King Alfred of Wessex Bookplate

Charles Fifield's Bookplate (ca. 1902).

The Corona-virus pandemic has recently virtualized two academic conferences I had hoped to attend next summer, the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo (May 2021) and the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (July 2021). Of course it is true that the academic work of presenting papers (and attending papers as they are read) can still go on virtually, but I doubt I am alone in thinking that it's seeing old friends in person that's the true reward of going to a conference.

Had I gone, both of the papers I would have given would have at least touched on my old claim that King Alfred of Wessex (871-99) was a collector of books. So I was delighted, this week to come across this early twentieth-century bookplate that suggests much the same thing.

Located on the inside front board of a book from 1902, Charles L. Fifield's bookplate has a certain rustic charm, even if artistic appeal may not be its chief attraction. It may be the case that Fifield himself provided the drawing that the plate was made from. The little poem at the bottom of the plate says:

King Alfred, deep engrossed in book

  Forgot the cakes and let them burn

Remember Thou, the book thou took

  Ought to its owner soon return.

Of course, this refers to the legend of "Alfred and the Cakes," the most popular story ever told about Alfred: at his fortune's lowest ebb, he took refuge in a herdsman's cottage and was rebuked by the cottager's wife for allowing her cakes to burn when he ought to have been watching them. Almost certainly the story is apocryphal; it appears to suggest that Alfred as a "lord" of his people (Old English hlaf-weard = loaf-guard) had failed, and needed to be reminded of his duties: in the earliest records of the tales, it is not cakes that burn, but loaves (Latin: panis, breads). 

In most retellings of the story, Alfred is distracted by military worries about how to regain control of his kingdom, nearly overrun by the Danes; this bookplate's little poem is the first time that I can recall the suggestion that he was distracted by his reading.

Though some of my readers may recognize it, it may be worth explaining that the Old English phrase on the bookplate, "Alfred Mec heht gewyrcan" is the text on the Alfred Jewel, one of the great treasures surviving from late ninth-century England, often associated with Alfred's literary and book-producing activities.  

It's a delight to add this little homage to Alfred to my own collection of books, where it can also serve as a reminder, perhaps, for me to take an extra bit of care with my pandemic baking. 

John Hassall's Berlyn Tapestrie [ca. 1915]

Two weeks ago, I wrote here about some surprising (to me) war work undertaken by medievalists during World War I. This week, I'm happy to show off a different item; a parodic re-telling of Kaiser Wilhelm's invasion of Flanders in the mode of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Hassall's Berlyn Tapestrie. 

The format of this book is an unusual one: it is a long, folded panorama, printed on one side only (at Bayeux, one can purchase as a souvenir a similar accordion-fold reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry). Printed (probably) in 1915, it made use of cheap pulp paper, and the acidity of the paper now means that my copy is very fragile and subject to chipping, splitting, and loss.

The artist, John Hassall, was one of England's best-known commercial illustrators in his day, and his works were probably most often encountered in posters, advertisements, and children's books. But the Berlyn Tapestrie shows us at the very least that Hassall was familiar with the Anglo-Saxon Bayeux Tapestry.

I do not know if it was a commonplace the time to compare Flanders to England, and the Germans to the Normans, but certainly that's at least part of the effect of this little book. The Berlyn Tapestrie was reprinted by Oxford in 2014, but--as always--I find the original publication, despite its fragility, to be far more interesting. 

Thomas Rowley: Latin Poet?

Foolish though it may by, I am obnoxious enough to think that I ought to be able to solve all the mysteries that a new acquisition throws my way. One in a while, however, I buy something that might benefit from a real expert in the areas in question.  Fortunately, I have some friends and acquaintances out there with many specializations; this little blog post will leave many questions unanswered, but I'd be delighted if any of my readers could help me answer them, or even come closer to answers.

Rowley's Latin poem.

