More cartoon protests

Just when you thought that the furore over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed was last year's news, someone decided to reprint them.

Ælfric had good reason to sympathise with the Muslim protestors. Danes were not his favourite people. Violent pagans, worshipping false gods and slaughtering English Christians indiscriminately, Viking raiders had already proved their destructive prowess in the eighth and ninth centuries. Their return in the late tenth century was a real source of horror for people like Ælfric, who imagined their whole way of life going swiftly down the tubes. Even though a lot of Danes were Christian by this point, in Ælfric's mind the invaders were still heathens whose presence in England risked dragging the native population back to their pre-Christian idolatry. Ælfric's warning to his countrymen that anyone who follows Danish fashions, including those who sport Danish-style haircuts, should be excommunicated reminds me of the constant controversy over women wearing headscarves. Relatively minor aspects of our appearance become a means of categorization, and provide a focus for prejudice and hatred. Ælfric was no stranger to racist polemic, nor was he squeamish about using it in the service of his doctrine.

Ironically, of course, it wasn't the Danes that Ælfric really needed to worry about. Around fifty years after his death came the Norman Conquest; the rest is history. I get the feeling, though, that he would have been rather happier with the course of English history under the Normans, with the flourishing of Christianity and the institutional Church, than with a takeover by heathens who risked plunging every English soul down to hell.

Despite his primal fear and hatred of the Danes, though, it isn't too likely that Ælfric would have taken the Muslim side in this argument. Islam wasn't a well-known or understood religion in the Anglo-Saxon period. Ælfric would have read about Saracens in Bede, and probably been aware of the tradition that related them to Ishmael. But whether the Saracens were understood as having a separate religious system, or merely as another group of perfidious barbarians, isn't clear. What we can say with some confidence, is that Ælfric wasn't very keen on dark-skinned foreignners. Being fair and blonde-haired was an ideal, and at best the people of countries such as India turn up as excessive, exotic, erotic figures of dubious morality. At worst, Ælfric uses dark-skinned people to represent the devil.

On the whole, race was a subsidiary issue for Ælfric. What he really valued was orthodox Christianity. As such, he would probably have had little time for either the Danes or the Muslims in this modern controversy (unless they were willing to listen to his arguments for conversion, of course). But he would understand the mindset of the protestors; standing firm against a tide of heresy and insult was crucial to Ælfric, a lesson he preached to all who would listen.