Cambridge University’s Anglo-Saxon History Department Decides Anglo-Saxons Never Actually Existed

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.)

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.

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.