The item in question is a pair of printed binding fragments. When I purchased these, they were billed as incunabula fragments, but I suspect they are slightly later. The printed text appears to be Nicolas Panormitano's Repertorium super Decretalium, but with some additional materials I haven't traced in any actual incunabula printings (the additions are common in printings from the later 16th century; I haven't yet determined when and where they first were printed). I'd guess from the style of printing that these printed fragments derive from the first half of the sixteenth century. 

On their own, these scraps from an old legal book might not be especially interesting, but these are covered with scribbles and texts from a Englishman, Thomas Rowley, perhaps dating around 1600.

Two post-incunabula binding fragments with
Rowley's writing, none of which appears in the
center sections, corresponding to the spine
of the newer book in which they were re-used.

I haven't been able to trace Rowley: the name isn't uncommon, and Thomas Chatterton seems to have used the name for a late medieval poet who was the product of his own hoaxing imagination--a coincidence that further complicates internet searches on the name. But Rowley used these leaves (which must have been the free end-pages of a book he owned) for a variety of little bits and bobs, including the four lines of Latin verse pictured above.

To the best of my abilities in transcription, these verses read as follows:

Justitiam regnumque dei super omnia quære

Sic tibi largientur cætera cuncta satis

Cras[. . . . . . . . ] cures, curet sibi crastinus ipse

Sufficit ille dies tempus in omne malis.

This passage is followed by his signature, "Thomas Rowley" (at the bottom left of the top image, you may see his name written another time, with "Th / Rowly" just legible. Many of these items seem to be mere pen-trials). 

I am unsure of some parts of the transcription: "largientum" is probably wrong; the ellipses mark out a passage I'm even less sure of. Again, any clarification would be much appreciated. I think this is a syllable-counting verse form, rather than hexameters, but Latin meters are not my strongest suit, either.

Elsewhere, Rowley's notes here include a tag from Vergil and the poetic version of the Lord's Prayer (beginning “O pater omnipotens clarique") that was most familiar from having been used in Lyly's Grammar. Such passages are easily searchable on the web. But these four poetic lines I have not been able to trace, nor Rowley's evocative English line "The Gordian knot w[hi]ch nothing canne vnloose but death." 

With his expressive italic script, Rowley seems to have been well enough educated, and perhaps even a bit ambitious in a literary way, if we can judge his writing by so few bits. I wish I knew a bit more about him.

Mini-Catalogue Monday: 21 Unusual Nineteenth-Century Items

From David Williams's
Cymro yn Mexico, 1826.

It's been a while, I guess, since I posted a link to a small catalogue: but I've finally gathered enough interesting items together to make it possible again.

Nevertheless, this has been a fun list to put together, and while all the items are American (or at least have a crucial link to the Americas or American literature), I am glad to say there are items in French, Welsh, and German here. There are works of literature and works of science, manuscripts and printed books and comics, and some items that push the boundaries.

Perhaps my favorite of these items is the book of typed poems based on a weekly comic published in The Boston Globe in the early part of the twentieth century: I've always been fascinated with the genre of fan writing, where consumers or readers of text become, in turn, producers and writers.

Typescript of poems based on the Fatty Spillaker comics.

The poems in this book are, as it turns out, not very good--but I am not sure that matters so much. The whole production is a remarkable and early example of the fan-fic dynamic, I think.

Anyhow, the whole list is only 21 items, but across a range of interesting and unusual things. Enjoy!

Interlace Poem

Regular readers (and those who know me in real life) probably know that I am still somewhat active as an academic. For the past few months, I've been putting the finishing touches (I hope) on my fifth academic book, which I've begun to call "my last academic book," for whatever that's worth.

When asked what the book is about, I usually describe it as being about textual dimensions, even while I recognize that such a description probably doesn't communicate much of anything to anyone.

Agnes D Garbey's Interlace Poem, dated June 9, 1855. 

But it was a delight to be able to purchase this piece of manuscript poetry recently. It brings together, quite remarkably, many of the topics that have been occupying my mind as I've been writing this book. (And I recognize that the image is probably not legible here: the original is written in very tiny script--the whole thing is about 7" tall from top to bottom--and I need a magnifying glass to read the actual page itself).

