Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past: The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury

175 Pages·2000·0.69 MB·English

by  Eric Gerald Stanley

IMAGINING THE
ANGLO-SAXON PAST
The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon
Trial by Jury

Edited by Eric Gerald Stanley
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IMAGINING
THE ANGLO-SAXON PAST
THE SEARCH FOR
ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
AND
ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
ERIC STANLEY has an international reputation as a leading
Anglo-Saxonist,andhisperceptiveandoriginalcontributionsto
thefieldcontinuetooffervaluablecorrectivestoprevailingviews
and to show how scholarly predilection can easily become
prejudice and orthodoxy. The two issues under scrutiny in this
book are the tendency among some writers to exalt whatever is
primitiveandsupposedlypaganorcrypto-paganinthesurviving
Old English texts of the early Christian Middle Ages (for ex-
ample, Tolkien on monsters or Jacob Grimm on everything
Germanic), and the idealism of some advocates of political and
legalreformthatleadsthemtoidentifythebeginningsoftrialby
jury (and hence the first step on the way to democratic rule by
law), in Germanic or Alfredian institutions.
Eric Gerald Stanley is Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor
Emeritus of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford.
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IMAGINING
THE ANGLO-SAXON PAST
THE SEARCH FOR
ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
AND
ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
Eric Gerald Stanley
D. S. BREWER
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# Eric Gerald Stanley 1975, 2000
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
First published in book form 1975
Reprinted 2000
Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury
First published 2000
D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
ISBN 0 85991 588 3
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA
website: http://www.boydell.co.uk
Acataloguerecordforthisbookisavailable
fromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Stanley,EricGerald
[SearchforAnglo-Saxonpaganism]
ImaginingtheAnglo-Saxonpast/EricGeraldStanley
p.cm.
Firstworkpreviouslypublishedin1975;secondworkpublishednowfor
thefirsttime.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
Contents:TheSearchforAnglo-Saxonpaganism–Anglo-Saxontrial
byjury.
ISBN0-85991-588-3(alk.paper)
1. English literature – Old English, ca. 450–1100 – History and
criticism. 2. Paganism – England – History – To 1500. 3. Jury –
England–History–To1500. 4. Mythology,Germanic,inliterature
5. Anglo-Saxons – Religion. 6. Law, Anglo-Saxon. I. Stanley, Eric
Gerald.Anglo-Saxontrialbyjury. II. Title.
PR176.S68 2001
829.00–dc21 00–057203
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Typeset by Joshua Associates Ltd, Oxford
Printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for
inclusion in the eBook.
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CONTENTS
Preface to the new edition, AD 2000 vii
Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon
Paganism xiii
PART I
THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
1. The Romantic background 3
2. The English branch of the German tree 7
3. Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry 10
4. ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’ 14
5. English and German views on the conversion of the English 24
6. J.M. Kemble 29
7. The views of the founders seen through the writings of
their lesser contemporaries 33
8. English views of the late nineteenth century and after 38
9. Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding
Germanic antiquities in them 40
A. Disintegration 40
i. Beowulf 41
ii. The elegies 50
iii. Gnomic Poems 61
B. The search for Germanic antiquities 63
10. The gods Themselves 77
A. Appearances veiled by Christianity 77
B. Overt appearances 80
11. Wyrd 85
A. ‘Event’ or ‘fate’, Norn or Fortune 85
v
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contents
B. Early interpretations of wyrd 88
C. Wyrd in a Leipzig Ph.D. thesis 92
D. Germanic fatalism accommodated in Anglo-Saxon
Christianity 93
E. Germanic fatalism: a key to Anglo-Saxon melancholy 94
F. Wyrd: the mark of heathenism 96
G. Fate and Providence 98
H. Metod 101
I. More recent pagan interpretations of wyrd 102
J. Wyrd in Solomon and Saturn 105
K. Current views on wyrd 106
12. Conclusion 110
PART II
ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
Trial by Jury and how Later Ages Perceive its Origins
perhaps in Anglo-Saxon England
1. Jury: this palladium of our liberties, sacred and inviolate 111
2. Delivering the truth not the same as judging 123
3. Guilt and innocence a matter of conscience 128
4. ‘England’s great and glorious Revolution’ (1688), its debt to
Henry II’s revival of ancient institutions fostering liberty 132
5. Trial by jury not a Proto-Germanic nor perhaps an Anglo-
Saxon institution; but what of the twelve leading thegns of
the wapentake? 136
6. Why promulgated at Wantage? 140
7. The twelve of the wapentake probably an institution for the
Danelaw only 142
8. Conclusion 146
I. Index of sources 149
II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors 152
III. General Index 155
vi
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PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION, AD 2000
Fifty years have passed since I started to collect quotations from
scholarly writings that struck me, at that time an undergraduate, as
whollyunfoundedinclaimingtohavefoundintheChristianliteratureof
the Anglo-Saxons indelible vestiges of Germanic paganism, or in
claiming to have discovered the paganisms the Anglo-Saxon authors
appeared to have striven to conceal. Those teaching at Oxford, and
among them those whose teaching I attended regularly were, however,
not guilty of these misguided scholarly endeavours: my tutor,
E. Stefanyja Olszewska (Mrs Alan S.C. Ross), a brilliantly sensitive
and wide-ranging reader of Old and Middle English literature and of
Icelandicliterature,fromwhomIlearnteverythingthatIwascapableof
learning, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Alistair Campbell.
