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Donna Beth
Ellard
Anglo-Saxon(ist)
Pasts
postSaxon
Futures
Contents
Foreword · 15
First Movement
Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts
1 · OED. ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’: Professional Scholar or

Anonymous Person · 19
2 · Krákumál, Sharon Turner, and the Psychic Crypts of
Anglo-Saxon History · 61
3 · Beowulf, James Douglas, and the Sepulchral Body of the
Anglo-Saxonist · 101
Second Movement
Interlude — A Time for Mourning
4 · On Being an Anglo-Saxonist: Asser’s Life of King Alfred,

Benjamin Thorpe, and the Sovereign Corpus of
a Profession · 175
5 · Becoming postSaxon, or, a Biochemical Vita Ælfredi · 239
Third Movement
postSaxon Futures
6 · Old/e English Poetics and ‘Afro-Saxon’ Intimacies · 283

7 · Becoming postSaxon · 337
Bibliography · 355
Index · 399
Acknowledgments
So many people have had a hand in making this book. I would

like to thank Melissa Gniadek (who has been, throughout this
process, the most generous reader and friend), Joe Campana,
Claire Fanger, Helena Michie, Tim Morton, Judith Roof, Cary
Wolfe, Diane Wolfthal, and the wonderful undergraduate stu-
dents of Rice University, where the seeds of this project began to
grow, while I was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow.
At the University of Denver, DU’s First Book Group has
been a sustaining force in transforming this project from sev-
eral, loosely-conceived essays to a monograph in bloom. Thank
you to Alejandro Cerón, Sarah Crockarell, Tayana Hardin, Sa-
rah Hart-Micke, Chad Leahy, Ben Nourse, Juli Parrish, Orna
Shaughnessy, Armond Towns, and Kristy Ulibarri. Elsewhere at
DU, Bin Ramke and Selah Saterstrom have talked about family,
writing, and the South with me; Tayana Hardin has lent her ears
and given her emotional energy too many times to this project;
and Chad Leahy has found precious hours to read, comment,
and talk through several chapter drafts, despite his busy sched-
ule.
Outside Rice and DU, Carol Pasternack, Aranye Fradenburg-
Joy, and Alan Liu were extraordinary mentors at UCSB. Jessica
Murphy, Megan Palmer, Maggie Sloan, and Mac Test were at-
tentive interlocutors in graduate school, when this book was a
misdirected dissertation. Alex Cook, Dorothy Kim, Clare Lees,
Gillian Overing, Dan Remein, and Cord Whitaker have engaged
in conversation and answered many questions from early to late
stages of the project. Kathy Biddick, Mary Dockray-Miller, and
Robin Norris have graciously served as readers for this project
and provided immensely helpful comments.
punctum books has magically transformed this manuscript
into a book. Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei has electrified the cov-
er art in hot pink and made everything beautiful inside and out.
Joyce King has done the all-important work of copy-editing the
manuscript. Eileen Joy’s unbelievable editorial comments and
questions have challenged me to refine and make explicit the
global arguments of this book. Her careful attention not only to
the book’s arguments but also to its prose are remarkable. I can-
not thank punctum enough for taking a chance on it.
Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 were previously published as es-
says in postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and
Rethinking History. I am grateful to the editors of these journals
for believing in my work many years before issues of colonialism
and race were topics of immediate concern in medieval studies.1
Any errors and omissions in this book are strictly my own.
Outside academia, a very big thank you to my husband and
girls, who continue to remind me what is really important in life.
1 Donna Beth Ellard, ‘Ella’s Bloody Eagle: Sharon Turner’s History of the An-
glo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxon History,’ postmedieval: a journal of medieval
cultural studies 5, no. 2 (2013): 215–34 and ‘“Anglo-Saxonist, n.”: Professional
Scholar or Anonymous Person,’ Rethinking History 23, no. 1 (2019): 16–33.
For Virginia Sugg, Virginia Dare, Virginia Anne, and
Pressly Virginia—the Ellard women and girls.
For Brandon.
and
For Mississippi, whom I still love, despite it all.

Foreword
We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of

unwanted and often shunned memory, of a history whose
infiltrations are at times so stealthy we can pretend otherwise,
and at times so loud we can’t hear much of anything else. We’re
still here — there differently than those before us, but there,
otherwise known as here. And that matters for writers. That’s
the first intuition. The second one is that it seems a lot of us here
when asked to talk about race are most comfortable, or least
uncomfortable, talking about it in the language of scandal. It’s
so satisfying, so clear, so easy. The wronged. The evildoers. The
undeserving. The shady. The good intentions and the cyclical
manipulations. The righteous side taking, the head shaking.
Scandal is such a helpful, such a relieving distraction. There are
times when scandal feels like the sun that race revolves around.
And it is so hard to reel conversations about race back from the
heavy gravitational pull of where we so often prefer them to be.
——Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine1
The scandals of Anglo-Saxon studies do not need to be re-

hearsed here, although they do need to be worked through, in
1 Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, ‘Introduction,’ in The Racial Imagi-

nary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (East Peoria: Versa Press,
2015), 13–14.
15
the sense that Freud gave to that phrase: the field needs bet-
ter accounts of its intellectual history, as well as reconciliation
and reparation, and that is a big part of what this book is about.
These scandals continue to erupt, monthly — weekly — daily,
in online platforms, professional conferences, and classrooms.2
They are a repetition-compulsion, a symptom of our inability
to work through ‘a history…so loud we can’t hear much of any-
thing else.’ But they are also an opportunity.
To my white colleagues: this book is an offering. It is the story
of my family, myself, and a Mississippi world in desperate need
of healing. As an offering, this book is written with the great
hope that we might learn to speak about race in the profession
and in our personal lives from outside the framework of scandal,
and within the framework of decentering our whiteness in our
scholarly work, and listening better to our colleagues of color.
To my colleagues of color: this book is also an offering. It is
the story of my family, myself, and a Mississippi world in des-
perate need of healing. As an offering, this book is written with
the great hope that (once, again) you will forgive the field previ-
ously known as Anglo-Saxon studies.
2 I want to briefly express my gratitude as well to the early career, and also
precarious, scholars in the field formerly known as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies
who have been so brave, so smart, and so vigilant in exposing, confront-
ing, and challenging the structural racism of our shared field, as well as
urging others to commit to change, especially Mary Rambaran-Olm and
Erik Wade. In the midst of the current ‘scandals,’ they shine a much-need-
ed light on the past and show different, better paths forward.
16
First
Movement
Anglo-Saxon(ist)
Pasts
1
oed. ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’:

Professional Scholar or
Anonymous Person
In the 1990s, a wave of new forms of critique and critical theory

broke over Anglo-Saxon studies, an interdisciplinary field that
focuses on England’s early medieval, ‘Old English,’ or ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ period. Spurred by decades of European decolonization
and American desegregation, Anglo-Saxonists reflected upon
their field’s nineteenth-century academic origins; its associa-
tions with nation, empire, and race; and the editorial and meth-
odological practices that silently maintained these connections.1
1 See, among other representative works, Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins:
New Languages, Old English, and Teaching Tradition (New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1990); Allen Frantzen, ed., Speaking Two Languages: Tra-
ditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (Albany:
State University of New York, 1991); Allen Frantzen and John Niles, eds.,
Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: Flor-
ida University Press, 1997); John D. Niles, ‘Locating Beowulf in Literary
History,’ Exemplaria 5, no. 1 (1993): 79–109; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe,
ed., Reading Old English Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990); James W. Earl, Thinking
About ‘Beowulf ’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Roy Michael
Liuzza, ‘The Return of the Repressed: Old and New Theories in Old
19
These were important (if occasionally contentious) conversa-

tions within Anglo-Saxon studies, and when the twenty-first
century began it appeared, to some, that the field had acknowl-
edged the complex intellectual histories that belonged to its in-
stitutional past and had reckoned with them.
Yet, in 2008, while I was completing my Ph.D., the 3rd edi-
tion of the Oxford English Dictionary added a new entry, the
proper noun ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ which challenged the critical ef-
ficacy of the field’s late-century self-examinations:
1. an expert in or student of Old English language, literature,

and culture
1837 Gentleman’s Mag. Nov. 493 Gibson edited that valu-

able and interesting historical document, the Saxon
Chronicle; Rawlinson published Alfred’s translation of
Boethius… .These names…belong to the school of the
Anglo-Saxonists.
1896 S.H.V. Gurteen Epic of Fall of Man 21 There will arise

many a fine Anglo-Saxonist to carry on the work begun
by Turner, Thorpe, and Kemble.
1991 Guardian (Nexis) 18 July The Anglo-Saxonists…were

defeated when they proposed that the Old English exami-
nation should be made harder.
2. a person who believes in the importance or superiority of

Anglo-Saxon language, people, or culture (past or present)
English Literary Criticism,’ in Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings,

ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (New York: Garland, 1994), 103–47; and
John Hill, The Cultural World in ‘Beowulf ’ (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995).
20
oed. ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’
1879 J.A. Weisse Origin Eng. Lang. & Lit. 672 In the face of
this constant and steady increase, Anglo-Saxonists clamored
in vain against the addition of foreign words.2
The OED’s lexicographer presents, by way of the entry’s defini-

tions, a supposedly autonomous relationship between ‘1’ and ‘2’
of the headword, ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ ‘An expert in or student of
Old English’ is contrasted with ‘a person’ who has no academic
intentions. Expertise and study are compared to the novice’s ‘be-
lief.’ ‘Old English,’ a contemporary linguistic term, is countered
by its antiquated and ethnically charged precursor, ‘Anglo-Sax-
on.’ And the scholar’s textual corpus and philological methods
of ‘language, literature, and culture’ are set apart from the ethnic
anthropology of ‘language, people, or culture’ that preoccupies
the anonymous non-professional.
Although the two definitions of ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ are at pains
to distance the academic from the anonymous enthusiast, the
dictionary entry’s nomenclature and its etymology point to-
wards a deep history of semantic entanglement. Numbers 1 and
2 indicate that these definitions represent two ‘senses, or mean-
ings’ of one word, which ‘are ordered according to a structure
resembling a family tree, so that the development of one mean-
ing from another can be plotted.’3 Anglo-Saxonist scholarship
and Anglo-Saxonist ethno-nationalism are organized under
the same headword. Likewise, the academic sense of the first
definition, first attested in 1837, etymologically generates the na-
tionalist sense of the second definition, which dates, in print, to
1879. The genealogical relationship between the two senses of
‘Anglo-Saxonist’ destines this word for semantic entanglement,
and the OED’s quotations bear silent witness to this process and
its long-term effects. While the OED asserts, via its quotation of
S. Humphreys Gurteen’s 1896 Epic of the Fall of the Man, that
2 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ http://www.oed.com/.

3 ‘Guide to the Third Edition of the OED, Sense Section,’ Oxford English
Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/public/oed3guide/guide-to-the-third-
edition-of#sense.
21
Sharon Turner, Benjamin Thorpe, and John Mitchell Kemble are

‘expert’ Anglo-Saxonists in the first sense, when read in its orig-
inal context, Gurteen’s praise of these scholars also resonates
with the political ideologies expressed in the second sense of
the OED’s definition.4 Moreover (and more troublingly), the OED
lifts its 1991 attestation of the first sense of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ from a
Guardian article that traces lines of ideological descent between
past and present Anglo-Saxonists. In a piece about Oxford’s
English department’s curricular reforms, the British newspaper
calls Anglo-Saxonist faculty members a ‘very tight-knit cabal’
set on ‘keeping the degree well away from what the old guard
regarded as the distractions of modern literature.’5 Despite the
4 The OED’s second quotation under sense 1 of the headword, ‘Anglo-

Saxonist,’ is excerpted from a chapter in S. Humphreys Gurteen’s The Epic
of the Fall of Man: A Comparative Study of Caedmon, Dante and Milton
(New York: G.P. Puntam’s Sons, 1896), which surveys the current state of
the field of Anglo-Saxon studies. In this chapter, Gurteen draws together
Anglo-Saxon ‘descendants’ and Anglo-Saxon ‘scholars’ under the shared
banner of ‘the language and literature of their ancestors’ (20); he warns
against allowing ‘foreigners’ such as Erasmus Rask and G.R. Thorkelin to
take pride of place in the study of Anglo-Saxon England (20); and then
he appeals to ‘many a fine Anglo-Saxonist to carry on the work begun by
Turner, Thorpe, and Kemble’ (21). When Gurteen’s quote is read in context,
it undermines the OED’s partitioning efforts. By attending, simultaneously,
to senses 1 and 2 of the headword, this quote positions Turner, Thorpe, and
Kemble as both Anglo-Saxon scholars and descendants of an Anglo-Saxon
‘culture.’
5 Nicholas de Jongh, ‘The Beowulf at Oxford’s Door,’ The Guardian, July
18, 1991, 23. Perhaps not unexpectedly, no curricular reform took place in
1991, and a decade later, in 2001, Oxford and The Guardian revisited the
issue. Once again, Anglo-Saxonists were the focus of the story:
Elaine Treharne insists that she would have specialised in [Thomas]
Hardy if she hadn’t been forced to apply herself to OE. ‘I doubt that,’
snorts David Lawton, director of graduate studies in English at Wash-
ington University in St Louis, and a keen advocate of the benefits of
translation. ‘I would be very surprised if her natural curiosity had not
led her to it’.…Specialists in the language, he says, often feel that trans-
lation involves an ‘improper sense of creativity. But I think we ought to
be able to correct that,’ he adds optimistically. (Ros Taylor, ‘Valentine’s
Day of Reckoning,’ The Guardian, March 20, 2001, https://www.the-
guardian.com/education/2001/mar/20/highereducation.english)
Another Anglo-Saxonist, Emily Thornbury, shared in the same article:
22
OED’s partitioning efforts, its quotes not only trace hidden en-
tanglements between academic and ideological Anglo-Saxon-
ists but also hint at the presence of patronymic ghosts secreted
within the ranks of contemporary scholars.
I spent eight years in graduate school becoming an Anglo-
Saxonist, and I have since used this appellative to describe my
scholarship in print, to colleagues, and, at times, to family and
friends. Yet, when I read the OED’s headword, ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’
in 2008, and as I read it again now, I continue to ask myself: does
my field’s professional appellative locate me, a ‘student of Old
English,’ in proximity to the unnamed ‘person who believes’ in
Anglo-Saxon ‘supremacy…(past or present)’? Does the academ-
ic process of becoming an Anglo-Saxonist somehow position
me in an entangled relationship between senses 1 and 2 of the
OED’s entry? No one in Anglo-Saxon studies would disavow the
historical connections between academic and popular Anglo-
Saxonisms (emphasis on the plural), and the field has engaged
in field critiques that expose the nineteenth-century politics of
nation, empire, and race that are co-terminous with the mod-
ern academic origins of Anglo-Saxon studies.6 While the OED
‘I think there’s a personality factor involved in separation from the

mainstream of English literature. Hard-core philology has hung on in
Old English partly because of that. Anglo-Saxonists seem more posi-
tivistic than most literary scholars.’ Thornbury, who studied astrophys-
ics before moving to Cambridge for her Ph.D. studies, believes a desire
to uncover the origins of English literature is what motivates many of
her colleagues. (Ibid.)
‘[N]atural curiosity’ and ‘an improper sense of creativity’; ‘positivistic’
thinking and a ‘desire to uncover…[literary] origins’ — as academics from
outside and inside the field weigh in on what it means to be an Anglo-
Saxonist, a portrait emerges that bears a distinct likeness to that of The
Guardian’s 1991 reporting, which emphasized an anti-modernism that was
attached to a silent but powerful ‘old guard.’ Moreover, these perceptions
of Oxford’s Anglo-Saxonists are directed across the Atlantic where, ac-
cording to the Guardian reporter Ros Taylor, ‘[t]he peculiar combination
of fear and reverence which Old English inspires has been a challenge in
North American faculties, where the subject is widely taught but rarely
compulsory for undergraduates’ (ibid.).
6 See, for example, Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon”
and “Anglo-Saxons”?’ Journal of British Studies 24, no. 4 (1985): 395–414;
23
painstakingly separates the ‘expert in or student of Old English’

from the ‘person who believes in the importance or superior-
ity of Anglo-Saxon,’ the shared interests and, moreover, sample
quotations that it uses to attest these differences suggest that, de-
spite my field’s historiographic scholarship, the signifier, ‘Anglo-
Saxonist,’ continues to locate me in the long shadow of an old
guard, whose resistant anti-modernism undergirds an academic
imperialism. The OED indicates an appellative that has, perhaps,
outlasted its professional usefulness and points towards a pro-
fessional dilemma.
This book takes as its subject the Anglo-Saxonist and the
mysterious old guard that lies behind it. Despite the sensibility of
the term, which identifies specialists of early medieval England,
this book argues that ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ cul-de-sacs its scholars
within Anglo-Saxon temporal, ethno-national, and methodo-
logical frameworks. As a signifier that nests Anglo-Saxon within
itself, ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ calls us to claim a professional identity
that is neither of the present tense nor necessarily grounded in
our personal values, and it asks us to maintain the parameters
of this identity by way of methodologies that do not sufficiently
account for our personal affiliations or the embodied aspects
of our and others’ scholarship. These associations — with the
past, with race, with methodological praxis (among other af-
filiations) — silently position the Anglo-Saxonist within a retro-
grade orbit of loss and desire. This is a state of being — not of be-
coming — and it is a static ontology that generates a melancholic
scholarly position. Yet, being an Anglo-Saxonist is not simply a
matter of locating ourselves in the orbit of a signifier that oper-
ates according to past-tense temporalities, value systems, and
scholarly methods. ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ is likewise a term that en-
gages a group of nineteenth-century scholars whose interdisci-
plinary research practices set the initial temporal boundaries
Frantzen, Desire for Origins; Frantzen and Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the
Construction of Social Identity; and John Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon
England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing
the Past (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).
24
and methods of our field. These first Anglo-Saxonists, whom

the OED identifies as Sharon Turner, Benjamin Thorpe, and John
Mitchell Kemble (and to whom this book adds James Douglas)
made watershed contributions to the emerging disciplines of
early medieval history, literature and philology, and archaeol-
ogy. Moreover, their scholarship is set to the time of Britain’s
nineteenth-century empire and the racist systems that operated
in tandem with it across Europe and America. Being an Anglo-
Saxonist therefore invokes these so-called fathers of our inter-
disciplinary field and the imperial moment to which they be-
long. It acknowledges their haunting presence within our ranks
as an old guard whose anti-modern stance is keyed to positions
of nineteenth-century colonialism and racism. As the children
of these spectral Anglo-Saxonist fathers, we are unknowingly
(or, perhaps, more knowingly) melancholic — towards our pro-
fessional ancestors, their empire, and the racial-colonial ideolo-
gies of Anglo-America.
In order to wrest the Anglo-Saxonist from a position of an
over-determined ontological being, the ghosts of its interdisci-
plinary past, and the (repetitive) melancholia that attends these
relationships, this book mourns our field’s professional, impe-
rial, and racial pasts. While mourning is emotional work, it is a
labor enacted by reexamining, destabilizing, and reconfiguring
the self ’s historical narrative. Anglo-Saxon(ist) pasts, postSaxon
futures therefore begins by examining the historical figures,
ideological freight, and scholarly processes — the colonial old
guard — responsible for developing the signifiers, ‘Anglo-Sax-
on’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ The book’s early chapters discuss in-
tersections between certain medieval texts and their reception
histories by historians, archaeologists, and philologists of the
nineteenth century, revealing the mechanisms by which this old
guard of Anglo-Saxon studies has become a ghostly presence se-
creted away within the field. These chapters likewise explore the
ways in which this old guard keeps present-day scholars duty-
bound to colonial figures of previous generations and to colo-
nial ideologies and scholarly methodologies of the past that do
not account nor suffice for the beliefs and bodies of our living,
25
contemporary, and postcolonial world. By exposing the entan-

glement between living scholars and the dead, I want to reveal
ghosts within Anglo-Saxon studies that have rendered the field
overly (if sometimes collectively unconsciously) melancholic.
Such an exposure opens a channel for critical reflection, exor-
cism, and grief: for Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist, for the
old guard which has not only haunted but, moreover, kept us
from mourning, and for the static ontological state of being that
we have inherited as a consequence of using these terms and
keeping company with the unquiet (un)dead. The book’s later
chapters enter this open, affective channel, using creative non-
fiction and speculative criticism to write alternative narratives
of and about our profession. These prose narratives radically
unsettle the identity positions maintained by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and
‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ They create a space in which we can grieve,
work through, and abandon Anglo-Saxon(ist) pasts and the
shadows of their old guards. Further, these narratives open a
horizon for imagining more capacious and critically generative
postSaxon futures.
To return, again, to the 1980s and 1990s, if we look back on
that period, one could say that a glimpse of these futures had al-
ready arrived. Almost thirty years ago, in 1990, Allen Frantzen’s
Desire for Origins sounded a clarion call. Frantzen’s book argued
that the politics of nation and empire are encoded within and
maintained by the traditional ‘academic’ disciplines of philology
and historicism. Further, he claimed that Anglo-Saxon studies’s
fidelity to these traditional field methodologies and its disdain-
ful dismissal of postmodern critical theories unconsciously se-
cured a national-imperial politics. While Desire for Origins was
a lightning rod in the field during the 1990s, it succinctly articu-
lated a sea change that was already in progress. Scholars before
and after Frantzen were busy fruitfully coupling old-school phi-
lology and historicism with new-school postmodern approach-
es. Literary scholars, historians, art historians, and archaeolo-
gists, such as Patricia Dailey, James Earl, Shari Horner, Eileen
Joy, Catherine Karkov, Susan Kim, Stacy Klein, Clare Lees,
Mary Dockray-Miller, John Niles, Gillian Overing, Carol Braun
26
Pasternack, Alfred Siewers, Elaine Treharne, Janet Thormann,

Renée Trilling, and Lisa Weston, were analyzing Anglo-Saxon
texts according to post-structuralist methods and feminist
theories, for example. The writings of these scholars proceeded
apace with historicist discussions of the workings of nation and
empire in Anglo-Saxon culture and history by Nicholas Brooks,
Joshua Davies, Kathleen Davis, Irina Dumitrescu, Sarah Foot,
Stephen Harris, Nick Howe, Chris Jones, Ananya Jahanara Ka-
bir, Catherine Karkov, Janet Nelson, Larry Swain, and Howard
Williams, among others. I pause here to express sincere grati-
tude for this remarkable body of knowledge.
The field’s late-century embrace of post-structural methods
and feminist (among other) theories, its discussions of premod-
ern colonialism, and its participation in postcolonial and ethnic
studies have all unsettled the narratives of nation, empire, and
race that are sedimented within traditional Anglo-Saxon stud-
ies. Consequently, the inclusion of these theories within the
field have challenged identity positions consonant with Anglo-
Saxonist political ideologies. However, as the OED’s 2008 edition
suggests, the arrival of critical theory in Anglo-Saxon studies
has not dislodged the anti-modern old guard of many years ago.
This introductory chapter evaluates the assertion, championed
by Allen Frantzen and long-held within Anglo-Saxon studies,
that critical theory is a force that can disrupt and displace the
nationalist, imperial, and racial politics embedded within the
field’s scholarly narratives. It examines and ruminates upon
statements by prominent twenty-first-century scholars regard-
ing the state of Anglo-Saxon studies, especially with respect to
the place of theory within the discipline. These statements un-
consciously trace the methodological, ideological, and affective
shape of the old guard, outlined above, even when they advocate
for theories of postcolonialism, race, and ethnic studies. Critical
theory, I argue in this chapter, fails to render Anglo-Saxon stud-
ies postcolonial because it does not approach closely enough
the secret sites of imperialist and racist ideologies: the often un-
thought, emotional positions that lie at the heart of scholarly
attachments. In order to find the ‘heart’ of Anglo-Saxon studies,
27
I examine my own disciplinary attachments via an autoethno-

graphic account of my Mississippi family, its inability to work
through the loss of a post-Civil War South, and the ghostly,
Confederate old guard that continues to haunt its identity poli-
tics and genealogical narratives. As I interrogate my own fam-
ily biography, I find narrative parallels between my personal life
and the state of Anglo-Saxon studies, and I delineate the affec-
tive relays between them. Autoethnography is a genre that helps
me to disclose the very personal process of mourning the iden-
tities, narratives, and ghosts of my family, and this genre also
enables me to do the grief work necessary to this book’s project
of mourning, and working through, the oppressive ghosts of the
professional field of Anglo-Saxon studies.
In 2006 and 2007, Michael Drout, the anonymous ‘Tirun-
cula,’ Scott Nokes, Eileen Joy, and Larry Swain staged a critical
debate in a series of blog posts regarding the state of Anglo-
Saxon studies.7 In 2008, the same year that the OED published
its first entry for ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ the field began to take more
formal stock of its relationship to these critical perspectives. In
7 Michael Drout, ‘State of the Field,’ Worm Talk and Slug Speak: My Life
among the Invertebrates [blog], December 29, 2006, http://wormtalk.
blogspot.com/2006/12/; Michael Drout, ‘Again with the State of the Field,’
Worm Talk and Slug Speak: My Life among the Invertebrates [blog], Janu-
ary 7, 2007, http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2007/01/again-with-state-of-
field-tiruncula.html; Michael Drout, ‘An Example,’ Worm Talk and Slug
Speak: My Life among the Invertebrates [blog], January 10, 2007, http://
wormtalk.blogspot.com/2007/01/example-to-illustrate-point-i-was.html;
Michael Drout, ‘Gatekeeping?,’ Worm Talk and Slug Speak: My Life Among
the Invertebrates [blog], January 22, 2007, http://wormtalk.blogspot.
com/2007/01/gatekeeping-while-back-i-p_116949841976709399.html;
Tirincula, ‘What does a healthy field look like from the inside?,’ Practica
[blog], January 7, 2007 [URL no longer active]; Scott Nokes, ‘More on the
State of the Field,’ Unlocked Wordhoard [blog], January 10, 2007, http://
unlocked-wordhoard.blogspot.com/2007/01/more-on-state-of-field.html;
Eileen A. Joy, ‘My Life Among the Anglo-Saxonists: More Anomie, De-
spair, and Self-Immolation,’ In the Middle [blog], January 20, 2007, http://
www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2007/01/my-life-among-anglo-saxonists-
more.html; and Larry Swain, ‘State of the Field Repost,’ The Ruminate
[blog], March 11, 2007, http://theruminate.blogspot.com/2007/03/state-of-
field-repost.html.
28
May 2008, a conference panel titled ‘Is There a Theory in the

House of Anglo-Saxon Studies?,’ sponsored by the BABEL Work-
ing Group, was held at the International Medieval Congress in
Kalamazoo, Michigan, and, in October 2008, Mary Dockray-
Miller published ‘Old English Literature and Feminist Theory:
A State of the Field,’ in which she interrogated the vibrancy
of post-structuralist scholarship and feminist methods in Old
English literary studies.8 These online conversations and pub-
lications yielded productive fruit. Larry Swain invited his fel-
low bloggers to continue their conversation about the state of
the field in a 2008 forum published in The Heroic Age, ‘State
of the Field in Anglo-Saxon Studies.’9 Likewise, Eileen Joy in-
vited interlocutors from the BABEL-sponsored panel, along with
several other scholars, to express their thoughts on critical and
feminist theories in the field of Old English studies in a 2010 es-
say cluster co-published across postmedieval and The Heroic Age
called ‘The State(s) of Early English Studies.’10 In the titles of the
above-mentioned blog posts, essays, forum, and essay cluster,
‘state of the field’ is used eight times to frame the discussions
regarding Anglo-Saxon, Old English, and Early English studies.
This phrase turns on the word, ‘state,’ a signifier that, accord-
ing to Jacqueline Rose, connects one’s mental condition to one’s
political investments.11 In other words, psychological ‘state’ and
8 Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A

State of the Field,’ Literature Compass 5, no. 6 (2008): 1049–59.
9 Michael Drout, Tom Shippey, Richard Scott Nokes, and Eileen A. Joy,
‘State of the Field in Anglo-Saxon Studies’ [forum discussion], The Heroic
Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 11 (May 2008).
https://www.heroicage.org/issues/11/foruma.php.
10 Eileen A. Joy, ed., ‘The State(s) of Early English Studies’ [special essay
cluster], co-published across postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural
studies 1, no. 3 (2010) and The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval
Northwestern Europe 14 (2010). In this essay cluster, many scholars ex-
change the compound, ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ for ‘Old English’ or ‘Early English,’
a move that, I suggest, gives contributors the disciplinary and semantic
breathing room needed to take more theoretical stances.
11 Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998). Note
the OED’s (2008) myriad definitions of the headword, ‘state,’ n.: I.2.b. ‘A
condition of mind or feeling’; I.3.a. ‘Physical condition as regards internal
29
political ‘state’ work together to interleave the literary imagina-

tion with fantasies of nation and empire. Consequently, interro-
gating the S/states of Anglo-Saxon, Old English, and Early Eng-
lish studies is a process that, pace Rose, does not merely assess
the critical condition of these literary, linguistic, and historical
fields. It considers to what extent theories of embodied mind are
welcome in them and, consequently, what political fantasies are
harbored therein.
Among the most active contributors to the online debates in
2008 was Michael Drout, who first (and most frequently) used
the phrase ‘state of the field’ to conceptually frame the 2006–
2010 discussions. Drout’s general assessment of Anglo-Saxon
studies is that the field need not disavow postmodern theories
but should reconfirm its commitments to philology. In 2007,
and again in 2008, Drout writes:
Anglo-Saxon studies and philology are a highly irritating

rebuke to most of the rest of the sub-disciplines in English
because our intellectual practices are a direct refutation of
one of the current central dogmas of literary studies: that all
‘knowledge is situated and contingent… .’12
I would submit that the ‘something different’ we should
do is to focus on language and how it works in a historical
sense rather than an abstract philosophical sense. Literary
studies suffers from a continuous pull in two directions: to-
wards solipsism and towards politics — you end up with ‘that
text means this to me’ or ‘that text illustrates this political/
social phenomenon.’13
In positioning ‘Anglo-Saxon studies and philology’ as a ‘highly

irritating rebuke to most of the rest of the sub-disciplines in
English,’ Drout’s statements recall the The Guardian’s Anglo-
constitution, nature, or structure’; III. ‘A commonwealth or polity, and

related senses.’
12 Drout, ‘Again with the State of the Field.’
13 Drout, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies: The State of the Field?’
30
Saxonist cabal and its devotion to an old guard set against dis-
ciplinary change. Yet, Drout extends this old guard beyond the
hedges of Oxford, and, in so doing, he rearticulates its form. This
old guard does not bear likeness to disciplinary fathers such as
Turner, Thorpe, or Kemble who were named in the OED’s defini-
tion of Anglo-Saxonist but rather takes the shape of the part-
ner fields of Anglo-Saxon studies and its primary methodology,
philology. Regardless of these differences in place and form, the
old guard of Anglo-Saxon studies and philology remains set
upon disciplining the minds and bodies of those who claim af-
filiation with ‘it.’ As Drout avers, the supposed rebuke and refu-
tation of philology’s insights limit the influence of Anglo-Saxon
studies and philology vis-à-vis the wider community of English
disciplines, intellectually, and, by extension, socially. Such an
antagonistic (and forbidding) intellectual and social posture is
corollary to a stance towards ‘knowledge’ which denies that it
could ever be ‘situated’ in the body or ‘contingent’ upon its af-
fective displays. By setting itself apart from others and foreclos-
ing scholarly consideration of embodiment and affect, the old
guard of Anglo-Saxon studies and philology bars its devotees
from expressing what the ‘text means…to me,’ as a person and
as a political subject.
Drout’s commentary on the state of Anglo-Saxon studies and
the old guard which attends it exposes the state of its political
fantasies. After emphasizing the important partnership between
Anglo-Saxon studies and philology and its rebuke to other sub-
disciplines of English studies, Drout discusses an unnamed
essay that ‘analyses novels which depict different kinds of im-
migrant and second-generation ethnic experience in America.’14
While he concedes that the essay competently engages with
critical theory and demonstrates ‘some sensitivity to the litera-
ture,’ Drout begins his assessment of it with the statement, ‘there
was, to my eye, an enormous, gaping, hideous lacuna right in
the heart of it,’ and concludes that absent a rigorous stake in
second-language acquisition and linguistics, ‘[t]he paper is in-
14 Drout, ‘An Example.’
31
stead 100% politics. Some of it sophisticated, some less so, but

everything is taken as politics and nothing more.’15 Previously,
Anglo-Saxon studies and philology were removed from all oth-
er English sub-disciplines and the bodily aspects of language
and literature. Yet, here, Drout summons an alliterative connec-
tion that is decidedly of the body. Drout’s ‘eye,’ the organ of sight
that generates the optics for his criticism, finds something ‘enor-
mous.’ As he inspects it further, its enormity gives way to a ‘gap-
ing’ and ‘hideous lacuna,’ a monstrous textual gap that is located
right in the embodied and affective center — the ‘heart’ — of an
essay that, according to Drout’s summary description, gauges
what it is like to be a non-Anglo body in America. An old guard
moves and shutters. It shows itself in the poetics of this moment,
which summons Drout’s critical and therefore metaphorical eye,
divested of its body, to look upon and find a body that is enor-
mous, yet gaping. Its distended size is physically overgrown and
therefore textually lacking. Consequently, for Drout, it is un-
bearable. Its immigrant, ethnic form, which Drout recognizes as
all body and no text, is held in stark contrast to an Anglo-Saxon-
ist position, which claims a superabundance of text in exchange
for a non-body. Because the beating heart of the immigrant’s
politicized body possesses an affective vitality unpossessed by
philology’s textual, yet lifeless, corpus.
From the grave, this old guard sutures physical monstrosity
and textual lack to the immigrant, ethnic, living body and its ex-
periences. Yet, it tries to remedy such an unbearable embodied
position by suggesting ‘language acquisition, second language
performance, the phonology of “accent,” code switching or any
of the multitude of analytical tools that could come from con-
temporary linguistics’ that would rescue this critical essay from
its stake in a non-Anglo body that is ‘100% politics.’16 As ‘An
Example’ of Drout’s philological rebuke to contemporary eth-
nic literature, the poetics of his criticism reveal something else
about this old guard, which exceeds its status as either, as the
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
32
OED suggests, the specter of previous scholarly generations or, as

Drout’s blog posts reveal, the conceptual figment of Anglo-Sax-
on studies and philology. This old guard is the racialized corpse
of Empire long since buried in the grave. It is the ethnic subjec-
tivity of a colonizer that maintains itself, undead, by way of the
entangled, unconscious, and encrypted relationship between
Anglo-Saxonist scholarship and Anglo-Saxonist nationalism.
While Drout’s comments upon the state of Anglo-Saxon
studies reveal fantasies of Empire and race buried within the
discipline’s methods, Eileen Joy, another contributor to the
2006–2010 conversations, articulates the field’s state of mental
health. In ‘Goodbye to All That: My Personal State of Schizoid
Anglo-Saxon Studies,’ Joy references a neurological disorder
called visual agnosia that is characterized by affects of coldness
and detachment, emotional incapacity, failure to experience
pleasure, an incapacity for erotics, and a preoccupation with
fantasy, in order to describe the state of Old English scholar-
ship.17 Is this ‘agnosia’ one that is symptomized in Drout’s blog
posts and essays? Is the field mentally unhealthy? In order to
maintain the graveyard politics of an old guard — one that this
chapter has associated with genealogical fathers, a disembodied
Anglo-Saxon philology, and the ethnopolitical fantasies of Em-
pire — it has distanced itself from most other sub-fields of Eng-
lish, as well as from critical theory. Out of step with the rest of
the discipline, the assessments of Drout and Joy suggest its states
of social rank and mental health are in decline. While Joy goes
on to reclaim the position of the schizoid by way of of Deleuze
and Guattari,18 her essay lands on a relationship, signaled across
the discussions from 2006 to 2010, between an old guard that
17 Eileen A. Joy. ‘Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of
Schiziod Anglo-Saxon Studies’ [forum post], in Drout et al., ‘State of the
Field of Anglo-Saxon Studies,’ https://www.heroicage.org/issues/11/foruma.
php.
18 According to Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy, to be ‘schizoid’ in Old Eng-
lish studies would mean to undo its chief figures of ‘Father’ and ‘Family’
and ‘Nation’ and to seek more cross-disciplinary, theoretically informed,
and even presentist approaches to the past.
33
disciplines the mind and body via its lifeless, encrypted corpse
and a state of the field that suffers critically and politically, emo-
tionally and affectively, from its overly rigid Anglo-Saxonist po-
sition.
Although, at times, these early twenty-first-century discus-
sions pointed to dark clouds above,19 they nonetheless also
19 Essays by Mary Dockray-Miller (‘Old English Literature and Feminist

Theory’) and Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (‘Still Theoretical After
All These Years, Or, Whose Theory Do You Want, Or, Whose Theory
Can We Have?,’ The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern
Europe 14 [2010]: https://www.heroicage.org/issues/14/lees&overing.php)
underscore the relationship between the states of Old English and Anglo-
Saxon studies and their relationships to feminist theory and feminist
politics. As Lees and Overing write in their contribution to the Heroic
Age–postmedieval essay cluster:
Anglo-Saxon England has yet to publish a single feminist or gender-
identified article (a record worse than even Speculum or PMLA).
Second, the program committees for the bi-annual conferences of ISAS
(International Society for Anglo-Saxonists) do not yet routinely offer
a home for any theoretically oriented studies, although the Interna-
tional Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo offers a warm home to such
organizations as the Medieval Feminist Forum (MFF) and the Society
for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (SSHMA), and the
International Medieval Congress at Leeds devotes a strand of sessions
annually to women’s and gender studies.
As Lees and Overing point out, for an Anglo-Saxonist to think and write
in modes other than historicism or philology is fraught with professional
consequences. One can find ample homes for one’s work within medieval
journals; one can publish monographs and edited collections that are
avowedly theoretical in method; one can find plenty of eager listeners and
interlocutors at medieval conferences. But in order to publish, present, or
otherwise gain access to the institutional venues of Anglo-Saxon studies
that count, they suggest, one must alter, give up, or screen ‘her’ body by
keeping, for example, ‘feminist or gender-identified’ theoretical methods
from view. Joy levels a similar critique in ‘Goodbye to All That’:
[E]ven a brief glance at the titles of papers presented at the biennial
meetings of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists — choose
your year, any year, then look at them cumulatively if you have the
time — reveals a lot about what the discipline of Anglo-Saxon studies
would seem to either actively dismiss or set to the side or minimize:
studies of gender, class, race, and sexuality; feminist and queer stud-
ies; Marxist and postcolonial studies; cultural studies (of the British
or Benjaminian materialist type); post-processural archaeology;
34
forecasted sunshine. In 2012, Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée

Trilling’s A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies was published.
Stodnick and Trilling’s Handbook is not, by any means, the first
theoretically minded anthology of literary criticism published
in Anglo-Saxon studies. Rather, it is a theoretical primer meant
to introduce readers to a wide range of critical theories and
methodologies already in use by Anglo-Saxonists. In their in-
troduction, Stodnick and Trilling look back to Allen Frantzen,
writing:
[O]ur discussion of the word handbook has thus far been

voiced in both of the ‘two languages’ that Allen Frantzen
identified in his seminal 1991 collection Speaking Two Lan-
guages as a feature of the critical discourse employed by any
Anglo-Saxonist interested in theory. In beginning with a his-
torical analysis of a word [handbook], we are not far from
the disciplinary ‘comfort zone’ for Anglo-Saxon studies,
long dominated by textual study and specifically philological
aims.20
In returning to Frantzen, whose scholarship in the early 1990s

garnered much criticism as well as acclaim, Stodnick and Trill-
ing negotiate a formal peace to longstanding debates regarding
the appropriateness of postmodern theories within Anglo-Sax-
on studies, by emphasizing that their theoretical labors are ‘not
far from the disciplinary “comfort zone” for Anglo-Saxon stud-
media and textuality theory; new or post-philology; semiotics and

deconstruction; Foucauldian genealogy; psychoanalytic and cognitive
approaches; political and sociological theory; nonlinear dynamics and
systems theory; the theoretically roguish thought and schizoid-rhizo-
matic theory of Deleuze and Guattari and their ilk; postmodern her-
meneutics; and any other number of other schools of post-structural
thought and analysis as well as their significant ‘turns’ — to language/
discursivity, to the performative, to the body/embodiment, to space/
habitus, to the Other/posthuman, to memory/spectrality, to reading/
aesthetics, to ethics, to the animal, and to temporality.
20 Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée Trilling, ‘Introduction,’ in A Handbook of
Anglo-Saxon Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 3.
35
ies, long dominated by textual study and philolog[y].’ Theory is

now practiced not only alongside historicism and philology but,
moreover, from within the disciplinary frame of Anglo-Saxon
studies. Consequently, it would seem that Frantzen’s once-con-
troversial arguments in Desire for Origins, which claimed that
the active exclusion of critical theory from the field subtended
its national-imperial politics, have finally been recognized and
resolved. With a handbook of theory, Anglo-Saxonists must
have settled the field’s restless states and, ipso facto, become
postcolonial.
In two consecutive chapters, ‘Postcolonial’ and ‘Race and
Ethnicity,’ Handbook contributors Catherine Karkov and Ste-
phen Harris signal the arrival of postcolonialism to a suppos-
edly now-theoretical Anglo-Saxon studies. Karkov cites essays
by Uppinder Mehan and David Townsend, Barbara Yorke,
Kathleen Davis, and Elaine Trehane, which articulate ‘postco-
lonial approaches to Anglo-Saxon England.’21 However, when
she turns to ‘postcolonial medievalists,’ she cites only two, Kath-
leen Davis and Ananya Jahanara Kabir, whose work has been
positioned from within Old English and Anglo-Saxon studies.22
What is the difference between a postcolonial approach and a
postcolonial medievalist? Why a postcolonial medievalist rather
than a postcolonial Anglo-Saxonist? Karkov’s language suggests
that one can employ postcolonial theories without occupying a
postcolonial subjectivity, and it is worth noting that the recent
publication histories of Davis and Kabir evidence a trajectory
that moves further afield from (rather than closer towards) An-
glo-Saxon studies.23 Karkov’s ‘Postcolonial’ chapter is followed
by Harris’s ‘Race and Ethnicity,’ an essay in which Harris does
21 Catherine Karkov, ‘Postcolonial,’ in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies,

eds. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée Trilling (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012), 152.
22 Ibid.
23 It should be noted as well that Kabir eventually left Old English studies
proper, and is now a scholar of the cultural and memory politics of con-
temporary South Asia and its diasporas (especially in Africa), medievalism
and Empire, and postcolonial approaches to Philology.
36
not name other scholars within Anglo-Saxon studies who spe-

cialize in this area but rather repeatedly suggests that problems
of race, ethnicity, and colonialism cultivated in nineteenth-
century scholarship remain harbored within the field of Anglo-
Saxon studies:
Influential nineteenth-century scholars, whose interpreta-

tions and methods still powerfully inform our own, wrote
studies of early English literature under a guiding presump-
tion that a national literature somehow expressed the spiri-
tual essence of a language group’s founding race(s).
…
The second supposition described above, that national
habits of thought would be expressed in literature, follows
from the first supposition. If race is a precondition of thought,
it is certainly a precondition of literary art. This second pre-
supposition has been a steady presence in OE criticism.… So
we tend to teach OE poetry according to those purported ra-
cial characteristics: as more of a practical mirror for princes
or a useful, historical record of a vanishing folk culture than
as a site of philosophical speculation, for example.
…
The Rassenproblem has left a rigid legacy. Assumptions
about the racial limits of culture and nation still control our
less considered approaches to OE poetry.24
While the Handbook announces that, as a field, Anglo-Saxon

studies has finally caught up with the theoretical positions advo-
cated by Frantzen and others during the 1980s, 1990s, and early
2000s, Karkov and Harris suggest that the embrace of critical
theory does not render one postcolonial. For racism and coloni-
alism are not always logical. They are systems of the conscious
mind as well as of a whole host of affects. Consequently, cog-
24 Stephen Harris, ‘Race and Ethnicity,’ in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Stud-

ies, eds. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée Trilling (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012), 166, 169, 172.
37
nitive academic methods such as critical theory cannot reason

colonialism out from under a field, nor can they excoriate the
ghostly old guard that continues to haunt it from its unlocatable
crypt. Thus, when Karkov and Harris are called on to explore
and bear witness to theories of postcolonialism, race, and eth-
nicity in relation to Anglo-Saxon studies, Karkov can articulate
the presence of postcolonial approaches but cannot name post-
colonial Anglo-Saxonists, and Harris can talk about race and
ethnicity but in the process must point out the ongoing rela-
tionship between nineteenth-century scholarship and our own.
While the Handbook avows that Anglo-Saxon studies speaks
two languages, the pursuit of Frantzen’s argument reveals that
attending to theory has not, in fact, decolonized the field nor
quieted the old guard in its grave. For this can only happen, as
this chapter will soon argue, at the interstices of both head and
heart.
So, to start with the head: Kathleen Davis’s work articulates
cognitive steps that Anglo-Saxon studies must take in order
to arrive at what Karkov might call a postcolonial medieval-
ist subjectivity. In her essay, ‘Periodization and the Matter of
Precedent,’ Davis articulates the legal concept of precedent as a
discursive intervention that decides which elements of the past
can ‘serve as a rule for future guidance.’25 She then discusses the
Norman Conquest as the precedent that divides the English past
into pre- and post-Conquest periods. The Conquest signals a
precedent — a historical beginning and a future forward — that
guides the Anglo-Norman period seamlessly towards the late-
medieval period and Middle English. Conversely, the Anglo-
Saxon period, which lies on the other side of Conquest, is a site
where time flows backwards. Incompatible and therefore barred
from a post-Conquest future, it is rendered obsolete, unhistori-
cal, and primitive. Yet, in designating the early medieval period
as that ethnically marked time zone from which a premodern
England supposedly progresses, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ underscores
25 Kathleen Davis, ‘Periodization and the Matter of Precedent,’ postmedieval:

a journal of medieval cultural studies 1, no. 3 (2010): 357.
38
an ethnic temporality from which all English legal, linguistic,

and cultural histories have since been continuously, uninter-
ruptedly, and progressively written. To route the arguments of
Davis’s 2007 book, Periodization and Sovereignty, in the direc-
tion of her 2010 essay, the Anglo-Saxon period functions as the
untouchable point of origin for a sovereign medieval history
that is written ‘at the height of and in tandem with, colonialism,
nationalism, imperialism, and orientalism.’26 Its untouchability
enables historians to simultaneously disavow and revere the
Anglo-Saxon period so that it can maintain the machinery of an
ethno-political progress narrative, in which an ever-unfolding
imperial future extends into the so-called postcolonial moment
in which we live.
Despite Davis’s arguments that, in the name of postcoloni-
alism, we must unmoor our field from the fastenings of tradi-
tional periodization, Anglo-Saxon studies remains attached to
the Anglo-Saxon period and to the professional term ‘Anglo-
Saxonist’ even as it tries to address the troubling problem of
Anglo-Saxonism. Consequently, all intellectual histories and
critiques of Anglo-Saxon studies, from Frantzen’s 1990 Desire
for Origins to John Niles’s 2015 The Idea of Anglo-Saxon Eng-
land, take as their terminus ad quem Queen Victoria’s death or
World War II, events that symbolically foreshadowed or materi-
ally triggered decades of world-wide European decolonization.
These are critical years. For just as nineteenth-century politics
coordinate with nineteenth-century scholarship, worldwide
European decolonization and America’s meteoric rise to power
during the Cold War function as the political state during which
contemporary Anglo-Saxon studies takes shape. When we leave
the mid-century and what comes after undiscussed, we leave
the project of decolonization unfinished. Instead, we spurn An-
glo-Saxonism of the Victorian and pre-war years but can only
26 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism

and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
University Press, 2007), 5.
39
proceed forward under the banner of postcolonial approaches

rather than as postcolonial medievalists.
As a case study, consider Helen Young’s ‘Whiteness and
Time.’ Young’s essay argues that race, like the medieval period,
generates and maintains a colonial progress narrative, a position
that follows from and is corollary to Kathleen Davis’s impor-
tant work on sovereignty and periodization. Young uses Sharon
Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons as the example by which
she articulates this position:
Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earli-

est Period to the Norman Conquest (1799–1805) was a core
popular text of Anglo-Saxonist thought on both sides of the
Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century and into the twen-
tieth century, and helped shape widely held beliefs. Turner
invoked a progressivist model of race… . In 1836, the preface
to the sixth edition closed with an expanded version of this
idea:
The Anglo-Saxons were deficient in the surprising im-

provements which their present descendants have at-
tained: but unless they had acquired and exercised the
valuable qualities, both moral and intellectual, which they
progressively advanced to before their dynasty ceased,
England would not have become that distinguished na-
tion which, after the Norman graft on its original Saxon
stock, it has gradually been led to.
The Middle Ages, both before and after the Norman Con-
quest, are the key period in the progression of the Anglo-
Saxon race according to his account; its history reaches back
beyond them to the Classical era, but the Middle Ages make
the transition from racial infancy to maturity possible.
This progressivist model of race may have been shed in
theoretical and academic writing in the twenty-first century,
40
but it remains very strong in the medievalisms of popular cul-

ture.27
Young nests a quote from Turner’s History at the center of three

chiastic phrase pairs. An exterior chiasmus is constructed by
a ‘popular text of Anglo-Saxonist thought’ and the ‘medieval-
isms of popular culture.’ A second, interior chiasmus circuits
‘the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century’ to ‘the
twenty-first century.’ Young’s chiastic structure first shields aca-
demics from implication as popular Anglo-Saxonists then ex-
cludes the decades of mid-to-late twentieth-century decoloniza-
tion from purview. Upon figuring coloniality as a non-scholarly
problem, then skipping from colonial to postcolonial moments,
Young articulates the third, chiastic component formed by the
repeated phrase, ‘progressivist model of race,’ which surrounds
her quote from Turner’s History. Young’s cognitive argument
works to expose the problem of coloniality, whiteness, and time,
yet its unthought, chiastic form prohibits further redress. Con-
sequently, when scholarly Anglo-Saxonists and the decades of
the recent past are allowed obliquely into Young’s passage, she
can claim only that ‘this progressivist model of race may have
been shed in theoretical and academic writing.’ Such a subjunc-
tive, half-hearted faith keeps scholarly self-reflection at arm’s
length,28 and it prohibits a postcolonial approach from generat-
ing a postcolonial medievalist.
As I read Karkov and Harris, Davis and Young, I began to
recognize that, despite the field’s best intentions, opening the
crypt of the old guard, viewing its lifeless corpse, coming to
terms with our academic S/states, and decolonizing the field of
Anglo-Saxon studies, does not happen only by way of well-rea-
27 Helen Young, ‘Whiteness and Time: The Once, Present, and Future Race,’
in Studies in Medievalism XXIV: Medievalism on the Margins (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2015), 44, my emphasis.
28 Note also that, throughout the essay, Young repeatedly uses ‘Anglo-Sax-
onist’ and ‘medievalist’ as adjectives for ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and ‘medieval-
ism,’ a move that conflates and confuses scholarly and popular uses of the
terms.
41
soned arguments. Because this is a process of working through

and letting go. This is a process of grieving. For all our love ob-
jects, once dead, must be mourned by way of some narrative
framework lest we become trapped within the crypts of a corpse
(or the rings of a chiasmus) and haunted by its ghostly presence.
Consequently, my critical imperatives began to shift. I stopped
focusing on the conversations of others so that I could pay at-
tention to ones I was trying to have with myself. Why do I call
myself an Anglo-Saxonist? How is my work in Anglo-Saxon
studies perceived not only by my academic colleagues but also
among those I live with and love? How does this professional
identity penetrate the deepest quarters of my personal identity?
These are questions about myself — about ourselves — that can
never be known or understood completely. Yet it has been, at
last, from this quiet place of self-critique, that I began to ask
what devotional ties bind me to the signifiers ‘Anglo-Saxon’
and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ and how might I let go of them in order to
make not just my scholarship but moreover myself postcolonial.
And so, I invite you, my reader, to stand with me, in vulnerabil-
ity, and to listen to your own heart as I show you mine, in grief
and mourning, in working through and letting go.
I was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I grew up,
however, in Houston, Mississippi, where my grandmother,
Virginia Ellard, lived. When I stayed with my grandmother on
weekends, throughout the summer, and during holidays, I vis-
ited the cemeteries of my great-, great-great, and great-great-
great grandparents. My cousins and I went off-roading in my
dad’s truck, looking for, but never finding, the old Ellard home-
stead that my Coz Vic could vaguely recall. I listened to my
relatives talk. About the Depression. About the ill-timed death
of my great-grandfather, a doctor who died while treating pa-
tients in the 1918 outbreak of the Spanish Flu. About relatives
who survived the Delta floods of 1906. About my great-uncle’s
involvement in a lynching amid the 1915 revival of the Ku Klux
Klan. About the War…the War…the War. As a child, I learned
my family’s history through narratives of loss, trauma, nostalgia,
and elegy, all of it situated somewhere between the personal and
42
the political. These acts of visiting and searching for others long
since dead, and these stories of finding family in the deep and
conflicted sadnesses of the post-War South, became my own.
You could say that my family is as melancholic as it is Confeder-
ate. And you could say that this has been my only inheritance, a
point to which I will return in a moment.
It’s important to understand that I am the first in seven gen-
erations who was not born and raised somewhere between the
adjacent counties of Calhoun and Chickasaw, Mississippi, and
since leaving home for college, I have felt myself living as a
Southerner in diaspora. First as a child, then as an adult, much
of my personal life has been spent yearning for a place, a people,
and a time to which I do not belong and can never return. To
put it in terms that make me wonder with no small amount of
chagrin about the stakes of my engagement with Anglo-Saxon
studies, my family’s grief for a ‘Heroic Age’ was passed on to
me, and I have carried it as a silent, unspoken burden my en-
tire life, as an old guard that was locked inside its crypt long
before I was ever born. Although I would like to say with some
certainty — though none of us knows the limits of our own de-
sires — that my attraction to Old English is unrelated to my fam-
ily’s history, my professional interest in the intellectual history of
Anglo-Saxon studies is undoubtedly and, at first, unconsciously
personal.
Among scholars in the humanities, admitting the private
stakes in one’s academic projects can be forbidden (and forbid-
ding) territory. It lays one vulnerable to charges of unprofession-
alism, ad hominem attacks, and accusations of self-indulgence.
Yet, in so many other disciplines, such as Sociology, Anthropol-
ogy, Communication Studies, and Education, these admissions,
frequently termed autoethnography, are methodological salvos
by which an academic essay or book is meant to begin. In these
fields, autoethnography ‘refers to writing about the personal and
its relationship to culture. It is an autobiographical genre of writ-
43
ing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness.’29

In connecting one’s personal life to another’s cultural experienc-
es, autoethnography is writing ‘the self as an evocative, unfold-
ing, scenic, and dialogic plot.’30 Yet, as Margaret Vickers argues,
for the ‘researcher’ to become a ‘storyteller’ is to ‘writ[e] on the
edge — and there is no safety net’ for this kind of work.31 In other
words, as she and others explain, when we allow ‘life experi-
ences to overlap into [our] intellectual work,’ we make ourselves
vulnerable and risk emotional exposure.32 In the process, how-
ever, ‘life becomes performance’, and we ‘writ[e] to make room,
to create a space for what happens between note and line, emo-
tion and intellect, thought and action.’33 Such attention to the
‘room’ and ‘space’ between our personal experiences and our in-
tellectual labors opens us up to what Stacy Holman Jones calls ‘a
lyrical place that gives pause…[f]or emotional space…for recip-
rocal conversations…to shift gears, to disengage and reengage
standpoints, positions, and purposes.’34 In this pause, we find an
emotional and embodied research position. Autoethnography is
‘thus a bodily, as well as [an] intellectual, production.’35 Perform-
ative and often non-cognitive, it is the heart work from whence
comes an argument. To put it simply, autoethnography ‘do[es]
not distinguish doing research from living life.’36
29 Carolyn Ellis, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoeth-

nography (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004), 37.
30 Ibid., 32.
31 Ibid., 619.
32 Margaret Vickers, ‘Researchers as Storytellers: Writing on the Edge — And
Without a Safety Net,’ Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 5 (2002): 619.
33 Ellis, The Ethnographic I, 157; Stacy Holman Jones, ‘Emotional Space:
Performing the Resistive Possibilities of Torch Singing,’ Qualitative Inquiry
8, no. 6 (2002): 753.
34 Jones, ‘Emotional Space,’ 754.
35 Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy, ‘Introduction: Emergent
Methods in Social Research Within and Across Disciplines,’ in Emergent
Methods in Social Research, eds. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia
Leavy (Thousand Oaks: sage Publications, 2006), xxiii.
36 Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe, ‘Introduction: Critical Autoeth-
nography as Method of Choice,’ in Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting
44
Among historians, similar projects, organized under the

genres of autobiography and memoir, have become critical po-
sitions from which historical writing unfolds. As medievalist
Gabrielle Spiegel discloses her childhood relationship to post-
war loss, she writes that, ‘[i]t is my profound conviction that
what we do as historians is to write, in highly displaced, usually
unconscious, but nonetheless determined ways, our inner, per-
sonal obsessions.’37 Put another way, as Rocío G. Davis notes,
‘[w]e comprehend that academics function not only as “schol-
ars,” committed to objective reality, but as “authors” who some-
how project themselves in their texts which, in important ways,
may become negotiations of their personalities and intellectual
positions.’38
This book would not be possible if I could not look into the
cryptic corners and gaze upon the Confederate corpses of my
family; if I could not locate the old, Southern guard that has
refused to let me mourn and find a space for grief; if I could
not write myself in my scholarly project; if I could not, in the
acts of working through and letting go of these specters, claim
my body’s affects — its physical and emotional engagement with
grief — as the necessary means by which I have navigated my
personal and professional self. For, once again, in 2008, as I had
just started writing this book, my grandmother died. As many
know, the death of a parent can be a devastating event, and my
grandmother was not only my mother but, moreover, my first
love. During the last three months of her life, my father, my
aunt, my husband, and I cared for her, first at home, then in the
hospital, and finally in hospice. Watching her die, all the while
Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, eds. Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P.

Orbe (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014), 15.
37 Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘France for Belgium,’ in Why France? American His-
torians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination, eds. Laura Lee Downs and
Stéphane Gerson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2.
38 See also Rocío G. Davis, ed., Reading Academic Autobiographies [special is-
sue], Prose Studies 31, no. 3 (2009) and ‘Introduction: Academic Autobiog-
raphy and/in the Discourses of History,’ Rethinking History 13, no. 1 (2009):
1–4.
45
trying to reassure her that she would recover, was the hardest
thing I have ever done. And in the wake of her death, I did not
know myself. As the voice of so many family stories, as the living
image of so many dead relations, she was the narrator, matri-
arch, and the most beautiful piece of my melancholic Southern
family: its seemingly timeless connection to the land and to un-
mournable, unbearable, unspeakable loss. A decade later, I still
grieve her passing.
After my grandmother died, I continued to go home, to Hou-
ston, Mississippi, and to her house, which I had inherited. But
absent my grandmother, I began to feel no longer comfortable
there, and this gnawing feeling creeped inside me when I would
visit Mississippi: that only ghosts were waiting for me there. Al-
though my grandmother’s house continued to remain a comfort,
and her love encircled me when I walked through its rooms,
going home was not a homecoming. Most of the people I grew
up with — the relatives I once visited, accompanied on cemetery
outings and other failed adventures, and listened to as they told
their stories — were, like her, dead. In 2013, I had a daughter,
and when she was six weeks old, I took her to my grandmother’s
house for a few weeks to meet my many extended family mem-
bers, to meet my grandmother (for whom she was named), to
be comforted in the rocking chair whose worn treads had put to
sleep five generations of babies in my family. A week after I re-
turned from my grandmother’s house, my inheritance from her,
it burned. To the ground. Not just the nineteenth-century fur-
niture. Not just the daguerreotypes, the aquatints, the black and
whites, the 1970s orange-smudged photos and boxes of Kodak
slide carousels. Not just the walls, the bricks, the chimney, the
surrounding flowers, the plants, the six-foot palm. Not just all
the childhood possessions of my father and myself. Not just eve-
rything, but all of it. Burned. All of my family. Burned. All of my
self. Burned. All that I imagined for my daughter. Burned.
Burned.
46
u
r
e
d.
..
.
.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, I began to feel without a place in An-

glo-Saxon studies, and without knowing it at the time, I started
to mourn what I believed to be the in toto loss of my personal self
in intimate proximity to my professional one. In the drafting and
redrafting of this book, I have mourned my losses and have been
able to see, for the first time, the unmourned and unmournable
intimacies of my own life that stretch towards my intellectual
pursuits. I tell you these things as a matter of autoethnography,
autobiography, memoir, confession, or penitential — whatever
genre you find this narrative to belong — because not only are
my personal stories instrumental to constructing my own iden-
tity, but they are acts of ‘communication’ that ‘hope for embod-
ied and personally implicated understandings between writer
and reader.’39 To put it another way, it is in these written com-
39 A.P. Bochner, ‘On First-Person Narrative Scholarship: Autoethnography as

Acts of Meaning,’ Narrative Inquiry 22, no. 1 (2012): 158, author’s emphasis,
and Satoshi Toyosaki and Sandy L. Pensoneau-Conway, ‘Autoethnography
as a Praxis of Social Justice: Three Ontological Contexts,’ in Handbook of
47
muniqués of my perceived life that we — you and me — can be

together and believe together that there are histories as yet to be
written because, to borrow from the conceptual framework of
Kathleen Biddick, they do not exist in the archive but rather in
the unsovereign and unspliced performances of my body, your
body, our embodied minds.40
What’s more, that grief, far from being a private and personal
activity, is an intersubjective process. Counter to mid-century
psychoanalytic literature, which emphasized the importance of
decathexis, contemporary psychoanalysis finds that grief affects
are efforts to communicate, to maintain relatedness, to engage
other survivors in bereavement. Further, as George Hagman
explains, ‘many problems arising from bereavement are due to
the failure of other survivors to engage the bereaved person in
mourning together,’41 and as Robert Neimeyer, Dennis Klass,
and Michael Robert Dennis write, ‘the meaning of loss as well as
the meaning of the continued connection with the loved one are
(literally) negotiated within families and communities, and not
merely dealt with in the cognitive province of one or more iso-
lated individuals.’42 Consequently, this chapter is, in many ways,
an act of engaging you so that I might narrate my way towards
reconfiguring my relationship with personal losses and profes-
sional ones, for to say that these are separate, unrelated issues to
be born alone and in silence is to deny on a fundamental level
Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn

Ellis (New York: Routledge, 2016), 565.
40 Kathleen Biddick, ‘Doing Dead Time for the Sovereign: Archive, Aban-
donment, Performance,’ Rethinking History 13, no. 2 (2009): 137–51.
41 George Hagman, ‘Beyond Decathexis: Toward a Fresh Theory of Griev-
ing,’ in Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, ed. Robert A.
Neimeyer (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001),
25.
42 Robert A. Neimeyer, Dennis Klass, and Michael Robert Dennis, ‘Mourn-
ing, Meaning, and Memory: Individual, Communal, and Cultural Nar-
ration of Grief,’ in Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, eds.
Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netzer (New York: Springer, 2014),
329.
48
the twinning of one’s personal and professional selves, one’s in-

dividual and community relationships.
Finally, and most importantly, this book is an invitation for
others in Anglo-Saxon studies to grieve. As an introductory
chapter that locates my own subjectivity at a crossroads of my
research field and my family, trespassing the boundaries be-
tween professional and personal identities, it serves as an in-
tersubjective invitation. It invites others to recognize their own
unacknowledged losses — whatever they may be — and mourn
these losses alongside mine such that the field of Anglo-Saxon
studies is reshaped and transformed through the transformative
acts of its mourners. For it is an inability to grieve identity posi-
tions and love objects that are no longer tenable and no longer
living that keeps us attached to professional signifiers like ‘An-
glo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ and the subterranean old guard
that maintains them. In a certain, quiet stillness, we must ask
ourselves what needs to be mourned in order for the states of
our field to truly become postcolonial — to be radically changed
by decolonial narratives, theories, and activisms43 — and for the
old guard that haunts it to be driven from its closeted S/states.
While such work is intimately personal, it is in the process
of making oneself vulnerable that we can not only find collabo-
ration but moreover underscore scholarship as ethical praxis.
Eileen Joy elegantly explains the ways in which the process of
grieving, or, as she terms it, ‘revisiting,’ long-held positions can
be generative of collaborative and more ethical scholarship, as
exemplified in the collaborative work of Gillian Overing, Clare
Lees, and Diane Watt:
There are certain debates that we need not to return to, for as
Overing herself hopefully stated in 1993, ‘we are changed by
43 See Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Con-

cepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Walter D.
Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, eds., Globalization and the Decolonial Op-
tion (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Bernd Reiter, ed., Constructing the
Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Durham: Duke University Press,
2018).
49
this new work’ — i.e., we are already profoundly altered in our

orientation toward our scholarship in Old English studies by
the more ‘new’ critical methodologies, and in a sense, there
is no going back, no slamming on of the brakes as regards
new directions in the field. I would hold up Gillian Over-
ing, however, as an exemplary model of how a scholar might
be willing, nevertheless, to revisit themselves in the past and
rethink everything all over again with even newer modes of
thought… .This risk-taking and willingness to become ‘un-
done’ that Overing exemplified, beautifully…was also on
display in London in the collaborative presentation of Clare
Lees and Diane Watt…where Lees and Watt are pushing and
challenging each other past the usual terms of their schol-
arship…in order to consider newer, transgendered spaces
within which their scholarship can be co-practiced, while
also continuously argued and debated and struggled over,
but together, even when in opposition. To me, this is such
an exemplary model of scholarship, of scholarship, even, as
an ethical life-practice, in which the agon of thought is not
abandoned but reformulated along lines that are mutually
sustaining while also productive of the types of difference
[of thought, of methodologies, etc.] that are crucial to the
progress of any discipline of knowledge. For while we will,
of necessity, disagree with each other, we do not recognize
enough the ‘with,’ the shared togetherness, of disagreement
that holds us in abeyance with, and not against, each other.
I wish we could see this better sometimes, as Lees and Watt
obviously do.44
44 Eileen Joy, ‘What Lies Before Us: Old English Studies, the Agon of
Thought, and Our Moments of Unknowingness,’ In the Middle [blog],
August 21, 2008, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/08/what-
lies-before-us-old-english-studies.html. Joy was commenting on scholarly
work presented by Overing, and by Lees and Watts, at the 2nd Interna-
tional Workshop of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, King’s College
London, May 23–24, 2008.
50
While Joy, Overing, Lees, and Watt challenge us to revisit, col-

laborate, and find in scholarship an ‘ethical life-practice,’ this is a
monograph, and, consequently, there are no formal co-authors.
Yet as an open invitation for some of us or, perhaps, all of us to
grieve or revisit our relationships to Anglo-Saxon studies and
our stakes in the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ this
book hopes that we might become collaborators, remembering
that, as Joy makes clear, agreeing or disagreeing with its content
is not the point of collaboration. For, as Spiegel and Rocío Davis
have likewise said, all academic histories are, in some way, acts
of writing the self, and as Joy reminds us, collaboration is ‘the
shared togetherness, of disagreement that holds us in abeyance
with, and not against, each other.’
The need for such collaboration among scholars within An-
glo-Saxon studies cannot be signaled more clearly than in this
present moment. In 2016, the first waves of a new, rising tide
of state of the field debates emerged. The New Chaucer Soci-
ety’s panel, ‘Are We Dark Enough Yet?’ articulated the endur-
ing problem of race among medievalists in the weeks following
the United Kingdom’s Brexit decision.45 Academic blog posts on
sites such as In the Middle46 and The Public Medievalist47 contin-
ued this conversation though America’s racially charged presi-
dential election campaign, and, in May 2017, sessions at the 52nd
45 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (organizer), ‘Are We Dark Enough Yet? Pale Faces
2016,’ 20th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, London, UK,
July 11, 2016.
46 See Dorothy Kim, ‘Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies,’ In
the Middle [blog], January 18, 2016, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.
com/2016/01/antifeminism-whiteness-and-medieval.html; Cord Whitaker,
‘Pale Like Me: Resistance, Assimilation, and “Pale Faces” Sixteen Years
On,’ In the Middle [blog], July 20, 2016, http://www.inthemedievalmid-
dle.com/2016/07/pale-like-me-resistance-assimilation.html; Wan-Chuan
Kao, ‘#palefacesmatter?’ In the Middle [blog], July 26, 2016, http://www.
inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/07/palefacesmatter-wan-chuan-kao.html;
and Sierra Lomuto,‘White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies,’
In the Middle [blog], December 5, 2016, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.
com/2016/12/white-nationalism-and-ethics-of.html.
47 See ‘Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages,’ The Public Medievalist [blog],
http://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-toc/.
51
International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) discussed

troubling connections between racism, colonialism, and medi-
eval studies.48 During the summer of that year, an explosion of
events happened that sharpened these connections. At the In-
ternational Medieval Congress in Leeds (UK), a racist joke made
by the moderator of the conference’s keynote lecture prompted
censure on Twitter, in online forums, and in The Chronicle of
Higher Education.49 The International Society of Anglo-Saxon-
ists’ biennial meeting in Honolulu was marked by accusations of
native erasure.50 Then, the white supremacist rallies, with result-
ing deadly violence, in Charlottesville, Virginia, happened,51 and
rifts that had been developing within medieval studies began to
widen. In 2018, the Kalamazoo’s Congress’s leadership was un-
willing to put in place measures to protect medievalists of color
from harassment at the Congress, and, months later, the ICMS
denied all Medievalist of Color-sponsored sessions for its 2019
48 See Sierra Lomuto, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, and Cord Whitaker (co-organ-

izers), ‘Medieval Race and the Modern Scholar,’ 52nd International Con-
gress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 11, 2017; Sierra Lomuto,
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, and Dorothy Kim (co-organizers), ‘Whiteness in
Medieval Studies: A Workshop,’ 52nd International Congress on Medieval
Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 13, 2017. See also Matthew Hussey (organ-
izer), ‘#ASESoWhite,’ Modern Language Association Convention, New
York City, NY, January 5, 2018.
49 @punctum_books, Twitter post, July 3, 2017, https://twitter.com/punctum_
books/status/881788042507427840; ‘On Race and Medieval Studies,’ Medi-
evalists of Color, August 1, 2017, http://medievalistsofcolor.com/statements/
on-race-and-medieval-studies/; J. Clara Chan, ‘Medievalists, Recoiling
From White Supremacy, Try to Diversify the Field,’ The Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 16, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Medievalists-
Recoiling-From/240666.
50 Adam Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS
in Honolulu,’ In The Middle [blog], July 29, 2017, http://www.inthemedi-
evalmiddle.com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html.
51 Dorothy Kim, ‘Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,’
In The Middle [blog], August 28, 2017, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.
com/2017/08/teaching-medieval-studies-in-time-of.html; Nell Gluckman,
‘A Debate About White Supremacy and Medieval Studies Exposes Deep
Rifts in the Field,’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2017,
https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Debate-About-White-Suprema-
cy/241234.
52
Congress. These (in)actions prompted open letters of dissent

and concern from many within medieval studies and a boycott
of Kalamazoo by many medievalists of color.52
As if to signal the failed promise of Desire for Origins, which
advocated for critical theory as the antidote to methods of phi-
lology and historicism overdetermined by colonialist frames of
thought, readers of this chapter may recall that Allen Frantzen’s
own fall from grace tipped off this list of events. In January 2016,
medievalists responded to statements on Frantzen’s personal
website which decried feminism as ‘a sour mix of victimization
and privilege…use[d] to intimidate and exploit men.’53 Scruti-
ny of Frantzen, who had, in the minds of some scholars, been
an unflagging supporter of feminism and feminists in Anglo-
Saxon studies, quickly turned to online discussions about the
prevalence of misogyny and sexual harassment within the field.
Yet Dorothy Kim deftly connects the ‘femfog’ of Frantzen to a
‘credo and ethos…of white supremacy, white nationalism, and
neo-Nazism,’54 and, as the short list of events above indicates,
it took only a few months for discussions regarding anti-femi-
nism, misogyny, and sexual harassment in Anglo-Saxon studies
to turn to issues of race and racism in the field as well.
52 Seeta Chaganti, ‘Statement Regarding ICMS Kalamazoo,’ Medievalists of

Color, July 9, 2018, http://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-the-profession/
statement-regarding-icms-kalamazoo/; BABEL Working Group, ‘Letter of
Concern, ICMS / Kalamazoo 2019,’ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FA
IpQLSdReGZAQJiSSDWTRV0kT2tO2b9LEaAPLTjDJGCeH6auDczBhA/
viewform; Eileen A. Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, ‘A Statement of
Concern Regarding the Programming for the 2019 International Congress
on Medieval Studies @Kalamazoo,’ punctum books [blog], July 14, 2018,
https://punctumbooks.com/blog/a-statement-of-concern/.
53 Allen J. Frantzen, ‘How to Fight Your Way Out of the Feminist Fog,’ Allen
J. Frantzen: Author. Boxer. Traditional Man [URL no longer active], quoted
from Cohen, ‘On Calling Out Misogyny,’ In The Middle, January 16, 2016,
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/on-calling-out-misogyny.
html.
54 Dorothy Kim, Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies (upublished manu-
script). My thanks to Prof. Kim for sharing her unpublished manuscript
with me.
53
The past three years reveal a medieval studies that appears to

be free-falling towards an uncertain future. Yet, amid so many
problems, changes are being made that are cause for much opti-
mism. In 2017, Medievalists of Color became a professional or-
ganization and has since become an integral voice in medieval
studies, providing support for medievalists of color, organizing
workshops and panels that address racial inequities and sup-
port inclusivity, and hosting an online forum that advocates for
diversity in medieval studies. In 2018, the Medieval Academy
created the Belle de la Costa Greene Award to support research
and travel by scholars of color. In January 2019, the first ‘Race-
B4Race’ symposium was held at Arizona State University, spon-
sored by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Early Modern
Studies, and a second symposium was held at the Folger Shake-
speare Library in September 2019. Also in 2019, important and
highly anticipated books by Cord Whitaker and Dorothy Kim
were published on race, whiteness, the middle ages, and medi-
eval studies,55 and in 2020 a special issue of postmedieval titled
‘Race, Revulsion, and Revolution,’ edited by Mary Rambaran-
Olm, M. Breann Leake, and Micah Goodrich will add more
voices to the mix.56
The tense proximity between events which signal disaster
and developments which point towards hope indicates that
some institutions and individuals within medieval studies are
doing the difficult and painful work of mourning — and activ-
ism. As a result of these labors, old narratives that have struc-
tured these fields are slowly falling by the way, and new ones are
supplanting them. Yet, despite many who have publicly and pri-
vately called for an end to the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-
55 Cord Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from

Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2019); Kim, Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies.
56 Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake, and Micah Goodrich, eds., Race,
Revulsion, and Revolution [special issue], postmedieval: a journal of medi-
eval cultural studies 11, no. 3 (2020).
54
Saxonist,’57 both are still in widespread circulation, intimating, as

this chapter has argued, that the grief work by scholars who lay
claim to these professional appellatives has yet to be done. This
book engages in this work. As it moves from the tender spaces of
personal grief towards grieving the field of Anglo-Saxon studies
more broadly, it divides its chapters into three critical-emotion-
al movements: ‘Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts,’ ‘Interlude — A Time for
Mourning,’ and ‘postSaxon Futures.’
The First Movement, ‘Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts,’ critically ex-
amines, exposes, and unearths the old guard of Anglo-Saxon
studies that has lingered, silently, and for many centuries, within
the unconscious quarters of the field. In chapters that place early
medieval poetry in conversation with the historical, archaeolog-
ical, and literary scholarship of Sharon Turner, James Douglas,
and John Mitchell Kemble, three fathers of the interdisciplinary
field of Anglo-Saxon studies, this Movement uncovers narra-
tives of mourning and melancholy, colonial desire and ethnopo-
litics, that arc from Anglo-Saxon texts to Anglo-Saxon studies,
impacting the minds and bodies of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and
twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonists.
Chapter 2 — ‘Krákumál, Sharon Turner, and the Psychic
Crypts of Anglo-Saxon History’ — works to rout the ghosts that
linger, silently, within the unconscious quarters — the psychic
crypts — of Anglo-Saxon studies and prohibit acts of mourning
from unfolding. It begins by discussing the Old Norse poem,
Krákumál, a crypt-making narrative of death and psychoana-
lytic incorporation that returns in Sharon Turner’s History of the
Anglo-Saxons. Turner, the first antiquarian historian of Anglo-
Saxon history, is haunted by the medieval ghosts of Empire, and
as this chapter traces his History from its publication during the
rise of Britain’s late-eighteenth-century empire to its disavowal
57 In addition to portions of this book, which were published in postmedi-

eval and Rethinking History, Dan Remein’s conference paper, ‘ISAS Should
Probably Change its Name,’ International Congress on Medieval Studies,
Kalamazoo, MI, May 2017 (https://www.academia.edu/34101681/_Isas_
should_probably_change_its_name_ICMS_Kalamazoo_2017), makes the
case for abandoning the term ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’
55
amid twentieth-century decolonization, it locates the stirrings

of Turner’s encrypted ghosts in the narratives of Anglo-Saxon
historians in criticism of the 1980s and 1990s. It then argues
that the unacknowledged presence of Turner’s ghosts maintains
twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxon studies in a posture of unre-
flexiveness that prohibits the process of mourning from fully
unfolding. Specifically, this chapter suggests that, in America,
the field’s inability to historicize the discipline has left room
for popular historians to return Ragnar, the blood eagle, and
medieval ghosts of Empire to television screens and American
politics.
Chapter 3 — ‘Beowulf, James Douglas, and the Sepulchral
Body of the Anglo-Saxonist’ — which serves as a companion to
Chapter 2, argues that in order to dislocate the field of Anglo-
Saxon studies from a critical posture that prohibits mourning,
we must discuss crypts not only of the mind but also for the
body. In this chapter, I trace connections between early me-
dieval funeral barrows, Beowulf, and James Douglas, the first
antiquarian archaeologist of the Anglo-Saxon period. I argue
that Beowulf and Douglas are barrow diggers, and in the pro-
cess of opening another’s grave, stepping into its mortuary in-
terior, and retrieving the antiquities within, both become sub-
ject to the barrow’s territory of dying and are reterritorialized
as figures of interminable grief. Douglas’s first barrow sketch in
Nenia Britannica couples the affects of grief with those of Brit-
ish nationalism, and as his sketch is replicated in archaeological
reports across the nineteenth century, a visual representation of
the Anglo-Saxonist emerges as a grief-stricken, undead figure of
racialized, national-imperial performance. The embodied rep-
resentation and performance of the Anglo-Saxonist is encoded
within Beowulf studies via John Mitchell Kemble, whose edi-
tion of the poem summarily precedes his barrow excavations
in Hanover. Kemble’s scholarship associates Beowulfian and
Anglo-Saxon barrows, and it connects Beowulf ’s mortuary per-
formances with those of the Anglo-Saxonist. In reading Beowulf
we become the Anglo-Saxonists of Douglas and Kemble. We en-
ter (and lead our students into) early medieval crypts and poetic
56
graves. Yet we fail to attend to the affects, gestures, and move-

ments of race and empire that accompany this funereal descent.
Together, the chapters of ‘Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts’ argue that
Turner, Douglas, and Kemble form part of an old guard, the fa-
thers of Anglo-Saxon studies. Their scholarship, which is driven
by national-imperial sentiments and their associated ethnopo-
litics, recasts early medieval responses to death into those of in-
terminable, colonial mourning. Turner, Douglas, and Kemble
deposit, within the emerging scholarly narratives and methods
of Anglo-Saxon studies, psychic crypts and material graves.
From these funerary sites, the Anglo-Saxonist emerges, a pro-
fessional who, in mind and in body, is not only raced and ethni-
cally identified. Standing with one foot in the grave, his posture
also takes on a colonial grief that has become, in the wake of
twentieth-century decolonization, unconsciously melancholic.
The Anglo-Saxonist is a racialized corpse of Empire that main-
tains itself, undead, by way of an entangled, unconscious, and
encrypted relationship between Anglo-Saxonist scholarship
and Anglo-Saxonist nationalism.
Once this corpse has been unearthed and its ghostly habita-
tions have been located, the Second Movement, ‘Interlude — A
Time for Mourning,’ enacts the process of working through and
emotionally letting go of this Anglo-Saxonist and its old guard.
Such grief work engages my professional and personal selves,
and, in this section, I approach genealogical narratives of the
field and my family in order to creatively rewrite them.
Chapter 4 — ‘On Being an Anglo-Saxonist: Asser’s Life of
King Alfred, Benjamin Thorpe, and the Sovereign Corpus of a
Profession’ — turns to Alfred, King of the Anglo-Saxons, the
sovereign father of the field who guards the professional signi-
fiers, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist. It tracks the function of
rex Angulsaxonum (‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’) in Asser’s late
ninth-century Life of King Alfred, a biography that establishes
much of what we know about Alfred and the many Old English
texts translated during his lifetime. Asser’s Life uses the king’s
royal style to transform Alfred’s chronically ill, ethnopoliti-
cal body into a sovereign, Anglo-Saxon signifier and a textual,
57
Anglo-Saxon corpus. The consequences of these actions become

apparent centuries later in the writings of philologist Benjamin
Thorpe, philological father of Anglo-Saxon studies and inter-
disciplinary companion to Turner, Douglas, and Kemble. By
studying Thorpe’s translation of Erasmus Rask’s Grammar of the
Anglo-Saxon Tongue and reading Thorpe’s primer, Analecta An-
glo-Saxonica, his reader plots a pedagogical path towards transi-
tioning from a student of Anglo-Saxon into an Anglo-Saxonist:
a professional and an ontological being who has positioned,
within his body and mind, Alfred’s sovereign, now-racialized
corpse and its textual, Anglo-Saxon corpus.
For twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonists, the ontological
force of our professional appellative weighs heavily upon us. Yet,
as Chapter Four discusses, the sovereign figure of Alfred, king
of the Anglo-Saxons, which lies at the bedrock of our profes-
sional signifier not only keeps us in place as Anglo-Saxonists
but also prohibits us from becoming something else. In order
to emotionally give up, or at least loosen the ties that bind us
to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ Chapter Five — ‘Be-
coming postSaxon, Or, a Biochemical Vita Ælfredi’ — returns
to the body and biography of King Alfred while contemplat-
ing my own family. It writes a micro-history of Alfred’s body
that tracks its purported engagements with hemorrhoids and
Crohns disease, its eventual death and decay in the grave, and
its supposed recovery in the 1999/2013 excavations of Hyde Ab-
bey. This work of creative non-fiction attends to Alfred’s body
as a biochemical organism that, in life and in death, challenges
and exceeds the Anglo-Saxon parameters and patriarchy that
have been thrust upon him. Witnessing Alfred’s decay enables
me to supplant the settler colonialists and Confederates of my
family and make room for a genealogy that runs counter to the
Ellards’ Anglo-Saxonist history. The process of making these
new fictions circuits the personal back to the professional. By
attending to Alfred’s material corpse rather than his ethnopo-
litical and racialized corpus, Alfred is no longer (if ever he was)
Anglo-Saxon, and I find myself no longer an Anglo-Saxon(ist)
but a scholar of postSaxon becoming.
58
‘Interlude — A Time for Mourning’ enacts scholarly and

creative means of rescripting, and thereby grieving, Alfred,
the sovereign Anglo-Saxon father and primogenitor of Anglo-
Saxon studies, even as it comes to terms with the fatherly old
guard that lurks within my family. From here, the book turns to
its Third, and final, Movement, ‘postSaxon Futures.’ As a place-
holder, not a term, for what the field might become, ‘postSaxon
futures’ serves as an invitation for a once-Anglo Saxon studies to
reposition itself in relation to temporalities, bodies, and meth-
ods once excluded by its racial and ethnopolitical signifiers.
Chapter 6 — ‘Old/e English Poetics and “Afro-Saxon” Inti-
macies’ — explores one possible ‘postSaxon’ future by follow-
ing the entangled histories of Olde English malt liquor and Old
English language. The silent partnership between Olde and Old
Englishes not only reveals that these terms are freighted (like
Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist) with the baggage of race
and Empire. This chapter writes a narrative that sutures Olde
English malt liquor to African American sociolinguistics and
American rap music, impressing upon the scholarly community
that it does not own Old English but is simply a user of a term
that is unequivocally colonial. As African American linguistic
and arts communities are drawn near to Anglo-Saxonist ones,
this chapter leverages these intimacies in order to disinvent Old
English and speculatively reinvent Olde English as a decolonial
expression of ‘becoming postSaxon.’
Chapter 7 — ‘Becoming postSaxon’ — returns to autoethnog-
raphy, surveying changes afoot in Anglo-Saxon studies in rela-
tion to an account of how writing this book has changed me.
It argues that narratives of open reflection and bereavement,
which challenge the genre restrictions of academic writing, are
critical to field change because they underscore scholarship and
scholarly writing as processes of becoming rather than being.
This chapter queries the possibility, set forth in the book’s initial
chapter, that postcolonialism is a possible future horizon, argu-
ing that decolonization, like mourning, and like becoming, has
no end. Further, it advocates, once again, that it is only in the
collaborative performances of many scholars that once-called
59
Anglo-Saxonists can imagine new and more ethical postSaxon

futures.
Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures may seem, at a
glance, to be a work of intellectual history that speaks exclu-
sively to specialists in Anglo-Saxon studies. Yet medieval studies
programs and English departments claim this historical period
and academic sub-field as points of origin. Consequently, the
arguments of this book gesture towards a much wider audience.
Like Anglo-Saxonists, medievalists use a parallel nomenclature
that locates them within a temporal and geographic past, and
English departments, the institutional homes for many of these
scholars, maintain ethno-political and racial affiliations by way
of the discipline’s attachments to Anglo-America. Indeed, de-
spite the earnest efforts of medieval studies and English, the
conversations that take place within these arenas remain largely
tied to periodization, to Western canons, and to disciplinary
methods that rarely consider one’s personal identity or the em-
bodied aspects of scholarship. Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon
Futures is thus a test case for not only what our identity politics
have been in the past but also what they could become in the fu-
ture if we cease to point our fields in directions that harbor and
maintain the ethno-political, racial, and methodological freight
of previous academic generations.
60
2
Krákumál, Sharon Turner, and the

Psychic Crypts of Anglo-Saxon
History
From the Death of Egbert to the Death of Alfred1 is the second

volume of Sharon Turner’s four-volume History of the Anglo-
Saxons. Although a history of the eighth and ninth centuries,
its narrative is crafted around a medieval Scandinavian poem
that was quite popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries called Krákumál. Krákumál was Turner’s poetic inspi-
ration while writing a history that entwines the arrival of the
Vikings with the rise of Alfred. In From the Death of Egbert,
Turner explains that the Viking hero Ragnar Lodbrog, on an
ill-fated adventure to Northumbria, is captured by King Ella and
1 From their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Egbert and
From the Death of Egbert to the Death of Alfred are the first two volumes of
Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons. They were printed in 1799 and 1801,
respectively, with London printers, T. Cadell and W. Davies. In 1802 these
volumes were reprinted by Longman and Rees, which likewise printed the
last two volumes of the four-volume History (From the Death of Alfred to
the Norman Conquest [1802] and The History of the Manners, Landed Prop-
erty, Government, Laws, Poetry, Literature, Religion, and Language, of the
Anglo-Saxons [1805]) and each successive edition (1807, 1820, 1823, 1828,
1836, 1852). Given the longevity of this relationship between Turner and
Longman, I have chosen to cite the 1802 Longman edition in this chapter.
61
thrown into a pit of snakes.2 In Ella’s snake pit, Ragnar composes

Krákumál before dying from the bites of venomous vipers. The
sounds of Krákumál ring out across the open seas, and Ragnar’s
‘Death-song,’ as Turner calls it, heralds the vengeful expedition
of ‘the Northmen’ to Anglo-Saxon England.3 Upon arrival in
Northumbria, they ‘inflicted a cruel and inhuman retaliation on
Ella for their father’s sufferings. They cut the figure of an ea-
gle on his back…to tear out his lungs.’4 Turner continues, ex-
plaining that Ella’s ‘blood eagle’ is not simply a revenge act but
a ‘dismal sacrifice’ that precipitates a Scandinavian politics of
conquest and colonialism.5 Once in Northumbria, ‘the invad-
ers did not depart’ but extended their Viking vengeance across
Anglo-Saxon England by conquering and colonizing its king-
doms.6 If Ragnar’s Death-song is Turner’s poetic invocation,
then Ella’s death by blood eagle is the history called forth from
it. This strange, singular, and likely apocryphal event sets in mo-
tion the coming of the Northmen and of Alfred. It serves as a
fantastic trauma and a primal scene by which Turner’s narrative
of early English history arcs from Ragnar’s colonial ambitions
toward Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon nation.
Could Ragnar and Ella be the mythical fathers of Anglo-
Saxon history? I pose this question in relation to another: might
Sharon Turner be a father of Anglo-Saxon historians? Allen
Frantzen calls Turner the ‘first modern historian of Anglo-
Saxon England,’ and Claire Simmons, in a statement echoed by
Sarah Foot, goes so far as to rate his multi-volume History of the
Anglo-Saxons as ‘the most important single impetus to Anglo-
2 The stories of Ragnar and Ella are recounted in a number of texts from
medieval Scandinavia and from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
England. The spelling of names and places varies in these texts, and, unless
otherwise indicated, I use Turner’s spellings for consistency.
3 Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from Their Earliest Ap-
pearance above the Elbe, to the Norman Conquest, vol. II (Paternoster-Row,
London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, Printed for the Author, 1802–1805),
vii.
4 Ibid., 123.
5 Ibid.,124.
6 Ibid.
62
Psychic Crypts of Anglo-Saxon History
Saxon studies.’7 Turner’s History has been called ‘pioneering’ and

‘immensely detailed and influential.’8 Its historical breadth, ar-
chival research, and bibliographic citations signal milestones in
the field’s professional development. While Turner’s importance
to the history of Anglo-Saxon studies is well noted, Turner’s
scholarship is unequivocally disavowed. Written and revised as
Britain sailed toward the national-imperial horizons of its Vic-
torian Age, Turner’s History envisions the Anglo-Saxon past as
a romantic narrative that anticipates an English future. Conse-
quently, as many scholars have explained, the historical integrity
of Turner’s labors in the British Museum is compromised by his
Whiggish commitments, nationalist fervor, and imperialist be-
liefs. Likewise, the racist and colonialist uses to which later edi-
tions of his History were put in the post-bellum American South
and in settlement-period Australia have further jaundiced its
academic legitimacy outside of England.9
Guided by the psychoanalytic research of Nicolas Abraham
and Maria Torok and the sociopolitical implications of their
work on transgenerational haunting, this chapter examines Sha-
7 Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Languages, Old English, and
Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1990), 33; Claire Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1990), 55; and Sarah Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 237.
8 Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Crushing the Convent and the Dread Bastille: The
Anglo-Saxons, Revolution and Gender in Women’s Plays of the 1790s,’
in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the
Twentieth Century, eds. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 123; Linda Pratt, ‘Anglo-Saxon At-
titudes? Alfred the Great and the Romantic National Epic,’ in Literary
Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth
Century, eds. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000) 144.
9 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 10; Leigh
Boucher, ‘Trans/National History and Disciplinary Amnesia: Historicizing
White Australia at Two fins de siècles,’ in Creating White Australia, eds.
Jane Carey and Claire McLisky (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009),
57–58.
63
ron Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons as a crypt in which the

unmourned losses and unacknowledged traumas of British co-
lonialism are secreted. I argue that Turner, a historian inspired
by the Old Norse poem Krákumál and driven by imperialist ide-
ology, is haunted by a restless colonial other whose encrypted
form stirs the pages of his History and makes ‘incomprehensible
signals.’10 Turner narrativizes these signals as the blood-eagle,
‘a cruel and inhuman retaliation’ that rips apart Ella’s body and
tears out his lungs so that his Northumbrian kingdom might be
conquered and colonized. Turner, moved by the ghostly sounds
that emerge from his narrative voice, buries Ella’s blood-eagled
body within his History, which becomes a crypt across which
Ella strays. This chapter suggests that Turner, an ambiguous fa-
ther of Anglo-Saxon studies, has transmitted Ella’s blood eagle,
an encrypted specter of empire, to his children. I contextualize
scholarly commentary on the blood eagle within late twentieth-
century decolonization, arguing that scholars of the 1980s and
1990s return to the blood eagle and act out the trauma that
Turner has passed on to them to try and heal (or re-inter) the
hidden wounds of colonialism. This chapter analyzes Turner’s
historical work in order to ask what twenty-first-century fu-
ture — what state of academic unmindfulness and unmourn-
ing — has been imagined for Anglo-Saxonists through over two
centuries of wrestling with these encrypted ghosts of empire.
It then turns to twenty-first-century visions of the blood eagle,
the spectral presence of which has stirred, again, in the wake of
9/11 and also on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration. While
ghosts, as Stephen Frosh writes, may ‘come from the future,’ the
blood eagle reminds Anglo-Saxon studies that it urgently needs
to look more closely at how it minds its past.11
Although Turner cites an impressive breadth of medieval
sources in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, his preface credits
10 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of
Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: Chicago Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 130.
11 Stephen Frosh, Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (Lon-
don: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11.
64
a popular poem as the primary impetus for the entire project.