It is, I think it is fair to say, a puzzle-poem, with the first "lines" reading "Begin and see if thou canst shew/ the starting point and place of ending too." The design, I think, can usefully be described as an interlace design--the single ongoing linear text of the poem wrapping around, with numerous crossing points and tricky turning points.

Such interlace designs were common in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (and elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon art), and a well known critical essay by John Leyerle even concerns itself with "The Interlace Structure of Beowulf." It is difficult to tell if Agnes D. Garbey (if I am reading her name correctly) had Anglo-Saxon models in mind, but the interlace effect of her poem could not be more obvious. And the poem's use of the phrase "The endless knot" will also recall Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for readers who know that poem well. We will probably never know for certain if medieval models have influenced this poem, but it is possible that they did: the middle nineteenth century was, if possible, even more fascinated with all things medieval than we are today.

In terms of the book I've been working on, this poem is a two-dimensional text: any attempt (such as the one I will offer below), to linearize it, to re-present it in a single textual line, without crossovers or overlap, will diminish the poem and its effect upon readers. Too often, we suppose that a poem can be read aloud, and maybe even that a poem should be read aloud. This poem, on the other hand, must be seen to be appreciated. 

The argument of the book I am writing, of course, is that we have long ignored or misunderstood two-dimensional and three-dimensional aspects of some literary texts, though manuscripts in particular have often enough made use of more than a single linear dimension. Agnes Garbey's poem, here, is a reminder that even as recently as the nineteenth century, manuscripts might make use of complex visual structures in ways that deserve our attention and respect. 

I don't know if I'll be able to use this poem in the book itself. I am tempted, though, to offer it up as a possible image for the cover--if only it were a bit more legible!


Transcription:

Begin and see if thou canst shew
The starting point and place of ending too;
Oh! mortal behold and thou shalt see,
The endless knot Love's twined for thee.
But like this knot a point of winding
And like this knot Love has no ending.
Is love like a moat that lives but a day,
On the beams of the sun and vanishes away?
Or like the flower that blooms at the morn
At noon of its beauty and lasciviousness shorn?
No, true love may [be] likened to the beautiful rose,
That from its leaves sweetest fragrance throws.
It buds, it blooms and dies, its presence is done,
Yet sweetness remains though the body is gone.
Oh! What wants life be de[ . . . ]ed of true love
Of heaven's cheering beams from our Father above;
A dark howling wilderness. --thick gathering gloom,
Spreading o'er our sad journey to the place of the tomb.
June 9th 1855                       Agnes D Garbey.

Lingulf the Saxon

I recently bought a small archive of manuscript poems from little known turn-of-the-century American poet William Brunton. Brunton, so far as I have been able to piece together, was a minister in Massachusetts and an active occasional poet, who published a surprising number of poems in newspapers and other (generally) non-literary venues from the 1880s to about 1910.

In this, Brunton reminds us that poetry occupied a slightly larger slice of the public eye than it does today; perhaps the places modern Americans most often encounter poetry is in children’s books (and perhaps, remarkably, in some Young Adult books, where the “novel in verse” remains a real thing) and sentimental greeting cards.  But at the end of the nineteenth century, one might still see a poem printed in the newspaper, even one's local paper.

Brunton's manuscript of "The Saintly Chimes"

Given my recent blog post on Longfellow and his interest in Anglo-Saxon literature and history, I was astonished to find one poem of Brunton’s on an Anglo-Saxon topic, “The Saintly Chimes.”

I will transcribe the poem below (I realize that this image may not be immediately legible), but it was striking to me to find this because it stands as one more example of how widely the interest in the Anglo-Saxon period spread, a century or so ago. 

The Anglo-Saxon period here, is little more than a setting for this little Christian tale, and yet the tale is not set in Chaucer's day. The Anglo-Saxon period was apparently understood to be familiar enough to function with only the barest reference: here, a name ("Lingulf") and really nothing else specific.

