the sneers which she had heard at English

barbarians were not altogether without ground. Not only had her lover's

life been passed among half brutal and wild adventurers, but, like the rest

of his nation, he had never felt the influence of that classic civilization

without which good manners seem, even to this day, almost beyond the

reach of the western races. (1: 205)

So Kingsley is careful to emphasize that Hereward is entirely untouched by "classic

civilization," that Torfrida will be marrying a barbarian who has never truly been out of the metaphorical forest. Conversely, Kingsley makes Torfrida's extensive contact with

civilization equally clear, specifically through her access to her uncle, the Abbot of St.

Bertin, and his private library, which leads to her "deep and sincere longing - as one soul

in ten thousand has - after knowledge for its own sake" (1: 171). Moreover, the dark side

of civilization is present in this desire for knowledge, since she delves into the works of

classical and medieval sorcery, and even learns much from her Lapp nurse, who is

"skilled in all the sorceries for which the Lapps were famed throughout the North" (1:

168).

Both Hereward and Torfrida, then, are characterized by the virtues and the

weaknesses of their respective racial classes (in Turner's words) or genders (in 70

Kingsley's). Despite its Odd Couple nature, however, the marriage turns out remarkably well. Each seems to mute, if not cure, the racial weaknesses in the other. She "as much awed him by her learning, as by the new world of higher and purer morality, which was opened for the first time to the wandering Viking" (1: 206-7). The choice of "wandering" here clearly connects Kingsley's thinking to Turner's classification of his race as

"nomadic." Hereward, "for his part, drank it all in" and Kingsley is quick to ensure that this receptiveness is gendered: "but the spell was on him - a far surer, as well as purer spell than any love-potion of which foolish Torfrida had ever dreamed - the only spell which can really civilize man - that of woman's tact, and woman's purity" (1: 207).

Here again is the feminine, civilizing force, but it is not the only teaching force in the relationship; after all, even as Torfrida is teaching Hereward, he is unconsciously teaching her the "foolish" nature of her dabblings in sorcery. This lesson may seem

insignificant in comparison to "the world of higher and purer morality" to which she

exposes him, but it is a lesson which later yields the greatest victory to the resistance at

Ely, when her demonstration of Christian faith counters the spells of William's witch.

Wawn asserts that Kingsley finds it "emotionally as well as intellectually hard to regard

the Conquest as a beneficial fusion of the best elements of Anglo-Danish and Norman

tradition" ("Hereward" 366). It may indeed have been difficult for Kingsley, but clearly

he feels that the marriage between the English, wandering, male Hereward, and the

French, civilized, female Torfrida is one that counteracts the weaknesses endemic to both

of their races.

Marriage is not the only institution that Kingsley associates with both

degeneration and regeneration. Kingsley's respect for Christianity's positive influence 71 on history was immense,45 but it is worth noting the emphasis he places on the Church's role in the degeneration of cultures even beyond the Empire, not only in both The Roman and the Teuton and in Hereward but also in Hypatia, another historical novel. Taking place early in the fifth century in the midst of what Kingsley calls a "general intermixture of ideas, creeds, and races" (1: xvii), Hypatia depicts a moment of cultural contact (and conflict) between Hypatia's Neo-Platonic school, the Alexandrian Church, the quasi- pagan political authority, the Jewish community, and a band of Gothic raiders. As with the other texts discussed above, there is a fusion of (some of) these elements taking place in this novel and again it is the foreign, nomadic, wild, Goths that are presented as the energizing force. While Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, is presented as a scoundrel, it is interestingly the Church, at least the elements controlled by Archbishop Cyril, that

Kingsley condemns most vehemently. One of the first descriptions of Cyril's Church is a warning to the naive, new arrival, Philammon, to avoid its corruptions:

Look here, my youth; you seem too ingenuous for a monk. Don't flatter

yourself that it will last. If you can wear the sheepskin, and haunt the

churches here for a month, without learning to lie, and slander, and clap,

and hoot, and perhaps play your part in a sedition-and-murder satyric

drama - why, you are a better man than I take you for. (1: 83)

This warning comes from a self-professed Greek philosopher, whose antagonism for the

Church clearly biases his opinions, but the actions of many of the monks and priests

For example, while discussing Roman slavery laws, Kingsley casts Christianity as the primary restraining force on tyranny: "[i]t is an ugly picture: but common sense will tell us, if we but think a little, that such will, and must, be the case in slave-holding countries, wherever Christianity is not present in its purest and strongest form, to control the passions of arbitrary power" {Roman 41). Note, however, that even here Kingsley puts in the qualifier "in its purest and strongest form" - he has great faith in the power of Christianity, but also great criticisms of many of its manifestations. 72 throughout the text, even a "sedition-and-murder" plot, make it clear that the man's warning is justified. With this representation of the potential for clerical deception, deceit, and conspiracy, it becomes much clearer what Kingsley may have meant when he condemns the Saxons as "priest-ridden."

But it is vital to note that Kingsley does not condemn the Alexandrian Church as a whole; on the contrary, he takes great efforts to present a few examples of truly virtuous clergymen in the text, including Augustine of Hippo, who has a sort of guest-star appearance, and Bishop Synesius, who seems much like Kingsley himself, particularly in his tendencies towards Muscular Christianity. Even in this corrupt time, Kingsley suggests, there are great minds and great individuals being produced. As Kingsley says in his preface, "[t]he Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour not for themselves, but for us" (1: xxi). The deeds of the individuals were not worthless, even though they could not redeem culture in its current form, since these deeds have

sown seeds for future cultures. Moreover, as in The Roman and the Teuton and in

Hereward, so too in Hypatia: it is in the Goths that the power resides to reinvigorate

these seeds within Alexandrian culture. The Goths are represented in the text by an

unworldly but vigorous and virtuous Viking band first seen asking Philammon for

directions to Asgard, which they have been tricked into believing lies up the Nile.

Michael Young argues correctly that Hypatia "manages to locate the approved values of

the romance sphere in a group of Vikings, a racial identity the text sees as close to that of

the English" (178). The culture of Alexandria, then, as with the Empire as a whole

before it, is only waiting for a redeeming infusion from an external, untainted, source, 73 such as the Gothic nation, in order to purge the corruption from the culture and allow the

seeds planted by such men as Augustine to bloom.46

"The History of Men and Women, and of Nothing Else"

In Hypatia, Kingsley personifies his notion of each ideological or religious

community in an individual representative. So, Kingsley sets forth the patriarch Cyril as

emblematic of the entire Christian community in Alexandria, Hypatia as Hellenic

philosophy, Wulf as the Viking spirit, and so forth. It is partially a narrative technique to

allow these concepts to interact directly, as discussed above, but it is also the flip side of

Kingsley's conception of history. Kingsley argued that "[t]he history of the masses

cannot be written" {Roman 231) and, therefore, the best way to access historical truth is

through an understanding of the great individuals of the time.47 He adopts this argument

as the thesis of his inaugural lecture at Cambridge:

If they wish to understand History, they must first try to understand men

and women. For History is the history of men and women, and of nothing

else; and he who knows men and women thoroughly will best understand

Note, however, that while the Goths did regenerate much of the Western Empire, Kingsley makes it clear that limits were placed on their influence: "some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every other quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in Constantinople, which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and manners of Asia. The Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern doom, from the only influence which could have regenerated it" {Hypatia 1: xx). 47 Edward Spencer Beesly took Kingsley to task on this point, asking, "how would contemporary history look if written by an Irish peasant or a Spitalfields weaver?" (quoted in Catherine Hall 63). Kingsley may actually have been very interested in such a history since it was not the value of the perspective of the masses that he questioned, but rather their ability to write and to create history. Both Kingsley and Beesly had arguments from influential Anglo-Saxonists that could support their positions. Turner would have come down on Kingsley's side, having argued that "when great political exigencies evolve, which threaten to shake the foundations of civil society, they are usually as much distinguished by the rise of sublime characters, with genius and ability sufficient to check the progress of the evil" (1: 473). Kemble, however, argues that "[c]ould we place ourselves above the exaggerations of partizans, who hold it a point of honour to prove certain events to be indiscriminately right or indiscriminately wrong, we should probably find that the course of human affairs had been one steady and very gradual progression; the reputation of individual men would perhaps be shorn of part of its lustre" (2: 450). 74

the past work of the world [.,.]. He [the great individual] may appeal to

the meanest, or to the loftiest motives. He may be a fox or an eagle; a

Borgia, or a Hildebrand; a Talleyrand, or a Napoleon; a Mary Stuart, or an

Elizabeth: but however base, however noble, the power which he exercises

is the same in essence. He makes History, because he understands men.

And you, if you would understand History, must understand men. {Roman

xi-xii)

Note that the great individual does not make "history," as in "the history of men and women," but rather "History." This capital letter is the difference between the "history of the masses" and that of the great individuals. "History" is actively made, while "history" is merely passively lived, and only the great individuals are capable of both. This difference is affirmed most strongly by Kingsley's selection of biographies, and preferably autobiographies, as the most constructive source by far of historical information (xii). This belief is, at the same time, very sophisticated and rather naive.

On the one hand, Kingsley is, whether he realizes it or not, suggesting that the best way to study history is to study the very qualities and processes that allow an individual to

"make" or write history - studying, if you will, the act of selective historiography. But,

on the other hand, he is suggesting a dangerously high level of uncritical acceptance of

the results of that historiography. Taking Kingsley's emphasis on the biographies of

great individuals to its logical end also puts an astonishing value on historical fiction,

particularly those detailing the lives of historically significant figures; this evaluation is at

the heart of Kingsley's assertion that "[t]he literature of every nation is its

autobiography" ("English Literature" 257). This not only explains his belief in Bulwer- 75

Lytton's Harold as a reliable historical teaching text but also indicates his belief in the inextricability of his theories of history, his theories of race, and his fiction.

How, then, does this belief in approaching history through its "great individuals" work into Kingsley's understanding of race? It seems to me that Kingsley felt not only that the individual is the best access point for understanding a historical community, but

also that the community can itself be personified in the individual, that the very identity

markers that characterize an individual can be applied equally effectively to the

characterization of races. This explains, for example, the differences between Turner's

and Kingsley's otherwise similar ideas. After all, Kingsley would not have been satisfied

with Turner's comparatively abstract description of races as settled or nomadic, prefering

notions like "male" or "female," which offer a much more personalized, substantial, and

vivid metaphor for conceptualizing racial communities. This "race as individual" theory

can also be seen in Kingsley's firm belief in the notion of races having ages. "Races," he

argues in his lecture on "The Forest Children," "like individuals, it has been often said,

may have their childhood, their youth, their manhood, their old age, and natural death. It

is but a theory - perhaps nothing more. But at least, our race had its childhood" {Roman

6). As Kingsley indicates, this is not his theory alone. The very first paragraph of

Kemble's study of Anglo-Saxon England, for instance, defines his subject as "the history

of the childhood of our own age, - the explanation of its manhood" (1: v).48 Banton may

48 Kingsley's thinking is also rather similar to the contemporary work of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel on the "theory of recapitulation." Various formulations of this theory, sometimes summarized in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," assert that the history of a species is paralleled in the developmental stages of each individual or embryo of that species. The similarities have limits: Kingsley is discussing the growth pattern of a race rather than the evolution of a species and while Kingsley does focus on developmental identity categories - namely age - he also applies other identity categories, such as gender, as we have seen. Nevertheless, the basis of the thinking is the same: the individual is a directly applicable and informative microcosm of the nature and development of the larger group, be it the race or the species. For a thorough discussion of such ideas, see Stephen Jay Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny. 76 be correct when he suggests that Kingsley felt that the age of a race was related to the

"tasks" which it "had been called by God to accomplish" (24) - it is certainly true that

Kingsley takes the age idea much further than a simple metaphor for the past's relationship with the present. For example, while lecturing on the defeat of Valens by the

Goths in 378, Kingsley returns to his image of the Goths as forest-children:

The Teuton had at last tried his strength against the Roman. The wild

forest-child had found himself suddenly at death-grips with the Enchanter

whom he had feared, and almost worshipped, for so long; and behold, to

his own wonder, he was no more a child, but grown into a man, and the

stronger, if not the cunninger of the two. (Roman 81)

The Teutons, therefore, were a child race, while the Romans were adult, and more importantly, the interactions between them are defined by the power dynamics of that age difference. In the same way that the child both emulates and struggles with the adult, so too does Kingsley's Teuton. Furthermore, the age of a race is apparently not a static

condition, since the child is growing into adulthood. Consistent with Kingsley's sense of

devolution, this growth is not necessarily positive, as the sinister undertone of

"cunninger" implies. Most significant, however, is the fact that age is yet another way of

theorizing the interactions between races - the vital youthfulness of the Teutons is part of

what allows them to reinvigorate the Romans, who have grown frail and morally infirm.

English Honesty, Danish Freedom, and Norman Discipline

The English of the Conquest-era Hereward are a far cry from the youthful forest-

dwelling Teutons that confronted their Roman elders. The English have grown; they are, 77 perhaps, not as aged as the Romans were when the English encountered them, but they are nonetheless mature. The very maturity of the English race is one of the reasons that

Kingsley does not have Hereward self-identify with them until well into the novel. As mentioned above, early in his life, Hereward sees himself as a Viking; he even flaunts his disregard for England, such as when he advises his nephews to "leave England to founder, and rot and fall to pieces" (1: 128). But, as the novel progresses, he begins to perceive more and more his affinity with the Anglo-Saxons, which leads him to define himself progressively more frequently as an Englishman. This progression is not a smooth one - at one moment Hereward will emphasize his Englishness ("Ah, that he had been in England [...] where he ought to have been" [1: 260]) and mere paragraphs later he will re-assert his allegiance to Vikingness ("Harold Sigurdsson, Harold Hardraade,

Harold the Viking, [...] the one man whom Hereward had taken for his pattern and his

ideal" [1: 261]). Depending on one's opinion of Kingsley's writing skills, this fluctuation

in Hereward's self-identification can be either dismissed as mere sloppiness (a criticism

that Kingsley is far from immune to) or seen as evidence of his awareness of the

complexities of racial and national self-identification. While I certainly do not deny the

former, I believe strongly that the latter is also at play - Hereward's confusion

demonstrates how in Conquest-era England, one individual could be pulled by numerous

different racial, ethnic, and national loyalties, and moreover, that self-determination was

key to disentangling this web.

When he hears the tale of the battle of Hastings, Hereward's vacillation between

his Viking, Anglo-Dane, and English affinities culminates in a sudden, tearful expression

of his respect for his familial foes, the Godwinssons: "Honor to the Godwinssons! Honor 78 to the southern men! Honor to all true English hearts! Why was I not there, to go with them to Valhalla?" (1: 269). This outburst indicates a progression in Hereward's thinking: he does still see a distinction between the Saxons and the Anglo-Danes, but he now sees this distinction as secondary to their community under the term "English." To phrase this in different terms, Hereward has come to realize that as important as his familial and racial loyalties to the Anglo-Danes may be, his loyalty to England as a whole must take precedence, particularly in times of crisis. This realization is strong enough that it also imprints itself on Torfrida, who, in response to her husband's tears, "whether from a woman's sentiment of pity, or from a woman's instinctive abhorrence of villany and wrong, had become there and then an Englishwoman of the English, as she proved by strange deeds and sufferings for many a year" (1: 269). Torfrida, then, performs the ultimate act of racial self-definition, literally metamorphosing herself into the

Englishness that she admires in her husband. Kingsley's choice of the phrase

"Englishwoman of the English," rather than "of England," is significant - she is joining the community of individuals, not adopting a new geographical home.49

Torfrida's ability to become one of the English indicates that Kingsley saw

Englishness as not exclusively based on ancestry; it is also a set of cultural values that an

outsider may adopt, thereby becoming English. What, then, are these values that Torfrida

adopts in her conversion? There are certainly numerous qualities attributed to the

English throughout Hereward, not all of them positive,50 but two stand out as essential to

49 This distinction would probably have been quite conscious on Kingsley's part, since it is one that Bulwer-Lytton discusses in his Harold, specifically in reference to the practice of the Norman nobility to call themselves not "Counts or Dukes of Normandy, but of the Normans" (1: 17n.). Bulwer-Lytton goes on to indicate that a parallel practice continued with the Anglo-Normans kings until Richard I. 50 The English are represented in a number of nineteenth-century medievalism texts as plagued by a tendency to over-drink. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, Tolkien takes strong exception to this trend (see pp. 241-42). 79

Kingsley: honesty and freedom. The former of these two qualities is, perhaps, best represented by one of Hereward's first, and therefore definitive, interactions with the

English upon his return. When he seeks lodging for the night, Hereward's identity is challenged; he responds not with his name but with a claim to honesty:

"An honest gentleman and his servant, looking for a night's lodging."

"This is no place for honest folk."

"As for that, we don't wish to be more honest than you would have us;

but lodging we will pay for, freely and well." (1: 297)

When the Englishman refuses them entry, Hereward's servant breaks his way in and then explains his actions to his lord: "Let be: these are no French, but honest English, who like one all the better for a little horse-play." The Englishman's statement that his town is "no place for honest folk" is a backhanded reference to the French occupation of the area.

The untrustworthy French versus honest English binary is in itself not surprising, of course, given the context; what is more important is the nature of the honesty that

Kingsley casts as English. It is not only truth-telling that they value, but also an open and direct bluntness, both in words and actions, that is succinctly summed up in the phrase

"horse-play."51 They are straightforward and simple as opposed to the subtle and

complex French. Hereward defends this bluntness to Torfrida: "[w]e cannot pay glozing

French compliments like your knights here, who fawn on a damsel with soft words in the

hall, [...] and then if they find her alone in the forest, show themselves as very ruffians

This notion of the virtues of horse-play is evocative of certain aspects of Muscular Christianity, particularly those represented in Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays. Tom's father sends his son to Rugby not "to make himself a good scholar" (73), but rather to make him into "a brave, helpful, truth- telling Englishman" (74). Tom does indeed become all these things, in part by modeling himself after an ideal older student, Old Brooke, whose inspirational speech has "[n]o tricks of oratory; plain, strong, and straight, like his play" (121). 80 as if they were Paynim Moors. We are rough, lady, we English; but those who trust us find us true" (1: 195). English honesty, then, is a function of the relationship between public and private, or more generally external and internal. The French, being a civilized race, may have public polish, but that exterior is a mere veneer. The English, on the other hand, while "rough," have nothing to hide. This notion participates in the discourse

of the forest-dwelling, nomadic Teutons - the English as a young race, have not yet

learned to obfuscate.52

Even more than honesty, Kingsley emphasizes freedom as an essential quality of

the English. This is logical, of course, given that Hereward is a resistance story, but

Kingsley makes it clear from the very beginning of the novel that freedom is a value of

the English throughout history, not just during the resistance, pointing out that the same

"proud spirit of personal independence" that drove the outlaw resistance "kept alive, too,

though in abeyance for a while, those free institutions which were without a doubt the

germs of our British liberty" (1: 5).53 These deep roots allow Kingsley to explore in

Hereward the process by which freedom becomes so integral to the English identity.

This process is intimately connected in Kingsley's thinking with his conception of the

racial marriages between the Danes, Saxons and Normans, discussed above.

"Personal independence," for example, is a racially coded phrase for Kingsley; he

uses it repeatedly throughout Hereward, specifically to evoke a peculiarly Anglo-Danish

type of freedom. Kingsley uses Hereward's return to England to join the resistance as an

occasion to contrast this Anglo-Danish freedom with his continental learning:

52 Kingsley and Hereward both repeatedly swing in their representation of the English - they are either the idealized forest-dwellers or the priest-ridden men of Wessex, depending on the needs of the moment. 53 For more on such belief in the continuity between Anglo-Saxon and modern English political institutions, see Clare A. Simmons' Reversing the Conquest; her work on the image of King Alfred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is particularly interesting (e.g. 3Iff.). 81

The reckless spirit of personal independence, especially among the Anglo-

Danes, prevented anything like discipline, or organized movement of

masses, and made every battle degenerate into a confusion of single

combats.

But Hereward had learned that art of war which enabled the French to

crush piecemeal, with inferior numbers, the vast but straggling levies of

the English. His men, mostly outlaws and homeless, kept together by the

pressure from without, and free from local jealousies, resembled rather an

army of professional soldiers than a country posse comitatus. (2: 29).

The choice of the term "posse comitatus" to refer to the English resistance forces indirectly evokes the extensive mass of critical discussion, generally drawing on

Tacitus's Germania, of the relationship between a medieval lord and his comites.

Kingsley is intimating, consciously or otherwise, that the Anglo-Danes' high evaluation of "personal independence" may be tapping into a general early Germanic value system.

This "reckless spirit" is the negative flip-side to the positive "rough" but "true" nature of the English and their early Germanic, nomadic ancestors. Kingsley does not suggest that this recklessness needs to be eliminated; on the contrary, it is a vital component of the

"British liberty" that he values. Kingsley puts forth Hereward's civilized, French learning as the polish that can smooth over the roughness of the English, without eliminating its merits. This learning, then, is merely a corrective, not a replacement.

Most interesting of all is that a side-effect of the union between this French polish and the

English independence is the creation of a community "free from local jealousies." Under the influence of the French, the feuding between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane is 82 forgotten, and not just because the French are an external, unifying foe, but also because of the discipline that their continental learning provided. The freedom of the post-

Conquest English, therefore, is a combination of personal freedom and an awareness of the communal good and the duty of the individual towards that good. Kingsley describes this combination during Hereward's outlaw period: "[gradually, too, law and order rose among them, lawless as they were; that instinct of discipline and self-government, which

is the peculiar mark, and peculiar strength, of the English character" (2: 195).

Generations of the English: The Ending of Hereward

The final chapter of Hereward takes place nearly 80 years after Hereward's death,

so it is in the final lines of the previous chapter that Kingsley eulogizes his hero and the

freedom that he embodied:

they knew not that the Wake was alive for evermore: that only his husk

and shell lay mouldering there in Crowland choir; that above them, and

around them, and in them, destined to raise them out of that bitter

bondage, and mould them into a great nation, and the parents of still

greater nations in lands as yet unknown, brooded the immortal spirit of the

Wake, now purged from all earthly dross - even the spirit of Freedom,

which can never die. (2: 317)

Kingsley, therefore, asserts that Hereward's legacy lies in his ability to elevate

"Freedom," which is naturally bound to the limitations of "all earthly dross," to the level

of undying "spirit"; it is this spirit that will drive the English to fulfill their destiny of

becoming "the parents of still greater nations." Freedom will be transmitted to future 83 generations, and not just generations of individuals but also of nations. This passage, then, implants Hereward into the imperial enterprise, even suggesting him as one of its grandfathers. This conception of the spread of English influence as generational in

structure is the final way in which Kingsley invokes the "race as individual" analogy. As

discussed above, Kingsley saw races as possessing gender, age, and the ability to marry -

here we have that third term taken to its logical conclusion, the ability of races to birth

other races.

The propagation of races is a central concern of the final chapter of Hereward.

Kingsley begins with a summary of the history of "Crowland Minster" after Hereward's

death, drawing on the Croyland Chronicle. The summary leads into a discussion about

the recent coronation of Henry II; this discussion takes place between Hereward's

granddaughter Torfrida and her husband Richard of Rulos, who began to drain the

Deeping Fen. The now old Richard indicates that he can finally rest in peace now that

"he sees an English king head the English people," since he believes that Henry unites the

virtues of the Normans and the pre-Conquest English (2: 322). But Richard himself

embodies something else, something that looks forward, rather than to the conflicts of the

past. The novel ends with Torfrida deciding on a new epitaph for her grandfather

Hereward's tomb: "[h]ere lies the last of the old English" (2: 323). She then selects one

for her aging husband: "[h]ere lies the first of the new English; who, by the inspiration of

God, began to drain the Fens." Richard, then, is the first of an entirely new race,

specifically the child of the marriage of the Normans and the old English - he represents

the first of the "still greater nations" that the old English will parent. His most famous

act, draining the fens, is symbolic of this combined lineage. This closing chapter forms a 84 framing structure with the prelude to Hereward, "Of the Fens," which established a connection between the Fenland and the nature of the Anglo-Danes who dwelled on it, a connection reinforced by the use of the wetlands as a defense for the Anglo-Danish resistance. By beginning to drain the fens, then, Richard is integrating Anglo-Danishness into a unified English identity.

Perhaps the most significant effect of the frame structure of Hereward is to emphasize the overarching movement in the book with regard to race in England. The frame serves to juxtapose the image of competing racial groups depicted in the first chapter with the united English of the end of the novel. The fens work, in effect, to situate the Hereward story into the broader narrative of the ethnogenesis of the English people. This grand narrative that Kingsley constructs can be summarized as follows.

Long before the Conquest, the Danes, the Saxons and the Normans, were young and separate, each with strengths (especially the Danes) and weaknesses (especially the

Saxons); the weaknesses became more pronounced as time passed, resulting inevitably in racial degeneration; the Conquest, while a horrible crime against the sovereignty of

England, allowed the races to bond in a regenerative marriage; and eventually this

marriage yielded (and continues to yield) fruit through the generation of a pure, united,

English that possesses the strengths of each of its parents (especially the Danish) and

whose long arm reaches bountifully across the world.

This grand narrative is at the same time both sophisticated in its approach to race

and, of course, quite problematic. As discussed above in reference to Hereward's

youthful fantasies, Kingsley's depiction of the racial tensions of pre-Conquest England

demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the diversities and complexities of racial 85 interactions. He seems to be aware of the vast difficulties, on both the political and interpersonal levels, of progressing out of a period of colonization into one of cooperative co-existence. Kingsley makes clear that Hereward was a member of a variety of different, over-lapping communities, and, moreover, that his loyalties to these groups could be in direct conflict. Kingsley is addressing one of the most interesting aspects of medieval communal membership, something that still needs further discussion today: in

Patrick J. Geary's words, "individuals could simultaneously hold several identities, seeing themselves as part of larger confederations as well as smaller groups" (84). While

Geary is referring to barbarian interactions with Rome, the notion applies equally well to the England of the beginning of Hereward, in which Kingsley points to a labyrinth of national, racial, religious, and familial communal ties. Hereward's actions in the first few

chapters make clear that self-definition is the decisive factor in resolving such conflicts: it

is Hereward's conscious, even if overly romantic, decision to imagine himself as Viking

that makes him a member of that identity group before all others. The complexities of

this relatively sophisticated view of pre-Conquest England's identity issues are not,

however, compatible with the end goal of Kingsley's grand narrative. Hereward presents

diversity as problematic disunity, fracturing English strength rather than tempering it; it is

through the elimination, or at least reduction, of racial difference that the single, unified,

English identity is achieved. Self-definition still exists, as Torfrida demonstrates, but the

options are drastically limited: English or other. The movement of Hereward is from

complexity to simplicity - the question that Kingsley either avoids or does not see the

need to ask is that of what is lost in this progression towards unity, what is lost when the

fens are drained. 86

This primacy of racial unity over difference runs deeper than Kingsley's overt grand narrative - it is intrinsic to the assumptions behind his theories of race. Any theory of racial qualities involves a certain amount of essentialism, but Kingsley's belief that the individual is a valid model for the race takes this further. It suggests that there is an archetype for each race, by asserting, at least in principle, that the range and depth of an entire race can be embodied in a single individual. While Kingsley's intentions behind this theory were simply to facilitate the conceptualization of race through the use of a microcosm - in fact, Kingsley's Darwinism would have made him the first to admit and even commend the variations within a race - the effect is nonetheless the same. The over-simplified microcosm has the ability to blot out the nuances and variations within the macrocosm, a problem that plagues Kingsley's emphasis on reading history through the lens of its exceptional individuals. The great individual approach not only devalues the importance of the communal masses to history but also recruits historiography to write out those masses, and the differences they embody, in favour of the individual. The

fact that this individual is, by the very definition of the theory, extraordinary and therefore specifically unrepresentative of the community is an irony that Kingsley's work

leaves unexplored.

In 1903, Louis Cazamian suggested that Kingsley "gives a definitive view of the

most vital aims and ideals of his time, under the guise of fiction" (241). While this may

be overstating the case, the influence and reach of Kingsley's voice in the nineteenth-

century discourse of race should not be underestimated. The impact of his fiction is,

perhaps, best illustrated by the fact that the plight of Tom in The Water Babies

contributed to the drafting less than a year later of the Chimney Sweepers Regulation 87

Act, which prohibited the use of children as chimney sweeps (Chitty 222). As Chadwick

argues, the impact of his lectures was also considerable:

He held a steady audience of 100 undergraduates or more, far larger than

any of his predecessors had achieved, or indeed any of his contemporary

professors in other faculties. Some of the young men came no doubt

because they were interested in Kingsley, not because they were interested

in history. But the one might lead to the other. (8)

This audience increased dramatically, of course, once these lectures were published in

book form. Chadwick's emphasis on the interest in Kingsley himself is key - his fame

gave Kingsley an appeal to audiences that were otherwise uninterested in Anglo-Saxon

scholarship. P. G. Scott characterizes Kingsley "as a popularizer rather than a discoverer,

a transmitter of facts to which the public was making an inadequate response" (11).

While I would suggest that Kingsley did in fact act as a discoverer, uncovering insights

about Hereward by juxtaposing his different sources in one text, and moreover that he

transmitted as much ideology as fact, Scott's assertion is nonetheless astute. Kingsley's

position was a potent one: he was able to bring the racial thinking of the early Anglo-

Saxon histories into greater contact with the varied discourses of evolution, social

activism, and contemporary fiction. The histories of such prominent scholars as Turner,

Palgrave, and Kemble captured significant audiences in their own right, but these

audiences were nevertheless limited; Kingsley's audiences, on the other hand, were likely

much larger and certainly more diverse. His popularity allowed him to re-transmit the

racial ideas of these histories to a veritable cross-section of society, from scholars, to

popular fiction readers, to social activists, to congregations. He was, in short, one of 88

Frantzen's "gatekeepers," "[presiding over this process of "filtering, of admitting into

discussion some aspects of the past and prohibiting others" (124). Kingsley sifted

through the histories of the Anglo-Saxons and the racial ideas therein, disregarded some,

modified others, and swallowed some whole; his engagement with these ideas, both

directly in his own history, The Roman and the Teuton, and indirectly in his fictions and

other writings, marks him - and by extension the histories he transmitted - as vital to the

racial debates of the period. 89

Chapter 3:

Translation, Socialism, and the Germanic Folk: William Morris's Old Northernism

On December 12 1886, William Morris gave the first part of a lecture series on the history of England (LeMire 308). In this lecture, titled "Early England," Morris depicts what he considered to be the first broad phase of English history, beginning with the pre-Roman British and culminating in the Norman Conquest. As it was for Kingsley, this latter was a topic of mixed feelings for Morris:

I have said that a[n] English History is apt to lack romance; yet the history

of the great change for good and for evil which connected England forever

with the continent could scarcely be more romantic. And here above all

times does one regret that subjection of the native writers to monkish

Latin, and longs for the story now never to be written which the English

sagaman might have given us of that field of Hastings. And this all the

more as one part of the story and that the least important part has been told

dramatically enough by an Icelander. ("Early England" 175)

We can see in this passage echoes of a number of the concerns in Kingsley's works on

Anglo-Saxon (and Anglo-Danish) England. The Conquest is acknowledged as a "change for good and for evil," but this concession cannot be made without an expression of

"regret." There is throughout an almost insecure desire to fill a perceived deficiency of narrative in the national history, an awareness of the "lack" of "romance" and "the story now never to be written." Furthermore, Morris engages in the discourse around

England's national relationships: was it connected to "the continent" with its "monkish

Latin" or was it closer to the Old North of the unnamed "Icelander"? Perhaps the most 90 significant aspect of all, however, is Morris's construction of a hypothetical "English sagaman." For Morris, the early history of his race was primarily accessible through the

Old Icelandic sagas, whose stories, while not often specifically related to England, are the closest surviving things to the stories that an early Englishman would have told. Morris, through lectures, romances, and most of all translations, made it one of his life goals to open this access point to "Early England" to as broad an English audience as possible, making him, like Kingsley, another vital "gatekeeper" of medieval notions of race and ethnicity. This function is further accentuated by Morris's active participation within the scholarly discourse around the Old North, most particularly through his potent position as translator of numerous key texts. In this chapter, I will explore how Morris employs his position as gatekeeper in order to assert a theory of race that, unlike Kingsley's more biological or evolutionary racial Anglo-Saxonism, constructs the development of the

English on notions of fellowship and freely chosen communal identification.

Outside of the discourse around medievalism, Morris is probably most famous for

his socialist Utopian novel, News from Nowhere, or for his vital role in the emerging Arts

and Crafts Movement, including his own designs for a remarkably wide range of

products, from furniture to stained-glass windows to wallpaper. That said, Morris's

fascination with the medieval was so intense that most of these endeavours were

connected to his medievalism to at least some degree. This medievalism has received an

impressive amount of scholarly attention, but the vast majority of this attention has been

directed almost exclusively to his engagement with Middle English materials, with mere

lip service being paid to his much more extensive work with Old Icelandic, and to a

lesser extent Old English, literature. Gary Aho notes this imbalance in his introduction to 91

Morris and Eirikur Magnusson's Three Northern Love Stories by pointing out how few readers even of that book "will know of the range and significance of Morris's Icelandic writings" (v).

The imbalance is not hard to explain - Morris was, after all, associated with the

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and a colleague of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which situates

him prominently in a discursive field that has relatively little overlap with Anglo-Saxon

and Old Icelandic medievalism. Morris's obsession with the North comes later; Morris's

first collection of poetry, The Defense of Guenevere, draws on the chivalric concerns of

the works of Thomas Malory and Jean Froissart, rather than on Njdls saga or Beowulf.

Some critics have discerned a divide in Morris's life, with Rossetti defining the early

artistic period that ends with Morris's subsequent turn towards Icelandic issues. Fiona

MacCarthy, for example, calls upon the discourse of northern versus southern races to

help explain this divide in Morris's creative and personal development:

In leaving his wife at Kelmscott with Rossetti, 'the man of the South,' and

in setting off to Iceland Morris cut himself off decisively from old

allegiances.54 His new passion for the sagas was itself in effect a

discarding of Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelite influence: he regarded the

bluntness of the old Norse literature as 'a good corrective to the

maundering side of mediaevalism.' (279)55

54 One reason behind Morris's first trip to Iceland was indeed an attempt to come to terms with the long- term affair between his wife and Rossetti. 55 The phrase "maundering side of medievalism" is slightly ambiguous, but it suggests that Morris had come to feel that the southern traditions of the late medieval period were somehow lacking in purpose, direction, or motivation, in contrast to the apparently more satisfying traditions of the Old North. Clive Wilmer suggests that this "maundering" refers to how Morris saw Rossetti's works: "the realm of dreamers with no hope or desire to make their dreams a reality" (73). Medievalism, Morris perhaps felt, should not be purely aesthetic but rather active and functional, as borne out by his application of his medievalism to his socialist writings. 92

MacCarthy goes on to argue how this "corrective" involved Morris "travelling to Iceland with three hearty male companions" and "recreating the carefree expeditions of his pre-

Rossetti period." For MacCarthy, then, the ethnically Italian Rossetti comes to stand for a southern influence in Morris's life, represented by a certain effeminate, "maundering," perhaps even indulgent, approach to the medieval that Morris needs to transcend in favour of the "hearty male" associations of the North. But it should be noted that Morris never fully extricates himself from the influence of Rossetti. D. M. R. Bentley, for example, describes four "great gifts" that Rossetti passed on to Morris, including a

"critical attitude to Victorian culture" and "a democratic conception of creative talent and ability whereby the capacity to acquire artistic skills and make new things is not limited to an elite but present in everyone" (46-50); both of these gifts remained influential for

Morris into his final socialist phase. MacCarthy, however, is nonetheless correct in identifying Morris's "new passion" for all things Icelandic as one of his dominant inspirations from this phase onwards, and in recognizing that this passion carried with it a racial undertone.

Iceland First (and Second) Seen

Morris's first trip to Iceland took place in 1871, followed by a second in 1873.

These were his only trips to what he called a land of "terrific and melancholy beauty [...]

illumined by a history worthy of its strangeness" ("Early Literature" 179), but he preserved his memories of the land in travel journals as well as in verse, most notably in

"Iceland First Seen" and "Gunnar's Howe above the House at Lithend." The former of

these two poems questions the purpose of his voyage: 93

Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land,

Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce hidden fire,

But that there 'mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining

streams

Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?

(11-14)

The most striking aspect of this poem is the desolate hostility of Morris's depiction of the island. Jon Sigurdsson, to whom Morris sent the two poems to be translated into

Icelandic, rather understandably objected to this harsh representation of his homeland

(Wawn, Vikings 246). Andrew Wawn presents a convincing case for interpreting

Morris's depictions less severely than Jon did, primarily by defending Morris's frequent

application of the colour grey to Iceland in these poems and in the journals. "Grey," he

argues, "was a solemn, dramatic, ever-changing colour for William Morris; and in the journals it is the essential background tone against which the stunning primary colours of

Iceland flicker across page after page like the northern lights" (254). Contrast, then, is

the key to Morris's visualizations of the Icelandic landscape. With this defense of

greyness in mind, Morris's depictions of Iceland should not be understood as desolate or

dreary, but it is important to remember that Wawn's argument does not alter the fact that

Morris's Iceland is nevertheless inherently harsh, often inhospitable. The harshness of a

land "dreadful with grinding ice" and "scarred by ruinous streams" is vital to Morris's

conception of northernness, since it contrasts with the equally intense beauties of the land

and of its inhabitants. It is only within the framework of such grey severity that "the

undying glory of dreams" can thrive. I would suggest that this notion of extreme 94 contrasts applies to Morris's conceptions not only of the Icelandic landscape but also of the Icelandic character, and more generally, that of the northern races.

