Monday 4th January: Welcome and Introduction
Wæs hal everyone! No preparation required for our first class this coming Monday (Mōnandæg).
However, please do try to get a copy of the course text book from the bookstore (The Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic, and Anglo-Norman Literatures (Longman, 2011)), and bring it along to class (so you can start working on those shoulder muscles...).
We'll be going over the syllabus, talking about the course expectations (both yours and mine), and doing a short introduction to the Early Middle Ages in Britain.
Dates for today:
43: AD: Invasion under Claudius.
- what did the Romans ever do for us? (Roads, walls, romanitus)
410: Honorius and the withdrawal of the Legions
- romano-british rule, pressure from North and West leads to germanic mercenaries being deployed (this was a long-standing Roman practice).
449: see Anthology pp. 424-5. Adventus saxonum.
- Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890)
- myth vs reality; how can we know about the dark ages? (genetics, archaeology, place-names)
- history, rise of literacy, pre-Christian literacy, runic codes (and serving letters - thorn, ash, eh, wynn), religions, Tacitus, comparative (Norse) cultures
- the 'Dark Ages' - problems of historical knowledge
600-800: Rise of the Heptarchy
- 597 Augustine of Canterbury (from Pope Gregory the Great), 'non Angli sed angeli'.
- Bede (see Anthology, 454), Conversion of Edwin
- also Celtic missionaries from Ireland (which leads to the 664 Synod of Whitby (Celtic vs Roman))
793-900: The Vikings
"AD. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."Entry for the year 793 in the Anglo Saxon chronicle.
871-899: Alfred
- as David: Viking Wars, Wessex
- as Solomon: wisdom, learning, 'translate certain books, which are most needful for all men to know', Law codes (weregeld and the compensatory system, 12 man jury, etc.)
924: Athelstan, Brunanburh (937), England
- Wessex ascendancy
954-1066: Danes, English, Normans
- rule of Cnut (Dane, 1018-35), Harold (1035-40), and Harthacnut (1040-42), then Edward the Confessor (1042-66).
1066 and all that: a huge change?
For Wednesday and Friday, please read:
Anthology, 421-30 (The coming of the Saxons)
Anthology, 454-66 (Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons)
Anthology, 430-40 (King Alfred)
Anthology, 449-54 (on fate and providence)
Tacitus, from the Germania
There's a very strange and bizarre racist annotation on that Tacitus reading, apropos of nothing. Heads up, I guess?
ReplyDeleteYes - fn. 18, one assumes? Well noted. Here we have an example of the type of footnote that one finds in an edition of Tacitus produced in North America in 1908, reflecting the anthropological opinion of the time. I considered using another version, but the footnote is a useful thing to think about: how the medieval past (or in this case the classical past) is deployed in the 20th century (and today) for various ideological reasons. We'll discuss this more on Wed (or Friday),
DeleteAgreed. Just caught me off guard and I was rather puzzled for a moment. One does wonder about the irony of deploying accusations of "barbarism" on the basis of a text that characterizes the editor's (presumable ancestors) as "barbarians" themselves. It's an interesting category.
ReplyDeleteAnyone else get the web page on Harris and Greenwell attorneys for the link to 'non angli sed angeli'?
ReplyDeleteWeird! Will fix.
Delete