LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Vol. 1 Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History (2008) A Paradise Full of Monsters: India in the Old English Imagination Mark Bradshaw Busbee Florida Gulf Coast University Abstract Between the ninth and the twelfth centuries in England, the idea of India began to figure into Anglo-Saxon statecraft, religion, and literature. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that in 883, Alfred the Great promised to send emissaries to India; a sermon preached by the Anglo-Saxon priest Ælfric in the tenth century tells about the passion of Saint Thomas and his trials and eventual death in India; and Old English translations of Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East describe the amazing riches, unusual animals, and monstrous people found in India. Scholars applying post- colonial theory to these texts see them as essentially racist. This essay argues that such reductive readings miss the deep complexities in how Anglo-Saxons imagined India or what those fantastic ideas might reveal. The many notable ambivalences appearing in descriptions of India and its people show that Anglo- Saxons regarded India as an imaginative space where fears, hopes, and desires might be entertained freely. Rather than support the notion that the Anglo-Saxon mind was inherently racist, these texts, in their expressions of fear and fascination, reveal a willingness to engage and understand a mysterious Other. Keywords India, Old English, Anglo-Saxon, manuscripts, monsters, Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Cotton Tiberius, Cotton Vitellius, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ælfric, Alfred the Great Old English manuscripts dating from the late ninth through the early twelfth centuries contain what may be the most neglected 51 Mark Bradshaw Busbee A Paradise Full of Monsters: pp. 51-72 India in the Old English Imagination body of medieval Western texts regarding the nature of India and its inhabitants. These texts tell about the location, topography, and people of India; they offer stories about the martyrdom of Saints Bartholomew and Thomas in India; and some of them—like Latin and Old English renderings of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (A Book of Monsters of Various Kinds), and a text called The Wonders of the East—include vivid illustrations that act as imaginative renderings in these texts about India and its people.1 Read collectively, this body of stories and the illustrations accompanying them offer readers a window into Anglo-Saxon thinking about India. The Anglo-Saxons imagined India not only as a paradise with mountains of gold and vineyards yielding precious stones but also as the domain of frightening creatures, like dog-headed men, speaking trees, ants as big as dogs, and sheep the size of donkeys. As offensive as they might seem to modern readers, these imaginative details fit within a conceptual framework that allowed medieval people in England a multidimensional understanding of India and, as a consequence, their own fears and desires. Versions of this paper were presented at the First International Conference “India in the World” at Universidad de Córdoba, Spain (March 9, 2007) and at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (May 12, 2007). I am thankful to Douglass Harrison and Rebecca Toronto, my colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast University, for their comments and suggestions on this paper. 1 The Latin text of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle appears in the British Library’s Royal 13.A.I, fols. 51v-78r; the Old English text appears in the so-called Beowulf ms, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. fols. 107r-131v (Brit. Lib.). The Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus exists in a singular extant ms: Royal 15.B.xix (Brit. Lib.). Normalized texts and translations of these mss and the ms of The Wonders of the East are available in Orchard’s Pride and Prodigies, whose texts and translations I rely on throughout this paper. The Wonders of the East exists in two Latin and two Old English texts. Bodleian Library 614, fols. 36r-48r (Oxford) contains one of the Latin versions, and Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fols. 98v-106v contains one Old English version. Cotton Tiberius B.v, fols. 78v-87r (Brit. Lib.) contains side-by-side Latin and Old English texts. The most useful compilation of these texts in facsimile was made by Rhodes in 1929. In my discussion, I will be focusing primarily on the images and texts in the Tiberius ms. 52 LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Vol. 1 Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History (2008) While similar accounts of India can be found in continental medieval texts, students of post-colonial Anglo-Indian relations have become interested in these texts’ presentation and discussion in Old English literature, since the presence of these texts represents the earliest surviving textual efforts of Englishmen to comprehend India. This attention has naturally benefitted a traditionally neglected part of English literary history by opening it up to more careful scrutiny. An unfortunate side-effect, however, has been that these texts are often summarily dismissed as racist. For example, in “Wonders of the Beast: India in Classical and Medieval Literature,” Andrea Rossi-Reder asserts that these texts “presuppose the superiority of Western peoples over non-Western peoples” and that scholars have generally examined the roots of Anglo- Indian colonial discourse only as far back as the Renaissance, but, in fact, classical and medieval literature, long before colonial expansion, contained the seeds of colonial thinking about natives of non-European countries such as India. (53) Such an assertion relies upon the shaky assumption that the Anglo- Saxons dreamed of colonizing India, or more specifically that a king like Alfred the Great (871-899) thought Alexander the Great and his conquest of India an admirable model. Though anachronistic,2 this approach has become a common tool for explicating The Letter of Alexander and the Liber monstrorum, two texts that seem to embody “colonial thinking” and that seem to stress the horrific and distasteful aspects of the monstrous races the Anglo-Saxons expected to find in India. I argue that, if used exclusively, post-colonial theory oversimplifies what Anglo-Saxons thought and believed about an 2 Gretta Austin makes the point that the term race, as we understand it, was coined only in the 17th century, by François Bernier in “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les differentees espéces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent” (quoted in Austin 26, note 5); therefore, it could be argued (against Rossi-Reder) that any discussion of medieval racism is essentially anachronistic (Austin 26). I do not mean to engage this fine point here. 53 Mark Bradshaw Busbee A Paradise Full of Monsters: pp. 51-72 India in the Old English Imagination unknown, almost mythical place. While post-colonial theory explores the situation of colonized people during and after colonization, the term postcolonial is sometimes used to refer to relations between two groups of people that seem similar to postcolonial conditions but do not involve a former colony. Old English writings about India remain outside this discussion because there is no evidence of any sort of an Anglo-India relationship during the Anglo-Saxon period. Instead, a text like the Old English The Wonders of the East, when read in combination with its illustrations, can offer a richer account of how the Anglo-Saxons imagined India before Anglo-Indian relations began (if we can risk using the term “relations”). The Tiberius manuscript of The Wonders of the East vividly imagines Indian peoples living in an earthy paradise or a sort of early medieval El Dorado. And though it shows them as monstrous or grotesque hybrid beings, I will demonstrate that this text and other Old English accounts ultimately depict India with a sort of romantic curiosity, one characterized by awe and wonder. This wonder is a far cry from racial or imperial designs. Before getting to the text and images featured in the Old English Wonders of the East, it would be useful to explore the nature and background of Anglo-Saxon belief about India’s location. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that first recorded instance of Anglo- Indian intercourse occurred in the year 883 (884 in the “C” manuscript). The entire entry for that year reads as follows: In this year the [English] army went up the Scheldt to Condé, and stayed there for a year. And Pope Marinus sent some wood of the Cross to King Alfred. And that same year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome the alms, and also to India to [the shines of] St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, when the English were encamped against the enemy [Viking] army at London; and there, by the grace of God, their prayers were well answered after that promise. (Whitelock 50)3 3 Whitelock contends that the whole incident of the vow is suspicious. MS A contains only the first sentence, but all others contain the account. Contemporary accounts by Asser (Alfred’s biographer) and Æthelweard 54 LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Vol. 1 Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History (2008) Other historical records of this event mostly corroborate The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle entry. Written in Latin sometime between 1100 and 1125, the manuscripts of Florence of Worcester state that in 883 a churchman named Swithelm bore Alfred’s alms to the shrine of Saint Thomas in India (Thorpe 98-99). William of Malmsbury, an early thirteenth century English historian, also states that a journey to India was successfully carried out, writing that Sighelm penetrated successfully into India, a matter of astonishment even in the present time.