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Cambridge University’s Anglo-Saxon History Department Decides
Anglo-Saxons Never Actually Existed
Statue of King Alfred The Great in Winchester, Hampshire, England(TonyBaggett/iStock/Getty Images)
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By JEFFREY BLEHAR
June 6, 2023 9:30 PM
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Hwæt! News has just come down from the U.K. Telegraph that the venerable
dons of the Cambridge University (est. 1209) Department of Anglo-Saxon,
Norse and Celtic History — apparently suffering from a profound crisis
of identity — will now be instructing their students that “Anglo-Saxons aren’t real.” Apparently, anti-racists at Cambridge have determined that the phrase smacks too much of “the myth of nationalism.”
Britain being the multicultural melting pot it is, emphasizing its
Anglo-Saxon roots now apparently seems as churlish as emphasizing its
Norman French ones during the Napoleonic Wars. (The Welsh, Scots, and
Irish are also purportedly not supposed to have ever “existed” as
coherent ethnic groups under Cambridge’s new rubric, which will be news
to my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty at the very least.)
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This alone suggests why the entire exercise is such insultingly
ahistorical nonsense. First of all, nationalism is not a myth. While in
its modern form — as a politically unifying force giving coherence to an internationally recognized state — it is certainly a creation of the
19th century, the idea of ethnically or culturally coherent identity
groups goes back, transparently, to the dawn of humanity. (The German
word Deutsch literally descends from a proto-Indo-European root that functionally means “us people as distinct from them.”)
It must be understood that the complexities of British identity are
various and ongoing, and the idea of a “national identity” as one that binds together different races, native languages, or ethnicities is as
old as . . . well, as old as the British Isles themselves. Once upon a
time these islands were occupied by dark-skinned, blue-eyed
hunter-gatherers. Then those were wiped out by neolithic Anatolian
farmers. Then those were almost entirely genetically replaced by
Indo-European horse-warriors, first presumably Celtic-speaking and then
later (this time documented historically) by Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons.
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Believe me, the cold recitation there doesn’t come close to
approximating the human strife involved in these population movements. (Bloodshed? Human sacrifice? Let me suggest politely to you how an
entire preexisting genetic substrate gets replaced wholesale: The answer
is violent murder, systematic extinguishing of male bloodlines, and
massive polygamy among male warrior tribal leaders. There’s a 99.9
percent chance you’d have existed on the sharp-speared end of
pre-civilized life, my friend.) And nobody cared back then, because
nobody had time to care about anything except the material world in
front of them — until the introduction of Christianity suggested another
way.
Nobody in Britain circa a.d. 630 understood racial or ethnic politics
the way such things are understood now, or with the same moral valence.
It was “my team” — usually defined as “my family, tribe, or war leader”
— and while a shared language and culture weren’t fully required
overlaps (e.g., any number of conglomerate Asian steppe-origin hordes
like the Huns or Scythians), they were, for reasons obvious to human
common sense, the most easily binding ones. It is fair to say that seventh-century Anglo Saxons and British Celts did not consider
themselves fellow countrymen. The term “Welsh” is literally descended
from the Anglo-Saxon name for the Romano-Brits they subjugated; Wælisc
is a Germanic word for “foreigner” (one inherited from a Latin term for
a continental Gaulish Celtic tribe, to give you some sense of how words traveled in this age). Relations between them were . . . harsh at first,
and took centuries to improve, and are still iffy nowadays (any Brit understands exactly how much history has been elided here for American sensibilities). In the meantime, incidentally, those invading
Anglo-Saxons were themselves pressed to near political extinction by Scandinavian invasions so vast that they ended up carving out an entire
chunk of the island as a temporary sub-kingdom, contributed a few
members to the English throne, and left an indelible mark upon the
language (every time you use your skill to make an egg, tip a cap to a
Viking). And I haven’t even mentioned the Norman French yet — 1066 and
all that.
At all points this nation was still a single cognizable thing, with a
sense of itself. Later, with the incorporation of Wales and Scotland
(and, temporarily at least, Ireland) it became British. The Anglo-Saxon component of it was no myth; it was a legally, culturally, and
politically unified world imported from a foreign land but fused to the
native soil, and thus particular in its own way. It was not Welsh, nor
Irish, nor Scottish, nor Danish. When William the Conqueror invaded, his primary claim to legitimacy for the people he sought to rule was as an
upholder of all Anglo-Saxon laws of King Edward the Confessor. On this fundamental basis, with Norman French imports, was English common law
born. Of English common law was born American jurisprudence, and if
you’re wondering why National Review is devoting this many words to an attempted revision of British history, well . . . we are conservatives.
We properly understand our roots.
What this points out most of all is the silliness of importing American politics, academic obsessions, and social-historical frameworks into the European context. The United States is as close to a “blank slate”
nation as exists, only possible as a miraculous creation during a
circumscribed historical era: founded explicitly on political principles
rather than ethnic identities. The way in which those principles have
failed to match our practice (from the treatment of Amerindians to the
stain of African slavery to our half-hearted attempts at
early-20th-century empire) are a uniquely American story, and those
obsessions map incredibly poorly onto a land as old and ridden with
history and blood as Europe. As the Telegraph article points out, most
older British scholars of the era consider “the furore over the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ [to be] an American import,” one which makes no sense on
an island where none of the current inhabitants have anything whatsoever
to do with ancient populations they not only subjugated but genetically exterminated almost outright during prehistory. (As I said, just ask
Cheddar Man, or the guys who actually built Stonehenge.)
The construction of national identity itself is remarkably historically contingent and often retrospective; the greatest literary work of the
Old English/Anglo-Saxon period is Beowulf, an oral heroic poem whose
survival (in one burnt copy) is pure happenstance and whose regional associations locate its origins far away in the Jutland that divides
modern-day Denmark rather than the eastern coast of England, among whose descendants the poem was performed and preserved. Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, perhaps the finest and most quixotic piece of medieval
English poetry, is itself a one-off fusion of northwestern Midlands
Anglo Saxon poetics with Norman French chivalric traditions: The result
is quintessentially English, just as Beowulf is English yet in a
different, earlier way, and just as in later eras the works of
Shakespeare and his successors become something more, something British.
So while I can never object to the introduction of nuance into our
discussions of national identity, cultural formation, and the fluidity
of “ethnic groupings” — such details are the warp and woof of historical study, what makes it such a joy — the effort to graft immature American
novo homus prejudices onto the complexities of European history and life-and-death struggles between uncivilized ancient populations is
comically inapposite. Bluntly put, things were different back then. Say
what you will about the French (and I have more to say than most; I’m
still irked about the war in the Vendée), but they do not lack for
equivalent self-confidence in their historical traditions. France is
every bit the dog’s breakfast of ethnicities and languages and
territorial disputes warred out over time as Great Britain is (or the
United States, for that matter, and dear Lord do not inquire into
Germany), but they at least are willing to admit it in a way Americans
have always shied away from and the English — our elder siblings,
enfeebled and taking their political cues as spoon-fed mush from us as
Yank eldercare nurses — are now increasingly afraid to acknowledge as
their founding strength.
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JEFFREY BLEHAR is a National Review contributor living in Chicago. He is
also the co-host of National Review’s POLITICAL BEATS podcast, which
explores the great music of the modern era with guests from the
political world happy to find something non-political to talk about. @esotericcd
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