Wawn enumerates the vast range of reasons that the nineteenth-century English had for travel to Iceland: they went "to investigate the commercial harvesting of seaweed, to study the geology of a terra that was never firma, to undertake medical fieldwork, to climb mountains, to mine sulphur for gunpowder, to watch birds, to buy wool, to inspect the hot springs of Haukadalur, and eventually to wander in awe through the saga-steads"

{Vikings 37-38). As Wawn and others note, Morris's motivations fall squarely into the last item of that list. This is certainly true; Morris rages against what he perceives as more touristy reasons for visiting Iceland: "this (a long way off still) is our journey's end to-day, and I feel ashamed rather that it is so; for this is the place which has made Iceland

famous to Mangnall's Questions and the rest, who have never heard the names of Sigurd and Brynhild, of Njal or Gunnar or Grettir or Gisli or Gudrun: Gey sir the Icelanders call

it" {Journals 66). Morris refuses to camp in the "beastly place" (67), causing an

Icelander to reply, "[y]ou must [...] all Englishmen do" (68). Morris resists because he

is attempting to distinguish himself from common, nineteenth-century Englishness - he is

attempting to commune with the history of the North, to reconnect his British nationality

to a broader ancestral northern identity. His trip is closer to a pilgrimage than a tour.

And yet this notion can be taken too far; the critical attention to the Journals has a

tendency to get caught up in Morris's saga-fever, to the extent of losing sight of other

details. Phillippa Bennett, for example, argues that Morris creates Iceland into a

"topography of wonder," comparing certain of Morris's reactions to William

Wordsworth's "spots of time" (36-37). Wawn argues that Morris's "knowledge of 95

Brennu-Njdls saga [...] enabled him to animate every desolate location he visited"

("Translation" 255). Both arguments seem to be overlooking two important things: first, that there are pages and pages of everyday details that fill the spots between the spots of time, and more importantly, that the topography may indeed be animated by Morris but it is also inhabited by Icelanders.

The Journals are filled with understated moments of intriguing, and occasionally touching, interactions between the English "skald" (57) and the native Icelanders. When visiting "Borkstead," Morris comes face to face with the Icelandic approach to mental disability; their host was

an old man with seven tall sons, most of them really handsome fine men,

tall, thin, with long straight light hair and light grey eyes: of course we had

more coffee here: they were very busy bringing home hay from the

outmeads: [...] I note by the way that an unsavoury idiot greeted us at the

porch door asking each of us his name; he followed us into the parlour and

took up each man's glass after he had drunk and squeezed it, laughing

approvingly at his cunning the while: the explanation of him was that in

Iceland where there are no workhouses or lunatic asylums, the paupers or

lunatics are distributed among the bonders to be taken care of. (56)

Putting aside the fact that Morris's description of the "unsavoury" individual is distasteful

to the politically correct readers of today, Morris is clearly sympathizing with the

vulnerability of the individual. Morris contrasts the "idiot's" challenges with the physical

virtues and the industriousness of the old man and his sons. Just as Morris juxtaposes his

descriptions of these men on the page, so too does Icelandic social custom bring the 96 socially or medically ailing individual into close contact with a broader, supportive community. Morris also situates this social policy in contrast to the options employed in

England: "workhouses or lunatic asylums." While England marginalizes its "paupers and lunatics," Iceland secures such individuals a place within the most intimate communal group, the familial household, either their own or if necessary another's.

More subtle but equally significant about the above passage is Morris's reference to coffee. Morris's use of "of course" is an indication of how very common an invitation for coffee was throughout his two visits to Iceland. Its frequent occurrence does not make the offer of coffee something mundane or trivial, however; on the contrary, it makes it an almost ritualistic expression of hospitality. What is perhaps surprising to today's reader about these exchanges is that they occasionally occur with complete strangers. Regardless of whether the Icelander is personally known to Morris's guides, and, moreover, regardless of how "very busy" the Icelander may be, Morris is "of course" immediately welcomed into the home. This notion of steadfast hospitality is

something that imprints itself upon Morris. Morris's daughter May comments upon this

in her introduction to the Journals:

occasionally they were allowed to pay modestly for their entertainment,

sometimes the farmers would only accept payment for the beasts' food,

sometimes they would accept nothing, while of course in many places they

were received as guests by people of distinction. But everywhere, at the

prosperous homesteads and at the poorer ones, the same idea of hospitality

prevailed, (xxij) 97

This placement of communal needs above individual ones colours Morris's theories of the northern character, both medieval and modern, from this date on. Moreover, it is closely connected to the harshness of his descriptions of the Icelandic landscape.

Specifically, Iceland may be inhospitable, but Icelanders are just the opposite. This distinction is a key developmental factor in Morris's conception of the northern races: they are a race tried by fire (or rather by ice), for whom individualism was not an option.

The prime feature of the northern character, then, is an emphasis on the values of fellowship. Morris certainly does not see this value as exclusive to the North, but it is there, where it is most needed and where it is most noticeable, that it impresses itself upon his thinking.

What, then, is the relationship between these formative experiences with modern

Icelanders and Morris's conception of the medieval Icelandic race? As discussed above,

Morris enthusiastically, sometimes even gleefully, populates the landscape with saga

characters, but it is in a moment of somber reflection that his most telling thoughts come

through:

Just think, though, what a mournful place this is [...] how every place and

name marks the death of its short-lived eagerness and glory; and withal so

little is the life changed in some ways: Olaf Peacock went about summer

and winter after his live-stock, and saw to his hay-making and fishing just

as this little beak-nosed parson does; [...] But Lord! what littleness and

helplessness has taken the place of the old passion and violence that had

place here once - and all is unforgotten. (108) 98

There is something similar here to Kingsley's notion of the degenerate "Saxon" evoking the unfulfilled potential of the earlier "Teuton": similarly, the modern Icelanders are somehow mere echoes of their medieval counterparts. There is, however, a vital distinction - unlike Kingsley's notions, Morris does not see modern Icelanders as degenerate in any way but rather merely as faded or muted versions of those who came before. The modern Icelanders are very much like their ancestors in kind, therefore, but are much less in degree. Moreover, the landscape and the people of Iceland are, for

Morris, haunted by this "unforgotten" potential of the "old passion and violence." So,

Iceland, at least in this moment of darkness for Morris, is a place of stagnation, where the echo may become fainter but will never disappear.

Morris the Old North Scholar

Morris's Journals make quite clear how enthusiastic he was about the Old North, but how much of Morris's writing on the early medieval Germanic world was enthusiastic fancy and how much was transmission and development of scholarly ideas?

More specifically, how involved was he in the academic discourse of the field? Of the three case studies in this thesis, Morris's credentials as scholar are the least clear. If translation is a scholarly enterprise,56 however, then Morris's contributions to scholarly

While most scholars would concur with this "if," there remains in some quarters the sense that translation is the lesser sibling of true literary criticism. The fallacy in this privileging of criticism is that translation, at least when performed rigorously, is itself an act of literary criticism, as discussed by Susan Bassnett in her overview of the state of Translation Studies: The translator, then, first reads/translates in the SL [source language] and then, through a further process of decoding, translates the text into the TL [target language]. In this he is not doing less than the reader of the SL text alone, he is actually doing more, for the SL text is being approached through more than one set of systems. It is therefore quite foolish to argue that the task of the translator is to translate but not to interpret, as if the two were separate exercises. {Translation 83) 99 discourses are numerous and significant. His most significant translations include "The

Lovers of Gudrun" (1869, from Laxdcela saga), The Story ofGrettir the Strong (1869),

The Story ofGunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Scald {1869/91), Volsunga saga:

The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (1870),57 and The Tale ofBeowulf(1895).

The critical tendency has been, however, to emphasize the personal rather than the scholarly aspects of Morris's interactions with the Old North. Wawn, for example, argues that medieval Iceland "was a past which Morris rarely sought to recall with scholarly objectivity; his demands on it were insistent and revealingly personal"

("Translation" 265). Indeed, Morris's engagement with the medieval past was remarkably immediate, but the suggestion that personal immediacy and scholarly objectivity are mutually exclusive is problematic at best. J. N. Swannell goes much further than Wawn: "[w]hat [Morris] had above all, though, was a natural affinity with

Old Norse literature, a unique sense of kinship with the Saga Age. Morris always had an instinctive knowledge of how things were made and used in the Middle Ages [...], and in the same way he seems to know about the domestic details of the Viking Age" (366).

While I do not disagree with Swannell that Morris does seem naturally in tune with the way medieval texts function, his argument nevertheless illustrates a significant problem

The "decoding" and "recoding" function of translation is, importantly, not a mindless process, but rather a "decision process," as Jin Levy calls it, because of the lack of complete equivalence between the source and target languages (or cultures). Since there will always be a certain amount of untranslatability, the translator is left with the task of deciding what aspects of the source text are the most significant and which are, however regrettably, expendable. Such determinations require the translator to have a critical understanding of the text that parallels that of the literary critic. I would suggest that this parallel is perhaps even stronger in a field like Medieval Studies, in which a significant portion of the criticism involves debate over the proper translation of a given word, phrase, or passage. Add to this the potential influence that the translation has as a mediator of access to the text, either as a primary resource for those unable to read the source text or as a useful complement for those who are able, and it becomes clear that translations engage the scholarly discourse quite extensively, both by receiving and processing scholarly ideas on the text and also by producing and transmitting new ones. This scholarly engagement is only enhanced in translations with a distinct philological bent like Morris's. 57 For consistency and clarity, the title of this saga has been normalized from Volsunga saga to Vplsunga saga throughout. 100 with the current state of Morris criticism, specifically a lack of attention to the scholarly rigour and, to put it bluntly, hard philological work that Morris would have done to compose his translations. By under-valuing this aspect of his labour, much of the criticism on Morris serves only to reinforce the image of him as having "an instinctive knowledge" of the medieval. The truth is that Morris did not just "know" the details of the Viking Age - no one can truly know such details - he had to learn and extrapolate them just like anyone else.

There is preliminary evidence that he took such learning quite seriously. T. A.

Shippey demonstrates this point by an examination of Morris's use of the word "Mark" in

The House of the Wolfings. Shippey notes that Morris refers to the settled woodland clearings in his romance by this word, subsequently pointing out that "[a]s one can see

from the OED, this [...] word (in the sense of 'tract of land') had no currency at all in

England between the Anglo-Saxon period and its use in John Kemble's philological

speculations of 1848. For Morris to use it, indeed to centre his story on it, is a clear case

of scholarship affecting fiction" ("Goths" 57). I would suggest that such scholarship had

the same (or even greater) influence on Morris's translations. The preface to Morris and

Eirikur Magnusson's Volsunga saga addresses this issue: "we claim no special critical

insight, nor do we care to deal at all with vexed questions, but are content to abide by

existing authorities" (283). The translators are being very politic here, but the admission

that they are influenced "by existing authorities" inherently contradicts the claim that

they do not "deal at all with vexed insights" - after all, to select the view of one specific

authority is to make an important critical decision. Moreover, the proof is in the pudding:

as Wawn asserts, based on the "philological exuberance which Morris brought to the task 101 of translation," "it is sometimes difficult to resist the sense that Morris was reaching out to an audience of initiates rather than seeking to win converts" (Vikings 260). I think that

Wawn is here giving insufficient credit to his own perception; perhaps his observation does not need to be resisted, since it seems likely to me that Morris was indeed hoping to appeal not only to newcomers but also to those in the philological know.

Perhaps the reason for resisting the idea of Morris's translations as scholarly work lies in the fact that he enlisted the help of more recognized, established academics as partners for almost all of them - the sense, then, is that the scholars did the scholarly work and the poet provided the ornament. There were two such partners, Eirikur

Magmisson for the translations from the Old Icelandic, and A. J. Wyatt for the 1895

Beowulf translation. Wyatt, of Christ's College, Cambridge, had significant expertise in

Old English studies, having already published an edition of Beowulf in 1894 and later An

Elementary Old English Grammar (1897). Eirikur, however, was certainly the more significant of Morris's collaborators, since they worked together on more projects, over more years, and since Eirikur, or "Mr. Magnusson" as Morris refers to him in the

Journals, acted as Morris's guide and companion on both of his visits to Iceland. The translation process that Morris used with each of these collaborators was quite similar, and so I will focus on Eirikur, whose influence was more formative for Morris's notions about the Old North. Eirikur was one of the two central figures of what Wawn calls "the

Invisible College" of Old North studies in Victorian England, a network of correspondence and tutoring that connected an impressive array of individuals, including serious scholars, beginners enthusiastic to learn a tidbit or two about Icelandic culture, 102

CO g and many stages in between. Wawn presents this College as having two hubs, Eirikur at Cambridge and his fellow Icelander GuSbrandur Vigfusson, whose work includes An

Icelandic-English Dictionary (with Richard Cleasby), at Oxford.59

Eirikur's scholarly contributions were vast, both in depth and in scope. In collaboration with George E. J. Powell, he published a two-volume translation of Jon

Arnason's collection of folktales, called Icelandic Legends (1864-66). Working independently, he produced a two-volume translation and edition of Thomas saga erkibyskups (1876-83), which includes extensive scholarly apparatus. He was also an expert on Icelandic verse, having edited and translated the late medieval Icelandic Marian poem Lilja (1870). However, his intellectual range is reflected more in his articles. As

Aho points out, Eirikur's bibliography includes "hundreds of articles and reviews, written in Icelandic, Danish, German, and English, on a great variety of topics: Runic calendars,

Viking ships and how they were navigated, the meaning of 'Edda,' the significance of

Othin's wonderful horse, 'Yggdrasill,' and so forth" (xi). Moreover, Eirikur was an accomplished librarian, earning the position of Under Librarian at Cambridge in 1871, with Morris's recommendation (Aho x). In 1883, he was given the post of lecturer in

Icelandic, teaching such future scholars as Israel Gollancz and Bertha Phillpotts

(Benedikz).60

See Wawn Vikings 342-69 for an excellent discussion of the wide range, professionally, culturally, and geographically, of this network. 59 "The Two Invisible Colleges" may be slightly more apt, considering the distaste that arose between Eirikur and Gu6brandur. In Wawn's words, "the two men, friends when they arrived in Britain, became deadly enemies in a private philological war worthy of the rawest Sturlung-age conflict [...]. They squabbled in print over anything and everything" (Vikings 356). 60 See Wawn's Vikings, especially pp. 356-67, and Aho, especially pp. x-xii, for a more detailed discussion of Eirikur's contributions to the nineteenth-century community of Old North scholars, students, and enthusiasts. 103

Morris's translations, therefore, were written in collaboration with one of the most important figures in Old Icelandic studies in nineteenth-century Britain, but this is not the only reason for the critical tendency to allocate neatly the scholarly side of the translation process to Eirikur and the poetic side to Morris. In fact, the translators' own accounts of the writing process buttress this critical perception. Morris, for example, in an 1879 letter to The Athenaeum plays down his own contributions:

As a matter of fact, when we set about these joint works, I had just begun

the study of Icelandic under Mr. Magnusson's mastership, and my share in

the translation was necessarily confined to helping in the search for the

fittest English equivalents to the Icelandic words and phrases, to turning

the translations of the 'visur' into some sort of English verse, and to

general revision in what might be called matters of taste; the rest of the

work, including notes, and all critical remarks, was entirely due to Mr.

Magnusson's learning and industry. (1: 513)

The context of this letter must be considered, however: Morris is actively defending

Eirikur's role in the translation process in response to GuSbrandur Vigfusson, who had challenged the extent of that role; moreover, Morris is here describing specifically the early stages of their professional relationship, when Morris would have needed the most linguistic help. A parallel comment appears in Eirikur's obituary for Morris, in which he recounts Morris's response to his suggestion that they begin their first day of translation with some grammar: "No, I can't be bothered with grammar; I have no time for it. You be my grammar as we translate. I want the literature, I must have the story. I mean to amuse myself (quoted in MacCarthy 290, Aho xxix, etc.). Again, Eirikur is describing 104 specifically the beginning of their endeavours; Eirikur actually goes on to describe how quickly and thoroughly Morris developed his grasp of Old Icelandic. Aho refreshingly resists the critical tendency to create a divide between grammar and story, or scholarship and artistry, and so argues convincingly that Eirikur was far more than merely Morris's

"grammar" (xxx). Aho is certainly correct, but the inverse is also true - Morris was likewise far more than merely the artistry, an assertion supported by a working manuscript of Morris and Eirikur's translation of St. Olafs Saga that survives in the

Brotherton Library in Leeds.

In general, the translation process involved a joint reading of the story, followed

by Eirikur writing a close, literal translation of the Old Icelandic, which Morris would

then edit (MacCarthy 291). Swannell analyzes the St. Olafs Saga manuscript that

embodies this process, commenting on a variety of features from handwriting styles to

differences in register to the use of archaisms (378-82). Swannell's most significant

argument, however, is that Morris was not entirely dependent on Eirikur for access to the

original text:

It is clear that Morris is emending with the Old Norse by his side, for

when Magniisson accidentally omits three and a half lines Morris, on the

opposite blank page, inserts a translation of the missing words. On

another blank left page Morris writes 'what is aukvisi literally?' He

notices, too, that Magniisson has used the wrong English word in one of

the verses: 'Thou didst champion the most valiant king' (brauzt bag vid);

Morris writes: 'to champion a man means, I think, to fight for him, not 105

against him', and translates accordingly: 'thou daredst the king most

valiant.' (378)

The fact that Morris knows enough Old Icelandic to feel sufficiently confident in correcting the native Icelandic speaker Eirikur is significant in and of itself, but even more important is the destabilization of the notion of the translation process as being composed of discrete, sequential tasks. The linear model of

Source Text - Scholarly/Literal Translation (Eirikur) - Artistry (Morris) - Translated Text

is simply not valid. Morris's unmediated access to the source text and his inquiries to

Eirikur add feedback loops to the system that serve to integrate Morris's and Eirikur's

contributions at each of the stages. Morris's engagement with the philological discourse

is, therefore, no mere abstract notion - thanks to his interactive work relationship with

Eirikur, this scholarly engagement was intimate, personal, direct, and, moreover,

multidirectional. With this engagement in mind, I turn now to perhaps the most

important of Morris and Eirikur's translations, specifically that of Vglsunga saga, and

then to Morris's poetic adaptation of the same, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the

Fall of the Niblungs (1876), with particular attention to Morris's developing notions of

the northern races.

"The very heart of the North": Morris's Volsungs

Referring to Anderson's "imagined communities," Lawrence Venuti argues that

"[translations have undoubtedly formed such communities by importing foreign ideas,"

in part since "[t]o translate is to invent for the foreign text new readerships who are aware

that their interest in the translation is shared by other readers, foreign and domestic" 106

(482). Morris and Eirikur's translation of Vglsunga saga is no exception to this claim, as the preface makes clear:

In conclusion, we must again say how strange it seems to us, that this

Volsung Tale, which is in fact an unversified poem, should never before

have been translated into English. For this is the Great Story of the North,

which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks -

to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has

made our race nothing more than a name of what has been61 - a story too -

then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy

has been to us. (286)

The key point of the first sentence is less to express surprise at the lack of a prior English

translation and more to blur the distinction between poetry and prose and thereby lay the

groundwork for Morris and Eirikur to claim the saga as an epic; Vglsunga saga may be

prose, but its true essence is poetry, even if it is no longer "versified" (a task that Morris

eventually takes upon himself, resulting in his Sigurd the Volsung)?2 This assertion is

partly an aesthetic claim: the saga, the translators repeatedly indicate throughout the

paragraph, is worth direct and unapologetic comparison to the Homeric epics. But

whether the saga is simply as good an epic as are the Iliad and the Odyssey is secondary

to the racial ramifications that are inherent to the epic label. Morris and Eirikur are here

directing their audience to consider the saga a national, or rather racial, myth - this story,

61 It is quite possible that the "change" Morris is here referring to is a future in which the English are as extinct as the Trojans are now, but I wonder if this is also a germ of Morris's socialist thinking, specifically his belief in an inevitable change that will eventually eliminate identity categories such as race, an idea he expands upon in News from Nowhere (see below pp. 167-68). 62 By "unversified," Morris and Eirikur may mean that the saga represents a prose formation of an older poetic cycle. 107 they argue, should not be what the Odyssey is to the rest of the world, but what it is to the

Greeks, nothing less than a profound literary declaration of racial community.

But who, in the translators' view, belongs to "all our race"? While they are clearly translating for an English audience, the spread of the "Great Story of the North" excludes the possibility of it belonging to the English alone; the only remnant of the

Volsung story in England is a very short episode in Beowulf. "Our race," therefore, refers to a broader Germanic racial identity that includes not only the Icelanders and

Scandinavians with their Vglsunga saga and Eddie poems, but also the continental

Germans with their Nibelungenlied. For Morris, therefore, to be English is to be one part of a racial bond that unites the Old North, and, furthermore, this bond comes with an inheritance: the literature of that unified North. Morris laments in "Early England" that

"we have lost the account of the mythology of the North from the Low German branch of the great Teutonic race: it is the feeblest and slenderest branch of the Goths [i.e. the

Icelanders] that have been the story tellers of the race and not the Germans or the

English" (167). The absence of the "Great Story" in England is, from this perspective,

something of an injustice, a failure by the English to keep alive the all-but-lost spirit of

the North; this failure can be remedied, however, through the community-building act of

translation, symbolically enough through the joint efforts of a Briton and an Icelander.

This reaffirmation of the place of the English in the Old North is emphasized yet again by

the opening of the "Prologue in Verse" that Morris adds to the saga: "O Hearken, ye who

speak the English Tongue, / How in a waste land ages long ago, / The very heart of the

North bloomed into song" (1-3). Note that this invocation does not call upon the English

race, but rather upon those who speak the "English Tongue." Morris, by defining the 108

English as a specifically linguistic rather than racial group within the Old North, allows for the possibility of viewing a broader term, along the lines of "northerner," as a preferable racial identifier; the English are English by language, but northern by race.

This distinction is reiterated in the third stanza, when he claims that the Volsung tale (the

"ruth-crowned tangle" [16]) was cherished even at "the first grey dawning of our race"

(15); the race is here equated with the audience of the story, namely the Germanic tribes.

In the final stanza, Morris begins the process of reintegrating the English into this broader racial/literary community by calling the "English Folk" to "draw [...] round and hearken" (36); as will be discussed later in this chapter, Morris's selection of the specifically Germanic word "folk" is no accident. Morris's prologue, therefore, defines the function of the saga as a focal point for racial gathering and racial definition, a perfect example of the powers of community-formation that Venuti ascribes to translation.

Morris felt so strongly about the Volsung legend that he returned to it late in

1875, five years after the publication of his and Eirikur's 1870 translation. The result of this second, and prolonged, effort was Sigurd the Volsung, an 11,000-line version, this time "versified," that covers the story from the wedding of Signy to the death of Atli and

Gudrun's plunge into the sea.63 Despite the disagreement of some critics, even this short description demonstrates that Sigurd is an adaptation, not a translation; on top of the fundamental change from prose to verse, the origin myth of the Volsung race (including the miraculous birth of Volsung himself) has been cut, as has the Jormunrek episode at

63 For the sake of clarity and consistency, I will adopt in this chapter the anglicized versions of Old Icelandic and Old English names that Morris uses in his works. Note that in some cases, including Sinfjotli/Sinfiotli, Morris is inconsistent in his Anglicization between texts; in such instances, I will give preference to the spelling he selects for his translation. 109 the end; moreover, Morris imports certain ideas and scenes from the Nibelungenlied, especially in the Atli episodes, creating yet another level of adaptation. But these changes are only the obvious, major ones; the true adaptation permeates the text, subtly as well as bluntly, at every turn. These changes afford critics an excellent, and under utilized, tool for understanding Morris's thought processes, including those on race. We have, after all, three parallel texts for analysis: the original saga, Morris and Eirikur's

translation (Volsungs), and Morris's adaption (Sigurd). Furthermore, Vglsunga saga

engages thoroughly in a number of key racial issues, particularly the nature of biological

determinism and inheritance; Morris's treatment of these issues in his two versions is

invaluable for understanding his conceptions of the northern races.

These issues of determinism and familial inheritance are addressed most directly

early in the saga as Signy plots revenge against her husband (Siggeir) for the deaths of

her father (Volsung) and all of her brothers save Sigmund. The version in the saga text is

a fascinating exploration of biological determinism - blood, the saga tells us, will out.

Signy, upon realizing that her brother requires assistance for a revenge plot, decides that

Both of these changes have drastic effects on the tone of the story. The elimination of the early episodes significantly reduces the sense of Odin's puppet-mastery - he is much less the agent orchestrating the family towards the eventual birth of Sigurd. The elimination of the Jormunrek episode, however, has an even greater effect. In Sigurd, Gudrun hath spread out her arms as she spake it, and away from the earth she leapt, And cut off her tide of returning; for the sea-waves over her swept, And their will is her will henceforward; and who knoweth the deeps of the sea, And the wealth of the bed of Gudrun, and the days that yet shall be? (306) There is here a fundamental change from the saga in terms of agency. In this version, Gudrun's chosen method of suicide is to subsume her own will into those of the unpredictable natural forces. In the saga, too, she attempts to kill herself, but she retains (or regains) agency nevertheless: "GuSnin gekk eitt sinn til saevar, ok tok grjot i fang ser ok gekk a saeinn lit, ok vildi tapa ser. I>a hofu hana storar barur fram eptir sjanum, ok fluttisk hon med peira fulltingi ok kom um sidir til borgar Jonakrs konungs" ("Once Gudrun went to the sea, picked up stones in her arms, and walked out into the water, meaning to kill herself. Then towering waves carried her out over the sea, and she crossed the water with their help and came at last to the fortress of King Jonakr") (74). In the saga, Gudrun's agency is far from ended at this stage, since she becomes the motivating impulse behind her sons' vengeance plot against Jormunrek. J. W. Blench claims that the deleted ending "has nothing to do with the main story" (3), but the trials, fate, and responses of Gudrun are fundamental to the thematic structure of the saga. 110 only someone of Volsung blood will be sufficiently heroic. As she and Sigmund are all that are left of the Volsung race, she offers her son by Siggeir to Sigmund for testing.

When Sigmund reports that the boy failed the test, she answers, "[t]ak bii harm pa ok drep harm. Eigi barf harm ba lengr at lifa" ("then you take him and kill him. He need not live

any longer") (9).65 Sigmund promptly does so and the series of events is then repeated

with a second son, again ending in failure and the murder of the boy. It is significant that

the decision here is Signy's, not Sigmund's. Sigmund's loyalty is singular- he is simply

duty bound to avenge his father and brothers - but Signy's loyalties are plural and

conflicting. Her speech act is not only a directive to murder, but also a declaration of her

choice in favour of her loyalty to her father and brothers over her loyalty to her husband

and sons. The saga presents Signy as almost dismissive of the boys, making her seem

cold or heartless. Morris and Eirikur's translation of Signy's response suggests a possible

uneasiness with this emotionlessness: "[t]ake him and kill him then; for why should such

an one live longer?" (300). This rhetorical question (instead of, for example, the simply

declarative "[e]igi barf harm ba lengr at lifa") adds an extra note of emotion - specifically

derision or even contempt - to Signy's otherwise cold decision. Morris and Eirikur's

"such an one" rather than simply "he" interprets Signy as having visceral disgust for her

child, not simply an awareness of his uselessness to her cause. This disgust is partially

racial - the boy is insufficiently Volsung and too much Siggeir and so deserves to die.

The solution to this problem is clear: Signy needs to find a mate with Volsung

blood, and there is only one other surviving Volsung. Signy's sons by Siggeir had only

one quarter consanguinity with the mighty Volsung, but a son by Sigmund would have

one half consanguinity with their father, just as she and Sigmund do. The presence of a

65 Translations from Vglsunga saga are from Jesse L. Byock's 1990 translation, with modifications. Ill

"seiQkona" ("sorceress") (9)66 allows Signy to change shapes, and the requisite incest takes place over the span of three nights, resulting in the conception of Sinfjotli. Blood proves to be a true determinant, as Sinfjotli, despite being nurtured in Siggeir's home, manifests the physical and mental might of his (maternal and paternal) grandfather,

Volsung. As with her other sons, Signy eventually sends the youth Sinfjotli to Sigmund for testing, and after he passes (spectacularly) Sigmund takes him as his student. Signy leaves Sigmund and, it seems, Sinfjotli in the dark as to the boy's true parentage. This makes Sinfjotli inscrutable to his father, whose belief in blood-based determinism cannot account for his son's characteristics: "Sigmundi bykkir harm mjpk i aett Vplsunga, ok bo hyggr hann at harm se sonr Siggeirs konungs, ok hyggr hann hafa illsku feSr sins, en kapp

Vplsunga ok aetlar hann eigi mjok fraendrcekinn bvi at hann minnir opt Sigmund a sina harma ok eggjar mjpk at drepa Siggeir konung" ("It seems to Sigmund that Sinfjotli takes much after the Volsung race, but, nevertheless, he believes the boy to be the son of King

Siggeir and to have the evil disposition of his father along with the bravery of the

Volsungs. Sigmund feels that Sinfjotli does not put much store in kinship, for he often

reminds Sigmund of his grievances and urges him strongly to kill King Siggeir") (10). In

typical saga style, Sigmund's confusion is expressed through understatement ("aetlar hann

eigi mjpk fraendrcekinn"), but Sigmund's understanding of race simply cannot explain

how Siggeir could produce a son so much like Volsung. Interestingly, this passage

undermines the contribution of the mother to the racial inheritance of the child, since

Sigmund does not seem to consider that Sinfjotli could have inherited his Volsung nature

Morris and Eirikur: "witch-wife" (300). 112 from Signy. Moreover, the primacy of nature over nurture is so strong here that the possibility that Signy may have indoctrinated Sinfjotli into a hatred for Siggeir seems to be eclipsed by the notion that this hatred is somehow intrinsic to his racial makeup;

Sinfjotli is a Volsung, and therefore believes in the cause of the Volsungs, even if he thinks he is a son of Siggeir.

Morris and Eirikur's translation of this passage indicates their interest in blood determinism, since their version goes even further than does the original in encouraging the reader to interpret the passage with this issue in mind:

Sigmund deems him to take much after the kin of the Volsungs, though he

thinks that he is Siggeir's son, and deems him to have the evil heart of his

father, with the might and daring of the Volsungs; withal he must needs

think him in nowise a kinsome man, for full oft would he bring Sigmund's

wrongs to his memory, and prick him on to slay King Siggeir. (302)

The physicality of the issue of inheritance is emphasized here by Morris and Eirikur's

rendering of the abstract "illsku" ("wickedness") by the far more visceral "evil heart."68

Sinfjotli's inheritance, Morris and Eirikur suggest, is something particularly concrete - it

is not intangible but rather firmly biological. Moreover, Morris and Eirikur's translation

suggests, even more strongly than the original, that flowing literally in Sinfjotli's

inherited blood is some sort of racial memory. Their translation of both "aett" and

"fraend-" as "kin" creates a direct connection between Sinfjotli's Volsung heritage and his

67 This devaluation of the matriarchal genetic heritage is later confirmed by the nature of Sigmund's second son Sigurd, who, despite not having a Volsung mother, is presented as even more "i astt Volsunga" than Sinfjotli. Likewise, the translation of the conceptual "sett" ("descent" or "lineage") by the more immediate "kin", and "eggjar" ("incite," "encourage," or "egg on") by "prick on." This tendency towards concretization is an attempt, with varying degrees of success, to capture the blunt realism of the saga style. 113 lack of regard for his apparent father. This connection, reinforced by the division of

"kapp" into both the physical "might" and the mental "daring," represents a distinct interpretive choice: it makes far more firm the possibility that Sinfjotli's blood- inheritance includes his family's beliefs as well as their physical characteristics. More significant to my purposes here is that these translation choices, in concert with those in the testing scenes discussed above, demonstrate that the Signy and Sinfjotli characters raised an anxiety in Morris and Eirikur, conscious or otherwise, about the boundaries and implications of the extreme end of blood determinism.

Morris was particularly concerned about two such implications: its relationship to socially constructed obligations and, more importantly, the status of free will in such harshly deterministic worldviews. In reference specifically to Morris's Sigurd, Hartley S.

Spatt declares that "Signy, a true Norseman, sets the ties of blood above those of wedlock and helps Sigmund" (355). This is a somewhat problematic oversimplification of her role

in Sigurd, but it is even less applicable to the saga version, not least of all because Signy

has her sons (as much her flesh and blood as Sigmund and Sinfjotli) murdered. Even

more importantly, Spatt's argument implies that Signy actually had a choice, which the

saga refuses to make clear. The episode actually begins with Signy's father informing

her that she in fact does not have free will. Not only does Signy marry Siggeir

unwillingly, but when she declares to her father that her "framvisi" ("foresight") and

"kynfylgju" ("familial characteristic" or "guardian spirit")69 have made her certain that

they should not follow through with the marriage arrangement, he again overrules her.

Sigmund informs her that "kynfylgja," a racial inheritance, does not have the power to

69 Morris and Eirikur: "fore-knowledge" and "fetch of our kin" (296). This foreknowledge is yet another example of the non-physical characteristics that are inherited by a member of the Volsung lineage. 114 override social commitments, "bvi at bat er skomm mikil baedi honum ok sva oss at brigda bessu vid harm at saklausu" ("for it would be shameful both for him and for us to break this agreement with him, he being blameless") (5-6).70 Volsung repeats this lesson even when Signy learns that Siggeir has raised an army to eliminate the Volsungs: "[b]u

skalt at visu fara heim til bonda bins ok vera samt meS honum, hversu sem med oss ferr"

("you must certainly go home to your husband and be together with him, however it goes

with us") (7).71

This motif is completed at the end of the episode, when Signy is faced with the

choice of rejoining her blood family or of dying with her loathsome husband. The former

seems far more appealing, but Signy has learned her father's lessons well, as her last

words indicate: "Hefi ek bar til unnit alia hluti at Siggeir konungr skyldi bana fa. Hefi ek

ok sva mikit til unnit at fram koemisk hefndin, at mer er med engum kosti lift. Skal ek nu

deyja med Siggeiri konungi lostig er ek atta harm nauQig" ("In everything I have worked

so that King Siggeir should have his death. I have worked so hard to bring about

vengeance that I have little chance for life. I shall now willingly die with King Siggeir,

though I married him under constraint") (13-14). Here, even in Signy's moment of

triumph over her husband, she feels obligated to stay at his side. The entire Signy

episode, therefore, begins and ends with assertions of a marital or social duty that is as

deterministic as is blood inheritance; Signy's fate is plotted out before her from the very

moment of her marriage, as she well knows thanks to her foresight. Moreover, these

assertions of social duty act as bookends, framing the exploration of the blood-based

70 Morris and Eirikur: "for great shame will it be to him, yea, and to us also, to break troth with him, he being sackless" (296). 71 Morris and Eirikur: "[t]hou shalt surely go back to thine husband, and abide with him, howsoever it fares with us" (297). 115 inheritance and obligation discussed above. The saga presents a situation in which the demands of each are diametrically opposed - Signy must obey both, even to the point of her own destruction. And yet, interestingly, the saga also includes a possible disruption of these determinisms: the parallelism between the words "lostig" ("willingly") and

"nauSig" ("under constraint"). Is there a certain kernel of free will amid the deterministic

systems of social and blood obligation? Are these systems perhaps only partially, rather than totally, determining? How much free will does Signy have in determining her

communal memberships? By joining Siggeir in death, is she actively choosing to affirm

her membership in her husband's household, or merely reaffirming her submission to the

obligations of marriage vows and the communal identity they presuppose, "lostig" or

otherwise?

I would suggest that the ambiguity around these questions offered Morris and

Eirikur yet another opportunity to influence their readers' interpretation of the saga. Just

as their translations of the passages dealing with Sinfjotli intensified the blood-

determinism, their translation of Signy's last speech intensifies her claim to agency: "and

for this, and for nought else, have I so wrought, that King Siggeir might get his bane at

last; and all these things have I done that vengeance might fall on him, and that I too

might not live long; and merrily now will I die with King Siggeir, though I was naught

merry to wed him" (306). The choice of "wrought" is particularly potent, since it casts

Signy in the role of artisan or artist, shaping events to her will. Moreover, while the

original is less than clear about why Signy feels she should die, Morris and Eirikur's

version suggests that her plan all along has been as much to accomplish her own

honourable death as it has been to avenge her father and brothers. The desire to "not live 116 long" implies an acknowledgement that her only way out of the snare of conflicting communal obligations is to die; in effect, even if she is lacking free will within these deterministic systems of bloodlines and marriage, she still has the choice of extracting herself from them entirely. Most puzzling about this translation, however, is the choice of the word "merry." It is possible that this word is a euphemistic attempt to deal with the connotation of rape that is intrinsic to Signy marrying Siggeir "naudig." If so, then this euphemism, whether inspired by prudery or another motive, removes yet another

aspect of Signy's powerlessness in the saga; in its place, Morris and Eirikur cast Signy as utterly victorious in her moment of free choice, since the once powerful Siggeir is

reduced to the rather pathetic cause of her being "naught merry."

Morris and Eirikur's intensification of Signy's free will, combined with the

intensification of Sinfjotli's blood-based inheritance, strongly urges the reader to take the

tension between these two issues as a dominant theme for their text. Morris and Eirikur

are limited by the conventions of the saga form, however, particularly the external and

realistic narrative perspective that is so key to the impact of the genre. Morris and

Eirikur can encourage certain interpretations about the internal motivations of the

characters, but as they are still attempting a close translation, they cannot declare them

overtly. By contrast, in his adaptation of the saga, Morris is freed of such limitations,

which gives him the opportunity to put forth a thesis about the internal thought processes

of Signy, Sigmund, and Sinfjotli. The tension between blood determinism and free will

that is strong in the saga, and even stronger in his and Eirikur's translation of it, can be

entirely recast, with blood determinism placed firmly in submission to Morris's belief in

free fellowship as a central facet of the racial character of the Old North. 117

Foster-Sons and Lovers

Morris's reworking of the Signy-Sigmund-Sinfjotli episode in Sigurd takes two main tacks: first, the destabilization of the extreme blood determinism of the episode, and second, the introduction into it of free will as a vital component of healthy kinship, especially through an emphasis on fosterage. In terms of the first, the main manifestation of blood determinism in this episode is, of course, the testing of Siggeir's two sons, leading into the incestuous conception of Sinfjotli. As a vital plot sequence, Morris clearly cannot eliminate this episode without fundamentally altering the story and eliminating much of the intrigue around one of its most compelling secondary characters,

Sinfjotli. But Morris is able to recast the events surrounding the incest in such a manner

as to mute its more deterministic aspects. First of all, only one of Siggeir's sons is tested

and he is not slain when he fails. Instead Sigmund merely sends the boy back to his

mother with a message:

Mother, I come from the wild-wood, and he saith, whatever befal

Alone will I abide there, nor have such fosterlings;

For the sons of the Gods may help me, but never the sons of Kings. (26)

The fact that the boy is returned unharmed is in and of itself significant - there is little

left of the racial extermination that lurks uneasily in the backgrounds of the saga version

and particularly of Morris and Eirikur's translation. More nuanced, however, is the

change in the reason for the boy's failure. It is not because he is from a lesser human

race; on the contrary, Sigmund emphasizes the boy's heritage as of "the sons of Kings," a

racially privileged and proud category from his perspective. The boy lives up to this

analysis, since he does not betray Sigmund "[fjor the heart of a king's son had he" (27). 118

But Sigmund indicates that only someone with the divine spark, one of "the sons of the

Gods" can help him; he is, in effect, saying that something extraordinary is needed in their situation. Not only does this claim of special circumstances counter the troubling notion of racial weakness in Siggeir's bloodline, but it also sets the stage for a suspension of the normal moral rules. Desperate times, the poem suggests, require desperate measures, including the violation of the incest taboo.

