Orientalist fantasy in the poetic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn

Extract

A tenth-century ‘orientalist’ fantasy informs the poetic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn and serves to screen certain anxieties about the cultural identity of the English people. By placing these poems in the context of other vernacular works circulating in the tenth century, I would suggest that anxieties about the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, the stability of kingdoms and the efficacy of religious faith were likely to have been prevalent at the time when the poems were preserved in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422. The Solomon and Saturn poems address these anxieties by displacing any lack of knowledge, political stability or faith onto the Eastern and pagan figure of Saturn and the Chaldean people he represents, while English readers are encouraged to identify with the ideals and behaviours of the Christian figure of Solomon. In this way, the poems construct a degraded East as a support for English, Christian culture.