In Turner’s 1802 Longman preface, he claims that the ‘Death-
song of Ragnar Lodbrog’ and Ragnar’s death in Northumbria
prompted his research for the History. Turner was not alone in
finding inspiration in the Death-song. Krákumál, as it is known
by contemporary academics, is a skaldic poem that dates from
the late twelfth century. The poem’s subject and speaker is Rag-
nar Lodbrog, a Volsung descendant and Viking king12 who cel-
ebrates the bloody outcomes of past battles as he awaits death
in the Northumbrian king Ella’s snake pit. The poem’s bellicose
images collapse the ethical, physical, and temporal distance
between Ragnar’s body and that of cultural Others. In earlier
stanzas, Ragnar claims, for example, that his skirmishes near
Hjaðningavágr and Northumbria were neither ‘like placing a
fair maiden in a bed’ nor like ‘kissing a young widow.’13 These
remarks, which locate battle in negative proximity to sexual re-
lations, loosen the ethical distinction between hostile and hos-
pitable acts, and they lay the groundwork for subsequent, mate-
rial elisions between enemies and allies. Ragnar contemplates
the aftermath of battle in which men lay dead atop one another,
and he considers single combat among unidentifiable warriors.14
These remarks, which recognize no lexical difference between
12 According to Ragnars saga (The Tale of Ragnar Loðbrok), Ragnar marries

into the Volsung line by wedding Áslaug, the daughter of Sigurd and Bryn-
hild of the Völsunga saga (The Tale of the Völsungs). He inherits the throne
of Denmark from his father, also named Sigurd.
13 ‘vasat sem bjarta brúði / í bing hjá sér leggja’…‘vasat sem unga ekkju / í
ǫndvegi kyssa’ (Finnur Jónsson, ed., Den norsk–islandske skjaldedigtning.
B: Rettet tekst [1912–1915; repr. Copenhagen: Villadsen & Christensen,
Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1973], 652, stanza 13, ll. 9–10 and stanza 14, ll. 9–10).
All translations of Krákumál are my own but lean upon Rory McTurk’s
prose translation, which follows, for the most part, Jónsson’s edition.
Rory McTurk, ‘Samuel Ferguson’s “Death-Song” (1833): An Anglo-Irish
Response to Krákumál,’ in Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth:
Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey, ed. Andrew Wawn (Turnhout, Belgium:
Brepols, 2007), 167–92.
14 ‘Hverr lá þverr of annan’…‘Hitt telk jafnt, at gangi / at samtogi sverða
/ sveinn í motí einum / hrøkkvit þegn fyr þegni’ (Den norsk–islandske
skjaldedigtning, 642, stanza 16, l. 2; 654, stanza 23, ll. 2–4).
65
mutually hostile warriors, anticipate Ragnar’s own heroic cel-

ebrations in the dwellings of Óðinn. In death he will drink beer
from ‘the curved-tree of skulls.’15 By way of an elaborate kenning
that references a drinking horn, Krákumál emerges as an oral
poem that locates future action in the present tense and trans-
forms Ragnar’s empty mouth into a site for poetic consumption.
In ode to his own death, Ragnar drinks the dead.
Krákumál’s emphasis on orality engages a rigorous discus-
sion about the psychopolitics of incorporation, a concept that
emerges in the psychoanalytic work of Abraham and Torok. As
Abraham and Torok explain, when we do not mourn the death
of a loved one — when we deny that we have lost an object of
our affections — we refuse to abide the often painful and lengthy
process of grieving. In a defensive act that violates the ethical,
physical, and temporal constraints of mourning, we open our
(psychic) mouth and fantastically ‘swallow whole’ their figure.16
Through these illicit acts of ‘eating’ the dead, we magically in-
corporate their spirit, their drives, and their urges within our
psyche as a self-preservative mechanism that shields us from the
painful process of identity reconfiguration that is enacted across
the time of mourning. As Ragnar lies dying in Ella’s pit, his
thoughts about the past relax the conceptual distance between
war and love, foe and friend, self and other. Consequently, they
prepare Ragnar for contemplating his future. As he envisions
himself at Óðinn’s banquet table, Ragnar fantasizes a scene of
incorporation. He presses his open mouth upon the skull of an
unidentifiable other, fantasizing an act of consumption that en-
codes a prohibition against mourning into the poetic fibers — its
kennings — of Krákumál’s skaldic verses. Soon after, Ragnar
predicts, ‘Viðrir’s switch [glossed frequently as Óðinn’s spear]
will stand fast in Ella. The slaying of their father will cause my
15 ‘Hitt lœgir mik, jafnan / at Baldrs fǫður bekki / búna veitk at sumblum;
/ drekkum bjór af bragði / ór bjúgviðum hausa’ (Den norsk–islandske
skjaldedigtning, 655, stanza 25, ll. 2–6).
16 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 126, 128.
66
sons’ hearts to swell with rage.’17 Instead of grieving his death,

Ragnar’s sons will incorporate their father’s libidinal energies:
they will devour and ingest his Volsung-Viking spirit, and they
will cleave their sense of self to the corpse of their Odinic father.
As a consequence, ‘Viðrir’s switch will stand fast in Ella.’ If Krá-
kumál gestures toward the effects of incorporating Ragnar, then
other medieval Scandinavian texts make these gestures clear.
Ragnar’s sons arrive in Northumbria, murder Ella by blood-ea-
gling him, then conquer and colonize Anglo-Saxon England.18
In Krákumál, psychological acts of incorporation hasten toward
political acts of incorporation: in devouring, cannibalizing, and
swallowing whole one’s beloved father, one exacts a similar ter-
ror upon one’s unloved enemy. In short, prohibitions against
mourning become directed toward policies of colonialism.
As a poem that explores the psycho-politics of incorporation,
it is not infelicitous that Krákumál is published first in English
by Thomas Percy in 1763, a year that evidences the success of
Britain’s resounding colonial victories in both the Seven Years
War and in the French and Indian War.19 Percy’s interests in
translating Krákumál and other skaldic poems are underwritten
by his investments in an English identity that is secured by as-
sociation with ‘a “Norse poetic” empire.’20 As Robert Rix points
out, Percy argued that ‘a central feature of Norse poetics [was]…
17 ‘…Viðris / vǫndr í Ellu standi; / sonum mínum mun svella / sinn fǫður
ráðinn verða’ (Den norsk–islandske skjaldedigtning, 655, stanza 27, ll. 5–8).
18 See Saxo Grammaticus’s Danish chronicle, Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the
Danes), Book IX; the Icelandic prose works Ragnars saga (The Tale of Rag-
nar Loðbrok), Chapter 15; and Þáttr af Ragnars sonum (The Tale of Ragnar’s
Sons), Chapter 3.
19 While ‘Indian’ is an inappropriate term for the native and indigenous
peoples of North America, I invoke this word, and repeat it throughout
this chapter, within the context of eighteenth-century colonial history and
according to its use by Percy and his contemporaries.
20 Robert Rix, ‘The Afterlife of a Death Song: Reception of Ragnar Lodbrog’s
Poem in Britain Until the End of the Eighteenth Century,’ Studia Neophilo-
logica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literature 81,
no. 1 (2009): 4, 13. Rix’s quote derives from a statement made by Thomas
Wharton, who was a co-collaborator (with Percy) of Runic theory. Here, I
use Wharton’s words in reference to Percy for the sake of expediency.
67
the inclination to make “poetical fiction” out of “poetical his-

tory”…[and] Percy believed this method of composition was
embodied in Ragnar’s epicedium.’21 Ragnar’s epicedium, which
he titles ‘The Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrok,’ is the first among
Percy’s Old Norse translations. In selecting ‘The Dying Ode,’
Percy lays claim to his literary inheritance from ‘the northern
nations’ and pronounces himself implicitly a son of Ragnar.22 By
making these genealogical claims, Percy finds himself entangled
in the not-so-poetical history that follows from Krákumál’s po-
etical fiction. In his preface to ‘The Dying Ode,’ Percy writes,
‘war in those rude ages was carried on with the same inhuman-
ity, as it is now among the savages of North-America: their pris-
oners were only reserved to be put to death with torture. Ragner
was accordingly thrown into a dungeon to be stung to death by
serpents.’23 Percy measures the ‘inhumanity’ of Ragnar’s death
by snake-bite against the ‘savagery’ of indigenous North Ameri-
cans. He draws the medieval brutalities of Anglo-Scandinavia
into dialogue with Britain’s wars in North America. Krákumál
acts according to what Gabrielle Schwab calls a screen memory,
a story that ‘focus[es] on histories of violence elsewhere in order
to split them off from one’s own violent histories…to cover up
or work through another affectively closer history that would
be more problematic to deal with.’24 While Ragnar’s death is a
screen memory that shields Percy from the ‘affectively closer
history’ of British colonialism, Ragnar’s poetic legacy has di-
rected him into ethically troubled waters. By way of poetry, have
Ragnar’s English descendants taken inside themselves Ragnar’s
Volsung-Viking spirit? Have they responded to their father’s
skaldic verses by incorporating his libidinal drives? In an act of
gross unmourning, have they unleashed these Ragnarian ener-
gies upon North America in the vengeful-cum-colonial pursuit
21 Rix, ‘The Afterlife of a Death Song,’ 12.

22 Thomas Percy, Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic
Language (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1763), A3.
23 Ibid., 23–24.
24 Gabrielle Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenera-
tional Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23.
68
of their French and ‘Indian’ enemies? In 1763, Percy screens

these questions but does not dare answer them.
In subsequent decades, Krákumál’s popularity keeps time
with Britain’s colonial actions in North America and elsewhere
across the world,25 and in 1782 Rev. Johnstone’s Lodbrokar Qui-
da; or The Death-Song of Lodbroc is published. In language that
echoes Percy’s preface, Johnstone explains the longevity of Krá-
kumál:
[D]uring the rude periods of society, the safety, both of na-

tions and of individuals depends upon making themselves
objects of terror. Hence, while the captive Indian mitigates
his torments by the recollection of his exploits, he tramples,
as it were, on the cruelty of his enemies…The Lodbrokar-qui-
da shews, that a similarity of manners prevailed in the north;
and, indeed, men, in the same degree of civilization, will act,
and think, nearly in the same way.26
Johnstone’s statements regarding the ‘captive Indian’ and the

‘cruelty of his enemies’ reverberate against Percy’s prefatory
rhetoric of the ‘torture’ of ‘prisoners’ and the ‘inhumanity, as it is
now among the savages of North-America.’ Unlike Percy, how-
ever, Johnstone identifies the prisoner as an ‘Indian’ who is no
longer destined for death but remains captive to a cruel enemy.
Johnstone’s revisions extend the horizons of colonization from
North America to the Americas and to India. They implicate
this ‘Indian’ as a hostage held for the unforeseeable future and
imply, moreover, that an unspecified ‘cruelty’ locates the jailer
in the same alliterative space as his ‘captive.’ Johnstone’s prose
keeps pace with Britain’s imperial actions, tightening the bond
between colonial subject and colonizer and entrapping Ragnar
25 For a list of available translations, see Frank Edgar Farley, Scandinavian

Influences in the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn & Co, 1903),
58 ff.
26 James Johnstone, Lodbrokar Quida; or The Death Song of Lodbroc; now first
correctly printed from various Manuscripts, with a free English translation
(Printed for the Author, 1782), 94, author’s emphasis.
69
within his rhetoric: ‘while the captive Indian mitigates his tor-
ments by the recollection of his exploits he tramples, as it were,
on the cruelty of his enemies.’ In the acoustical space between
the ‘captive Indian’ and the ‘cruelty of his enemy’ — between the
alliterative ties that link colonial subject and colonizer — Ragnar
lies, silently, in the absence–presence of pronouns. Imprisoned
together, Ragnar and the ‘Indian’ ‘mitigate’ their pain, ‘recollect
[their] exploits,’ and ‘trample upon’ their jailers. In the same
darkling pit, they stage a pyrrhic victory: because the sounds of
Ragnar and the ‘Indian’ can be heard only within the confines
of Johnstone’s English prose. After two decades of simultane-
ous acts of translation and colonization, after two decades of
employing an Old Norse poem that screens a modern English
history too close to bear, Krákumál’s translators have held hos-
tage, swallowed whole, and incorporated Ragnar and the ‘In-
dian.’ One a beloved father, one an unloved Other, Johnstone
unknowingly ventriloquizes their defiant recollections.
Johnstone’s comment appears in ‘Notes to the English Read-
er,’ the final appendix of Lodbrokar Quida, an edition that is
not written for the casual reader. As Margaret Clunies Ross has
explained, it is a collaboration between British diplomat James
Johnstone and Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin.27 A
‘self-consciously accurate and scholarly production,’ Lodbro-
kar Quida is meant for the aspiring scholar-translator of Old
Norse.28 Its bilingual text of 29 stanzas is preamble to a robust
critical apparatus of 77 pages: (i) ‘Epicedium,’ a Latin transla-
tion of the poem; (ii) ‘Glossarium,’ an extensive Old Norse-Latin
glossary of words, phrases, and figures; and (iii) ‘Notes to the
English Reader,’ a description of places and events referenced
in each stanza. In the last appendix of Lodbrokar Quida lie Rag-
27 Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain 1750–1820 (Trieste:

Parnaso, 1998), 173–75.
28 Thomas A. Shippey, ‘“The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrog”: A Study in
Sensibilities,’ in Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Les-
lie J. Workman, eds. Richard Utz and Thomas Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols,
1998), 161.
70
nar and the ‘Indian,’ not simply held captive but buried alive
together under a mountain of scholarly effects.
To return to the language of Abraham and Torok, Ragnar and
the ‘Indian’ have been incorporated, entombed, and, moreover,
encrypted within the final pages of Lodbrokar Quida:
[When] this segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality…

[is] untellable…[it] causes a genuinely covert shift in the en-
tire psyche. This shift itself is covert, since both the fact that
the idyll was real and that it was later lost must be disguised
and denied. This leads to the establishment of a sealed-off
psychic place, a crypt in the ego.29
A crypt emerges from incorporation. It is built when our grief

and shame prohibit us from mourning our losses or grieving
our traumas. Instead of giving voice to our pain, we ‘disguise’
and ‘deny’ it. We stage a psychic defense against suffering by de-
positing these secret losses, unshared traumas, and ‘untellable’
pains within ourselves. Trapped in ‘a sealed-off psychic space,’
they linger in deep and profound silence, inhabiting us as ‘exqui-
site corpses’ against which we unknowingly and unconsciously
brace our subjectivity.30 Ragnar and the ‘Indian,’ England’s un-
mourned and unmournable relations, are corpses that disguise
the losses and deny the traumas of British colonialism. Though
hidden from view, their captive shapes sound out — in John-
stone’s own words — the ‘savage’ violence, the ‘inhuman’ brutali-
ties, the ceaseless ‘torments,’ and the constant state of incorpo-
ration that is necessary to build and sustain an empire. For all
their noise, however, Ragnar and the ‘Indian’ cannot be found.
‘[S]ealed off ’ in the ‘psychic place’ of Johnstone’s ego, they are
‘inaccessible to [his] conscious self.’ Consequently, as Johnstone
ventriloquizes the sounds that come from within his psychic
crypt, he misrecognizes them as scholarly artifacts and encodes
them into his scholarly apparatus. Lodbrokar Quida becomes, as
29 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 141.

30 Ibid., 120–23.
71
Esther Rashkin writes, a ‘fictional saga’ that is ‘perturb[ed] and

propel[led]’ by ‘unspeakable secrets.’31 It is a literary work that is
produced by ‘subjects [who] deploy different practices and tech-
niques to act on their world and themselves in their struggle to
transcend psychic distress and create new paths for survival.’32
As these corpses make their way from Johnstone’s uncon-
scious to the final appendix of his scholarly edition, each sec-
tion of the critical apparatus serves as a partition that erects
the crypt of Lodbrokar Quida according to what Abraham calls
anasemia, a process by which the meaning of signs is problema-
tized through fracture: ‘allophemic slippages, demetaphoriza-
tion, spiraling language’ — ‘words buried alive’ that are ‘relieved
of their communicative function’ yet articulate ‘that the desire
was in a way satisfied, that the pleasurable fulfillment did take
place.’33 In anasemia, signifiers shatter into ‘angular pieces…
internal (intra-symbolic) partitions, cavities, corridors, niches,
zigzag labyrinths, and craggy fortifications’ as the semiotic ef-
fects of a refusal to mourn, to acknowledge, and to give voice to
one’s secret grief and shame. By way of anasemia, one incorpo-
rates these others in order to encrypt them within the unspo-
ken, unsignified, and most unknown corridors of the uncon-
scious.34 Each scholarly appendix of Lodbrokar Quida functions
as an anasemic partition that silences and fragments Ragnar’s
Old Norse voice and encrypts Ragnar and the ‘Indian’ within
its pages. The Epicedium presents Krákumál first as a Latin text,
a move that signals it as a learned poem written in a language
worthy of extensive exegesis. To these ends, the Glossarium aids
the aspiring reader’s perusal of Krákumál’s Old Norse lexicon.
It provides the Latin equivalents of difficult Old Norse gram-
mar and vocabulary, and it glosses unfamiliar figures of Scan-
dinavian mythology and saga with extended Latin explanation.
31 Esther Rashkin, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 16.
32 Ibid.
33 Jacques Derrida and Barbara Johnson, ‘Fors,’ The Georgia Review 31, no. 1
(1977): 99.
34 Ibid., 76.
72
While serving as helpful reading aids, the Epicedium tempers

the Old Norse poem, and the Glossarium fractures the signifiers
of its 29 verses across 42 pages of the edition. By way of ana-
semic gloss, the oral poetics of Krákumál are given a ‘thorough
dissection and explanation.’35 Its kennings are demetaphorized,
and its semantics are relieved of their communicative function,
breaking Krákumál’s acoustical surfaces into a thousand irregu-
lar and angular pieces and cleaving them to Latin, a language
meant to be studied but unspoken by the gentleman scholar. The
Epicedium and Glossarium stage a rigorous defense that sets
about to render the Old Norse sounds of Krákumál completely
incomprehensible and entirely mute. Such a project is necessary
to make ready the crypt for its occupants. ‘Notes to the English
Reader,’ the last appendix, introduces the figure of Ragnar and
his Scandinavian context in modern English prose. It assembles
the angular pieces of Ragnar’s shattered voice into English terms
that misrecognize Krákumál as a pastime of scholars and poetic
translators and therefore fail to take note of the bodies buried
within.36
Lodbrokar Quida’s illicit acts of entombment do not occur
without consequence to Johnstone or to his ‘English Reader.’
As Schwab states, ‘no one colonizes with impunity…histories
of violence create psychic deformations not only in the victims
but also in the perpetrators.’37 As an English Reader pores over
Lodbrokar Quida, Ragnar’s Old Norse cries of unmourning
shatter into silent Latin fragments, which are then reassembled
into an English account of Ragnar. Once apprised of his dying
body, this ‘English Reader’ approaches Ragnar’s bilingual text,
35 Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, 176.

36 Consider Shippey’s remarks regarding the ‘oddity’ of Lodbrokar Quida
as ‘the most self-consciously accurate and scholarly production of [all
translations of Krákumál]’ and ‘at the same time the most dictional and, in
a sense, unfaithful’ (‘The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrog,’ 169). Consider
also Shippey’s further comment regarding Johnstone’s faithless English
translations: ‘For all his care Johnstone seems almost afraid of his subject,
or at least exposing it to English-speaking readers’ (169).
37 Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 48.
73
fashioning her scholarly self by vocalizing and ventriloquizing

a poem, the acoustics of which are shaped according to the en-
crypted outlines of its captive corpses. The ‘English Reader’ of
Krákumál is inhabited by the dead. She suffers from the effects
of extreme psychic splitting but cannot perform the painful and
conscious work of self-analysis. After poring over its multiple
critical partitions and multi-lingual chambers, the ‘English
Reader’ becomes, like the poem itself, a ‘subject particularly re-
sistant to analysis,’ a subject carrying within herself a ‘puzzle of
shards about which we would know nothing: neither how to put
it together nor how to recognize the pieces.’38 From Lodbrokar
Quida emerges an English scholar-translator of Old Norse po-
etry who is so terrified, so guilty, and so ashamed of England’s
ceaseless colonial pursuit of incorporation that she has encrypt-
ed its effects within herself. She has constructed her subjectivity
against the voices of Ragnar and the ‘Indian,’ and she ventrilo-
quizes from the crypt of Krákumál their captive cries.
Krákumál achieves a ‘paradigmatic status’ in the eighteenth
century.39 Its ‘extraordinarily high evaluations’ among antiquar-
ians and poets anticipate the twenty-one English translations,
partial ‘paraphrases,’ and ‘elaborate [literary] creations’ that
emerge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.40 As
Peter Mortensen quips, ‘Regner’s death-defying laugh could
be heard throughout the period’ as the most popular medieval
Scandinavian text in England.41 Among Krákumál’s most devot-
ed English Readers is Sharon Turner, who not only references
Percy’s translation and cites Johnstone’s edition but, moreover,
frames From the Death of Egbert to the Death of Alfred — the
second volume of his History of the Anglo-Saxons — according
to the encrypted acoustics of its anasemic translations. From
38 Derrida and Johnson, ‘Fors,’ 76–77.

39 Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, 91.
40 Shippey, ‘The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrog,’ 157; Ross, The Norse Muse
in Britain, 168.
41 Peter Mortensen, ‘“The Descent of Odin”: Wordsworth, Scott and Southey
among the Norsemen,’ Romanticism 6, no. 2 (2000): 211; Ross, The Norse
Muse in Britain, 231.
74
the Death of Egbert begins in Denmark, where Ragnar Lodbrog,

an undefeatable sea king, builds ‘two ships of a size which the
North had never beheld before,’ loads them with soldiers, and
sails toward England.42 Turner explains that the unwieldy size of
these ships makes them unnavigable, and they run aground off
the Northumbrian coast. Ragnar is captured by the Anglo-Sax-
on king, Ella of Northumbria, and thrown into a pit of snakes,
where he composes Krákumál before dying from their poison-
ous venom. Turner describes the enraged responses of Ragnar’s
sons, his Danish kin, and ‘all the fury, and all the valour of the
North’ who set out to redress Ragnar’s murder and colonize An-
glo-Saxon England.43 No kingdom is safe from ‘the Northmen,’
Turner explains, and in a final battle against Ragnar’s relations,
King Ethelred of Wessex is killed.44
From the ashes of complete defeat, Alfred emerges as its
new leader, fighting the Northmen continuously across Anglo-
Saxon England and meeting them, finally, at sea. In a statement
that resolves the two ships of an unprecedented size by which
Ragnar sailed to Northumbria, Turner argues that Alfred builds
‘vessels…full-twice as long as theirs,’ which are ‘swifter, higher,
and less unsteady’ than those of his enemy.45 Alfred’s ship de-
sign and naval strategy acoustically and martially outperform
those of Ragnar. Once his enemies have departed, Alfred ex-
tends his Wessex ‘sovereignty,’ first, over all Anglo-Saxons, then
over the Welsh.46 By way of sustained engagement with Ragnar’s
Northern ilk, Alfred has incorporated Ragnar’s military drives,
his seafaring spirit, and his colonial urges. By modeling his His-
tory upon Krákumál’s psycho-politics of incorporation, Turner
explains that Alfred wrests power from his colonial oppressors
and fashions an English nation.
Upon declaring Alfred an English sovereign, Turner an-
nounces Alfred’s death, concludes his historical narrative, and
42 Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2:115.

43 Ibid., 2:118.
44 Ibid., 2:153.
45 Ibid., 2:240.
46 Ibid., 2:246.
75
begins an epicedium, a Death-song, to Alfred. From an early

age, Turner explains, Alfred ‘was an eager auditor, and was in-
dustrious to commit them [“Saxon” poems] to memory… . It
was always one of his principle pleasures to learn Saxon poems,
and to teach them to others.’47 As a king, Alfred’s literary pur-
suits turn towards Latin. Alfred learns by keeping a ‘little book’
of devotions close to his ‘bosom’ and by gathering together and
inscribing ‘diversified extracts’ of Latin conversation and scrip-
ture within it.48 Turner does not narrate the time Alfred spends
in Latin study or labors in his Latin translations because Alfred
learns instead by incorporation. By keeping a little book close to
his heart, Turner explains that Alfred magically swallows whole
these Latin fragments, and, after a time, writes his Preface to
Pastoral Care and translates Orosius, Bede, and Boetheius into
the vernacular language. Braced against Krákumál’s psycho-pol-
itics of incorporation, Turner’s Epicedium reveals that Alfred’s
political projects — his armed resistance to Ragnar’s North-
men — have occurred simultaneous to his personal projects of
translation. With the eighth and ninth centuries as a colonial
backdrop, Turner fashions a posthumous account of the process
by which Alfred becomes a scholar, a translator, and an ‘English
Reader.’ To wit, as Turner translates the Preface to Pastoral Care,
he encounters Alfred’s statements regarding the state of Latin
learning in Anglo-Saxon England and introjects, ‘this statement
would tempt us to imagine that the Anglo-Saxons had been a
learned people before the days of Alfred; but the discriminating
king prevents the delusion by his subsequent paragraphs. They
had the means of knowledge, not its possession.’49 Although
Turner recognized initially the ‘Saxon’ poets that Alfred enjoyed
as a child and recited as an adult, here Turner elides the ‘Saxon’
voices of the hall and instead hails Alfred — a Latin scholar and
translator — as the first learned ‘English Reader.’ While Turner’s
Epicedium locates the voices of England’s earliest vernacular
47 Ibid., 2:252.
48 Ibid., 2:267.
49 Ibid., 2:278.
76
poetry, such a reference tells the lie that Turner’s History, which
gives voice to Alfred, pivots upon the muted sounds of another.
Although Turner avows his relationship to Krákumál and
pursues vigorously its paths of incorporation, he does not know
that his is an anasemic History and therefore shaped in relation
to a crypt. As Abraham and Torok explain, when we encrypt a
loss or a trauma, we do so as a self-preservative action. In cleav-
ing our self to a corpse, however, we leave ourselves vulnerable
to its haunting maneuvers. They write, ‘the “shadow of the ob-
ject” strays endlessly about in the crypt’ and ‘sometimes in the
dead of night, when libidinal fulfillments have their way, the
ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giv-
ing him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him per-
form bizarre acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations.’50
Turner explains that when Ragnar’s sons arrive in Northumbria,
they ‘inflicted a cruel and inhuman retaliation on Ella for their
father’s sufferings. They cut the figure of an eagle on his back,
divided his ribs, to tear out his lungs, and agonized his lacerated
flesh by the addition of a saline stimulant.’51 Strange and incom-
prehensible in its logic. Bizarre in its performance. Unexpected
in sense and in sensation. This elaborate act breaks apart Ella’s
ribs and turns his body inside out to render him without air or
breath, effectively mute, and suffering in silence. It is a torture
of surgical precision that, despite its deliberate method, makes
little sense: it disables Ella’s Anglo-Saxon body violently in order
to steal his Old English voice. In a footnote at the bottom of the
page, Turner, the dutiful historian, cites his sources: ‘Frag. Isl. 2
Lang. 279. Ragnar Saga, ib. The Scalld Sigvatr. ib. Saxo Gram. 177.
This punishment was often inflicted by these savage conquer-
ors on their enemies. See some instances in Stephanius, 193.’52
50 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 141, 130.
52 Interestingly, while Ella’s death by blood eagle is accounted for in the
Ragnars saga (The Tale of Ragnar Loðbrok) and Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta
Danorum (Deeds of the Danes), the only Scandinavian text that includes
the ‘lung-ripping’ component is the Þáttr af Ragnars sonum (The Tale of
Ragnar’s Sons), which Turner does not mention here.
77
In these marginal, academic quarters, Turner draws the blood

eagle from the hazy reaches of an Icelandic fragment to a saga
narrative in prose, from the voice of a skald to that of an histo-
rian, from Saxo’s medieval history to Stephanius’s early modern
commentary.53 Turner’s footnote genealogically excavates the
blood eagle from the sedimented layers of Scandinavia’s past.
Suspended, however, in between the medieval and early mod-
ern citations of Turner’s footnote is his own commentary — ‘this
punishment was often inflicted by these savage conquerors on
their enemies’ — which does not hearken back to the rhetoric of
Scandinavia but to that of Percy and Johnstone. In the dead of
night, when libidinal fulfillments have their way, Turner’s prose
butchers Ella’s body and voice. In the light of day, when these
pleasures are restrained, Turner’s notes legitimate these actions
under the aegis of scholarship and translation. Turner, the cem-
etery guard, has unearthed a ghost of the crypt. Like Percy’s
North American ‘savages’ and Johnstone’s ‘Indian,’ Ella stages
a colonial resistance against Ragnar and his Northern relations
that takes place at home, in England, not abroad, in English
colonies. Ella, not Alfred, is the real figure of Anglo-Saxon sov-
ereignty and ‘Saxon’ poetry, but his body has been broken, and
his voice has been rendered mute by Turner’s History.
53 Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2:123n9. Stephanus Stephanius

is an early modern commentator. In 1645, he published Notæ Uberiores in
Historiam Danicam Saxonis Grammatici (Søro: Crusius, 1645), an edition
and exegetical commentary of Saxo’s Gesta. Stephanius expands Saxo’s
mention of the ‘aquilam figurante’ by explaining that it was a practice com-
mon to the ‘Angles, Danes, and other Northern nations’ [‘Anglos, Danos,
and aliasq[ue] nationes Boreales’], in which ‘the victor, about to inflict
his defeated adversary with the greatest dishonor, drives a sword into the
spine in the back near the shoulder blades, and, with a massive incision
having been cut along the length of the body, he separates the ribs from
the spine, both of which [the ribs], having been drawn out to the sides,
represent the wings of an Eagle’ [‘victor ignominia summa debellatum
adversarium affecturus, gladium circa scapulas ad spinam dorsi adigebat,
costasqu[e]amplissimo per corporis longitudinem facto vulnere, utrinque
a spina separabat: quae ad latera deductae alas repraesentabant Aquilinas’]
(193). My translation.
78
It takes Turner two subsequent paragraphs to give direction

to the ceaseless straying of Ragnar’s sons and to make compre-
hensible the incomprehensible signals of Ella’s death. Immedi-
ately after describing the blood eagle, Turner explains that, ‘after
this battle, decisive of the fate of Northumbria, it appeared no
more as an Anglo-Saxon kingdom.’54 Then he narrates briefly
the ascension and expulsion of several of Ella’s successors. Amid
these internal politics, which span an uncertain length of time,
Ivar, one of Ragnar’s sons, remains, quietly ‘usurp[ing] the scep-
ter of Northumbria from the Humber to the Tyne.’55 Turner, un-
able to understand the sequence of events or the timeline of his
own narrative, returns to the scene of Ella’s death and revises
the history he has just written. He begins a new paragraph that
recodes the ‘cruel and inhuman retaliation’ of Ragnar’s relations
as ‘a dismal sacrifice [that] had been offered up to the manes
of Ragnar, yet the invaders did not depart.’56 Turner then nar-
rates the complete destruction of Northumbria and Mercia by
the ‘manes of Ragnar,’ concluding with the fall of Wessex and
the death of Athelred. Upon Ella’s broken body, silenced voice,
and conquered kingdom Turner’s historical arc pivots: from the
death of Ragnar to that of Alfred, from colonial invasion to na-
tional unification, from an Anglo-Saxon past that is trampled
and silenced to an English future that will be forever incorporat-
ing the bodies, voices, and territories of others. Turner arranges
the strange stirrings and haunted visions that emerge jointly
from his scholarly sources and from his psyche into a primal
scene. The murder of Ella, a mythical father, is enacted by all of
Scandinavia’s sons: poets and saga writers; skalds and chroni-
clers; translators and scholars; Sigvatr, Saxo, and Stephanius;
Percy, Johnstone, and Turner. This traumatic fantasy shapes a
nation’s history. The ‘dismal sacrifice’ of one Anglo-Saxon king’s
sovereignty allows Alfred to claim a greater reward for all of
England.

55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
79
While Turner arranges his History to make sense of some-

thing incomprehensible, he remains horrified by these stirrings
and signals that come from without and within. Consequently,
as Turner reflects upon his History, he buries Ella’s blood eagle
within its Preface:
On comparing their documents with our own, he [self-ref-

erentially, Turner] was struck with the resulting fact, that the
great Danish invasion, by which Alfred and his brother were
so afflicted, was not a casual depredation, but a deliberate at-
tack to revenge the death of the celebrated Ragnar Lodbrog.
The circumstance, which gave system and meaning to what
appeared before to be incoherent and unconnected, occa-
sioned further researches, and it at last became apparent, that
the inattention of our writers, to the Northern documents,
had filled their histories with obscurity and mistake.57
One event, which Turner concedes as ‘the circumstance,’ not

only explains ‘the great Danish invasion’ but also ‘gives system
and meaning’ to the ‘incoherent and unconnected’ events of
Anglo-Saxon history. This circumstance, upon which Turner
previously elaborated in his narrative but does not name in his
Preface, is the torture by blood eagle of Ella of Northumbria.
Turner’s elusive and obscurantist lexical choice denies Ella’s
presence. Likewise, Turner’s syntax, which locates ‘the circum-
stance’ as the subject of a new sentence that succeeds ‘the great
Danish invasion’ that ‘afflicted Alfred,’ confuses the sequencing
of these events. Turner obfuscates, obstructs, and renders inac-
cessible the scene of Ella’s death. He anasemically disables Ella’s
bloody shape. These processes of encryption shield Turner from
recognizing that he is inhabited and haunted by restless specters
that have caused him to tear apart the body, render the mouth
voiceless, and ravage the territory of an Anglo-Saxon sovereign,
while writing an Anglo-Saxon history. Consequently, Turner
cannot mourn Ella. He can neither speak his grief for the death
57 Ibid., 2:vii.
80
of this Northumbrian king nor express his shame in causing

it. So Turner hides Ella. He locks his blood-eagled body away
where no one will find it with language that disregards Ella’s
death as merely ‘the circumstance,’ thus dislocating it from its
place in the narrative. In an act of double encryption, Turner
installs Ella’s captive body and his muted voice with those of
Ragnar and the ‘Indian.’ To the unspeakable traumas of coloni-
alism, he adds the unvoiced shame of nation-building, a fantasy
of incorporation that is as inhuman, savage, and tortuous as that
of Empire.
From the Death of Egbert and its companion volumes initially
received mixed reviews,58 and despite Turner’s continuous revi-
sion and republication (he revised the History until this death in
184959) it took almost 70 years for its seven editions to sell about
4500 copies, the last of which were purchased by scriveners
and shipped to America in the 1870s.60 Nonetheless, Turner’s
History was highly influential during the first half of the nine-
teenth century. Longman ledgers record that Turner’s 1820 third
edition — its most popular and fastest-selling History — was
purchased by romantic writers Sir Walter Scott and Robert
Southey, popular historian Charles Mills, and former Bombay
judge, Whig MP, and professor at East India Bombay College, Sir
James MacKintosh.61 Shortly thereafter, the 1824 edition of The
Library-Companion recognizes Turner alongside John Lingard
as ‘among the most eminent of those of our living historians,’
and, much later, Turner’s biographer for the Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography recognizes the History as ‘a work which
58 For example, Anonymous, ‘The Second Part of the History of the Anglo-
Saxons: From the Death of Egbert to the Norman Conquest,’ in The
Edinburgh Review 4, no. 6, ed. Francis Jeffrey (London: T.N. Longman and
O. Rees, 1804), 360–74.
59 In a telling move, the posthumously published seventh edition (1852)
removes all of Turner’s Prefaces, the content of which had, over the course
of revision and republication, replaced Krákumál and Ragnar’s death with
the British empire as the inspiration for his History.
60 Longman Manuscript, Records of the Longman Group, University of
Reading, MS 1393/I/A7/164, 623.
61 Ibid.
81
was to have a powerful influence on historical thought for the

succeeding half-[of the nineteenth]century.’62
Perhaps because of its celebrity status as a popular rather
than a scholarly text, Turner’s History was discarded in favor of
other narratives of the Anglo-Saxon period written by Stubbs,
Green, and Freeman. As these nineteenth-century historians
were replaced by a new generation of twentieth-century schol-
ars, Turner’s History became not simply old-fashioned but un-
tenable, and Ella’s blood eagle, encrypted long ago within the
tomb of the History, was an entirely forgotten sacrifice. Yet, as
Abraham and Torok explain, while ‘the dead do not return to
join the living,’ they ‘lead them into some dreadful snare, en-
trapping them with disastrous consequences. To be sure, all the
departed may return, but some are destined to haunt.’63 From
the mid-1940s through the mid-twentieth century, the blood ea-
gle begins to stir, appearing first in the dismissive comments of
Frank Stenton’s monumental Anglo-Saxon England. First pub-
lished in 1943 amid World War II, Stenton returns Ragnar to
the spoken shores of Anglo-Saxon history in chapter eight, ‘The
Age of Alfred’:
At the end of the eighth century each of the three Scandi-

navian peoples of historic times formed a nation… . The in-
vasions which deflected the course of English history in the
ninth century arose from internal movements among the
peoples who commanded the entry to the Baltic Sea, and at
the court of Charlemagne were regarded as forming a single
kingdom of the Danes.64
62 T.F. Dibdin, The Library-Companion: Or the Young Man’s Guide and the
Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of a Library (London: Harding, Triphook,
and Lepard, 1824), 237.
64 Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 239.
82
From Denmark, the Great Army descends upon East Anglia,

and, after a year in England, it turns towards Northumbria,
where it encounters Ælla:
The contemporary account of these events in the Chronicle

shows that he [Ælla] had barely come into power before the
Danes were on him, and, if disproof were necessary, would
disprove the famous Scandinavian legend that as king in
York he had killed Ragnar Lothbrok, the father of Ivar and
Halfdan, by throwing him into a pit infested with snakes.65
After almost a century of Anglo-Saxon histories that have left

Ragnar and his sons unmentioned, Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon Histo-
ry, written and published during England’s darkest hours of war,
turns to the myth and poetry of Ragnar and his Death Song as
a means of explaining historical threats to English sovereignty
by outsiders. In the 1940s, England’s national other is no long-
er Napoleonic France or Britain’s own imperial self, but Nazi
Germany. Amid English wartime propaganda and Churchill’s
statements about ‘Hunnish’ barbarians, Ragnar’s name and the
‘Scandinavian legend’ of simple ‘disproof ’ rise to Stenton’s his-
torical consciousness with ironic force as couched signifiers of
German invasion and the threat of Nazi empire. To combat such
a mythic threat, Stenton turns to Alfred’s defenses, arguing that
Alfred’s fleet of ships mark the beginnings of the English navy,
and he concludes the chapter, ‘[i]t thus becomes important evi-
dence of the new political unity forced upon the various English
peoples by the struggle against the Danes.’66
In the wake of World War II, interest in the blood eagle was
rekindled by a group of Stenton’s fellow Oxford academics. Its
inarticulate signals grow louder in the prose of Gabriel Turville-
Petre and Gwyn Jones.67 A few years later, as Roberta Frank ob-
65 Ibid., 247.
66 Ibid., 276.
67 E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of An-
cient Scandinavia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 254–55; Gwyn
83
serves, ‘the significance of the blood-eagle was heralded in the