By reinterpreting the incest as a response to extraordinary circumstances,

Sigmund's message actually begins the process of condemning the notion of incest,

something that the saga simply does not do. In the saga, the incest is seen as little more

than the next logical step once the original plan of using Siggeir's sons proves unviable.

Morris's Sigurd, however, takes the stance that Signy would not have taken the violation

of such a fundamental prohibition so lightly. The Signy of Sigurd struggles extensively

to make her decision to violate the taboo. She "pondered [...] how shall it be with

earth's people if the kin of the Volsungs die" and "mused" on the morality of incest if the

gods "deemed it nothing wrong / To mingle for the world's sake" (27), finally making her

decision:

Alone I will bear it; alone I will take the crime;

On me alone be the shaming, and the cry of the coming time.

Yea, and he for the life is fated and the help of many a folk,

And I for the death and the rest, and deliverance from the yoke. (27-28)

Morris is certainly here emphasizing the shame of the incestuous act in part to make the

scene more acceptable to a Victorian audience, but that is not all. He is also going as far

as the limits of the plotline permit in condemning the notions of racial purification and 119 blood determinism upon which the act is founded. Morris is making as clear as possible

that Signy's choice to commit the incest is just that: a freely made, psychologically

convincing, choice. What was just a suggestion in Morris and Eirikur's translation of

Signy's death scene is here confirmed: Signy's choices will necessitate her death, but this

death will lead to a "deliverance from the yoke" of the deterministic system of an

unwilling marriage. Note also Signy's emphasis in all three passages on the communal

good that can come from the choices of the individual. While the logic of her reasoning

smacks of rationalization,72 we can see, amidst a scene so entrenched in blood-based

community definition, the attempt to assert the individual's obligation to broader

communities, to "many a folk." Her claim that on her "alone be the shaming" again

carries the undertone of rationalization, but it too does so while privileging communal

over individual good. Morris, therefore, has taken the original saga, with its casual

acceptance of incest, and recast it as a nascent theory about the nature of community:

specifically that community is based upon each individual having free will to choose

between individual desires and communal needs. While Signy's ability to distinguish

between the two is questionable, the value system that she proclaims, even through her

rationalizations, clearly favours the latter. The community for whose needs she is

claiming to sacrifice herself is emphatically not merely her blood kin but rather all the

"earth's people."

To return briefly to Morris's Journals, we see in his depiction of Signy's

decision-making process a corollary to his observations about the treatment of the poor

72 There is an unsettlingly self-serving (and self-loathing) undertone to Signy's ponderings, as if she is attempting to rationalize a latent desire to commit the incestuous act; for example, when Signy realizes the witch can swap forms with her, "the eyes of her soul saw all things, like the blind, whom the world's last fire / Hath healed in one passing moment 'twixt his death and his desire" (27). 120 and of the mentally challenged in Iceland. For Morris, much of the essential character of that country derived from the broader community willingly choosing to take care of those in need, regardless of blood ties. Similarly, here Signy puts forth the view that community is built through the individual freely choosing to privilege the needs of that community over his or her own, even beyond the incest taboo. I would suggest, therefore, that Morris is attempting to make the Volsung story more and more suitable for the role of the communal Germanic epic that he so wanted it to fill, by having it reflect the values that he believed were inherent to the ancient Germanic race. This attempt is

furthered considerably in Morris's adaptation of the scenes involving Signy's sons.

Morris's infusion of free will into the saga reaches its highest significance in his

modifications to the relationships between Sigmund and the boys sent to him by Signy,

first Siggeir's son and then Sinfjotli; specifically, Morris goes out of his way to

emphasize repeatedly these relationships as fosterage. We have already encountered

Siggeir's references to "fosterlings" in his message to Signy, but the word appears first in

the message Signy sends to Sigmund with Siggeir's son ("I send thee a man to foster")

and is then quickly repeated when Sigmund chooses to give the boy a chance ("[s]o he

fostered him there") (25). When the boy fails Sigmund's test, Sigmund uses the word

again ("no more will I foster thee" [26]) to verbalize his decision to send him home with

the aforementioned message to Signy. Sigmund's relationship with the boy is framed,

therefore, by two things: by the choices to accept and then to reject the boy, and by paired

instances of the word "foster." The repetition of the word, as well as its situation in

conjunction with such key choices, makes it clear that Morris is not using this word in

any casual sense but rather in the formal, almost contractual sense seen so often 121 throughout the sagas. The significance of this relationship is one of the reasons, for

Morris, that no ordinary boy could possibly meet Sigmund's standards - he is being selective because he is selecting not only a partner in revenge but also a new member of his family.

Morris makes clear that freedom of choice in such a relationship is a two-way street; Sinfjotli greets Sigmund by saying, "I would that my foster-father should be such a man as thou" (30, my emphasis). This desire may be another vestige of the blood- determinism of the saga, since Sigmund also immediately feels a certain visceral connection with the boy: as he "looked on the youngling [...] his heart unto him yearned" (30). Morris stresses, however, that this connection is under the control of

Sigmund's conscious will; Sigmund resists the instinctual connection, thinking, "[b]ut why should I cherish and love him, since the end must come at last?" (31). This changes, however, once Sinfjotli passes the test: "[b]ut now full glad was Sigmund, and he let his

love arise" (31). The key word here is "let" - Morris goes out of his way to ensure that the affection felt by Sigmund for Sinfjotli, while almost natural, is not merely the force of

instinct, but a freely chosen act of fellowship. Morris does not deny the ties of blood,

therefore, but rather indicates that the will is superior to them, that ties freely chosen -

rather than inherited - are stronger.

An intriguing opportunity arises for Morris's adaptation of the episode, since the

main cause that unites Sigmund and Sinfjotli in brotherhood is the death of Siggeir, the

man they both believe to be Sinfjotli's biological father. The saga gives no specific

motivation for Sinfjotli's willingness to betray his father, merely basing this strange act

on the fact that Sinfjotli's Volsung blood is "mjok fraendrcekinn" ("very much attached to 122 his kinspeople"), even if his conscious mind is not. As is his pattern, Morris sees such an omission as a chance to recast the moment into an assertion of his vision of proper community-building. When Sigmund asks if Sinfjotli could "bear the curse" of having committed patricide, Sinfjotli's answer indicates that the murder of Siggeir would not fit into that category:

Then loud laughed out Sinfiotli, and he said: "I wot indeed

That Signy is my mother, and her will I help at need:

Is the fox of the king-folk my father, that adder of the brake,

Who gave me never a blessing, and many a cursing spake?

Yea, have I in sooth a father, save him that cherished my life,

The Lord of the Helm of Terror, the King of the Flame of Strife?

Lo now my hand is ready to strike what stroke thou wilt,

For I am the sword of the Gods: and thine hand shall hold the hilt." (35)

In a moment dripping with dramatic irony, Sinfjotli here declares that Siggeir is not his

father, not because he knows the truth about the incest (he does not), but because Siggeir

has not "cherished" him. The murder will not be patricide, therefore, but worthy

tyrannicide. What begins as a renunciation of Sinfjotli's father, however, quickly

becomes something much more profound: a declaration that Sigmund, "him that

cherished my life," is his father, regardless of the apparent lack of a blood tie. Sinfjotli

chooses to foster Sigmund as his father, just as Sigmund fostered him as his son. We

have here the completion of the circle of free will- each member of the nascent

community has freely chosen to form a bond with the other; there is no blood obligation,

but only the willingly accepted obligation of fellowship. The choice of Sinfjotli as the 123

sword that Sigmund will wield is quite deliberate; Sigmund does not, and arguably could not, order Sinfjotli to kill Siggeir, but Sinfjotli can and does choose to place himself in

Sigmund's hands.

It could be argued that Morris's attempt to reinterpret this episode out of the blood

determinism of the saga and into alignment with his belief in freely chosen community is

inherently undermined by the fact that the father that Sinfjotli chooses is also, in fact, his

biological father. Sinfjotli's selection of Sigmund can, after all, be seen as the ultimate

triumph of the power of blood ties, suggesting that consanguinity is able to determine

social relations even when it is unknown. But the Sigurd version of Sinfjotli's death

scene counters such an argument. In both the saga and the adaptation, Sinfjotli is killed

by poison; Sinfjotli notices the poison, but Sigmund, drunk and inherently resistant to

poison, encourages him to drink anyway. In the saga, Sigmund says, "[l]at gron sia,

sonr" ("let the moustache filter it, son") (18), which Morris and Eirikur render as "[n]ay,

let the lip strain it out then, O son" (312). In Sigurd, however, Morris alters this line to

"[w]ell seen, my fosterling; let the lip then strain it out" (47). Given the fact that Signy

has already made public the biological relationship between Sigmund and Sinfjotli, there

is no need for Sigmund to refer to him as anything but son. This suggests that Sigmund

sees his fosterage of the boy as more definitive of their relationship than their biological

bond. Moreover, the fact that these words are the last that Sigmund ever says to his son

serves to stamp this definition with some degree of permanence. Morris, therefore, takes

this rare situation - a man who is both the biological father and the foster-father of the

same individual - as an opportunity to privilege directly the latter bond over the former. 124

As ideal as the Signy-Sigmund-Sinfjotli episode is for Morris's exploration of his notions of community, it is far from a unique case. The relationship between this episode in the saga and Morris's two versions of it is actually representative of a repeated pattern in Morris's work of using such moments as opportunities to privilege community- building through freely chosen relationships rather than through blood ties. There are a number of examples even within Morris's versions of Vglsunga saga. In Sigurd, for example, the blood-oaths sworn by Sigurd, Gunnar, and Hogni culminate with the declaration that "now are theyyaster-brethren" (182, my emphasis). J. W. Blench provides another example: he observes that in the final book of Sigurd (in which Gudrun opts to assist her new husband Atli in overcoming her brothers, who betrayed her first husband Sigurd), Morris draws heavily on the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, thereby avoiding the "more primitive manners" of the Vglsunga saga "which placed blood-ties before those of marriage" (3). While I would not consider the Norse tradition

"primitive," the point is a good one: Morris, faced with two variant traditions, selects the one that favours free will over blood determinism. Moreover, these issues recur repeatedly throughout Morris's oeuvre (or at least the portion of it dealing with the Old

North), as shall be seen later in this chapter with regard to his Germanic romances and his translation of Beowulf.

With this emphasis on fosterage and other freely chosen communal relationships in mind, it becomes apparent that Vglsunga saga, Morris and Eirikur's translation of it, and Morris's Sigurd form a specific hermeneutic progression. First, the original saga juxtaposes determinism and free will, perhaps not specifically contrasting them but nevertheless allowing the tensions between them to manifest. Second, Morris and 125

Eirikur's translation is an active interpretation of this original, the general movement of which is an intensification of both the free will element and the determinism

(emphasizing primarily its blood-based and often racialized form but also pointing to its

social forms such as forced marriage); this intensification encourages an interpretation of

the saga that marks the tension between these contraries as the dominant thematic

concern of the text. Third, Sigurd goes beyond interpretation to the level of adaptation,

repeatedly taking the opportunities emphasized in Morris and Eirikur's translation to

affirm the value of freely chosen community membership over blood ties, even on the

most basic level of kinship identity - the immediate family.

Morris's conceptions of familial relationships serve, as shall be shown below, as

an effective microcosm for his conceptions of larger kinship groups, including race.

When Signy suggests that her individual decisions will have ramifications not only for

her immediate family but also for "many a folk" (28), for example, she is not only

rationalizing her guilt; she is also pointing to the fact that races are composed of families

and that the same issues of blood ties and free will have just as much importance for

defining the character of the community on the racial level as they do on the familial.

More specifically, I would suggest that Morris's interpretations of these familial bonds in

the sagas formed the foundation for his later theorizations of the Germanic racial

character as a whole - he saw in the saga families an expression of what he would come

to consider a universal northern understanding of how communities should be bound

together. When Morris makes his eventual and emphatic turn to the socialist cause, he

takes the opportunity to build upon these foundational notions of the North, as can be 126 seen in the racial theories imbedded in his socialist writings, particularly in his collaboration with fellow socialist E. Belfort Bax.

Medieval Germs of Socialism

In a September 1883 letter to fellow socialist Andreas Scheu, Morris asserts a direct connection between his travels in Iceland and the socialism of his later life. "I learned one lesson there, thoroughly I hope, that the most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes" (2: 229). Wawn, however, states that

"though Morris's socialism is not in doubt, its putative Icelandic origin seems less certain," arguing that the Journals offer little evidence of Morris's exposure to the lower classes in Iceland {Vikings 278) and that "self-authenticating political testimonies built on such brittle memories and undernourished understandings ought perhaps to be taken with a pinch of Icelandic nose tobacco" (277). This is a valid objection since Iceland's social and class politics are far more complex than Morris's occasionally naive depictions indicate, but I would suggest that this objection should go only to counter the factuality or merits of Morris's political theories, not the sincerity of his belief in them or in their origins. His perceptions of Iceland may indeed have been skewed by a lack of exposure to the lower classes and by ten years of fading memory, but the influence of his image of

Iceland, whether accurate or skewed, should not be underestimated.

MacCarthy describes what she calls a "conspiracy of memory" that originates with J. W. Mackail, Morris's first biographer and the son-in-law of his close friend

Edward Burne-Jones; MacCarthy argues that Mackail's The Life of William Morris

(1899) "was the originator of the view, widely accepted over the next few decades, that 127

Morris's membership of, first, the revolutionary Democratic Federation, then the

Socialist League, were aberrations from which he soon recovered to enjoy a golden twilight of renewed artistic and literary activity" (x). The motivation for this view is understandable - Morris was a successful capitalist from bourgeois roots whose design

firm brought him into regular contact with the wealthiest of patrons, and so the fiery

socialism of his later life would at times have been embarrassingly awkward for many of

his family and friends. During his life, he endured through what MacCarthy calls "the

inevitable snide attacks" on the "inconsistency in living as a capitalist and at the same

time speaking in support of the Socialist cause" (479). Regardless of the discomfort of

Burne-Jones and others, the fact remains that in 1883 Morris openly adopted socialism,

and moreover, eventually came to be one of the most highly active and visible socialists

in England at the time. He was the treasurer of the Democratic Federation and in 1884

published A Summary of the Principles of Socialism with Henry Hyndman, founder of

that Federation. Morris, however, became disillusioned with Hyndman's leadership and

broke off with others, including Eleanor Marx and Bax, to create the Socialist League late

in 1884. He travelled the country lecturing and protesting, which even had him placed

under arrest (he was fined one shilling plus costs) (MacCarthy 536-38). His greatest

impact, however, probably came in his application of his writing skills to the cause - he

wrote almost 500 articles for the socialist newspapers Justice and Commonweal

(MacCarthy 486). Most useful for my purposes was the publication of Socialism: Its

Growth and Outcome (1893)73 in collaboration with the Marxist theorist Bax, in which

they provide a subtly racialized theory of socialist history that locates many of the germs

of the movement in the early Middle Ages.

73 Originally published serially in Commonweal under the title Socialism from the Root Up (1886-88). 128

Bax, born in Warwickshire, had been exposed to Marxist thought while working in Berlin for the London Standard; working as a journalist throughout the 1880s and early

1890s, he published regularly on matters philosophical and socialist (Pierson). Of

greatest significance to my purposes here was that Bax and Morris held similar views

about the nature of social history, that it is possible and profitable to identify specific

origins and roots for current social ills in earlier forms of society. "It may be

remembered," they argue, "that the earlier stages of a new social development always

show the characteristic evils of the incoming system, not perhaps in their really worst,

but, at least, in their most direct and obvious form" (37).74 This is determinism at its

highest level, seeing the movements of human social development as fixed many

generations before they occur. This massive scope is one of the reasons that the Middle

Ages are so important to Morris, perhaps even more so in his socialist years than in any

previous period. On the one hand, the emphasis on the "evils of the incoming system"

reflects Morris and Bax's belief that all manifestations of society to date have failed to

achieve the socialist ideal; on the other hand, they also believe that some such

manifestations, including the Germanic tribes of the early Middle Ages, have come far

closer to the ideal than has modern civilization. This determinism is not despairing,

therefore, but hopeful, since it claims that modernity contains within it the potential for a

true socialist society - if one is only able to nurture the seeds already planted in the

medieval past, then they will inevitably bear fruit. For Morris and Bax, the discovery of

those seeds takes place through an examination of history, with particular attention to the

relationship between individuality and communality. This discovery is a moral

74 Morris and Bax illustrate this argument by asserting the prevalence of "usury and litigation" "in all early civilized Communities" (37) - they cite the Icelandic sagas as proof, once again demonstrating the pervasiveness of Iceland to Morris's socialist thought. 129 imperative: as Morris states in "How I Became a Socialist," "the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past which would have no serious relation to the life of the present" (280).75

Morris and Bax present society as moving through distinct phases, which can be loosely described as follows: (1) primitive, (2) classical/ancient, (3) medieval

(early/barbaric and late), (4) modern/civilized, and eventually, (5) socialist. The relationship between these eras is not strictly linear but rather periodical, with the primitive being aligned with the medieval and the classical being aligned with the modern. In and of itself, this is not unusual; Morris and Bax themselves refer to the

common view of history that privileges the ancient and the modern over the medieval:

"[a]ncient civilization used to be considered as the direct parent of modern society, with nothing between them but a chaos of merely negative lapse of time" (43). From this view, the Middle Ages are little more than a lacuna, a breath taken in between the more

significant ancient and modern periods. Not surprisingly given Morris's Pre-Raphaelite

connections, Socialism defends the Middle Ages staunchly. In their reclamation of the

medieval, Morris and Bax do more than place it on par with the ancient and the modern;

they actually give it a privileged position above both ancient and modern. Morris and

Bax, then, are not disputing the essence of the more common model; on the contrary, they

are simply inverting it. The question becomes, of course, one of determining the aspects

of the medieval period that distinguish it from those preceding and following it.

75 This moral imperative is the main reason that Morris's medievalism is not conservative - it is not a passive admiration or affection for the Middle Ages but rather an active attempt to construct an image of that period that would compel social change for the future. 130

The answer lies in the relationship between individuality and communality, a relationship that, as shown above, Morris had been fixated on at least as far back as his translation work on Vglsunga saga. Morris and Bax assert that individuality is characteristic of civilization (whether ancient or modern), while communality is characteristic of primitive society:

Modern civilized society has been developed by the antagonism

between individual and social interests, between the holding of property in

severalty and in common; and between the simple and limited kinship

group, and the complex and extended political whole, or impersonal state,

which has transformed primitive society into civilization.

The difference between these opposing circumstances of society is, in

fact, that between an organism and a mechanism. The earlier condition in

which everything, art, science (so far as it went), law, industry, were

personal, and aspects of a living body, is opposed to the civilized

condition in which all those elements have become mechanical, uniting to

build up mechanical life, and themselves the product of machines material

and moral. (22-23)

The prose may be somewhat convoluted, but the message is nonetheless clear. Morris

and Bax see the essence of civilization not in technological, governmental, or industrial

advancement, since, as they emphasize in the second paragraph, these things existed to

some extent even in primitive society. On the contrary, they locate the essential

difference between civilization and primitivism in the nature of social relationships.

Much of the confusion of the passage, however, stems from the fact that Morris and Bax 131 are not arguing that civilization privileges individual values while primitive society privileges the communal; they are arguing that civilization creates an "antagonism" between the needs of the individual and those of the rest of society, while primitive society generates a harmonic sympathy between those needs.

Importantly, this minimizing of the significance of technological (etc.) advancement is at the heart of the periodic nature of Morris and Bax's theory of social development - civilization is not a Pandora's box, contents unleashed, but merely one extreme of a swinging pendulum. Primitivism in its pre-classical form will not return, due to technological and industrial advancement, but the communal spirit of that primitivism can return and, indeed, has done so in the past. Much like "[a]ncient civilization used to be considered as the direct parent of modern society," Morris and Bax present early primitive society as the parent, in spirit if not in particulars, of early medieval, barbaric society: they identify a "close resemblance on many points between the pre-classical period of antiquity, the epoch of the Homeric poems, and the Middle

Ages" (43). The overall movement of social history, therefore, can be visualized as a wave function, oscillating repeatedly between on the one hand the dissociation of individual from societal needs and on the other the harmonizing of those needs.76

The question remains one of how this theory of social history is connected to representations of race. On the surface, Morris and Bax's theory of history is specifically

76 The image of a wave function addresses a key aspect of Morris and Bax's theory, specifically the idea that the impulses towards both the communal and the individual exist in all eras, even when one is in ascendance. History, for them, flows in a continuous curve from one side of the divide to the other, with identifiable inflection points when one impulse begins to override its opposite. See, for example, their description of the transition between the late classical and early medieval periods: "[t]his interpenetration of progressive barbarism and decaying Roman civilization, so essential to the life of the new epoch, began with the first invasion of Italy by the Goths (406), and went on through centuries of confused war and struggle, till the process of welding together the varying elements grew complete about the time of Charles the Great" (50). 132 class-oriented, and it certainly becomes so as they move into the chapters dealing with the modern period. But it is far less so for the chapters on the earlier periods, in which the comparisons are rarely between upper- and lower-class experiences but rather, as described above, between the social philosophies of different eras and the races that dominated them. More specifically, despite the occasional nod towards the eastern world

(e.g. 26, 34, 41), the book is almost exclusively concerned with the history of the west -

in the place of rich and poor, then, Morris and Bax put forth Romanic and Germanic.

Herein lies the core of Morris's representations of the Germanic races, including the

Icelanders, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Volsungs they revered: these peoples are the

closest a racial grouping has come to truly valuing communal over individual needs and,

as such, represent the exemplar after which all communities should model themselves; as

Rosemary Jann argues, "for Morris the dominant trait in England's racial heritage was [..

.] the spirit of communal fellowship central to socialism" (144). It is important to keep in

mind that Morris and Bax probably did not intend their book to be racial theory, but

nevertheless that is precisely what they produced. That it is a racial theory, steeped on

Morris's side in decades of work on northern literature, should not be overlooked.

Water as Thick as Blood: Germanic Communalism

The very first pages of Socialism put forth the notion of the value difference

between blood and non-blood relationships in a way that recalls the anxiety present in

Morris's treatments of the blood determinism in the descriptions of Sinfjotli's nature:

Our present family of blood relationship, based on assumed absolute

monogamy, recognizes feeble responsibility outside itself, and professes to 133

regulate the degrees of affection to be felt between different persons

according to the amount of kinship between them, so that, for instance, the

brotherhood of blood would almost extinguish the sense of duty in that

other brotherhood of inclination or of mutual tastes and pursuits, and in

fact scarce admit that such ties could be real. (9-10)

This argument goes on to place a hefty portion of blame for the ills of capitalism on this

over-emphasis in modern society on the close ties of blood. Morris and Bax are here

asserting that blood kinship has been the means by which modern civilization can

quantify "the degrees of affection" - and, more importantly, the means by which the

modern individual can morally justify the disaffection he or she feels for those outside

those blood-sanctioned borders. Genuine community, in this view, has been shrunk to its

smallest viable unit (other than the single individual), eliminating any broader notions of

"brotherhood," be it brotherhood "of mutual tastes and pursuits" or, by extension, of race,

nationality, religion, and so forth. Moreover, they even argue that the brotherhood of

familial bonds is often likewise meaningless, since affection cannot and should not be

forced; such blood ties generally become, in their words, "the iron chain of conventional

sham duty" (11).77 It is absurd, in Morris and Bax's view, to extricate free will from

affection: regulated affection simply serves to reduce it to the level of "mechanism," to

return to the dichotomy mentioned above. Freely chosen brotherhood, on the other hand,

leads to an "organic" community.

77 Morris and Bax reinforce their assertion that the civilized community described above is essentially Roman by claiming that as bad as it may be in England, it is worse in France: "In England it is true, as we have said, that all virtue, honor, and affection are supposed to be embraced within the pale of the family; this superstition is by no means so strong in France; nevertheless there is a conventional bond there, apparently a survival of the tyranny of the civil law of the Roman Empire, that is much stronger than any family tie in England" (10). 134

In Morris and Bax's theory, this organicism goes hand in hand with the pre- classical tribes and with the early medieval Germanic tribes that followed the pre- classical model. Interestingly, at first glance this model does not seem all that different from the model described above, since it too seems to identify blood relations as the core communal identity marker:

This primitive community took the form of a narrow and exclusive

group based on the kinship, real or supposed, of its members. The three

integral bodies of this society are the Gens, the Tribe, and the People. The

Gens is a group founded on actual blood relationship, in which inter

marriage is forbidden [...].

These Gentes have a tendency to coalesce and form the Tribe, in

which kinship is still supposed, but is not necessarily actual; as time goes

on, the Gentes tend to lose their autonomous existence in the Tribe; but the

Tribe in its turn tends to merge itself into a higher unity, the People, which

is a federation of tribes, and in which the formal traditional kinship is in

general merely mythical. (25-26)

The "narrow and exclusive group" of the opening sentence is certainly reminiscent of the

modern community, but the similarity is illusory. The modern, civilized race for Morris

and Bax is indeed composed of "narrow and exclusive groups," but these groups actively

resist, almost repel, each other, forming a collective only in the sense of a mass of

individual units. The internal momentum of the primitive community, and its eventual

successor in the Germanic tribes, is precisely the opposite: instead of resisting

integration, these groups tend naturally, even inevitably, towards amalgamation. This 135 amalgamation leads to broader racial identities, and, furthermore, to the non-blood

"brotherhoods" that Morris and Bax suggested are so lacking in civilized communities.

Moreover, part of this amalgamation is an acknowledgement that while kinship is vitally important on a symbolic level, its practical connection to blood is far from absolute.

Even at the basic level of the Gens, Morris and Bax insert a qualifier, "real or supposed,"

into their description of the kinship within the group. As the unification of the Gentes progresses, the balance swings further and further away from the "real" side of the

equation, first with "supposed, but not necessarily actual" at the tribal level, and finally

with "in general merely mythical" at the level of the People. The importance of this

notion of "supposed" or "mythical" kinship cannot be underestimated. "Mythical," of

course, means far more than simply unreal, if it even means that. Morris and Bax are

suggesting that even as the members of the People acknowledge less and less factual

consanguinity with each other, they still maintain the pretence of kinship - this kinship,

freed from the restrictions of blood, achieves a highly symbolic, perhaps even quasi-

sacred, significance.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this theory is the connection between this

drive towards racial amalgamation and the tribal inclination towards communal rather

than individual needs. As the kinship group expands, so too does the group to whom

one's moral obligations apply. If a Germanic community can maintain a belief in its

kinship, even if only on a symbolic level, then obligation becomes independent of direct

personal connection; even perfect strangers, if they are members of the People, are

obliged to each other. From Morris's perspective, this wide net of obligation would have

been the direct precursor of what he believed to be the Icelanders' communal approach to 136 the care of "paupers" and "lunatics," not to mention their emphasis on hospitality that so imprinted itself upon Morris's memory. But, according to Morris and Bax, with this social policy within the People came a foreign policy that was quite harsh: "[t]hese groups above mentioned, whether People, Tribe, or Gens, were essentially exclusive; within their limits peace and community of property was the rule - without, a state of war was assumed; it was not war that had to be declared, but peace" (27). Morris and Bax are not suggesting that the Germanic tribes were overly aggressive or even unfriendly, since peace could easily be declared, but rather that they have a very strong sense of the

difference between racial self and racial other, the stark boundary between these groups,

and the different moral obligations connected to each. This great differential over the

Germanic racial boundary does not seem to counter the "tendency to coalesce" that

dominates Morris and Bax's racial theory - the racial boundary is at the very same time

highly exclusive, asserting drastic differences between self and other, and highly

inclusive, tending towards unification with racial others.

Sigurd and Socialism

The correlation between Morris's treatments of Volsunga saga and this theory of

race is remarkably strong. I will summarize just a few of the salient points of Morris and

Bax's theory and suggest some connections to Morris's versions of the saga:

1. In Socialism, Morris and Bax suggest that Germanic tribes value communal needs

over individual ones. In Sigurd, Signy justifies her decision to commit incest by

appealing to the good of two communities, first her family, and second the good 137

of "many a folk" (28). This action is situated within the context of personal

sacrifice, since she consciously claims all of the guilt.

2. Morris and Bax reject blood affinity as a valid determinant of affection between

individuals or of community boundaries, instead suggesting "brotherhood" based

on "inclination" (10). Likewise, Sigurd rejects the blood determinism of the saga

as a valid basis for Sigmund and Sinfjotli's relationship and, by extension, the

future of the Volsung line; their relationship is defined instead as fosterage, freely

chosen on both sides, even after their blood relationship is revealed.

3. Morris and Bax claim that Germanic tribes are simultaneously extremely

exclusive, harshly defining their differences in obligations to kin and not kin, and

extremely inclusive, tending towards amalgamation with other kinship groups.

Similarly, Sigmund is willing to take final vengeance upon Siggeir for past

wrongs but is also willing to accept as a member of his own family a boy he

believes to be Siggeir's son. Looking at Sigurd as a whole, the uniting of Sigurd

with Gunnar and Hogni as foster-brothers would also fit this pattern.

With such connections in mind, the influence of Morris's understanding of the saga on his later racial theories becomes clear. And yet, as discussed above, his treatments of the sagas are strongly influenced by his nascent conceptions of racial community. The relationship between these theories and the sagas was, therefore, a self-perpetuating system, each continually influencing and inflecting the other.

The persistence of Morris's thinking on the relationship between the Germanic and the communal is astonishing - it is present in his work of the late 1860s and early to mid 1870s (in his Journals and in his translations and adaptations from the Old 138

Icelandic), and it is even more fully crystallized in his 1893 Socialism. There is, however, a gap of a full decade in between these two time periods; Morris had a remarkably wide range of interests and the Old North took the metaphorical back seat from the late 1870s and well into the late 1880s. There are, therefore, two distinct phases to Morris's thought about the Germanic races. It is difficult to determine exactly when

Morris's notions about tribal community assumed the structured form present in

Socialism; perhaps it was not until his collaboration with Bax that these ideas, percolating for so long, coalesced into a specific theory. But I would suggest that what is reasonably

clear is that in the late 1880s and through to his death, his writings take on a much

different tone with regards to the issues of free will, kinship, and community. As his

versions of Volsunga saga demonstrate, his earlier treatments of this issue tend towards a

relatively simple binary - community should be based on free will rather than blood - but

his later works engage these issues on levels much more complex. First of all, while his

first-phase works tended to address the development of community at its smallest units,

such as the rebuilding of the Volsung family, his second-phase works attempt a broader

focus, looking at the interactions of tribes and races; what is the exact nature, for

example, of the interaction between the Geats and the Danes in the first section of

Beowuip. Second, particularly in his Germanic romances, he becomes more concerned

with exploring the implications of his racial theory, rather than simply stating it. This

shift in focuses is most likely due to his formal adoption of socialism and his subsequent

engagement with the historical theory of that political movement, but regardless of its

cause, it is paralleled by a resurgence in his production of literature dealing specifically

with Germanic texts or tribes. Morris uses these texts as testing grounds for examining 139 the implications and complications of his racial theory. He becomes particularly interested in exploring how a free, Germanic community could possibly cope with otherness that refuses to respect its principles. How, for example, does a community based on what I have called the spirit of amalgamation interact with a community that adamantly rejects such a spirit? Conversely, how does such a community handle

individuals within it that reject its communalism in favour of their own individual needs

and desires? These are the types of questions that dominate Morris's later writings.

The Roots of the Mountains and Racial Interactions

Florence Boos suggests that after the 13 November 1887 violent suppression of

socialist demonstrators in Trafalgar Square, Morris was looking for "socialist victories in

a more distant past, of Germanic tribal societies in the twilight of the Roman Empire"

(322). Two romances written shortly thereafter, The House of the Wolfmgs and The

Roots of the Mountains, she argues, "both describe early struggles of imaginary tribal

societies toward a more coherent communal order." This is certainly true, as the final

words of Roots indicate:

Now telleth the tale of all these kindreds, to wit, the Men of Burgdale

and the Sheepcotes; and the Children of the Wolf, and the Woodlanders,

and the Men of Rosedale, that they were friends henceforth, and became

as one Folk, for better or worse, in peace and in war, in waning and

waxing; and that whatsoever befell them, they ever held Shadowy Vale a

holy place, and for long and long after they met there in mid-autumn, and

held converse and counsel together. (411) 140

This use of phrasing evocative of wedding vows indicates that Morris is here drawing upon the spirit of amalgamation that Morris and Bax describe in Socialism. The

important critical question for this text is not, however, whether the kindreds will unite (it

is clear that they will), but rather how. Morris in this second stage of his Old

Northernism could see clearly the socialist goal that would manifest itself in the

internationalism of his News from Nowhere, but he needed to develop more fully his

thinking on how communities would amalgamate and, moreover, how communities

would deal with disruptions, both internal and external, to the spirit of fellowship.

Morris's two Germanic romances, Wolfings and Roots, are on one level testing grounds

for just these questions.

Roots details the encounter of the Burgdalers and their fellow kindreds with two

racial groups, one friendly and distantly related, the other hostile and racially other; I will

first discuss the encounter, and eventual unification, with the friendly race, the kindred of

the Wolf. I chose the passage above in part because it combines the two main social

institutions that Morris puts forth in Roots as vehicles for community-building in the

Germanic tribes, namely marriage and the Folk-mote. At the beginning of Roots, the

most prominent young Burgdaler, Face-of-God, is betrothed to a woman of the House of

the Steer, a house from which the men of his family traditionally select their wives; but,

as the romance progresses, he falls in love instead with a foreigner, Sun-beam of the

kindred of the Wolf. Their marriage (which is mirrored by the marriage between Sun

beam's brother and Face-of-God's original betrothed) is unorthodox, however, and so

requires some intriguing racial intervention: 141

So Hall-ward stood forth and took the Sun-beam's right hand in

his, and said:

"Now do I take this maiden, Sun-beam of the kindred of the Wolf,

and lead her into the House of the Steer, to be in all ways one of the

maidens of our House, and to wed in the blood wherein we have been

wont to wed. Neither from henceforth let anyone say that this woman is

not of the blood of the Steer; for we have given her our blood, and she is

of us duly and truly." (378)

Morris provides here a manifestation of his belief in the simultaneous exclusivity and inclusivity of the Germanic racial group. Face-of-God cannot (or at least should not) marry Sun-beam because she is outside the rigidly defined acceptable marriage group; but, at the same time, that group welcomes Sun-beam absolutely, making her one of their number. Note that Sun-beam's acceptance into the House of the Steer is not simply a social function but also a biological one. Hall-ward emphasizes blood three times in what is a performative declaration - by declaring that she has the blood of the House, and also by forbidding anyone to declare the opposite, he effectively changes her blood to that of the Steer. This repetition of "blood" serves to emphasize how aware Morris's

Germanic tribes are of biological bonds, but Morris also emphasizes that free will trumps biology, that blood can be changed. This switches biology from cause to effect: blood for the Germanic tribes, in Morris's understanding, was the symbol of the bond between two individuals rather than the determinant of that bond.

As much as marriage has become a standard literary trope for communal bonding,

Morris is not satisfied with it; the symbolic connection that the two marriages create 142 between the Burgdalers and the kindred of the Wolf is, for him, insufficient. Marriage may be symbolic, but it is also individual. Face-of-God's and Sun-beam's free wills determine only their own kinship connection; only the wills of the communities at large can make any broader unification possible. Such is the role of the Folk-mote, the communal assembly or council and the Germanic social institution that most harmonized with Morris's socialism. There are multiple Folk-motes in Roots, in which various questions are addressed communally, from the election of war-leaders to punishments to battle strategy to fellowship with foreigners. The kindred of the Wolf send the following invitation to the Burgdalers at the end of the romance:

since ye have joined yourselves to us in battle, and have given us this

Dale, our health and wealth, without price and without reward, we deem

you our very brethren, and small shall be our hall-glee, and barren shall

our Doom-ring seem to us, unless ye sit there beside us. Come then, that

we may rejoice each other by the sight of face and sound of voice; that we

may speak together of matters that concern our welfare; so that we three

Kindreds may become one Folk. (408)

This amalgamation of "Kindreds" into "one Folk" closely parallels Morris and Bax's

progressive amalgamation of "Gens," "Tribe," and "People." More interesting, however,

Boos argues that Morris draws upon Gibbon's Decline and Fall for information on topics such as the Folk-mote (325). This is likely, though it should be noted that Morris was probably also drawing on descriptions of such assemblies in other scholarly texts and in the sagas, in which the bing ("assembly"), especially the Icelandic Albing ("national assembly/parliament"), regularly plays a central role. In any case, Boos usefully draws the following description of the mote out of Gibbon's text: "[t]he trial of public offenses, the election of magistrates, and the great business of peace and war, were determined by its independent voice. Sometimes, indeed, these important questions were previously considered and prepared in a more select council of the principal chieftains. The magistrates might deliberate and persuade, the people only could resolve and execute" (1: 264-65). This final clause is of the utmost importance for Morris's Germanic romances, in which one of the key functions of the Folk-mote is to manage the power of the public officials, both legislative and military. 143 is the causality of the invitation: the kindred of the Wolf invite the Burgdalers to a mutual

Folk-mote79 "so that" they "may become one Folk." Morris is here suggesting a method of racial definition: you have a kinship bond if you are mutual members of a mote. For

Morris, therefore, the right to speak, to declare freely one's opinion, to help choose the fate of the community, is in itself what defines the community. To invite another kinship group to join yours in a mote is, therefore, an invitation to racial unification.

