The Healthy Wyrdness of the Anglo-Saxons

Mr Pearce looks at the profoundly Catholic spirituality of the ancestors of those who became the 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestants'.

From Faith&Culture 

By Joseph Pearce

It is one of the tragic ironies of modern-life that the words “Anglo-Saxon” and “Protestant” are often seen synonymously. It is also one of modern-life’s perversities that the term “Anglo-Saxon Protestant” is often pre-fixed with the word “white” to make the racially charged and acrimonious acronym “WASP”: “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. It’s enough to make the most mild-mannered Anglo-Saxon Catholic more than a little waspish!

The irony springs from the fact that Anglo-Saxon England was profoundly Catholic, to such a degree that the saintly Englishman, Boniface, helped to evangelise Pagan Europe, while his contemporary, the truly venerable Bede, exhibited the high culture that Saxon England enjoyed in abundance. Whilst the former converted the Germans to Christ, the latter excelled in Latin and Greek, and classical and patristic literature, as well as Hebrew, medicine and astronomy. Bede also wrote homilies, lives of saints, hymns, epigrams, works on chronology and grammar, commentaries on the Old and New Testament, and, most famously, his seminal Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum which was translated into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred the Great. At the time of his death in 735 Bede had just finished translating the Gospel of St John into Anglo-Saxon. Almost six hundred years later, Dante expressed his own admiration for Bede’s achievement by placing him in the Paradiso of his Divina Commedia. Thus, even at the dawning of the Anglo-Saxon era, England was a beacon of Christian enlightenment. So much for the so-called Dark Ages!

The epic poem, Beowulf, probably dates from the early eighth century, making it contemporaneous with the lives of Saints Boniface and Bede. This wonderful and wonder-filled narrative is animated by the rich Christian spirit of the culture from which it sprang, brimming over with allegorical potency and evangelical zeal. It also conveys a deep awareness of classical antiquity, drawing deep inspirational draughts from Virgil’s Aeneid, highlighting the Saxon poet’s awareness of his place within an unbroken cultural continuum.

The continuum remains unbroken. Twelve hundred years after the Saxon scop recited the saga of Beowulf to packed mead-halls a scholar of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University was using the ancient poem as one of the major inspirations for his own latter-day epic, The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien, sharing the same ancient faith as his Anglo-Saxon ancestors, knew that the truths conveyed in Beowulf continue to speak across the centuries with crystal-like and crystallised clarity.

Although Beowulf is the best-known poem in Old English it is by no means the only poetic jewel in the Anglo-Saxon crown. “The Ruin”, “The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer” and “The Dream of the Rood” have each strode across the continuum of the centuries with the consummate ease that is the mark of all great art. The timely and timeless reminders of man’s mortality are almost ubiquitous in these poems, palpitating like the heartbeat at the poetic core of life itself …

Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone, fast in gravesgrasp …

… sank to loam-crust.

Yet if the Anglo-Saxons were close to death, always aware as Tolkien reminds us that they were “mortal men doomed to die”, they were also close to life, in the sense that they were truly alive. They were close to nature, living off the fruits of the loam-crust until in the fullness of time sinking into it. Thus the imagery is primal, dealing with the primal realities of man’s dependence on nature. Hail, falling on “the frost-bound earth”, is described as the “coldest of grains”. Fishermen are the ploughmen of the sea, who “drive the foam-furrow” to harvest the sea’s fruit. The Seafarer is close to the creatures of the earth, with whom he shares an intimate communion, invoking his knowledge of birds and beasts to incant potent images of the “clinging sorrow” of his “breast-drought” …

                                    
… for men’s laughter
there was curlew-call, there were cries of gannets,
for mead-drinking the music of the gull …

And the cuckoo calls him in his care-laden voice,

scout of summer, sings of new griefs
that shall make breast-hoard bitter …

Cuckoo’s dirge drags out my heart,

whets will to the whale’s beat
across wastes of water: far warmer to me
are the Lord’s kindnesses than this life of death
lent us on land.

How much more alive were these Anglo-Saxons than are we moderns! 
They lived in a world that was harsh and hard, but at least it was real. We live in our computer-generated demi-worlds, centred on ourselves, utterly addicted to the artificial-life support machine which drips the anodyne into the anoesis of our comfortably numb minds. How can we experience the beauty of this Old English poetry if we have never heard a curlew, or a gannet, or a cuckoo, or a gull? How can we experience Keats if we have never heard a nightingale, or Shelley if we have never heard a skylark? Oh for a sobering dose of reality that will re-connect us with the real!

And what is true of the natural is equally true of the supernatural. Unlike us moderns, the Anglo-Saxons were closely connected with the supernatural realities underpinning human existence. They called these realities “wyrd”, a word which has decayed into the much weaker “weird”. Wyrd was more than merely weird. It was the intimate, almost palpable, presence of Providence in the lives of men, the closeness and connectedness of God to the destiny of His creatures.

Who liveth alone longeth for mercy,
Maker’s mercy. Though he must traverse
Tracts of sea, sick at heart,
-       trouble with oars ice-cold waters,
the ways of exile – Wyrd is set fast …

In the earth-realm all is crossed;
Wyrd’s will changeth the world.
Wealth is lent us, friends are lent us,
man is lent us, kin is lent;
all this earth’s frame shall stand empty …

For the modern in his electronic dream-world this is but foolishness. He has no concept of wyrd. For him the wyrd is just weird, or, worse, merely absurd. Our ancestors’ closeness to the natural and the supernatural is merely a sign of our ancestors’ ignorance or barbarism. Or so the modern perceives. But then the modern perceives very little because he is covered with too many artificial accretions to be able to experience, and therefore perceive, the real.

The modern is right in one respect at least. He is right in perceiving that the Anglo-Saxons were primitives. He is right, however, for the wrong reasons. His error lies in his perception that the primitive is synonymous with the barbaric or the ignorant. It is indeed the irony of ironies that his belief that the primitive is synonymous with the barbaric or the ignorant is actually the product of his own barbarism and ignorance. In truth, the Anglo-Saxons are primitive while he, the modern, is barbaric and ignorant. One who is primitive is one who never loses sight of the prime realities, the first things, upon which all else rests. As an adjective prime relates to the chief things, the most important things; as a noun it means the state of highest perfection. A primitive never loses sight of the most important things nor of the state of highest perfection which, properly understood, is the Godhead. It is the ignorant and the barbarian who lose sight of these things.

Let us leave the modern to his barbarity and his ignorance and let us return to the healthy wyrdness of the Anglo-Saxons. The conclusion of “The Seafarer” is the conclusion that any sagacious Primitive will draw as the primal lesson of life. It is a lesson that needs to be learned from life before death forces its conclusion upon us.

A man may bury his brother with the dead
and strew his grave with the golden things
he would have him take, treasures of all kinds,
but gold hoarded when he here lived
cannot allay the anger of God
towards a soul sin-freighted.