I began reading widely in the scholarly writings on the Anglo-Saxon
lawsonlyinthelastfewyears.IhadnoticedlongagothattheSaxonists
of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s time and those who followed him
looked back to their ancestors before the Norman Conquest for the
civil liberty extinguished, as they thought, under the Normans and only
slowly restored.1 King Alfred and the institution of trial by jury,
supposedly in his reign, played a part in a venerative view of the
Anglo-Saxon heritage and King Alfred’s place in it.2 I did not know
till fairly recently the range of reference to the supposed debt to the
Anglo-Saxons for the institution of trial by jury, and not at all that it
playedapartinthepoliticsofnineteenth-centuryGermany.Whenitwas
suggested to me that I might read a paper to the Bayerische Akademie
der Wissenschaften, which had honoured me by making me a corres-
pondingmember,itseemedappropriatetotakeasmysubjectthelawof
the Anglo-Saxons and how it was perceived in later ages. An expanded
version of that paper, read 5 July 1996, forms a Sitzungsbericht of the
1 See E.G. Stanley, ‘The Scholarly Recovery of the Significance of Anglo-Saxon
RecordsinProseandVerse:ANewBibliography’,Anglo-SaxonEngland9(1981),
pp.231–2;reprintedinE.G.Stanley,ACollectionofPaperswithEmphasisonOld
EnglishLiterature(Toronto,1987),p.13.
2 See E.G. Stanley, ‘The Glorification of Alfred King of Wessex (from the
Publication of Sir John Spelman’s Life, 1678 and 1709, to the Publication of
ReinholdPauli’s,1851)’,Poetica(Tokyo)xii(1981),p.113;reprintedinStanley,A
CollectionofPapers,p.420.
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preface to the new edition
Philosophisch-historischeKlasseoftheAkademie,andtheinstitutionof
trialbyjuryisapartofthat.Asomewhatdifferent,Englishversionwas
read to members of a conference at Western University, London
(Ontario), in April 1997, and that underlies the part on jury contained
in this book. I wish to thank Professor Jane Toswell for inviting me to
participate in the conference.
Therearegoodreasonsforpresentingthematerialontrialbyjuryina
volume in which ‘The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism’ is reprinted,
notjustbecausebothinvolvescholarlymythographiesabouttheAnglo-
Saxon past, butbecause these mythographies share in the same political
origins from the early nineteenth century till much later. Jacob Grimm
plays a major roˆle in the creation of both myths,3 and it is important to
understand the politics of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth
century when he began to publish. Vaterlandsliebe, German patriotism,
underliesitall.TheGermanstateswere,ofcourse,notyetunited,butthe
Napoleonic defeats, culminating in Jena and followed by victories at
Leipzigand Waterloo,inboth ofwhichGerman armswere significantly
involved,shapedattitudes.NotthatallGermanswereofonemindabout
Napoleon himself; some were conservatives, others were not unsympa-
thetic to republican notions: but defeat is bitter, and forged a united,
patriotic spirit in scholars and poets who were, in other respects, of
varied outlook. And Jacob Grimm was among the patriotic scholars.