The question becomes, however, how a Germanic community handles an encounter with a racial group that resists the spirit of amalgamation, over whom the unifying abilities of the Folk-mote hold no sway. How, for example, did Morris conceive of such a group handling encounters with hostile communities? Morris struggles with this question in Roots by having a war with the sinister Dusky Men act as backdrop for the Burgdalers' unification with the kindred of the Wolf. Morris seems to believe that some races are beyond redemption, that what I have called the spirit of amalgamation can only reach so far from its Germanic origins. Morris depicts the Dusky Men as propagating their race by exploitation of the races they encounter: "[a]s to women, they had none of their own race, but lay with the Daleswomen at their will, and begat children of them; and all or most of the said children favoured the race of their begetters. Of the men-children they reared most, but the women-children they slew at once; for they valued not women of their own blood" (203). The Dusky Men, therefore, do not amalgamate with other races but rather despoil them, even to the point of infanticide.

The fact that their children take after their fathers rather than the Burgdalers attests to the

79 Morris does not here use the term "mote," instead referring to the place at which the mote would traditionally occur, the "Doom-ring" (from the Old Icelandic "domhringr" and cognate with the Old English "dom" ["judgment"]); Morris treats the notion of a community's Doom-ring with reverence in a number of his works. 144 persistence of their apparent genetic corruption, so much so that there is no chance of evolution through interaction with diversity. Moreover, the murder of their female children limits their method of racial interaction almost exclusively to parasitism, since they can only propagate their existence by feeding off other races, namely by acquiring women through the slave trade or by conquest. This notion of parasitism is one instance

of Morris's presentation of the Dusky Men as a social disease. Another example occurs when Face-of-God considers the prospect of allowing the slaves of the Dusky Men to join their community: "[h]ow shall it be, moreover, when we have them in the Dale, and they

fall to the deed of kind there, as they needs must. Will they not bear us evil and thrall

like men?" (198). Face-of-God worries, therefore, that the slaves have been infected by

the evil of the Dusky Men and that this infection will insinuate itself into the Burgdalers'

racial make-up.

This depiction of the Dusky Men as a parasitic disease is one facet of Morris's

struggle to resolve the problem of racial resistance to his socialist belief in communality;

after all, if the Dusky Men are a disease, then there is a greater acceptability in purging

them, which after all is said and done the Burgdalers and their allies effectively do.

Parallel to this notion of disease is Morris's dehumanization of the Dusky Men by

repeated application of animal imagery to their physicality and behaviour. For example,

when the Burgdalers make an initial attack, the Dusky Men "fell to howling as if a wood

full of wild dogs was there" (325). Similarly, "they were long-armed like apes" (339)

and they take to "baying and yelling like dogs" (346). This strain of imagery suggests

that the Dusky Men can never amalgamate with the Burgdalers because they are sub

human. Shippey notes that it is "ominous" how the Dusky Men are different "almost by 145 species" from the Burgdalers (68). Morris, therefore, has solved the problem of the

Dusky Men's resistance to the spirit of amalgamation by recasting the question entirely; it is no longer simply a matter of race but the difference between humanity and the rest of creation. Species boundaries cannot be overcome like racial ones can, the logic runs, and so there is no reason to try to build community with the Dusky Men, especially since they are not only a different but also a lesser species than the Burgdalers - a truly troubling notion.

While Morris does not use the terms "Goths" and "Huns" in Roots, Shippey and

Boos have each demonstrated convincingly that Morris had these racial groupings in mind for the Burgdalers and their allies on the one hand and the Dusky Men on the other.

There is, of course an implicit equivalence between the Goths and the English, as members of the broader Germanic family; in Shippey's words the Goths/Burgdalers are represented as "very-much-the-same-as-English" ("Goths" 56). Both critics draw on

Morris's problematic depiction of the Dusky Men as part of the proof of their identity as

Huns: "he beheld the men and saw that they were utterly strange to him: they were short of stature, crooked-legged, long-armed, very strong for their size: with small blue eyes, snubbed-nosed, wide-mouthed, thin-lipped, very swarthy of skin, exceedingly foul of favour" (88). Boos (329) suggests that Morris may have been drawing on Gibbon's descriptions of the Huns and of Attila in particular: "the portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of the modern Calmuk; a large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short square body, of nervous strength, though of a disproportioned form" (Gibbon 3:

389). Shippey puts forth Jordanes's sixth-century Historia Getica as a possible source, 146 from which he draws out this description of the Huns: "because their swarthy aspect was

fearful, and they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin holes rather than eyes [...]. They are short in stature, quick in body movement, alert horsemen, broad shouldered, ready in the use of bow and arrow, and have firm-set necks which are ever erect in pride" (trans. Mierrow 86-87, quoted in Shippey "Goths" 56).

Either option is feasible, as is the possibility that Morris was drawing on both sources. I

would add that Morris may have been led to pay more heed to these descriptions because

of the honourless and antagonistic role that Atli and his Huns play in Morris's beloved

Vplsunga saga.so Regardless, what is certain is that Morris was familiar with a tradition

with deep medieval roots that demonized the Huns, and it is to this tradition that Morris

appeals when encountered with a problem in his socialist theory. I will suggest two

effects created by this appeal to the medieval. First, it emphasizes the specifically

Germanic character of the socialist spirit that he sees in the barbarian tribes. Second, it

distances his acknowledgement of the problem of racial hatred from the political and

racial status of his present day, thereby partially containing it, and the problems it causes

Q 1 his theory, within the protection of the past.

This Goth versus Hun divide is emphasized even more strongly in Morris's Sigurd than in the saga. In Sigurd, Morris emphasizes the Gothic nature of both Sigurd's and Gunnar's families far more than their more specific racial identifications as Volsungs or Burgundians; in fact, an argument could be made that Morris presents these latter two terms as specifically familial and "Goth" as specifically racial. In any case, both groups are contrasted with the treachery of the Huns. 81 The key word, however, is "partially," since Morris's descriptions had significant contemporary ramifications, regardless of their medieval sources. Most particularly, while I do not think Morris intended to comment on this issue, his decision to label these enemies "Dusky" could nevertheless have easily evoked questions of slavery and black rights - issues of great immediacy both in North America and in Britain in the nineteenth century. 147

The Extraordinary Individual Problem

Morris's emphasis on communality over individuality does not preclude him from acknowledging the importance of individual identity; in fact, he takes the tension between these two levels of identity as the central theme for his other specifically

Germanic romance, The House of the Wolfings. In Wolfings, Morris describes an early

conflict between a confederation of specifically Gothic kinship groups (under the

leadership of their greatest warrior, Thiodolf) and an invading Roman army. This

conflict, however, is merely the occasion for Morris to explore the question of how a

socialist society, with its emphasis on the communal, can accommodate an individual too

extraordinary to be effectively defined within the constraints of communal identity;

Thiodolf, despite the emphasis on the communal in his name ("to wit Folkwolf' [10]),

embodies this very question in terms of both his political and his personal lives.

Much is made in the opening pages of Wolfings about the absolute equality of all

members of the kindreds: "nor were there," the narrator says, "many degrees amongst

them as hath befallen afterwards, but all they of one blood were brethren and of equal

dignity" (5). He goes on to say that even thralls captured in battle were occasionally

"taken into the House, and hailed as brethren of the blood." The key word, however, is

"many," since there are apparently at least a few "degrees" within the community despite

this emphasis on equality. For example, at the first meeting of the Folk-mote in the

romance, Thiodolf is quickly and unanimously elected by the kindreds to be their war-

leader against the Romans. This is logical, since Thiodolf is the most able person for the

task, and so it only makes sense for the community to select him to direct their war

efforts. But war-leader is a military position: if the position is elected solely for the 148 duration of a war, then who leads the community in the intervening periods? Morris seems to have become particularly concerned with this issue in the intervening months between writing Wolfings and Roots because in the latter, he provides an answer in the form of the Alderman, while in Wolfings no such position is described. And yet, from the very beginning of the book, Thiodolf is presented as in command of his House, a "chief giving explicit orders. Such leaders obviously existed within historical Germanic communities, which forms a significant challenge to Morris's representation of the absolute equality within those racial groups. Morris takes the opportunity to probe this question even further by making Thiodolf even more extraordinary than simply being among one of the few higher "degrees." Thiodolf is actually presented as having mysterious origins, having come "[o]f an alien folk" (20), and moreover, as John Goode points out, Thiodolf alone among his community has access to the divine, through his secret lover Wood-sun, a valkyrie (Goode 267).

As the romance progresses, Thiodolf is tempted to explore the likelihood that he is indeed alien, to give in to the possibility that since he is extraordinary his individual

identity and desires should come before those of the community. This temptation manifests itself in the form of a magical hauberk given to him by his divine lover. The hauberk has the power to prevent his death in battle and unite him with his lover, but it

comes at the cost of wiping away all of his concern for the welfare of the people. After

wearing the hauberk in battle, Thiodolf describes the experience to Wood-sun:

now must I tell thee a hard and evil thing; I loved [the Wolfings and their

allies] not, and was not of them, and outside myself there was nothing:

within me was the world and nought without me. Nay, as for thee, I was 149

not sundered from thee, but thou wert a part of me [...] and I longed to

depart from them, and to see thy body and to feel thine heart beating. And

by then so evil was I grown that my very shame had fallen from me. (169)

Thiodolf ends this sequence of his speech with a particularly telling question: "[w]here then was life, and Thiodolf that once had lived?" (170). The hauberk, then, subsumes the objective world within Thiodolf s subjectivity; all that exists for him is his own interests, his own desires, and through the extension of himself, his own lover. And yet, ironically, this domination of the individual over the communal leads to a loss of self; the "Thiodolf that once had lived" cannot survive this domination. This argument seems to suggest that there is no identity outside of the communal, that communal identity and personal identity are either equivalent or, at the least, inextricable. For one to reject community in favour of individuality, as the hauberk tempts Thiodolf to do, is therefore to reject oneself

- a truly "hard and evil thing."

Thiodolf is, however, able to resist this temptation despite knowing that it will probably result in his death, thereby completing, in Boos's words, "the allegory of the need to subordinate the exclusiveness of erotic attachment to love of the kindred" (341).

Thiodolf s performative declaration of this choice mirrors compellingly the passage above:

For whereas thou sayest that I am not of their blood, nor of their

adoption, once more I heed it not. For I have lived with them, and eaten

and drunken with them, and toiled with them, and led them in battle and

the place of wounds and slaughter; they are mine and I am theirs; and 150

through them am I of the whole earth, and all the kindreds of it; yea, even

of the foemen, whom this day the edges in mine hand shall smite.

Therefore I will bear the Hauberk no more in battle. (170)

And again these declarations lead into a question about his own identity: "[l]o thou, is not this the Thiodolf whom thou hast loved?" (170). Thiodolf declares, therefore, that it does not matter whether he is biologically connected to the Wolfings; his interactions and his free choice throughout his life have made him one of them. As Goode argues, "Thiodulf is not a Wulfing, but only through the continually renewed process of becoming a

Wulfing through action is he truly Thiodulf (269). I would go so far as to suggest that the same would be true of all Wolfings, including those actually born into the House.

How, then, does this address the issue of the extraordinary individual's place within

Morris's communalism? I would argue that the answer Morris is struggling towards is that truly extraordinary individuals are so because they have within themselves the ability to take the submission of individual desires to communal ones even further than can

ordinary individuals. If choosing individualism is a "hard and evil thing," Morris is

implicitly suggesting that choosing communalism, while still hard in all its senses, is

nonetheless the good thing.82

The Folks of Beowulf

There has been relatively little critical attention over the past century to Morris

and Wyatt's 1895 The Tale of Beowulf Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats.

MacCarthy, for example, felt that it deserved no more than half a page of her 700 page

82 An argument could be made that Morris is here projecting anxiety about a criticism against which he had to defend himself regularly, specifically that his own significant success as an entrepreneur, selling high- end products to the upper echelons of society, was fundamentally at odds with his socialism. 151 biography. In her words "[f]ew people have had a good word to say for Morris's Beowulf

(least of all in Oxford). I will not attempt one. It is Morris at his most garrulous and loose" (649). Even more devastating is Swannell's quick dismissal of the translation as

"almost unreadable" (373).83 "Garrulous" Morris and Wyatt's Beowulfmay be, but its aesthetic value should not determine the amount of critical attention it receives, particularly since it is a text so invested in racial ideas that even its garrulousness has ideological significance. Moreover, Beowulf was a pivotal text in Morris's conception of the literary canon, making his list for The Pall Mall Gazette's "Best Hundred Books by the Best Judges" in 1886 (cited in Purkis 95-96). It is not hard to see why. As well as being a key text for any study of the Old North (including its reference to his beloved

Volsung legend), Beowulf also provides any number of moments that would have resonated with Morris's belief in fellowship as a cardinal value. The question of

Hrothgar's possible adoption of Beowulf, the emphasis on the importance of the bond between a leader and his comitatus, the intimacy of the Wiglaf-Beowulf relationship, the

aiding of one Germanic racial grouping, the Danes, by another, the Geats - just a few

examples of aspects of the text that would have appealed to Morris's notion of a

Germanic definition of free community. But this appeal was not only plot-based or even

thematic; it was also linguistic. Old English was for Morris tangible evidence of

England's community with the greater northern world. Morris was not alone in this

belief, but his unique translation choices, infused as they are with his socialist thought,

provide a significant commentary on the relationship between the Germanic races.

There have been a (very) small number of critics willing to defend the translation. Perhaps its strongest advocate is Robert Boenig, who calls it "lively" and "accurate"- "[f]or all its faults, [...] the best translation available" (12). 152

Morris and Wyatt's translation process was essentially similar to that of Morris and Eirikur and so need not be discussed in detail here. There is, however, one key difference that I would like to emphasize: while Morris and Eirikur were the first to translate Vglsunga saga into English, Morris and Wyatt translated Beowulf into an already healthy translation tradition. Even if one ignores the translations into other languages, including Latin and German, by the time of Morris and Wyatt's 1895 version, the poem had been translated into English in its entirety at least ten times, beginning with

Kemble's influential 1837 version. Preceding these ten were the partial translations of

Sharon Turner (1805), William Taylor (1816), and John Josias Conybeare (1826); moreover Francis B. Gummere published a translation of the beginning of the poem in

1886. These fourteen versions include both prose and verse translations, translations from either side of the Atlantic, and even a version targeted primarily at children.84

Morris and Wyatt were in effect members of a second wave in the translation side of

Beowulf scholarship. This second wave had plenty of momentum, beginning with two translations in the 1870s, followed by three in the 1880s, and two more in the early 1890s even before that of Morris and Wyatt. Morris and Wyatt were not, therefore, translating in isolation, and so any analysis of their work should take into account the ever-richer tradition that they were contributing to. This is why I will begin my analysis of Morris

and Wyatt's Beowulf by juxtaposing its highly political opening lines with those of its precursors. For convenience, I have provided the translations of this passage from all of these versions in chronological order in an appendix at the end of this chapter.

84 These versions include only those translations that I have personally examined; it is quite possible, even likely, that there were more translations that I have not discovered. While he does not include all of the English translations mentioned in this thesis, see Chauncey B. Tinker's The Translations ofBeowulf Tor more on the tradition that Morris and Wyatt inherited. 153

The opening lines of Beowulf famously recount the origin of the Scylding line and the establishment of the dominion of the Gar-Danes over their "ymb-sittendra" ("around- sitters" or "neighbouring peoples") (9).85 The combination of this nationalistic concern with the fact that Scyld begins life "fea-sceaft" ("destitute") (7) but eventually becomes a

"god cyning" ("good king") (11) creates for the poem an intense focus on the nature of proper community-building and racial interaction. I quote here lines 1-11, followed by

Morris and Wyatt's translation.

Hwaet! we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum

beod-cyninga brym gefrunon,

hu 6a aebelingas ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scefing sceabena breatum,

monegum maegbum, meodu-setla ofteah.

Egsode eorl, sySdan aerest weard

fea-sceaft funden; he bass frofre gebad,

weox under wolcnum, weord-myndum bah,

06 bast him aeghwylc para ymb-sittendra

ofer hron-rade hyran scolde,

or: gomban gyldan; baet waes god cyning!

All translations from the Anglo-Saxon are my own. For this chapter only, all quotations from Beowulf are from Wyatt's 1894 edition (minus the macros), since it provides the most accurate picture of Morris's exposure to the text (elsewhere quotations from Beowulf are from Elliott van Kirk Dobbie's edition for the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, unless otherwise noted). A fuller study of the relationship between Morris and Wyatt's edition and their translation would be quite worthwhile; it is, however, beyond the scope of this study. 86 "Listen! We have heard of the glory of the people-kings of the Spear-Danes in the days of old, how the princes performed deeds of courage. Scyld Scefing often took away the mead-benches from the hosts of ravagers, from many kinship groups; he terrified the noble[s]. After first being found destitute, he experienced comfort, waxed great under the heavens, prospered in honours, until each of the neighbouring peoples over the whale-road had to heed him, pay him tribute: that was a good king!" 154

What! we of the Spear-Danes of yore days, so was it

That we learn'd of the fair fame of kings of the folks

And the Athelings a-faring in framing of valour.

Oft then Scyld the Sheaf-son from the hosts of the scathers,

From kindreds a many the mead-settles tore;

It was then the earl fear'd them, sithence was he first

Found bare and all-lacking; so solace he bided,

Wax'd under the welkin in worship to thrive,

Until it was so that the round-about sitters

All over the whale-road must hearken his will

And yield him the tribute. A good king was that! (179)

Examining the translation record shows how difficult some of the translation choices are even in the first three lines of the poem. Ignoring the hotly contested opening exclamation, two words in particular give the translators headaches: "beod-cyninga"

("people-kings") and "aebelingas" ("nobles" or even "royals"). Turner, despite a solid handful of modern terms, decides that none of them is sufficiently representative of the original Anglo-Saxon meaning and so leaves them effectively untranslated, offering

"Theod-kings" and "ethelings." Perhaps aware of the evasive nature of these translation choices, Turner provides a footnote for the former term, guiding the reader to look to the portion of his History that explores the nature of such kingship. Turner's decision is justifiable within such a larger academic study, but the influence of his choice is much wider in reach - he validates what will become a long tradition of such archaistic translation of Anglo-Saxon. Conybeare, Wackerbarth, and Earle all follow suit in terms 155 of "aethelings/ethelings,"87 while Wackerbarth also borrows "Theod-Kings." Turner's influence was obviously due in part to his authority within the field. Likewise, Kemble's and Thorpe's credentials served to validate the modernizing strain of translation; Kemble opts for "mighty kings" and "noble men," while Thorpe selects "great kings" and

"princes." They are followed by Arnold, Lumsden, and Garnett. The question becomes, of course, a matter of what was at stake in making such translation decisions. I will

suggest three answers to this question. First, the archaizing and modernizing strategies

orient the relationship between the original Anglo-Saxon poem and its nineteenth-century

readers in different ways: does the modern reader feel connected to or alienated from the

culture of the original text? Second, the selection of Anglo-Saxon versus Latinate words

makes assertions about the relationship between Anglo-Saxon England and its

contemporary cultures and political bodies: was it a part of a broader Germanic and/or

Scandinavian - possibly pagan - world or was it closer in alignment to the clearly

Christian southern Europe? Putting aside these two issues for the moment, I turn to a

third, namely that the establishment of these traditional translations, even of single words,

generates an expectation that they be translated in such a way in the future. It is in

deviation from this expectation that other translators, including Morris and Wyatt, were

able to create often highly political meaning.

Among the most political of these openings is that of Earle. "What ho!" he

writes, "we have heard tell of the grandeur of the imperial kings of the spear-bearing

Danes in former days, how those ethelings promoted bravery." For Earle, Scyld's

87 While I suspect that the difference between "atheling" and "etheling" merely reflects different choices on how to modernize the "ae," there is nevertheless a significant semantic difference between the two. While "atheling" would stay closer to the word's denotation of "an individual of noble lineage," "etheling" suggests a connection to the Old English "ebel," which refers to one's "country" or "native land." 156 domination of his neighbours can apparently be translated into a nineteenth-century context most clearly by the notion of imperialism. Earle, therefore, is lending credibility to the imperialist enterprise by suggesting it has an ancient pedigree, reaching back into

England's Anglo-Saxon heritage. Earle's choice not to translate "etheling" reinforces this notion by evoking notions of lineage in a specifically Anglo-Saxon context. Scyld, and by extension Hrothgar and Beowulf, were not simply barbarian thugs, but rather the

imperial precursors of the modern ethelings, including Victoria herself. Morris and

Wyatt's opening lines contrast with Earle's more markedly than any other's. Most notably, while Morris and Wyatt also keep "Athelings" untranslated, they offer "kings of the folks" for "peod-cyninga." The selection of the word "folk" is partially because of its

Anglo-Saxon etymology, but primarily because it evokes a sense of earthiness, a

connection with all strata of the community. This effect is emphasized by the syntactical

construction of the phrase as well. Hall, for example, chooses the similar "folk-kings,"

but this maintains a greater ambiguity about the relationship between the kings and the

peoples. More than any other prior translation, then, Morris and Wyatt emphasize that

the king is not over the people but of the people. While only implicitly socialist,

following closely after the explicit imperialism of the Earle's opening lines, Morris and

Wyatt's message is clear.

Morris's use of the word "folk" not only to translate "peod" but also in the

extended title (Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats) is part of a larger pattern

in this second phase of his Germanic writings. Reading his Beowulf and the late

romances leaves one with the sense that "folk" might just have been Morris's favourite

single word. In terms of Beowulf it is illuminating to look at the different Anglo-Saxon words that he feels are best translated as "folk." I provide here a catalogue of Morris and

Wyatt's uses of the word for only the first tenth of the poem (lines 1-319, until Beowulf

arrives at Heorot); I include Earle's translations for contrast. Even in this small test

group, the list is impressive:

Words (Discrete or in Compounds) Page Number (Line Earle's Translated as "Folk" by Morris and Wyatt88 Number in Original) Translations I>eod 179 (2) imperial (1) 180(44) stately (2) 184 (178) not directly translated Folc 179(14) people (1) 180(55) nation (3) 181 (73) people (3) 181 (76) people (3) 186(262) nation (9) Dene (translated as "Dane-folk") 183(155) Danish (6) 186 (242) Danes (8) 187(271) Danes (9) Geatas (translated as "Geat-folk") 184(195) Goths (7) I>eoden (translated as "folk-lord") 184(201) ruler (7) Leod 185 (205) Leeds (7) 185 (225) Leeds (8) 186(269) people (9) Weras 185 (216) brave men (8) Scyldingas (translated as "Scylding-folk") 185 (229) Scyldings (8) Fyrd 185 (232) not directly translated Men (translated as "men-folk") 185 (233) Men (8) Werod 188(319) force (11)

Even counting the different racial names as one instance, that leaves nine different words

that Morris and Wyatt consider to be appropriately translated as "folk." In terms of

frequency, they use "folk" 21 times in the 319 lines, or approximately once every 15

lines. This sampling is slightly higher than the poem as a whole, in which Morris and

Wyatt use the word a still remarkable 161 times, or approximately once every 20 lines.

Not included in this list is Morris and Wyatt's use of the word in their chapter titles (once) and in their opening "Argument" (three times). 158

This high frequency, created by the great variety of situations in which Morris and Wyatt use the word, creates a sense of insistence in the text; the notion of "folk" is consistently and determinedly pressed upon the reader's consciousness.

This insistent use of "folk" is paralleled by an avoidance of other semantically related words. We see above, for example, that Earle translates "folc" as, among other things, "nation." Morris and Wyatt, however, use "nation" only once in their entire translation (256). Similarly, they never use "empire" or "imperial," never use "state"

except occasionally in the form of "stately," and only use "country" three times (230,

257, 265). There is a certain historical validity to these choices, since the modern understanding of these concepts, particularly "empire" and "state," apply only

problematically to Viking-Age England. But this historical awareness is secondary to the

main effect of Morris and Wyatt's extreme preference for "folk." By eliminating these

other related words, Morris and Wyatt define the semantic field of "political body"

entirely by the word "folk." This choice eliminates, or at least severely reduces, the

notion of geography or territory as fundamental to the political community; the

importance of the actual people to the definition of this community is expanded to fill the

space (pardon the pun) left by the elimination of geography. Moreover, the words

"empire" and "state" contain within them the idea of power structures, which the word

"folk" simply does not. Consequently, Morris and Wyatt are reducing not only the

importance of geography from the political landscape of Beowulf but also the importance

of government. Granted, the function of the king and his close group of followers is an

inherent part of Beowulf, and so words such as "king" and "thane" are used with great

regularity in Morris and Wyatt's translation, but when combined with overwhelming use 159 of "folk," the function of the kings and thanes seems to be merely an extension of the fellowship of the Germanic community; as Regina Hansen states, "[fellowship, for

Morris, also implies the absence of hierarchy" (19). By their insistence on "folk,"

therefore, Morris and Wyatt are presenting the Anglo-Saxon (and by extension, medieval

Germanic) political unit as defined not by boundaries or by governmental bodies but first

and foremost by the people - it is community, even fellowship, more than citizenship.

Morris declares in "Early England" that Beowulf demonstrates that we must "live

fearlessly and confident of our immortality not as individuals but as a part of the great

corporation of humanity; and that I say was the faith of our forefathers" (163). In this

notion of the life of the folk, perhaps more than anything else, we can see the influence of

Morris and Bax's Socialism on the translation of the poem.

But these issues return us to the problem Morris attempts to address in relation to

Thiodolf in Wolfings. How can the function of an extraordinary individual, in this case a

king, be fitted into such a socialist view of the poem? If the populace defines the political

community, what is the nature of kingship? These questions return us not only to

Wolfings but also to some of the issues discussed in regard to Vplsunga saga and,

moreover, to Morris and Wyatt's translation of the opening lines of Beowulf. I turn now

to the second paragraph of the poem, in which the birth of Scyld's son is described:

Daem eafera waes aefter cenned

geong in geardum, bone God sende

folce to frofre; fyren-dearfe ongeat,

89 Morris makes a similar case in "Early Literature of the North - Iceland": "personal relations between men were what was considered and not territorial: when a priest or chief moved as sometimes happened, many of his thing-men accompanied him, there was no political territorial unit to which loyalty was exacted" (183). 160

baet hie aer drugon aldor-[le]ase

lange hwile.90 (12-16a)

Morris and Wyatt translate this passage as follows:

By whom then thereafter a son was begotten,

A youngling in garth, whom the great God sent thither

To foster the folk; and their crime-need he felt

The load that lay on them while lordless they lived

For a long while and long. (179)

The function of a good king is, intriguingly, not to rule or lead but "[t]o foster the folk."

The Anglo-Saxon word that they render as "foster" is "frofor" ("comfort,"

"compensation," "joy," etc.). They accurately translate this word as "solace" a mere

seven lines earlier, so there is no chance that Morris misunderstood the word. Given the

fact that they change not only the meaning of the word but also its grammatical value (it

is clearly a noun in the original), it becomes apparent that the change is programmatic.

The placement of this change is far from accidental: the poem constructs both Scyld and

his son as exemplars of proper kingship, and Morris and Wyatt seize this opportunity to

mould this thematic concern to their own political viewpoint. As we saw in the

discussion of Sigmund and Sinfjotli's relationship, Morris constructs fosterage as

typifying the Germanic notion of social connection by free affection rather than by blood

obligation. Sigmund may not seem to be Sinfjotli's biological father, but their mutual

affection proves that he is his right and proper father nonetheless; a king, Morris and

Wyatt are suggesting, needs to have the same affection for his subjects, and, moreover, he

90 "A son was afterwards born to him, young in the dwellings, whom God sent, a comfort to the people. God perceived that they previously endured dire need, lordless for a long time." 161 needs to earn the affection of his subjects in return, thereby uniting the political body not through geography or administration but through emotional good will. That is a good folk-king.

Morris and Wyatt maintain this notion of affection as uniting the Germanic community as a theme throughout the translation; it converges most strongly with the issue of fosterage in their rendering of Hrothgar's announcement of his pseudo-adoption of Beowulf. Hrothgar, overwhelmed with gratitude for Beowulf s defeat of Grendel, declares,

Nu ic, Beowulf, pec,

secg betsta, me for sunu wylle

freogan on ferhbe; heald ford tela

niwe sibbe.91 (946b-49a)

Morris and Wyatt's translation is quite accurate:

O Beowulf, I now

Thee best of all men as a son unto me

Will love in my heart, and hold thou henceforward

Our kinship new-made now. (207)

Morris and Wyatt's choice of "kinship" for "sibbe" is significant. "Sibbe" certainly can mean "kinship," but it can also mean "peace" or the more general "relationship," as is probably more appropriate in this instance. Morris and Wyatt's selection of "kinship" makes the potent claim that a kinship can be "niwe," that what is normally considered a blood-bond can be created just as well by any unrelated individuals who will "freogan on

91 "Now, I will love you, Beowulf, best of men, as a son to me in heart, and hold forth well a new kinship/peace." 162 ferh^e." Beowulf s response, and Morris and Wyatt's translation of it, is equally interesting. Beowulf immediately states that he and his companions undertook the fight

"estum miclum" ("with much grace/good will") (958), which Morris and Wyatt translate as "with mickle of love." "Love" is a possible meaning of "est," but it is a surprising choice in this instance, since none of the previous translators had chosen anything even close to that interpretation. For example, Kemble offers "pleasure" (40), Wackerbarth

"joy" (38), Thorpe "good will" (1921), and Earle "good heart" (31). For Kemble and

Wackerbarth, then, Beowulf fights Grendel simply because he enjoys a good brawl, while for Thorpe and Earle, he does so because he is good-spirited, but for Morris and Wyatt, he does so out of love. Moreover, this is not an isolated incident; Morris and Wyatt continue to assert the role of affection in community-building throughout the interactions between Hrothgar and Beowulf. For example, they translate Hrothgar's declaration,"[i]c be sceal mine gelaestan / freofie, swa wit furdum spraecon" ("I must fulfill my peace/friendship to you, just as we two previously declared"; 1706b-1707a), as "I shall make thee my love good, / As we twain at first spake it" (230). It is affection, the corner

stone of Morris's notion of Germanic community, that is the motivation behind the

Beowulf-Hrothgar relationship, including the rescue of Hrothgar's hall. And since

Beowulf has done his deed in this spirit of fellowship, Hrothgar's response to adopt

(metaphorically, or even literally) the hero is, therefore, most suitable.

From Archaism to Future Internationalism

I mentioned above that one of the differences between Morris's two phases of Old

Northernism is that the early phase tended to apply his ideas more to the individual or the 163 family, while the later phase tended to focus more on the broader communal levels, such as the race. We see this in Morris and Wyatt's emphasis on "folk" in their version of

Beowulf. We see it also in the extension of Morris's ideas of fosterage from individuals such as Sigmund and Sinfjotli to the relationship between a king and his people. I would suggest that it is also present in Morris's translation style, specifically his extensive use of archaisms and his avoidance of Latinate words in favour of Germanic ones. Morris and Eirikur's translations were obviously characterized by these same features, but

Morris and Wyatt's Beowulf takes them to a new level, reflecting the intensification of

Morris's interest in the nature of the Germanic race in this later period. What some have considered the unreadability of Morris and Wyatt's Beowulf stems in part from this intensification; compare for example, the opening of Beowulf, quoted above, with the opening to Vglsunga saga: "[h]ere begins the tale, and tells of a man who was named

Sigi, and called of men the son of Odin; another man withal is told of in the tale, hight

Skadi, a great man and mighty of his hands" (291). Morris and Eirikur's style is

archaistic, certainly - "withal," "called of men," "hight" - but only the last of these would present the nineteenth-century reader with any difficulty. This style is a far cry

from the "Athelings a-faring in framing of valour" of Morris and Wyatt's Beowulf

One of the most significant nineteenth-century attacks on archaisms such as

Morris's comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from Eirikur's scholarly nemesis, Gudbrandur

Vigfusson, in collaboration with F. York Powell:

There is one grave error into which too many English translators of old

Northern and Icelandic writings have fallen, to wit, the affectation of

archaism, and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English 164

words. This abominable fault makes a Saga, for instance, sound unreal,

unfamiliar, false; it conceals all diversities of style and tone beneath a

fictitious mask of monotonous uniformity, and slurs over the real

difficulties by a specious nullity of false phrasing. (1: cxv)

The phrase "affectation of archaism" is valid, yet somewhat problematic given Morris's beliefs about the Old North - Morris's archaisms were not the result of affectation but rather assertions of his beliefs about the aesthetic and linguistic nature of the Old North.

First, he (much like Eirikur) believed strongly in the essentially Germanic nature of the saga, that as a genre it bound the northern world into one literary community. Second,

Morris is going out of his way to demonstrate through translation the inherent connections between Modern English and the Old English, or Old Icelandic, that he is translating. Through these archaisms, he is arguing that a speaker of Modern English has significant linguistic overlap with a speaker of either of those medieval languages, that they are, in effect, mutual members of one (admittedly very broad) communicative group.

Morris's archaisms, therefore, are not affected; they are a conscious demonstration of the

community among not only the Old North but also the nineteenth-century North, both

synchronically and diachronically.92

GuSbrandur and Powell hit on a vital question for Translation Studies when they

suggest that archaism makes translations "sound unreal, unfamiliar, false." Archaisms,

92 That is not to say that Morris saw Modern English as one and the same with the rest of the Germanic linguistic family. In an August 1892 letter to Wyatt, before the translation has been started, Morris indicates quite the opposite: "I am well aware of the great difficulty of dealing with it because every word which it is necessary to substitute for the old one (every word that is which has not its exact equivalent in modern English) must be weakened and almost destroyed. Still as the language is a different language from modern English and not merely a different form of it, it can, I would hope be translated and not paraphrased merely" (3:436-37). While Morris here acknowledges the distance that has grown between Old and Modern English, we can detect in his tone an early form of one of the main motivations for his translation: to conserve and even recover as many Old English words as possible and thereby to offer as much as is possible an unweakened form of the text. 165 they suggest, undermine the credibility of the narrative and, by extension, that of the translator him/herself; rather than providing the reader with real or true access to the source text (if such a thing is ever possible), archaistic translations interfere with and obstruct this access, creating a sense of falsity and unreality. This is a valid concern, but

Gudbrandur and Powell's phrasing obscures it with an entirely separate criticism: that archaism makes the source text seem unfamiliar. A sense of unfamiliarity, after all, does not necessarily include a sense of falsity or unreality. What Gudbrandur and Powell are

doing with this argument, therefore, is answering one of the central questions raised by

Translation Studies: should the translator emphasize or de-emphasize the cultural

distance between the source culture and the target culture - or in other words, should the

translator foreignize or familiarize the text?93

Aho suggests that at times Morris's archaisms do in fact go too far in terms of

foreignizing the text, becoming "almost self-indulgent"; he suggest that at these times

Morris is "allowing his delight to cloud meaning for most of his readers" (xix-xx).

Randolph Quirk takes a different tack; instead of arguing the aesthetic value (or lack

thereof) of Morris's archaisms, he probes instead the translation philosophy behind them.

Referring specifically to Morris's saga translations, Quirk suggests that Morris wrote his

translations in such a way that his audience "must read the sagas with just that extra

concentration and care that Morris himself had to use; they must find them couched in a

language which would be as intelligible to them as Icelandic was to him but which would

have the same areas of unfamiliarity too" (76). Quirk, therefore, is suggesting that

Morris was not simply foreignizing or familiarizing, but attempting to construct a text

93 Susan Bassnett, in her overview of the field of Translation Studies, points to the strength of the foreignizing impulse in nineteenth-century translations, particularly in terms of a desire to create "period flavour" (19). 166 that would simulate for his audience the reading experience of a learned, but not entirely

fluent, student of the translated language. From this perspective, Morris's goal was to create something suggestively familiar and suggestively foreign at the same time. In part,

Morris simply wanted to recreate for his audience the same joy that he experienced in working out the meaning of a text that is on the edge of familiarity, but he also wanted to

demonstrate that while Old Icelandic and Old English may only be distantly related to

Modern English, they are nonetheless related.

Morris's penchant for archaisms cannot be dissociated from his avoidance of

Latinate words, since many, though far from all, of his archaisms are themselves either

Germanic words or compounds using Germanic elements. Morris was attempting to

evoke a sense of the English from before the Norman Conquest, to recreate the aesthetic

qualities of the language before the drastic linguistic changes (of which an infusion of

Latinate words is only one relatively minor aspect) in the wake of that event. Like

Kingsley, Morris had strong, though ambiguous, feelings about the Conquest and its

influence on English language, culture, and blood: "[i]f we could only have preserved our

language as the Germans have theirs, I think we with our mingled blood [i.e. pre-

Conquest English + Norman94] would have made the world richer than it is now - but

these are vain regrets [...] nor do I ask you to look on it now" ("Early England" 177).

Morris is definitely suspicious of the linguistic contribution of the Normans - as Chris

Jones's recent article on Morris's Beowulf asserts, Morris felt that "modern, non-Saxon

English is in a state of decadence and degeneracy" (202).

It is important to note, though, that it is not the Norman infusion that causes the

decay that Jones mentions, since Morris makes clear that the "mingled blood" of the

94 Note, too, that Morris's father was Welsh (McCarthy 3). 167

English should have been a key factor in making "the world richer"; Morris suggests that the problem lies rather with the inability of the English to retain the Germanic element of their language, culture, and race in the face of this Norman infusion. His Germanicisms, therefore, are less a rejection of the Conquest and more a push towards a perceived ideal balance between the Saxon and the Norman. In fact, this balance was part of Morris's belief that the ideal future for human society lies in the dominance of internationalism over nationalism, of racial unity over racial distinction. The spirit of amalgamation that

Morris saw as working to unify the Germanic tribes was something that he believed would eventually unify all races, eventually obliterating borders entirely. Morris presents this spirit as alive and well, for example, in certain of his representations of post-

Conquest England. In A Dream of John Ball, the nineteenth-century dreamer is struck by the fourteenth-century revolutionary's emphatic praise for fellowship as a sublime virtue:

Ball, for example, proclaims, "[fjorsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell" (230). So, while Morris saw communalism as being a definitive characteristic of the Germanic tribes, he did not see it as being exclusive to them. The

Middle English, with their "mingled blood," are also able to lay claim to the spirit of fellowship, even in a time of revolution. As simple as this idea is, it is key to Morris's conception of history - it is how he is able to bridge his predominantly backward-looking

Old Northernism with a forward-looking internationalism.

