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.

It's still winter...

The Anglo-Saxons weren't big fans of bad weather. Not surprising, perhaps, since finding heat and light wasn't a matter of flicking a switch, and freezing conditions made death a real possibility if you were unprotected. For the anonymous author of The Wanderer, cold and damp are metaphors of exile and hardship; the lonely man stirs the ice-cold sea with his hands, as frost and snow and hail darken his already depressed mind. Similar imagery is used by the narrator of The Wife's Lament, imagining her exiled lover sitting under a storm-battered, frosty cliff. Snowmen and hot cocoa are not part of the story in an Anglo-Saxon winter.

With this context in mind, it isn't surprising that destructive storms are one of the signs that Wulfstan interprets as showing God's wrath towards his countrymen. Alongside malice, disease and bloodshed, "excessive taxes have afflicted us, and storms have very often caused failure of crops". Wulfstan sees both the malice of men and the malice of God as just punishments for his nation's sinful excesses: "this nation, as it may appear, has become very corrupt through manifold sins and through many misdeeds: through murder and through evil deeds, through avarice and through greed, through stealing and through robbery, through man-selling and through heathen vices, through betrayals and through frauds, through breaches of law and through deceit, through attacks on kinsmen and through manslaughter, through injury of men in holy orders and through adultery, through incest and through various fornications."

Wulfstan isn't one to pull his punches, his polemical excesses leading modern readers to wonder whether his "Sermo Lupi" isn't really a "Sermo Loopy"... But I digress. We aren't unfamiliar with this kind of rhetoric - though perhaps many of us wish we were. Religious leaders (and others) blaming natural phenomena such as weather conditions and diseases on the wrath of God towards a sinful nation rear their ugly heads occasionally, to the dismay even of some of their co-religionists. But whereas modern Christianity is one religion amongst many, and is constantly subject to disagreement and question, in Wulfstan's time Christanity was officially established as the one true religion of the country. Modern preachers warning us of impending judgement for our sins are likely to provoke humor or disgust in a large number of people. Wulfstan, on the other hand, probably scared the pants off the majority of his audience.

Our ability to question authority when we need to is surely an improvement, and a return to the restrictive orthodoxy of the Anglo-Saxons would hardly gain much support in Modern Britain. Though perhaps we could bring Wulfy back on a one-time contract just to deal with Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse?

Authenticity and the internet

Newsweek reports a trend against user-generated content like Wikipedia. "The expert is back", trumpets the article, citing Google's Knol project and Mahalo as examples of a backlash against the unfiltered crud that so often turns up on the internet.

Wikipedia, needless to say, would have mystified our Ælfric. An information source so ubiquitous and accessible that the majority of the English people (his chosen audience) could read it and publish to it? Sheer lunacy! But what would have struck a chord with Ælfric is the problem of authentication.

The problem with Wikipedia or any other user-generated website is the supreme difficulty of sorting out correct information from lies, inventions and mistakes. If we really want to read something that has a high probability of being reliable, we seek out named authors writing for reputable publications. Ælfric would have done something very similar. Anglo-Saxon prose authors were perennially concerned with authenticating what they wrote. Apart from a very few exceptions, they were writing Christian texts for a people whose Christian tradition was young and unstable, so what they wrote needed to be orthodox and, to some extent, provable.

Some sources of information were considered more authoritative than others. The Bible and the Church Fathers were, of course, practically unimpeachable. Beyond this, hearsay evidence from men of honourable reputation, particularly holy men, was considered perfectly good enough even for what we would now consider quite amazing tales of miracles and wonders. Events that seemed particularly remarkable might draw extra emphasis on authenticating evidence. Ælfric is very keen to prove the virginity of the twice-married St. Æthelthryth not only by recounting the many miracles surrounding her corpse, but also by citing the supporting testimony of St. Wilfrid. (How exactly the holy Wilfrid was supposed to know for sure that Æthelthryth was a virgin, we're never quite told.)

Ælfric's anxiety about the authenticity of his sources was paralleled by anxiety over the authenticity of his own texts, as they were passed on and re-written. Like most writers of the period, he wasn't too concerned about maintaining named authorship of what he wrote. His chief worry was that his message would be adulterated with mistakes. He concluded the preface to his translation of the Biblical book of Genesis by urging, in the name of God, that anyone who copied his work should do so carefully: "much evil is done by an inaccurate scribe if he does not correct his work."

The evils that worried Ælfric were theological ones; an inaccurate translation of the Bible could be a matter literally of life or death for the soul of the reader. It's unlikely that anyone would claim that Wikipedia has the same importance. Nonetheless, access to reliable information remains as much an issue for us as it was for Ælfric. The anxiety and excitement of finding things out is an experience that we share with our medieval ancestors, although in different ways. I have a sneaking hope that an ultimately authoritative source never materialises.

Ærest þinga...

Leofan men, ge sindon wilcuman! Ic grete ge swiðe freondlice innan blogospheran.

Wulfstan of York, Maimonides, Dante Alighieri... They and others like them taught us well back in those dark, dark ages. And yet now, their voices are practically silenced. Free speech for the dead should be a fundamental right; this blog aims to rehabilitate our medieval forbears as apt and insightful commentators on the modern world.

Whether it's protests over artistic expression, expanding methods of distributing knowledge, or the aggressive tactics of international corporations, Wulfstan and the rest of the crew have their opinions on all the news stories that matter to you.

While WWWD? is in no way seeking to rival the genius of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, and can't claim the great men themselves as contributors, we will channel the thoughts and opinions of the premier medieval minds and give you a whole new (old) perspective on the things you read.

Wes hal!