Grimm’s primary interests were not only philological. The most
literary president of the Philological Society in more than a century-
and-a-half of its history, William Paton Ker, understood Grimm’s
literary motivation well, and he portrayed him sympathetically in 1915,
a time when the Kaiser’s war would not have made a glowing reference
to Vaterlandsliebe an acceptable subject of praise to a London audience
orBritishreadership.4KerdrawsattentiontoGrimm’sstatementonhow
his interest in philology developed:5
3 A succinct account of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, with excellent bibliographical
informationisE.Ebel’sentry,s.v.Grimm,inthe2ndeditionofJohannesHoops,
founder, Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, XIII (Berlin and New
York,1999),pp.40–5.ItistoberegrettedthatEbelhadnomorethanaboutnine-
and-a-halfcolumnsforhisentry;thatistobecontrastedwiththeentryHeuslerby
the general editor, Heinrich Beck, Reallexikon, XIV (1999), pp. 533–43, nearly
twentycolumns,andthereaderisdirectedfurthertoBeck’sownentryEthik§6,
Reallexikon,VII(1989),pp.609–11,notquitefivecolumnslong,inwhichHeusler
playsamajorpart.IamnotarguingthatHeuslershouldhavehadlessspace,but
thattheBrothersGrimmcouldvaluablyhavebeengivenmore.
4 W.P. Ker, Jacob Grimm – An address delivered at the annual meeting of the
Philological Society on Friday, May 7, 1915, Publications of the Philological
Societyvii(1915).
5 J. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, I, 2nd edn (Go¨ttingen, 1822), p. viii: ‘Das
einladende studium mittelhochdeutscher poesie fu¨hrte mich zuerst auf gramma-
tische untersuchungen; die u¨brigen a¨lteren mundarten mit voller ausnahme der
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preface to the new edition
The inviting study of Middle High German poetry led me first to
grammaticalinvestigations.Theotherolderdialectsofferlittlebyway
of poetry, with the full exception of the Old Norse dialect, and the
more partial exception of the Anglo-Saxon dialect. A considerable
volume of Middle Dutch and early Middle English works can hardly
be compared with the aforementioned verse.
That was published ten years after the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig,
seven years after Waterloo. Glorious victories had been achieved, and
after the earlier defeats there was a sense not so much of exultation but,
asthere had been after the ThirtyYears War concluded in 1648, asense
of gratitude that the country had come through. Some years earlier, the
poet Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, with a very different political outlook from
that of the Brothers Grimm, had expressed well that sense of gratitude
foranationalsurvivalintheveryturbulenttimesofhisownsicknessand
of humiliating, multiple defeat at the turn of the century, when, after a
longabsence,hereturnedhome:6‘Butthou,myfatherland,sacredinthy
suffering, behold, thou hast endured!’ There were more calamities to
come for Germany, and these youthful years of the Brothers Grimm –
Jacob was born in 1785 and Wilhelm a year later – were formative.
EarlyintheirlivestheBrothersGrimmwereimbuedwithaloveofall
aspects of the Germanic past. Jacob Grimm’s first academic study was
Law; at the University of Marburg F.C. von Savigny was an inspiring
teacher, and the legal institutions of the Germanic peoples before they
were imbrued with alien legal systems were of a kind with the ancient
GermanicliteraturesandwiththesisterdialectsoftheGermanicpeoples:
that kind was seen by him as ‘our kind’, unsere Art, the national
character. German patriotism was sentimentally affectionate of the
German past and not yet aggressively expansionist.
TherewasavigorouslyimaginativesidetoJacobGrimm’sscholarship,
leadingquiteoftentoconclusionsbasedonwishfulthinking,abouthalf-
concealedmanifestationsofpaganismandaboutProto-Germanicorigins
of legal institutions. W.P. Ker ends his account of Grimm with a
wonderful play on words: ‘the cloud of his fancies and aspirations had
fire and life in it; and the history of Jacob Grimm, his progress and his
altnordischen, theilweise der angelsa¨chsischen, bieten wenig dichterisches; eine
ansehnliche maße mittelniederla¨ndischer und altenglischer werke la¨ßt sich jenen
kaumvergleichen.’
6 N. von Hellingrath, F. Seebass and L. von Pigenot (eds), Ho¨lderlin: Sa¨mtliche
Werke, IV Gedichte 1800–06, 3rd edn (Berlin, 1943), p. 32, ‘Ru¨kkehr in die
Heimath’lines11–12(andcf.pp.285–6,notesonthepoem):
DochdumeinVaterland!duheilig-
Duldendes!siehe,dubistgeblieben.
It might be possible to take geblieben as meaning ‘stayed (behind)’ rather than
‘endured’,butIthinkhardlyherewithduldend;perhapsbothsensesarepresent.
ix