This internationalism is expressed most clearly in the Utopian future of Morris's most famous novel, News from Nowhere. The narrator of the text, Guest, spends most of his time asking questions of the individuals he encounters, at one point asking, "[h]ow about your relations with foreign nations?" Guest receives the following response: "I 168 will tell you at once that the whole system of rival and contending nations which played so great a part in the 'government' of the world of civilisation has disappeared along with the inequality betwixt man and man in society" (85). Social inequality, therefore, is interconnected with nationalism; the elimination of one results in the elimination of the other. When Guest subsequently asks about the effect of such internationalism on national variety, the response is highly evocative of Morris and Bax's Socialism: "[h]ow should it add to the variety or dispel the dulness, to coerce certain families or tribes, often heterogeneous and jarring with one another, into certain artificial and mechanical groups

[...]?" This response could easily have come from one of Morris's barbarians. It contrasts, as did Socialism, mechanical civilization with the organicism of barbarian tribes; moreover, it points to the superiority of allowing affection, rather than arbitrary coercion, to drive communal amalgamation. This futuristic Utopia has, in effect, progressed beyond civilization's ascendancy in the cycle of history - they are, once again, driven by the spirit of free fellowship that Morris saw so strongly in the medieval

Germanic tribes. But note that it is not a simple return to the Old North. Morris's view of history may be cyclical but it is also progressive - one of the main developments being the conquering of the nationalistic spirit by the spirit of amalgamation and fellowship, thereby creating a socialist internationalism.

For Morris, of course, this progress is achieved in part by learning from the historical groups that have come closest to it, particularly the barbarian tribes of the Old

North. John Purkis suggests that Morris wished "to turn the English into latterday

Vikings" (95). Morris certainly entertained this romantic possibility on a visceral level,

and I hope I have shown that it may have inspired some of his theories as well, 169 particularly those pertaining to the intersection betweeen socialism and race. While

Morris knew well that the time of the Vikings had passed, he nevertheless believed that the English, and eventually all of the other races as well, needed to adopt certain facets of the medieval Germanic character. Morris's intense social activism compelled him to serve, like Kingsley before him, as a gatekeeper for his contemporaries, providing access to this character and, in his mind, to the lessons that that character could teach. Again as with Kingsley, this gatekeeping function involved participation not only with the primary medieval sources but also with ongoing discourses, in this case the growing translation tradition. By placing these medieval texts and scholarly discourses in contact with the

socialist thought of the time, Morris was able to generate a deeply theorized notion of the

Germanic race and its relationship with the civilized races of southern Europe. He used his popularity as a writer to transmit this theory, implicitly in his translations and romances, explicitly in his socialist writings. With this theory, he also transmitted the

lessons he felt the Germanic races could teach modern society: to value the communal

over the individual; to accept the value of creating such a community through organic

amalgamation, particularly the fellowship of freely chosen affection, rather than the

obligations of blood ties; and to define the nature of a racial group not by government nor

by geography but by the people themselves, the folk. 170

Appendix to Chapter 3: Opening Lines to Nineteenth-Century English Translations of Beowulf

From The History of the Anglo-Saxons (1805)95 Sharon Turner

It opens with an exclamatory introduction of his hero, but without immediately naming him: -

How have we of the Gar-Danes in former days, of the Theod-kings, the glory heard? How the ethelings excelled in strength! Oft the scyld-scefing from hosts of enemies, from many tribes, the mead-seats withdrew. The earl was dreaded - he grew up under the heavens; he flourished in honours till that each of those sitting about the path of the whole should obey him; should pay him tribute.

His birth and encomium follow: -

There was a good king: To him offspring was afterwards born, a youth in the world: this one God sent the people to comfort because he understood their need, which the Supreme knew that they had before a long while suffered. (282-83)

A partial verse translation, with synopses and commentary interspersed amid the selected passages. This is drawn from the 1823 edition. The introductory sentences are Turner's. 171

From The Monthly Review (1816)™ Anonymous (William Taylor)

At the beginning Who was the Dane's King of the people; Winner of glory. Leading their nobles The path of daring? Shefing the Shyld. Threat'ner of foes, For many crews' Dwellings he won. (132)

From Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1826)97 John Josias Conybeare

List! we have learnt a tale of other years, Of kings and warrior Danes, a wondrous tale, How aethelings bore them in the brunt of war.

Thus the poet announces what has now so entirely indeed become "a tale of other years," that little or no light can be drawn even from the copious stores of Scaldic literature for the illustration of either the personages or events which it commemorates. The introduction is occupied by the praises of Scefing, a chieftain of the Scylding family, (who appears to have been the founder of a kingdom in the western part of Denmark,) and of his son and successor Beowulf. The embarkation of the former on a piratical expedition is then detailed at some length. In this expedition (if I rightly understand the text) himself or his companions were taken or lost at sea. (35)

From A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem ofBeowulf(1837)98 John M. Kemble

Lo! we have learned by tradition the majesty of the Gar-Danes, of the mighty kings in days of yore, how the noble men perfected valour. Oft did Scyld the son of Scef tear the mead-thrones away from the hosts of his foes, from many tribes; the earl terrified them, after he first was found an out-cast. He therefore abode in comfort, he waxed under the welkin, he flourished with dignities, until each one of the surrounding peoples over the

From an anonymous review of Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin's 1815 edition of the poem; Taylor includes verse translations of short passages of the poem. A different section from that quoted here was later published in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Poets and Poetry of Europe under the name W. Taylor. 97 Like Turner's, a partial verse translation, with synopses and commentary interspersed amid the selected passages. 98 The first English translation of the entire poem. 172 whale's path must obey him, must pay him tribute: That was a good king! To him was afterwards offspring born, young in his dwelling-places, whom God sent to the people for their comfort; he knew the evil-need which they before had suffered for a long while, when they were princeless. (1)

From Beowulf: An Epic Poem (1849)" A. Diedrich Wackerbarth

Lo! We have learn'd in lofty Lays The Gar-Danes Deeds in antient Days And Ages past away, The Glories of the Theod-Kings, And how the valiant ^Ethelings Bare them in Battle's Day. Oft Scyld, the son of Scef, from Bands Of foemen, drawn from numerous Lands, The Mead-thrones tare away; For Dread he cast on all around Sith he was first an Out-cast found, Thus he abode in easy State, And 'neath the Welkin waxed great, And in his Glories thrave, Till circling Nations far and wide Over the Path the Whale doth ride Obeyed and Tribute gave. This was a Monarch good: - and he Was after bless'd with Progeny, Young in his Palaces, by Heaven A Comfort to the People given: He knew the 111 they had sustain'd While cheiftanless they long remain'd. (1)

From The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, the Scop or Gleeman's Tale, and the Fight at Finnesburg (1865) Benjamin Thorpe

Ay, we the Gar-Danes', in days of yore, the great kings', renown have heard of: how those princes valour display'd. Oft Scyld Scef s son

The first English verse translation of the entire poem. 173 from bands of robbers, from many tribes, their mead-benches drag'd away: inspired earls with fear, after he first was found destitute: he thence look'd for comfort, flourished under the clouds, in dignities throve, until him every one of those sitting around over the whale-road must obey, tribute pay: that was a good king! To him a son was afterwards born, a young one in his courts, whom God sent for comfort to the people: he the dire need felt that they ere had suffered while princeless, for a long while. (1-31)

From Popular Romances of the Middle Ages (1871) George W. Cox and Eustace Hinton Jones

Scef and Scyld and Beowulf- these were the god-like kings of the Gar-Danes in days of yore. Upon the sea and alone came Scef to the land of Scani. He came in fashion as a babe, floating in an ark upon the waters, and at his head a sheaf of corn. God sent him for the comfort of the people because they had no king. He tore down the foemen's thrones, and gave the people peace and passed away. (382)

From Beowulf: A Heroic Poem of the Eighth Century (1876) Thomas Arnold

What! we have asked and heard concerning the renown of the true kings of the Spear- Danes in days of yore, how those noble princes put forth their might. Often did Scyld the son of Scef drive from their mead-benches bands of robbers, many kinships; [he] the earl discomfited them, in the time following that when he was first found, a desolate outcast. From [or For] this he looked for comfort, - waxed great beneath the sky, - throve with dignities, - until that every one of the neighbouring peoples, across the whale-road, was 174 bound to obey him, and pay him tribute: that was a good king! To him afterwards an heir was born, young in the hall, whom God.sent for a comfort to the people: He perceived their troublesome straits, [how] that they had before had to suffer for a long while, lordless. (1-2)

From Beowulf: An Old English Poem (1881) H. W. Lumsden

Lo! we have heard of glory won by Gar-Dane kings of old, And mighty deeds these princes wrought. Oft with his warriors bold Since first an outcast he was found, did Scyld the Scefing hurl From their mead-benches many a folk, and frighted many an earl. Therein he took his pleasure, and waxed great beneath the sky, And throve in worship, till to him all folk that dwelt hard by, And o'er the whale-path, tribute paid, and did his word obey. Good king was he! To him was born an heir in after day, A child in hall; the gift of God to glad the people sent; For He had seen the long sore straits they, lordless, underwent. (3)

From Gudrun and Other Stories from the Epics of the Middle Ages (1881) John Gibb

The land of the Danes was without a king. And there was confusion and disorder in all the land. Every one did what was right in his own eyes, for there was none to bear rule. It happened at this time that there came a single ship to the land from across the waves. The people went on board the ship, and behold, there were no sailors, and no men in armour in the ship. No living thing was to be seen in it save one little boy lying beside the mast. Around him were laid many precious treasures, rich coats of mail, shields and swords, and gold and precious stones. The men wondered when they saw the child and all the rich treasures which lay around him. But one said - "Surely the gods have sent this babe to our kingless land that he might become our King." The others hearkened to the voice of him who thus spake, and they made the child King of the Danes, and his name was called Scyld. He grew to man's estate, and became a mighty king, and subdued the peoples under him. All the neighbouring peoples across the whale-roads obeyed Scyld, the King of the Danes, and paid him tribute. He gave many gifts to his own people, and he was loved by them; and when an heir was born in his hall, all were willing that he should sit upon his father's throne, and that the Scyldings should rule over them for ever. (135-36)

A version not translated "literally" but "with the special design of interesting young people" (Prefatory Note). From Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Poem, and the Fight at Finnsburg (1882) James M. Garnett

Lo! we of the Spear-Danes', in days of yore, Warrior-kings' glory have heard, How the princes heroic deeds wrought. Oft Scyld, son of Scef, from hosts of foes, From many tribes, their mead-seats took; The earl caused terror since first he was Found thus forlorn: gained he comfort for that, Grew under the clouds, in honors throve, Until each one of those dwelling around Over the whale-road, him should obey, Should tribute pay: that was a good king! To him was a son afterwards born, Young in his palace, one whom God sent To the people for comfort: their distress He perceived That they ere suffered life-eating care So long a while. (1-16)

From "The Translation of Beowulf, and the Relations of Ancient and Modern English Verse" (1886)101 Francis B. Gummere

Lo, of Danes spear-armed in days that are sped, people-kings, the power we have heard, how the doughty earls wrought deeds of valor! Oft Scyld Scefing from scathing armies, from many a clan, the mead-bench tore, - aw'd was the earl - since erst he lay a friendless foundling; he far'd the better: he wax'd under welkin in worth and name, till the folk around, both far and near, across the whale-road, hush'd before him, gave him gifts: 'twas a good king! To him a boy was born thereafter, in his halls a prince, whom heaven sent in grace to the folk, for God saw well that ever they lack'd an early for leader so long a while. (77)

101 From a scholarly article on the principles of translating Anglo-Saxon to Modern English; Gummere includes a translation of the first 53 lines of the poem as a demonstration of his prefered method. 176

From The Deeds of Beowulf (1892) John Earle

What ho! we have heard tell of the grandeur of the imperial kings of the spear- bearing Danes in former days, how those ethelings promoted bravery. Often did Scyld of the Sheaf wrest from harrying bands, from many tribes, their convivial seats; the dread of him fell upon warriors, whereas he had at the first been a lonely foundling; - of all that (humiliation) he lived to experience solace; he waxed great under the welkin, he flourished with trophies, till that every one of the neighbouring peoples over the sea were constrained to obey him, and pay trewage: - that was a good king! To him was born a son to come after him, a young (prince) in the palace, whom God sent for the people's comfort. He (God) knew the hard calamity, what they had erst endured when they were without a king for a long while. (1)

From Beowulf, An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem (1892) Lesslie Hall

Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of, How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle. Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers From many a people their mead-benches tore. Since first he found him friendless and wretched, The earl had had terror: comfort he got for it, Waxed 'neath the welkin, world-honor gained, Till all his neighbors o'er sea were compelled to Bow to his bidding and bring him their tribute: An excellent atheling! After was borne him A son and heir, young in his dwelling, Whom God-Father sent to solace the people. He had marked the misery malice had caused them, That reaved of their rulers they wretched had erstwhile Long been afflicted. (1) 177

Chapter 4:

J. R. R. Tolkien, Literary Criticism, and the Sorrowful Anglo-Saxons

Michael D. C. Drout closes his preface to J. R. R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the

Critics by posing an important question: "[w]hat have Hobbits to do with Danes and

Geats?" Drout continues by suggesting that "[t]he two are now, for better or for worse

(and I think much for the better), completely intertwined in the cultural imagination"

(xiv). Drout is not actually posing a question about race, of course, but rather metaphorically inquiring about the relationship between Tolkien's modern fiction and his medieval scholarship. Moreover, the question is rhetorical, being, after all, an adaptation of Alcuin's famous rhetorical question to the Bishop of Lindisfarne, "quid enim

Hinieldus cum Christo?" ("what has Hinieldus/Ingeld to do with Christ?") (242). But it is a question that should be taken not only metaphorically and rhetorically but also literally: what is the nature of the relationship between Tolkien's fantastic races and the northern races of history and scholarship? Drout sketches out a possible roadmap for such a study in a separate article, "Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism." Drout suggests that the following issues would all need to be discussed: the racial discourses that have developed in recent decades; the different races of humans in Middle-earth, as well as the races of non-humans; and the influence of Tolkien's medieval scholarship on his thinking about race (27-28).

This case study will attempt to follow much of the trajectory set out by Drout. I will argue that, just as Kingsley and Morris engage the discourses of Anglo-Saxon histories and translations, Tolkien engages the discourse of literary criticism that was then emerging in Anglo-Saxon (and Middle English) Studies. These scholarly 178 interactions lead Tolkien to generate in his fiction an image of the English (both ancient and modern) that racializes the difference between sorrow and despair and contributes to the constructions of northernness and southernness that so intrigued Kingsley and Morris.

I have decided to place three limits on this case study, the first and second because of the magnitude of the issues at hand, and the third because of a belief in the need for change in Tolkien criticism. First, I have decided to limit the number of texts that this chapter will explore. I will focus primarily on The Lord of the Rings (LotR) and on a variety of his scholarly works. Tolkien's other fictions (including The Hobbit, The Silmarillion,

The History of Middle-earth, and the shorter prose and poetry) are certainly important, sufficiently so that they deserve more space than this study can devote to them.

Moreover, in addition to the practicalities of chapter length, my reasons for this limitation include the fact that the cultural impact of LotR vastly outweighs those of the other texts and the fact that it is in LotR that Tolkien provides his most developed representation of the Anglo-Saxons, namely the Rohirrim.

The second limitation is a decision to focus primarily on the human102 races

(including the hobbits) in Tolkien's fiction, rather than the non-human ones, such as the dwarves and elves. Much excellent work has already been done on these non-human races. Verlyn Flieger, for example, has explored the differences between Tolkien's elves and humans, specifically in terms of their different relationships with death, and the philosophical, linguistic and aesthetic implications of that difference (Splintered 52, 120, etc.). T. A. Shippey has demonstrated that Tolkien constructs a "linguistic map," in

1021 will avoid using Tolkien's gender-specific "man" (or rather "Man") to refer to the humans in Middle- earth. Also, there is some inconsistency within his texts as to whether species-based words such as hobbit, elf, man, or dwarf should be capitalized; despite Tolkien's general tendency to capitalize them, I will use the opposite convention except in direct quotations. I will, however, still capitalize labels that align more closely with national groups, such as Rohirrim or Gondorian. 179 which different races and cultures in Middle-earth correspond with real world languages,

such as the connection between Old Norse and Tolkien's dwarves {Road 105-6).

Meanwhile, Shippey has also shown how the ores are key to understanding Tolkien's

representations of evil, and, moreover, how they demonstrate homosocial-bonding

behaviours ("Ores" 183-86). With this and other work on the non-human races in

Middle-earth having already been done, I feel justified in focusing primarily on Tolkien's

humans, especially given that this category includes the Rohirrim, the Gondorians, and

the hobbits, the primary sources of insight into Tolkien's notions of Englishness.

The third limitation that I have placed on this case study is a conscious decision to

avoid the question of whether Tolkien and his works are racist. I strongly believe that

one reason, perhaps the main reason, that critics have had difficulty fulfilling the various

aspects of Drout's plan for analyzing the racial issues in Tolkien's oeuvre is a widespread

tendency to drift away from discussing race in favour of discussing racism. In fact,

Tolkien criticism has been somewhat mired in the latter debate since its inception.

Christine Chism, in her review of the charges of racism in the J. R. R. Tolkien

Encyclopedia, describes three categories of this criticism: "those who see him as

intentionally racist; those who see him as having passively absorbed the racism or

Eurocentrism of his time; and those who, tracing an evolution in his writing, see him

becoming aware of a racism/Eurocentrism in his early works and taking care to counter it

in his later ones" (558). On the other side of the fence, in his aptly named Defending

Middle-Earth, Patrick Curry asserts that "[p]erhaps the worst you could say is that

Tolkien doesn't actually go out of his way to forestall the possibility of a racist

interpretation" (42), while Virginia Luling argues that in Tolkien's "sub-creation the 180 whole intellectual underpinning of racism is absent" (56). While we should always keep this valid range of critical views in mind, it seems to me that the time has come for the question of whether Tolkien or his works were racist to take a backseat to the more nuanced question of how race actually works in those texts. Those who write on Tolkien

(be they appreciators or detractors) do tend towards the passionate, and this emotion is at its highest in the "racist!/not racist!" debate. The divisiveness of this issue continues to weigh down rather than propel what is, after all, a vital aspect of Tolkien criticism, in part by keeping good critical voices from interacting on any but the more antagonistic levels.

It is imperative that Tolkien criticism push more towards studying race without needing to study racism, since Tolkien's works are too fertile a ground for discussion of racial

issues to do anything less.

"I am, in fact, a Hobbif':103 Two Key Biographical Details

Much biographical work has been done on Tolkien over the years, including the

1977 text of his official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter. This and other biographies

demonstrate that Tolkien lived a life surrounded by racially charged events from his very

first days. He was born in South Africa (and was even briefly kidnapped/borrowed by a

native servant for "the novelty of a white baby") (Carpenter 26); the influence of this

origin remained strong throughout his life, as he makes clear in his "Valedictory

Address," declaring, "I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones" (238). John Garth's

recent biography details Tolkien's experiences in the First World War, including his

interactions with German prisoners and the influence of such experiences on his thinking

(192). Moreover, Tolkien's extraordinary sense of familial and personal connection to

103 From a 1958 letter to Deborah Webster (Letters 288). 181 the West Midlands of his maternal ancestors has also been thoroughly explored (e.g.

Carpenter 35, 178, etc.), especially in contrast with his German surname and paternal lineage.104 There are, however, two biographical points that are of even greater significance to my purposes here. The first is Tolkien's seemingly widespread dislike of anything French; the second is a related issue, specifically his complex relationship to

Germany, especially during and after World War II. I will discuss them in turn.

Tolkien's wariness of the French is well documented; Carpenter, for example, suggests that "his Gallophobia (itself almost inexplicable) made him angry not only about what he considered to be the pernicious influence of French cooking in England but about the Norman Conquest itself, which pained him as much as if it had happened in his lifetime" (175). While this assertion of gallophobia has been accepted by many critics,

Garth cautions that Carpenter "surely pays too much attention to mischievous hyperbole," since Tolkien "felt a lingering attachment towards the region of France in which he served," though it is "a nostalgia not for remembered happiness but for a lost intimacy, even with horror, drudgery, and ugliness" (189). Carpenter may indeed be overstating his case, but there is nonetheless at least some truth to his claim. What I find more interesting than the actual charge of gallophobia, however, is Carpenter's suggestion that it is "almost inexplicable" that Tolkien would take the Norman Conquest as a very personal affront. This judgment seems to ignore the fact that Tolkien dedicated his

104 In a justifiably oft-quoted letter from 1938 that praises the Jewish people in response to a German publisher enquiring whether Tolkien was of "arisch" (and therefore not Jewish) descent, Tolkien writes, My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source ofpride. (37-38) 182 professional life to studying a body of literature that the Conquest had rather effectively wiped out. Regardless of his feelings, racist or otherwise, about the French, it is important to recall that, as with Kingsley and Morris, the Conquest continued to have a very personal and immediate effect on his work. This chapter will demonstrate that while the war between Saxon and Norman may have been decided once and for all at Hastings,

Tolkien's daily work, be it teaching or writing, was nevertheless directly engaged in the fight for a specific interpretation of that event.

Tolkien's opinions of Germany, its people, and its political policies, were likewise intertwined with his professional and personal interest in medieval literature and philology. While I do not wish to diminish the importance of World War I to this personal investment,105 World War II seems to have taken it to an entirely new level. In a letter to his son Michael in mid 1941, in the early stages of his drafting of LotR,i06

Tolkien describes how personal the Second World War had become for him:

Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this

"Nordic" nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge

- which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22:

against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler [...]. Ruining, perverting,

misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a

supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to

present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in

England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized. (55-56)

105 As well as note 104, above, see Garth 289-90, which describes Tolkien's "apparent stubbornness" in the face of modernity: "[h]e would not or could not turn his back on philology, matters Germanic, or Romanticism." 106 Tolkien began work on LotR in 1937. 183

Tolkien sees Hitler's horrendous deeds not merely as an offense against England, or

Germany's enemies in general, but also specifically against him, a "private grudge" that matches the public, national grudge. Hitler's manipulation of northern mythology to

advance his racial policies (his "'Nordic' nonsense") is an attack on philology and "the northern spirit" in a way that injures Tolkien on a visceral level. While such hatred of

Nazism was obviously not uncommon, the fact that Tolkien had spent his own

professional life advancing the cause of northern mythology may have made him feel

uncomfortably complicit when faced with the perverted and misapplied uses to which his

efforts could eventually lead. As Chism states, "Nordic race-mythology sharpened [for

Tolkien] an ethical dilemma in the ambitions and costs of his creative writing" ("Middle-

earth" 63).107 Nevertheless, even amid such "burning" concerns, Tolkien's mind turns

instinctively back to the glorious status of England and specifically to what he sees as its

privileged status among the nations of the North. This return, emphasized by the

comparatives "nobler" and "more early," is curiously disconnected from the tone of the

rest of the passage; England, it seems, and its glories present and past, can still be

detached from the horrors committed by another member of the broader Germanic

family. We shall see below that this detachment is a theme of Tolkien's writing,

particularly his criticism, from even well before the war.

For more on the influence of Nazi racial theories, which this chapter will not address, see Chism ("Middle-earth"), which takes the above passage from Tolkien's letter as a focus. She argues, among other things, that one of Tolkien's reactions to such racial thinking, and the dilemmas they cause, is to construct LotR as "a tale of the renunciation of mythology and the willed return to history" (64). 184

Literary Critics: Tolkien and His Sources

Tolkien begins his 1936 lecture to the British Academy ''Beowulf. The Monsters and the Critics" ("Monsters") with a discussion of the then current state of Beowulf criticism: "Beowulfiana is, while rich in many departments, specially poor in one. It is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem" (5).

Regardless of whatever other insights it may put forth (its range of topic is sweeping), the essay certainly acted as a corrective, swinging the critical pendulum away from the primarily historical (and comparative) discourses towards the more literary.108 In Drout's words, "[w]hile it does not mark the moment that Beowulf 'was first studied as literature [.

..], it does begin the study of the poem and its workings as legitimate in their own right,

as something worth studying to see how it worked rather than simply comparing it

(unfavorably) with other literature" (Introduction 1). Some critics, such as Clare A. Lees

in "Men and Beowulf' (131), have even gone so far as to suggest that Tolkien was a New

Critic with all of the text-centred focus that that theoretical school espoused. Drout

disagrees with this label, pointing out that "Monsters" does not view "the poem in a

cultural, political, and social vacuum," but rather engages in "etymology and philology [.

..], religious interpretation, and historical speculation" (21). Tolkien may not have been

a New Critic, then, but his Beowulf essay nevertheless does express, in Drout's words,

"New Critical sentiments," and moreover lays the groundwork for much future criticism

that can be more accurately identified with that theory. It is only appropriate, therefore,

108 John Earle provides a good expression of the type of criticism against which Tolkien was reacting. As he launches into an intricate historicizing theory that locates the composition of the poem within the familial intrigues of Offa of Mercia, Earle declares, "I am not sure that we should have been gainers, if all unsightly edges [of the poem's transitions] had been smoothed away; for, as it is, these imperfections and the insight they afford, are worth more to us than any amount of finish in the workmanship would have been" (lxxxiii). Tolkien was responding both to the casual assumption that Beowulf is intrinsically flawed and also to the assertion that such historical data is of more worth than the poem's aesthetic qualities. 185 that this case study should use literary criticism as the context for Tolkien's racial thinking, in order to augment the historical criticism that I used for Kingsley and the translation tradition that I used for Morris.

As much as Tolkien's essay was a turning point, he was not, as Drout points out, the first critic to treat Beowulf as literature. This is self-evident in "Monsters," since

Tolkien engages a handful of such critics therein. The question becomes, of course, one of identifying which critics Tolkien found most influential. Drout's extensive work with the textual history of the essay is helpful here again, particularly his edition of two of

Tolkien's early versions of the "Monsters" essay. Both drafts, which Drout calls Beowulf and the Critics A and B {Critics A and i?),109 are significantly longer than the final published version and provide previously unavailable insights into his thinking. Most

importantly, Tolkien seems to feel far freer in the drafts than in the published text to

express antagonistic opinions about the critics he engages. As part of his editorial

apparatus, Drout suggests that this engagement, positive and negative, focused on four

critics in particular: R. W. Chambers, Archibald Strong, John Earle, and W. P. Ker (6).

My own reading confirms these conclusions, though I will also add one name to the list.

In "R. W. Chambers and The Hobbit," Douglas A. Anderson describes the close

professional relationship between Tolkien and Chambers, including, for example, their

habit of sending each other copies of their publications. Tolkien had immense respect for

Chambers, the Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University

College; in Critics he call him no less than "the greatest of living Anglo-Saxon scholars"

109 Since this chapter will refer to three distinct versions of Tolkien's essay on Beowulf, some clarification is in order. One the one hand, if I mention simply Tolkien's Beowulf essay or "Monsters," then I am referring to the final published form of the essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," or to an aspect of the text that remains relatively consistent throughout the three forms. On the other hand, if I refer to Critics, then I am referring to one or both of the earlier versions. 186

(32). His contributions to Anglo-Saxon scholarship include book-length studies of

Widsith (1912) and Beowulf {1921), a revision of Wyatt's edition of Beowulf, as well as an introductory essay for Strong's translation of it. Strong, himself Jury Professor of

English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide, Australia, supplemented

Chambers's essay with a thorough introduction of his own; this introduction, when combined with the translation itself (Beowulf Translated into Modern English Rhyming

Verse [1925]), was his most significant contribution to the field, though Tolkien also quotes from his A Short History of English Literature (1921). Drout characterizes

Strong's role for Tolkien as "more of a foil than a support, but he was an effective and challenging foil" (6). Meanwhile, Tolkien draws on Earle, whose translation of Beowulf

(The Deeds of Beowulf'[1892] ) I compared to Morris's in the previous chapter, primarily

for the survey of Beowulf criticism in its introduction (Drout 6). W. P. Ker, Chambers's mentor and predecessor in the Quain professorship, "looms," in Drout's words, "larger

than any other in Beowulf and the Critics" (6). In "Monsters," Tolkien "honour[s]" Ker's

"name and memory" and calls him "a great scholar, as illuminating himself as a critic, as

he was often biting as a critic of the critics" (9). Tolkien was particularly influenced by

Ker's The Dark Ages (1904), a literary history of the early medieval period, and to a

lesser extent his Epic and Romance (1897) and English Literature: Medieval (1912).

Much of the preceding paragraph is clearly drawn from Drout, who gives a fuller

summary of Tolkien's sources for the Beowulf drafts and the final "Monsters" essay in

his introduction to Critics (6-7). I disagree with Drout on one significant point, however;

Drout does not give enough credit to the influence on Tolkien of Jean Jules Jusserand, the

French diplomat (and ambassador to the U.K. during the First World War) and literary 187 critic. While Drout does later discuss more fully Tolkien's responses to Jusserand, his initial summary simply observes that "Tolkien enjoyed lampooning" Jusserand's

"multifaceted errors and obvious pomposity" (6). While this is certainly true, I would suggest that the fact that Tolkien had little respect for Jusserand or his criticism does not mean that that criticism did not influence his writing. It is often the critics that bother us the most that force us to advance our thinking the furthest. And Jusserand's explicit declarations of French superiority and Anglo-Saxon moral and cultural barbarism did far more than bother Tolkien, as I hope this chapter will prove. Most important to my purposes is the first volume of Jusserand's A Literary History of the English People

(English translation 1812). This chapter, therefore, will draw heavily on that work as well as on the works of the four critics Drout identifies, especially Chambers and Ker.

This leaves the other mass of criticism that I will obviously explore, namely

Tolkien's own work. A thorough listing of Tolkien's published works, critical and otherwise, is most conveniently available in "Appendix C" of Carpenter's biography

(353-66); a survey of only the most important will suffice here.110 In terms of Middle

English literature, Tolkien produced an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with

E. V. Gordon, 1925); an analysis of the dialects of the Katherine Group texts and the

Ancrene Wisse ("Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhadf 1929); as well as "Chaucer as a

Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" (1934), an essay asserting that Chaucer consciously casts the dialogue of the Reeve's clerks in a northern dialect. On top of his Beowulf essay,

Tolkien's publications on Old English literature include a two-part essay on the Old

English word for "Ethiopian" titled "Sigelwara Land" (1932, 1934), a preface on

110 For an analysis of the influence of each of Tolkien's most significant critical works, see Drout's "J. R. R. Tolkien's Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance." 188 translating Beowulf for C. L. Wrenn's 1940 revised edition of John R. Clark Hall's translation of the poem, a dramatic poem cum essay on The Battle ofMaldon called "The

Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son" (1953), and posthumous editions of

Exodus (1981) and the Finnsburgh fragment and episode (Finn andHengest 1982).

Other works important to my purposes include the publication of his "Valedictory

Address" (1979) on the divide between the language and literature streams in English departments, and a lecture on the relationship between the English and Welsh peoples and languages ("English and Welsh" 1963). Before I get into the specifics of the racial elements of his criticism, however, I wish to describe a current that runs consistently throughout Tolkien's criticism: his desire to establish the texts he analyzes as English, to

stake his claim, if you will, to certain texts as belonging distinctly and individually to his

own race.

Particularly English Texts by Particularly English Writers

It is perhaps in "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhad" that this desire to claim a text

as specifically English has its simplest expression. Tolkien argues that despite the

linguistic and scholastic impact of the Norman Conquest, a school of traditional English

learning and composition had survived into the thirteenth century. He asserts "the

existence in the west of a centre where English was at once more alive, and more

traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else" (105n.). He goes on to

describe the school's English as having "traditions and some acquaintance with books

and the pen, but it is in close touch with a good living speech - a soil somewhere in

England" (106). This willingness to characterize the compositional environment of a text 189 is indicative of the confidence in the science of philology that was typical of Tolkien's academic heritage. This type of confidence is significant since it allows room for ideology to impose itself upon interpretation; while Tolkien's argument is based upon sound philological principles, his desire for traditional Englishness to have had a representative, learned voice in the Middle English period nevertheless shines through. I am not suggesting that Tolkien's ideology influenced his results, but I am suggesting that it is no coincidence that he chose to work on a text about which he could draw those specific results.

The urge to localize (and Englishize) is also present in Tolkien's work on

Beowulf, both "Monsters" and his work on the "Finnsburgh Episode" and the related

Finnsburgh Fragment. One of the central arguments of "Monsters" is a rebuttal of the long critical tradition that viewed Beowulf as a product of either the northern world in general or of some specific, usually Scandinavian, part of it;111 it was perhaps Strong to whom Tolkien was responding most directly. Strong's description of the poem in A

Short History of English Literature echoes some of the main themes of this tradition:

Beowulf is the only poem of any length [. . .] which has come down to us,

of the early heroic poetry of the Teutons. [...] There is nothing

distinctively English in the poem. The scenes are laid in Denmark and

South Sweden: the tribes who play a part in the action are Danes, Geats,

Swedes, and Frisians. It is clear, therefore, that, if the poem was written in

111 In "Monsters," Tolkien summarizes the critical reception of the poem thus: Nearly all the censure, and most of the praise, that has been bestowed on The Beowulf has been due either to the belief that it was something that it was not - for example, primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an epic; or to disappointment at the discovery that it was itself and not something that the scholar would have liked better - for example, a heathen heroic lay, a history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica. (7) 190

England - and of that there can be little doubt - the legends were carried,

in all likelihood in the form of short lays, by the English from their

continental home. (2)

In Critics B, Tolkien quotes the opening sentence of this passage, as well as more of the remainder of the description, which I have not included (82-83). Strong's perspective, which draws heavily on the Germanic Liedertheorie, is founded on the assumption that continental Germanic tribal origins clearly trump the somehow less glamorous possibility that Beowulf is a product of Christianized England. If the poem existed in any form whatsoever before the Saxon colonization of Britain, the logic runs, then the poem belongs to "the Teutons" in general, rather than the English in particular. In Strong's words, "Beowulf is the picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which Tacitus describes" (2-3), a claim that Tolkien quickly declares "is, of course, nonsense" (Critics

35, 83).

In "Monsters," Tolkien counters these arguments by stating,

Slowly with the rolling years the obvious (so often the last revelation of

analytic study) has been discovered: that we have to deal with a poem by

an Englishman using afresh ancient and largely traditional material. At

last then, after inquiring so long whence this material came, and what its

original or aboriginal nature was (questions that cannot ever be decisively

answered), we might also now again inquire what the poet did with it. (9)

This is a sound, logical application of Ockham's razor, as Tolkien's chiding use of

"obvious" indicates. But while the key to his argument is the logic of not overcomplicating the issue based on slim evidence - though Tolkien, as shown above, 191 was himself willing to make bold assertions about the compositional origins of texts - the conclusion was clearly not as "obvious" to other critics, even other English critics, as it was to Tolkien, primed as he was by his intense desire to naturalize Beowulf as English.

In his mind, Beowulf, while highly traditional, was nonetheless the product of a very specific, possibly even identifiable, moment in definitely English history; content and historical tradition, while important, pale in comparison for Tolkien to the clear fact that the text is written in Old English. "And there is the rub," he states in Critics, '"Beowulf may be a poem about Danes, but it is an English poem about them, or rather the poem of a particular Englishman using in a particular way English tradition about them" (A 38).

As Drout points out in his corresponding note (156), this reference to Hamlet draws a perfect analogy: by the criteria applied to Beowulf, even Shakespeare's play would have to be considered Danish, despite being the prized pearl of English Literature.

It is, however, in Tolkien's Finn andHengest that this Englishizing theme is most cleverly pursued; the intricacy of his argument demands more attention than those of the other works. In Finn, Tolkien combines the poetic fragment known as The Fight at

Finnsburgh and the incomplete episode from Beowulf that deals with the same events, in order to create a theoretical reconstruction of the original story.112 This urge to reconstruct is not in itself unusual, but Tolkien's motivations behind the work are telling.

He states, "[tjhere is not so much left of the heroes of ancient English traditions that we should scorn the attempt, tiresome in the process and inconclusive in the result as it may

112 The texts give only a partial picture of the events, but what is relatively clear is that a Danish leader, Hnaef, takes his followers (including Hengest) on a visit to his sister, Hildeburh, who has married Finn, the leader of the Frisians; for some reason, violence erupts and Hnaef and Finn's son are killed. A temporary peace is achieved between Hengest and Finn until violence erupts yet again, resulting in the death of Finn. The fragment begins in medias res, describing part of one of the battles, while the episode gives a brief and elusive summary of the events before focusing on the losses of Hildeburh. 192 be, to piece together all the scraps" (50). This argument is fair enough, but it raises an important theoretical question: how exactly could a poem that makes no mention of

England or of the English, that in fact has no explicit connection to England whatsoever beyond being written in Old English, inform us about the "ancient English traditions"?