1974 Stenton Lecture when J.M. Wallace-Hadrill made available
the then-unpublished observations of Alfred Smyth’:68
What happened to Duke Seguin in 845, when he was cap-

tured and put to death? Occisus est. Or Archbishop Madal-
bert of Bourges in 910? Dr. Alfred Smyth has advanced some
reasons for holding that as late as the eleventh century the Vi-
kings practiced ritual sacrifice of important victims of Odin,
in the form of the blood-eagle. That is, the victim, after being
a target for javelins or arrows, was stretched face-downwards
over a stone, so that his ribs could be torn upwards from the
spine in a shape suggestive of an eagle’s wings. Finally he was
beheaded. Examples of this practice may have included: King
Ella of Northumbria, Halfdan son of King Haraldr Harfagri
of Norway, King Edmund (a victim, like Ella, of the great
Danish Viking Ivar), King Maelgualai of Munster, and just
possibly Archbishop Ælfheah if Thietmar is to be trusted.
It may also be noted that where one source will report little
more than occisus est, or will concentrate on some aspect of
the torture reminiscent of earlier Christian martyrdom (as,
use of arrows,) another will betray the essentially complex
procedure of the sacrifice. It happened in Scandinavia, in
Ireland and in England. I am presuming Francia was not ex-
empt.69
As if to acknowledge what Stenton only dared to allude,70 Wal-

lace-Hadrill’s Stenton Lecture describes an intricate ritual that
Jones, A History of the Vikings (1968; repr. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 219n2.
68 Roberta Frank, ‘Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-
Eagle,’ The English Historical Review 99, no. 391 (1984): 332.
69 J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1974), 224–25.
70 Note that Wallace-Hadrill’s lecture begins, ‘It seems fitting that a lecture
bearing the name of the man who, more than any other historian, has
enabled us to understand the English Danelaw…Sir Frank Stenton was
wonderfully at home with Danish settlers and their problems while at
84
adds javelins, arrows, body-stretching, and decapitation to the

blood-eagling process. He explains this ‘ritual sacrifice’ as a
practice that punctures and hacks away at all material surfaces,
rendering a person without recognizable voice, physical form,
or identity. Yet Wallace-Hadrill can correctly identify the blood
eagle torture and name its victims by bracketing his own state-
ments with the italicized Latin verb phrase, ‘occicus est.’ From
this untranslated, undisclosed, and, moreover, encrypted ex-
pression — a passive construction that allows for all kinds of
terrible deaths71 — Wallace-Hadrill identifies the blood eagle,
explains its procedures, and turns to Ella as its first unques-
tioned victim. Occisus est is rhetoric fraught with equivocation.
Consequently, Wallace-Hadrill begins with a question: What
happened to Duke Seguin and Archbishop Madalbert? Occisus
est. And he ends with a statement: the precise and ‘essentially
complex’ descriptions of the blood eagle are occisus est.
Wallace-Hadrill delivers his 1974 Stenton Lecture in the wake
of three decades of intensive decolonization. Beginning with In-
dia, which won independence in 1947, Britain’s empire had fall-
en apart. It lost Asian, Middle Eastern, and African territories
in the late 1940s and 1950s, and these conflicts were followed by
the abrogation of its remaining African lands in the 1960s. The
changes taking place within Britain’s empire reflect those else-
where in Europe during the post-war period, and Michael Win-
tle explains this worldwide decolonization process as ‘sympto-
matic and emblematic of Europeans having to accept that their
role in the world had changed radically, and then for the worse
in terms of power politics.’72 As the British empire contracts and
the same time recognizing the full extent of the terror they inspired and
the destruction they caused in the earlier phases of their English career’
(Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History, 215).
71 Wallace-Hadrill quotes here from Adémar de Chabannes, an eleventh-
century French monk and historian. Note that as the passive, indicative,
active conjugation of ‘occido,’ occisus est is an expression that implicates
any number of deaths by beating, smashing, crushing, slaughtering, and
torturing, to name a few variations.
72 Michael Wintle, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Ideals, Identity and War: The Idea
of Europe, 1939– 1970,’ in European Identity and the Second World War,
85
its identity adjusts ‘for the worse,’ mid-century historians recon-

sider and fiercely debate the impact of the Vikings on medieval
Europe.73 They begin to challenge (or defend) the predatory im-
age of the Vikings, the violence of their conquests, and the last-
ing impact of their engagements with other European peoples.
Amid these discussions, the blood eagle begins to stir. Its phan-
tom presence, encrypted within Turner’s colonial History, can
be felt in the scholarly conversations that circulate around the
Vikings. The blood eagle locates what Abraham and Torok call
a ‘gap’ in narrative that points toward an unspeakable secret.74
As Abraham and Torok explain, these gaps and secrets — these
phantoms that arise within a subject’s memory — are not gener-
ated by her own traumas. They are skeletons in the closet, ‘post-
memories’ that are not experienced by the children of parents
who have been traumatized but come secondhand ‘as full and as
empty, certainly as constructed, as memory itself.’75 As Schwab
writes:
it is almost as if these children become the recipients not

only of their parents’ lived memories but also of their somatic
memories. Children of a traumatized parental generation, I
argue, become avid readers of silences and memory traces
hidden in a face that is frozen in grief…without being fully
aware of it, they become skilled readers of the optical un-
eds. Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), 4.
73 Peter Sawyer’s The Age of the Vikings (London: Edward Arnold, 1962) and
the contentious debates that surround it (Peter Sawyer, ‘The Two Viking
Ages of Britain: A Discussion,’ Mediaeval Scandinavia: A Journal Devoted
to the Study of Mediaeval Civilization in Scandinavia and Iceland 2 [1969]:
196) are exhibits that reflect the relationships between mid-century aca-
demic historicism and European cultural unconscious. For a brief discus-
sion of the impact of decolonization on English Studies in general, see Bart
Moore-Gilbert, ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: Empire, Race and English Studies
in Contemporary University Fiction,’ Wasafiri 13, no. 26 (1997): 3–8.
75 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
86
conscious revealed in their parents’ body language… . The

second generation thus receives violent histories not only
through the actual memories or stories of parents (postmem-
ory) but also through the traces of affect, particularly affect
that remains unintegrated and inassimilable.76
Wallace-Hadrill, a ‘child’ of an imperial generation of nine-

teenth-century scholars, has become the ‘recipient’ of his ‘par-
ents’’ lived and somatic memories: their silenced and encrypted
colonial losses and traumas. He bears no responsibility, no guilt,
and no shame in this but has been, nonetheless, affected by it.
Consequently, Wallace-Hadrill, like many other medievalists
of his generation, has become a ‘skilled reader’ of his parents’
‘optical unconscious,’ the ‘traces of [scholarly] affect,’ and the
parts of an ‘unintegrated and inassimilable [history].’ Like oth-
ers who bear witness to the blood eagle, he recognizes that some
unspeakable secret — some gap, some occisus est — has been
passed down from another’s historical memory to his own. A
century later, however, as Wallace-Hadrill eyes Ella’s encrypted
body, voice, and Northumbrian territory, these bloody outlines
do not form the sacrificial shape of a nation but map the entire-
ty of northern Europe: ‘it happened in Scandinavia, in Ireland
and in England. I am presuming Francia was not exempt.’77 In
the post-war twentieth century, an era during which Europe’s
nations have given up the majority of their empires, an era in
which their political futures are uncertain, Wallace-Hadrill
finds the unspeakable gaps and secrets of the ninth century and
arranges them the best way he can: in the shape of a Viking em-
pire marked by blood-eagle butchery.
Wallace-Hadrill’s Stenton Lecture and Smyth’s 1977 mono-
graph, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles 850–880, signal a
hotly contested but fleeting revival of the blood eagle in terms
76 Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 14.

77 Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History, 225.
87
that offer an eerie acoustical echo of Turner’s narrative voice.78

While James Campbell, Eric John, and Patrick Wormald write
that its ‘particularly gruesome’ operations ‘involved ripping a
victim’s lungs out of his rib-cage’ in a sacrificial ritual that dedi-
cates the bodies of Ella and other victims ‘to Othinn (the Scan-
dinavian Woden),’79 Roberta Frank and Bjarni Einarsson dispute
whether or not the practice was ‘a conspiracy of romantic hopes’
or a ‘refined method of execution [that] seems thus to have been
reserved for royals.’80 Despite two rounds of arguments between
Frank and Einarsson, neither side reached consensus.81 Saga
Book, the journal in which the concluding exchanges were pub-
lished, however, did: it placed the debate’s final episode under
one heading, ‘The Blood-Eagle Once More: Two Notes,’ and
featured Frank’s and Einarsson’s comments side-by-side.82 Saga
Book’s flagging editorial interest and historical equivocation
foreshadow the blood eagle’s reception history from the 1990s
forward. Aside from another round of debate between Smyth
and Frank,83 the blood eagle no longer makes headlines.
78 See Nicholas P. Brooks, ‘England in the Ninth Century: The Crucible of

Defeat,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series 29 (1979):
13; James Campbell, Eric John, and Patrick Wormald, eds., The Anglo-
Saxons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 148–49.
79 Campbell and Wormald, The Anglo-Saxons, 148.
80 Roberta Frank, ‘Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood
Eagle,’ The English Historical Review 99, no. 391 (1984): 337. Bjarni Einars-
son, ‘De Normannorum Atrocitate, or on the Execution of Royalty by the
Aquiline Method,’ Saga Book 22, no. 1 (1986): 79.
81 For the first volley of debate, see Roberta Frank, ‘Viking Atrocity and
Skaldic Verse,’ which was countered by Einarsson, ‘De Normannorum
Atrocitate,’ to which Frank responded in ‘The Blood-Eagle Again,’ Saga
Book 22, no. 5 (1988): 287–89.
82 Bjarni Einarsson and Roberta Frank, ‘The Blood-Eagle Once More: Two
Notes; A. Blóðörn — An Observation on the Ornithological Aspect; B.
Ornithology and the Interpretation of Skaldic Verse,’ Saga Book 23, no. 2
(1990): 80–83.
83 See Alfred Smyth, ‘The Effect of Scandinavian Raiders on the English
and Irish Churches: A Preliminary Reassessment,’ in Britain and Ireland,
900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan
Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19, and Roberta
Frank, ‘Skaldic Poetry,’ in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide,
88
In discussions and debates among Stenton, Wallace-Hadrill,

and Smyth, as well as Frank and Einarsson, along with other
mid-to-late-century historians, the blood eagle functions as an
effect of secondhand trauma. One might argue that, as scholars
turned to the blood eagle, they compulsively acted out hidden
wounds as a means of healing — that they exorcised encrypted
ghosts of empire by speaking a heretofore silenced shame. But
did they? In the 1990s, as the nations of post-imperial Europe
began to imagine transnational and global futures, interest in
the blood eagle faded. It has been over a decade since scholars
have weighed in on the ritual, and most have edged away from
wholehearted belief in the practice.84 Yet, the blood eagle con-
sistently finds its way into the passing comments, footnotes, and
bibliographies of contemporary scholarship. It lingers quietly in
the academic margins as a figment, a specter, a ghost. Its restless
figure, an unmourned and unmournable body of Empire, is a
long-term effect of nineteenth-century colonization and twenti-
eth-century decolonization.
In ‘The Underdeveloped Image: Anglo-Saxon in Popular
Consciousness from Turner to Tolkien,’ Tom Shippey asks why,
despite nineteenth-century England’s power as a global empire
and Western hegemony, its Anglo-Saxon history has been all
but forgotten and left in the medieval shadows of Arthurian and
Viking worlds. Shippey proffers: ‘I suggest that the developing
and potentially powerful image of Anglo-Saxon origins was sac-
rificed during the nineteenth century to the needs of an Imperial
and a British, not an English ideology.’85 Shippey speaks here of a
eds. Carol J. Clover and John Lindlow (1985; repr. Toronto: Toronto Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 170.
84 See, for example, Gareth Williams, ‘Raiding and Warfare,’ in The Viking
World, ed. Stefan Brink, in collaboration with Neil Price (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008), 196, and Anders Winwroth, The Age of the Vikings (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 36–39.
85 Thomas A. Shippey, ‘The Underdeveloped Image: Anglo-Saxon in Popular
Consciousness from Turner to Tolkien,’ in Literary Appropriations of the
Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, eds. Donald
Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 225, my emphasis.
89
metaphorical sacrifice, and he explains its genesis as a response

to pressures within and upon the British empire. Over the
course of the nineteenth century, he argues, Anglo-Saxon cul-
tural identity was not expansive enough to manage non-English
nationalist traditions developing within the British archipelago.
Yet, as a host of Western European countries clamored to claim
their Germanic origins, a Saxon identity was too non-specific to
be the exclusive property of Britain. England, Shippey suggests,
ceded memory of ‘the developing and potentially powerful im-
age of Anglo-Saxon origins’ in exchange for greater, immedi-
ate goods, some of which endure into the twenty-first century:
the wealth of its remaining colonies, a global lingua franca, and
a position of international cultural and political prestige. In
its ‘post-Imperial situation,’ however, Shippey points out that
these Anglo-Saxon sacrifices have left England ‘suffering from
an identity crisis caused by the retreat from Empire.’86 Shippey’s
comments87 speak of a future for England at the turn of the
twenty-first century that is, arguably, shared by its Anglo-Sax-
86 Ibid., 235.
87 As a counterpoint to his 2000 article, I mention briefly a subsequent
essay by Thomas A. Shippey, ‘Tolkien, Medievalism, and the Philological
Tradition,’ in Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies
on Early English, eds. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel and Begoña Crespo García
(New York: Rodopi, 2007), 265–79, that, perhaps unwittingly, revises
his response to the question of why Anglo-Saxon studies is in decline:
‘Tolkien’s professional speciality continues its long decline. Compulsory
Anglo-Saxon has lost its long struggle for survival at Oxford, the same has
just been decided at University College London, and my successor at Leeds
(also, of course, Tolkien’s successor) tells me heart-rending stories about
the trouble he has had to keep Anglo-Saxon on the curriculum even as a
minor option — the situation is even worse in most American university
departments of English. People love Middle-earth. They have no time
for the Middle Ages. Why this enormous contrast?’ (265–66). Shippey
responds to his own question with a statement that is, itself, a response to
the stirrings of an old guard discussed at length in this book’s introductory
chapter. He points to Tolkien, the Grimm brothers, and nineteenth-cen-
tury philological traditions in which ‘the study of literature should never
be separated from the study of language, and the history of language. The
refusal to see this by departments of English, in Britain and America, has
been a disaster for the subject’ (274).
90
onists, who find themselves struggling to maintain a toehold in

English Studies. While Shippey’s language of sacrifice reverber-
ates acoustically against Turner’s ‘dismal sacrifice’ and Wallace-
Hadrill’s ‘ritual sacrifice,’ his is not an encrypted rhetoric, but
a mourning call — a cry to look to the past without nostalgia
and to acknowledge a history that is no longer tenable. Shippey’s
own contributions to nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon histori-
ography and literary appropriation, along with those of many
others,88 could be perceived as similar modes of mourning and,
possibly, of exorcism. In recognizing the ties that have bound
Anglo-Saxon studies to Anglo-Saxonism, medieval studies to
medievalism, the identity politics of nations and empires to
those of their academies, Shippey seems to desire a scholarly
self-awareness that would loosen the knot between narratives
of early medieval history and of national-imperial ideologies.
Is this time of mourning over, though? Or has it yet arrived?
The postcolonial ‘turn’ has come to Anglo-Saxon studies89 and
with it an archipelagic view of the field. But how sharp is its arc
if, as Aranye Fradenburg argues, we are located and write with-
in an ‘ambivalent, indeed melancholic, relation to modernity’
that has not, as of yet, mourned its ‘archaic signifiers’?90 As an
oblique response to these questions and Fradenburg’s caution-
ary words, this chapter now turns to popular culture, where, in
88 See Frantzen, Desire for Origins; Allen Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds.,
Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville:
Florida University Press, 1997); Scragg and Weinberg, eds., Literary
Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons; Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain;
Margaret Clunies Ross, The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victori-
ans: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge:
Boydell and Brewer, 2000); Andrew Wawn, ed., Constructing Nations,
Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols,
2007).
89 For example, see Catherine Karkov, ‘Postcolonial,’ in A Handbook of Anglo-
Saxon Studies, eds. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renee Trilling (Malden: Wiley,
2012), 149–63.
90 L.O.A. Fradenburg, ‘(Dis)Continuity: A History of Dreaming,’ in The Post-
Historical Middle Ages, eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 89.
91
the post-9/11 decades, the blood eagle’s notoriety has soared. It is

defined by online sources such as Wikipedia and Urban Diction-
ary. It is the name for online gaming groups,91 pagan religious
organizations,92 and heavy metal bands.93 It has been the subject
of various internet discussion boards, some of which advocate
91 Warhammer, Planet Tribe, and the no longer available BattleField 2 have

co-opted it as a name for online gaming clans. Brakus D’Vehne, a member
of Blood Eagle Talon Prime Tribe, states, ‘They call us butchers, murder-
ers, and worse, as if pretty rules govern war. Heh. There’s only one rule:
win! Whatever the cost! If the other tribes are too soft, we’ll carve the
blood eagle on their sorry carcasses and carry the remains as banners
into battle. It’s simple: Win and live. Lose and die’ (Sons of Ma’as, Tribes
Webring, http://som.iwarp.com/main.html). On a smaller scale, the
recently created role-playing game, ‘Blood Eagle: Skirmish Warfare in the
Legendary Dark Ages,’ asks, ‘Have you ever wanted to replicate the bloody
feats of heroism you see in The Thirteenth Warrior movie and the Vikings!
TV series?’ (‘North Star Military Figures’).
92 Blood Eagle Kindred is a New England chapter of the Ásatrú Alliance, a
religion that practitioners claim is descended from Northern Europeans.
93 A short list of songs include ‘The Sons of the Dragon Slayer (Blood Eagle)’
by Rebellion; ‘Blood Eagle’ by Ritual In Death; ‘Blood Eagle Sacrifice’ by
Cobalt; ‘Blood Eagle’ by The Wound Man; ‘The Blood Eagle’ by Vreid;
‘Blood Eagle’ by Amon Amarth; ‘Blood Eagle Wings’ by Anthrax; and
‘Blood Eagle’ by Firespawn. The lyrics of these songs emphasize over-
whelmingly the story of Ælla and Ivar, Ælla’s tortured body, and Viking
conquest of England. A handful of bands likewise have adopted the Vi-
kings as figures of racist agendas, and several have chosen the blood eagle
as a signifier of these politics. Blood Red Eagle, an Australian RAC / Viking
Rock band of the early 2000s, describes its music as ‘heavily influenced
by the traditional Scandinavian Viking Rock style before it was pacified
by many of the weak politically correct “acts” of today, Viking Metal,
Folk metal, while still retaining their roots as a skinhead band with an
aggression to match.’ The now-defunct website, BloodRedEagle.com, had
weblinks to the white power organizations, Blood & Honour, Volksfront
International, and Hammerskin Nation, all sites now discontinued.
92
neo-Nazi activity,94 others which denounce Al-Qaeda.95 In the
94 Connections between Nazism and neo-Nazism, Odin, and, by proxy, the

blood eagle, run deep. In the ‘Culture and Customs’ segment of Storm-
front.org, the discussion board of the Stormfront White Nationalist Com-
munity, many of its threads concern Scandinavia and the Vikings. One
entitled ‘viking blood eagle’ addresses the veracity of the practice. Discus-
sants differ in their historical opinions, but all are fascinated. One writes,
‘[m]ost of us here are pissed off that it appears to be a myth.’ Another
Stormfront.org thread begins with the comment, ‘[w]ell im looking for
a good looking tattoo, that dont just blatently stand out and scream “im
a racist” but also want something some may notice every now and then,’
[sic] see ‘help me with a tattoo, please.’ Among the suggestions, panzer-
jeagar responds: ‘I would recommend the “Blood Eagle.” This is the one
with wings swept down and head to the left. Often it is clutching a reath
[sic] in its claws. It is also known as the “Sentries Eagle.” If you ever see a
ring of this sort, chances are the wearer is involved with law enforcement,
especially amongst the military types. In the graphics gallery it is featured
with a swazi in a wreath, but there are version [sic] with claws outstretched
w/o the swazi. I have had this tatt for a while and when people see it they
usually associate it with european [sic] flags of various sorts, but racially
aware usually associate it with white pride. Also Thor’s hammer (Mjolnir)
is a good one, especially with runes on the head.’ These posts extend the
reach of the blood eagle further into the company of white supremacists as
a stand-alone symbol of racism. Likewise, pangerjeager’s suggestion of a
tattoo with a graphic that is ‘associate[d]…with European flags of various
sorts’ displaces further the rite from its Scandinavian origins by conflat-
ing the Viking blood eagle with German nationalism and Nazism. In this
context, the blood eagle becomes a frightening code for State-sponsored
racial violence and torture.
95 While contemporary fictions most often associate the blood eagle with
Nazi and neo-Nazi movements, the blood eagle has leached into post-9/11
on-line conversations about America’s relations with the Islamic Arab
world. In a posting about Al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui’s 2006
testimony, one participant, Othala, writes, ‘Give him a blood eagle and
cover him in pig grease and bury him facing south. :beer: / and tell all of
the terrorists this is what is awaiting you if you attack us. :yes:’ Email to
a thread, ‘Moussaoui Says He Was to Hijack 5th Plane,’ in CurEvents.com
discussion forum, site now discontinued.
In the discussion topic entitled, ‘How Do You Think Saddam Should
Be Punished?,’ respondent Evil Engineer writes, ‘give him a blood eagle
and fly him from the witehouse [sic] flagstand, to show other countries
not to fuck with america. [sic] Or give him a sex change operation and
force him to live with the Taliban’: email to a thread, ‘How Do you Think
Saddam Should Be Punished?,’ in Tribal War discussion forum. In another
93
wake of 9/11 attacks that remind America of its identity politics

as both a nation and an empire under threat, the blood eagle
makes its restless presence felt. It is no surprise, then, that in
popular fiction and television, the relationship between Nazi
movements, Al-Quaeda, and the blood eagle is revealed by way
of medieval history.96
In Craig Russell’s 2005 novel Blood Eagle, Jan Fabel is Chief
Commissioner of Hamburg, Germany’s murder unit. He begins
to investigate the deaths of two women killed within a twenty-
four-hour time-span. Their bodies are mutilated, but it is not
until he visits his former medieval history professor that he
learns of the blood eagle and begins to put together clues that
link a former SS officer, the Hamburg Cell (the al-Qaeda group
that masterminded the 9/11 airline attacks), and a shadowy
arch-criminal who operates with tacit protection by anti-terror
departments of the American CIA and Germany’s Bundesnach-
thread, ‘Who’s Afraid of Islam?,’ Fletcher Christian responds, ‘“Muslims

have somehow have failed to convey to the world that they are good.” Per-
haps because they’re not? And also perhaps, it’s time to start reviving some
old traditions, such as hanging drawing and quartering, the blood eagle,
and burning at the stake–for use on violent nutcases who plan to kill and
maim numbers of people they don’t even know’: email to a thread, ‘Who’s
Afraid of Islam?,’ in Winds of Change discussion forum.
The blood eagle is only one of many death fantasies that are suggested
for Al-Qaeda members, Saddam, and the Muslim community. While other
suggested forms of torture appear once or twice on different message
board sites, the blood eagle recurs with startling frequency.
96 Note that fictional works that reference the blood eagle have been popular
since the mid-1980s: Andrew J. Offut and Keith Taylor, When Death Birds
Fly (New York: Ace Books, 1984); R.A. MacAvoy, Book of Kells (New
York: Spectra, 1985); Edward Rutherfurd, Sarum: The History of England
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1987); Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
(New York: Random House, 1995); Thomas Harris, Hannibal (New York:
Random House, 1999); Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire (Atlanta: Top Shelf
Productions, 2003); Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun (New
York: New American Library, 2004); Alfred Duggan, Conscience of the
King (1951; repr. London: Phoenix Press, 2005); Craig Russell, Blood Eagle
(London: Hutchinson, 2005); David Gibbins, Crusader Gold (London:
Headline, 2006); Robert Barr Smith, Blood Eagle (Palm Beach: Medallion
Press, 2007); and Bones (2009) episode: ‘Mayhem on the Cross,’ 4 (20), dir.
Jeff Woolnough.
94
richtendienst because his military experience in Afghanistan

makes him a valuable ‘source of information on al-Qaeda and
other Islamic terrorist organizations.’97 In the following year, Da-
vid Gibbins’s novel, Crusader Gold, signals more clearly the in-
tegral and dangerous role that medieval historians play in track-
ing down the blood eagle. During archaeologist Jack Howard’s
search for the lost Golden Menorah of Jerusalem, he discovers
that Viking armies plundered the menorah during their raids
on Constantinople. Nazis attempt an excavation in Greenland to
find it, and, in the process, a group of Nazi archaeologists recre-
ates the ‘félag,’ a Viking secret society that tortures errant mem-
bers with the blood eagle. When Maria de Montijo, a medieval
historian from Oxford, and Father O’Connor, a Catholic priest
and medievalist by training, hear about the Nazi félag, they en-
gage in the following exchange:
‘The outline of an eagle was carved on the back of the vic-

tim, while he was still alive,’ Maria said quietly. ‘Then they cut
away the ribs and ripped out the lungs.’
‘God almighty.’ Even Costas was at a loss for words.
‘They haven’t used it yet on one of their own,’ O’Connor
said. ‘But at the Einsatzgruppen trial one of the Jewish survi-
vors spoke of a rumor that SS officers had carried out some-
thing like this on a group of prisoners, using his ceremonial
dagger.98
Gibbins enmeshes Viking lore with Nazi history, and the blood
eagle is registered as a Viking signifier for Nazi barbarisms. Yet,
at the moment at which it is introduced into the plot, it is linked
to unspeakability. Maria, whose mother is a Holocaust survivor,
‘quietly’ explains the procedure, to which ‘Even Costas was at
a loss for words.’ O’Connor references the ‘rumored’ possibil-
ity that ‘something like this’ may have been carried out by the
Einstazgruppen, and Gibbin’s turn to the Einsatzgruppen trials
97 Russell, Blood Eagle, 393.

98 Gibbins, Crusader Gold, 224–25.
95
echoes the unsayable and therefore cryptic nature of the blood

eagle.99 Late in the novel, we learn that the blood eagle is not a
figment of history but a murderous agent against its medieval
historians, when Maria finds the body of Father O’Connor, who
has been blood eagled by the neo-Nazi Pieter Reksnys.
In the post-9/11 world of crime fiction and historical fantasy,
only medieval historians have the capacity to locate the blood
eagle. Yet the ambivalence and, moreover, the silence of ‘real’
medievalists towards the blood eagle’s ghostly presence has
left popular culture to its imagination. Likewise, this silence
by medievalists has given agents of popular culture permission
to act as though they were medieval historians. Most notably
is the History Channel’s television series, Vikings, the narrative
of which follows the figure of Ragnar Lothbrok. From its first
season in 2013 to its fourth season, which spanned 2016–2017,
the death of Ragnar in King Ælla’s snake pit and the subsequent
blood-eagling of Ælla by Ragnar’s sons has been a narrative
through-line of the series. After a glimpse of Ælla’s snake pit in
Season 1, in Season 2 Ragnar describes the blood eagle before
enacting it upon fellow Viking Jarl Borg:100
The offender gets down on his knees and his back is opened
with knives. And then, with axes, his ribs are chopped away
from his spine. And then his lungs are pulled out of these
99 The Einsatzgruppen were a special unit of the SS, which operated as death
squads in Eastern Europe, killing over a million Jews between 1941 and
1943. Their commanders were tried in post-Nuremberg military tribunals
held by the U.S. Government. As part of the Court’s opinion and judge-
ment, it wrote: ‘a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such
inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image
and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degrada-
tion beyond the power of language to adequately portray’ (‘Nuremberg
Military Tribunal,’ Vol. IV, 412,’ The Mazal Library: A Holocaust Resource,’
http://www.mazal.org; ‘Nuremberg Military Tribunal,’ Volume IV, Page
413,’ The Mazal Library: A Holocaust Resource,’ http://www.mazal.org).
100 Vikings, ‘Burial of the Dead,’ 1 (6), dir. Ciarán Donnelly, The History Chan-
nel, April 7, 2013, and Vikings, ‘Blood Eagle,’ 2 (7), dir. Jeff Woolnough, The
History Channel, April 3, 2014.
96
huge, bleeding wounds and laid upon his shoulders, so they

look like the folded wings of a great eagle. And he must stay
like that, suffering, until he dies. If he suffers in silence, he
may enter Valhalla. But if he screams, he can never enter its
portals.101
As Ragnar describes the practice, his hands slide forward and

grip the front of a bathtub in which he is soaking so that they are
parallel with his shoulders. As ‘his ribs are chopped away from
his spine,’ Ragnar lifts his hands, drawing them around his own
back in order to show the site of ‘these huge, bleeding wounds.’
Recounting its steps not only draws Ragnar forward in the bath,
as if in anticipation of the event, but also engages his own body
as locus of the blood eagle. Likewise, the lentissimo with which
Ragnar explains the process — each step joined by an ‘and’ as
the slow, but eerie strand of a violin begins to accompany his
words — implicates a sensual intimacy with the practice, one
that is accented by his place in the warm water of a bath.
When the torture is finally enacted, Ragnar appears dressed
as a priest, and the blood eagle is staged as a night-time ritual
sacrifice. Although it is introduced by the close-up shot of a
snake, which recalls Ælla’s snake pit of Season 1, and also fore-
shadows Ragnar’s own death in the distant future, on this night,
Ragnar is not the victim, but the executioner. The camera moves
from the snake to Jarl Borg, the intended victim. As Borg is tak-
en from his cell, the snake retrenches, and when Borg steps out-
side, he is met by Ragnar, who is dressed in a long, white robe
and standing barefoot on a wooden dais, surrounded by his
entire community. Torches light the night; drums beat in uni-
son; spears, skulls, stones, and shells hung from twine decorate
the space. The camera slows down the pace of the action, and
the only sound that can be heard is the unrecognizable voice of
a man, whose chant is accompanied by a bell and other ambi-
ent sounds. As Borg approaches the dais, he makes eye contact
with many of Ragnar’s Vikings, all of whom look silently and
101 Ibid.
97
unflinchingly back at him and at the elevated platform where he

will be blood-eagled. This, the viewers of The History Channel
are to understand, is not revenge but a serious and meaningful
act, and they are asked to participate in it, watching, for over
three protracted minutes — from Ragnar’s initial cut on Borg’s
back to the final extraction of his lungs. As all eyes silently gaze
on Ragnar’s bloody but unseen operations, and Borg remains
open-eyed, unspeaking, and unflinching despite his immense
pain, viewers are asked to mimic the behaviors of the characters
on screen: to watch, open-mouthed but silent, at the ritual se-
verity of its practice and to acknowledge Ragnar’s priestly status.
Again, absent the voices of ‘real’ medievalists, The History
Channel takes on this role, supported by the Viking’s creator and
writer, Michael Hirst. In an interview with Curt Wagner of the
Chicago Tribune’s redeye, Hirst articulates his own faith in the
practice:102
It [the ‘Blood Eagle’ episode] is a totally extraordinary TV

event, I think. And one of the things I’m proudest of…it’s a
profound experience of suffering and spirituality in the Vi-
king context. And if it wasn’t in a Viking context it would be
like watching, I guess, the crucifixion of Christ… .It is a very
profound and a very real experience. In other words, it actu-
ally happened to people. It’s not fancy. It’s not made up. It’s
not for show. It’s a profound spiritual experience.
For me this is what Vikings is [sic] all about. This is where
we are. This is real; it’s honest. It’s about spirituality. It’s about
profound things. It’s not a joke.
…
It was like being present at some extremely wonderful,
sacrificial, frightening event. And I just wanted the opportu-
nity to say that. For me, it’s a very, very important moment in
television history.
102 ‘Vikings Creator on Frightening, Spiritual Death,’ Chicago Tribune, April

10, 2014, http://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/redeye-vikings-post-
mortem-ragnar-kills-borg-20140410-story.html.
98
Hirst expresses a terrifying romance with the blood eagle and,

upon waxing poetical with respect to its ‘profound spiritual ex-
perience,’ states that ‘this is what Vikings is all about.’ Is Hirst
referring to the historical Vikings or to the Vikings of The His-
tory Channel? Does he consider himself a Viking? While Hirst’s
interview statement is ambiguous, his words not only point
back to the sensuality of Ragnar’s description and the reveren-
tial silence of the Viking community in the recently aired ‘Blood
Eagle’ episode. Moreover, they foreshadow the events of Season
4, in which the long-awaited blood-eagling of Ælla takes place.
In an episode titled ‘Revenge,’ Ragnar’s sons nail Ælla’s hands
to a horizontal beam, and as a hot blade is inserted into his
back, Ælla’s cries are heard by King Ecbert of Wessex, who sits
up in his bed, looks up, and calls out ‘Christ.’103 Unlike Ragnar’s
priestly performance, in which the camera showed only the
bloody evidence of the blood eagle, this time Ælla’s back, pieces
of bone, and finally his entire blood-eagled body are on display.
After four seasons of preparation, the Vikings, the Vikings, and
their American viewers are ready for the intense scopophilia of
this event. When Ælla’s blood-eagled body is hoisted, with out-
stretched arms, into the air, everyone is asked to believe, with
Christian faith, in the ‘profound spiritual experience’ of Ælla’s
blood-eagling.
In the world of network television, the dates of TV shows are
plotted months, if not seasons, in advance. Yet ‘Revenge’ aired
two days before Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inaugura-
tion, a temporal proximity that is uncanny, if not down-right
chilling. As Stephen Frosh argues, ghosts signal the future as
well as the past, and Ella’s blood eagle is that spectral haunting
which, in the decades since 9/11, has increased the frequency
of its signals as American politics take up the banner of eth-
no-nationalism. Yet the failure or, rather, the inability of early
medieval historians to contemplate and speak openly about the
blood eagle marks its cryptic presence in the field. As Kath-
103 Vikings, ‘Revenge,’ 4 (18), dir. Jeff Woolnough, The History Channel, Janu-
ary 18, 2017.
99
leen Biddick cautions, when ‘the consequences of the fathers’

work still elude acknowledgement,’ a discipline’s ‘disavowal of
them[, its ‘excluded objects,’] actually reflects an inability to his-
toricize the discipline’ and therefore to mourn the objects and
narratives which have created it.104
The blood eagle is that encrypted specter — that excluded
object — passed down from Sharon Turner’s imperial psyche to
those of his children, a post-imperial generation of Anglo-Sax-
on historians. As a ghost of Empire, it haunts the unconscious
quarters of the discipline, keeping the field of Anglo-Saxon his-
tory unmindful of its presence and therefore unable to engage
fully in the process of mourning. Yet psychic crypts are often
positioned next to material ones, and, consequently, while cryp-
tic hauntings impact the mind, they likewise impact the body.
The next chapter searches out these material crypts by examin-
ing the writings of another father of the interdisciplinary field
of Anglo-Saxon studies, eighteenth-century barrow digger and
early medieval archaeologist James Douglas. Douglas spends
his life stepping into and out of Anglo-Saxon graves, and his
archaeological report, Nenia Britannica, bears witness to the af-
fective displays of interminable grief that arise from standing
too close to the skeletons of the racialized, Anglo-Saxon dead.
104 Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University

Press, 1998), 1.
100
3
Beowulf, James Douglas,

and the Sepulchral Body of the
Anglo-Saxonist
Just a few years before Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo Sax-
ons appeared in print, James Douglas published Nenia Britan-
nica: or, a sepulchral history of Great Britain; from the earliest pe-
riod to its general conversion to Christianity.1 Printed initially in
twelve parts, then as a monograph in 1793,2 Nenia Britannica is
an archaeological report and a general history of pre-Christian
funerary practices in Britain. Its material is not organized into
chapters but into tumuli, or barrows, each of which contains
1 For a biography on Douglas, see Ronald Jessup, Man of Many Talents:

An Informal Biography of James Douglas 1753–1819 (London: Phillmore,
1975).
2 Several different printings of Nenia were made in 1793, one of which is for
Benjamin and John White: James Douglas, Nenia Britannica; or, A Sepul-
chral History of Great Britain (London: Printed by John Nichols; for Ben-
jamin and John White, 1793). Another copy was made for George Nichol:
Nenia Britannica; or, A sepulchral history of Great Britain (London: Printed
by John Nichols; for George Nicol, in Pall-Mall, Bookseller to his Majesty,
1793). These two printings have different images on page 3. One (Benjamin
and White) depicts a draped urn on page 3 while another (Nicol) depicts
the Grim Reaper sitting on a tumulus. This chapter references the Nicol
edition throughout.
101
an aquatint plate of numbered artifact illustrations followed by

short artifact descriptions.
‘Tumulus I,’ the first of Nenia Britannica’s tumuli, opens with
an illustration numbered ‘1,’ which depicts the cross-section of an
excavated barrow. Inside a thickly inked circle, which represents
the barrow’s ring ditch, a skeleton stands with one foot turned
outward in a gentlemanly stance. One hand grasps a sword, the
other holds the decayed shaft of a spear, and a knife and shield
boss are positioned within easy reach. Although dead, the body
inside Tumulus 1 seems to be alive, and its connection to the
living is strengthened when Douglas explains that the barrow
depicted in Figure 1 was opened by soldiers at work outside the
naval town of Chatham, Kent. The identity of the skeleton, and
its relationship to Chatham’s soldiers, comes into focus when
Douglas cross-references the sword in the skeleton’s left hand
with illustrations of ‘a Saxon foot-soldier’s dress’ that appear in
a manuscript copy of Prudentius’s Psychomachia.3 Douglas’s as-
sessment of the weapons in Tumulus 1 suggests that the skel-
eton in this barrow is a Saxon. Furthermore, Douglas’s visual
and narrative accounts of the excavation suggest that Chatham’s
soldier-excavators are also Saxons. The first tumulus and figure
of Nenia Britannica underscore barrow digging as an activity
that draws living bodies into the graves of the dead, creating
physical, cultural, and racial connections between generations
of ‘Saxon foot-soldiers.’
The previous chapter employed the psychoanalytic concepts
of mourning, incorporation, and transgenerational haunting in
order to consider the role of Sharon Turner as a father of Anglo-
Saxon history.4 In tracing a genealogical relationship between
Turner and contemporary historians, it uncovered a psychic
3 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 128, 128n1, 128n3.