Once I'd read this poem, of course, I wondered if I could trace the story. Remarkably, a Google search on the phrase "Saintly Chimes" does not turn up any published version of the poem (though it may have been printed in a newspaper or other source that hasn't yet been effectively digitized), and a search for the words "Lingulf" "Saxon" and "goats" turns up exactly one relevant item, a short paragraph from a periodical titled The New Unity, that reads as follows:

 "Lingulf, an old Saxon herdsman, sold his flock that he might put bells into the tower of the minster at St. Albans, and whenever he heard these bells ringing he said, "How sweetly do my sheep and goats bleat to-day." So we may joyously sacrifice the lower in the interests of the higher, that we may become builders of that permanent church building which is ever rising" ("The Tower of Babel: A Sermon Preached in All Souls Church, Chicago, December 5, 1897, by Jenkin Lloyd Jones," New Unity new series vol. 6 [1898], 1102-08, at p. 1106).

Brunton's poem, one guesses, may well have been inspired by this very passage; so far I've been unable to trace any older source for the tale: I'd love to hear if there's an earlier source for the story. Of course, it may also be the case that the influence goes the other direction, from Brunton's poem to Jones's sermon.

Here is Brunton's poem:

The Saintly Chimes

O'er his devotion deep I brood,

  A tale of other days,

Lingulf, a Saxon herdsman good,

  Desired to do God praise;

At old St. Albans did he live,

  In that Cathedral town,

And of his flocks did freely give,

  To win it fair renown:

He sold his goats and sheep so fine,

  And chime of bells he bought;

Their voices praised the great divine,

  And gladdened him in thought:

How sweetly bleat my sheep to-day,

  The herdsman said in glee,

As out they rang from far away

  In holy melody!

And we though centuries apart,

  And silence falls between,

Can take the music to our heart

  And keep his memory green:

For those that help the church in love

  By giving of their good,

Prolong the chime of bliss above,

  And join his brotherhood!

                       William Brunton.

Longfellow and King Alfred

Marcus Ward's Royal Illuminated Legends:
Longfellow's King Alfred and Othere (ca. 1872-80?)

I've been thinking (and also doing some writing) recently about the place of Anglo-Saxon literature in the nineteenth century, for a host of reasons, including what I recently discovered about the Wheeling, West Virginia, glassmaker, William Leighton, Jr (whom I've long known about from the glass world, as a major figure at Wheeling's Hobbs, Brockunier & Co). Leighton, I learned, was also an American poet of at least minor note. 

Even more surprisingly, he wrote two books (which I've not yet read) that appear to concern themselves with events from Anglo-Saxon England: The Sons of Godwin (1877) and At the Court of King Edwin (1878). Since medieval literature, and Anglo-Saxon literature in particular, has always been a focus of my academic writing, Leighton is especially fascinating to me: like me, he dealt in Victorian glassware, was interested in Anglo-Saxon literature, and lived in West Virginia. It's an unusual combination, I think.

"Othere, the old sea captain."

My post today, however, is about a more famous American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His short work, "The Discoverer of the Northern Cape)" was another American poem on an Anglo-Saxon topic that I knew nothing about until recently (note that here, Longfellow's title has been superseded by the title "King Alfred and Othere"). Of course I knew the story of King Alfred and Ohthere--it's one of the first things learners of Old English read, an interesting little bit of late ninth-century geographical learning that King Alfred inserted (or had inserted) into the Old English translation of Orosius's Historiae Adversus Paganos.

Longfellow's poem, as my images show, was of sufficient interest to readers in England that the firm of Marcus Ward & Co produced this children's version of the poem, set to music and lavishly illustrated with six full-page pictures. It is, apparently, a rare book: WorldCat shows copies published (as here) by Marcus Ward & Co, in London; and also copies published (with only four plates) by Nimmo, in Edinburgh; as well as an American version published by J. R. Osgood. But WorldCat only seems to show about half a dozen holdings in total for all of these three editions together.

