The Anglo-saxon Culture

By Author: Mike Jones
Total Articles: 256
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The self-proclaimed imperial destiny of the British presented other factors that kept the Anglo-Saxons away from centre-stage. When it came to justifying colonial dominion, medievalism had an important role to play. Cultures, like individuals, pass through childhood and maturity, and if the Middle Ages represent European infancy, then the Indians in the nineteenth century must, so the logic went, be comparable to our medieval ancestors. Ananya Jahanara Kabir has explored the analogical mapping of the medieval development of the English language onto the Indian languages of the nineteenth century: 'Just as England was lifted out of her medieval "Dark Ages" by the light of the classics during the Renaissance, so would English perform the role of the classics in Thomas Sabo Jewellery bringing Bengal, and indeed the rest of India, to its own Renaissance'. Her findings are more elaborate than this, but the immaturity projected by the analogy is the essential point here.

John Ganim, also, has written of the pressure that conflation of the oriental and the medieval placed upon Victorian ...
... conceptions of the latter. They tended to conceive of medieval culture as 'essentially identical with its theatricality', imagining it in terms of 'display, spectacle and excess', characteristics readily ascribable to a juvenile culture. And it was romance that constituted the most obvious arena for these characteristics. A post-Conquest genre permeated by French influence, dealing extensively with pre-English Arthurian material, by definition eclipses Anglo-Saxon culture. Old English literature itself is very different from high-medieval romance and a much less inviting site of 'display, spectacle and excess'. Add to this the dominance of German scholarship in the study of the old Germanic languages, with its fervent nationalistic claims upon Saxon and Anglo-Saxon alike, and it is scarcely surprising that Thomas Sabo Bracelets the period tended to resonate little with most British. Greater Germania was not a place they wanted to come from.

And yet Tennyson, as we have already seen, translated the tenth-century account of the crucial victory at Brunanburh, a battle that saved the fledgling English nation from the forces of the north. In the same year he published the play Harold, celebrating the heroism of the last English king, in which he explicitly refers to 'that old song of Brunanburg Where England conquered'. As Edward Irving has pointed out, the heavy double-dactylic meter of his own translation is precisely that in which twenty-two years earlier he commemorated 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. Given that he first pioneered the meter in his translation from Beowulf, many years earlier still, I suggest that for 'The Light Brigade' he deliberately chose a patriotic 'Anglo-Saxon' meter. In Guinevere he names the heathen as 'the brood by Hengist left', an allusion to Bede's tale of the mercenary who turned against his British employers, thus opening the door to the Saxon influx. In doing so Tennyson clearly seeks to anchor the Idylls in history, identify the Saxons as both destroyers of the old Britain and ancestors of the new. Whether he thereby celebrates the passing of a torch, a tmnslatio imperil, or disrupts and problematises the authority of that translation, is a point that requires close examination of the poem. I have already suggested he does both, and his historicizing of romance, that convenient genre of magic, display and spectacle, should alert us to the disruptive potential of his quite genuine patriotism.