8 - ‘For the Sake of Bravado in the Wilderness’: Confronting the Bestial in Anglo-Saxon Warfare

Summary

‘We are wise in our civilized knowledge, but our knowledge extends just so far […]

Who knows what shapes earthly and unearthly may lurk beyond the dim circle of light our knowledge has cast?

Who knows what gods are worshipped under the shadows of that heathen forest, or what devils crawl out of the black ooze of the swamps?’

[…]

‘There's nothing in the universe cold steel won't cut’, answered Conan.

The equation of the behaviour of men in war with the attributes of animals is ingrained in modern descriptions of violence: men ‘fight like beasts’, ‘crawl like worms’, ‘die like dogs’. The imagery is old and surprisingly stable over time and place. In the Iliad, Odysseus fights like a boar in a thicket, just as Alfred is said to have done at the battle of Ashdown, or Caradawg at Catraeth. It is therefore not at all surprising to encounter a bestial dimension to the conceptualisation of Anglo-Saxon warfare. Animal imagery finds rich expression in the material culture of the Anglo-Saxon military elite in the seventh and eighth centuries, as well as in later literature, a fact to which many of the papers in this book and elsewhere have drawn attention. This chapter will briefly survey some of the ways in which the beast was represented, encountered, and conceptualised in the warfare of early medieval England, before moving to a consideration of the battlefield as wilderness: a place that was imagined as an appropriate forum for expressing, testing and containing the bestial energies that were imagined to be unleashed in the conduct of violence.

The general reluctance of people to kill each other in conflict has been frequently observed in modern contexts, and it has long been recognised that in pre-state societies even exceptionally war-like groups engage in artificial rituals designed to induce a state of heightened aggression in which lethal violence is made possible. An early medieval version of this phenomenon has been suggested as a key aspect of the magical–military axis in Viking-age Scandinavia.