So I was obviously delighted to get this copy recently. It certainly served a role, in the nineteenth century, of associating Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons with the discovery of and knowledge of foreign lands. In that sense, this book did its work in promoting the ideals of the British Empire; that Longfellow was the poet reminds us that Americans, too, could be both the influencers and the influenced in relation to such associations. 

At the same time, the book is part of a series, "Marcus Ward's Illuminated Legends" which the publisher's ad on the rear cover describes in the following terms: "Each Story, or Legend, is Illustrated with a set of brilliant Pictures, in the quaint spirit of Mediæval times, and printed in Colors and Gold. The stories are related in Antient Ballad form." One of the other titles advertised in the series is "Pocahontas, or La Belle Sauvage." One wonders, indeed, what "brilliant Pictures, in the quaint spirit of Medieval times," would accompany the tale of Pocahontas. But here, too, America and some notion of the Middle Ages were fit together somehow in the Victorian imagination, and they were further placed together for the consumption of Victorian children. 

There's still much to think about here, I think, though the transatlantic aspects of these linkages seems clear.

"And there we hunted the walrus"

"Anglo-Saxonists"

There’s been a lot of traffic in my little corner of the internet lately that suggests that the field of early medieval studies, and Anglo-Saxon studies in particular, has a problem. The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is racism, with a side helping, it seems, of sexism. I don’t think I have any insights that can solve such serious problems, I am sorry to say, but I think I do have some observations to make that might help us understand where our discipline is now, how we have gotten here, and what we can—and cannot, or should not—do in the present moment.

The whole discipline, the claim has been made, is tainted by the way in which the very terms “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxonist” have been employed, from the nineteenth century to the present, in ways that explicitly or implicitly align with ideas of whiteness and white racial superiority. There can be no real argument with this point that the terms have been used by racists: it is true, and it has long been known. But the notion that these terms are now irrevocably tainted is one that I am not (yet?) persuaded of: different speech communities often use identical words with differing senses. Like even the worst characterizations of Anglo-Saxon studies, America, too, has a long history of both open and institutional racism, and yet I am not sure that we should wish to change the name of the country, just because the politics of some Americans includes white supremacist attitudes.

More troubling to me is the argument that the very structure of the discipline of Anglo-Saxon studies embeds and embodies an institutional racism, especially since the origins of the discipline were almost always built around discovering or rediscovering “authentic” Anglo-Saxon origins: whether that was Archbishop Matthew Parker hoping to throw off the yoke of Roman Christian practice, or nineteenth-century philologists like the Grimm brothers, hoping to discover an authentic German-ness. There is nothing wrong, of course, in wishing or hoping to discover something authentic about the past: the trouble comes in when that kind of authenticity is associated with purity and superiority, when the supposedly inauthentic is seen as corruption. The truth (if we can know such a thing) seems to be that there was nothing pure about even the earliest Anglo-Saxon culture: the Sutton Hoo ship burial includes items from Merovingian Gaul and even from Byzantium: such cosmopolitan connections were apparently deeply valued. And subtracting off those pieces doesn’t leave us with the essential truth of Anglo-Saxon culture, it only leaves us with a fragment instead of a whole.

It is admittedly difficult to draw a firm line between the authentic and the pure, and I myself suspect that some modern disciplinary structures in Anglo-Saxon studies might rightly be criticized for crossing that line. Yet the institutional racism that results can hardly be understood as a problem internal to Anglo-Saxon studies. At least in this country, the hiring of Anglo-Saxon scholars into academic positions is virtually always accomplished by people who are not themselves Anglo-Saxonists. Thus the ranks of working academic Anglo-Saxonists are people who have been selected and chosen by other scholars from outside the field—and their judgments about what the field is and should be. These people making the hiring decisions, I think it is safe to say, may not always be as reflective about the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies as are Anglo-Saxonists themselves.