4 Briefly summarized, mourning is a process of coming to terms with the
death of a loved one (whether a person, thing, or idea). This process
involves constructing a new narrative of the future self that is no longer
inclusive of the beloved. Incorporation is the fantasmatic act of taking into
one’s body the dead love object as a mechanism for avoiding the pain of
losing it. It is a prohibition against mourning that installs the love object
102
The Sepulchral Body of the Anglo-Saxonist
crypt of Empire located within Turner’s imperial unconscious,

deposited within his History, and passed on to the minds of his
‘children,’ the post-imperial generation of twentieth–century
Anglo-Saxon historians. This chapter, which complements the
previous one, examines James Douglas as a father of Anglo-
Saxon archaeology. By tracking Douglas’s excavation of Brit-
ish barrows, it draws the psychic crypts and psychoanalytic
theory of Chapter 2 into conversation with material crypts and
two relational modes of embodied identity-making: the Deleu-
zoguattarian concept of territory and the rhetorical practice of
ekphrasis. In so doing, this chapter examines the mental state of
Anglo-Saxon historians alongside the bodily state of Anglo-Sax-
on archaeologists and, by extension, literary scholars. Together,
Chapters 2 and 3 articulate the embodied psychic-social profile
of the interdisciplinary Anglo-Saxonist scholar.
Nenia Britannica has been acknowledged as a ‘notable mile-
stone’ and a ‘turning point’ in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, and
Douglas has been called a ‘pioneer in the field’ who established
‘standards of accuracy and observation’ in antiquarian excava-
tion and analysis.5 Using the illustrations and descriptions of
Nenia Britannica’s twenty-six tumuli as visual data, Douglas
compares and distinguishes, for the first time, Anglo-Saxon
burial mounds and funerary objects. Nenia Britannica and
Figure 1 become critical references during the mid-nineteenth
century. Victorian antiquarians consult Nenia Britannica when
assessing Anglo-Saxon artifacts recovered from their own bar-
within the self. For a more extensive explanation of these two interrelated
concepts, see Chapter 2 of this book.
5 Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth–
Century Britain (New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 211, 345; C.J.
Arnold, An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 3; and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon
England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), 2. See also Kelley M.
Wickham-Crowley, ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back: Excavating the Field
of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology,’ in The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England:
Basic Readings, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (New York: Garland Publishing,
Inc., 1999), 2, and Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins, Archaeological Illustra-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4, 9.
103
row excavations, and they use Figure 1 as a template when draw-

ing their own barrow illustrations. Yet Douglas’s report and his
barrow sketch, especially, are not simply reference materials
for the emerging field of Anglo-Saxon archaeology. As Doug-
las arranges Saxon bone and artifacts according to the postures
and gestures of Chatham’s living soldiers, Figure 1 becomes ek-
phrastic. In other words, its visual rhetoric transforms Douglas’s
two-dimensional Saxon skeleton into a performative figure that
reaches out from its ink-drawn barrow and phenomenologi-
cally impacts the viewer. The ekphrastic performance of Figure
1 prompts antiquarians to respond affectively to this Saxon. They
interpret barrow excavation as an act of mourning and construe
bone-artifact collection as a mechanism for incorporating the
dead within the self. As these Victorian antiquarians are drawn
into the ekphrastic orbit of Figure 1, they imagine themselves to
have psychically incorporated a Saxon soldier, and, consequent-
ly, they fantasize an embodied physical, cultural, and racial as-
sociation with it. Douglas’s Victorians continue to use Figure 1
as a model for the barrow illustrations of other Saxon skeletons,
and, in the process, they generate the archaeological portrait of
an ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ As a figure that is positioned inside psychic
and material crypts, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is simultaneously within
and exterior to its antiquarian excavators. Consequently, its mil-
itary artifacts, skeletal height, and cranial shape and size articu-
late a racial-cultural body that refracts the bodies of a growing
community of professional Anglo-Saxon antiquarians. The skel-
etonized, undead, yet performatively embodied ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is
characterized by an insatiable appetite for destruction, but pos-
sesses mental faculties that are marked by balance and reason.
Although James Douglas is a ‘father’ of Anglo-Saxon archae-
ology, he has been most influential among scholars specializing
in the disciplinary sub-field of mortuary archaeology. In Death
and Memory in Early Medieval Britain, Howard Williams ex-
plains that ‘early and mid-twentieth-century approaches’ to
early Anglo-Saxon archaeology, which ‘develop[ed] upon…
precedents’ set by Douglas and the Victorians, ‘took the form of
“culture-history”: charting the history of tribes and ideas, and
104
their origins, movements and evolution through burial rites and

the artefacts contained within graves.’6 Over the past forty years,
however, the field has moved away from these interests. Al-
though archaeologists continue to recognize Douglas’s pioneer-
ing work and disciplinary milestones, mortuary archaeologists
have replaced the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with ‘early medieval’ when
referencing their scope of study. Likewise, Williams continues,
‘the influence of new theoretical paradigms employed through-
out archaeology’ has led early medieval mortuary archaeologists
to ‘adop[t] alternative perspectives from traditional culture-
history.’7 Such changes within the field have had a consequential
6 Howard Williams, Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.
7 Ibid. For example, much work over the past twenty years has focused on
the metaphorical and symbolic use of grave goods. For a recent survey, see
Heinrich Härke, ‘Grave Goods in Early Medieval Burials: Messages and
Meanings,’ Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and
Dying 19, no. 1 (2014): 41–60. On the the social agency and social identity
of the dead and their communities, see, for example, Nick Stoodley, ‘Age
Organization and the Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Rite,’ World Archaeol-
ogy 31, no. 3 (2000): 456–72; Howard Williams, ‘Death Warmed Up: The
Agency of Bodies and Bones in Early Anglo-Saxon Cremation Rites,’ Jour-
nal of Material Culture 9, no. 3 (2004): 263–91 and ‘Assembling the Dead,’
in Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe, eds. Aliki Pantos and
Sarah Semple (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 109–34; Kirsty E. Squires,
‘Piecing Together Identity: A Social Investigation of Early Anglo-Saxon
Cremation Practices,’ Archaeological Journal 170, no. 1 (2013): 154–200; and
Zoë L. Devlin, ‘“(Un)touched by Decay”: Anglo-Saxon Encounters with
Dead Bodies,’ in Death Embodied: Archaeological Approaches to the Treat-
ment of the Corpse, eds. Zoë L. Devlin and Emma-Jayne Graham (Oxford:
Oxbow Books, 2015), 63–85. On emotional expressions in funerals, see
Howard Williams, ‘The Emotive Force of Early Medieval Mortuary Prac-
tices,’ Archaeological Review from Cambridge 22, no. 1 (2007): 107–23. On
mortuary practices and social memory, see Williams, Death and Memory
in Early Medieval Britain, 2006. On landscape and monumental contexts
of commemoration, see Howard Williams, ‘Ancient Landscapes and the
Dead: The Reuse of Prehistoric and Roman Monuments as Early Anglo-
Saxon Burial Sites,’ Medieval Archaeology 41, no. 1 (1997): 1–32; and ‘Monu-
ments and the Past in Early Anglo-Saxon England,’ World Archaeology
30, no. 1 (1998): 90–108; and Sarah Semple, Perceptions of the Prehistoric
in Anglo-Saxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
105
impact on the study of barrow burials. Howard Williams has

employed the methods of comparative anthropology and eth-
nography. Sarah Semple and Andrew Reynolds have used char-
ters, historical documents, early medieval poetry, boundary
markers, and place names to reconfigure the barrow from a
funereal site to a dynamic landscape of ritual, movement, com-
munity activity, and monument re-use.8 Heinrich Härke has
assessed grave goods from multiple excavation sites in relation
to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, reinterpreting the function of
weapons burials from a reflection of warrior status to a strat-
egy for constructing identity.9 Martin Carver has appropriated
the language of metaphor and symbolism to reframe the grave’s
funeral tableau from a material reality to a material poetics.10
These examples not only reflect the influence of theoretical ap-
proaches within mortuary archaeology but also evidence meth-
odological changes to a field that was once tied exclusively to
excavation and archaeological reports. Contemporary studies
in early medieval mortuary archaeology have taken Saxon skel-
etons and artifacts from the hands of Douglas and his Victorian
8 See Williams, ‘Death Warmed Up,’ ‘Assembling the Dead,’ Death and
Memory in Early Medieval Britain, and ‘The Emotive Force of Early
Medieval Mortuary Practices’; Sarah Semple, ‘A Fear of the Past: The Place
of the Prehistoric Burial Mound in the Ideology of Middle and Later
Anglo-Saxon England,’ World Archaeology 30, no. 1 (1998): 109–26, ‘Burials
and Political Boundaries in the Avebury Region, North Wiltshire,’ Anglo-
Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 12 (2003): 72–91, and Perceptions
of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England; and Andrew Reynolds, ‘The
Definition and Ideology of Anglo-Saxon Execution Sites and Cemeteries,’
in Death and Burial in Medieval Europe: Papers of the ‘Medieval Europe
Brugge 1997’ Conference, Vol. 2, eds. Guy De Boe and Frans Verhaeghe
(Zellik: Instituut voor het Archeologisch Patrimonium, 1997), 33–41.
9 Heinrich Härke, ‘“Warrior Graves”? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon
Weapon Burial Rite,’ Past & Present 126, no. 1 (1990): 22–43, and ‘Material
Culture as Myth: Weapons in Anglo-Saxon Graves,’ in Burial and Society:
The Chronological and Social Analysis of Archaeological Burial Data, eds.
Claus Kjeld Jensen and Karen Hoilund Nielsen (Aarhus: University of
Aarhus, 1997), 119–27.
10 Martin Carver, ‘Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon
Graves,’ in Treasure in the Medieval West, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (York:
York Medieval Press, 2000), 25–48.
106
antiquarians and thereby worked towards unknotting the racial

and cultural ties between dead and living ‘Saxon’ bodies.
Despite these changes in the theories, methods, and perspec-
tives of early medieval mortuary archaeology, one connection
remains between James Douglas, barrow diggers of the nine-
teenth-century past, and archaeologists of the twenty-first–
century present, a connection that persistently ties the larger
field of Anglo-Saxon archaeology to Anglo-Saxon literature:
Beowulf. In this chapter, I first argue that Beowulf’s formal archi-
tecture — specifically, its chiasmus and interlace — constructs a
poetic barrow, and the circulation of Danes and Geats around
this poetic barrow engages a conversation about how these
early medieval funerary structures facilitate identity-making as
an embodied and performative act. Beowulf’s association with
early medieval barrows positions the poem in relation to sites
excavated by Douglas and claimed by his Victorian acolytes to
contain Anglo-Saxon graves. Likewise, Beowulf’s investment in
expressing identity through physical performance anticipates
the work of these antiquarians. When interest in the poem is re-
kindled in the nineteenth century (and early medieval barrows
and bodies have been claimed as Anglo-Saxon), Beowulf enables
archaeologists and literary scholars to construct and maintain
an interdisciplinary relationship as Anglo-Saxonists.
Digging Beowulf’s Grave: Mortuaries, Territory, Ekphrasis
Early medieval barrow burial is one of the many ways that com-
munities of eastern England commemorated their dead during
the pre-Christian, or final-phase, period, which dates from the
mid-fifth to the early eighth century. Some barrows are affiliated
with a single grave, while others are part of a regional cemetery.
Some contain inhumed bodies, and others contain cremated
ones. While many of these barrows were built by Anglo-Saxons
as a means of honoring their own dead, others — erected by ne-
olithic, British, and Roman peoples — were re-used, enlarged, or
supplemented with new mounds by Anglo-Saxon communities
107
in what is known as secondary or associative burials.11 Whether a

primary, secondary, or associative grave site, barrows are placed
in meaningful proximity to other landscape features. Often near
waterways, on hilltops or promontories, or adjacent to active or
unused structures, barrows command a panoramic view of an
area. Among the most visually distinct and prolific manmade
landscape features of eastern England, barrows remained vis-
ible for over a thousand years until industrializing efforts of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries razed many to the ground.
Although these earthworks were built for the dead, they were
continuously reused by the communities that lived near them.
For example, Howard Williams considers the early medieval
cremation cemetery of Lovedon Hill, Lincolnshire, a prominent
hill and ‘one of the most striking and easily recognized land-
marks in the vicinity’ that ‘Anglo-Saxons may well have regard-
ed…as an ancient burial mound.’12 Given the size of Lovedon
Hill (the second largest early medieval cemetery found in Eng-
land, with 1,800 excavated graves), it is regarded as a ‘central
burial plac[e] serving many settlements and farms and perhaps
related to a defined “tribal” territory.’13 Williams argues that its
size and central location suggest Lovedon Hill as an assembly
place where large numbers of people — not only the dead but
also ‘close kin,’ ‘friends of the deceased,’ ‘other individuals ow-
ing allegiance,’ ‘as well as those with more specific duties, roles
and obligations to enact’ — from small, dispersed communities
met and interacted.14 Consequently, the funerals enacted here
may have been large events where ‘a wide range of social activi-
ties’ took place, ‘including feasting, settling disputes and form-
ing alliances through gift giving.’15 When Williams assesses the
topography, archaeological evidence, and geography of Love-
don Hill in relation to other Anglo-Saxon cremation sites, he
hypothesizes that cremation cemeteries like Lovedon Hill were
11 Williams, ‘Ancient Landscapes and the Dead.’

12 Williams, ‘Assembling the Dead,’ 123.
13 Ibid., 113.
14 Ibid., 115.
15 Ibid.
108
encircled by a network of places in which people lived, worked,

and worshipped, making them sites of assembly or ‘central plac-
es’ for both the dead and the living.16 Even after barrows were
abandoned as places for burying the dead, onomastic, histori-
cal, and archaeological evidence reveals their continued func-
tion throughout the Anglo-Saxon period as sites for community
assembly, administration, judicial activities, and execution.17
Despite their central placement in early Anglo-Saxon geogra-
phies, barrows likewise are found along the boundaries of villas
16 Ibid., 124–26, especially Figs 5.6 and 5.7; Howard Williams, ‘Cemeteries as
Central Places: Place and Identity in Migration Period Eastern England,’
in Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods, eds. Birgitta
Hårdh and Lars Larsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International,
2002), 341–62.
17 Aliki Pantos identifies barrows and mounds (OE hlæw and beorg; ON
haugr) as the most common ‘physical feature’ referenced in the names of
meeting places (‘Assembly Places in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Aspects of
Form and Location,’ PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2002, 69–70, cited
in Semple, Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England, 217). See
also Alexandra Sanmark and Sarah J. Semple, ‘Places of Assembly: New
Discoveries in Sweden and England,’ Fornvännen 103, no. 4 (2008): 245–59.
109
and estates,18 hundreds,19 parishes,20 and wapentakes.21 As sites

located at the outermost edges of these land divisions, barrows
are borderlands. Their position on the margins of later medieval
geographies is reflected in both Old English poetry, where they
are depicted as evil, monstrous, and haunted ‘pagan’ spaces,
18 Peter Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, 2nd edn. (New
York: Routledge, 1998), 147–48, and Martin Welch, ‘Rural Settlement
Patterns in the Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon Periods,’ Landscape His-
tory 7 (1985): 19–21. D.M. Hadley cites, as an example, the barrow burial
at Caenby, which is close to the junction between Hemswell, Harpswell,
Glentham, and Caenby vill boundaries, and she writes that ‘presumably
such burials either were located on existing boundaries, or were used to
mark out new boundaries; either way it suggests that such boundaries
existed in the early Anglo-Saxon period’ (The Northern Danelaw: Its Social
Structure, c.800–1100 [London: Leicester University Press, Continuum,
2000], 98).
19 The Hundred is an administrative division of land. Dating to about the
mid-tenth century, it subsumed a large amount of land under juridical and
fiduciary control. Each Hundred, scholars assume, had an open-air meet-
ing place, where trials, disputes, etc. would take place. Wenslow (Bedford-
shire) and Thunderlow (Essex), for example, contain elements of the word
hlæw, one of several Old English words that can mean ‘mound,’ ‘cairn,’
‘hill,’ ‘mountain,’ ‘grave-yard,’ or ‘barrow’ (Audrey Meaney, ‘Pagan English
Sanctuaries, Place-Names and Hundred Meeting-Places,’ Anglo-Saxon
Studies in Archaeology and History 8 [1995]: 36).
20 Ann Goodier, ‘The Formation of Boundaries in Anglo-Saxon England: A
Statistical Study,’ Medieval Archaeology 28 (1984): 1–21. For an analysis of
Goodier, see Welch, ‘Rural Settlement Patterns,’ 19. For cautionary state-
ments regarding barrows and boundaries, see Andrew Reynolds, ‘Burials,
Boundaries, and Charters in Anglo-Saxon England: A Reassessment,’ in
Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, eds. Sam Lucy and Andrew
Reynolds (London: Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 17,
2002), 173–74. For initial, but now disproven assessments of barrows and
boundaries, see Desmond Bonney, ‘Early Boundaries and Estates in South-
ern England,’ in Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change, ed. Peter H.
Sawyer (New York: Edward Arnold, 1976), 72–82.
21 Alexis Tudor Skinner and Sarah Semple, ‘Assembly Mounds in the Danel-
aw: Place-name and Archaeological Evidence in the Historic Landscape,’
Journal of the North Atlantic 8 (2016): 115–33.
110
and in real life, where they become gallows sites22 and staging
grounds for battle.23
As a topography that marks the center of a settlement or the
borderlands of a region, barrows make territory, in the geopo-
litical sense, by parceling land into districts.24 In addition, their
enduring material participation in a network of ever-shifting
cultural practices points towards an engagement with a dif-
ferent kind of territory. Borrowing from the methodology of
Deleuze and Guattari,25 territory is not simply a material place
that is claimed (and reclaimed). It is a concept that sees identity
as an ever-shifting process that is assembled, disassembled, and
22 Semple, ‘A Fear of the Past,’ 123, and Andrew Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Devi-
ant Burial Customs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 248–50.
Reynolds’s survey of cwealmstowe (execution places) reveals that the great
majority were located on barrows on boundaries, especially hundred
boundaries (‘The Definition and Ideology of Anglo-Saxon Execution Sites
and Cemeteries,’ 37). Martin Carver points out that Mound 5 of Sutton
Hoo has around it the remains of hanged or beheaded bodies, and on the
eastern periphery of the cemetery, another group of burials lies amid the
postholes attributed to a gallows site (Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?
[Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998], 137–43). On the place-
ment of gallows on barrows in the medieval period, more generally, see
Nicola Whyte, ‘The Deviant Dead in the Norfolk Landscape,’ Landscapes 4,
no. 1 (2003): 33.
23 Recently, Sarah Semple and Alexandra Sanmark articulated an example
that highlights both the ‘real significance’ and longue durée of the barrow’s
power when they discuss Cwichelmeshlæwe, an Iron Age round barrow in
Northumbria. Purportedly named to commemorate Edwin of Northum-
bria’s killing of Cwichelm of Wessex in 636 ce, the homicidal power of the
‘Mound of Cwichelm’ is invoked and challenged four hundred years later
when a troop of Danes camped near the barrow and then marched around
it, ‘boast[ing] threats, because it had often been said that if they sought out
Cwichelm’s Barrow, they [the Danes] would never get to the sea’ (Sample
and Sanmark, ‘Assembly in North West Europe,’ 1).
24 For a discussion of the role of barrows in the contested territorial frontier
of Wessex-Mercia, see Sarah Semple, ‘Burials and Political Boundaries in
the Avebury Region, North Wiltshire.’
25 While Deleuze and Guattari are discussed infrequently in relation to early
medieval studies, Manish Sharma’s recent essay on Old English formulaic
theory offers an exciting engagement with these philosophers (‘Beyond
Nostalgia: Formula and Novelty in Old English Literature,’ Exemplaria 26,
no. 4 [2014]: 303–27).
111
reassembled by means of our affective performances. We make

signs and sounds; we hold postures; we gesture, display, and ad-
vertise. We demonstrate via our bodies how we feel and who we
are, in a given moment, at a given location. We communicate an
identity that is assembled in performance. Consequently, it is al-
ways changing, never the same, and always attached to the place
where we are standing. And we respond to these behaviors in
others. To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari, our identi-
ties are de- and re-territorialized with each shift in sign, sound,
and movement; and the ‘territory’ is the locus ‘where’ all these
re-codings of identity take ‘place.’ Thus, geopolitical territory
and expressive territory are intertwined, and when we stand in a
particular place, we express an assemblage of identities that are
always on the move.
As sites for celebrating alliances and making war, for manag-
ing community affairs and executing criminals, for mourning
one’s dead and being terrified by them, barrows are, to reem-
phasize, geopolitical territories — they mark the most central
and peripheral boundaries of a socio-cultural community. Here,
people gather and display signs, sounds, and movements that
are keyed to the barrow’s particular territorial function: Who
belongs and who does not? How should we (and others) live and
die? How can we account for others’ relationships to this place
and, nonetheless, make it our own?26 As communities assemble
and performatively negotiate answers to these questions, over
and over again, early medieval barrows come to function as lim-
inal zones striated by vectors of deep power. They draw together,
26 Alfred Siewer’s essay, ‘Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions

of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building,’ Viator 34 (2003): 1–39, considers how
early medieval poetry engages barrow landscapes and identity formation
and as such is an important precursor to the arguments of this chapter.
112
by material means, human acts of intimacy and extimacy,27 ways

of dying and living.28
As burial sites, the surfaces, soil, geography, and climate of
barrows make possible and prohibit certain kinds of funeral ac-
tivities, mourning rituals, and monumental construction. Their
abiotic features shape ‘dying practices’ that (re)assemble, or re-
territorialize, a community’s sense of self while doing the same
for the dead. Yet, once these dying practices are complete, the
grave is covered up. A barrow is erected over its mortuary in-
terior, and the exterior surface of this new landscape becomes
the site of ever-expanding networks of ‘living practices’: how to
call into being and confirm alliances, how to make and re-make
culture, and how to distinguish self from other. Barrows shut-
tle death towards life by enjoining the force of the earth to that
of human movement. With each new community re-use, post-
holes are dug, surfaces are worn down, and materials are left
standing or forgotten. These changes code and re-code, and re-
and de-territorialize, barrows that record old and new identity
assemblages and the relationship between them. As a record-
ing, barrows broadcast this range of assemblages between and
among communities over long stretches of time. Consequently,
to extend our understanding of the barrow by invoking one
other Deleuzoguatterain term, barrows are a geophilosophical
27 ‘Extimacy’ (in French, extimité) is a term coined by Jacques Lacan, who

adds the prefix ex- to ‘intimacy’ [intimité] and writes, ‘this central place,
this intimate exteriority, this extimacy, which is the Thing’ (Jacques Lacan,
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter [New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1992], 167). As a word that yokes ‘inside’ to
‘outside,’ extimacy reveals the relationship between interior and exterior
domains.
28 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Mas-
sumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 325–26. For a
recent discussion and overview of cemetery — in particular, barrow — re-
use, see Sarah Semple and Howard Williams, ‘Landmarks of the Dead:
Exploring Anglo-Saxon Mortuary Geographies,’ in The Material Culture
of the Built Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World, eds. Maren Clegg Hyer
and Gale Owen-Crocker (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015),
137–61.
113
Figure 1. John Niles’s ‘Diagram 6’ of the ‘chief correspondences that

knit the poem [Beowulf] together.’ John D. Niles, ‘Ring Composi-
tion and the Structure of Beowulf,’ PMLA 94, no. 5 (1979): 930. Image
courtesy of PMLA.
114
territory and moreover its Natal, the territory’s ‘intense center’

and the ‘extra-territorial convergence of different and distant
territories.’29 Put another way, barrows are homing sites. They
point the way towards a forever-becoming entity that we cur-
rently call ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ a multiplicity of identity assemblages
that are always in motion, never stable, and perpetually unmak-
ing and remaking themselves.
Beowulf is a poem that is deeply concerned with practices
of living and dying. The funerary rituals of Scyld Scefing and
Beowulf, which bookend the poem, call into question and con-
firm what it means to be Danish or Geatish. Toward the poem’s
narrative interior, the attacks of Grendelkin and the dragon
upon Heorot and Daneland challenge these identity positions
and prompt their reorientation. Amid these many and varied
dying practices, the construction of Heorot and the celebrations
that take place therein express living through performances,
gestures, conversations, and stories that further adjust and re-
confirm ‘Dane’ and ‘Geat’ as highly mobile assemblages. Beowulf
is also a poem that constructs, by way of these dying and living
practices, the three-dimensional outline of a barrow.
As John Niles argues,30 Beowulf’s key episodes generate three
nested ring structures: Prologue and Epilogue, First Fight and
Third Fight, Interlude and Interlude (see Figure 1). For Niles,
ring structure provides the poem with a circular frame, which,
this chapter argues, is given height, depth, and dimension in
its coupling with interlace patterning. Moreover, the interplay
of ring structure and interlace — Beowulf’s overarching poetic
modes — articulates a calculus of dying and living strategies that
29 Consider Sarah Semple’s article, ‘Recycling the Past: Ancient Monuments

and Changing Meanings in Early Medieval Britain,’ in Antiquaries and Ar-
chaists: The Past in the Past, The Past in the Present, eds. Megan Brewster
Aldrich and Robert J. Wallis (Reading: Spire, 2009), 29–45, as an alterna-
tive mode of expressing the openness of funerary territory.
30 See also Gale Owen-Crocker, The Four Funerals in Beowulf and the Struc-
ture of the Poem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
115
Interlude Interlude
First Fight Third Fight
Prologue Epilogue
Second Fight
Figure 2. Author’s visual remapping of John D. Niles’s diagram

(see Fig. 1).
Figure 3. Stephen Plunkett, photograph of reconstructed Mound 2 at

Sutton Hoo (S2007). Image courtesy of Dr. Stephen Plunkett.
116
narratively erects a three-dimensional barrow (see Figures 2 and

3).31
In the Prologue, Scyld’s boat funeral turns to Hrothgar’s
hall building, and the boat’s wooden hull and funereal gold are
transformed into Heorot’s wide-gabled roof and gilded lintels.
As Niles’s diagram makes clear, these narrative activities and
architectural spaces anticipate those of the Epilogue, and the
Prologue opens a circuit that will be closed when Scyld’s death
is revisited in Beowulf ’s death. Yet, as an episode that likewise
summons the activities of Hrothgar and the hall of Heorot, it
interlaces the Prologue and the First Fight. Together, ring struc-
ture and interlace give the narrative material dimension. The
poem fastens together two kingly deaths and their burial struc-
tures in order to assume an emergent sense of circular depth
and width, and it also weaves together the passing of Scyld with
the ascent of Hrothgar’s reign, and Heorot’s hall, to add height
to these dimensions. From dying to living, from royal death to
a bare life, Beowulf traces the outline of a barrow’s foundation.32
Beowulf ’s First Fight with Grendel makes these outlines
more materially present, as Hrothgar’s rule and Heorot’s hall are
refigured into even more capacious ‘living structures,’ and in the
subsequent Interlude, Danes and Geats feast in celebration of a
community that does not merely survive, but now thrives. These
two episodes, which pivot jointly upon chiasmus and interlace,
plot the upward slope and outer curvature of a barrow as they
angle towards modes of vibrant living — towards a more robust
assemblage that articulates what it means to be a Dane or a Geat
now that Grendel has been defeated. Moreover, as the Interlude
that occurs after Beowulf ’s fight with Grendel is circuited to
the Interlude that follows his victory against Grendel’s mother,
this ring structure doubles as a poetic and a material plateau, a
31 For a discussion of the narrative functions of ring structure in Beowulf,

see H. Ward Tonsfeldt, ‘Ring Structure in Beowulf,’ Neophilologus 61, no. 3
(1977): 443–52.
32 Note also that Robert Boenig argues that Scyld’s boat burial represents ‘a
burial in a grave mound like those found in East Anglia and Scandinavia’
(‘Scyld’s Burial Mound,’ English Language Notes 40, no. 1 [2002]: 3).
117
‘place’ where Danes and Geats gather and feast, tell stories and
give gifts. At the poem’s ‘highest’ point — as if sitting atop a bar-
row — these two communities meet and take part in an array
of social activities that, as Howard Williams has explained, are
associated with this funerary structure.
From these celebratory Interludes, the poem begins to calcu-
late the downward slope and curve of a barrow. Upon Beowulf ’s
homecoming to Geatland, stories of intra- and inter-communi-
ty hostility, warfare, and execution descend towards Beowulf ’s
Third Fight with the dragon. This episode closes the chiastic loop
opened by his battle with Grendel even as it interlaces Heorot’s
wooden hall, golden gift exchanges, and practices of sociability
with the dragon’s stan-beorh, treasure hoard, and lost commu-
nity. As ring structures that were opened in the first half of the
poem are now closed, narratives of living give way to stories of
dying even as architectures of hospitality are refigured as places
of interment. Beowulf dies from wounds sustained in his Third
Fight, and the Epilogue depicts his funeral rituals. This final
episode returns the poem to its chiastic beginnings: the wealth
brought from the dragon’s cave echoes Scyld’s golden treasure,
the war-gear in which Beowulf is posthumously dressed is remi-
niscent of Scyld’s funerary battle-dress, and the Geatish woman
who mourns during Beowulf ’s cremation recalls the grieving
community of the Danes who watch Scyld’s boat launch. Like-
wise, even as the wooden hull of Scyld’s boat returns as kindling
for Beowulf ’s funeral pyre, the architecture of the dragon’s bar-
row cave produces Beowulf ’s barrow. In an energetic display of
interlace and chiasmus, the Epilogue employs building materials
from its earliest and most recent episodes in order to complete
the double construction of Beowulf’s poetic barrow, an aesthetic
form that has been materially finished.
Beowulf’s poetic barrow does not simply reflect historical en-
gagements between land and people. To borrow the language
of Aranye Fradenburg, it is a ‘representatio[n]’ that ‘show[s] us
118
where we might or might not live.’33 It shows us who we might

or might not (want to) be. It is a material territory and an ex-
pressive one. As a form that is continuously produced and refig-
ured by means of chiasmus and interlace, Beowulf’s barrow is,
as Fradenburg writes, ‘always, already multiply transformed,’ es-
tranged, and ‘elsewhere.’34 Like the material earthworks and the
dying and living practices that it replicates, Beowulf is a territory
that is open and forever becoming, ‘for the meaning of terri-
tory is mobility and expressivity.’35 Its barrow does not direct ‘us’
towards a particular place or people in northern Europe36 but
towards a ‘home’ that abides in its poetic form.37
33 L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, ‘Life’s Reach: Territory, Display, Ekphrasis,’ in

Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts, ed. Eileen A. Joy
(Brooklyn: punctum books, 2013), 227.
34 Ibid., 228.
35 Ibid., 229.
36 For recent attempts at locating the poem in the landscape and in specific
geographies, see Sam Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking
Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993); John D. Niles,
Beowulf and Lejre (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 2007); and Leonard Niedorf, ed., The Dating of Beowulf: A Reas-
sessment (Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2014). Assigning a composition date and
location to this poem has, historically, been one of the most contentious
areas of Beowulf scholarship. While the motives and emotions that sur-
round arguments about the poem’s provenance remain undiscussed by the
scholarly community, a recent review of Leonard Niedorf ’s The Transmis-
sion of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2017), suggests that identity politics underwrite these,
at times uncivil, debates. Reviewer Craig Davis, for example, points to
Niedorf ’s ‘unusual devotion…for an early Beowulf’ that is written by ‘An-
glian peoples’ who replicate the poetic forms and narratives of ‘Germanic-
speaking migrants to Britain’ who come from ‘the ancestral homeland of
the Angles in Schleswig’ (‘The Transmission of “Beowulf ”,’ The Medieval
Review, September 30, 2018, https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.
php/tmr/article/view/25665). Neidorf ’s ‘devotion’ to and his arguments
for a Migration-Era Beowulf sound very much like those of John Mitchell
Kemble, whose racial ideologies, this chapter will argue much later, posi-
tion Beowulf on the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Teutonic family tree.
37 Mary Kate Hurley, ‘Ruins of the Past: Beowulf and Bethlehem Steel,’ The
Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 13 (August
2010), https://www.heroicage.org/issues/13/ba.php.
119
For Beowulf, however, the poem’s barrow-shaped home be-

comes an increasingly complicated place in which to live. On
the outer perimeters of Prologue and Epilogue, Danes and
Geats point the rituals commemorating the deaths of Scyld and
Beowulf in the direction of community survival. In other words,
the dying practices that take place at the beginning and end of
the poem are circuited to and woven into living strategies that
take place during the poem’s Interludes. Danes and Geats cir-
culate across the narrative surfaces of Beowulf’s barrow, mov-
ing always towards the post-war celebrations that take place
atop its plateaued surfaces. Unlike the communities with which
he is associated, Beowulf repeatedly finds himself engaged in
combat within the poem’s architectures. As he fights to protect
Danish and Geatish communities — to maintain living practices
that not only negotiate relationships between these two peoples
but also distinguish humans from monsters — he discovers the
mortuary interior of Beowulf’s poetic barrow.
Nested within the poem’s Interlude ring structure is Beowulf’s
Second Fight with Grendel’s mother. Described by Niles as the
poem’s ‘single [chiastic] kernel,’ this episode takes Beowulf to the
poem’s narrative epicenter and to the impossibly deep ‘grund-
wong,’ or ‘bottom [of the mere]’ of Grendelkin.38 Yet, archaeo-
logical assessments of this underwater cave and Beowulf ’s fight
inside it reframe this space as a barrow’s mortuary interior. The
chiastic kernel of the poem, in association with the arguments
of mortuary archaeology, reveals the home of Grendelkin as the
deep, funerary center of Beowulf’s barrow territory.
As Patrick Geary and Howard Williams have remarked, the
cave of Grendelkin is described like a barrow, a place that dur-
ing the later Anglo-Saxon period was believed to be haunted
by monsters and revenants.39 Beowulf enters, fights Grendel’s
mother, and mutilates Grendel in a supernatural battle that ech-
38 Niles, ‘Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf,’ 924.

39 Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994), 67; Williams, Death and Memory in Early Medieval
Britain, 172; and Semple, ‘A Fear of the Past,’ 109–36.
120
oes the practice of early medieval ‘mound-breaking’: ‘dramatic,

staged events’ in which individuals tunnel into and destroy the
skeletons, grave goods, and burial tableau within a barrow.40
Mound-breaking can serve a variety of functions that range
from ‘punishment/revenge, neutralization of the dead, humilia-
tion of a defeated enemy, trophy hunting or destruction of mem-
ory,’ but upon killing Grendel’s mother and decapitating Gren-
del with a sword that he has found inside this barrow, Beowulf
discovers that neither is its rightful occupant.41 As the sword’s
blade melts in the monster’s hot blood, the poem remarks that
Beowulf did not take from this underwater ‘wic’ [‘habitation’],42
‘many treasures, although he saw many there, except the head
and hilt, together, shining treasures’ [‘maðmæhta ma, þeh he
þær monige geseah, / buton þone hafelan ond þa hilt somod /
since fage,’ ll. 1558a, 1562b].43 In calling this a wic in which Gren-
delkin dwell, the poem casually marks this place as a temporary
home and implicates these monsters as barrow squatters. More-
over, it suggests that the treasures sighted by Beowulf are funer-
ary objects belonging to others. While no physical remains are
mentioned that would identify the barrow’s rightful occupant,
the ‘giant’s old sword…a work of giants’ [‘ealdsweord eotensic…
giganta geweorc,’ ll. 1558a, 1562b] that he has just used to kill and
mutilate Grendelkin suggests that this is a giant’s burial cham-
ber. Upon making this discovery, Beowulf takes Grendel’s head
and the sword’s remaining hilt, then leaves the barrow. In these
actions, his acts of mound-breaking become acts of grave-rob-
40 Jan Bill and Aoife Daly, ‘The Plundering of the Ship Graves from Osenberg
and Gokstad: An Example of Power Politics?’ Antiquity 86, no. 333 (2012):
818.
41 Christoph Kümmel, quoted in Bill and Daly, ‘The Plundering of the Ship
Graves from Osenberg and Gokstad,’ 818.
42 In addition to its primary definition as ‘a dwelling-place, abode, habita-
tion, residence, lodging, quarters,’ wic can also reference ‘a temporary
abode, a camp, place where one stops,’ or more suggestively, ‘a place where
a thing remains’ (Bosworth-Toller Dictionary).
43 All citations are by line number to R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John
D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf: Fourth Edition (Toronto: University of
Toronto, 2008). All translations from Old English are my own.
121
bing, an early medieval practice in which the deceased’s body

and grave goods were subject to intentional disturbance, mutila-
tion, and looting.44
Whether an act of mound-breaking or of grave-robbing,
archaeologists Hella Eckardt and Howard Williams point to
this particular moment in Beowulf as one that ‘illustrate[s] the
importance attached to entering into ancient tombs to retrieve
old objects…usually swords,’ and they explain that although a
trespass, this action was ‘an important social process by which
[early medieval] communities physically reordered their his-
tories and memories.’45 Eckardt and Williams’s comments ring
true for the Danish and Geatish communities that celebrate
during the poem’s Interludes. Beowulf ’s triumphs over Grendel
and his mother allow Heorot’s denizens to live without fear of
future attack, to celebrate together in the hall, and subsequently
to enable Hrothgar and Hygelac to reestablish a comitatus bro-
ken by Hrethel. Further still, Beowulf ’s encounter with the gi-
ant’s sword enables him to eradicate and mutilate the monsters
that have intruded upon Heorot’s peace and God’s cosmology.
For Danes and Geats, Beowulf ’s physical actions reorder com-
munity history and memory. In the process, they disassemble
and reassemble what it means not only to be Danish and Geat-
ish but, moreover, to be human.
Yet barrows are not made to be penetrated, disturbed, or loot-
ed. Their mortuary interiors, which harbor a decomposing body
and grave goods, are intentionally arranged into a burial tableau.
44 For discussions of early medieval grave robbing and reopening, see

Bill and Daly, ‘The Plundering of the Ship Graves from Osenberg and
Gokstad’; Edeltraud Aspöck, ‘Past “Disturbances” of Graves as a Source:
Taphonomy and Interpretation of Reopened Early Medieval Inhumation
Graves at Brunn am Gebirge (Austria) and Winnall II (England),’ Oxford
Journal of Archaeology 30, no. 3 (2011): 299–324; and Sean Lafferty, ‘Ad
sanctitatem mortuorum: Tomb Raiders, Body Snatchers and Relic Hunters
in Late Antiquity,’ Early Medieval Europe 22, no. 3 (2014): 249–79.
45 Hella Eckhardt and Howard Williams, ‘Objects Without a Past? The Use of
Roman Objects in Anglo-Saxon Graves,’ in Archaeologies of Remembrance:
Death and Memory in Past Societies, ed. Howard Williams (New York:
Springer, 2003), 145, 144, my emphasis.
122
This ‘poetic’ scene, Martin Carver explains, is composed ritually

and according to a particular temporal sequence by those who
survive and mourn the deceased.46 Consequently, Carver, with
Howard Williams, explains that it refracts the ‘emotive force’ of
a funeral. It visualizes a dynamic network of death, loss, and
grief; reverence, honor, and love; and anger, shame, and relief.
The emotional constellation that is created by those who shape
the funeral tableau is expressed by the choice, arrangement, and
order in which grave goods are placed. Together, these material
artifacts transform the barrow’s mortuary interior into a terri-
tory of dying, which is then covered up with dirt and screened
from view so that it might become the invisible foundation upon
which a barrow is built and living takes place. To enter a bar-
row is, consequently, to encounter a territory that, subsequent
to the rituals of a funeral, is meant only for the dead because it
expresses an identity assemblage that was organized in response
to death. For the Danes and Geats, communities that benefit in
absentia from Beowulf ’s Second Fight, mound-breaking and
grave-robbing are productive strategies. To return to Eckardt
and Williams’s language, the traumatic ‘histories and memo-
ries’ of Grendelkin’s predations upon Heorot are ‘physically re-
ordered’ by another, whose violent acts make life more livable.
For Beowulf, however, opening Beowulf’s barrow and robbing
the giant’s grave (performances enacted by descending into the
underwater cave and grundwong of Grendelkin) draw him into
its territory of dying. Here, he encounters a sword, part of a fu-
neral tableau that materially broadcasts practices enacted long
ago to commemorate an unknown deceased. He activates these
identity-oriented practices when he uses the giant’s sword to kill
and physically mutilate Grendel’s mother and her son. However,
it is not until Beowulf brings the remaining hilt back to Heorot
that these dying practices physically reorder — they disassemble
and reassemble; they de- and re-territorialize — him.
46 As Carver writes, ‘A grave is not simply a text, but a text with attitude,
a text inflated with emotion…like poetry it is a palimpsest of allusions,
constructed within a certain time and place’ (‘Burial as Poetry,’ 37).
123
The physical effects of entering and exiting Beowulf’s barrow

become apparent upon the hero’s return to Heorot. Specifically,
they extend from a discussion of the sword hilt, the only piece of
loot that Beowulf has brought back from the grave:
Hroðgar maðelode, hylt sceawode,

ealde lafe. On ðæm wæs or writen
fyrngewinnes: syðþan flod ofsloh,
gifen geotende giganta cyn,
frecne geferdon; Þæt wæs fremde þeod
ecean dryhtne; him þæs endelean
þurh wæteres wylm waldend sealde.
Swa wæs on ðæm scennum sciran goldes
þurh runstafas rihte gemearcod,
geseted ond gesæd, hwam þæt sweord geworht,
irena cyst ærest wære,
wreoþenhilt ond wyrmfah. (ll. 1687–98a)
[Hrothgar spoke, he looked at the hilt, the old heirloom,

on which was written the origins of former strife, when the
flood — the rushing ocean — destroyed the community of gi-
ants. They fared terribly. That was a people estranged from
the eternal Lord; the Ruler gave them a final retribution for
that by means of the surging of water. So it was on that metal
plate of shining gold marked, set down, and said in runic [or
secret] letters, correctly, for whom [or by whom] that sword
was made, the best of swords [that] was first made with a
twisted hilt and serpentine patterning.]
As he looks upon the hilt’s engraved surfaces, Hrothgar explains

that, once upon a time, God sent a flood to destroy a commu-
nity of giants. Despite their terrible suffering and estrangement
from God, some of them seem to have survived. The inclusion
of this hilt in a giant’s funeral tableau shapes a territory of dy-
ing according to expressions of emotional duress and physical
survival in the face of total community destruction. Hrothgar’s
narrative emerges from looking and touching the secret letters
124
[runstafas], metal plate [ðæm scennum sciran goldes], twisted

sides [wreoþenhilt], and serpentine pattern [wyrmfah] of the
hilt. His statements are prompted by an object that does not
document the past but materially displays and gestures towards
the identity assemblages of those who have been affected by it.
Hrothgar’s words and the hilt’s visual imagery collaborate to
produce an ekphrasis that draws forth a previously unknown
territory of dying from the mortuary wic of Grendelkin into
Heorot. A term of literary criticism and art history, ekphrasis
has been understood traditionally as the detailed description of
an object. Over the past two decades, however, it has undergone
extensive redefinition.47 No longer considered to be a mimetic
form, and no longer defined in relation to the exclusive pairing
of verbal text with visual image,48 ekphrasis can be understood
simply as the imagistic ‘response’ in one medium to an image
that is presented in another medium.49 As a response rather
than as a representation, ekphrasis not only enacts a non-hi-
erarchical intermingling between media but also functions as a
performative agent. For some scholars, the performative agency
47 See Renate Brosch, ed., Contemporary Exphrasis, a special issue of Poetics

Today 39, no. 2 (2018), for a survey of past understandings of ekphrasis and
current reconsiderations of the concept.
48 Beginning in the late 1990s, scholars began to challenge the twentieth-
century definition of ekphrasis as a specifically verbal representation of a
visual representation. See, especially, Claus Clüver, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsid-
ered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts,’ in Interart Poetics:
Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, eds. Ulla-Britta Lager-
roth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 19–33,
and ‘Quotation, Enargeia, and the Function of Ekphrasis,’ in Pictures into
Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, eds. Valerie
Robillard and Els Jongeneel (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998),
21–34. In 2000, Siglind Bruhn radically redefined the concept as ‘repre-
sentation in one medium of a real or fictitious text composed in another
medium’ (Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting
[Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2000], 8). Ekphrasis has since been used in
discussions of theatricalization, film, tableau vivant, and digital works, to
name a few, all of which rhetorically expound upon the text of a different
medium.
49 Renate Brosch, ‘Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Responses to Image,’ Poetics
Today 39, no. 2 (2018): 227.
125
of ekphrasis gives it material depth and dimensionality. Timo-

thy Morton explains that vivid, often dramatic and imaginative,
statements descriptively generate an object, the expressive ‘spa-
ciousness’ and enduring ‘nowness’ of which exceed the borders
of its narrative frame.50 Fradenburg refines this position when
she explains that ‘the ekphrastic object is nearly always a relic,
living on, undead.’51 Morton’s and Fradenburg’s thinking allows
us to explore the hilt as a reliquary object of the barrow that
gathers material ‘spaciousness,’ temporal ‘nowness,’ and ‘un-
dead’ animation via Hrothgar’s description. Suspended in space,
time, and movement as a thing undead, the hilt does not simply
represent a diluvian story or the funerary world of giants. Via
ekphrasis, its engravings of past war, flood, destruction, duress,
and survival acquire dimensionality and performative agency.
They objectively display and gesture, extending an assemblage
of identity-making forces in space and in time. The hilt’s ekph-
rasis reaches out beyond the barrow’s mortuary interior and be-
yond the time of the giant’s funeral. In Heorot, ekphrasis shows
us a territory that once was lost and enables us to find it over and
over.
As an object that performs outside and beyond its spatiotem-
poral origins, the hilt’s ekphrastic displays seek interactions and
generate a response. Unwittingly, when Beowulf uses the hilt to
kill Grendel’s mother and decapitate Grendel, he activates the
full force of the hilt’s dying practices and wipes out the suffering
and estranged community of Grendelkin. Consequently, Hroth-
gar’s meditation upon the hilt proceeds to a meditation upon
Beowulf ’s fate, and the hilt’s territory of dying exacts its terri-
torializing forces upon Beowulf ’s living body. Hrothgar warns:
Nu is þines mægnes blæd

ane hwile; eft sona bið,
þæt þec adl oððe ecg eafoþes getwæfeð,
50 Timothy Morton, ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,’ New Literary

History 43, no. 2 (2012): 222.
51 Fradenburg, ‘Life’s Reach,’ 265.
126
oððe fyres feng, oððe flodes wylm,

oððe gripe meces, oððe gares fliht,
oððe atol yldo; oððe eagena bearhtm
forsiteð ond forsworceð; semninga bið,
þæt ðec, dryhtguma, deað oferswyðeð. (ll. 1761b–67a)
[Now is the glory of your power but a little while; presently,

in turn, it will be that disease or the sword will deprive you
of strength, or the grip of the fire or the surging of a wave, or
attack of a sword or the flight of a spear, or terrible old age;
or the brightness of your eyes will fail and become dim. Sud-
denly, death will overpower you, warrior.]
Hostile enemies, sickness, and infirmity encroach upon the safe

borders of Beowulf ’s body, serially, simultaneously, and cross-
modally. The fire’s grip, the wave’s surge, the sword’s attack, and
the spear’s flight enact a catalogue of protracted physical trau-
mas that are stretched across an unending temporal moment
that is ‘now’ [‘nu’], for ‘a little while’ [‘ane while’], ‘presently, in
turn’ [‘eft sona’], and ‘all of a sudden’ [‘semninga’]. Like the ma-
terial spaciousness of the hilt and the nowness of its temporal-
ity, Beowulf is caught up in the de- and re-territorializing forces
that once physically reordered Grendelkin and now physically
reorder him. Yet, unlike Grendel and his mother, who are killed
by a blade, the hilt’s ekphrasis transforms Beowulf into a rhe-
torical canvas upon which disasters sequentially and simultane-
ously erupt. Amidst total ruin, he survives. Beowulf lives on,
suspended between the forces of fire and wave, sword and spear,
old age and infirmity. He acquires dimension with each poetic
turn. The words ‘oððe…oððe…oððe’ become a delicate refrain
that not only invites tragedy but also animates his form with
descriptive texture and drama. Like the hilt, Beowulf is trans-
formed into a reliquary object that has been totally ruined in its
production process; his warrior’s body has been unforged and
made undead. To return again to Fradenburg, Beowulf, like the
127
hilt, is a relic that has become ekphrastic: ‘embellish[ed]’ and

‘art[ful],’ restively alive, even in death.52
As an ekphrastic object, Beowulf exceeds his status as a hu-
man participant in the world of the poem and is now a commu-
nicative form. He is a zone of contact between the living practic-
es of Geats and Danes who circulate across the barrow’s exterior
surfaces and the dying practices of an unnamed community of
giants that has been buried and hidden within the barrow’s fu-
nerary interior. In drawing together Beowulf’s barrow territories
of life and death, Beowulf functions as an undead, liminal zone
that stretches across the poem’s territorial strata. Is he a mon-
ster or a hero? An adopted Dane or a Geat? Beowulf ’s ekphrasis
prompts us to ask not only who he is but, moreover, who we are.
These communicative aspects are a crucial part of ekphrasis. As
Liliane Louvel argues, ‘the performative aspect of visually im-
bued texts’ phenomenologically affects the reader, ‘work[ing] on
our senses, on our percepts, emotions, and bodies.’53 While the
readers of Beowulf (and the hilt) are communities within the
poem, for Louvel, the reader is extra-textual — a point to which
this chapter will return. As ‘word and image…time and space’
are ‘blend[ed]’ together, the reader’s body is ‘moved, “seized”
by ekphrasis, she — the reader — “is activated”.’54 She ‘reach[es]
unheard-of or unspoken truths’ and links ‘memory and imagi-
nation’ across time and space.55 Ekphrasis prompts emotional and
embodied responses that reassemble identity in relation to the ter-
ritory from which it emerges.
It is important to note that this is not the first time that
Beowulf has entered and emerged from a barrow. From Heorot
to the Grendelkin’s mere, from the dragon’s beorg to his own
biorh, Beowulf constantly enters and exits each of the poem’s
increasingly barrow-shaped structures, the last of which cir-
cuits back, via chiasmus, to Scyld’s funeral. Indeed, as Niles’s
52 Ibid., 109.
53 Liliane Louvel, ‘Types of Ekphrasis: An Attempt at Classification,’ Poetics
Today 39, no. 2 (2018): 247, 259.
54 Ibid., 259.
55 Ibid.
128
diagram (see Figure 1 above) and his essay make clear, each of
these episodes is organized according to its own internal ring
structure (and interlace patterns). Beowulf therefore reveals it-
self to be internally populated with barrows. As Beowulf moves
in and out of this virtual barrow cemetery, he becomes more
like to the dead than to the living with each entrance and exit
(see Figures 4 and 5), and he prompts ever more complex ques-
tions about Danes, Geats, and ourselves. Thus, Beowulf is not a
single or a singular barrow territory that, all at once, transforms
dying practices into living practices. Rather, it is an expanding
network of mortuary ‘homes’ to which Beowulf returns ‘again
and again’ in order to navigate the ever-becoming but never-
the-same process of identity making that phenomenologically
impacts the emotions and bodies of many different communi-
ties across many different times.56
Tumuli, Antiquarian Mourners, and Undead Saxons
Throughout the early modern period, barrows remained dy-

namic sites of community activity and continued to function as
landscapes engaged with a variety of living practices.57 However,
as Nicola Whyte explains, the rapid enclosure of open fields
56 Fradenburg, ‘Life’s Reach,’ 265.