Following the pattern of his work on the Ancrene Wisse and Beowulf, Tolkien argues in

Finn andHengest that regardless of this lack of direct reference to the English in the surviving pieces of the Finnsburgh story, the story itself was nevertheless a significant part of the foundation legend for the Anglo-Saxon race, taking place just before the initial colonization of England. Tolkien's argument rests on his identification of the Hengest of the poetic fragments with the legendary founder of the Kentish royal line, identified in

Bede (Book 1, Chapters XIV-XV) and throughout the chronicle tradition as one Hengist, himself probably a Jute.113

Tolkien's efforts to make this identification lead him to many of the troubling cruces that plague the Finnsburgh texts, most particularly the meaning of the word

"eotenas." The word is actually a two-layered crux. First, the word causes problems on the lexical level; while it is generally taken to mean "Jutes," it could also mean "giants"

and, through metaphorical generalization, "enemies." The second level is interpretive: if the word's meaning is accepted as Jutes, which seems the more likely option, who are these Jutes and what exactly is their role in a conflict that seems to be primarily between

Danes and Frisians? The word does not occur in the fragment but does appear four times

in the episode. Tolkien identifies the third of these occurrences as "the most difficult passage in the whole Episode" (124): Hengest, stewing over the peace he has made with

113 Tolkien certainly believed Hengest to be a Jute, but the evidence is not quite absolute. See Bliss's "The Nationality of Hengest" for a case that though Hengest ruled over the Jutes in Kent, he was not necessarily a Jute himself but possibly an Angle. 193

Finn, considers vengeance for the death of his lord, "gif he torngemot burhteon mihte / bast he Eotena beam inne gemunde" ("whether he could bring about a violent encounter, so that he could remember therein the son[s] of the Jutes/enemies") (1140-41). Who, exactly, are/is the "Eotena beam" that Hengest is dwelling upon? Assuming "Eotenas" means "Jutes" and not "enemies," the word could refer to allies of Finn or allies of Hnaef.

If the latter, does the term include or exclude Hengest? Moreover, "Eotena" is clearly genitive plural, but "beam" is ambiguous in terms of number, leaving open the possibility that Hengest is brooding about a specific Jute, which would change the nature of his vengeance dramatically. Or, is "Eotena beam" in apposition with "he," thereby making it a descriptor of Hengest himself? Tolkien discusses these and other hermeneutic problems of the passage in great detail (124-30), scientifically identifying and eliminating as many interpretations as possible. In Tolkien's words,

Let us first assume that the Eotena beam are (as now usually

supposed) solely on the Frisian side, and therefore Hengest's enemies.

Then we will see if the difficulties we have landed in are in any way

relieved, not by a change of construe but of theory - by regarding the

Eotena beam as Hengest's friends (or perhaps ambiguous). If the

difficulties will not disappear we must look for another way out. (125)

It is in such an interpretive morass that Tolkien's ingenuity thrived, and perhaps more importantly, it is in such areas where certainty is impossible that Tolkien was most free to explore his more ideologically influenced ideas. 194

Tolkien's rather clever "other way out" is actually one that C. L. Wrenn seems also to have come up with, either independently or through Tolkien's influence,114 though

Alan Bliss indicates that Tolkien's notes are emphatic that the idea is his own ("Editor's

Introduction" 5). The idea is that the Jutes need not have been on only one side but could quite possibly have been on both:

So far I believe that Hengest was a Jute, probably with Jutes in his train

who made up a large part, at least, of Hnaef s sixty men. The whole lot are

called Dene, because such is the name of Hnaef s people [...]. It is no

doubt the Jutish contingent which have taken service with Hnaef and the

Danes that are the object of some feud (probably including Hnaef) by

exiled, dispossessed, unsubmitting Jutes who have taken refuge in the

Frisian court. (Tolkien 100-101)

Tolkien, therefore, sees the Finnsburgh conflict as essentially Jutish: the Frisians and the

Danes have the misfortune of bringing the wrong friends to the wrong place at the wrong

time, and they pay the price by being drawn disastrously into a conflict not their own.

The merits of this theory aside,115 it nevertheless provides significant access to Tolkien's

thinking on race. First, it demonstrates that he had a tendency to think of communities

not as homogeneous but rather as having a complex series of levels. A Jute in the

company of Hnaef, for example, would racially be a Jute but would identify as a "Dene,"

would be in the "train" of Hengest but "have taken service with Hnaef," and would have

114 See, for example, page 52 of Wrenn's Beowulf(1953). 115 The theory certainly solves a number of the cruces in the poem, but it nevertheless requires a considerable leap in logic, since neither of the poems as we have them mention the tragedy of the Danes and Frisians losing their leaders specifically in someone else's cause; this vital element to the story as Tolkien has reconstructed it may be discussed in a section of the fragment that has been lost, but one would expect it to be mentioned somewhere in the episode. 195 had "some feud" with other Jutes. Tolkien saw early medieval communities as products of intricate webs of loyalty bonds and racial ties, each of which can apparently trump the others depending on the circumstances. This type of thinking is not unique to Tolkien, but the fact that he considers such a complex arrangement to be the obvious solution to the Finnsburgh problem is a good indicator of the intricacy of his approach to race.

Second, Tolkien's theory gives Hengest a plausible back-story to explain why and how he might end up founding Kent:

It is not forcing the evidence, but following its most obvious leading, to

identify the two Hengests, and believe that we have preserved two

traditions of different adventures in the life-history of one famous

adventurer - and each where we should expect it, were the two Hengests

one: the story of the gallant defence in the heroic traditions mainly

concerned with Germania, not Britain; the story of the landing in Britain

and the foundation of a new kingdom in the embryonic history of that new

kingdom. (67-68)

This is an example of the most discussed single argument in Tolkien Studies, specifically

the notion that Tolkien's motivation for his fiction was to create a mythology for

England, since its actual myths had not survived in the same numbers as had those of

Iceland or Germany.116 From this perspective, Tolkien has latched onto a name that is

116 At the center of this critical discussion is the following passage from a letter from Tolkien to Milton Waldman of Collins publishing house: I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff [...]. Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story - the 196 tantalizingly suggestive of heroism and has found a way, however tenuous, of satisfying that potential. The difference is that Tolkien has not created the back-story. On the contrary, using scholarly methods, he has re-created it; he has not created a fantasy but has argued a case for historicity. Shippey has demonstrated that this "activity of recreation - creation from philology - lies at the heart of Tolkien's 'invention'" (Road

53).117 Shippey draws a parallel between the philological reconstruction of asterisk- words (word-forms for which there is no extant record but which can be extrapolated through philological principles and which are traditionally marked as such by an asterisk) and Tolkien's reconstruction of "asterisk-reality" (Road 17), recreations not only of words, but of stories, traditions, and cultures from the remnants of evidence in the historical records. It is just this type of method that Tolkien is employing in his treatment of Hengest.

Tolkien provides four pieces of evidence for his identification of the two

Hengests: first, that "Hengest is an odd and rare name"; second, that the "bearers of this memorable name were contemporaries"; third, that the founder of the Kentish royal line

"was probably a Jute, and at any rate a leader of Jutes," while the figure in the fragment and the episode is connected to the words "eotena" and "eotenum"; and fourth, that the name Finn is connected to Hengest in the Kentish tradition (67). Even if we grant

Tolkien that this interpretation "is not forcing the evidence," the only possible conclusion based on these grounds is that there is a possibility, at best a probability, that these two

larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths - which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. (144) For just a few examples of the many critical voices on this impulse to create a mythology for England, see Jane Chance's Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England, Shippey's "Grimm, Grundtvig, Tolkien: Nationalisms and the Invention of Mythologies," and Drout's "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England." 117 See also Shippey's "Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings." 197 individuals were one and the same, and Tolkien's rigid philological training would have forced him to accept the need for more evidence. Looking at the four pieces of evidence, numbers one, two, and four have little room for further development, but number three, the Jutish connection, most certainly does. If Tolkien could argue convincingly that the

Hengest of the fragment and the episode is, just like the Hengest of Kent, "probably a

Jute, and at any rate a leader of Jutes," then his third piece of evidence shifts from suggestive to reasonably convincing. With this in mind, it was necessary for him to prove that the Jutes were most definitely on the side of the Danes. The fact that he argues that they were also on the side of the Frisians may indicate either respect for the

1 1 8 arguments made for that case or a belief that the texts could not support an argument that the Jutes were exclusively on the Danes' side.

As well as reinforcing the identification of the two Hengests, Tolkien's theory also promotes Hengest from the founder of Kent to a legendary hero-king on the order of a Beowulf. Tolkien famously argued that Beowulf 'is fundamentally a two-part poem, that it is a "presentation of Beowulf s rise to fame on the one hand, and of his kingship and death on the other" ("Monsters" 28). Tolkien saw this balance of the two functions as key to Beowulf s place amid the great Germanic heroes, as well as the poem Beowulf s prominence among the literature of the North.119 Hengest, Tolkien seems to have felt, deserved a similar prominence, but the chronicles only preserved one half of the balance, the half that deals with Hengest's kingship (or at least his acquisition of it), and ignored his youthful exploits. Tolkien's identification of the two Hengests, however, rectifies this

118 See, for example, Dobbie (xlix-xlx). 119 Tolkien argues in "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth" that this balance, or rather Beowulf s inability to navigate it, was also integral to Beowulf s fall: after discussing the appropriateness of a reckless chivalry to a youthful and subordinate Beowulf, he goes on to argue that Beowulf "does not rid himself of his chivalry, the excess persists, even when he is an old king upon whom all the hopes of a people rest" (145). 198 lack, providing the hero with the back-story for his legendary founding of Kent and thereby cementing his place alongside Beowulf, Sigurd, and the other heroes of the

North. Tolkien was keenly aware that the Old English heroic pantheon was rather thinly populated, and so he would have found irresistible an opportunity to use his criticism to promote a middle-weight hero up into the ranks of the heavy-weights, at the same time

emphatically claiming that hero as English. Again, I am not suggesting that this desire

negatively affected Tolkien's critical objectivity, but I am suggesting that Tolkien, with

his intense pro-England feelings, was well primed to develop a new reading that

reinforced that ideology.

"Norse is Norse and English English"

This emphasis on the particularly English nature of certain texts makes it clear

that Tolkien's conception of the relationship of the Old English to the rest of the Old

North must have been drastically different both from Kingsley's privileging of the Danish

and from Morris's assertion of the unity of the Germanic world. Decades of criticism

comparing Tolkien's fiction with the Norse and Germanic legends have tended to obscure

the fact that Tolkien's sentiments on the subject are actually quite conflicted. Shippey

points to "this ambiguity about the Old Norse heathen tradition" in The Road to Middle-

Earth (270), but as influential as that work has been on Tolkien Studies, this vital point

has often fallen through the cracks. Drout's edition of the Critics essays offers an

opportunity to address this oversight. Part of the problem lies with Tolkien's extensive

use of the Old Norse tradition in his most famous critical publication, "Monsters"; of

particular note is his reference to "the fundamentally similar heroic temper of ancient 199

England and Scandinavia" (21), but the publication of Critics presents a different picture of this "temper":

There is something in the background of Northern Europe - an ancient

community of temper and spirit and ideals, to some extent of custom, law,

and social arrangements, which corresponds roughly to the known and

definite community of language which we express by the terms Teutonic,

or now more generally Germanic, and by the hypothesis of an actual

linguistic unity in the far past. But the linguistic hypothesis - a necessary

and inevitable one, though all the problems connected with it are far from

settled - is not instantly convertible into terms of race or ethics. Too

many other factors, some known, some unknown, intervene in the course

of the spread of the Germanic languages to areas where they were

certainly not indigenous (such as Britain or Southern Germany). It is no

longer good criticism to speak of things written in Norse or English or

German or Gothic as just "Teutonic." Or rather it is just as good and just

as bad as lumping all the products of Spain, Portugal, Italy and France as

Romance or Latin. There is, or may be, a truth in it, but it is not always

the most important truth - especially in dealing with individual works of

literature: namely that Spanish is Spanish, Italian Italian, and French

French.

So Norse is Norse and English English. (Critics A 36)120

Here we have Tolkien's localizing impulse most clearly expressed. Tolkien is not here

trying to detach English identity entirely from the North but is rather emphasizing the fact

120 See also 85-86 of Critics B for the corresponding, though slightly modified, passage. 200 that the English and the other northern races have diverged. In Tolkien's mind, each of the races, regardless of what super-racial affinities may be evident, are first and foremost individual and distinct. It is probably no accident that when referring to such affinities he refers to them as "just 'Teutonic'"; in his mind, such a label limits or confines the characteristics of the race to a generic template. Most importantly for him, calling the

English "Teutonic" gives insufficient consideration not only to the "many other factors" that have occurred since the Saxon emigration from the continent but also to the accomplishments of the English since that separation. These accomplishments include but are not limited to the literary, such as Beowulf and the hypothetical full story of

Hengest.

Equally pointed as the "just" is Tolkien's assertion that "[i]t is no longer good criticism" to refer to multiple races under a blanket term. Tolkien is here referring in a general way to the racial discourses of writers such as Morris, but more specifically to a tradition of scholarship that explicitly stated such beliefs. Ker, for example, argues that

"[b]efore everything, they belonged to a great national system which Tacitus calls

Germania - which was never politically united, even in the loosest way, but which nevertheless was a unity, conscious of its separation from all the foreigners whom it

called, in a comprehensive manner, Welsh" (English 20). Ker goes on to declare that

"[t]hose who listened to heroic songs in England seem to have had no peculiar liking for

English subjects. Their heroes belong to Germania" (26-27). These arguments would

most certainly have been greeted warmly by Morris, but they seem to have stuck in the

craw of Tolkien. Tolkien acknowledges that this identity of race is "necessary and

inevitable" to any effective application of linguistic principles - it is after all the 201 underlying assumption of modern philology - but he also points to the fact that the great

successes of philology can cloud the judgment of scholars, specifically in regard to its

dangers. Tolkien, probably writing this passage in the early 1930s, had personal

experiences of the emphatic disunity of Germania that were less immediate to Ker, who

was writing pre-war in 1912,121 though Tolkien was referring more to theoretical

problems than to actual political ones.

What, then, are these problems that this "linguistic hypothesis" raises? They

certainly included for Tolkien the failure to give full credit to the English for the cultural

accomplishments of the Anglo-Saxon period; the English most certainly did have heroes,

Tolkien believed, and while they may have had an affinity with Germania, they

nonetheless belonged securely to England. But these problems go deeper than the

literary. They go, in Tolkien's words, to issues of "race and ethics." Most important to

my purposes here is the fact that Tolkien is pointing out the difference between linguistic

communities, racial communities, and national communities. Or rather, he is pointing out

that there is a difference, without clearly elaborating on what that difference is. He is

asserting that to conclude that the English are Germanic simply because their language is

a Germanic language is fallacious, that it assumes the unprovable claim that language is

equivalent with race. This is a remarkable and at first confusing notion coming from a

writer who saw race and language as so linked that he felt unable to create one without

creating the corresponding other.

Tolkien further explores the connection between language and race in his

"English and Welsh," a lecture given at Oxford in 1955. Though this lecture is two full

121 These dangers were certainly not entirely unknown to Ker, however; the problematic nature of the relationships between the "Germanic" countries had been manifest since at least the Schleswig-Holstein conflicts of 1848-51 and 1864. 202 decades later than Critics, the blurring of racial and linguistic terms is still one of his primary concerns: "[ljanguage is the prime differentiator of peoples - not of 'races,' whatever that much-misused word may mean in the long-blended history of western

Europe" (166). Language, therefore, is a marker of a "people," while "race" is marked by something entirely different, being a product of biology. Perhaps most importantly, he suggests that "the modern myth" of the blanket terms "Celts" and "Teutons" constructs those communities as "primeval and immutable creatures, like a triceratops and a

stegosaurus [. ..], fixed not only in shape but in innate and mutual hostility, and endowed

even in the mists of antiquity, as ever since, with the peculiarities of mind and temper

which can be still observed in the Irish or the Welsh on the one hand and the English on

the other" (171-72).122 Note here yet another instance of one of the key words in

Tolkien's thinking about race: "temper." It is his word for the essentialist representations

of races; it is a word that he sometimes critiques, as shown here, but elsewhere uses

himself without such criticism. The contradiction is resolved, however, once one realizes

that it is not the fact that a race has essential qualities that truly bothers Tolkien but rather

the assertion that these qualities are static; for Tolkien, the temper of a race (or a people)

is ever-changing, interacting with history, and diachronically varied. This belief is

actually a manifestation of the localizing tendency discussed above: just as a text is a

product of a specific individual writing in a specific context at a specific time, so too is a

race a product of the specific historical forces converging at a specific moment. This is

why Tolkien argued against seeing the English as a sub-group of the Old Northern races

122 Chism summarizes the racial arguments of "English and Welsh" as follows: "Celts and Teutons alike, first, are peoples not races; second, they are to be defined by the languages they speak not the blood they carry; third, they are not unchanging essences or forces but historically, linguistically, and culturally heterogeneous and changing; fourth, they are not indigenous (tied to the soil) within any known region in which their languages are still spoken, in England as in Germany" ("Middle-earth" 74). 203 in general: centuries of history acting upon each of those races have created more difference than similarity between them. This, if anything, is "the most important truth" that he mentions in Critics (36).

Regardless of any linguistic commonalities with the rest of the North, therefore, the English are for Tolkien distinct; the differences that have arisen are at least as

essential to racial identity as are the persisting similarities. He extends this argument

even further by suggesting a similar racial affinity between the English and the Celts,

despite the significant gap between these two groups on the linguistic family tree:

But if we leave such terms as Celtic and Teutonic (or Germanic) aside,

reserving them for their only useful purpose, linguistic classification, it

remains an evident conclusion from history that apart from language the

inhabitants of Britain are made of the same 'racial' ingredients, though the

mixing of these has not been uniform. It is still patchy. The observable

differences are, however, difficult or impossible to relate to language.

("English and Welsh" 170)

The word "mixing" echoes Tolkien's description above of the history of western Europe

as "long-blended." He is implying that all of the European races, not just the English, are

composite; the corollary of this, that none of the races is therefore pure, is of course

equally important. In this instance, Tolkien is destabilizing the long-standing rhetoric of

thinkers like Ker and Morris that reinforced the unity of the North through othering (be it

of the Celts, of the Romans, of the French, etc.). The differences between the races,

Tolkien suggests, are not differences of kind but of degree; the English may have more of

the Teutonic ingredient and less of the Celtic, but the recipe itself is not at all dissimilar. 204

While this thinking is a break from some of Tolkien's most respected predecessors, such as Ker, he is drawing, consciously or otherwise, on the work of someone he respected little, Jusserand, who also thinks of race in terms of mixed ingredients. The first chapter of Jusserand's A Literary History of the English People begins by declaring that "[t]he people that now occupies England was formed, like the French people, by the fusion of

several superimposed races.123 In both countries the same chief races mingled at about the same period, but in different proportions and under dissimilar social conditions" (3).

Jusserand is arguing for the mutual applicability of studies on the French and English

literary traditions, which is something that Tolkien may have resisted, but in spite of that,

or perhaps because of it, the image of a race produced by mixture seems to have sunk into

his consciousness. In fact, this notion, like "temper," is one of the central facets of

Tolkien's understanding of race.

These different ideas, "temper" and "blending," as well as the problematic

relationship between language and race, certainly demonstrate that deep thinking about

race was characteristic of Tolkien's scholarly writing from his early through to his late

work. That said, his ideas are nevertheless relatively disjointed. He criticizes other

theories of race, particularly that of Ker, but he is less than clear as to his own

understanding of the concept. This leads to two questions. First, does he ever present a

coherent theory of race in his writings? And second, if the English are unique, distinct

from even those races traditionally seen as close relatives, what is it that makes them so?

What differentiated and defined them, in Tolkien's mind?

123 Tolkien also echoes this notion of races as "superimposed" in "English and Welsh," though in different phrasing; for example, Tolkien describes the eastern part of England as "the area where the newer layers lie thicker and the older things are thinner and more submerged" (170). 205

Concerning Hobbits, and Other Matters

Drout is one of the very few critics who have attempted to detail the specifics of

Tolkien's theory of race in general or of the English race in particular. Drawing on

Tolkien's letters and his work on Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group texts, and Beowulf,

Drout suggests that the following represents Tolkien's theory of the English:

English identity is based upon contact with the earth itself, with the

physical land of the British Isles. Englishness derives from persistent

presence in England, not from solely genetic connections, and not from

purely cultural antecedents, either. Being native to the English tongue is

not enough; one must also be native to the land. In other words, an

English racial identity is made through participation in two related

traditions: physical occupation of England (preferably in close contact

with the soil and growing things of the countryside) and participation in

the English speech community. The traditions could both be entered - the

Tolkiens eventually became completely English after their arrival from

Germany - but such an enlistment was slow and, most importantly,

required participation in both traditions. (Introduction 14)

Drout is suggesting here that "an English racial identity" is not actually a racial category

at all, but rather something much closer to nationality; neither of the two "traditions" that

he lays out - residence and use of the national language - are actually racial categories in

any strict sense of the word, but if you add in a third element along the lines of a duty or

responsibility to the state, then the three traditions form a not unconvincing definition of

citizenship in the English nation. This is not to say that Drout is wrong (quite the 206 contrary), but rather to suggest that Drout is picking up on Tolkien's uncertainty about the differences between race and nationality, an uncertainty also at work in his attempts to differentiate a linguistic "people" from a biological "race." At the core of this confusion is, I would suggest, the question of whether a race can be "entered," to borrow

Drout's word.124 Biologically, the answer is no, at least on the level of the individual, and yet Tolkien knew that his racial thinking had to accommodate how his own ancestors could somehow switch their racial identity from German to English. Taking such confusion into account, Drout's analysis is convincing, though I would suggest that he de-emphasizes too much Tolkien's belief in the importance of biology (whether it is termed race or ethnicity) to a discussion of identity. For example, we have already seen

Tolkien provide an argument firmly grounded in biology that solves the aforementioned problem of how an individual (or at least a family line) can be enlisted into another race,

specifically his arguments that all of the races are: (1) made up of essentially the same

racial ingredients, and (2) continually changing and developing, including in terms of the

proportions of those ingredients, which is, in effect, a change of race.

As pervasive as such racial thinking is in Tolkien's scholarship, it is even more so

in his fiction, particularly LotR. Take, for example, the opening of the novel. It is not

unusual for fantasy novels to begin with a prologue or introductory section that lays out

some of the most pivotal differences between the real world and the fantasy world that

the reader is about to enter, such as the pertinent mythology of the land, for example, or

the nature of magic within it, and so forth. LotR is no exception, beginning as it does

124 Sandra Ballif Straubhaar also picks up on these uncertainties, arguing with evidence from LotR that "[e]thnicity is not really the issue with Tolkien, in the long run; as always, language is: and language is sharable" (115). This notion of the "sharability" of language is for Straubhaar an indication of Tolkien's "delight in [...] cultural exchange" (116); this "cultural exchange" could easily be the first step towards the slow "enlistment" that Drout describes. 207 with an extensive essay entitled "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters." The title is

quite accurate: the essay, which runs to 18 pages (in the reset edition), is devoted purely

to describing the nature of hobbits, their home, and their activities and interests, with

particular attention to their love of "pipe-weed," which merits an entire section. The

prologue is, therefore, not only a tool to familiarize the reader with the fantastical world

but also an extended act of racial definition; it is, in effect, an anthropological essay that

attempts to enumerate the most definitive aspects of the hobbit community. Note that

Tolkien provides here almost no information about the mythology of Middle-earth

(despite his belief in its importance) and precious little information - merely four of the

18 pages - on the plot of The Hobbit. On a factual level, this last is the most important -

there are plot points from The Hobbit that are necessary for understanding LotR - but this

section nevertheless comes across as an afterthought to the far more important act of

defining the nature of hobbits. Tolkien, therefore, is not really initiating the reader into

the mysteries of Middle-earth but rather into a major and recurrent thematic concern of

LotR: the exploration of how and why racial groups are defined.

It is a vital point that the framework of LotR constructs the narrator not as

composing the text but rather as translating it from an original, which happens to be

written by hobbits. "Concerning Hobbits," therefore, is not merely an act of racial

definition but rather an act of racial se/f-definition.125 The section on pipe-weed makes

this particularly clear: it is included not because it is actually important but because a

hobbit would think it important. The hobbit view will be, after all, the one provided for

125 Technically, "Concerning Hobbits" is supposedly reconstructed (rather than directly translated) by the translator, but the effect is nevertheless the same, since the information he is reconstructing is theoretically from hobbit originals; the translator makes this clear by pointing to his hobbit source in the first paragraph and later by directly quoting a hobbit for three whole paragraphs (11-12). 208 the reader throughout the book, so the reader is being encouraged to come to understand first the self, before the repeated encounters with otherness. And, in fact, this balancing of definition of self and other is completed in the final appendix of the novel, creating a framework of racial definition. The first half of this appendix, "The Languages and

Peoples of the Third Age," defines the races in turn, beginning with the elves, followed by men, then hobbits, then all of the "other races" (511), specifically ents, ores, trolls, and dwarves. This structure, both in terms of order and in terms of which races get clumped into the "other" section, is far from accidental. It is a theory of the races of Middle-earth, constructed based on the experiences of the hobbits throughout their travels. The elves have primacy, while the men and the hobbits are prominent enough to deserve individual

attention, while the others are presented as marginal, either due to evil natures or through

less influence on the world as a whole. One of the main movements of LotR, therefore, is

from definition of the racial self in isolation to orientation of the racial self with respect to various racial others.

The question becomes, then, one of determining what the hobbits are exposed to

on their adventures that sparks the shift from their relatively isolated racial thinking early

in the work to their broader racial understandings at its end. Their experiences with race

are obviously myriad, so I will break them down into two main categories: first, exposure

to racial assumptions, beliefs, and sentiments that are visceral, unconscious, or at least

relatively untheorized; and second, developed and often intellectual theorizations of race.

I will deal with the first relatively briefly before turning to an extended examination of

the second. Jane Chance discusses the racial sentiments of the book in terms of 209 resistance to queerness.126 She demonstrates how this thematic concern is raised early in the books, specifically in terms of the tensions between the different branches of the hobbits:

This tension between the "normal" and the "queer" Hobbit will blossom in

later chapters and books into the ethical drama of LotR. The question

Tolkien addresses is this: How can individuals (and nations) so different

from one another coexist in harmony? The danger is clear: the

Brandybucks will be forever stigmatized by the Shire inhabitants because

they choose to live beyond the river in un-Hobbitlike fashion. And what is

to prevent a Dark Hobbit Lord from then using this Shire fear of

difference to separate the Brandybucks from the Bagginses? To divide

one family branch from another? (Mythology of Power 34)

The hobbits are indeed an isolationist society, even a xenophobic one; whether or not this

"fear of difference" is in fact "the ethical drama" of the book, it is undeniable that xenophobia manifests itself in each and every race depicted in LotR. LotR is a book replete with suspicious meetings on boundaries: the meeting of the fellowship with the border guards of the elvish realm of Lorien; Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas's hostile

encounter with Eomer's patrol in Rohan; and Treebeard the ent's near fatal greeting of

Merry and Pippin, to name just a few. Jes Battis argues that the long peace preceding

LotR has "allowed [the free races of Middle-earth] to grow complacent in their social

attitudes, forgetting old alliances and retreating back into insular communities" (911).

And xenophobia is only the surface of deep, abiding racial hostility amid the races. This

126 Note that Chance uses this word not only to engage Queer Theory but also because it is one of Tolkien's favourite words for describing something foreign or unnatural to a hobbit's eyes. hostility is presented as a weakness that hostile forces can exploit: "in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him" (FotR 456). Sauron, however, is not the cause of this dissension but merely an agitator, since these sentiments transcend his influence, as the ancient hatred between the elves and the dwarves, the fear of the elves in Rohan and

Gondor, and the entish isolationist policy127 all attest.

But xenophobia and racism are not the most important influences on the hobbits' racial thinking; the sentiments are not, after all, new to the hobbits, though perhaps the intensity of them is. This brings us to the second type of racial experience the hobbits encounter in their travels, specifically the exposure to different theories of race. In The

Two Towers (TT), the fellowship divides, with the four hobbits going off in pairs in two opposite directions. As Shippey's discussion of the interlace nature of TT (Author 102-

11) indicates, however, there are any number of strands that connect the divergent members of the fellowship; one such connection is a strong parallelism between two distinct conversations about race, held on the one hand by Merry and Pippin with

Treebeard and on the other by Frodo and Sam with Faramir. Each conversation consists

of the hobbits being exposed to a specific method of racial definition. When Treebeard

encounters Merry and Pippin, his first instinct is to attempt to fit them into the entish

theorization of race, which is preserved mnemonically in song:

Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!

First name the four, the free peoples:

Eldest of all, the elf-children;

Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;

127 See Chance ("Tolkien and the Other" 180) for a discussion of this isolationism. 211

Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;

Man the mortal, master of horses. (72)

The song apparently proceeds to catalogue the rest of the animal kingdom, but the hobbits, being totally alien to the ents, remain unlisted. Pippin improvises a solution, suggesting that Treebeard add in "Half-grown hobbits, the hole-dwellers" (73). Note that the list is in Germanic alliterative verse, including the caesura that divides each line in half; in terms of Treebeard's list, each race is given a full line, one half of which names the race, the other describes it or elaborates on the description of the other half. Tolkien believed strongly in the importance of the half line to the semantic effect of this verse form, arguing that the half lines "are founded on a balance" ("Monsters" 30), that one half line completes the other.128 In this case, therefore, Tolkien is presenting a racial theory in which the nature of a race is completed or summed up in a single description.

This is, in effect, the extreme of racial essentialism. This essentialism is symptomatic of the ents' xenophobia; it is not that they cannot learn more about the other races, and thereby create definitions that are fuller, but rather that such information is of little

significance to their worldview. The description of "Man" makes this clear; "master of horses" applies only to those certain humans who live directly adjacent to Treebeard's

forest, but Treebeard has no interest in human culture as a whole and so this limited

definition serves his limited interests.

Tolkien describes the construction of a line of Germanic verse as the "opposition between two halves of roughly equivalent phonetic weight, and significant content, which are more often rhythmically contrasted than similar" but it is important to understand that this "opposition" and "contrast" are not meant to suggest that the two half lines are at odds, but rather that the one fulfils the other through complementation. 212

Reification and Ranking: Gondorian Racial Theory

Pippin proposes not only a line for the hobbits but also the appropriate placement of that line: "[p]ut us in amongst the four, next to Man" (73). There is a fascinating assumption here, specifically the fact that these races are alignable, that some are closer to others.129 According to the entish system, or at least Pippin's understanding of it, the races are different not only in essence but also in relation. Moreover, Pippin's suggestion presages the ordering of the races found in the appendix, here again with the elves in the primary position. This ordering is even stronger in the parallel conversation in the

second half of TT, that between Frodo, Sam, and Faramir. The racial theory that Faramir puts forward is different from that of Treebeard not only in content but also in the fact

that it is presented as based on authority, the "lore" of Gondor, rather than the more

experiential knowledge of the ancient ents. What makes Faramir's theory particularly

useful to my purposes is that Faramir focuses exclusively on the human races, rather than

on race in the broader sense, which provides us with key insights into Tolkien's

conceptions of the races of northern Europe. Faramir discusses the theory at length, but

the core is as follows: "[f]or so we reckon Men in our lore, calling them the High, or Men

of the West, which were Numenoreans; and the Middle Peoples, Men of the Twilight,

such as are the Rohirrim and their kin that dwell still far in the North; and the Wild, the

Men of Darkness" (355). The Gondorian theory, therefore, divides humanity into three

different levels, which Luling suggests "sounds very like the classic Victorian

evolutionary sequence of Savagery - Barbarism - Civilisation, which was around in

Tolkien's youth" (54). Luling suggests this schema only to dismiss it, mainly because the

129 The association of hobbits with humans is quite strong in LotR; the narrator declares that "[i]t is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours" (FotR 2). There is also a strong connection between certain groups of humans and elves. Dwarves, on the other hand, are the odd men out. 213 progression in Tolkien's thinking is devolutionary rather than evolutionary, but I do not think it should be discarded so readily.

This devolution is important, but less to the entire theory than to the first level in particular. Faramir presents Gondor as a place of past learning, where "ancient lore by long tradition" is "preserved: books and tablets writ on withered parchments, yea, and on stone, and on leaves of silver and gold, in divers characters" (344). The key word here is

"preservation": Faramir depicts the current state of civilization not as attempting to develop but as merely attempting to resist degradation. Gondor is, or at least once was, a highly advanced society in numerous ways, from architecture to seamanship to scholarship to medicine, and it is the ability to preserve these achievements that apparently makes them civilized. This perception of Gondor is not the only act of self- definition in this passage, however; it is through the characterization of other races, the

Men of Twilight and of Darkness, that Faramir truly defines his own people. The Men of

Twilight (the barbarians in Luling's schema), for whom the Riders of Rohan are the only

real representatives in the book, are those who, while not truly civilized, are worthy of

respect. Faramir defines their lack of civilization primarily in terms of their approach to

war, in that they "love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an

end" (355), but he also emphasizes the "love" that Gondorians feel for them and the

loyalty they display in their alliance with Gondor against her foes. The Men of Twilight,

then, are those who are technologically and culturally less advanced than the High Men,

but who redeem themselves on what is perceived to be an almost moral level, by

opposing the enemies of the High; from the Gondorian perspective, they are barbarians,

culturally, but not savages, morally. The classification of the Men of Darkness, on the 214 other hand, is more vague; in fact, this group remains defined only by their exclusion from the other two groups, leaving the impression that they consist of any people that side against Gondor in her wars; for this act, inherently evil in the mind of a Gondorian, such people are condemned not only as culturally barbarous but also as morally savage and cruel ("cruel" being the most common descriptor applied to the people of Harad, one of the two main races in this category).

Luling unfortunately does not go any further into the categorizations that she lays out, but she is nevertheless quite right to suggest that Tolkien is engaging in an impulse, characteristic of his era, to rigidly and definitively classify and evaluate the races.

Stephen Jay Gould addresses this impulse in his The Mismeasure of Man. Gould identifies two fallacies that were prevalent in scientific thinking at the turn of the century, particularly in anthropological and biological theories: reification, "our tendency to

convert abstract concepts into entities" (24), followed by the impulse to rank individuals

and groups by the results of that reification. Gould's study plots changes in the nebulous

concept of intelligence during this period as his main example of reification and then

proceeds to discuss how scientific studies attempted to rank various groups of people by

intelligence, via numerous techniques from craniology to IQ testing. While I have no

evidence that Tolkien was interested in such studies, Faramir's thinking about race

nevertheless follows the two fallacies that Gould lays out. It presupposes that the

differences between peoples have categorizable racial bases and that these bases have

inherent value differences. More specifically, his theory asserts that there is an objective

racial paradigm, specifically affinity to an ancient ideal (that of the Numenoreans), and

that ranking is possible on that basis. The Gondorians are ranked highest because they 215 are the descendents of these ideal humans.130 Tolkien even provides quantifiable proof of this close affinity by declaring that the lifespans of the Gondorians are determined by the quality of their blood, that their ancestors lived supernaturally long lives, in a manner reminiscent of the Old Testament patriarchs, but each generation has succumbed to age earlier than the last: "the span of their lives had now waned to little more than that of other men, and those among them who passed the tale of five score years with vigour were grown few, save in some houses of purer blood" (RotK 153). Aragorn, as the single individual closest to the genetic ideal, lives well over 200 years.

The Middle People, such as the Rohirrim, hold their rank due to an affinity to the ideal that is still demonstrable but is one significant step removed from this direct line of descent: Faramir declares, "it is said by our lore-masters that they have from of old this affinity with us that they are come from those same Three Houses of Men as were the

Numenoreans in their beginning" (TT 355). Lineage, therefore, provides a justification, through the processes of reification and ranking, for the racial beliefs that the Gondorian theory presupposes. The fact that this method of proof is undermined by the third group, the Men of Darkness, who seem to include the descendents of the so-called Black

Numenoreans, is ignored. This racial group possesses a biological, cultural, and technological inheritance from the Numenorean ideal that should rank them at or near that of Gondor, but their ancient betrayal of Gondorian principles nevertheless condemns them to the third tier, savagery. Whether Tolkien included this irony to enhance the

130 This ranking occurs even within the first level of humans, as shown by the fact that certain regional groups of Gondorians are considered closer to the reified ideal. See, for example the comparison of the people of Lebennin with those of Dol Amroth: the former "were reckoned men of Gondor, yet their blood was mingled, and there were short and swarthy folk among them whose sires came more from the forgotten men who housed in the shadows of the hills in the Dark Years ere the coming of the kings. But beyond, in the great fief of Belfalas, dwelt Prince Imrahil in his castle of Dol Amroth by the sea, and he was of high blood, and his folk also, tall men and proud with sea-grey eyes" (RotK 10). 216 realism of such problematic racial thinking, or whether he was unaware of the flaw in such Victorian attitudes to race, is difficult to determine. This issue raises the question of whether Faramir's problematic thinking can be taken as reflective of Tolkien's own opinions, but basic literary theory tells us to be wary of such an equation,131 so the best

approach is to use Faramir's discourse on race simply as a springboard towards analysis

of the depictions of the levels of humanity throughout the book as a whole.

Rohirric England, Gondorian Rome

Faramir's theory plots the different rankings through three different metaphors:

highness ("High" and "Middle"), light ("Twilight" and "Darkness"), and compass

direction ("West" and "North"). The first metaphor is clearly a simple (though

nonetheless problematic) ranking device, designed to emphasize the gradation of value

from High to Wild, and so needs no further interrogation here.132 The second metaphor is

clearly more loaded, since the connection of "darkness" to inferiority with regard to a

category of humanity is obviously fraught.133 But it is the third metaphor that is most

useful for my purposes here. The west is, throughout Tolkien's fiction, the privileged

compass direction; it is from the west that civilization comes, and it is in the west that the

divine resides. In fact, the geography of Tolkien's world is such that you can plot a

131 Moreover, this question takes us too close to the mire of the "racist!" versus "not-racist!" critical debate that I am attempting to avoid, as discussed above (pp. 179-80). 132 While Faramir is using this "High" through "Wild" metaphor as a simple ranking, Verlyn Flieger has shown in "Tolkien's Wild Men" that the concept of the "wild man" is actually quite complex mLotR and that Tolkien draws on medieval traditions of that figure for many of his characters, including some, such as Aragorn, whom Faramir would place in the "High" racial category. 133 See Brian McFadden's "Fear of Difference, Fear of Death: The Sigelwara, Tolkien's Swertings, and Racial Difference" for a discussion of the Swertings (from Old English "sweart," meaning black and related to Modern English "swarthy"). McFadden argues that the "Swertings are feared because they are unfamiliar, and they are enemies because they serve Sauron, but once his influence is removed, the Swertings negotiate and interact with the men of the West as an equal people" (156). 217 culture's claim to civilization and morality relatively accurately based on how far west its origins are. Furthest in the west is Valinor, home of the angelic Valar, then we move across the spectrum through Elvenhome, Numenor, and finally to Middle-earth proper, which continues the gradation through to the east, the source of both the enemy Sauron himself and also a major category of the Men of Darkness, emphatically named the

Easterlings. That said, as important as the west-east axis is for Tolkien, I am more

interested in the north-south. Faramir's reference to the Men of Twilight as living "far in

the North" is only one of many instances that associate Rohan with the North or Gondor

with the South. In terms of the northernness of Rohan, take for example, Aragorn's

depiction of its residents. He says that "[t]hey have long been the friends of Gondor,

though they are not akin to them. It was in forgotten years long ago that Eorl the Young

brought them out of the North"; Aragorn then proceeds to mention their kinship with

other racial groups still residing in the North (7T28). Ironically, Aragorn is quite

incorrect to call the years "forgotten" since he, Faramir, and others mention that very

migration from the North. Similarly, Gondor is repeatedly referred to as southern, either

in relation to Rohan (where it is called "the South-kingdom" [RotK 79]) or to the other of

the two Niimenorean kingdoms, with Gondor ruled by "the Southern Line" (RotK 386).

