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)
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.
