Old English, A Historical Background: Gathering Information (Or, When Things Get Wildly Out Of Control)

As you may recall, one of my 2023 goals  was "Study Old English:  Be able to translate a text by December 2023".  This mostly was a personal vanity project for me, and like many of my personal vanity projects I can lose momentum pretty quickly.  But as wise men have said (and as reminded most recently by friend of this blog Eaton Rapids Joe), what gets measured gets managed.  

And so I came up with a supporting plan: I would do a blog series on Old English.  This would meet the need of keeping my momentum up and essentially holding myself accountable at some level to someone - in this case, my audience.

As can be imagined with someone whose undergraduate and graduate degree are in social sciences, the first place I inevitably start is background, specifically history. After all, if you do not know where you come from, you will have very little idea of how you got there and lack context for how things turned out.  

Initially I felt pretty confident:  I had at least three books (below) to guide me on my initial writing.  Sure, I thought, I might need one more book to get us to the Norman Invasion and the tail end of post Anglo-Saxon England, but likely that was it.

Fair enough, I said.  I found the second book in "The Norton Library History of England" and bought it (below).  Conveniently it went through the second half of Anglo-Saxon England and past. 

Wonderful, I thought.  I am ready.

And then, of course, I actually started writing.

My pre-455 A.D. history was pretty solid and I knew fairly well.  Even that next period was known to me; collapsing civilizations have an odd and special interest in my heart and I have been at least a passing student of Celtic history and The Celtic Twilight for over 30 years.  But really, that only got us up to 597 A.D., when St. Augustine arrived on British shores.  Suddenly my "Defining History in Six Easy Blog Posts" became a lot more difficult.

I do not suppose this is a surprise, of course - after all, around 600 years is a lot of history.  And when I hit something I do not know about, my first reaction is 1) Buy a Book; and 2) Study.  And so I started reading, trying to catch up on something like 400 years of history on an era that I knew very little about in detail but definitely impacted the Anglo-Saxon language (my actual project).  Suddenly, the books I had did not seem like enough.

And then, randomly, I looked at my bookshelf in the "British History" area (yes, I have the organized by areas and interests):

Low and behold, not one but two general general British histories.  On the one hand, general histories are simply that:  general.  On the other hand, every author has a slightly different take and thus every book contains slightly different interpretations (they are also, thankfully, pre-2000's; I find older books more useful even if I have to supplement with more modern materials).

But then, the writer in me jumped up:  I should not just include bland history.  History is made up of personalities and as we continue into the later period of the Anglo-Saxons, we have more written materials and thus at some level, we start to see individuals as more than just simple actors.  One of the personalities we know more about than almost any other is Alfred the Great (coming soon).  The books I had talked some about him, but not really at the level I was hoping for.

Then, again, I looked at my bookshelf - not at the "British History" area but at the "Medieval Literature" area (also a thing).  There, sitting there as it had been since we moved in 2009, was this:

Yup.  The biography of Alfred the Great (one of two "biographies") we have from the period.  I have probably looked past it a hundred times in the last 10 years, largely because I was not doing any thinking of Anglo-Saxon England at the time.

But wait!  There was more:

You might remember that The Ecclesiastical History Of The English People by The Venerable Bede was one of the two major works we have on the history of early Anglo-Saxon England prior to the formalization of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the late 9th Century.  And here I had not just that work, but other works of the period to give a flavor of the writing of the period.

As we are now fully into Viking Age England, if only I had a book on that:

In all fairness, I remember that I owned this one.  It is actually a quite good book that I acquired likely 35 years ago just because it had a discussion of "The Battle Of Maldon" (which we will get to eventually as well).

Which then led two the great opponents of the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings (who they turned back) and the Normans (who they did not):

God bless Osprey Publishing.  On a personal note, the book on The Normans was the very first Osprey book I bought - Dublin, Ireland, 1989.

One of the other pivotal figures in Anglo-Saxon England is, of course, Harold Godwinson, the beater back of one (but not two) invasions and the last Anglo-Saxon king.  There is much less about him specifically in the historical record (if for no other reason that he was not anticipated to be king).  

Thanks, 2014 me for thinking ahead:

Suddenly the project that was going to be a thing to keep me on course for a project has become a project all on its own.

This is what I love about things like history (and philosophy and geography and agriculture and, well, really anything):  they are interlinked.  One thing leads so easily to another:  I start with a simply study of history and suddenly I am reading up on literature and invasion routes and 9th Century agriculture and where the Vikings succeeded (and where they did not) and how the establishment of the fortified areas known as burhs became our modern English word borough and Dear Lord, I may still need to buy another book.

In short, this turned out to be a lot more than I intended.  But I am loving it.

Of course, one hanging thread is the fact I do not recall how much the Norse literature mentions their interactions with Anglo-Saxon England.  No worries.  I have it covered...