While it is true, therefore, that Tolkien constructs both Rohan and to a much greater

extent Gondor as western, within that broader category he does seem to conceive of their

difference in terms of a north-south divide.134

But this is all rather vague. How do these ideas about racial difference translate to

the real world? It has long been observed that the Rohirrim map quite closely onto the

134 Southernness in its absolute sense, like Eastemness, is associated mLotR with the Men of Darkness, in this case specifically the Southrons. 218

Old English, as mentioned above. Shippey's work on this subject remains convincing, so the specific arguments need not be detailed here, but put briefly: the language of

Rohan is Old English, or as Shippey has more precisely indicated, its Old Mercian dialect

(Road 112n.); the history of Rohan has numerous connections to Old English history; and, moreover, there is extensive intertextuality between the sections of LotR that deal with Rohan and certain Old English poems. Most importantly, the sixth chapter of TT,

"The King of the Golden Hall," follows the course of Beowulf s approach to Heorot in extensive and specific detail. Tolkien, while admitting the connection between the languages, actually resisted the notion that it could be expanded to anything broader:

This linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely

resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or

modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances: a

simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and

more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its

domain. (RotK 520n.)

But, as Shippey declares, this denial of a connection "is totally untrue. With one admitted exception,136 the Riders of Rohan resemble the Anglo-Saxons down to minute details" (Road 106).137 Tolkien's denial is in part due to his well-documented hostility

135 See particularly Road (11 Iff.) and Author (90ff.). 136 Shippey points out the fact that horses are a definitive aspect of Rohirric culture and warfare, as opposed to the culture of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom horses were less significant. Shippey uses this difference to further an argument that Tolkien wrote reconstructively (see p. 196, above), in this case reconstructing what Anglo-Saxon culture could have been like had their geographical situation been such as to make horses more culturally central {Road 115). 137 Furthermore, Drout has shown that the early ancestors of the Rohirrim may be identifiable with the Goths; for a discussion of this possible identification and its ramifications on Tolkien's views on the races of Beowulf, particularly the Geats, see Drout's "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England" (236ff). 219 towards allegorical interpretations of his work (and to allegory in general),138 but this aversion is no reason to avoid seeing the allegorical connections that are most definitely present in the work.

What has received less critical attention than Tolkien's denial is the implication of one of its main corollaries, specifically that if there is a connection between Rohan and

Anglo-Saxon England, then the connection is in the relationship between that culture and its most influential neighbour, namely Gondor and Rome respectively. There is, therefore, another explanation for his denial that is equally important to his distaste for allegory, specifically that Tolkien is suggesting, intentionally or otherwise, that an analysis of the connections between these fantasy and real world cultures in absolute terms may not be as fruitful as an analysis of them in relative terms. This direction is significant; as with Kingsley's and Morris's, Tolkien's image of Anglo-Saxon culture is inextricably connected to his image of Roman culture and so to discuss either of them in isolation would provide less complete conclusions. But it is first necessary to interrogate the above assumption that Gondor and Rome can be seen as parallel. Shippey mentions this connection as a possibility, also putting forth the "mythical Wales" of the Kings

Coel, Arthur, and Lear {Road 118-19). Sandra Ballif Straubhaar has demonstrated the utility of pursuing the identification of Gondor and Rome ("Myth"), but it is Judy Ann

Ford who presents the case most fully. Ford goes through a wide range of connections between the two entities, from their southern locations (60), to their architectures (61), to their expansionist histories (62), to their cultural habits such as their love of luxury and

138 For Tolkien's dislike of allegory in general, see his famous letter to Milton Waldman (Letters 143-61, especially 145-46). For his rejection of allegorical readings of LotR, see the foreword to the second edition (FotR xvii-xviii). Note, however, that Tolkien draws a distinction between "allegory" and "applicability" in a 1957 letter to Herbert Schiro (Letters 262). 220 tendency towards late marriage and childlessness (63), to their encounters (especially military) with other racial groups (63-64), and so on. With such evidence to back her,

Ford concludes that "[t]he account of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings may be read as the story of the fall of Rome with a happy ending: a decaying western empire which did not quite fall, which somehow withstood the onslaught of armies from the east, and which was restored to glory" (54). Shippey cautions against such an interpretation, noting that

"Middle-Earth is remarkable [...] for the absence in it of references to Latinate languages or peoples; even Gondor is not very like Rome" ("Creation" 293-94).

Shippey's point about the lack of Latinate influence on the Gondorian tongue is well taken - one would expect such an influence from Tolkien - but all that this suggests is that Tolkien may not have been either as conscious of the connection he was drawing or as desirous of flagging it. While the proof is not as strong as that for the equivalence between Rohan and Anglo-Saxon England, which really is nailed down by the Rohirrim speaking Old English, I nevertheless find it thoroughly convincing.

Accepting the applicability of Rohan and Gondor to Anglo-Saxon England and the late Roman Empire returns us to the direction that Tolkien's denial obliquely suggests: what is the relationship between the Rohirrim and the Gondorians and what does that tell us about Tolkien's conceptions of their real world counterparts? I would suggest that the answer is related to the notion of racial blending that Tolkien draws in part from Jusserand and, as we shall see, from other critics of Anglo-Saxon literature.

We have already seen how Tolkien believed that "the inhabitants of Britain are made of the same 'racial' ingredients" ("English and Welsh" 170), but there is a logical corollary to this argument that he explores much more fully in LotR: if the different races of 221 modern Europe are composed of the same ingredients but in different proportions, then the historiography of Europe must include the exploration of how and under what circumstances the various different blendings occurred. LotR, I would suggest, is on one level Tolkien's attempt to explore the ramifications of one of the most important of these blendings in English history - that of the Anglo-Saxon and Roman cultures.

Narrating the Ideal Racial Contact

Faramir's conversation with Frodo and Sam is again a sound starting point for discussion; after describing the decay of Gondorian culture and particularly of its failed ruling line, he turns to the solution. As in Kingsley's conception of history, a decayed race requires regeneration from an external source:

But the stewards were wiser and more fortunate. Wiser, for they

recruited the strength of our people from the sturdy folk of the sea-coast,

and from the hardy mountaineers of Ered Nimrais. And they made a truce

with the proud peoples of the North, who often had assailed us, men of

fierce valour, but our kin from afar off, unlike the wild Easterlings or the

cruel Haradrim.

So it came to pass in the days of Cirion the Twelfth Steward (and my

father is the six and twentieth) that they rode to our aid and at the great

Field of Celebrant they destroyed our enemies that had seized our northern

provinces. These are the Rohirrim, as we name them, masters of horses,

and we ceded to them the fields of Calenardhon that are since called

Rohan; for that province had long been sparsely peopled. And they 222

became our allies, and have ever proved true to us, aiding us at need, and

guarding our northern marches and the Gap of Rohan. (77354-55)

It is readily apparent how some critics could see the similarities between this narrative

and the historical interactions between Rome and the Germanic tribes that populated its

northern borders; "the proud people of the North, who often had assailed us, men of

fierce valour" describes those tribes well, and the reference to the Rohirrim driving off

the "enemies that had seized our northern provinces" invokes strongly the Saxon defeat

of the Picts, Scots, et al., who had conquered Romanized Britain. But it is equally

apparent how other critics might not see it this way. Tolkien has provided enough

connections to make a strong association between Faramir's tale and the historical

account of the retreat of the legions from Britain, but has then taken this manufactured

opportunity to change the entire tenor of those events. Bede's account of the coming of

the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to England is far from a purely honourable story (they

treacherously turn on their British allies and hosts, for example [Bk. 1 Ch. 15]), but

Tolkien has rewritten this early stage of Anglo-Saxon history into what he thought it

ideally could have been. The Anglo-Saxons are recast as the closest friends and saviours

of Rome; instead of England being won through Anglo-Saxon conquest and trickery, it is

earned by the Anglo-Saxons through valorous deeds, and then granted to them by its

lawful owners. Suddenly, the Anglo-Saxons are connected to England by something

more natural than the claims of the conqueror. This is a reclamation project of massive

proportions, and therefore one which only fantasy can encompass, but the appeal of such

a recharacterization was nevertheless quite real for Tolkien. 223

This is, of course, only symbiotic contact, not yet racial blending, but Faramir moves quickly on to describe the second step towards that end. He begins, not surprisingly given his Gondorian perspective, by emphasizing what his country has given to the Rohirrim: "[o]f our lore and manners they have learned what they would, and their lords speak our speech at need; yet for the most part they hold by the ways of their own

fathers and to their own memories, and they speak among themselves their own North tongue" (355). Tolkien's Anglo-Saxons absorb the civilization of their southern

neighbours, beginning the blending of the two cultures. Tolkien, however, makes clear

that the Rohirrim only take what they choose, which places the agency for this cultural

transmission in the hands of the northerners: the Rohirrim "learned" rather than the

Gondorians taught. Moreover, their Germanic cultural tradition remains strong - "they

hold by the ways of their own fathers and to their own memories" - and, perhaps most

importantly to Tolkien, their linguistic heritage remains intact. We have here a subtle

assertion, imbedded rebelliously in Faramir's otherwise thoroughly reifying and ranking

theory, that the Germanic cultural tradition can hold its own against that of the Roman;

despite Faramir's southern bias, Tolkien momentarily breaks his narratorial persona since

he cannot pass up on an opportunity to indicate that northern culture is not inferior to and

should not be supplanted by the southern.

Faramir's narrative does not end there; he describes a third stage in the blending

of the two groups: "[y]et now, if the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us,

enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scarce

claim any longer the title High. We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with

memory of other things" (355). This is, perhaps, the single most important concept of all 224 of Tolkien's racial thinking in LotR. The races do not simply influence each other, but actually blur into each other. There is clearly a fourth stage, unspoken by Faramir since it has not yet happened, in which the Gondorians and the Rohirrim will become either

indistinguishable or, like the English and Welsh, only distinguishable by relatively

insignificant variations in the quantities of their racial ingredients. This fourth step

occurs outside of Faramir's discussion with the hobbits, but nonetheless centres on

Faramir himself, specifically his highly symbolic marriage to Eowyn, the highest-ranking

lady of Rohan. Note that while Faramir is describing cultural influence, his marriage to

Eowyn, and the subsequent mixture of the two ruling lines of the countries, indicates that

this influence is moving beyond cultural and into racial blending. Tolkien has provided

through Faramir's narrative, a step-by-step theoretical reconstruction of how the

European races evolved into their modern forms. Or rather, since Tolkien was well

aware of the differences between his fantasy and the historical realities, this narrative is a

reconstruction of how those races ideally should have evolved. His model describes a

steady progression from political alliance, to free cultural exchange, to genetic mixture.

While Kingsley's model of English racial history could be visualized as steady

degeneration followed by a regular infusion of regenerative blood, and while Morris's

model could be visualized as a wave pattern fluctuating between civilization and

barbarism, Tolkien's model can be visualized as different lines steadily and progressively

converging into one. 225

"The Blended Stream"139

We have seen above that this notion of blending appears in Tolkien's criticism partly in response to Jusserand, but Jusserand's ideas were only one facet of a larger debate in the medieval literary criticism of the time: should the English and their literature be seen as a product of the northern Germanic tradition or of the Mediterranean tradition? This debate was of extreme importance to two critics that Tolkien respected highly, Ker and Chambers. I will begin with Ker's opinion. One of his central arguments in The Dark Ages is that the shift from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages, which he situates at 1100, is marked and profound; the Dark Ages, he claims, had "a definite end, whatever their beginning may have been" (8). Ker felt that this distinction was particularly significant for the poetic tradition (he accepted the continuity of the prose tradition): "[ejverything that we can think of in modern poetry (except always the survivals and revivals of Teutonic literary verse, and some few other antiquities) is related to the French and Provencal literature of the year 1100 as it is not related to anything in the Dark Ages - the earlier Middle Age" (7). Respect for Ker aside, this argument would have been unpalatable to Tolkien. Ker's marginalization of the contribution of the North to English poetry - a marginalization reinforced grammatically by its relegation to parentheses - would have been bad enough, but to have all the credit given to the French would have added significant insult to injury for the gallophobic

Tolkien.

Tolkien could not deny the importance of the continental tradition to English poetry, but he could refute the corollary that the Old English tradition was unimportant.

Tolkien's belief in the continuity of the English poetic tradition underlies much of his

139 Ker {Dark 12). 226 criticism but it manifests itself most fully in his "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhad." As mentioned above, this work is a strong example of Tolkien's impulse to localize texts as specifically English. While Ker was focusing primarily on poetry, the core of Tolkien's argument is nevertheless a rejection of Ker's type of thinking: it asserts the existence of a school of English writing that "represents [.. .] a form of English whose development from an antecedent Old English type was relatively little disturbed" (106-7). He describes this English in terms of its age, richness, regularity, and finally pedigree. In his words, it has

preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long

relegated to the 'uplands' struggling once more for expression in

apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but

rather one that has never fallen back into 'lewdness,' and has contrived in

troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman.

(106)

The influence of the Mediterranean versus northern type of thinking is clear. First,

Tolkien refuses to accept the marginalization - note the highly pregnant quotation marks

around "uplands" - of the surviving examples of the northern tradition; they are not

anomalies, he is arguing, but a vibrant, living tradition. Second, he rejects the notion of

the inferiority of the northern tradition; these examples have no need to "emulat[e] their

betters," since the continental tradition has no claim to that status. Finally, he reclaims

the "country" half of the city-country divide, asserting a gentility in the latter that equals

that of the former. 227

In and of itself, this defense of the continuity of the northern tradition throughout medieval England does not necessarily support the notion of the blending of the continental and northern traditions. But the fact of the matter is that the southern influence was never really in doubt, and so Tolkien was not arguing for the superiority of the northern tradition but merely for its validity. Once this validity is accepted, then productive discussions of blending can take place. An excellent image of such blending occurs in Tolkien's other main article-length work on Middle English, "Chaucer as

Philologist: The Reeve's Tale.'''' He pays particular attention to the diversity that the tale presents: "in an East Anglian reeve, regaling Southern (and largely London) folk, on the road in Kent, with imitations of northern talk, which was imported southwards by the attraction of the Universities, we have a picture in little of his origins of literary English"

(6). These "origins of literary English" are the product not only of the London literary community but rather of the contact between that community and a wide variety of others, including the northern. Tolkien is arguing that Chaucer was indebted to the northern tradition and, more importantly, that Chaucer himself was acknowledging and even dramatizing this debt by painting this "picture in little" in the Reeve's Tale. Tolkien published these two articles on Middle English relatively early (1924 and 1934, respectively), but he continued to feel throughout his career that the point needed to be reinforced.140 In his "Valedictory Address," he states that the "[s]o-called Anglo-Saxon cannot be regarded merely as a root, it is already in flower. But it is a root, for it exhibits qualities and characteristics that have remained ever since a steadfast ingredient in

140 This ongoing interest is due in part to Tolkien's strong aversion to the dividing tension within the English departments at his universities between the "language" and the "literature" streams. For a discussion of the importance of this division between philology and literary criticism, see Chapter 1 of Shippey's Road, especially pp. 21-22. 228

English" (230). Note the return of the notion of English being composed of

"ingredients"; Tolkien may have focused primarily on the northern root, but he believed

strongly that that root was joined by others, including the southern. As Drout states in regards to "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidhad," however, these types of debates "are not the kind tha[t] can ever be resolved" ("Scholarship" 128). This is where the power of

fantasy comes in. Tolkien was aware of this lack of hard historical evidence, but in his

fantasies such evidence can be imagined: he can prove his case by narrating the very

moment at which the blending of the northern and the southern takes place. This type of

proof may have convinced no one, but that does not mean that Tolkien did not feel

satisfaction at creating it.

But what did Tolkien see as the real difference between the two streams, the

northern and the southern, that are to be blended in the making of the English? This

brings us to Chambers' opinions on the debate. While his teacher Ker emphasized the

continental, Chambers argued strongly for a middle ground: "[n]o student of our origins

has any business to study them in a partizan spirit. We have got to be both 'Anglo-

Saxons' and 'Mediterraneans,' and that simultaneously, when we study our beginnings.

For, from the Seventh Century, the two elements have been combined" ("Heroic" xiv).

The influence of this argument on Tolkien's belief in the blending of the northern and

southern is clear. What is particularly interesting about Chambers' argument, however, is

its emphasis on the seventh century as the moment, though obviously an extended

moment, of this blending. He goes on, stating that "the birth of our England dates from

the Seventh Century. Then England was brought into touch with European civilization."

From Chambers' perspective, the contact between two cultural traditions has the power to 229 create something entirely new. The English do not exist before the seventh century, despite the presence of the Anglo-Saxons on the island of Britain; it is only when these

Anglo-Saxons come into contact with the Mediterranean tradition that Englishness leaps forth into being. Tolkien, I would suggest, was fascinated by this idea and with the process by which it would have occurred, hence his inclusion of Faramir's model of racial blending.

Christianity's Contribution

Ideologically, Tolkien had a compelling reason to agree with Chambers' thinking, specifically the fact that it offered a method of resolving two of Tolkien's great but

seemingly contradictory loves: the pagan, heroic literature of the North and the Christian

learning of the South. This is why the seventh century was of such importance to

Chambers; it was the century of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. In

Chambers, therefore, Tolkien found a critic who refused to acknowledge the English as

essentially one or the other, Germanic or Christian, but rather inherently and definitively

both. Such is, after all, the core of Chambers' notion: "English" does not and cannot

simply equal "Anglo-Saxon" nor can it equal "Mediterranean/Christian," since both of

those entities were in existence for centuries before the advent of the "English."

Chambers closes his essay with the following depiction of the cultural contact

between the Anglo-Saxons and the Mediterraneans:

Many different standards and ideals were brought into contact in

England in the Seventh Century and the generations following: the

civilization of Rome, the loyalties and the violence of the Germanic 230

Heroic Age, the teaching of Christianity. We see these things combining,

in different ways, in the historical record of Bede, in Beowulf, in the Old

English poetry dealing with definitely Christian topics. The elements are,

as yet, not perfectly fused: from their combination the civilization and

ethics of modern Europe were to grow in the fulness of time, (xxxii)

Compare this passage with Faramir's depiction of the results of the Gondorian blending with the Rohirrim: "as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts" (7T 355-56). Tolkien felt it vital to his fantasy that it not be overburdened by Christian allegory, so he chooses to "not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion'" {Letters 172), but he

nevertheless includes the other two of the three elements that Chambers mentions as blending to form the English: the "civilization of Rome" and the "violence of the

Germanic Heroic Age." Tolkien has made an effort to ameliorate the slightly

problematic emphasis on "violence" in Chambers by selecting the words "war" and

"valour," but the thinking is the same: one part northern martial culture added to one part

southern learning, bake for a century.

Tolkien is able in his criticism (particularly in "Monsters") to give the third

element, the "teaching of Christianity," its all-important due. After discussing what he

considered to be the northern, pagan imagination's belief in the final defeat of the gods

and humanity, Tolkien, as usual, emphasizes what he considered unique to the English: 231

But in England this imagination was brought into touch with Christendom,

and with the Scriptures. The process of 'conversion' was a long one, but

some of its effects were doubtless immediate: an alchemy of change

(producing ultimately the medieval) was at once at work [...]. It is

through such a blending that there was available to a poet who set out to

write a poem - and in the case of Beowulf we may probably use this very

word - on a scale and plan unlike a minstrel's lay, both new faith and new

learning (or education), and also a body of native tradition (itself requiring

to be learned) for the changed mind to contemplate together. ("Monsters"

21)

Tolkien is here talking primarily about the production of a new type of literature, but the ideas apply equally well to his notion of race. Note first that we have here the explanation for Tolkien's ongoing insistence that Beowulf and the texts discussed above are uniquely English. Because the rest of the North was not exposed to Christianity at this specific (and early) moment, the "alchemy of change" that works on the English imagination distinguishes it from the rest of the Germanic world. "Norse is Norse," after all, and this "touch of Christendom" is one of the definitive ingredients that make "the

English English." Beowulf, Finnsburgh, Ancrene Wisse, and so on, Tolkien felt, all show the unique stamp of this "changed mind" that only the English possessed.

Equally significant is the fact that Tolkien takes his notion of blending remarkably far in this passage, even farther than does Faramir. Faramir constructs "skills and knowledge" as the contribution of the southern tradition, in contrast to the martial contribution of the North. But in "Monsters," Tolkien characterizes the northern tradition 232 as "requiring to be learned," which removes the slight disparaging taint that remains in

Faramir's biased account. To be sure, Tolkien does not put the traditions on perfectly even footing - the southern learning is further defined by the term "education," while the northern is left more ambiguous - but he nonetheless gives more credit than would have been generally accepted to the intellectual aspect of the Germanic tradition; recall, for

example, Chambers' "the teaching of Christianity." Tolkien is arguing that this tradition

may have been "native" in the sense of being present on the island for generations, but it

was most certainly not "native" in the sense of being intrinsic, bred-in-the-bone type

knowledge: it required acquisition and, therefore, some measure of education, even if not

in the formal sense that the southern tradition would have demanded.

Tolkien felt, however, that on its own this northern tradition was not English;

rather, it was merely the northern tradition located in the area now called England. Part

of the reason that Tolkien was so emphatic that the English were unique was that he felt

the northern tradition was intrinsically insufficient. For Tolkien, this insufficiency was

tied up into two northern concepts: "lof' ("praise") and "dom" ("reputation"), which

Tolkien defined jointly as "the noble pagan's desire for the merited praise of the noble"

and for the "limited 'immortality' of renown" ("Monsters" 36). Earle's arguments about

"lof influenced Tolkien, who readily admitted the debt ("Monsters" 36). Earle argued in

his introduction to his translation of Beowulf 'that "[m]ore than any other word that can be

named, that word LOF is the Motto of this Poem. What a prince must aim at is PRAISE,

that is to say, the moral approbation of his peers" (xcv). For Tolkien, the last three words

would have been particularly pregnant, insofar as they indicate that the nobility of the

North was misdirected; instead of doing good deeds for their inherent worth or for the 233 approbation of God alone, the Germanic hero does them for specifically worldly renown, the "limited" rather than the unlimited "immortality."

Tolkien explores these issues most fully in his drama cum essay "The

Homecoming of Beorhtnoth." This text is a critique on Beorhtnoth (the leader of the

English forces against the Viking raiders at Maldon in 991), primarily for "his ofermode," in the words of the poet of The Battle of Maldon. Tolkien argues that the desire for "lof' and "dom" leads Anglo-Saxon heroes to "excess" (144) using Beorhtnoth and Beowulf as his prime examples. This excess manifests itself in these heroes' decisions to treat battles that have grave consequences for numerous individuals merely as opportunities for increasing their "lof rather than as occasions to do right.

Beorhtnoth, as the poem tells us, "ongan for his ofermode / alyfan landes to fela lapere deode" (89-90), which Tolkien translates as "in his overmastering pride actually yielded ground to the enemy, as he should not have done" (143). This translation is, to say the least, highly interpretive. Tolkien inserts "actually" in order to cast Beorhtnoth's decision as surprising, even absurd, while "as he should not have done" is a drastic expansion of "to fela" ("too much"). This is not to say that Tolkien's interpretation is not accurate; it may indeed reflect the intent of the poet very well, but if it does, then at least as much credit needs to go to Tolkien's intuitive powers as to his textual evidence. As the case is, the single most prominent debate surrounding Maldon since "Homecoming" has revolved around attempting to solve the "ofermod" crux, and many critics still disagree about whether the poem is critical, forgiving, or laudatory of the English general.141 For Tolkien, however, there was no such debate. The folly of Beorhtnoth's

141 For perhaps the most significant arguments against Tolkien's interpretation, see George Clark's "The Battle of Maldon: A Heroic Poem" and "The Hero of Maldon: Vir Pius et Strenuus." 234 decision was clear, as was its motivation: a desire, in Earle's words, for the "approbration of his peers" rather than that of a higher power. Beowulf, Tolkien suggests, makes a parallel decision in his fight with Grendel, since he "does more than he need, eschewing weapons in order to make his struggle a 'sporting' fight: which will enhance his personal glory; though it will put him in unnecessary peril, and weaken his chances of ridding the

Danes of an intolerable affliction" (145). Tolkien, again showing his localizing tendency, declares that the mistake of Beorhtnoth - and by extension Beowulf too - was "a noble error, or the error of a noble" (148). The Germanic tradition was, therefore, at its heart inherently flawed by being the product, aim, and desire of the privileged few, rather than

of the broader community. Tolkien believed that the remedy for such a flaw was not to

excise the noble impulse behind the error, but to focus that nobility at an all-inclusive

community, which for Tolkien always suggested the Church.

Chance analyses this issue in regard to Tolkien's short fictions, dividing them into

two distinct groups. She argues that in his "medieval parodies" of 1945 to 1955 "Tolkien

focuses primarily on the failure of Germanic values," but in "the fairy-stories" of 1945 to

1967 "Tolkien focuses on the success of Christian values" {Tolkien's Art 119).142 A

central concern of Tolkien's writings in this period was, therefore, his belief in

Christianity's ability to complement the flaws of Germanic heroism. And it is indeed a

complementary relationship: Tolkien did not want Christianity to act as a substitute for

the "Germanic values," since those values were "merited" and "praiseworthy," even if

they were misdirected. Tolkien famously pointed out in "Monsters" what he felt to be the

greatest of these values, the "theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early

142 For further discussion of Tolkien's sense of the insufficiency of Germanic paganism, see for example Shippey {Author 150-51). 235

Northern literature" (20). Tolkien is here assuming that common to the North was a belief that the history of the world is essentially a long defeat, that the final fall of the gods and humanity is inevitable; the "theory of courage," Tolkien asserts, is the way that these cultures are able to respond to or at least cope with this terrible idea. Shippey characterizes this response as believing that "victory or defeat have nothing to do with right and wrong, and that even if the universe is controlled beyond redemption by hostile and evil forces, that is not enough to make a hero change sides" (Author 150). Inevitable the victory of evil may be, the logic runs, but that does not make it irresistible. This northern answer was insufficient for Tolkien, since it lacks the hope for eternal salvation that Christianity offers, but it nonetheless indicated to Tolkien a moral resiliency in the northern races that he felt made them "good soil" to receive the Christian message, to borrow an image from the parable of the Sower. Hence Tolkien's choice of the word

"contribution" to describe the theory: this word necessary implies the survival, rather than the replacement, of the essence behind the theory, even if Christianity makes the theory itself obsolete.

Recall that Tolkien's description in "Monsters" of the "blending" of the northern

"imagination" with "Christendom" asserted that this mixture "produc[ed] ultimately the medieval." Tolkien's meaning is clearer in Critics: "Christianity infused into the northern world (if we consider England), or the infusion of the North into the southern world (if we consider Europe more generally) make what we call the mediaeval. That process begins at once - some of the most fundamental changes of that alchemy are almost immediate, indeed instantaneous" (Critics B 119). Tolkien is here engaging (and attempting to destabilize) a more general discourse, such as that of Ker, that aimed in part 236 to establish essential characteristics that could distinguish the early from the late Middle

Ages. It is, however, Chambers that Tolkien is engaging most directly. Chambers provides a description that is remarkably similar to Tolkien's:

Now in Anglo-Saxon England this Heroic Age was brought into

contact with Christianity, and with all the civilization of the Mediterranean

which came to England with Christianity. It is just this which makes the

Seventh Century in England so exciting an epoch. Christian gentleness,

working upon the passions of the Heroic Age, produces at once a type

which is the rough outline of what later becomes the mediaeval ideal of the

knight, or the modern ideal of the gentleman. ("Heroic" xxvii)

Tolkien's use of the term "alchemy" is apt, since we have in these two passages

something akin to a chemical equation:

Heroic Age + Christianity -> Medieval (and eventually Modern) Ideal

The intense determinism of this "alchemy" is almost mind-boggling. It asserts a direct,

causal relationship between the events of a single century of Anglo-Saxon history and the

production of nothing less than the "ideal" individual in the later Middle Ages. The

changes that occur are both "fundamental" and "instantaneous." Moreover, they are not

isolated to the medieval but rather form the foundation for "the modern ideal" of human

behaviour as well, creating a direct continuity from the seventh through to the twentieth

century.

Tolkien's debt to Chambers' argument is indicated not only by his echoing of it in

"Monsters" but also by his selection in "Homecoming" of Sir Gawain as the moral

contrast for Beorhtnoth and Beowulf. This "medieval ideal of the knight," or in 237

Tolkien's words "the exemplar of chivalry" (149), preserves the noble virtues of the

Germanic tradition, while tempering them with Christian motivations, specifically the desire for service. Gawain, Tolkien declares, is

deeply concerned for his own honour, and though the things considered

honourable may have shifted or been enlarged, loyalty to word and to

allegiance, and unflinching courage remain. These are tested in

adventures no nearer to ordinary life than Grendel or the dragon; but

Gawain's conduct is made more worthy, and more worth considering,

again because he is a subordinate. (149)

This image of the servant as moral ideal is equally prominent in the hobbit heroes of

LotR, particularly Sam; it is the single image that, for Tolkien, most fully reconciled the

ideals of the northern and the southern components of the English character. The servant

can engage in all of the heroism of Beowulf and Beorhtnoth without crossing over into

"excess," because the end of the heroism is not the selfish "lof' but the needs of the

other, in the case of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "the safety and dignity

of his lord" (149). From this perspective, the Germanic tradition provides Sam's and

Gawain's "passions," to borrow Chambers' word, while the Christian tradition provides

the focus or direction for those passions.

As mentioned above, Chambers and Tolkien were engaging in a discourse that

attempted to explain the differences between the early and late medieval period. One of

the critical voices that they were most specifically countering was Ker's. Ker's thinking

is actually quite similar to Chambers' and Tolkien's, but his desire to delineate harshly

the pre-Conquest Dark Ages from the post-Conquest Middle Ages leads him to very 238 different conclusions. Relying strongly on Tacitus's image of the Germanic North, he argues that

The Northern world before 1100 was still in great part the world of the

Germania, with its indomitable liberty, its protestant self-will; after 1100

Germania is harmonised in the new conception of Christendom [...]. If

this [unity] be illusory in some ways, if the apparent unity of Christendom

cover no less misrule and unreason in the twelfth century than went naked

in earlier times, still it is hardly possible to mistake the growth of a new

spirit, in virtue of which the different nations are related more closely than

they had ever been before. {Dark 5-6)

The logical pattern here is familiar: the addition of Christianity to the northern world brings about a fundamental change of temper. The localization of this blending at 1100, however, has significant ideological ramifications. Specifically, it consciously diminishes the changes that took place among those Germanic peoples, such as the

Anglo-Saxons, who were converted to Christianity early in the so-called Dark Ages,

since these conversions brought about no true change in the "protestant self-will" of those

nations. The hundreds of years between the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the

seventh and eighth centuries are, for example, cast as merely following a holding pattern,

waiting for a truer conversion, a change to the "unity of Christendom." Ker is taking

significance away from the Anglo-Saxon conversion particularly pointedly through his

selection of 1100 as the key date, which suggests that the arrival of the Normans was

somehow the fulfillment of the conversion of England, that the Anglo-Saxon conversion

was only a typological precursor of this more important event. In the broadest sense, Ker 239 is also arguing that the conversion of any one northern nation is insignificant until all of the North has been converted; this logic is exactly the counter of the type of localizing that Tolkien argues for, since it admits significance only to the general. This impulse towards generalization is most clearly demonstrated in the fact that Ker identifies "unity" as the primary product of the Christianization of the North.

Ker would probably have been willing to accept the formula used above to schematize Chambers' thinking, which suggests that that formula is too general to represent fully Tolkien's thinking. The following variation takes into account, therefore, the localization that Tolkien, and to some extent Chambers, considered integral to their theories:

Early Anglo-Saxon Age + Christianity -» (Ideal) English

Interestingly, this localization leads to a certain problematic logic, specifically that the

addition of a non-racial element (Christianity) to a racial one (the Anglo-Saxons) has the power to yield a new racial product (the English). Taking this to its logical end suggests that since Christianity is an essential element of Englishness, then to not be Christian is to

not really be English. The implications of this type of thinking are diverse, but not least

of all is the blurring of the line between racial definition and cultural or religious

definition. This ambiguity was, I would suggest, a key characteristic of Tolkien's racial

thinking. As mentioned above, a similar blurring is present in Faramir's theory: an

uncertainty about when the early stages of racial contact, characterized more by cultural

exhange, shift into the later stages of more biological blending. I believe that this

uncertainty was one of the motivating factors behind Tolkien' decision to use his fantasy

as a way of exploring exactly how such a blending process could occur, to demonstrate 240 how cultural and racial blending are not distinct but rather merely different poles of the same spectrum, or stages in essentially the same process.

"Gallic Criticism"

The line of transmission from Chambers' criticism to Tolkien's criticism to

Tolkien's fiction is relatively direct. Faramir's theory of racial blending is built around the same basic premises as Chambers' theory about the origin of the English. The

Rohirrim represent the Germanic tradition, the passionate imagination that is noble if misdirected, while the Gondorians represent southern learning and civilization, certainly not Christian but the closest thing to it in Middle-earth. Neither of them has achieved the medieval independently, but both are in the process of achieving it through their mutual

interactions; likewise, neither has become English on their own, but they are on the cusp of doing so by their blending. As influential as Chambers' work was on Tolkien's thinking about the method by which the English race was born, however, I would suggest that Jusserand was a primary influence on his understanding of the natures of the Anglo-

Saxons and the modern English themselves. I will devote much of the remainder of this

chapter to Tolkien's representations of these natures.

Tolkien's earlier drafts of "Monsters" include a number of rough edges that were

polished away before its final publication, including a number of derisive jabs at criticism

he considered inferior. His ire is particularly raised by Jusserand and his Literary

History, Tolkien's attack on which is unfortunately explicitly racial. He describes

Jusserand's work as an excellent example of "a Gallic kind, whether by blood or

adoption," that demonstrates "the feebleness and obtuseness of the Latin (or especially 241 the Gallic) when he attempts to deal with non-Latin ingredients of English (and especially therefore Old English)" (Critics B 92). Tolkien's vitriol here is an indicator of how significant Jusserand's arguments were to his own ideas about the Anglo-Saxons.

While Tolkien's racial attack here is inappropriate, he probably saw it merely as responding in kind, since Jusserand is quite harsh in his description of the Germanic peoples, and of the Anglo-Saxons in particular. Jusserand declares that the Germanic tribes/Anglo-Saxons, "continually at strife with their neighbours, and warring against

each other, without riches or culture, ignorant and savage, preserved their strength and kept their ferocity. They hated peace, despised the arts, and had no literature but

drinking- and war-songs" (23). He goes on to describe them as "not inventive" (24),

learning only with difficulty (24, 38), dependent on mixture with other races for

development in terms of manners and customs, lacking in curiosity (36), gleeful "at the

thought of so many corpses, of so great a carnage and so much gore" (47), unable to

engage in true repartee since "nuances and refined sentiments escape [their]

comprehension" (43), and interested only in the "simple and primitive tastes" (54): orgies

(56), "fighting well, and after the fight eating and drinking heartily" (54).143 Any or all of

the above comments would have angered Tolkien, especially as they are often contrasted

directly to southern, and specifically French, refinements. Drout points to the accusations

of drunkenness as particularly irksome to Tolkien, who calls it Jusserand's "drink-

complex" (Critics A 50), or in Drout's words "Jusserand's tendency to read any reference

14 I have here conflated Jusserand's descriptions of the Germanic peoples themselves with his descriptions of their poetry and their poetic heroes, since they all contribute to his representation of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultures. 242 to drink in Beowulf as indicating wide-spread inebriation among the Anglo-Saxons"

(Introduction ll).144

Tolkien was able to mock Jusserand extensively in the unpublished Critics, while

his sense of academic decorum overrides his distaste in the published "Monsters." But

Tolkien could not leave aside these criticisms entirely, and as usual it is in his fantasy that

he is able to declare, however indirectly, those things that he could not say in his

scholarship. In the verbal confrontation between Theoden, king of the Riders of Rohan,

and Saruman, the wizard who has been orchestrating attacks against their lands, Tolkien

constructs the difference between the two sides in terms reminiscent of Jusserand's

disparagements of the primitive Anglo-Saxons. Saruman, momentarily losing his

composure, lashes out at the king and at his race: "Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but

a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among

the dogs?" (7T 225-26). "Dotard" is obviously a comment on Theoden's age, but it also

evokes Jusserand's assertions about the Anglo-Saxon lack of ingenuity and inability to

Drout's analysis of the influence of Jusserand's criticism on Tolkien's thinking points also to the famous allegory of the tower in his Beowulf essay. The final version of this attack on the 5eow///"scholarship up to that time is well known, and so need not be rehearsed here ("Monsters" 7-8); for the most convincing interpretation of the published allegory to date, see Shippey's/Joerc/(43-44). The earlier versions in Critics are, however, quite different in emphasis. In these versions, which use the image of a rock garden rather than a tower, it is specifically an Anglo-Saxon who constructs it, rather than the generic man of "Monsters": A man found a mass of old stone in a unused patch, and made of it a rock garden; but his friends coming perceived that the stones had once been part of a more ancient building, and they turned them upsidedown to look for hidden inscriptions; some suspected a deposit of coal under the soil and proceeded to dig for it. They all said "this garden is most interesting," but they said also "what a jumble and confusion it is in!" - and even the gardener's best friend, who might have been expected to understand what he had been about, was heard to say: he's such a tiresome fellow- fancy using those beautiful stones just to set off commonplace flowers that are found in every garden: he has no sense of proportion, poor man." And of course, the less friendly, when they were told the gardener was an Anglo- Saxon and often attended to beer, understood at once: a love of freedom may go with beer and blue eyes, but that yellow hair unfortunately grows always on a muddled head. (Critics A 32) The version from Critics B (81), though slightly longer, is essentially the same. Note the emphasis on beer and the "muddled head" of the Anglo-Saxon, which show the influence of Jusserand. 243 learn, while "thatched barn" reiterates the architectural - and broadly technological - imbalance between the Rohirrim and their neighbours (Saruman's own fortress is an architectural masterpiece of Middle-earth and is, notably, of southern design and

construction). More significantly, Saruman passes judgments on Anglo-Saxon behaviour, even echoing Jusserand's "drink-complex." It is also possible that the "brats

roll[ing] on the floor among the dogs," with its sense of indiscriminate procreation, may be Tolkien's suitable-for-readers-of-all-ages version of Jusserand's claims about Anglo-

Saxon orgies. With these similarities in mind, I would suggest that Saruman is a parody

of Jusserand, ostensibly a friend to the Rohirrim/Anglo-Saxons, but one whose friendship

is a veneer covering disdain. The depth of Tolkien's feelings for such "Gallic criticism"

may be reflected in the fact that of all the enemies in LotR, Saruman is the one who sinks

the lowest, becoming a slave to the most petty spite and malice.

