4 - Imaging and Imagining Anglo-Saxonness

Summary

Thus I present to my countrymen, the portrait of their great ancestors, and bring to light the elder glories of a noble nation: which ought with the greatest care to be preserved, and handed down to posterity.

Joseph Strutt

Philological, antiquarian and historical research on the Anglo-Saxon period frequently overlapped with various forms of imaginative or affective Anglo-Saxonism. In the majority of cases this type of Anglo-Saxonism served to reinforce an ideology of identity and belonging: literary and linguistic scholars heard the echoes of Old English in religious rites, legal arguments and everyday speech; historians studied the Anglo-Saxon history of their home towns or counties; antiquaries analysed the physical remains of the Anglo-Saxon past carefully, lovingly and at times too creatively, as they sought to develop narratives that brought them into closer contact with their ancestral past. The results of their research – textual or physical, oral or aural – could be popularised and celebrated as evidence of England’s particular heritage. In this and the next chapter I examine some the ways in which artists, writers and politicians engaged in creative and popular forms of Anglo-Saxonism as they reacted to or sought to capitalise on broader cultural sentiment about the character of the English people and their polity.

As Aranye Fradenburg and Carolyn Dinshaw have pointed out, scholarship, creativity and enjoyment are inseparable aspects of medievalism in all its forms. Given the clear evidence provided by recent scholarship for the confluence of these three aspects in medieval, early modern, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonism, there is no reason to assume that this was not just as much the case in eighteenth-century England. Dinshaw’s claim that exposure to various representations of the Middle Ages provides postmedieval audiences with expanded ‘temporal repertoires [that] include extensive nonmodern … temporal possibilities’ is borne out when we consider artistic, literary and political forms of eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism alongside scholarly ones. In other words, information about Anglo-Saxon history and culture that was ultimately derived from academic research constituted one source of raw material from which eighteenth-century English women and men could construct images of their ancestral past and themselves in relation to it.