I will consider just one specific issue, at the risk of irritating or angering some of my Anglo-Saxonist friends. At many universities in the US, Anglo-Saxonists are expected to or encouraged to also teach Old Norse language and literature. Undergraduates often love such course offerings, as they often love Old English. That love, indeed, is one of the shaping structures of modern Anglo-Saxon studies, and yet it is in turn shaped by public, rather than academic, discourses about the past. Considered dispassionately, Old High German and Old Saxon traditions are closer linguistically and culturally (as West Germanic languages) to Old English than is Old Norse. But most of the significant Old Saxon and Old High German poetry is explicitly Christian, inflected by foreign, Roman influence. The Old Norse saga tradition allows us to get at the pagan, warrior culture much more directly, and it is (therefore?) much more exciting. My point, of course, is that what we Anglo-Saxonists choose to teach is, indeed, shaped by interests and desires that come surprisingly close to a search for (or interest in) pure, untainted, Germanic origins. It is part of why we put Beowulf at the center of our study.

Now, I love Beowulf, and I think it is one of the great works of world literature, and it may deserve its place at the center of our discipline: but we need to be clearer, I think, about how and why a work like Beowulf gets its place and deserves its place (the two things have not been the same for Beowulf, I think). And not thinking clearly about that distinction, or not thinking clearly about things like why we teach Old Norse alongside Beowulf so much more often than we teach Old Saxon alongside it, leaves us subject to all the hazards of other kinds of not thinking clearly.

[And let me be clear: I am making no effort here to call out any individual who teaches Old Norse in preference to Old Saxon: I am calling out our discipline as a whole; students who demand or respond to such courses differentially; departmental structures and course-offerings; and the hiring-decision-makers at all levels who respond to their own sets of beliefs and ideas. All of these people and groups shape the discipline, and my point is that the current state of the field does indeed more often teach Old Norse than Old Saxon, and that that very practice is worth attending to. I am asking for self-reflection on the part of those of us who are now in the discipline. Likewise: increasing the diversity of academic Anglo-Saxonists is a laudable goal that I support, but if our habit of teaching Old Norse supports or derives from a search for Germanic purity, the discipline might still embody biases that look an awful lot like institutional racism. Solving these problems must surely involve Anglo-Saxonists, and students, and colleagues who make hiring, staffing, and curricular decisions—but just as surely, these structures are interlinked to structures that run right through our culture, and they won’t be easy to replace. And yes, teaching Old Norse is every bit as valuable as teaching Beowulf: but how we do these things structurally matters. The work before us will not be easy and it must involve us and others.]

Throughout much of the discussion that I’ve seen online surrounding these issues, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis, and the alt-right, are the bogey men whose use or invocation of Anglo-Saxon works like Beowulf and the very term “Anglo-Saxon” itself are driving the discussion. Most academics, perhaps reasonably, do not wish to be associated with such groups and their politics. But the usual claim that I have seen being made about these groups is that they “mis-appropriate” Anglo-Saxon literature or culture. [Medievalists, it turns out, are as likely as anyone else to tell others online that they are doing it wrong; I'm probably guilty of it here in my own essay.] But the claim of mis-appropriation is an extremely odd one, it seems to me—because it makes an unargued assertion about who owns the Anglo-Saxon period, its literature and its history, and their meanings. Unsurprisingly, academics seem to want to believe or claim that they own the meanings, and that they can judge what is or is not misappropriation.

But the truth is, the past is the common heritage and legacy of us all. It is wrong of academics to claim—however obliquely—ownership of the medieval past and its meanings. Of course, academics are indeed interested parties—but so are the white supremacists, after all, at least to hear them tell it. I don’t like or agree with what the white supremacists do with Anglo-Saxon materials—and I am glad they don’t own them either. Beowulf is not the heritage of any racial group in particular (my own Northumbrian ancestors give me no advantage or disadvantage in reading or interpreting Beowulf). Instead, Beowulf is part of the heritage of all who speak English, and indeed, of all the world. We all—including we academics—must share Beowulf and its meanings, rather than hoard them.