The parody of Jusserand is particularly strong in Tolkien's description of

Saruman's voice, his most definitive feature and his most dangerous weapon:

Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an

enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom

report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little

power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a

delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and

reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise

themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by

contrast. (TT'222) 244

This passage reveals an anxiety in Tolkien about the relationship between scholarly knowledge and common perception. Tolkien is well aware that many people had

"listened unwarily" to Jusserand's Literary History and while they may be unable to

"report the words that they heard," they were most certainly influenced by them nonetheless. Note also Tolkien's repeated use of the word "seem" - Gallic criticism, in his view, is too much surface and too little substance. Tolkien is not really attacking

Jusserand's statements on the level of historical fact (though he certainly could have done so). Tolkien grants that Jusserand may have the bare facts correct, but he suggests that the interpretion of those facts is anything but trustworthy - it may "seem wise and reasonable," but the trappings of wisdom, Tolkien suggests, are far from wisdom itself.

The parody of Jusserand does not reside exclusively in the characterization of

Saruman and his voice, however, but also in the comparison between the wizard and the

other participants in the verbal confrontration, those who are "harsh and uncouth," particularly Theoden. The response to Theoden's voice is quite telling: "[t]he Riders

gazed up at Theoden like men startled out of a dream. Harsh as an old raven's their

master's voice sounded in their ears after the music of Saruman" (225). But Theoden's

words, though harsh, have depth, while Saruman's are all surface. We have here the old

contrast between Truth and Art, between honest communication and empty rhetoric. The

choice of the raven is conscious: it evokes OSinn's two familiar ravens, and through

OSinn, the northern forms of poetic expression, one of that god's common associations.

The contest, therefore, is not only between honesty and deceit but also between the

northern and southern poetic styles, with the harshness of the northern having the clear

preference over the refinements of the southern. Note also that Odinn is associated with 245 wisdom, as are his ravens, whose names, Huginn and Muninn, translate as "thought" and

"memory." Theoden's voice, therefore, may be the jarring cry of the raven, but it is a cry that has thoughtfulness and deliberation as its essence. Saruman, too, is described in terms of an animal associated with the divine: he is called "a snake coiling itself to strike"

(225), a clear Satanic reference that completes the already strong contrast between wisdom and substance on the one hand and rhetoric and manipulation on the other.

Tolkien is admitting that the Anglo-Saxons may have been harsh, but he is also arguing that harsh and authentic is most certainly preferable to musical and hollow.

The Elegiac Anglo-Saxons

I would suggest that the umbrage that Tolkien took at all of Jusserand's attacks

listed above would have paled in comparison to his response to one passage in particular:

The same unchanging genius manifests itself in the national epic, in the

short songs, and even in the prose chronicles of the Anglo-Saxons. To

their excessive enthusiasms succeed periods of complete depression; their

orgies are followed by despair; they sacrifice their life in battle without a

frown, and yet, when the hour for thought has come, they are harassed by

the idea of death. Their national religion foresaw the end of the world and

of all things, and of the gods even. (56)

It is quite possible that these lines were among the most irksome for Tolkien to have ever

read. First, as mentioned above, the suggestion that the Anglo-Saxons engaged in orgies

offended the highly conservative Tolkien: he declares for the record that "in 'Anglo-

Saxon' as we have it, and not as it might have been, 'orgies' are nowhere praised and 246 very seldom recorded" (Critics B 95). Second, and more importantly, Jusserand's emphasis on the "unchanging" nature of the Anglo-Saxon genius would have run directly contrary to Tolkien's localizing tendencies, which assert the variation and diversity of the

Anglo-Saxons, both diachronically and synchronically. Third, and related, Tolkien objected to the characterization of the Anglo-Saxons based on generalizations about the

Germanic tribes. Quoting Jusserand's "their enthusiasm" and "their orgies," Tolkien challenges his conclusions about the Anglo-Saxons by arguing that Jusserand is basing them on Beowulf, a poem about Danes. "You would hardly guess," he states, "that

'Anglo-Saxons' are nowhere in that poem referred to at all!" (Critics B 94-5). Fourth,

Tolkien is suggesting that Jusserand is engaging in historiography "as it might have been," not in history "as we have it."

But despite the significance of these myriad objections, this passage bothered

Tolkien on a much deeper level, and it is this deeper objection that lurks in the background of Tolkien's own "apocryphal 'Anglo-Saxons,'" the Rohirrim. Specifically,

I would suggest that Tolkien was profoundly disturbed by Jusserand's depiction here (and elsewhere) of the Anglo-Saxons as characterized by depression and despair. For the

staunch Catholic Tolkien, after all, despair was a sin against God, so it was a grave insult

to suggest that it was an essential part of the racial makeup of the English. In fact, this

notion of despair ran contrary to Tolkien's understanding of both of the primary

ingredients of Englishness: the Germanic as well as the Christian. On the one hand, the

Christian tradition holds that despair is a moral paralysis that involves the rejection of all

hope for salvation. On the other hand, Tolkien's "theory of courage" may posit that the

Germanic world-view involved belief in inevitable and ultimate doom, but it also asserts 247 the heroic rejection of using that doom as any justification for despair; this willingness to reject despair, to act morally despite hopelessness, was key, in Tolkien's view, to preparing the Anglo-Saxons for the introduction of Christianity. For Tolkien, therefore, both components of the English were inherently anti-despair, exactly the opposite of

Jusserand's interpretation of them.

And yet, Tolkien was not unaware that a significant portion of Anglo-Saxon literature has an undeniably sorrowful tone, as seen by his foray into the long debate over the genre of Beowulf. "Beowulf is not an 'epic,'" he declares,

not even a magnified 'lay.' No terms borrowed from Greek or other

literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we

must have a term, we should choose rather 'elegy.' It is an heroic-elegiac

poem; and in a sense all its first 3,136 lines are the prelude to a dirge: him

pa gegiredan Geata leode ad ofer eordan unwaclicne: one of the most

moving ever written. ("Monsters" 31)145

Tolkien is certainly correct to indicate that classical poetic terminology can be transferred

only problematically to Anglo-Saxon poetry, but he is referring less to genre than he is to

mood. Asked to select the most moving lines just in Beowulf, few readers would select

these lines. That said, it is not the lines in isolation that Tolkien found so beautiful but

rather their culminative power, as well as their ironic depiction of both the Geats' sense

of loss for their lord and the Beowulf-poet's own sense of loss: "its maker was telling of

things already old and weighted with regret" (33). This elegiac tone is, of course, not

limited to Beowulf, being present in other Anglo-Saxon poems, particularly the

145 The quoted lines, 3137-38, open the final fitt of the poem and translate as "then the Geatish people prepared for him no small funeral pyre on the earth." 248 problematically named Old English elegies, such as The Wanderer, The Wife's Lament,

i and The Seafarer. With this belief in the prevalence of dirge-like qualities in Anglo-

Saxon culture, Tolkien was convinced of the importance of sorrow and mourning to the

Anglo-Saxon racial makeup. In this Tolkien and Jusserand agree, but the difference between the two lies in the fact that sorrow is not despair, despite how interchangeably they may sometimes be used. Sorrow is an emotional state of pain and loss; despair, on the other hand, is one of the many possible responses to sorrow, specifically the submission to it or abjection before it. Tolkien respected the sorrow of the Anglo-Saxons in part because he saw as key to their character - and therefore to the English character as well - a refusal to allow that sorrow to turn into despair. I would suggest that one of the recurrent themes in LotR is a claim for the nobility of facing sorrow with this heroic stability rather than with despair. Tolkien advances this theme through the racializing of such stability as Anglo-Saxon/northern and despair as southern.

The Jusserandian Saruman uses his agent at Theoden's court, Grima

Wormtongue, to plunge the king into sorrow and, at least for a while, despair. The

Grima-Theoden relationship is drawn directly from the Unferd-Hrodgar relationship in

Beowulf, though with significant interpretation. As mentioned above, the approach to

Theoden's court (itself called Meduseld, or "mead-hall" in Old English) in 7Tis calqued, to borrow Shippey's term,146 point for point on the approach of Beowulf to Hrodgar's court, and so the presence of an Unferd-like character in TT is not surprising. The identification of Grima with this role is made clear immediately by the positioning of !

146 Shippey demonstrates that one of Tolkien's methods of recreation is parallel to the linguistic process of "calquing [...], that process in which the elements of a compound word are translated bit by bit to make a new word in another language" {Road 92). Similarly, Tolkien translates a real world culture, history, or tradition bit by bit into his fantasy world. 249

Grima "[a]t [Theoden's] feet upon the steps" (137). Compare this placement to that of

Unferd in Beowulf:

Swylc paer Unferd pyle

aet fotum saet frean Scyldinga; gehwylc hiora his ferhbe treowde,

pa?t he haefde mod micel, beah be he his magum nasre

arfaest aet ecga gelacum.

(Likewise, the spokesman Unferd sat there at the feet of the lord of the

Scyldings; each of them trusted his spirit, that he had a great heart, though

he was not merciful to his kin in the swordplay). (1165b-68a)

Grima's placement is a signal to the reader, already primed by the preceding series of connections between the two texts, to interpret Grima's character in terms of the corresponding passages in the Old English poem. Tolkien would have been aware of the danger of the court trusting in the "ferhbe" ("spirit") of a possible kin-slayer, even to the point of letting him be their "byle" ("court spokesman"). Beowulf, however, does not conclusively declare that Unferd is or will be a traitor; the indications are there, but the final judgment is left in the realm of readerly interpretation. For example, does Unferd challenge Beowulf s credentials on their first meeting out of envious malice or is it simply in fulfillment of his duty as "byle"? Both possibilities have merit. Where, then, would Grima fit into the range of possible Unferds? I would suggest that Tolkien is pushing the boundaries of the interpretations, trying to see what Unferd could have been like if the Beowulf-poet had made him explicitly treacherous rather than merely letting drop implications of selfish motivations and dishonourability: to see, in effect, just how bad a bad counselor could be. 250

Clearly such a counselor would be one working actively against the interests of his lord, either for himself or for another; Grima certainly fits this characterization, but that is only the beginning. Tolkien is more interested in how such a counselor would operate, rather than simply to what final end. Tolkien's interpretation of Unferd's challenge to Beowulf is particularly telling on this account, taking place as it does between Theoden's bad counselor, Grima, and his eventual good counselor, Gandalf.

Theoden has called Gandalf a "herald of woe," only coming in times of sorrow. Grima seizes this opportunity to catalogue his king's sorrows:

You speak justly, lord [...]. It is not yet five days since the bitter tidings

came that Theodred your son was slain upon the West Marches: your

right-hand, Second Marshal of the Mark. In Eomer there is little trust.

Few men would be left to guard your walls, if he had been allowed to rule.

And even now we learn from Gondor that the Dark Lord is stirring in the

East. Such is the hour in which this wanderer chooses to return. Why

indeed should we welcome you, Master Stormcrow? Ldthspell I name

you, Ill-news; and ill news is an ill guest they say. (TT137)

Here Grima is performing the very act that he is criticizing Gandalf for: bearing "bitter tidings." Grima manages to insinuate into a conversation about the threat of Saruman

three sources of further concern: the greater threat of the Dark Lord Sauron, the death of

Theoden's son, and the possible unreliability of his nephew Eomer. Moreover, Grima is

not only the bearer of these tidings but also their interpreter. He is seeking to present the

events in such a way as to isolate his king from all avenues of support, to convince him

that he is utterly alone in his sorrows, with no one to look to for hope. In short, Grima is 251 undermining his lord's ability to face his sorrow with stability, instead pushing him towards the paralysis of despair. This despair-mongering, I would suggest, is what

Tolkien puts forth as the ultimate crime of an advisor.

Tolkien provides the remedy to this despair in the form of the good counselor,

Gandalf, who presents bad news not as cause for despair but as an impetus for action.

"Not all is dark," Gandalf says, "[t]ake courage, Lord of the Mark; for better help you will not find. No counsel have I to give to those that despair. Yet counsel I could give,

and words I could speak to you. Will you hear them?" (139-40). Even more potently,

Gandalf encourages Theoden to resume his role as military leader of the Rohirrim,

suggesting, "[y]our fingers would remember their old strength better, if they grasped a

sword-hilt" (143). In each case, Theoden responds directly with action, replacing the

paralysis of despair with a decision to accept sorrow without succumbing to it. The

miraculously instantaneous effect of Gandalf s words creates two impressions: first, there

is the sense that Gandalf has cured the king magically, but second, and more importantly,

there is the sense that if Gandalf has done so, then it was primarily through the

contravention or removal of the magic of despair cast on the king by Saruman through

Grima; Gandalf s magic does not change Theoden, therefore, but rather merely returns

him to his natural state, a state of stability. This suggestion that Theoden naturally

responds to sorrow with action is cemented when Gandalf assumes that the old king will

stay behind when his soldiers go to face the threat of Saruman. '"Nay, Gandalf!' said the

king. 'You do not know your own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to

war, to fall in front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better'" (145). This is

not the advice or influence of Gandalf but merely the restoration of Theoden's normal 252 character. For him, paralyzing despair is the exception that is magically imposed, covering but not eliminating the innate desire to confront the source of his sorrow and to resolve it one way or another.

Theoden's natural emotional stability is the individual representation of the broader Rohirric response towards sorrow. Eomer, for example, is equally quick to choose action rather than despair as a response to sorrow. Not only does he quickly declare "hope of victory" in response to the threat of Saruman (7T144) but later, when

Theoden dies before his feet, his instinct is to shun despair. Instead, he sings, notably in

Germanic alliterative verse:

Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen,

meet was his ending. When his mound is raised,

women then shall weep. War now calls us! (RotK 132)

This brief song invokes two separate passages from Beowulf. First, it recalls the construction of Beowulf s pyre, the lines which Tolkien called among "the most moving ever written" ("Monsters" 31).147 Just as Tolkien felt that those lines were the culmination of the entire poem preceding them, so too can Eomer's lines be seen as the

culmination of the entire Rohan plotline in LotR.

Like Beowulf'for Tolkien, the Rohan plotline is dirge-like, elegiac, but the

function of dirges and elegies is not to evoke despair; their function is rather to help restore emotional stability and reinvigorate the sorrowful spirit. This is why Tolkien

combines Eomer's allusion to Beowulf s funeral pyre with another allusion to a

147 Tolkien is also making an intertextual connection to the lamentation of the unnamed woman over Beowulf s funeral pyre: "swylce giomorgyd Geatisc meowle / aefter Biowulfe bundenheorde / sang sorgcearig" ("likewise, a Geatish woman with hair bound up, full of sorrow, sang the lament for Beowulf) (Klaeber's edition 3150-3152a). Note that Tolkien emphasizes that such lamentation, while worthy, should not take place until more pressing matters, such as battle, have been addressed. 253 completely different section of Beowulf, specifically the hero's brief consolation of

HroSgar after the death of the king's close advisor and friend. When HroSgar loses his counselor iEschere to the attack of Grendel's mother, he is briefly tempted to fall prey to despair. "Ne sorga, snotor guma," Beowulf advises, "selre bid aeghwaem / baet he his freond wrece ponne he fela murne" ("Sorrow not, wise warrior. It is better for one that he avenge his friend, rather than mourn overmuch") (1384-85). The Beowulf-poet here uses the word "sorga," which is cognate with the Modern English "sorrow," but he is clearly referring to a semantic field better mapped by "persist in sorrow" or maybe even

"despair." Beowulf- like Eomer - is advising action, acknowledging that sorrow is important, that it has a place, but that it must not paralyze the sufferer, since there is always work to be done. This is one of the purest expressions of "the theory of courage" that Tolkien believed to be so integral to Anglo-Saxon and Germanic poetry. Eomer's ability to maintain his stability in the face of his sorrow is, therefore, the dominant racial characteristic of Tolkien's representation of the Anglo-Saxons.

This racializing of sorrow, with action as the characteristically Anglo-Saxon

solution to it, is made most clear by the fact that Tolkien constructs a specifically

southern contrast for Theoden's sorrow: the despair of Denethor, lord of Gondor.

Tolkien encourages the comparison of these two lords through numerous parallels between their actions, their conversations, and their choices. Shippey points out a number of these parallels in his discussion of the symmetry of LotR, particularly their

ages, the losses of their sons, their doubts in their new heirs, and the descriptions of their

halls {Author 51); these broader correspondences are reinforced by a series of matching

details. One such detail is of particular relevance to the issue of sorrow and despair. Just 254 as Gandalf encourages Theoden to direct action by suggesting he arm himself with his sword, Gandalf urges Denethor - who has earlier revealed that he always wears his sword

(RotK 99) - to use it: "your part is to go out to the battle of your City, where maybe death awaits you. This you know in your heart" (RotK 145). But unlike Theoden, Denethor has succumbed irrevocably to despair:

Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have

seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance.

Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little

space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that

now arises there is no victory. (145)

This response situates Denethor's despair, intentionally or otherwise, within terms reminiscent of those used to distinguish the South and the North: specifically knowledge and learning versus ignorance. It is Denethor's expansive knowledge of the enemy that convinces him that there is virtually no chance of victory; this response is rational, but

Tolkien is suggesting that rationality is often an insufficient response to sorrow.

Southern learning, despite its powers, can be a potent destructive force. This inability to hope is Denethor's fatal flaw, and it is only the ignorant hope and stability of others, such

as Theoden and the Rohirrim, that keeps this flaw from destroying the entirety of

Denethor's people.

Tolkien repeatedly refers to Denethor's despair as a return to heathenism; in the

conversation quoted above, for example, Gandalf accuses Denethor of reverting to the

ways of "the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power [...], slaying

themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death" (145). As 255

Shippey points out, "heathen" is a jarring word for Tolkien to use in LotR, since it implies a specifically Christian perspective in a fantasy world actively stripped of such religious references {Author 176). I would suggest that this rupture of Tolkien's own voice into the narrative of his fantasy is in part due to his strong association between Christianity

and southern civilization and, therefore, Gondor. Denethor's despair is not only a betrayal of his city and of his ailing son - whom he will sacrifice along with himself- but

also of the Christian faith that he should represent. Denethor is taking his already sinful

despair to its most sinful end - suicide - and Tolkien's use of "heathen" encourages the

reader to judge this deed from a specifically Christian context.

We have, therefore, a situation where despair, southern learning, and Christianity

have all been connected; moreover, this situation has been placed in contrast to a parallel

scene, located in Theoden's emphatically northern hall, that presents the importance of

emotional stability in the face of sorrow. Chance has argued that Tolkien uses Theoden

and Denethor as a means to contrast "good and bad Germanic lords" {Tolkien's Art

172ff); while I obviously disagree with Chance's reading of Denethor as Germanic, she

is nonetheless quite correct in her suggestion that Tolkien has constructed here a direct

contrast, with Theoden (and by extension northern stability) offering the preferable

alternative to Denethor (and by extension the southern tendency to despair). As we have

seen, however, Tolkien's racial thinking tends towards mixture rather than preference,

which suggests that this may be only part of the story. The resolution lies, I believe, in

Tolkien's belief in the inherent complementarity of the northern and southern traditions.

The southern tendency towards despair is what makes its mixture with the northern so

vital. Recall that without either ingredient, neither the medieval nor the English could 256 have come to be. Specifically, the South brought learning while the North brought the stability to cope with the difficulties that learning sometimes occasions. The southern tradition brought Christianity, while the northern tradition's "theory of courage" brought the ability to resist reverting to pre-Christian despair, even in the face of deep sorrow.

Emotional Communities

Barbara H. Rosenwein has recently argued for the viability of defining early medieval communities through commonalities in their expressions of emotion:

Imagine, then, a large circle within which are smaller circles, none

entirely concentric but rather distributed unevenly within the given space.

The large circle is the overarching emotional community, tied together by

fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes

of expression. The smaller circles represent subordinate emotional

communities, partaking in the larger one and revealing its possibilities and

its limitations. They too may be subdivided. At the same time, other large

circles may exist, either entirely isolated from or intersecting with the first

at one or more points. (24)

While Rosenwein's work was published decades after Tolkien's, I would suggest that their conceptions of community are rather similar. Compare the above passage with

Tolkien's description of the northern "temper": "an ancient community of temper and

spirit and ideals, to some extent of custom, law, and social arrangements, which

corresponds roughly to the known and definite community of language which we express by the terms Teutonic, or now more generally Germanic" (Critics A 36). Rosenwein's 257 thinking is more intellectualized, while Tolkien's is more visceral, but substitute

"temper" for "emotion" and these methods of communal definition are remarkably similar. I will, therefore, use Rosenwein's image of overlapping circles as a way of bringing together the various aspects of Tolkien's racial thinking.

The "large circle" or "overarching emotional community" that Rosenwein describes maps well onto Tolkien's belief in a unifying "temper" for the northern world.

He describes this temper as the "theory of courage," a series of assumptions about the fundamentally doomed nature of the universe and, more importantly, a socially constructed ideal response to that inescapable fate: that true heroism lies in behaving morally even though it cannot change one's fate. The most important of the "smaller circles" in Tolkien's conception would be those related to the privileged response to

sorrow. Tolkien accepts the underlying principle of Jusserand's assertion that a key part

of the Anglo-Saxons' emotional community was a highly developed ability to feel sorrow

- that could itself be one of the subdividing smaller circles - but he rejected Jusserand's

claim that this led the Anglo-Saxons into despair. Instead he asserts that the Anglo-

Saxons idealized emotional stability in the face of extreme sorrow; this is another

subdividing circle, "revealing" the broader emotional community's "possibilities and its

limitations." The Anglo-Saxons, therefore, were not only a member of the larger

northern emotional community but also a part of that portion of the North which both

feels great sorrow and yet values stability and action over paralyzing despair.

This narrowing function of Rosenwein's scheme, based as it is on Venn diagrams,

maps particularly well onto Tolkien's strong localizing tendencies, at least

synchronically. The notion of subdividing and only partially overlapping circles easily 258 accommodates the keen individualizing impulse that underlies Tolkien's "Norse is Norse and English English" (Critics A 36). That said, this model does not work quite as well for Tolkien's diachronic localizing tendencies. His and Chambers' declarations for the chronological origins of Beowulf, the medieval character, and the very English themselves require a fluid rather than a static model. But such fluidity is possible. As

Rosenwein suggests, "other large circles may exist, either entirely isolated from or intersecting with the first at one or more points." One of these circles would, for Tolkien, have been southern Christianity. The key point for Tolkien would be that one needs to conceive of the circles as in motion, specifically on a collision course, at first not overlapping at all but then overlapping more and more or, to use Tolkien's own terminology, blending ingredients more and more. In the period prior to the Anglo-

Saxon conversion, the circles would not be in contact, with the Anglo-Saxons being the part of the northern circle at the edge closest to the southern. The moment of contact would represent the arrival in the seventh century of Christianity in England, and the resulting birth of the English. Subsequently, the area of overlap between the two circles would distinguish the Anglo-Saxons sharply from the rest of the northern world.

This notion of the diachronic fluidity of emotional communities raises the

question of what happens after the birth of the medieval and of the English; Tolkien's

localizing tendency was far too strong to allow him to believe that the English essence

could become static. That said, his belief in the birth of the specifically English - not

Anglo-Saxon - race at a specific moment in time makes clear his sense of a continuity in

the English character from that moment onward. To where, then, have Tolkien's circles

moved since the Anglo-Saxon period? Tolkien's partial answer to this question resides in 259 his depiction of the hobbits. Carpenter reports that Tolkien once told an interviewer that

"[t]he Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination - not the small reach of their courage or latent power" (234). For Tolkien, therefore, the hobbits represent Englishness, or rather a certain localized type of Englishness; this point need not be laboured since Shippey has demonstrated quite clearly the close similarities between the hobbits and the modern

English, detailing their historical and organizational points of contact (Road 92-93). But note that Tolkien points to "courage" - a key word in his scholarly and fictional representations of the Anglo-Saxons and their Germanic ancestors - as a still vital component of the hobbit and modern English characters. LotR makes quite clear that this courage has developed significantly from that demonstrated by the Anglo-Saxons or their

Rohirric counterparts. Sam, the servant, provides the clearest expressions of this new

English courage. For example, when faced with the impossible task of entering heavily guarded enemy lands, Sam responds in a way that shows his emotional kinship with

Theoden's Anglo-Saxon response to sorrow and, furthermore, his complete lack of a relationship to Denethor's "heathen" response. He decides to go on, since

after all he never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but

being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could

be postponed. Now they were come to the bitter end. But he had stuck to

his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he

would still stick to him. His master would not go to Mordor alone. (7T

301-2) 260

As Shippey rightly argues, this is a "modern version of the 'theory of courage'" (Author

153), but it is also more. The outcome is certainly the same: Sam performs the heroic act, deciding to enter Mordor regardless of the fact that he believes it to be a futile gesture.

But note that his motivation is not heroism, and most certainly not the Germanic "lof," but rather a specifically Christian ideal: service to another with no desire for anything in return. Sam makes his decision not because the world needs saving, but because his master and friend needs accompanying. Sam's cheerful service, most clearly of all of

Tolkien's representations, demonstrates the blending that Tolkien describes in his

scholarship as essentially English: the mixture of the northern temper, with its

courageous stability in the face of sorrow, and southern Christian learning, with its belief

that such courage should be directed selflessly into service of others. 261

Conclusion: Their Image and Ours

Allen J. Frantzen closes his Desire for Origins by pointing to the interconnectedness of "our own age, the previous ages in which Anglo-Saxon culture has been studied, and the Anglo-Saxon texts themselves." He concludes that "[w]e have a great deal in common with those whose experience and ideas shaped [Anglo-Saxon

Studies], more than we might expect, more than we might wish, and from them we have much to learn" (226). This observation applies not only to Anglo-Saxon Studies but also to Anglo-Saxonism: through the work of gatekeepers such as the three examined in this current study, the image - their image - of the Anglo-Saxons entered popular culture, where it was able to influence directly the current image - our image - of that people.

The recent resurgence of interest in the Anglo-Saxons (as marked by two major motion

picture adaptations of Beowulf, including one with such Hollywood stars as Anthony

Hopkins and Angelina Jolie) indicates that the development of the Anglo-Saxon image is

still underway. Meanwhile, I hope that this study has demonstrated how very much there

is to learn from those who furthered this development in the past, particularly in the

formative early years of the Anglo-Saxon discipline.

While a case study approach solves many problems in an analysis of influences, it

nevertheless has a drawback in its tendency to isolate its objects, to focus on the trees

instead of on the forest. The purpose of this conclusion, therefore, is to situate my three

case studies in relationship to each other, in order to regain some of that broader

perspective. With this in mind, I have identified a number of issues, concerns, and

methods that link my three gatekeepers together. Observations one through four deal

with the first general purpose of this dissertation: to plot the relationship between early 262

Anglo-Saxon scholarship and theorizations of the origins and nature of the Anglo-Saxons and of the English, particularly in terms of other related racial groups. The fifth and sixth observations address this study's second general purpose: to track how images of the

Anglo-Saxons were transmitted from the domain of Anglo-Saxon Studies to that of popular fiction.

1. A tendency to conceive of history in terms of patterns.

All three of my case studies conceive of the racial development of the Anglo-

Saxons in highly structural or systematic ways; it seems as if each of these writers was attempting to visualize a pattern or shape that they could each impose upon the history of that people. Kingsley constructs this history in terms of cyclical degeneration and regeneration. He argues that a people naturally degenerates, steadily declining into what he conceives of as a female, civilized race, which then calls for an infusion of regenerative blood from a male, nomadic race; this pattern of slow degeneration and sudden regeneration explains the invasion of England by the Saxons, by the Danes, and by the Normans, though this last remains uncomfortable for Kingsley. Morris, on the other hand, depicts the development of the Anglo-Saxons in terms of fluctuation, the steady movement between two poles: on the one hand the civilized (characterized by individualism) and on the other the primitive (characterized by communalism).

According to Morris, these fluctuations are eventually going to culminate in an ideal socialist society, to which the culture of the Anglo-Saxons is the closest that the English have yet to come. Tolkien constructs the racial development of the English in yet a third way; for him, there are two main "streams," the northern heroic culture of the early 263

Anglo-Saxons and the southern Christian learning brought north from Rome. Tolkien believed that it was through the convergence of these two streams that Englishness was born. That all three think so structurally attests to the belief of such writers in their ability to explain, even to diagram, the origins and development of the English race based significantly on their exposure to Anglo-Saxon texts and to Anglo-Saxon Studies.

2. A tendency to define the Anglo-Saxons along a north-south axis.

Not only does each case study provide a specific structure for the development of the Anglo-Saxons, but each also conceives of this structure primarily in relationship to the "southern" races, either the Romans or the Normans or both. For Kingsley and

Morris, this relationship is a matter of opposition, with the northern races, including the

Anglo-Saxons, clearly the superior. Tolkien, however, adopts the stance that both the

northern and the southern have merits and flaws and, moreover, that these merits and

flaws complement each other in such a way that the union of the two traditions yields

something greater than either, namely the English. This tendency towards constructing

theories along a north-south axis points to the centrality of both the beginning and the end

of the Anglo-Saxon period in determinations of the relative merits of the Anglo-Saxon

race. In terms of the beginning of the period, these scholars were keen to make clear that

even though the Romans may have had the advantage over the Anglo-Saxons in terms of

technology and similar markers of "civilization," such markers were less significant than

other measures of racial worth; they mount, in effect, a defense of "barbarity" and

primitivism. In terms of the late Anglo-Saxon era, the very fact that this period was

terminated by defeat at the hands of the Normans compelled Anglo-Saxon scholars to 264 construct theories that would resolve the historical facts with their pride in Englishness.

The methods that these scholars used to achieve these two ends may have been different, but the impulse behind them was nonetheless quite similar.

3. A desire to define the Anglo-Saxons in relationship to the rest of the "North. "

My three case studies share a desire to determine the precise status of the Anglo-

Saxons amid the rest of the Old North. For Kingsley, the Saxon racial character was initially strong, but over the centuries it had weakened to the point that they required reinvigoration from their Danish cousins; the Anglo-Saxons' relationship to the rest of the North was, therefore, characterized by racial separation followed by racial reunification. For Morris, on the other hand, the Old North was always unified; the

Anglo-Saxons were merely one manifestation of the broader racial group. It was, however, possibly Tolkien who felt strongest about this issue; he argues that the Old

North was emphatically not unified, that every racial group that just so happened to fall under that umbrella was nevertheless distinct and unique. I would suggest that the rigour of these various beliefs is in part a side-effect of the use by these writers of the north- south axis as their primary tool in racial definition; identifying an other to the south automatically raises, after all, the question of the exact nature of the self within the north.

4. Distinct opinions on what binds the Anglo-Saxons together.

The term "race" has been used extensively throughout this dissertation, in part because it is a term often used by many of the Anglo-Saxonists of the period. My three case studies demonstrate, however, that the term was as varied in significance then as it is 265 now. Kingsley employs the term in its biological, sometimes even genetic, sense; the characteristics of a race, he argues, run in the blood. Morris takes the exact opposite approach, seeing the characteristics of races as the product of their communal values; he shies away from defining the Anglo-Saxons in terms of blood-kinship in favour of defining them in terms of ideas and ideologies, most particularly devotion to fellowship.

Of the three, Tolkien is the least certain in his opinion on this issue, variously defining races in terms biological, linguistic, or cultural. What is common to all three, however, is their belief that the question of how to define the Anglo-Saxon race was a key site for critical interrogation and rhetorical argument.

5. The utility of fiction for developing as well as transmitting scholarly ideas.

I would suggest that the gatekeeping function of these three case studies was deeper than I initially thought. I originally chose to adopt a focus on individual

gatekeepers because I thought that their positioning astride the boundary between the

academic and popular discourses was the best way to demonstrate the flow of ideas between these discursive fields. I believe that this study has successfully demonstrated

that flow. I have, however, since realized that the value of studying such gatekeepers is

not only in their ability to transmit ideas between discourses but also in their ability to

access both discourses in the development of those ideas. Discourses, after all, are

restrictive - they permit certain ideas and utterances while forbidding others - but the

ideas forbidden by one discourse will not be exactly the same as those forbidden by

another. A gatekeeper's positioning between two discourses therefore offers him or her

the chance to develop ideas in ways that would not be available to someone working in 266 one discourse alone. Morris and Tolkien take particular advantage of this opportunity.

Morris's translation of Vglsunga saga allows him to demonstrate (rightly or wrongly) the grounding of his theory of Germanic fellowship in genuine medieval source texts, while his adaptation of that saga allows him to develop that theory to a greater extent than the medieval texts actually justify. Similarly, Tolkien's scholarly work allows him to develop his theory of ideal racial blending, but it limits him to speaking in generalities

and uncertainties; his fiction, on the other hand, offers him the chance to trace, movement

by movement and detail by detail, how that blending might actually occur.

6. The tendency to pull other discourses into Anglo-Saxonism and vice-versa.

While I have focused on my case studies' transmission of ideas from Anglo-

Saxon Studies to popular fiction, this is only one of their gatekeeping functions.

Kingsley and Morris in particular draw other discourses into their work on the Anglo-

Saxons; Kingsley integrates his responses to Darwinian discourse into his Anglo-Saxon

racial theories, while Morris merges his socialist beliefs with his notions of the Germanic

North. This multiplicity of gatekeeping roles means that when such thinkers transmit

ideas about the Anglo-Saxons to a popular audience, they are also transmitting the

notions that those ideas have accrued from various other discourses. Moreover, as these

writers are bringing these discourses into Anglo-Saxon Studies, they are also doing the

opposite: bringing the Anglo-Saxon image into discursive fields previously only loosely

connected to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. 267

Continuing to Develop the Image

I began this dissertation with Shippey's assertion that the Anglo-Saxons are a relatively "undeveloped image" in current popular culture. This dissertation has shown that prior to this current state of affairs, specifically in the not-so-distant past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were a much more vibrant image, discussed and debated in both scholarly and popular circles. The question becomes, however, one of determining the full extent of the development of this image.

In an attempt to address this question, I have consciously taken as my object in this study individuals whose influence is particularly high and whose writings were particularly well distributed, but this is only the first step. Exactly how typical or exceptional were

Kingsley's, Morris's, and Tolkien's uses of the Anglo-Saxon image? How many other writers were transmitting ideas from Anglo-Saxon Studies to popular culture, even if only on a smaller scale? And how were thinkers in other discourses using the image of the

Anglo-Saxons that these writers were transmitting? These are some of the questions that remain to be answered. If my three case studies are any indication, then by answering such questions we shall find that our modern understandings of the "Anglo-Saxons" and of the "English" carry a significant debt to exactly which ideas and ideologies past scholars have chosen to disregard and which to transmit. 268

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Michael Kightley Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

Ph.D. (In Progress) University of Western Ontario (London, ON), English, 2003- present

M.A. Queen's University (Kingston, ON), English, 2001-02

B.Sc. University of Toronto, Human Biology and English, 1997-2001

DISSERTATION

Racial Anglo-Saxonisms: From Scholarship to Fiction in England, 1850-1960 Supervisor: Russell Poole Second Reader: Allan Pero

HONOURS AND AWARDS

2008 Canadian Society of Medievalists Student Essay Prize

2007-08 Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Government of Ontario

2006-07 Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Government of Ontario

2005 Mary Routledge Fellowship, University of Western Ontario

2004-06 Special University Scholarship, University of Western Ontario

2004-05 Teaching Assistant Award (Nomination)

2003-04 President's Scholarship for Graduate Study, University of Western Ontario

REFEREED PUBLICATIONS

"Reinterpreting Threats to Face: The Use of Politeness in Beowulf, 11. 407-472." Forthcoming from Neophilologus (online version available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/sll061-008-9131-y).

"Heorot or Meduseld?: Tolkien's Use of Beowulfin 'The King of the Golden Hall.'" Mythlore 24.3-4 (2006): 119-34. 292

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS (Related to Doctoral Research)

"Socialism and the 'Folk' of William Morris's Beowulf." Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Canadian Society of Medievalists. University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC. 1-3 June 2008.

"Hereward the Viking and the English, but Not the Saxon: Kingsley's Racial Medievalism." 22nd International Conference on Medievalism. University of Western Ontario, London ON. 4-7 October 2007.

'"A new line shall be put in the old lists': Methods of Racial Definition in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings." 19th International Conference on Medievalism. University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. 1-3 Oct. 2004.