57 For example, as Nicola Whyte explains, early modern communities con-
tinued to recognize the boundary-making function of barrows. Barrows
were ‘key focal points along customary routes’ that separated parishes
and estates and were used by seigniorial lords to designate the boundaries
of fold-course territories as late as the mid-eighteenth century. Likewise,
the early medieval function of barrows as meeting places ‘continued to
structure territorial jurisdictions into the post-medieval period,’ and
Whyte cites examples from early modern court cases that evidence that
the annual leet courts of Great Fransham, Great Dunham, Kempstone, and
Beeston took place at barrows. In addition, Whyte suggests the ongoing
connection between barrows and early modern gallows sites, and, as an
example, she references an eighteenth-century map of South Acre, ‘which
depicts a number of apparently extant barrows on “Gallow Hill Heath,”
possibly the remains of the Anglo-Saxon cwealmstow’ (Inhabiting the
Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 [Oxford: Windgather
Press at Oxbow, 2009], 146–54).
129
Figure 4. Cliff Hoppitt, aerial photograph of Sutton Hoo. Image cour-

tesy of Cliff Hoppitt.
Prologue First Fight Second Fight Third Fight Epilogue
Figure 5. Author’s diagram, inspired by Sutton Hoo aerial photo,

which maps how the internal and overarching ring structures of the
poem work together.
130
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rendered them

unavailable as area landmarks and for public use.58 No longer
territories on the landscape or territorial expressions of local
peoples, barrows were rapidly destroyed.59 For antiquarian James
Douglas, however, barrows are exciting places that warehouse
Britain’s ancestors, material culture, and history. When he exca-
vates their mortuary interiors, Douglas engages early medieval
barrows once again as geopolitical and expressive territories, ar-
ranging fragments of bone and artifacts into complete historical
portraits that he describes and illustrates in his archaeological
report, Nenia Britannica. In the process, Douglas is emotion-
ally and physically reordered by their ekphrastic displays. His
embodied emotions, affects, and performances are re-figured,
and his identity assemblage is de- and re-territorialized. While
Douglas is a respondent to the ekphrasis of grave goods and hu-
man remains, his embodied and emotional performances have a
transformative effect on the medieval barrows from which they
emerge. As Douglas interprets its funerary contents, the barrow
becomes a new kind of territory — an antiquarian one — and
Douglas comes to identify the early medieval peoples interred
within these barrows as Saxons.
In his preface to Nenia Britannica, James Douglas touches
upon changes in British barrows. According to Douglas, bar-
rows have now become remote places. On ‘barren ground; on
commons, moors…[and]…near villages, of no great name or
importance in history…it is only by a casual discovery with the
plow, or the accidental use of the spade and pick-axe, that the
contents of these interments have been found.’60 No longer a site
around which communities settle and assemble, and also stake
58 Ibid., 163.
59 Graeme Kirkham, ‘“Rip it up, and spread it over the field”: Post-Medieval
Agriculture and the Destruction of Monuments; A Case Study from Corn-
wall,’ Landscapes 13, no. 2 (2012): 1–20.
60 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 1. Douglas’s assessment contradicts extensive
evidence by Nicola Whyte that points towards the continued relevance
of barrows to communities living in the later medieval and early modern
periods (Inhabiting the Landscape, 146–54).
131
Figure 6a. Aquatint of numbered artifacts from ‘Tumulus 1’ at

Chatham, Kent, in James Douglas, Nenia Britannica; or, A sepulchral
history of Great Britain (London: Printed by John Nichols; for George
Nicol, in Pall-Mall, Bookseller to his Majesty, 1793), 2. Image courtesy
of The Newberry Library.
132
Figure 6b. Tumulus I in James Douglas, Nenia Britannica; or, A sepul-

chral history of Great Britain (London: Printed by John Nichols; for
George Nicol, in Pall-Mall, Bookseller to his Majesty, 1793), 2. Image
courtesy of The Newberry Library.
133
out their borders and do battle, Britain’s barrows are incompati-

ble with and incidental to contemporary agricultural and indus-
trial modes of living. For the antiquarian, however, the opening
up of a barrow with a ‘spade and pick-axe’ is not a ‘casual’ or
‘accidental…discovery’ but an intentional activity.
On the first page of Nenia Britannica’s archaeological report,
in the middle of a plate of artifact illustrations, is a figure num-
bered ‘1.’ ‘Figure 1’ presents the outline of a ring ditch, sedimen-
tary fill, and a rectangular coffin (see Figure 6a). In its center,
accompanied by a variety of weapons, stands a skeleton that is
remarkably intact and strangely vibrant. Its skull is in slight pro-
file, its right hand leans upon its spear and touches a seax, its
left hand reaches for its sword, and its right foot is out-turned
in a gentlemanly stance. Armed and at the ready, this skeleton
is stylized according to late-eighteenth century portraiture, im-
pressing upon the viewer that these bones need only a little flesh
on them in order for this long-dead ‘warrior’ to come alive. Fig-
ure 1 turns his head and casts his eyes across the page towards
‘TUMULUS I.,’ ‘Fig. 1’ (see Figure 6b).
The page-long description that accompanies and contextual-
izes the illustration states that ‘Fig[ure] 1. represents the hori-
zontal section of a tumulus opened on the Chatham Lines*.’61
The asterisk that marks the end of this clause draws the reader’s
eye towards a lengthy footnote, which explains that when ‘la-
bourers and soldiers…travers[ed] a range of these small tumuli’
in order to dig out the defensive earthworks — the Lines — that
surround the military town of Chatham, Kent, they dig up
‘some spear-heads, umbos of shields, and a few other fragments
of arms.’62 For Douglas, ‘opening’ the barrows at Chatham is a
productive activity. In the physical motion of carving out earth,
new earthworks are built, and old ones are disturbed. Military
men of the present tense encounter military artifacts of the past.
Douglas seems to sense the de- and re-territorializing stakes
of excavation, and upon drawing together Chatham’s Lines and
61 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 3.

62 Ibid., author’s emphasis.
134
barrows, its martial bodies and artifacts, he imagines a simi-

lar bridge between military and mortuary geographies. Posi-
tioned on ‘the western slope of the steep hill,’ which ‘descend[s]
to the barrack gate’ of the Kentish militia, Douglas explains
that Chatham’s barrows are ‘bounded’ and ‘enclose[d]’ on the
‘extremity’ and ‘interior’ by the militia’s barrack-wall and the
Lines’s retaining wall.63 Douglas’s cartography redistricts the
landscape. Clustered together on a hilltop slope and routed
towards the entryway of a soldier’s living quarters, Douglas’s
language transforms Chatham’s barrows into a military ter-
ritory that ‘descends’ to and is surrounded by a military set-
tlement.64 These geopolitical acts have a transformative effect
on Chatham’s soldiers. When Douglas begins to recount their
excavations a second time, the unnamed assemblage of ‘la-
bourers and soldiers’ that once ‘traversed’ a ‘range of…tumuli’
is replaced by a ‘Hanoverian encampment’ that is ‘situated on
them.’65 This Germanic military body no longer freely crosses
the landscapes of the dead but temporarily settles on them. As
they dwell here, they sink into the grave, becoming secondary
inhabitants that Douglas himself now claims to excavate. He
identifies Chatham’s ‘Hanoverian encampment’ only by way of
‘the remains of the[ir]…kitchens,’ which ‘were to be seen on the
centre of the burial ground.’66
Although Douglas was a member of the Kentish militia, an
engineer on the Chatham Lines, and a supervisor of its earth-
works, he did not physically engage in the labor of barrow ex-
cavation. The artifacts dug up by soldiers and recovered from
Chatham’s barrows found their way to Douglas’s office,67 where
he collected and then examined, sketched, and engraved them,
arranging his representations of bone and funerary objects onto
lithographic plates. In his office, not in the field, Douglas exca-
vates from his armchair. As he handles materials that have been
63 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 3n*.

64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Jessup, Man of Many Talents, 25.
135
brought out of Tumulus I, Douglas (re)arranges them. He posi-

tions bones and artifacts such that a dead Saxon and its funeral
tableau suggest the posture and stance of Chatham’s living sol-
diers.
Within the first pages of Nenia Britannica, Douglas refigures
Chatham’s barrows — remote places of little interest to nearby
communities — into what appears to be a military territory.
Then he fills this territory with soldier occupants. While Doug-
las identifies the soldiers who excavate Tumulus I as Hanoverian
(an adjective that references the Germanic origins of Britain’s
current monarch), he says nothing about the skeleton’s iden-
tity. Towards the end of Nenia Britannica, however, Douglas
makes historical assessments about British tumuli and barrow
artifacts that draw Chatham’s military territory and the living
practices of its Hanoverian soldiers towards a Germanic past.
In a lengthy ‘OBSERVATIONS’ section, Douglas rightly notes
that Anglo-Saxon barrows are small, round, and often appear
in clusters. Likewise, he dates them to the pre-Christian period,
which extends from ‘the year 429 [when] the Saxons arrived’
to ‘the admission of cemeteries within the walls and near to
churches anno 742.’68 Douglas further connects these Saxon bar-
rows by evaluating their grave goods. Specifically, he focuses on
‘the nature of the arms, the most convincing proof of a parity
of custom,’ and he cross-references the illustration of a Saxon
soldier in a manuscript copy of Prudentius’s Psychomachia with
a sword from Tumulus I, the shield boss of Tumulus VII, and
‘[s]pears, knives, and axes,’ which Douglas claims to have ‘in
great numbers.’69 Douglas further surmises that these weap-
ons burials identify Saxons who were either not ‘peasantry’ or
‘under military enrolment.’70 Douglas’s observations bear heav-
ily upon the grave plan of Tumulus I. The circular ditch, which
is drawn tightly around a skeleton’s coffin, resembles Douglas’s
statements regarding the size and shape of Saxon barrows. The
68 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 127, 128.

69 Ibid., 128, 128n1, 128n3.
70 Ibid., 128n4.
136
weaponry inside the grave suggests the identity of a pre-Chris-

tian, migration-period Saxon male who is either of high rank or
enrolled as a foot soldier.
The barrows at Chatham seem to be a military territory
shaped by its Lines and barracks and the activities of its sol-
diers. However, when Douglas makes assessments regarding the
funerary aspects of these barrows, they become, first and fore-
most, an antiquarian territory. It is constructed from Douglas’s
office, rather than from the excavation site, and according to his
semi-professional assessments of barrow landscape features and
grave goods. Douglas directs the living places and practices of
Chatham’s Germanic (Hanoverian) community towards the dy-
ing places and practices of another Germanic (Saxon) commu-
nity. He positions a military territory within an antiquarian one
and, in so doing, reassembles — de- and re-territorializes — the
identity assemblages of Britain’s present and past Germanic sol-
diers.
Douglas presents this re- and de-territorialized Saxon soldier
visually in Tumulus I. Its skeletal body and the military grave
goods that surround it represent the bones and artifacts that
were excavated from a Chatham barrow, sent to Douglas’s mi-
litia office, then arranged according to Nenia Britannica’s anti-
quarian assessments. As a consequence, this skeleton seems to
move and to step out of its grave, such that Figure 1 becomes
an object. Its physical body and material grave goods extend
the intertwined identity-making performances of two different
groups of Germanic soldiers from their spatiotemporal domains
in Chatham’s barrows towards the new domain of Tumulus I. As
an object that not only provides access to barrow territories that
have been destroyed through excavation but, moreover, enables
the viewer to re-find these territories over and over, again, each
time she looks at its illustrated grave plan, Figure 1 of Tumulus
I reveals itself to be ekphrastic. It is a warrior-relic that ‘liv[es]
on, undead’ in the eternal ‘nowness’ of Tumulus I.71 As ekph-
71 Fradenburg, ‘Life’s Reach,’ 265; Morton, ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of

Poetry,’ 222.
137
rasis, Figure 1 performs in order to seek a phenomenological

response that, to recall Liliane Louvel, ‘works on our senses, on
our percepts, emotions, and bodies.’72 Therefore, when it looks
across the page at ‘TUMULUS I’ (see Figure 6b), its gaze settles
on the illustration located above this statement.73 In this illustra-
tion, an unnamed person sits on top of an unexcavated barrow.
He clasps a scythe in one hand and an urn in another, materials
of grief and collecting that suggest he is an antiquarian.74 In a
lengthy footnote regarding a tumulus near Broom, Kent, Doug-
las clarifies not only the barrow-sitter’s antiquarian identity but
also the antiquarian’s emotional and embodied responses to
Figure 1’s ekphrastic gaze.
Before turning to Broom, it is important to note that
Chatham’s barrows were the first that Douglas encountered.
Subsequent to Chatham, Douglas becomes, arguably, obsessed
with British barrows, overseeing the excavation of hundreds of
mounds over the course of his lifetime.75 At Broom, a site he
excavated long after Chatham, Douglas claims that his ‘restless’
‘spirit’ has the all-consuming urge to ‘ransack’ graves. While
Douglas’s excavations at Broom prompt in him reckless behav-
72 Louvel, ‘Types of Ekphrasis,’ 259, my emphasis.

73 See note 2 above.
74 While Nenia is a Latin word that references a funeral song, a song of
lament, or a dirge, its meaning becomes a point of contention immedi-
ately after the book’s publication. In August 1793, an anonymous reviewer
smugly writes that ‘the title itself is objectionable, and only applicable to a
dissertation on the funeral songs of the ancient Britons’ (‘Douglas’s Nenia
Britannica,’ The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature 8 [1793]: 415).
The following month, in the October edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine,
Douglas rebuts his reviewer, arguing, upon the authority of Festus, that
‘Nenia’ references a goddess, not a dirge, and claiming that before his
death Samuel Johnson gave Douglas his personal blessing for the title (‘Mr.
Douglas’s “Nenia Britannica”,’ Gentleman’s Magazine [October 1793]: 881).
75 According to Jessup, ‘[b]y 1782, something like 86 barrows or levelled
graves [at Chatham] had been opened and their contents described and
sometimes carefully drawn…In all, if we may depend on later topog-
raphers such as G.A. Cooke in the 1819 edition of his Pocket County
Directory of Kent, Douglas opened no less than 100 graves’ (Man of Many
Talents, 24).
138
iors, he cautions that ‘[t]ragical abominations’ can result from

the antiquarian’s protracted attachments to the dead.76 Doug-
las quotes from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, a report on
urn-burial in Norfolk and a work that not only confuses exca-
vating the dead with mourning them but also recognizes that
there are psychic consequences for the antiquarian who desires
to maintain these emotional ties once the excavation is over. As
Browne and Douglas, who quotes him, explain, should the ex-
cavator be unable to set aside her mourning — should she desire
to maintain her relationship with the dead — she may uncon-
sciously incorporate them. In other words, she may position
her affections for and memories of the dead within her uncon-
scious such that they continue to live within her. She may build
a psychic crypt for them so that they can inhabit her.77 Douglas,
quoting Browne, describes the effects of incorporation when he
writes that to excavate is ‘to be gnawed out of our graves,’ to have
‘our skulls’ and ‘our bones’ crafted into ‘drinking bowls’ and ‘to-
bacco pipes,’ instruments meant for imbibing and inhaling the
spirits of the dead.78 In order to avoid attachments that lead to
the formation of psychic crypts, Douglas, following Browne, re-
76 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 39 (unnumbered note).

77 These psychoanalytic concepts are discussed and explained extensively in
Chapter 2. As Maria Abraham and Nicholas Torok explain, this ‘sealed-off
psychic space’ warehouses the ‘exquisite corps[e] of a loved one who we
cannot bear to mourn’ (The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and trans. Nicholas T.
Rand [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994], 141).
78 Douglas, Nenia Britannica, 39n, quoting from Sir Thomas Browne’s
Hydriotaphia, urne-buriall, or, a discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately
found in Norfolk (London: Printed for Hen. Browne at the Signe of the
Gun in Ivy-Lane, 1658), 48. Note that Douglas spells ‘knav’d’ as ‘gnawed,’
and he amends ‘Pipes’ to ‘tobacco pipes.’ Recall from Chapter 2 that in
the Old Norse poem Krákumál, Ragnar claims that in death he will drink
beer from ‘the curved-tree of skulls,’ an elaborate kenning that references a
drinking horn. Krákumál’s emphasis on orality engages a rigorous discus-
sion about the psychopolitics of incorporation, and Abraham and Torok
associate food and drink imagery which emphasizes illicit acts of swallow-
ing whole with the enactment of incorporation (The Shell and the Kernel,
128–29).
139
vises his relationship to the Broom ‘antients’ as a post-mortem

friendship, a shift in affections that keeps them at arm’s length.79
Douglas further recalibrates his emotional attachments to
the dead at Broom by transforming acts of archaeological grief
into acts of professional collecting. Douglas explains that he
removes human remains from a barrow and puts them into
a curiosity ‘cabinet’ where ‘rotten bones’ become ‘everlasting
treasures.’80 As collectibles, however, another’s bone and ash
press Douglas’s own body in the direction of the grave, for as he
touches, arranges, and looks upon them, he imagines himself,
in the third person, ‘mouldering in his own sepulchre’ until his
decaying body is irreverently exhumed.81 Despite all of his cau-
tionary words and measures, Douglas’s mourning is protracted
through his collecting, and by means of these antiquarian activi-
ties, Douglas finds himself suspended in a state of living death.
In order to breathe vitality into his own body, Douglas returns
to his cabinet, where he discards the ‘everlasting treasures’ of his
friend’s remains, replaces them with ‘a little superfluous treas-
ure,’ then piously re-inters the body within its barrow.82
If Douglas continues to mourn the dead at Broom, has he
incorporated them? Has a psychic crypt formed within his un-
conscious? Regardless of whether or not Douglas physically
dug up the graves at Broom, his narrative presents excavation
as a physically — and emotionally — charged endeavor for the
antiquarian. These highly dynamic performances of ransacking
graves, mourning ancient friends, and collecting their bones
result in physical and emotional transformations. To put it in
Deleuzoguattarian terms, Douglas stages excavation as a de- and
re-territorializing activity. His mind and body — his embodied
mind — are subject to radical shifts in identity. Douglas says
nothing else in Nenia Britannica regarding excavation. However,
when Douglas’s mourning and collecting are associated with the
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., author’s emphasis.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
140
image of the barrow-sitter, his antiquarian practices show them-

selves to be refracted in its scythe and urn. The barrow-sitter
stands in, visually, for Douglas, who responds to the ekphrastic
gaze of the Saxon foot-soldier: he collects bones and artifacts; he
assesses their historical provenance and illustrates them; then,
he arranges them in a cabinet. These semi-professional move-
ments, which have become Douglas’s antiquarian living prac-
tices, are expressed in the barrow-sitter’s physical posture, af-
fective stance, and proximity to the grave. In short, the Saxon
of Figure 1 transforms Douglas’s mind and body as he excavates
it, and Douglas visually records these de- and re-territorializing
displays in his illustration of the barrow-sitter.
In the process of responding to Figure 1, this image of the
antiquarian barrow-sitter likewise becomes ekphrastic. It looks
across the page and gazes back at the skeletal soldier, whose ‘rot-
ten bones’ are now vibrantly displayed as ‘everlasting treasures,’
and whose military grave goods are now ‘superfluous treasure.’
The barrow-sitter’s gaze transforms the Saxon foot-soldier of
Figure 1 into the centerpiece of an aesthetically pleasing ar-
rangement, numbered ‘1’ through ‘10.’ The entire collection of
treasure is bordered by a thin sepia line, as if it is one virtual
‘drawer’ of a much larger curiosity cabinet. Suddenly, Tumulus
I, along with the other tumuli of Nenia Britannica, reveal them-
selves to be artifact illustrations that Douglas has collected from
his and others’ barrow excavations.
As both archaeological report and cabinet of antiquarian cu-
riosities, Nenia Britannica acknowledges that the early medieval
barrow has become a new kind of antiquarian territory by which,
to adapt the language of Jean Baudrillard, Douglas ‘construct[s]’
his own ‘mourning’ even as the Saxon foot-soldier inside the
excavated barrow ‘represents [his] own death.’83 The solitary
mourner that grieves on top of an unexcavated TUMULUS I
and the excavated skeleton that lies within Tumulus I transform
an unopened and forgotten barrow on the Chatham landscape
83 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (New York:
Verso, 2005), 104.
141
into a site where a Saxon soldier, in proximity to a Hanover-

ian one, awaits antiquarian recovery. From the materials of an
old burial mound, a new territory has been erected. TUMULUS
I / Tumulus I — constructed by de- and re-territorializing the
living practices of Hanoverian soldiers as the dying practices
of Saxons — makes a home out of a grave. Consequently, it is
a ‘regressiv[e]’ territory where, as Baudrillard again might also
say, Douglas ‘is dead, but he literally survives himself through
his collection.’84 Yet the Saxon soldier and barrow-sitter that oc-
cupy this tumulus are figures that have been removed from an
actual barrow and positioned within Douglas’s Nenia Britan-
nica. From the pages of this archaeological report (not from
within an early medieval barrow) they broadcast the performa-
tive gestures of a soldier and an antiquarian. They operate as
an ekphrastic pair. The undead, reliquary forms of an excavated
body and its excavator yoke dying to living practices, and they
enable all who view them to find this newly created antiquarian
territory over and over each time they scan the pages of Nenia
Britannica. Consequently, although this undead, reliquary pair
gaze at one another, they nonetheless seek interactions and re-
sponses from others.
Despite the temporal distance, connections abound between
the Old English Beowulf and James Douglas’s Nenia Britannica.
Both are invested in discussing early medieval barrows, and
both are concerned with converting their textual forms into a
network of barrows. For Beowulf, chiasmus and interlace con-
struct the poem into a barrow cemetery; for Nenia Britannica,
chapters called tumuli transform the archaeological report into
book of barrows. By positioning geopolitical territories within
literary and archaeological forms, Beowulf and Nenia Britannica
locate the expressive territory of the early medieval barrow. Fur-
ther, when Beowulf and Douglas loot and excavate mortuary
interiors, they encounter ekphrastic displays of weapons and
bones that emotionally and physically reorder them. Conse-
quently, Beowulf and Douglas become ekphrastic. Independent
84 Ibid., 104.
142
and unknown to one another, these literary and archaeologi-

cal figures seek respondents across time and space and into the
future.
The conceptual parallels between Beowulf and Nenia Britan-
nica are extensive, yet these two texts are temporally and ter-
ritorially distinct. While both are constructed in relation to the
early medieval barrow, Beowulf and Nenia Britannica belong to
different moments in time, and, consequently, they encounter
very different communities who ‘live’ upon barrow surfaces and
‘die’ within barrow interiors. Beowulf’s Danes, Geats, Gendelkin,
and giants are not the soldiers and antiquarians of Nenia Britan-
nica. Likewise, Beowulf is not James Douglas. The identity as-
semblages — the territorializing expressions — that are brought
into ekphrastic circulation on the pages of Beowulf and Nenia
Britannica are fundamentally asynchronous. Yet their shared
ekphrasis keeps them on the move, seeking interactions and
soliciting responses by way of embodied poesis. Beowulf, the
Saxon foot-soldier, and the antiquarian barrow-sitter of Tumu-
lus I circulate in the protracted present, occupying a zone that
extends from death to life, and from center to elsewhere, in a
constant motion that travels ceaselessly between then and now.
As of yet, however, the reliquary body of Beowulf is unknown to
the Saxon soldier and barrow-sitter, and this acquaintance will
come much later.
Nenia Britannica was dismissed by reviewers upon its pub-
lication, and Douglas’s widow eventually sold her husband’s
collection of barrow artifacts to Sir Richard Colt Hoare due to
financial need. Yet, as England’s nineteenth-century political cli-
mate began to emphasize nationalist and imperialist discourses,
Douglas and his Nenia Britannica begin to gather recognition.
In 1819, Hoare gifted Douglas’s artifacts to Oxford’s Ashmolean
Museum, thereby endowing it with the country’s most extensive
and varied collection of Anglo-Saxon artifacts.85 In the follow-
85 See A Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum: Descriptive of the Zoological

Specimens, Antiquities, Coins, and Miscellaneous Curiosities (Oxford: S.
Collingwood, 1836), 128–31.
143
ing years, Nenia Britannica gained in popularity among Victo-

rian antiquarians interested in what Douglas had identified as
the early Saxon period. These Victorians were motivated his-
torically by a narrative of Saxon conquest of Britain, politically
by ideologies of Empire, and genealogically by a belief that the
martial character of their Saxon ancestors lived on in Britain’s
present generation. The excavation, collection, and illustration
of certain kinds of grave goods and burial assemblages became
critical tools for generating a Saxon racial identity: an inherit-
able profile of traits that could be mapped onto the behaviors,
desires, and physical characteristics of members of Britain’s
highly militarized empire. As Victorian antiquarians began to
oversee the excavation of small round barrows on the British
landscape, they employed Douglas’s illustrated tumuli as an ar-
chaeological catalogue to compare and date the artifacts which
they found. While a low percentage of these graves contained
weapons,86 antiquarians were keen to recover the material cul-
ture of Saxon warrior elites because in their minds, weapons
burials refracted the racial profile of imperial Britons. Victorian
antiquarians used Douglas’s illustration of the Saxon foot-sol-
dier as a template when sketching weapons burials, which they
considered, in accordance with Douglas, to be exemplary of the
pre-Christian, or early Saxon period.
As Victorian antiquarians assess their barrow excavations in
relation to Douglas’s Tumulus I, the Saxon soldier and barrow-
sitter exceed their function as reference materials.87 They show
86 Although Douglas emphasizes the great number of arms that he has found
in Saxon graves, he admits, in a footnote, that ‘it was not in the propor-
tion of one in twenty [barrows] which produced arms of any kind’ (Nenia
Britannica, 128n4).
87 Archaeologists discuss the ekphrasis of archaeological images, albeit using
different terms. As Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser write, ‘archaeological
visualization[s]’ are ‘a coded system’ that functions as ‘both symbol and
communication.’ They create what Smiles and Moser call a ‘constructed
past’ that ‘produces some of its most long-lasting effects’ on the discipline
(‘Introduction: The Image in Question,’ in Envisioning the Past: Archaeolo-
gy an the Image, eds. Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser [Oxford: Blackwell,
2005], 5, 6). See also Brian Leigh Molyneaux, ‘Introduction: The Cultural
144
these antiquarians a territory where Saxon foot-soldiers stand in

their graves as if ready to fight again (and again), and antiquar-
ians make this post-mortem animation possible by performa-
tively mourning and physically collecting Saxon artifacts and
bones. Antiquarians respond to the ekphrasis of Tumulus I in
mind and in body. They play the role of the barrow-sitter, and,
as Douglas predicted, their activities result in the formation of
psychic crypts. These Victorian antiquarians are now inhabited
by the dead — they are de- and re-territorialized by imaginary
performances of excavation. Consequently, when they adapt
Douglas’s grave plans in order to illustrate newly excavated bar-
rows, Victorians evidence these changes to their own identities
by reassembling the physical features and grave goods of Saxon
foot-soldiers. As these Victorians re-create the ekphrastic gazes
that emerge between the images in Tumulus I, they transform
the early medieval barrow once again into an antiquarian terri-
tory that is now inhabited by Anglo-Saxons.
Sleeping Saxons, Post-mortem Tenancies, and the Encryption

of Race
William Wylie is one of Douglas’s Victorian readers. He employs

Nenia Britannica extensively as a reference that guides him in the
writing of his highly influential Fairford Graves, an archaeologi-
cal report on the barrow cemetery at Fairford, Gloucestershire.88
One grave, excavated on March 7th, becomes the touchstone for
his entire excavation. Upon opening it, Wylie remarks, in words
that sound as if it they were voiced by Douglas’s barrow-sitter,
that to the left of the skeleton’s head lies a ‘sadly decayed’ cup
Life of Images,’ in The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in

Archaeology, ed. Brian Leigh Molyneaux (New York: Routledge, 1997),
1–10, and Stephanie Moser, ‘Archaeological Visualization: Early Artifact
Visualization and the Birth of the Archaeological Image,’ in Archaeological
Theory Today, ed. Ian Hodder, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 316–17.
88 William Wylie, Fairford Graves: A Record of Researches in an Anglo-Saxon
Burial Place in Glouchestershire (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1852).
145
that ‘still hung together.’89 Although Wylie’s language identifies

grief as the affective means by which the cup’s decaying pieces of
wood and metal remain ‘together,’ he extends this assessment of
the artifact’s fragile togetherness in the direction of the excava-
tors who take it out of the ground. Wylie writes, ‘we were able
to remove it,’ and the ‘we’ of Fairford’s excavators becomes the
alliterative stave against which Wylie fashions the group’s emo-
tional response to the act of physically excavating the cup from
its burial site: ‘It is wonderful that a wooden vessel should have
existed at all for so many centuries, in this wet soil.’90
Like Nenia Britannica, Wylie’s archaeological report under-
scores barrow digging as embodied acts of mourning and col-
lecting. Note well that despite the language of hands-on exca-
vation, Wylie, like Douglas, was not necessarily present at the
Fairford excavation site.91 Nonetheless, embodied performance
and physical movement are key to this scene. Unlike Nenia,
however, the excavations at Fairford are not solitary activities.
An unidentified group reaches for the cup and responds, in uni-
son, to its perpetual decay by mourning it.92 As this group’s ex-
cavation shifts from the artifacts at the grave’s outer perimeter
towards its interior where a body lies, the cup’s ‘sad decay’ and
the excavators’ collective mourning are amplified by their next
find: a ‘corroded’ sword.93 This huge sword is tucked underneath
an ossified collar bone and extends past radius, ulna, and pha-
89 Ibid., 20.
90 Ibid.
91 As Howard Williams explains, Wylie distinguishes the archaeologist, a
‘middle-class gentleman and scholar’ who interprets artifacts, from the
uneducated laborer, who digs them up (‘Anglo-Saxon and Victorian Ar-
chaeology: William Wylie’s Fairford Graves,’ Early Medieval Europe 16, no. 1
[2008]: 62).
92 Elsewhere, William Wylie credits ‘Douglas and his modern followers’
for antiquarian activities by which ‘we have arrived at a more correct
apprehension of our own national antiquities,’ a statement that extends
the purview of Douglas and ‘his modern followers’ towards an unnamed
‘we’ that identifies itself by ‘our national antiquities’ (‘The Graves of the
Alemanni at Oberflacht in Suabia,’ Archaeologia 36 [1855]: 129).
93 Wylie, Fairford Graves, 20.
146
langes. It holds together a skeleton’s fragmented form despite

its own material corrosion. As Fairford’s excavators shift their
attentions from artifact to bone, Wylie explains that ‘it’ — this
self-same sword — has been found in multiple ‘Saxon barrows’
across England and ‘also in Livonian, Burgundian, and Frank-
ish graves.’94 ‘It’ is ‘of the same type’ as those of Scandinavia.95 ‘It’
‘answers to Plutarch’s account of the Cymbric weapon,’ and ‘it’
‘exactly corresponds to the description of Suevi weapons.’96 Just
as the sword’s materiality holds together the discrete bones of
the skeleton, the sword’s material culture connects the graves
of people from across northern Europe. On the one hand, the
sword is mobilized as an anthropological tool that signals cul-
tural connections between peoples. At the same time, the en-
tanglement between sword and bone creates cultural-racial ties.
Although corroded by the soil’s dampness, as Wylie’s narrative
continues to describe this sword, its massive military form gath-
ers together a kin group whose Saxon, Livonian, Burgundian,
et alii members belong to one ‘great and noble Teutonic fami-
ly’97 — a family that Wylie references on the first page of his Pref-
ace as ‘the Teutonic race.’98
As if responding to the ekphrastic gazes exchanged between
Douglas’s solitary barrow-sitter and his Saxon soldier-skeleton,
an unnamed group at Fairford mourns and collects the artifacts
and bone from one grave in order to extend the scope of their
grief and collecting across many graves in northern Europe. Do
they, like (or unlike) Douglas, engage in a mourning that psy-
chically encrypts the dead? Answers are, again, unclear. How-
ever, as this community of antiquarians stands, like Douglas,
over material crypts and imagines living practices of excavation,
its affective movements and gestures assemble the bodies of a
Teutonic race.
94 Ibid., 21.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., vi.
98 Ibid., v.
147
Fairford’s antiquarians and its Teutonic family are assembled

together in ‘The Saxon Chieftain: Written on Opening a Saxon
Grave, March 7, 1851,’99 a poem that reframes the March 7th ex-
cavation as an act that suspends the boundaries between death
and life and exchanges body organs of the dead and the living.
In his grave, this ‘Saxon Chieftain’ merely ‘sleeps,’ and when the
wooden vessel and corroded sword are arranged around his
body, they are no longer artifacts of decay and corrosion: ‘still at
his head the festal goblet stands…Still seeks the trenchant blade
those nerveless hands.’100 These uncorrupted grave goods locate
the uncorrupted head and hand of this sleeping Saxon, who ma-
terially, physically, and biologically endures. He lies ‘still.’ Yet,
his stillness is made possible by the embodied emotional perfor-
mances of the March 7th excavators. The unnamed ‘we’ of Wylie’s
archaeological report are figured here as ‘kindred men,’ Saxon
relatives who look upon their chieftain and ‘kindly breathe / A
pious requiem to the noble dead.’101 The mourning song of anti-
quarians establishes a relationship with this chieftain that is ar-
ticulated along relational and racial lines. He is their leader and
kinsman, and, consequently, all are Saxons. These connections
allow for a confusion of temporalities and of physical bodies. As
mourners, it is unclear whether these antiquarians exist in the
present or the past. In the space of this confusion, their mourn-
ing sounds breathe life into the chieftain’s Saxon lungs, and his
Saxon lungs animate the antiquarians’ other internal organs:
‘still sounds the Saxon tongue as erst of old, / In Saxon breast
still beats the Saxon heart.’102 From death to sleep, from skeletal
fragments to a complete skeleton, this Saxon Chieftain still lives
in the speaking tongues and beating hearts — in the bodies — of
its excavator-kinsmen who still mourn him. This exchange of
breath, spirit, and vitality articulates the racial profile of Saxon
bodies, who, whether past or present, are characterized by their
99 Ibid., 38–40.
100 Ibid., 38.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
148
imperial impulses and the ’God bless’d…empire-tree’ to which

they belong.103
The fantastic body crossings of ‘The Saxon Chieftain’ sug-
gest the process of psychic incorporation, and the grave plan
that accompanies this poem signals crypt formation. ‘Sketch of
a Grave: Opened March 7th’104 is a grave plan that ‘follows the
examplar’ of Douglas’s Figure 1.105 Unlike Figure 1, which looks
alive except for its skeletonized body, the warrior occupant of
Wylie’s illustration is an entirely lifeless, anonymous, and fading
fragment of bones (see Figure 7). Through the protracted and
embodied performances of community mourning, the life force
of this Saxon has been called to presence, animated, and depos-
ited within the bodies of his imperial kin, who keep him ‘alive’
in psychic crypts that have been built for him. All that remains
are the material leftovers, so to speak, of this Saxon. And as if to
underscore this point, Wylie positions ‘Sketch of a Grave’ as the
visual conclusion to Fairford Graves.
Around the time that Fairford Graves is published, Charles
Roach Smith’s second and third volumes of Collectanea Antiqua
extend and revise further Douglas’s grave plan now that psychic
crypts have been built for its Saxon warrior. In Volume 2, Smith
declares that Nenia Britannica is ‘one of the most useful, and
has, in the department to which it is more specifically devoted,
been more serviceable, as a work of reference, than any other we
possess.’106 By praising Douglas within a section called ‘Anglo-
Saxon Remains,’ Smith refines the racial identity of Douglas’s
Saxon foot-soldier and Wylie’s Saxon chieftain, who are now
perceived as denizens of Britain rather than Migration-Era
figures. Volume 3 opens with an excavation at Ozengell, Kent,
in southeastern England, a site that marks this transition from
Saxon to Anglo-Saxon identity. Smith’s ‘imagination…pictures
the traditional advent of Hengist and Horsa, the supposed lead-
103 Ibid., 39.

104 Ibid., n.p.
105 See Williams, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and Victorian Archaeology,’ 81.
106 Charles Roach Smith, Collectanea Antiqua, 7 vols. (London: J. Russell
Smith, 1848–1880), 2:156.
149
Figure 7. William Wylie, ‘Sketch of a Grave,’ in Fairford Graves: A Re-

cord of Researches in an Anglo-Saxon Burial Place in Glouchestershire
(Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1852), n.p. Image courtesy of the Library
of Congress.
150
ers of the people, among the immediate descendants of whom

were the tenants of the Ozingell graves.’107 As the arrival point of
Anglo-Saxon England’s mythical Saxon fathers and the burial
site of their ‘immediate’ Anglo-Saxon ‘descendants,’ Ozengell is
a landscape of romantic expectation and a place of post-mortem
‘tenan[cy].’ Secure in their psychic (and material) crypts, the
Saxons and Anglo-Saxons buried at Ozengell are not entirely
dead, and their undead presence calls into presence an antiquar-
ian group. When area railroad workers stumble upon some of
these graves, ‘about thirteen graves were laid open by order of
Sir [William Henry] Rolfe, who kindly invited on the occasion
Messrs. [Thomas] Wright, [James Orchard] Halliwell, [Freder-
ick William] Fairholt, [Edwin?] Keet, and myself [Charles Roach
Smith]’ to join him in the excavation.108 Framed by Smith’s intro-
duction, this ‘kindly invited’ group of well-known antiquarians,
scholars, and engravers sets out to re-discover the Anglo-Saxon
relations of Hengest and Horsa and to create what might now be
considered a professional community of antiquarians that finds
the racialized image of its collective body in the skeletonized
figure of a grave plan.
Smith does not document the excavation. There is no grief
expressed for the dead and no funeral dirges sung. Nor does
Smith mention the processes of collecting and assembling ar-
tifacts. As bodies that have already been enlivened through
incorporation and positioned within the psychic crypts of an
antiquarian group, there is no need to re-stage the embodied
performances by which the dead were fantastically assembled
within the living. After describing the location of Ozengell and
the antiquarians who are present, Smith reproduces a sketch of
one of Ozengell’s tenants (see Figure 8). This ‘annexed engrav-
ing, from a sketch made by Mr. Fairholt at the time of discov-
ery, represents one of the most interesting of the deposits.’109 In
addition to its erect position and lifelike stance, this ‘perfect’
107 Ibid., 3:2.

