10 - Fruit, Fat and Fermentation: Food and Drink in Peter Baker’s (Neo-)Old English Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Summary

On 25 May 2018, the Medievalists of Color website published a short text by Peter S. Baker, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies after Charlottesville: Reflections of a University of Virginia Professor’. It was prefaced by short remarks by Mary Rambaran-Olm, a scholar who has been at the forefront of the efforts to push the discipline to confront its racist history and fight white supremacy, including an initiative for the name change to early medieval English studies. ‘After Charlottesville’ refers to the ‘Unite the Right’ event organised by neo-Nazis and similar extreme-right groups on 11 and 12 August 2017 that took place in the town in Virginia where Baker lives and works. Baker speaks in the reflection about his introductory Old English class shortly afterwards: ‘I told my students that we were working in an area that had a long history of being exploited by racists, Nazis, and others whose views I found abhorrent’. Despite the success of the class, his ‘most diverse’ to date, Baker reports being unable to escape ‘a sense of failure’ that the entire discipline, his university – founded by the slave-owning US president, Thomas Jefferson, with the labour of enslaved Africans – and academia itself, were entangled in white supremacy. Baker ends the text with a call to change our field of study, ‘Not just relabeling it, but adjusting its boundaries in space, time, theoretical approach, and who knows what else, changing the kind of space it is’. This chapter does not present any specific suggestions regarding either the burning down or remodelling of the discipline, two possibilities with which Baker concludes. Rather, it reads his translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Old English from 2015 as a small but intriguing contribution to the project of ‘adjusting [the] boundaries [of early-medieval England] in space, time, theoretical approach, and who knows what else’.

Translation from modern languages into dead or historical ancestors of living languages comes with its own set of challenges and delights. Taking into consideration their relatively modest readership today, one wonders about their purpose and effect. Scholars identify a pronounced didactic promise in such versions that cast a later text into an earlier idiom.