Beowulf (and at this point in my little essay, I hope it is clear that the poem stands in for all the texts and artifacts of the medieval past) must be shared on an open-access basis. The great challenge of open access, of course, is the way it suggests that academics must give up any desire to control meanings. Why make digital facsimiles of medieval manuscripts open to all, if academics nonetheless still hope to control or own the meanings made from them? Open access, it seems to me, is meaningless (perhaps I should say pointless) without a different, less restricted vision of the ownership of meanings.

The role of academics in an open access world, it seems to me, will be perhaps to moderate, to persuade, to teach. The open access world will be filled with crazy, crackpot theories, but who is served if academics refuse to acknowledge them because their authors are not academically credentialed? [At the risk of answering my own rhetorical question, it seems to me that academics are served, because such a practice lets them try to maintain their supposed ownership of meaning.] Beowulf teaches us—or tries to—that hoarding is ultimately useless: but this is a lesson it seems that academics and white supremacists both need to learn. The one group needs to stop trying to hoard meaning, since it is impossible; the other needs to learn that hoarding purity is also impossible, no matter how it is defined. Is it wrong of me to suspect that these two groups might help teach each other such lessons?

Most academics, I think it is safe to say, will hesitate to believe that they can learn anything at all from white supremacists—but I worry that this, too, is an expression of an essential belief that the academic world owns meanings. That belief, too, it now seems to me, is also a kind of a dream of hoarded purity.

At the very least, if we have any hope at all of teaching and reaching those whose ideas and meanings are different from our own, we must have and even cultivate the humility to admit that all of our hoarded meanings have never enabled us to purchase Truth. It is a lesson, even, that we might yet learn from Beowulf.


ADDENDUM (August 11, 2017)

One of the great delights of my life is learning, and I am happy to say that, even at my age, I can still learn. In the blog post above, I hoped to share some of my thinking on a topic close to my heart. I have learned some things, in the aftermath, that might also be worth sharing. These are not all the things I have learned, nor do I believe that my learning is complete, but they are the things I am ready to write about here. And my thanks—to all those who wrote to me or communicated with me in a spirit of teaching or helping me to learn—could not be more heartfelt or sincere.

I learned I should have not described white supremacists as “bogey men”: they are far too real, and too dangerous in our world for such a term. This was wrong of me, and I’ll own it. I will try to do better.

I learned, yet again, that what seems clear enough to me in my writing may not always be clear to others. Of course, I’ve learned this one before: it will be a life-long struggle for me, I fear.

In particular, I should have made some of my concluding points far more explicitly: I should have said, rather than merely implying, that we academic medievalists might learn the dangers of our own claims of exclusive ownership of texts and their meanings from those of our opponents who also claim exclusive ownership of texts and meanings. I meant to say that even our claims—to the extent that some of them seem to boil down to claims of exclusive ownership—may work to reject the possibility that the literature of the past is the common heritage of us all. I meant to say that if we engage in a fight over who owns the literature of the past and its meanings, I fear we may have lost a bigger battle, because we have assented to the notion that someone can own the past. Instead of making those points more clearly and explicitly, I unintentionally left room in my text for readers to suppose that I meant that we might learn the explicit lessons that white supremacists wish to teach. This was a definite weakness—even a failure—in my essay, and I will own it. Indeed, I apologize for it.

I should also have found a way to say more straightforwardly and directly what I believe in my heart: I believe it is dangerous to claim categorically that we can have nothing to learn from our opponents. To me such a claim sounds like a denial of their humanity, a rejection of the possibility of any basis for connection at all.

Perhaps I am wrong in my feeling that it is a denial of their humanity, so one thing I hope also to have learned is to put this lesson, too, into a form I hope is clearer, by taking it out of the realm of teaching and learning, and rephrasing it as the simple wish of my own heart alone:

I hope I shall always have the courage to resist the urge to deny the humanity of my opponents, even those who would deny my own or others’ humanity.

Upon the rock of this wish I will stand.