108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., 3:3.
151
Figure 8. From Charles Roach Smith, Collectanea Antiqua, Vol. 3

(London: J. Russell Smith, 1854), 3. Image courtesy of University of
Colorado–Boulder.
152
‘Anglo-Saxon’ skeleton appears to have tissue on him.110 A thou-

sand years of tenancy in an Ozengell grave has left his arms and
legs gaunt, his eyes hollow, and his cheeks sunken. Yet his spear-
head is still sharp, his sword is curved like a pirate’s cutlass, and
the decayed wooden parts of his weapons are drawn in with a
dotted line, creating the illusion that they are still present and
whole. In the psychic crypts of Smith’s antiquarians, this ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ lives on, perfect, present, and complete. Consequently,
when Smith’s grave plan illustrates the physical body of this An-
glo-Saxon, it depicts a territory that is double — both a material
grave that has been excavated and also a psychic vault that been
built. This composite sketch draws the interest of Ozengell’s
antiquarian group because, as Smith’s archaeological narrative
explains, the weaponry is a ‘most interesting…deposi[t].’ His
height is the length of his six-foot spear; his shield boss covers
his heart; and the distance between ‘right hip’ and ‘left thigh’
are traced by his ‘short sword.’111 Hengest and Horsa’s descendant
stands at attention, and an entire group of gentleman archaeolo-
gists gazes upon the towering stature of an ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ While
his weapons continue to display the imperial spirit of Wylie’s
Saxon chieftain, these traits are now physically documented by
Smith’s antiquarian measurements. As a figure that is simultane-
ously outside and inside the embodied minds of a professional
antiquarian community, this ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is drawn, in part, ac-
cording to their specifications. Consequently, as Rolfe, Wright,
Haliwell, Fairholt, Keet, and Smith look, together, at this six-
foot tall warrior, he nods in acknowledgement of their presence.
Though one is barely living, and the others are entirely alive, this
is meeting of friends, a salutary moment in which the ‘immedi-
ate’ and extended ‘descendants’ of Hengest and Horsa physically
make one another’s acquaintance in the barrow.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid. Smith alludes to the precise measurements of boss and sword else-
where, noting that his drawing of the shield boss is ‘one-third of the size of
the origina[l]’ and his drawing of the sword is ‘half the actual size’ (ibid.,
3:5).
153
Figure 9. Plate XVI, no. 2, in John Yonge Akerman, ‘An Archaeologi-

cal Index to Remains of Antiquity of the Celtic, Romano-British, and
Anglo-Saxon Periods,’ The Edinburgh Review 86, no. 174 (1847): 233.
Image courtesy of New York Public Library.
154
Figure 10. Plate XXVIII, in Charles Roach Smith, Collectanea Antiqua,

Vol. 6 (1868), n.p. Image courtesy of University of Colorado–Boulder.
155
Wylie’s Fairford Graves and Smith’s Collectanea Antiqua

credit Nenia Britannica as the most valuable reference tool for
an emerging community of antiquarians, and they model their
grave plans upon Douglas’s illustration of Figure 1. Several oth-
ers were produced during the mid-nineteenth century, and they,
too, bear striking resemblance to Douglas’s Figure 1 (see Figures
9 and 10).112
These adaptations of Douglas’s Tumulus I expand the an-
tiquarian territory of the early medieval barrow such that the
identity assemblages articulated in Nenia Britannica as Saxon are
now considered to be Anglo-Saxon. As these antiquarians adapt
and transform Douglas’s Figure 1, they, like Douglas’s barrow-
sitter, respond, in mind and in body, to its ekphrasis. Douglas’s
lone antiquarian and Wylie’s anonymous ‘we…kindred men’ are
replaced by Smith’s list of notable gentlemen scholars. A solitary
mourner and collector is joined, next to the grave, by a group
of mourner-collectors, who summon the racialized body of an
Anglo-Saxon through imaginary, but also embodied, move-
ments and performances. Their antiquarian living practices are
tuned to (what they believe to be) Saxon and Anglo-Saxon dy-
ing practices, and they (re)assemble their antiquarian identities
according to assemblages of artifacts and bones. As this group
professionalizes, its grief turns, firstly, into incorporation and
encryption and, secondly, into studied interest. Barrow-sitting
becomes a professional practice for those who are inhabited by
the dead, and these barrow-sitters begin to live, so to speak, in
the graves of others. The ekphrasis of Tumulus I has broadcasted
the signals of its reliquary undeadness to its antiquarian read-
ers, who have responded to these communiqués in mind and
in body. Their professional living is attuned to others’ ways of
dying, and, consequently, they imagine Anglo-Saxon identity as
a skeletal form.
112 Note that Figure 9 is a reproduction of Douglas’s Figure 1, and the ‘crystal
ball’ between the leg bones of Figure 10 is referenced in relation to Doug-
las’s writings about this artifact (ibid., 6:150).
156
Anglo-Saxon Skulls, Craniology, and the “Essential

Characteristics of Our Race”
While this chapter has noted the shifting racial profile of anti-
quarians who believe themselves to be the inheritors of mar-
tially spirited and physically enormous Anglo-Saxons, as Doug-
las admitted and these scholars well know, the racial typology
sketched in the grave plans of Wylie, Smith, and others is neither
the average physical form of an Anglo-Saxon nor of the anti-
quarians who direct barrow excavations. Yet this group, which is
inhabited by the dead, desires to find a physical connection — a
mark on the body that distinguishes biological race — between
Anglo-Saxons of the past and present. Joseph Bernard Davis
and John Thurnam’s Crania Britannica does just that.
A pseudoscience that, Chris Manias argues, ‘allows the liv-
ing to be compared with the dead,’113 craniology is the study of
the shape and size of the skulls of different human races. Davis
and Thurnam set out to distinguish between Romano-British,
Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian crania in their two-volume
reference guide, Crania Britannica.114 The first of Davis and
Thurnam’s Anglo-Saxon crania comes from Ozengell, a site ex-
cavated not only by Smith but also by Thomas Wright, who, in
Wanderings of an Antiquary, explains that its barrows offer the
antiquarian ‘a melancholy way of making acquaintance with our
forefathers of thirteen centuries ago, by raising from the grave
113 Chris Manias, Race, Science, and the Nation: Reconstructing the Ancient
Past in Britain, France, and Germany (New York: Routledge, 2013), 118.
114 Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations
and Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginal and Early Inhabitants of the
British Islands, 2 vols (London: Printed for the Subscribers, 1865). In its
initial subscription publication of six parts (1856-1865), plate-sized crania
illustrations were interleaved with accompanying descriptions. Upon re-
publication in 1865, its material was reorganized, and cranial descriptions
and illustrations were split into two separate volumes. Volume 1 evaluates
the size, proportion, and distinguishing features of hundreds of skulls.
Volume 2 features a folio-sized illustration of each cranium.
157
158
Figures 11a & 11b. ‘Anglo-Saxon skull from Ozingell,’ in Joseph Bar-
nard Davis and John Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations and
Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginal and Early Inhabitants of
the British Islands, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Subscribers, 1865),
2:n.p. and 1:451. Images courtesy of the Library of Congress.
159
160
Figures 12a & 12b. ‘Anglo-Saxon skull from Wye Hill,’ in Joseph Bar-
nard Davis and John Thurnam, Crania Britannica: Delineations and
Descriptions of the Skulls of the Aboriginal and Early Inhabitants of
the British Islands, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Subscribers, 1865),
2:n.p. and 1:455. Images courtesy of the Library of Congress.
161
the bones which are no longer able to tell us their history.’115

Smith’s grave plan and Wright’s words — in addition to Doug-
las’s Tumulus I116 — are not lost on Davis and Thurnam, who or-
ganize their cranial evaluation of the Ozengell skull around the
archaeological illustrations of these antiquarians.
Unlike every other cranium from Volume 1 of Crania Britan-
nica, which is sketched from four different directions, Davis and
Thurnam substitute cranial representations of Ozengell with an
illustration from Wright’s Wanderings (see Figures 11a, 11b, 12a,
and 12b).
A gentleman’s estate lies in the background, and in the fore-
ground are several graves in active excavation. To the left, a
shovel is staked in the dirt, while a laborer leans over and into
a hole. To the right, two gentlemen stand at the mouth of a pit,
while another worker continues to dig. From the distance, a
gentleman approaches the activity, arriving, perhaps, from the
country house in the background. In the further distance — to
the left of the house — boxy apparitions point towards the exca-
vators. The mortuary landscape of Wright’s sketch, in which so
many people stand in grave pits, signals a ‘making acquaintance’
that is melancholic, indeed. The movements from country man-
or to grave signal a transtemporal circulation between bodies of
the past and present by which, it seems, the followers of Hengest
and Horsa have been ‘rais[ed] from the grave.’ The substitution
of Ozengell’s cranial images with Wright’s excavation scene ar-
ticulates an entanglement between psychic and material crypts.
Likewise, it suggests that the dead now literally inhabit the
minds and bodies of their excavators, whose professional living
practices are enacted in the territory of others’ dying practices.
These connections are not lost on Davis and Thurnam. After
listing all of Ozengell’s excavators — W.H. Rolfe, the company
of Charles Roach Smith, and Thomas Wright — they claim that
115 Thomas Wright, Wanderings of an Antiquary: Chiefly Upon the Traces of

the Romans in Britain (London: J.B. Nichols and Sons, 1854), 83.
116 Davis and Thurnam note that Smith’s grave plan ‘reminds us forcibly of
the fine delineation by the hand of Mr. Douglas. Nenia Britannica, plate 1’
(Crania Britannica, 1:452).
162
‘when our skull was discovered, in which of them [the graves]

we are not able to say. It has since passed, with many of the Oz-
ingell relics, into the hands of Mr. Joseph Mayer, F.S.A., to whose
ready acquiescence in our wish, the readers of the “Crania Bri-
tannica” owe its representation here.’117 Although its origins are
imprecise, the Ozengell skull has ‘passed’ through the ‘hands’ of
a growing body of excavators, collectors, craniologists, and Cra-
nia Britannica’s gentlemen readership. It is ‘our skull.’ It belongs
to all who desire to claim it. Consequently, even when Davis
and Thurnam state that ‘its representation’ is ‘here,’ in an aster-
isked footnote below, instead of a skull, they include citations to
Wright and Smith’s works and add the illustrator F.W. Fairholt
(who made the sketch that Smith used for his grave plan) to a
growing list of antiquaries affiliated with Ozengell.118 Where is
this skull that is being handled? It is ‘here,’ and yet it is not here;
it is dead, but it is living. It belongs to no single skeleton but to
the entire cemetery. It is a skull that could fit any and all of the
bodies — dead or living — at Ozengell.
On the next page, Davis and Thurnam provide no further
clues as to the location of this skull. Instead, they summarize the
Ozengell excavation. Beginning with the statement that most
graves were occupied by men, Davis and Thurnam provide the
average skeletal heights of Ozengell’s occupants: five feet, ten
inches, to six feet tall, with one body that was estimated to be
six feet, four- to six-inches tall. Then, they describe the weap-
ons, which include 30-inch broad swords, 9-to-21-inch spear
tips, 6-foot spear shafts, ‘iron knives; battle-axes, or franciscas;
umbones and studs of shields, the circular wooden discs having
perished.’119 The absence of this skull is substituted by a supera-
bundance of bodies and weapons, which have been measured
and collated. Placed in the middle of this accounting is an ‘Oz-
117 Davis and Thurnam, Crania Britannica, 1:451.

118 Ibid.
119 Ibid., 1:452, author’s emphasis.
163
Figure 13. Anglo-Saxon skeleton from Charles Roach Smith’s Collec-

tana Antiqua, reprinted in Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam,
Crania Britannica: Delineations and Descriptions of the Skulls of
the Aboriginal and Early Inhabitants of the British Islands (London:
Printed for the Subscribers, 1865), 1:452. Image courtesy of Library of
Congress.
164
ingell Grave, with Skeleton and remains of Shield and Spear in

situ.’120 (see Figure 13).
Surrounded by all of Ozengell’s men and their arms, this An-
glo-Saxon could be five feet, ten inches. Or he could be six feet,
four inches. He could have a nine-inch spear tip. Or it could be
twenty-one inches. One thing, however, is certain: he possesses
‘our’ Ozengell skull. As Davis and Thurnam’s excavation sum-
mary is read in relation to the ‘Skeleton’ in an ‘Ozingell Grave,’ it
becomes ekphrastic. It organizes a message of racial inheritance
that is located in multiple bone lengths and skeletal morpholo-
gies. Consequently, it asks antiquarians who view it to find their
own skeleton in its anonymous and unremarkable form. Fur-
ther, this skeleton associates its racialized, osteological features
with an armory of weapons, thereby transforming the martial,
imperial characteristics of Wylie’s Saxon chieftain and Smith’s
six-foot Anglo-Saxon into an appetite for endless battle.
On the subsequent page, Davis and Thurnam continue their
catalogue of Ozengell artifacts. Coins, glassware, weights, and
scales communicate an archaeological rhetoric of ‘balance’
and ‘proportion.’121 As the list of Ozengell’s grave goods arcs
from unusually large armaments to well-proportioned meas-
urements, Davis and Thurnam begin to describe, for the first
time, the craniological features of this Ozengell skull. Not with-
standing its post-mortem ‘deformations,’ ‘our skull’ is ‘well-
proportioned and upright,’ ‘well-expressed,’ ‘full,’ ‘moderately
lofty,’ ‘long, straight, or slightly elevated.’122 Though armed to the
teeth, everything about this skull evidences a well-rounded and
well-balanced mind of reason and intellect — just like the minds
of Davis and Thurnam’s antiquarian readership. While the Oz-
engell skeleton communicates one set of racialized features in
its skeletal morphology, the Ozengell skull and its associated
artifacts communicate another. Davis and Thurnam organize
the material culture of the entire Ozengell cemetery to imply
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid., 1:453.
122 Ibid.
165
that, despite their physical brawn and racialized appetite for

destruction, Anglo-Saxons are of a noble and rational disposi-
tion. Davis and Thurnam offer no opportunity to see what such
a skull looks like in this section because it is located ‘here’: inside
every living and dead Anglo-Saxon body.123 As summary proof
that Anglo-Saxons of the past and present now inhabit the same
racial body, Davis and Thurnam write in their ‘Conclusions’:
‘[t]he series of Anglo-Saxon skulls, in their great resemblance to
those of modern Englishmen, vindicate the true derivation of
the essential characteristics of our race from a Teutonic origin.
The form and proportions of these crania probably evince more
power than refinement.’124
Raised from the grave and from the pages of multiple schol-
arly reports, Davis and Thurnam anticipate the arrival of the fig-
ure of the Anglo-Saxonist — a professional who not only stud-
ies Anglo-Saxon peoples but is Anglo-Saxon. In mind and in
body — in embodied mind — the Anglo-Saxonist emerges from
the territory of Douglas’s antiquarian barrow and from the joint
ekphrasis of his Saxon foot-soldier and antiquarian barrow-
sitter. Yet, the Anglo-Saxonist is an interdisciplinary figure. In
order to locate ‘it,’ this chapter circles back to early medieval
barrows, to Beowulf, and to Beowulf ’s ekphrastic displays, dis-
cussing all in relation to one last nineteenth-century scholar:
John Mitchell Kemble.
Coda: John Mitchell Kemble, ‘Anglo-Saxonist’
Although Kemble is noted primarily as a philologist and a histo-

rian who published the first edition of Beowulf in 1833 and a sec-
ond edition and translation in 1837, Kemble was likewise deeply
committed to archaeology. A long-time friend of William Wylie
and a teacher of Thomas Wright, Kemble supervised the exca-
123 Note that in Volume 2, Davis and Thurnam provide a complete sketch of
the Ozengell skull (see Figure 11a), enabling the reader to study its mor-
phology in relation to Volume 1’s artifact descriptions, and find, in all of
these anatomical and cultural features, his own Anglo-Saxon skull.
124 Ibid., 1:238.
166
vation of barrow cemeteries and urnfields in Hanover. Just as

Kemble’s philological scholarship was invested in locating An-
glo-Saxon language and history within the Continental orbit of
Germanic tribes, his archaeology was similarly comparative.125
Moreover, as Howard Williams writes, Kemble’s interests in ar-
chaeology follow from his scholarship on Beowulf:
from his commentaries, it is clear that Kemble regarded

this as a literary work, as a source of historical and philo-
logical information and as a cultural lynchpin that connected
England to its Teutonic heritage….Even though he was not
alone in seeing disparities between the spectacular crema-
tions portrayed in the poem and the more modest cinerary
urns commonly uncovered by archaeologists, he was keen
to acknowledge, through the poems and texts, the impor-
tance of cremation as a pagan Germanic rite…hence the use
of archaeology may have been not only inspired by Beowulf
and philological models, but may have been directly aimed
as compensating the limitations of the literary and linguistic
evidence.126
Whether conscious or not, in his excavations in Hanover, Kem-

ble figures himself the Beowulfian hero. He not only ‘breaks
into’ mounds and ‘loots’ treasure; moreover, in choosing to tar-
125 On the racial investments in Kemble’s philological and archaeological

writings, see Robert McCombe, ‘Anglo-Saxon Artifacts and Nationalist
Discourse,’ Museum History Journal 4, no. 2 (2011): 144–52. Howard Wil-
liams makes Kemble’s racism explicit when he notes that ‘we can regard
how their [Kemble and Wylie’s] interpretation of Continental [archaeo-
logical] discoveries were permeated by racial theories aimed at making
specific statements about the shared Teutonic affinities and origins of the
English and the Germans’ (‘“Burnt Germans,” Alemannic Graves and
the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology,’ in Zweiundvierzig: Festschrift
für Michael Gebühr zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Stefan Burmeister, Heidrun
Derks, and Jasper von Richthofen [Rahden: Leidorf, 2007], 230).
126 Howard Williams, ‘Heathen Graves and Anglo-Saxonism: Assessing the
Archaeology of John Mitchell Kemble,’ Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology
and History 13 (2006), 5.
167
get cremation barrows, he locates himself, over and over again,

in what he believes to be the topography of Beowulf ’s own Geat-
ish grave. To return to the ekphrasis of Beowulf, whose reliquary
form, this chapter argues, seeks a response from readers within
and outside the poem’s narrative — in Kemble’s Hanover excava-
tions, we can finally find a response to its ekphrastic displays.
For Kemble, however, the barrow territory from whence
Beowulf emerges and is interred is shaped not by the identity as-
semblages of medieval communities but by James Douglas and
the Victorian antiquarians who reference him. Therefore, while
Beowulf may lead Kemble into barrows, the expressive terri-
tory — the dying practices — that Kemble encounters therein is
shaped by the living practices of his fellow nineteenth-century
antiquarians, who have reassembled artifact and bone into An-
glo-Saxons and the Teutonic kin group to which they belong.
Through Kemble’s Beowulf-inspired barrow excavations,
philology, history, and archaeology become entangled and in-
terdisciplinary. Through Kemble, Beowulf is linked to Anglo-
Saxon barrows, to the racialized skeletons that have been assem-
bled within them, and to the antiquarian association between
psychic crypts and material graves. Most importantly, through
Kemble, cognitive-oriented methods of philology and histori-
cism are linked to excavation, a method of embodied and per-
formative identity-making which this chapter has discussed in
relation to the concept of territory. As if to punctuate the critical
role of Kemble’s body to his scholarship, William Stokes writes,
Kemble ‘gave his life to the cause in which he had embarked
with all the energies of a vigorous mind and a vigorous body.’127
Indeed, Kemble is key not only to the interdisciplinary scope
of Anglo-Saxon studies and Beowulf, its keystone text, but also
to the use of the term, ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ the first two attestations
of which appear in reference to him. The first attestation appears
in the November issue of the 1837 Gentleman’s Magazine, in the
short article, ‘Retrospective Review. Anglo-Saxon Literature.’
127 William Stokes, ‘The Manchester Exhibition of Art-Treasures,’ The Dublin

University Magazine 49, no. 293 (1857): 615.
168
This anonymous essay prints the word, ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ in as-

sociation with Benjamin Thorpe and John Mitchell Kemble, ex-
plaining that, by studying Thorpe’s translation of Erasmus Rask’s
Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, then Kemble’s edition of
Beowulf, the ‘student of Anglo-Saxon’ may join their ranks as an
Anglo-Saxonist.128 Despite its use in the ‘Retrospective Review,’
if the term ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ was en vogue during the first half
of the nineteenth century, it does not appear in print again un-
til twenty years later and in association with Kemble. In an ad
hoc obituary for Kemble in Notes and Queries, he is eulogized
as ‘a man of undoubted and original genius, a thorough clas-
sical scholar, and profound Anglo-Saxonist, deeply read in the
language and literature of Scandinavia and Germany, master of
all, or nearly, the languages of Europe, and well versed in our
national history.’129 The phrase ‘profound Anglo-Saxonist,’ which
governs the following clause, says nothing of Kemble’s archaeo-
logical interests, even though, upon his return from Hanover, all
of his scholarly energies became focused upon excavation, and,
as Howard Williams writes, ‘during these final years, it is diffi-
cult to regard Kemble as anything other than an archaeologist.’130
Rather, in this instance, ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ posthumously limits
the scope of Kemble’s interdisciplinary methods to his ‘dee[p]
read[ing]’ in language, literature, and ‘our national history.’ As
the last word on Kemble’s ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ identity, Notes and
Queries denies the barrow-digging aspects of his scholarship in
order to advocate a thoroughly cognitive profession that neither
accounts for the affective movements nor shape of the physical
body, assemblages that make and re-make identity in perfor-
mance.
128 Anonymous, ‘Retrospective Review: Anglo-Saxon Literature,’ Gentleman’s

Magazine 8 (1837): 494; Erasmus Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon
Tongue, with a Praxis, trans. Benjamin Thorpe (Copenhagen: S.L. Møller,
1830).
129 ‘Miscellaneous. Notes on Books, etc.,’ Notes and Queries 2, no. 66 (April
1857): 280.
130 Williams, ‘Heathen Graves and Anglo-Saxonism,’ 4.
169
Barrows, Beowulf, and the real and imagined embodied

practices of field excavation all participate in nineteenth-cen-
tury processes that generate, from the grave, the Anglo-Saxon
body — not a real body, but a cultural one that helped to found
an academic discipline. Despite the critical role of barrow dig-
ging in the formation of an imagined, nineteenth-century com-
munity of Anglo-Saxon scholars, the professional appellative
‘Anglo-Saxonist’ has repeatedly denied the embodied, identity-
making performances and practices associated with antiquarian
archaeology in exchange for supposedly neutral and bloodlessly
objective pedagogical and professional activities that do not
consider the embodied practices and methods that underwrite
the writings of Douglas, Wylie, Smith, Davis and Thurnam, and
Kemble.131 Consequently, when we study and teach Beowulf, a
gateway by which we become Anglo-Saxonists, we find ourselves
unknowingly located within a poem that builds a barrow and
engages in a virtual descent into its mortuary interior. We men-
tally play the parts of barrow builder and breaker — living, then
dying, with Beowulf — and becoming, perhaps, like Beowulf,
ekphrastic figures of perpetual mourning and heroic return.
As we teach our students Old English, then read Beowulf with
them, in order to shepherd them through the gates of Anglo-
Saxon studies, we keep refashioning our embodied selves within
the contours of an expanding, reliquary, and skeletonized body
that was, in the nineteenth century, gendered, racialized, and
standing with both feet in the grave. Such a past of professional
disembodiment underscores not only the field’s fraught rela-
tionship with gender and sexuality but also its struggle to shut-
ter the ethno-political categories that overtly define the field.
Moreover, as the next chapter explains, it marks our profession
131 It is worth noting here that Chapter 1 of this book discusses Michael
Drout’s statements regarding Anglo-Saxon philology, which not only
refuses the body but also forecloses philological Anglo-Saxonists from
taking an embodied stance towards language. Likewise, Chapter 4 will
discuss the process of becoming a nineteenth-century professional Anglo-
Saxonist via pedagogies that emphasize cognitive mastery of Anglo-Saxon
languages and texts at the expense of embodied ways of knowing.
170
as one that maintains an ontology of ‘being’ that is cognitive and

static, continuing to struggle against elegaic, nostalgic, and most
of all, melancholic psychological positions — affects of and from
the continued return to and excavation of Beowulf’s barrows.
171
Second
Movement
Interlude —
A Time for Mourning
4
On Being an Anglo-Saxonist:
Asser’s Life of King Alfred,
Benjamin Thorpe, and the
Sovereign Corpus of a Profession
Several years ago, Howard Williams noted a relationship be-

tween Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, James
Douglas’s Nenia Britannica, and ‘an influential generation’ of
mid-nineteenth-century scholars:
The mid-nineteenth century in England witnessed a rapid

growth of interest in the material remains of Europe’s early
medieval barbarians. An influential generation of anti-
quaries, historians, and archaeologists quarried a new vein
of Dark Age discoveries. This work augmented an existing
historical and philological focus on the Germanic roots of
England’s people, language and customs, typified by Sharon
Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, and built upon James
Douglas’ Nenia Britannica in which burial mounds and fur-
175
nished graves were attributed to the Anglo-Saxons for the

first time.1
Chapters 2 and 3 of this book expand upon the implications of

Williams’s passing statement. These chapters argue that Turner
and Douglas, as well as John Mitchell Kemble, are not figures
whose work was ‘augmented’ by academics of a later period.
Rather, they are the encrypted, graveyard ‘fathers’ of Anglo-
Saxon Studies. When considered together, Turner’s historical
writings, Douglas’s archaeological report, and Kemble’s archae-
oliterary pursuits place the scholarly minds and bodies of this
interdisciplinary field in Anglo-Saxon crypts and graves.
This chapter takes Williams’s ‘influential generation’ and his
metaphor of quarrying a step further with a special focus on the
philologist Benjamin Thorpe, a key figure among the generation
that succeeded Turner and Douglas, especially. While Thorpe
labors in the funerary mine opened by these men, he does not
claim descent from them. Rather, Thorpe, one of the first named
‘Anglo-Saxonists,’ ‘quarries a new vein of Dark Age discoveries’
that belongs to another ‘father’: Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex, or,
‘Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons.’2
This chapter addresses Thorpe’s relationship to King Alfred,
the sovereign ‘father’ of our profession’s entangled signifiers,
‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ It tracks the terminologi-
cal appearance of Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex — first, in the early
1 Howard Williams, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and Victorian Archaeology: William

Wylie’s Fairford Graves,’ Early Medieval Europe 16, no. 1 (2008): 49.
2 While ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is the standard term used to reference the language
and people of the early English period c. 450–1100, several scholars
have recently remarked upon how the ninth-century origins and ethnic
orientations of this compound suggest it to be a historically insufficient
and ethnically limiting compound. See Hugh Magennis, The Cambridge
Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 34–35; Walter Pohl, ‘Ethnic Names and Identities in the British
Isles: A Comparative Perspective,’ in The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration
Period to the Eighth Century, ed. John Hines (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 25;
and John Higham and M.J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2013), 7–10.
176
On Being an Anglo-Saxonist
English charters, then in Asser’s Life of King Alfred — as an ex-

pression of kingship that translates the vernacular, performative
bodies of Alfred and his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ subjects into to the Latin,
textual domain of Christ’s sovereignty. In Asser’s Life, this trans-
lation is facilitated by an imaginary account of the crucifixion.
Christ’s crucified corpse, which marks the conversion of mate-
rial flesh into sovereign Word, enables Alfred to be translated
from a corporeal body of chronic illness and pain into a Lati-
nized, textual corpus. Through this fictional act, Asser’s biog-
raphy pronounces Alfred an Anglo-Saxon sovereign; however,
it suggests that in real life this work remains incomplete. Asser
suggests that a sovereign future awaits Alfred after death, when,
like Christ, his material body can be translated from a corpse
into a corpus of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ texts.
This chapter attends to these prognostications of Asser. It
discusses the loss of Alfred’s material corpse amid the turmoil of
the English Civil Wars, which enables him to return as a corpse-
like ghost of sovereignty. With no physical body to locate Al-
fred or keep him in the ground, Alfred’s ghost proliferates. His
haunting presence appears in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century portraits and paintings, becoming associated with the
enfleshed bodies of English kings, then taking on the shape of
‘Englishmen.’ As Alfred’s sovereign, undead figure takes up resi-
dence in the images of living bodies, ‘Angulsaxon’ becomes a
course of study at Oxford, and Alfred’s sovereign, corpse-like
body begins to inhabit a corpus of Anglo-Saxon texts.
Alfred’s ghostly movements ready the ground for the nine-
teenth-century scholarship and pedagogy of Benjamin Thorpe,
who (alongside John Mitchell Kemble) is the profession’s first
named ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ Thorpe activates Alfred’s ghostly figure
from within his numerous editions of Anglo-Saxon law codes,
poetry, and homiletic literature. Further, his language-learning
texts recast this association between Alfred’s corpse and textual
corpus as ‘the Anglo-Saxon,’ a raciolinguistic figure that, on ac-
count of its sovereignty, is pure, unmiscegenated, and, conse-
quently, undead. By studying Thorpe’s works, one transitions
from studying ‘Anglo-Saxon’ language to becoming an ‘Anglo-
177
Saxonist,’ a professional and embodied ‘being’ that is haunted by

the sovereign and racialized ghosts of the colonized past.
Early English Charters, an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Kingdom, and its

‘Anglo-Saxon’ Subjects
To begin, one does not simply jettison a word-concept. A signi-

fier is a powerful rhetorical tool, especially when it generates
group formation and maintains an individual’s belonging to the
group. If, as an Anglo-Saxonist, I harbor a scholarly devotion
towards the term ‘Anglo-Saxon,’3 then I might do well to consult
Susan Reynolds’s 1985 essay ‘What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Sax-
3 In modern English, ‘-ist’ designates a wide range of professional and busi-

ness affiliations, see ‘-ist,’ suffix, Oxford English Dictionary, def. 4. However,
the OED also explains that these secular applications derive from a Latin,
religious context. As a suffix, ‘-ist’ is used initially by ‘Christian writers, in
the latinizing of scriptural and ecclesiastical terms.’ Later, it ‘denotes the
observers of a particular rite, the holders of special religious or philosophi-
cal tenets, or the adherents of particular teachers or heresiarchs.’ Conse-
quently, ‘-ist’ generates descriptive terms that ‘designat[e] a person’ who
‘practices…studies…or devotes himself to some science, art, or branch of
knowledge,’ and later references denote an ‘adherent or professor of some
creed, doctrine, system, or art’ (see OED, defs. 2 and 3). A suffix of spiritual
and then secular devotion, these two senses of ‘-ist’ are followed by its final
and most contemporary one: ‘denoting one whose profession or business
it is to have to do with the thing or subject in question… . Also from
names of languages, as Americanist, Anglist, Germanist, Hebraist, Hellenist,
Latinist, Orientalist’ (see OED, def. 4). ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ is thus a term that is
defined in relation to the shifting semantics of ‘-ist.’ As a word that derives
from the professional study of the Anglo-Saxon language, the OED’s first
definition uses ‘-ist’ to denote one’s academic ‘profession or business,’ while
its second definition uses the suffix in order to mark one who ‘practices…
studies…or devotes himself ’ to a ‘creed’ of ‘Anglo-Saxonism.’ While the
multiple semantic registers of ‘-ist’ differentiate secular professionalism
from secular ideology, hovering just behind the occupational term ‘Anglo-
Saxonist’ is also the study of Latin and of the early medieval Church, both
of which are critical to the production of Old English texts. This Latinate,
Christian context routes the academic Anglo-Saxonist towards the reli-
gious origins of ‘-ist,’ a suffix that renders her, by way of professional study,
a ‘follower,’ ‘devotee,’ or ‘practiser’ of this body of scholarship and marks
her academic profession as one of faith and fidelity to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its
ecclesiastical partner language, Latin.
178
on’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’?’ in which she discusses the various early

medieval attestations of the terms ‘Angles,’ ‘Saxons,’ and ‘Eng-
lish.’ Reynolds’s etymological research leads her to early medi-
eval articulations of ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ The compound, she explains,
is used first by continental sources to reference, collectively, the
Germanic peoples of Britain. It then appears ‘occasionally…in
surviving native sources only from the late ninth century on,
when West Saxon kings and their successors sometimes referred
to themselves as kings of the Angli Saxones, Angolsaxones, An-
glosaxones, or Angulsaxones.’4 Reynolds’s historical assessment
hinges on the political language of King Alfred, who, in charters
from the late 880s and early 890s, rescripted the royal style of
his Wessex predecessors Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred,
from ‘king of the Saxons’ [‘rex Saxonum’]5 to ‘king of the Angles
and Saxons’ [‘rex Anglorum et Saxonum, Anglorum Saxonum
rex’],6 and, soon after, ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ [‘angol saxo-
num rex, Anglo Saxonum rex’].7
Janet Nelson, Simon Keynes, David Pratt, and Sarah Foot
attribute this change in the royal style of Alfred’s charters to
the political relationship between Wessex and Mercia during
4 Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Sax-

ons’?’ Journal of British Studies 24, no. 4 (1985): 398. See also Wilhelm Levi-
son, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1946), 92n1.
5 Simon Keynes, ‘The West Saxon Charters of King Æthelwulf and His Sons,’
The English Historical Review 109, no. 434 (1994): 1109–49, points to Saw-
yer charters by Alfred’s predecessors Æthelbald, Æthelberht, and Æthelred
(S 1274, S 326, S 329, S 335, S 336, S 340, S 539, S 341, S 334, S 333, and S 342),
all of which use the royal style rex Saxonum. Alfred follows this style until
889 (1123–25, 1147–48).
6 See the 889 and 891 Anglo-Saxon charters S 346 and S 347: Electronic
Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters, King’s College London,
http://www.esawyer.org.uk/about/index.html.
7 See the 891 and 892 Anglo-Saxon charters S 348 and S 349 (Electronic
Sawyer). In the charters, the compound remains in use after Alfred’s death
from his son, Edward the Elder (899–924), until ‘Æthelstan created the
“Kingdom of the English” in 927’ (Simon Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the
Mercians,’ in Kings, Currency, and Alliances: History and Coinage of South-
ern England in the Ninth Century, eds. Mark A.S. Blackburn and David N.
Dumville [Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998], 25).
179
the 870s and 880s.8 In the late 870s, Viking victories in Mercia
and the death of its king, Ceolwulf, pave the road for a Wes-
sex ascendancy, and, in the mid-880s, a coordinated monetary
system, royal marriage alliances, and, moreover, Alfred’s pro-
tective actions in London against the Vikings,9 indicate tight-
ening bonds between Wessex and Mercia. The precise politi-
cal relationship between these two kingdoms is articulated in
an 889 charter between ‘Alfred, king of Angles and Saxons and
Aethelred, petty king and nobleman of the Mercians’ [‘Ælfred
rex Anglorum et Saxonum et Æðelred subregulus et patricius
Merciorum’].10 The terms that designate Alfred’s relationship to
Æthelred not only express the overlordship of a Wessex king
[‘rex’] to a Mercian underking [‘subregulus’] but also articulate
this political hegemony by way of a new royal style: ‘Alfred, king
of Angles and Saxons’ [‘Ælfred rex Anglorum et Saxonum’]. As
David Pratt writes, ‘Æthelred’s submission was understood to
have created a new political order in southern Britain’ in which
Alfred operates as overlord to both kingdoms,11 which are now
stylized, according to Simon Keynes, as ‘namely the “Anglian”
kingdom of Mercia (less the part already settled by the Danes)
8 Janet Nelson, ‘The Political Ideas of Alfred of Wessex,’ in Kings and Kingship
in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (London: King’s College London
Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1993), 125–58; Keynes, ‘King
Alfred and the Mercians,’ 22–24; David Pratt, The Political Thought of King
Alfred the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 105–7;
Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman
Conquest,’ Transactions from the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996): 27.
9 Alfred’s ‘restoration’ or ‘gesette’ of London, a city governed by Mercia dur-
ing this period, not only puts a Mercian town under Alfred’s protection
and makes it defensible against Viking attack but, moreover, prompts the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to express that, in 886, ‘all English people, except
those who were held captive by the Danes, turned to him’ [‘him all Angel-
cyn to cirde þæt buton deniscra monna hæftniede was’] (The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, Vol. 3, MS. A, ed. Janet M. Bately [Cam-
bridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986], 53). All Old English translations are my own.
10 S 346, Electronic Sawyer. All charter translations are my own.
11 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, 106.
180
and the “Saxon” kingdom of Wessex and its eastern extensions.’12

For Pratt and Keynes, the use of ‘Angles and Saxons’ and, shortly
after, ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ in this and several other charters, signals,
on the one hand, a ‘wholly new and distinctive polity’ between
Wessex and Mercia13 and, on the other, a defensive ‘unity’ or po-
litical ‘amalgamat[ion]’ between its peoples.14
While politics are key to the development of the term ‘Anglo-
Saxon,’ in the court of Alfred the compound exceeds political
terminology and likewise functions as an ethnic term. In other
words, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identifies points of shared belonging be-
tween Alfred’s people. As Nicholas Brooks writes, the multicul-
tural court of Wessex ‘must have had an immediate problem
in determining the ethnic terminology that was appropriate
for King Alfred’s people, which now included both Saxons and
Mercians.’15 Brooks explains that while Alfred and Asser ‘are
likely’ to have considered ‘the king’s subjects and their language
as “Saxon,” his continental and perhaps Mercian advisers will
have thought of them as “English”.’16 ‘An initial compromise,’
Brooks argues, ‘seems to have been reached among the king’s
charter-writers’ in the compound ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ an ethnic term
that Brooks aligns with ‘the king’s subjects and their language.’17
12 Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the Mercians,’ 25. Elsewhere, Keynes has sum-
marily stated that ‘Alfred’s contribution was the invention of a wholly new
and distinctive polity which may with some justification be called the
“Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons”’ (‘Edward, King of the Anglo-Saxons,’ in
Edward the Elder: 899–924, eds. N.J. Higham and D.H. Hill [New York:
Routledge, 2001], 44–45). See also Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the Mercians,’
24–26, 34–39, 43–44, and Simon Keynes, ‘Alfred the Great and the King-
dom of the Anglo-Saxons,’ in A Companion to Alfred the Great, eds. Nicole
Guenther Discenza and Paul Szarmarch (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 13–46, 24n43.
13 Keynes, ‘Edward, King of the Anglo-Saxons,’ 44.
14 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, 107.
15 Nicholas Brooks, ‘English Identity from Bede to the Millenium,’ The
Haskins Society Journal 14 (2003): 46–47.
16 Brooks, ‘English Identity from Bede to the Millenium,’ 47.
17 Ibid. While at this point the precise definition of early medieval ‘ethnicity’
and ‘ethnic’ are beyond the scope of this chapter, see Robert Bartlett, The
Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350
(London: Penguin Press, 1993), 197; Stephen Harris, ‘Race and Ethnicity,’ in
181
Stephen Harris makes a similar, yet more developed, argument

for understanding ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in relation to ethnicity, writ-
ing that the ‘ethno-religious order of identity shaped by Char-
lemagne and imported into Anglo-Saxon England during the
reign of Alfred’ configures an ‘Anglo-Saxon ethnogenesis…
within the context of Christendom.’18 Elsewhere, Harris con-
cludes that when ‘Alfred and his successors recorded genealo-
gies that reached back through Germanic deities like Woden
to a Christian past, [they] unit[ed] a gens Anglosaxonum with
a gens Christianorum in the descent of a Christian English
king.’19 Brooks and Harris both assess ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as an ethnic
term that denotes a shared language and religion. Thus figured,
A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, eds. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée

Trilling (Malden: Blackwell, 2012), 165–79; Walter Pohl, ‘Introduction:
Strategies of Identification: A Methodological Profile,’ in Strategies of Iden-
tification: Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe, eds. Walter Pohl
and Greta Heydemann (Turnout: Brepols, 2013), 1–64; and Andre Ging-
rich, ‘Envisioning Medieval Communities in Asia: Remarks on Ethnicity,
Tribalism, and Faith,’ in Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World:
The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, eds. Walter Pohl, Clemens
Gantner, and Richard Payne (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 32–35. Pohl and
Gingrich underscore ‘ethnicity’ as a relational field of belonging.
18 Harris, Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature, 83. This passage illus-
trates what Harris has argued is the cultivation, in Alfredian translations,
of an ‘ethno-religious identity’ by which narratives of ‘Germanic imperium’
and ‘Roman Christianity’ orient positions of ethnicity and religion within
‘the very marrow of Anglo-Saxon identity’ (‘The Alfredian World History
and Ango-Saxon Identity,’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology
100, no. 4 [2001]: 489, 483). Helmut Reimitz recognizes this coupling of
‘Christianity’ and ‘ethnicity’ as a feature of early medieval identity politics
(‘The Providential Past: Visions of Frankish Identity in the Transmission
of Gregory of Tours’ Historiae,’ in Visions of Community in the Post-Roman
World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–1100, eds. Walter
Pohl, Clemens Gantner, and Richard Payne [New York: Routledge, 2012],
110–12). See also Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn,’ 25–49.
19 Stephen J. Harris, ‘An Overview of Race and Ethnicity in Pre-Norman
England,’ Literature Compass 5, no. 4 (2008): 750, 751, author’s emphasis.
Craig Davis makes a similar point about Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in an
Alfredian context, pointing to the influence of Bede’s gens Anglorum (‘Re-
dundant Ethnogenesis,’ The Heroic Age 5 (2001), http://www.heroicage.org/
issues/5/Davis1.html).
182
it draws under its sign not only those subjects who recognize
Alfred’s political overlordship but, moreover, all in Britain who
hold common linguistic and religious affiliations. ‘Anglo-Saxon’
exceeds the borders of Alfred’s political dominion and touches
upon any place where English-speaking Christians live.
Rethinking Anglo-Saxon: Translation, Sovereignty, Corpus
The compound ‘Anglo-Saxon’ classifies Alfred’s political lands

and his subjects; however, it is not a free-standing signifier. As
noted above, it exists as part of Alfred’s royal style, Angulsaxo-
num rex, and appears for the first time (and almost exclusively)
in early English charters, legal documents in which a king grants
land to a subject. While charters are secular demonstrations of
royal power, Kathrin McCann explains that, in Britain, they
have religious origins. Monks who had recently arrived on the
island did not trust the ‘oral tradition’ that kings used to trans-
fer land to their subjects, so they drafted Latin documents to
guarantee gifts of land to the Church.20 Although unmentioned
by McCann, the principle of translation — a process that entails
the creative selection, substitution, recoding, etc. of materials
from one domain to another — underwrites her discussion of
the history of early English charters. Kingly power, which had
traditionally been located in ritual performances and vernac-
ular statements, is now translated into new, written modes of
Latin documentation. Likewise, when land owned by a king was
gifted to the Church, the Latin formulae and religious rhetoric
used to describe this transaction translated a terrestrial king-
ship and kingdom into the spiritual architecture of God’s rule
and heavenly regions. The linguistic and conceptual re-codings
that take place within early English charters impacted the ‘self-
image of the ruler’ and ‘had implications…for the perception
of kingship as an office, separate from an actual person.’21 In the
20 Kathrin McCann, Anglo-Saxon Kingship and Political Power: Rex gratia

Dei (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 48.
21 Ibid., 47, 49.
183
charters, the king could exercise his power to rule without being
physically present; and through the charters, the king’s rulings
were ‘anchored in eternity.’22 Consequently, charters translate
the figure of the king from a physically present, embodied entity
of vernacular performance to an absent form of Latinate tex-
tuality. Likewise, they position kingship within the context of
God’s everlasting kingdom, making ‘charters…the place where
the secular and religious realms meet and merge.’23
In order to exercise this secular-spiritual power, the physi-
cally absent king must occupy textual space in the charter writ-
ings. Consequently, as McCann notes, ‘it is…the titles that bear
the greatest political significance’ because ‘royal titles’ (or styles)
enable the ‘sovereignty and authority of the monarch’ to exist in
writing ‘through kingdoms and even eras,’ according to a ruler’s
‘territorial politics as well as his territorial ambitions.’24 As part
of a royal style, the signifier rex articulates the king’s textual,
Latin form. However, a ruler such as Alfred may exercise his
sovereignty in absentia only through participation ‘of the An-
glo-Saxons’ [‘Angulsaxonum’].25 As a Latin compound that is
22 Ibid., 49.
23 Ibid., 47.
24 Ibid., 47, 49, 50.
25 ‘Sovereignty’ is a word that is largely absent from discussions about Alfred
and kingship in Anglo-Saxon studies (McKann’s Anglo-Saxon Kingship and
Political Power is a notable exception). While the term begins to circulate
in thirteenth-century England, the concept of sovereignty is not anach-
ronistic to the early English period. As a global concept, it can be traced,
first, to Assyrian rulers, and witnessed in the exercise of power by ‘Islamic,
Atlantic, Chinese, even nomadic and exilic’ communities and their lead-
ers, many of which pre-date the ninth-century moment of Alfred. See Zvi
Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, ‘Editors’ Introduc-
tion,’ in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on
the History of a Concept, eds. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos,
and Nicole Jerr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 6. While
Susan Reynolds cautions that ‘no medieval ruler…was sovereign in the
way that later theorists of the sovereign nation-state would require’ (‘The
Historiography of the Medieval State,’ in Companion to Historiography, ed.
Michael Bentley [London: Routledge, 1997], 111), Francesco Maiolo has
taken painstaking efforts to define and understand medieval sovereignty
in terms that are fundamentally different from modern sovereignty (as
184
likewise concerned with bodies, language, and Christian faith

(to recall the arguments of Brooks and Harris), Angulsaxonum
brings into presence Alfred’s kingdom by translating the physi-
cal bodies and vernacular expressions of his subjects into a Lati-
nized, ethnopolitical formula. Angulsaxonum rex is therefore
an expression of secular-religious sovereignty that is enacted
by translating the bodies of a king and his subjects. It abstracts
Alfred’s physical presence and, in its place, identifies those who
(and therefore where) he rules — over the people of a temporal
kingdom that is nested within God’s eternal, heavenly realm.
While the sovereign ambitions of Alfred’s royal style are artic-
ulated in the charters, they are not realized in these documents.
As Ben Snook notes, ‘for the diplomatic critic, Alfred’s presence
is rather less pervasive… . [T]he corpus of late ninth-century
West Saxon charters is comparatively small, full of forgeries and,
shared, rather than absolute, power within a territory) and exercised

across the kingdoms of medieval Europe (Medieval Sovereignty: Marsilius
of Padua and Bartolus of Saxoferrato [Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers,
2007]). While one critic believes the definition of modern sovereignty and
its body of legal thought ‘hampers’ Maiolo’s arguments (Thomas Izbicki,
‘08.09.22, Maiolo, Medieval Sovereignty,’ The Medieval Review, https://
scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/16669), Peggy
McCracken’s recent book, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality
in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), not only
surveys the many medieval inroads towards sovereignty but also exits the
limiting world of medieval jurists in order to consider sovereignty as a
concept that operates in literary worlds, which, for McCracken, concern
stories about animality. Given this body of evidence that advocates for the
relevance to sovereignty in an early English context, one might argue that
the absence of the term (and passive resistance to it within Anglo-Saxon
studies) reveals not only the masked power of the sovereign but also the
extent of Alfred’s sovereignty over Anglo-Saxon studies itself. For sophis-
ticated theoretical treatements of sovereignty in the medieval and early
medieval periods that attend to the refusal among contemporary theorists
to read the archives of medieval Christendom’s sovereignty in a manner
that would reveal the ways in which sovereignty (and in contemporary
parlance, biopolitics) always constituted itself by naming various enemies,
most notably Muslims and Jews, and how this scholarship has also fore-
closed even mention of such entanglements, see Kathleen Biddick, Make
and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties (Earth: punctum books, 2016).
185
from a literary perspective at least, not particularly interesting.’26

Rather, as Snook continues, ‘thanks largely to the work of his
biographers Alfred has become an immovable monolith, tower-
ing over…the whole Anglo-Saxon era.’27 Why does Snook pass
over the charters and look to biography as the place from which
Alfred’s sovereign, monolithic power emerges? Because, as Zvi
Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr explain,
‘sovereignty is established and maintained as much by aesthetic,
artistic, theatrical, and symbolic structures as by political claims
over everyday life, war and peace, and life and death.’28 In other
words, sovereignty comes from creative and, often, theological
appropriations of modes of understanding power, while also be-
ing solidified in political documentations of power.
First among Alfred’s biographers is Asser, a shadowy figure
who in 893 writes the Life of King Alfred just as charters from the
late 880s and early 890s record the change in Alfred’s royal style
to Angulsaxonum rex. Asser employs Alfred’s newly asserted
royal style throughout his biography, and he narrates the pro-
cess by which Alfred becomes a sovereign Angulsaxonum rex by
unpacking an understanding of sovereignty that builds upon the
charters’ emphasis on linguistic and conceptual modes of trans-
lation. In the Life, Asser translates Old English annal materials
into Latin while he translates Alfred’s body (along with those of
his subjects) from vernacular, physically embodied forms into
Latinized, textual ones.
Importantly, while Asser is guided by the language and spirit
of Alfred’s recent charters, his Life is not limited by them. As-
ser engages with multiple texts, literary traditions, and genres
of writing, composing a biography that many scholars have ar-
gued is a bit of a failed project. As Richard Abels summarizes,
‘The Life’s loose organisation, repetitions, inconsistent use of
verb tenses, and lack of conclusion, moreover, suggest a work
26 Ben Snook, The Anglo-Saxon Chancery: The History, Language and Pro-
duction of Anglo-Saxon Charters from Alfred to Edgar (Woodbridge: The
Boydell Press, 2015), 31.
27 Ibid., 29.
28 Benite, Geroulanos, and Jerr, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ 3.
186
in progress rather than a polished text. What we call the Life

of King Alfred may be no more than an imperfect copy of an
incomplete draft.’29 In terms of aesthetics, Abels’s statements are
true, but they arise from a tradition of source study and criti-
cism that continues to understand the Life from within the pa-
rameters of Gregorian, Carolingian, and Davidian models of
good governance. As we shall see, Pope Gregory’s Regula Pas-
toralis, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, and King David’s psalms
are of critical value to Asser’s biography.30 However, the scholar-
ship of Abels and other historians does not account for the role
of Alfred’s charters, which provide a rhetorical and conceptual
framework within which these governmental models operate.
Asser’s network of sources is entangled, and his narrative is
messy, to be sure. Yet, these elements work together in order
to translate and transform Alfred into Angulsaxonum rex — an
‘immovable [sovereign] monolith’ of the ‘Anglo-Saxon era.’31
While the Life of King Alfred is written around the time of the
charters, its story begins several decades earlier, in 849, when
‘Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, was born’ [‘natus est Ælfred,
29 Richard Abels, ‘Alfred and His Biographers: Images and Imagination,’ in

Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow,
eds. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Rochester: Boydell,
2006), 63.
30 While this chapter will focus on Asser’s Gregorian and Carolingian
sources, it is important to note that The Life of Alfred yokes together a
much wider range of Latin materials, including phrases from Virgil’s
Aeneid, Aldhlem’s De Virginitate, Augustine’s Enchiridion, and the Vetus
Latina translation of the Bible.
31 It is remarkable and telling that Alfred and his biography are not discussed
in relation to the history and theory of sovereignty, given the state-
ments that are made by some of Anglo-Saxon studies’ most well-known
historians of Alfred. For example, Simon Keynes notes that, ‘Alfred was
already in his own lifetime to some extent a literary construction’ (‘Alfred
the Great and the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons,’ 13), and David Pratt has
positioned ‘Alfredian discourse’ within the context of the king’s bodily per-
formance, arguing that ‘Alfred’s body itself acquired an all-encompassing
significance, as a microcosmic representation of his kingdom’ (The Politi-
cal Thought of King Alfred the Great, 178).
187
Angul-Saxonum rex’].32 By using the royal style of Alfred’s char-

ters to introduce Alfred, Asser announces the Life as a political
accounting of how Alfred grows up to become sovereign ruler
of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Asser quickly departs from a dis-
cussion of Alfred and turns to annal records (now known, col-
lectively, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), translating these ma-
terials from Old English into Latin. The annals recount Viking
raids on southern Britain, conflicts between and within British
kingdoms, and wicked deeds and customs. According to Asser’s
annal translations, the world into which Alfred is born is full
of civil strife and foreign invasions. It is a political landscape
in which no British king or kingdom is sovereign. Yet, when
Asser invokes the king’s royal style a second time, it acts as a
bulwark against these disruptions, which are now explained and
consigned to the past, in historical retrospect, by ‘my lord, the
truthful Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons’ [‘domino meo Æl-
fredo, Angul-saxonum rege veredico’].33
Despite the sovereign assurances of Ælfred, Angulsaxonum
rex, Asser continues to translate from the annals, which record
the yearly, and therefore recurring, onslaught of Viking attacks.
When the character of these incursions changes from intermit-
tent raids in Kent to a full-scale land invasion of East Anglia in
866, Asser’s rhetoric and his narrative are forcibly impacted. As
if disoriented by the seafaring Vikings, Asser is compelled to
speak ‘in nautical terms’ [‘more navigantium’], explaining that
as a consequence of the many wars and yearly reckonings, ‘the
ship’ [‘navis’] of Alfred’s biography has been left to ‘to waves and
sails’ [‘undis et velamentis’] and has ‘sailed quite far away from
32 Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds., Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of
King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London: Penguin: 1983), 67;
William Henry Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Together with
the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford: Claredon
Press, 1904), 12.
33 Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 71; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King
Alfred, 12.
188
the land’ [‘a terra longius enavigantes’].34 Asser will put it back
on course by narrating an account ‘of the infancy and boyhood
of my venerable lord Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons’ [‘de
infantilibus et puerilibus domini mei venerabilis Ælfredi, An-
gulsaxonum regis’].’35 In other words, Asser promises to return
Alfred’s biography to sovereign shores by recounting, in Latin,
personal information that falls outside the political activities re-
corded in the Old English annals.
After an extended discussion of stories and scenes from Al-
fred’s youth, Asser’s Life returns to annal materials, which re-
main preoccupied with Viking activities in Britain and abroad.
Viking attacks continue unabated despite defensive efforts led
by British kings, including Alfred, who succeeds to the Wessex
throne in 871. Throughout these years, Asser calls Alfred rex,
translating his title according to the Old English annals, which
refer to him simply as ‘king’ [‘cyning’]. In 882 and 885, however,
Alfred’s war with the Vikings, which has mostly been fought on
land, moves onto the water, where Alfred commands a seafar-
ing fleet that attacks the Vikings and succeeds in gaining some
short-lived victories. As Alfred puts his ships on an offensive
course against the Vikings, Asser departs from his Old Eng-
lish exemplar three times, substituting cyning with the charter
formula, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex.36 The tide appears to have
turned in favor of Alfred’s political situation, but it does not last.
The Vikings return to East Anglia, breaking the fragile peace
that he had negotiated with them and prompting Asser to return
to his nautical metaphors:
Accordingly, in order that I may return to that point from

which I digressed — and so that I shall not be compelled
to sail past the haven of my desired rest as a result of my
protracted voyage — I shall, as I promised, undertake, with
Alfred, 19.
35 Ibid.
36 Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 86, 87, 88; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of
King Alfred, 49, 51, 53.
189
God’s guidance, to say something about the life, behaviour,

equitable character and, without exaggeration, the accom-
plishments of my lord Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, after
the time when he married his excellent wife from the stock
of the Mercians…
[Igitur, ut ad id, unde digressus sum, redeam, ne diuturna

enavigatione portum optatae quietis omittere cogar, aliquan-
tulum, quantum notitiae meae innotuerit, de vita et mori-
bus et aequa conversatione, atque, ex parte non modica, res
gestas domini mei Ælfredi, Angulsaxonum regis, postquam
praefatam ac venerabilem de Mercorium nobilium genere
coniugem duxerit…]37
The annals have, again, lead Alfred’s political situation into trou-
bled waters, despite Asser’s repeated translations of Old English
cyning into the Latin charter formula, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum
rex. Again, the Life of King Alfred must be steered in the right
direction. And, again, Asser deploys Alfred’s royal style as a
phrase that holds out the promise of a return to sovereignty by
redirecting Alfred’s biography towards a lengthy, Latin discus-
sion of private events from the king’s early adulthood that are
not recorded in the Old English annals.
By positioning Alfred’s biography in dialogue with annal re-
cords, Asser articulates sovereignty as a concept that is situated
in relation to the domain of ‘vernacular’ politics but cannot be
located within it. Asser repeatedly engages Old English annal
material in order to begin the process, quite literally, of translat-
ing Alfred from his vernacular political world into a personal,
Latin one. Asser’s recounting of Alfred’s childhood, adolescent,
and young adult experiences continue this process. They inter-
rupt the yearly accounting of Old English annal records and,
together, create a Latin narrative that extends across Alfred’s life,
Alfred, 54.
190
tracking, first, his love of English poetry, then his love of Latin
writings.
In order to press Alfred in the direction of this textual world,
Asser’s extra-annal narrative first addresses the issue of Alfred’s
body. According to Asser, Alfred is chronically ill and has suf-
fered, since youth, from a ‘malady’ [‘dolor’] that he specifies as a
‘particular kind of agonizing irritation’ [‘genus infestissimi do-
loris’] called ‘piles’ [‘ficum’].38 Alfred’s piles are gifted to him by
God so that he may resist the sexual temptations of his adoles-
cence. Yet, at Alfred’s wedding celebration, a new sickness over-
takes him. Alfred ‘was struck…by a sudden severe pain’ [‘subito
et immenso…correptus est dolore’], which remained with him
‘from his twentieth year up to his fortieth and beyond’ [‘a viges-
imo aetatis suae anno usque quadragesimum, et eo amplius’].39
Unlike the piles, which is a term for hemorrhoids, Alfred’s new
condition is unknown, and his body is not only ‘struck’ [‘cor-
reptus’] but also ‘seized,’ [‘arripuit’], ‘plagued’ [‘fatiguit’], and
‘harassed’ [‘perturbatus’] by the unrelenting pains related to this
adult sickness.40 Issues of embodiment take center stage in a Life
that is keyed to gaining possession of and solidifying Anglo-Sax-
on sovereignty (and political hegemony). This lexical constella-
tion, which generates a twenty-plus-year scenario of physical
pain that attacks and overwhelms Alfred’s body, draws Alfred
back to his situation in Wessex, where, according to the annals,
Alfred’s kingdom has been in constant conflict with the Vikings.
Asser tightens these connections when he explains that Alfred
is burdened ‘with all kinds of illnesses unknown to the physi-
cians of his island…and also by the incursions of the Vikings’
[‘omnibus istius insulae medicis incognitis infirmitatibus…nec-
Alfred, 55.
39 Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 88, 89; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King
Alfred, 54.
40 Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 88, 90, 76; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of
King Alfred, 54, 57, 21.
191
non et paganorum…infestationibus’].41 Physical ‘illnesses’ and

political ‘incursions’ sit side by side as parallel forces that act
upon Alfred’s biological form and his kingdom’s territory. They
mark an entangled relationship between Alfred’s physical body
and his political body, indicating that the health (or sickness) of
one is coterminous with the other.
Alfred is not only a sick body but also a ‘vernacular’ one. As
a precocious child, Alfred is divinely inspired to learn ‘English
poems’ [‘Saxonica poemata’] by heart.42 Alfred’s love and com-
prehension of English introduces his desire to learn Latin, and
he memorizes the ‘“daily round,” that is, the services of the
hours, and then certain psalms and many prayers’ [‘cursum di-
urnum, id est celebrationes horarum, ac deinde psalmos quos-
dam et orationes multas’].43 In his youth, Alfred cultivates the
linguistic and religious components of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identi-
ty; and, as king, these expressions are amplified by his embodied
performances. Alfred’s enjoyment of ‘reading aloud from books
in English and above all learning English poems by heart’ [‘Sax-
onicos libros recitare, et maxime carmina Saxonica memoriter
discere’] introduces a range of Christian practices.44 Alfred not
only reads from books and memorizes poetry. He also listens to
the Mass, participates in psalms and prayers, and gives alms to
the needy. All these embodied, ritual activities of Alfred’s child-
hood and adulthood take place, however, amid ‘Viking attacks
and his continual bodily infirmities’ [‘paganorum infestationes
et cotidianas corporis infirmitates’].45 Alfred’s vernacular or
‘Saxon’ expressions of a so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ethnicity op-
Alfred, 21.
Alfred, 21. Asser uses four different verbs associated with educational peda-
gogy to emphasize Alfred’s total comprehension of ‘Saxon’ poetry: ‘disco’
[‘learn’], ‘intelligo’ [‘understand’], ‘recito’ [‘recite’], and ‘lego’ [‘learn’].
Alfred, 21.
Alfred, 59.
45 Ibid.
192
erate alongside the physical infirmities and territorial attacks

upon his two kingly bodies.
Stories of Alfred’s private life reveal that embodiment and
vernacularity are trip hazards on the journey to sovereignty.
Consequently, despite Asser’s departure from the annals, Alfred’s
childhood and adulthood draw Asser, repeatedly, back towards
its world of Viking invasion. As stories that are meant to return
Alfred’s biographical ship to the ‘land’ of Ælfred, Angulsaxonum
rex, however, these personal accounts do not simply evidence
Alfred’s unsovereign body but also work to remedy it. Asser
manages the problem of Alfred’s physical, vernacular form by
bracing his account of Alfred’s illnesses against Pope Gregory’s
Regula Pastoralis, a text that characterizes the rector, or ruler, as
a figure of pious governance who must not only forego temp-
tations of the body46 but also welcome physical suffering. Like
Gregory’s rector, as a youth, Alfred is sexually tempted, and God
gives him piles in order to help him resist his temptations. As an
adult, Alfred acts always in accordance with Christian practices
in the face of continuous illness and pain. In addition to draw-
ing from Gregory, Asser’s Life is influenced by Eusebius’s Life
of Constantine, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, and the anony-
mous Life of Alcuin, biographical models that emphasize ‘royal
devotion’ as an aspect of good kingship.47 These sources instruct
46 For example, in Part II, Chapter 2, Gregory explains that fear of God keeps
the rector humble and pure so that he does not engage in ‘delight of the
flesh’ [‘carnis delectatio’] (Grégoire le Grand, Règle pastorale, 2 vols., eds.
Bruno Judic, Floribert Rommel, and Charles Morel [Paris: Éditions du
Cerf, 1992], I:180, ll.48–49). My translation. See also Pratt, ‘The Illnesses of
King Alfred the Great,’ 82.
47 As Paul Kershaw summarizes, Asser’s biography ‘belongs to a lineage of
Christian royal biography that begins with Eusebius’s Life of Constantine,
but has a closer affinity with the more immediate family of Carolingian
and sub-Carolingian biographies of pious laymen’ (‘Illness, Power and
Prayer in Asser’s Life of King Alfred,’ Early Medieval Europe 10, no. 2
[2001]: 201). These biographies are also thought of as ‘mirrors for princes,’
and they emphasize what David Pratt, following Kershaw, explains as a
‘Carolingian tradition of royal devotion [that] provides by far the clearest
precedents for Alfred’s own personal piety, described by Asser’ (‘The Ill-
nesses of King Alfred the Great,’ 45).
193
rulers in the practice of good governance, arguing that the regu-

lation of one’s body is a priori to governing the bodies of others
and therefore an ‘enhance[ment]’ of the king’s secular position.48
While Asser’s religious and lay models of embodied rulership
do not absent Alfred’s body, they direct its unruly materiality
towards enactments of spiritual-secular self-regulation. They
prepare Alfred’s physical, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ form for its translation
into a Latinized, textual body.
As a child, Alfred’s memorization of psalms and prayers is
accompanied by an interest in Latin that, as an adult, blossoms
into a desire to learn the language and be educated in its scholar-
ship. Alfred seeks teachers, including Asser, from across north-
ern Europe to live at his court in Wessex and to instruct him
in the wisdom of Latin texts. This gathering of Latin-educated
men returns the Life to annal material. Specifically, Alfred’s bur-
geoning interest in Latin prompts Asser to return to the charter
language of Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex and to translate an annal
entry that documents the identification and voluntary submis-
sion of Angle and Saxon subjects to Alfred’s governance:
In that year [886] Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, re-

stored the city of London splendidly…and made it habitable
again…All the Angles and Saxons — those who had formerly
been scattered everywhere and were not in captivity with the
Vikings — turned willingly to King Alfred and submitted
themselves to his lordship.
[Eodem anno Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex…Lundoniam ci-

vitatem honoifice restauravit et habitabilem fecit…Ad quem
regem omnes Angli et Saxones, qui prius ubique dispersi
48 As Pratt writes, works such as Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne reshape king-

ship as a ‘ministerium or office’ in which the king’s ability to govern was
‘dependent upon his prior ability to rule his own body and his house-
hold…harness[ing] even more effectively…the needs of royal power’ (‘The
Illnesses of King Alfred the Great,’ 44).
194
fuerant aut cum paganis sub captivitate erant, voluntarie

converterunt, et suo dominio se subdiderunt’].49
Asser replaces the Old English reference to Alfred’s ‘Angelcyn’

people with the phrase, ‘omnes Angli et Saxones.’50 This sleight
of hand, which substitutes a Latin phrase for a vernacular com-
pound, not only ushers in the appearance of ‘Angles’ and ‘Sax-
ons’ but, moreover and most importantly, it also reveals these to
be Latin, not vernacular, terms. Asser’s Latin emendations to the
886 annal pronounce ‘Angles’ and ‘Saxons’ as Latin translations
of vernacular ethnicities. Asser’s Latinizing move is followed by
a description of these Anglo-Saxons that expands upon mate-
rial in the Old English. According to Asser, Angles and Saxons
form a corporate body that consists of everyone [‘omnes’], eve-
rywhere [‘ubique’], who are living freely in diaspora [‘dispersi
fuerant’], and count themselves Christian. When these dis-
persed Christians gather themselves under Alfred’s dominion,
their Anglo-Saxon bodies — the Angulsaxones named in the
charters as part of Alfred’s royal style — define the limits of his
kingdom. Not Saxons and Mercians, but all who can be identi-
fied by Latin signifiers and in accordance with Latinate faith, are
counted as Angli et Saxones, then rendered into the ethnopoliti-
cal subjects of Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex.
Up to this point in the Life of King Alfred, Asser has consist-
ently and repeatedly deployed Alfred’s royal style in order to sig-
nal an understanding of sovereignty that comes from within the
early English charter tradition. Yet Alfred’s vernacular, Anglo-
Saxon body acts as a roadblock to enactments of sovereignty
49 Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 97, 98; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King
Alfred, 69. Note that Keynes and Lapidge argue that Stevenson’s emenda-
tion of ‘sub’ from ‘sine’ contradicts annal statements, and their translation
follows the ‘original and intended reading’ (Alfred the Great, 266n199).
50 The 886 annal entry states, ‘In that same year, king Alfred restored the
town of London, and all English people, except those who were held
captive by the Danes, turned to him’ [‘Þy ilcan geare gesette Elfred cyning
Lundenburg, 7 him all Angelcyn to cirde þæt buton deniscra monna hæft-
niede was’] (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 53).
195
by this charter formula. Asser remedies this issue by translat-

ing Old English annal material into Latin and by translating, or
recoding, Alfred’s vernacular, performative, Anglo-Saxon body
into an increasingly Latin-oriented form. Asser’s work pays off:
Alfred’s subjects become an expansive body of Latinized Angles
and Saxons who declare Alfred their Angulsaxonum rex. Char-
ter language brings to presence a body, a corpus, of Alfred’s sub-
jects, who acknowledge Alfred’s political overlordship to all who
are ethnopolitically ‘Anglo-Saxon.’
Once this dispersed group of Latinized Angles and Saxons
have subordinated themselves to Alfred, and a political body ‘of
Anglo-Saxons’ [‘Angulsaxonum’] has been assembled, Asser no
longer translates from the Old English annals. Yet a spirit of cor-
poreal assembly guides Asser’s discussion of Alfred’s embodied
relationship to Latin texts: ‘It was also in this year [887] that Al-
fred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, first began…to read [Latin] and
to translate at the same time, all on one and the same day’ [‘Eo-
dem quoque anno seape memoratus Ælfred, Angulsaxonum
rex…legere et interpretari simul uno eodemque die primitus
inchoavit’].51 One day, as Alfred was listening intently to some
Latin passages that Asser was reading, ‘he suddenly showed me
[Asser] a little book which he constantly carried on his per-
son [‘subito ostendens libellum, quem in sinum suum sedulo
portabat’].’52 As all of Alfred’s cognitive energies are focused on
taking in this Latin passage, he stretches out [‘ostendo’] from
the ‘hollow,’ ‘bosom,’ or ‘hiding-place’53 [‘sinus’] of his garment
a little book [‘libellus’] comprised of ‘the day-time offices and
some psalms and certain prayers which he had learned in his
youth’ [‘diurnus cursus et psalmi quidam atque orationes quae-
dam, quas ille in iuventute sua legerat’].54 After invoking Alfred’s
Alfred, 73.
52 Ibid.
53 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds., A Latin Dictionary (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1879), s.v. ‘sinus, n.’
Alfred, 73. Note that this exchange between Asser and Alfred restages an
196
royal style, Asser explains that Latin, not ‘Saxon,’ language and
Christian, not secular, poetry have inhabited Alfred’s heart since
childhood. While Alfred has legerat (a term that means ‘gather,’
‘collect,’ ‘read,’ and ‘learn’) these Latin fragments for many years,
all of these activities have been done in secret.55 Upon showing
Asser his libellus, a book so filled with textual snippets that a
new one must be commissioned, Alfred sets to work ‘like the
busy bee, wandering far and wide’ as he ‘eagerly and relent-
lessly assembles many various flowers of Holy Scripture, with
which he crams full the cells of his heart’ [‘velut apis fertilis-
sima longe lateque…discurrens, multimodos divinae scripturae
flosculos inhianter et incessabiliter congregavit, quis praecordii
sui cellulas densatim replevit’].56 Through this early medieval
metaphor,57 Alfred’s ‘gathering’ and ‘collecting’ [‘legerat’] are
intensified as ‘assembling’ and ‘unifying’ [‘congregavit’] activi-
ties.58 Likewise, this metaphor transfers Alfred’s libellus from his
bosom [‘sinus’] into the emotional and affective interior of his
heart [‘praecordium’]. As Alfred is cognitively, then emotion-
earlier scene in which Alfred’s mother ‘was showing him [Alfred] and his
brothers a book of English poetry which she held in her hand’ [‘sibi et
fratibus suis quendam Saxonicum poematicae artis librum, quem in manu
habebat, ostenderet’] (Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 74; Steven-
son, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 20). Asser not only repeats the language of
books [‘liber,’ ‘libellus’] that are held [‘ostendo’] in hand [‘manus’], but he
also recycles, in his exchange with Alfred, the verbs used to track Alfred’s
full comprehension of ‘Saxon’ poetry: ‘disco’ [‘learn’], ‘intelligo’ [‘under-
stand’], ‘recito’ [‘recite’], and ‘lego’ [‘learn’] (Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred
the Great, 75; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 20). In so doing, Asser
appropriates the terms and conditions that document Alfred’s precocious,
divinely inspired, and in toto process of vernacular learning. By associat-
ing Alfred’s Latin-learning process with books that are not just held in
his hand but, moreover, positioned within his heart, Asser indicates an
intimacy with Latin that trumps Alfred’s love of Saxon poems.
55 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘lego, v.,’ I, II.B.2.
Alfred, 74.
57 Here and elsewhere, Keynes and Lapidge note Asser’s debts to Aldhelm’s
use of the bee metaphor in De Virginitate (Alfred the Great, nn161, 213).
58 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘congrego, v.,’ II.
197
ally, ‘Latinized,’ Latin religious texts are gathered into a corpus,

then assembled, unified, and inserted within his physical body.
At last, annal material and personal biography work together
in the service of Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex. The physical bod-
ies of Angles and Saxons seem to have been transformed into
the textual bodies of religious writings. A political corpus has
become a textual corpus, which is now located within Alfred.
When this happens, Alfred not only learns to read and translate
Latin but, moreover, desires to instruct others in Latin learning
and translation:
Now as soon as that first passage had been copied, he [Al-

fred] was eager to read it at once and to translate it into Eng-
lish, and thereupon to instruct many others…
[Nam primo illo testimonio scripto, confestim legere et in

Saxonica lingua interpretari, atque inde perplures instituere
studuit…]59
As Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, subjects Christian and Lat-

in texts to mental scrutiny and emotional assembly, he becomes
a figure of religious literacy [‘legere’], translation [‘interpretari’],
and, finally, instructive governance [‘instituere’].60 No longer is
Alfred the subject of translation. Rather, he becomes its agent in
order to exercise more compelling displays of royal power.61 As
Robert Stanton writes, ‘Alfre[d] clear[ly] identifi[es] with King
David as a besieged, wise, and, above all, teaching king,’ who is
traditionally assumed to have written the Psalms — the primary
Alfred, 75.
60 In addition to ‘teach’ or ‘train,’ instituo also means ‘to order, govern, ad-
minister, regulate’ the actions of others (Lewis and Short, A Latin Diction-
ary, s.v. ‘instituo, v.,’ II. I, K).
61 I would like to thank Ryan Perry for pointing this out to me and for draw-
ing my attention to Carolingian interest in King David as a literary figure.
198
contents of Alfred’s libellus.62 Moreover, as Daniel Orton writes,

‘For Asser, the figure of Alfred embodied a Davidic union of
ecclesiastical and secular power, with the king’s piety confirm-
ing his divinely ordained status.’63 Alfred’s alliance with David
not only advances his relationship with ‘an important source
of influence on the Christian definition of sovereignty’ but also
orients his kingdom within Christendom’s sovereign domain.64
As a translator, Alfred’s ethnopolitical overlordship over Angles
and Saxons reaches towards a scholarly–spiritual governance
that positions his kingship and kingdom within a Hebraic tra-
dition, from whence Christ and Christian sovereignty emerge.
Flesh, Text, and Christ’s Sovereign Corpse
Sovereignty, as this chapter noted earlier, emerges and is sus-

tained not only by exercises of top-down power but also by the
‘aesthetics, representation, and theatricality’ of power, which
enable the ‘staging…reproducing, [and] identifying with sover-
eignty and its experience.’65 Asser’s Life of King Alfred translates
62 Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cam-

bridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 126.
63 Daniel Orton, ‘Royal Piety and Davidic Imitation: Cultivating Political
Capital in the Alfredian Psalms,’ Neophilologus 99, no. 3 (2015): 483.
64 Francesco Miolo, Medieval Sovereignty, 129. Note that here, Miolo names
Melchisedech, whom ‘David is said to have looked…[to]…in the attempt
to unite royal and sacerdotal powers. Because of the conquest of Jerusa-
lem, David and his house became heirs to Melchisedch’s dynasty of priest-
kings’ from which ‘Jesus Christ and his New Order’ unfold (ibid, 129, 130).
65 Benite, Geroulanos, and Jerr, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ 5. See also Biddick,
Make and Let Die, Chap. 2, ‘Transmedieval Mattering and the Untimeli-
ness of the Real Presence’ and Chap. 5, ‘Tears of Reign: Big Sovereigns Do
Cry,’ for the ways in which medieval and early modern forms of sovereign-
ty absorbed and redeployed Christological symbolism and signifiers, and
also depended (and still do) on the textual and visual rhetorics of theatri-
cal performance and representational performativity. Biddick’s entire book
is critical for also understanding the ways in which contemporary theories
of sovereignty and biopower (such as from Agamben, Foucault, and Der-
rida) either misread or completely disregard the medieval archives of the
formulation and formations (religious, political, legal, and otherwise) of
sovereignty to which they are nevertheless tied, and which archives also
199
vernacular texts and bodies into Latin in order to transform

Alfred into a political overlord of Anglo-Saxon subjects. From
here, Asser abandons his literal translation of the Old English
annals and focuses his energies on the process by which Alfred
is translated into a Latinized, textual body of secular-spiritual
sovereignty. Key to Alfred’s sovereign recoding are his acts of
gathering, collecting, and assembling — of drawing together and
assembling within him a corpus of physical bodies that seem to
have become texts. In the future (and, importantly, this future
is not narrated in Asser’s biography), Alfred will translate this
textual corpus. But for now, Asser draws upon the elasticity of
the Latin term corpus in order to position Alfred directly within
the zone of Christian sovereignty.
In the next clause (but in the same sentence that pronounces
Alfred’s new role as a translator), Asser imagines a biblical ‘ex-
ample’ that not only extends Alfred’s associations with David
to those of Christ but also exposes the sovereign mechanisms
that translate a suffering physical corpus into an inviolate textual
corpus:
…just as we are admonished by the example of the fortunate

thief who recognized the Lord Jesus Christ — his Lord and
indeed Lord of all things — hanging next to him on the ven-
erable gallows of the Holy Cross, and petitioned Him with
earnest prayers. Turning his fleshly eyes only, (he could not
do anything else, since he was completely pinned down with
nails), he called out in a reverential voice: ‘Christ, remember
me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom’ [Luke 23:42].
This thief first began to learn the rudiments of Christian faith
on the gallows; the king likewise (even though in a different
way, given his royal station), prompted from heaven, took it
upon himself to begin on the rudiments of Holy Scripture on
reveal the always entangled relations between the development of politi-

cal sovereignty, Christian epistemology, and the often violent relations
between the Christian Church and its Others, which means not only have
we never been secular, but sovereignty is also not thinkable outside of rela-
tions of power that are inherently ethnocentric, racist, and violent.
200
St Martin’s Day [11 November] and to study these flowers col-

lected here and there from various masters and to assemble
them within the body of one little book (even though they
were all mixed up) as the occasion demanded. He expanded
it so much that it nearly approached the size of a psalter. He
wished it to be called his enchiridion (that is to say, ‘hand-
book’), because he conscientiously kept it to hand by day and
night. As he then used to say, he derived no small comfort
from it.
[…ac veluti de illo felici latrone cautum est, Dominum Iesum

Christum, Dominum suum, immoque omnium, iuxta se in
venerabili sanctae Crucis patibulo pendentem cognoscente;
quo subnixis precibus, inclinatis solummodo corporalibus
oculis, quia aliter non poterat, erat enim totus confixus cla-
vis, submissa voce clamaret: ‘Memento mei, cum veneris in
regnum tuum, Christe,’ qui Christianae fidei rudimenta in
gabulo primitus inchoavit discere. Hic aut aliter, quamvis
dissimili modo, in regia potestate sanctae rudimenta scrip-
turae, divinitus instinctus, praesumpsit incipere in venerabili
Martini solemnitate. Quos flosculos undecunque collectos
a quibuslibet magistris discere et in corpore unius libelli,
mixtim quamvis, sicut tunc suppetebat, redigere, usque adeo
protelavit quousque propemodum ad magnitudinem unius
psalterii perverniret. Quem enchiridion suum, id est manu-
alem librum, nominari voluit, eo quod ad manum illum die
noctuque solertissime habebat; in quo non mediocre, sicut
tunc aiebat, habebat solatium.]66
Asser’s interest in the crucifixion expands upon a discussion of

the thief, who acts as a proxy for Alfred. While the thief is com-
pletely immobilized on the cross, he (and Alfred) can nonethe-
less turn [‘inclinatis’] their ‘fleshly,’ ‘bodily,’ or ‘corporeal’ eyes
[‘corporalibus oculis’]. By restricting all physical movements
Alfred, 75, authors’ emphasis.
201
save one, Asser is able to anatomically limit an understanding

of what counts as ‘bodily’ and how the body can move: towards
Christ. While the thief hangs, suspended and unmoving on the
cross, he turns his eyes but does not gaze upon Christ, who, ac-
cording to the gospel of Luke, is one breath away from death
and from becoming a corpse. Instead, the thief calls out to him
in words from Luke, such that the thief begins to learn [‘incho-
avit discere’] the rudiments of Christian faith [‘Christianae fidei
rudimenta’]. In a similar fashion, Alfred takes it upon himself to
begin [‘praesumpsit incipere’] the rudiments of Holy Scripture
[‘sanctae rudimenta scripturae’], assembling them into ‘the cor-
pus’ or ‘body of a little book’ [‘in corpore unius libelli’].
Asser’s crucifixion scene offers a densely articulated medita-
tion on sovereignty via the shifting semantics of corpus, a word
that means not only ‘body’ and ‘text’ but also ‘corpse.’ As Debo-
rah Posel and Pamila Gupta write,
the dualistic life of the corpse [positions it] as a material

object, on one hand, and a signifier of wider political eco-
nomic, cultural, ideological and theological endeavours, on
the other. The moment of death produces a decaying body,
an item of waste that requires disposal — simultaneous with
an opportunity, sometimes an imperative — to recuperate
the meaning of spent life, symbolically effacing the material
extinction that death represents.67
Posel and Gupta understand the corpse as a borderland where

putrifying ‘waste’ meets a material ‘signifier.’ In other words, the
corpse negotiates the conversion of a dead body into text. As a
site of ‘recuperat[ion], it facilitates the ready movement between
two different definitions of corpus and, as such, functions as ‘a
pre-eminent site for the identification of…sovereign[ty].’68
67 Deborah Posel and Pamila Gupta, ‘The Life of the Corpse: Framing Reflec-
tions and Questions,’ African Studies 68, no. 3 (2009): 299.
68 Ninna Nyberg Sorensen, ‘Governing through the Mutilated Female Body,’
in Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies, ed.
Finn Stepputat (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 216.
202
In The Royal Remains, Eric Santner explores further the ‘du-

alistic life of the corpse,’ explaining, with Lacan, that the body’s
‘palpitating life-substance’ — its ‘flesh’ — is that ‘from which eve-
rything exudes.’69 And he continues (again, with Lacan), arguing
that ‘the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much
as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety.’70 The
body’s often-ill, often-suffering, fleshly form invokes, for Sant-
ner, a ‘crisis of materiality’ that must be managed, lest the body
become, upon point of death, what Posel and Gupta articulate
above as the decaying waste of the corpse.71 Santner expands his
argument in conversation with Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain:
[In pain,] the ‘obscenely…alive tissue’ of the human body

is enlisted as a source of verification and substantiation of
the symbolic authority of institutions and the social facts
they sponsor. This bottoming out of symbolic function on
what I am calling the flesh becomes urgent, Scarry argues,
when there is a crisis of belief or legitimization in a society…
‘allow[ing] extreme attributes of the body to be translated
into another language, to be broken away from the body and
relocated elsewhere at the very moment that the body itself
is disowned.’72
Scarry’s statements on the body in pain, which Santner recasts

as ‘flesh’ (and Asser identifies as ‘corporalis’ and ‘corpus’) locate
the suffering, physical body within the field of sovereignty, espe-
cially upon point of death. Such a relationship is possible, Sant-
ner and Scarry explain, when a community’s faith is in jeopardy.
69 Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the
Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 64,
65; quoted from Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, The
Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955,
trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 154.
70 Santner, The Royal Remains, 65; Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 155.
71 Santner, The Royal Remains, 64.
72 Ibid., xvi, quoting Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Un-
making of the World (New York: Oxford University Press), 31.
203
During ‘a crisis of belief,’ only the body’s ‘sheer material factual-

ness’ — its corporeal, suffering, and dying flesh — can lend re-
alness or certainty to political or social ideology that has been
challenged or remains unproven. At the moment of death, when
the living body becomes a corpse, its flesh can be ‘translated into
another language.’ It can be converted from waste into symbolic
meaning. The dualistic life of the corpse facilitates the conver-
sion, amid ideological crisis, from a material corpus to a textual
corpus.
The thinking of Posel and Gupta, and Santner, Lacan, and
Scarry, bear upon Christ’s crucifixion, a punishment that not
only displays Christ’s body as tortured flesh but likewise reveals
the unshaken, sovereign power of Rome. Further, the crucifix-
ion marks that crisis at which Judaic prophecies must be pain-
fully enfleshed and therefore made real by a Christian messiah,
whose death and attendant resurrection ushers in a new faith
and political ideology (via supersession).73 While crucifixion is
73 On the ways in which early medieval Christians fabricated imaginative

typologies and temporalities to ‘supersede’ and break off from their Jew-
ish ‘neighbors,’ which is also repeated, traumatically, in contemporary
academic scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations that continues to
reinscribe this fissure (which also reenacts its violence, both psychically
and materially, on real persons), see Kathleen Biddick, The Typological
Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). On the same state of affairs with regard to
Christian and Muslim ‘crusader martyrdom,’ see Kathleen Biddick, ‘Un-
binding the Flesh in the Time That Remains: Crusader Martyrdom Then
and Now,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007):
197–225, where she writes that, “[h]istorically, Christianity has constituted
and claimed official theological time by virtue of its temporal model of
supersession,’ especially by way of ‘corporeal’ fantasies tied especially to
Jewish circumcision and Christ’s crucifixion, and with the emergence of
Islam, ‘Christian supersessionary thinking stubbornly maintained this
temporal binary by confusing and conflating Muslim and Jewish flesh’ (197,
198). Ultimately, for Biddick, in ‘posing the question “Who is the enemy?”
the theologico-political intertwines itself inextricably with sovereignty. It
is therefore ethically urgent to understand the theologico-political vicis-
situdes of pleasure and pain, flesh and body at stake in the cult of martyrs,
then and now’ (198). It is not too much of a stretch, I would argue, to see
how this also plays out in Asser’s Life of King Alfred.
204
carried out by the legal authority of Rome, Christ’s death is per-

mitted by God the Father, whose paternal will renders Christ’s
body an ‘obscenely…alive tissue’ and ‘translate[s]’ it, by way of a
pain that ends in death, into the new ‘symbolic order’ of Chris-
tianity. Under joint penalty of earthly and heavenly sovereigns,
Christ’s flesh (bodily corpus) is rendered a corpse (corpus), then
translated into Christian Logos (textual corpus). Once ‘the in-
contestable reality of [Christ’s] physical body…[has] become an
attribute of an issue that at that moment has no independent re-
ality of its own,’74 Christ assumes his place as Son of God and
sovereign figure of Christian signification.
Asser’s retelling of the Crucifixion leverages the full force
of Christ’s sovereign corpse in order to complete the project
of making Alfred a king of Christian sovereignty. Asser posi-
tions Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, within this scene at the
moment when Alfred’s suffering, yet still living, body has been
thoroughly textualized and needs only the ideological weight
provided by Christianity to substantiate his claim to sover-
eignty. With the corpus of Christ in his hand — with an enchi-
ridion or hand-book that marks Alfred’s partial conversion of
flesh to text — Alfred is interpolated within its Latin world of
Holy Scripture. In the following sentence, Alfred hangs openly
(rather than by proxy) on the cross as a figure whose living body
in pain is, like Christ’s, now an agent of Christian sovereign-
ty. Alfred’s piles and unknown illnesses are no longer medical
manifestations but representative of purposive, spiritual suffer-
ing. Alfred’s body is no longer a worrisome material of decay
but, as Scarry would say, an ‘attribute’ of Christian doctrine that
has no ‘independent reality of its own.’75 As Asser explains, Al-
74 Santner, The Royal Remains, xvi, author’s emphasis; quoting Scarry, The
Body in Pain, 124–25.
75 Note that Asser’s crucifixion scene connects to Gregory’s figure of the
rector, whose physical suffering eventually transforms his body into a form
that is staked out between the poles of living [‘vivendi’] and dying [‘mo-
riens’]. As Gregory writes, ‘He, therefore — indeed, he precisely — must
devote himself entirely to setting an ideal of living. He must die to all
passions of the flesh and by now lead a spiritual life’ [‘Ille igitur, ille modis
205
fred is ‘transfixed by the nails of many tribulations[,]…plagued

continually with the savage attacks of some unknown disease[,
and]…perturbed…by the relentless attacks of foreign peoples’
[‘multis tribulationum clavis confossus…gravissima incogniti
doloris infestione incessanter fatigatur…assiduis exterarum
gentium infestationibus…inquietabatur’].76 In full possession of
his little book of scripture, however, Alfred’s ill and sickly physi-
cal form is translated and transformed into the world-making
Latin narrative of Christian sovereignty.
On the cross, Alfred suffers like Christ and alongside Christ
such that his body’s physical suffering form now aggrandizes
Alfred’s territorial limits. Asser immediately catalogues the
king’s ‘frequent expeditions and battles against the Vikings and
of the unceasing responsibilities of government…his daily in-
volvement with the nations which lie from the Mediterranean
to the farthest limit of Ireland…[and]…letters sent to him with
gifts from Jerusalem by the patriarch Elias’ [‘frequentibus con-
tra paganos expeditionibus et bellis et incessabilibus regne gu-
bernaculis…cotidiana nationum,77 quae in Tyrenno mari usque
ultimum Hiberniae finem habitant…de Hierosolyma ab El[ia]
patriarcha epistolas et dona illi directas’].78 Alfred’s earthly pow-
ers stretch from the periphery of Europe towards the center of
Christendom, and then return home, where Alfred exercises
these powers to rebuild towns, fashion treasures, construct halls
and chambers, and move royal residences. While threats to Al-
fred have not abated, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex manages them
omnibus debet ad exemplum vivendi pertrahi, qui cunctis carnis passioni-

bus moriens iam spiritaliter vivit’]. See Part I, Chapter 10 of St. Gregory
the Great, Pastoral Care, trans. Henry Davis (Westminster: Newman Press,
1950), 38; Grégorie le Grand, Règle pastorale, I:160–62, ll.1–4.
Alfred, 76.
77 ‘The transmitted text (de cotidiana nationum) is evidently corrupt, as
Stevenson recognized…a word such as sollicitudine has fallen out after
cotidiana, and our translation incorporates his suggestion’ (Keynes and
Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 270n219).
Alfred, 76–77.
206
with an indefatigable presence-in-pain that is no longer focused

on preventing invasion but on extending its territorial limits.
Alfred governs, simultaneously, in close proximity and at a dis-
tance from his political territories and subjects. He is physically
present yet entirely absent from the exercise of royal power. He
remains a living, physical body (corpus) in pain even though he
holds Christ’s sovereign corpse/text (corpus) in his hand.
Once Alfred’s ill and suffering flesh — its crisis of materiali-
ty — is recoded within the textual-symbolic, typological order of
Christianity, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex ‘is’ in perpetual, organ-
ized motion. Alfred expands his personal and political borders
in order to make his kingdom a heaven on earth. Once these
acts are complete, Asser returns to the nautical language from
whence his narrative began, describing the king as an ‘excellent
pilot’ [‘gubernator praecipuus’] who now ‘guide[s] his ship laden
with much wealth to the desired safe haven of his homeland’
[‘navem suam multis opibus refertam ad desideratum ac tutum
patriae suae portum…perducere’].79 Alfred’s biographical ship
no longer ‘waver[s] or wander[s] from course’ [‘haud aliter titu-
bare ac vacillare’] because Alfred now contains within himself
both the Latinized Angli and Saxones and the Latin body of
Christ.80 As helmsman of his own story, Alfred enacts the onto-
logical task of being ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ His royal style is no longer
appositive to, but located within, his name. Consequently, after
this point in the narrative, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex no longer
appears in Asser’s Life.
Asser’s biography enacts an understanding of sovereignty
that is pronounced within the charters, in which Old English
oral expressions and embodied rituals are translated into Latin
texts that recode the king’s body and earthly kingdom within
the eternal reaches of Christ’s sovereign Word and his heavenly
domain. Positioning Alfred within Christ’s sovereignty happens
by way of creative, theatrical means that Latinize and textualize
Alfred, 77.
80 Ibid.
207
the bodies of the Anglo-Saxons Alfred governs in order to as-

semble them within Alfred’s own Latin, textual frame. In order
to complete this translation, Asser draws upon the crucifixion
scene, exposing Christ’s corpus (a body, corpse, and text) as the
sovereign whose cosmological weight is necessary to substanti-
ate Alfred’s claim to sovereignty, and pointing out the ‘seriality’
of sovereignty, a concept ‘invented as a secularized successor to
divine representation.’81
Asser’s Life of King Alfred imagines a narrative conclusion
in which Alfred has arrived as a figure of Anglo-Saxon sover-
eignty. However, his crucifixion fantasy begins at the moment
when the translation of Alfred into Latin texts has resulted in
Alfred’s desire to become a translator. While Alfred sets out to
translate the texts he has copied in his libellus, this is a project
that is not realized within Alfred’s biography. In calling forth
Alfred as a translator, Asser references a body of texts that are
produced at Alfred’s court, beginning with David’s Psalms and
including Gregory’s Cura pastoralis and Dialogi, Boethius’s
De consolatione philosophiae, Augustine’s Soliloquae, Orosius’s
Historia, and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. While this textual
body — this Alfredian corpus — is located beyond the narrative
boundaries of Asser’s Life, Asser nonetheless positions Alfred’s
body within striking distance of it. To say it a different way, As-
ser’s biography not only imagines Alfred’s sovereignty over the
Anglo-Saxons according to terms understood in the early Eng-
lish charters. Moreover, it leans heavily on the sovereign corpus
of Christ in order to assert secular succession (which is also a
violently Christological supersession, as Kathleen Biddick has
demonstrated in her important work on the development of
sovereignty in the medieval period). Furthermore, Asser’s Life
writes a promissory note to Alfred, quietly asserting that he will
in the future become a sovereign like Christ, when his physical
body is translated into an Alfredian textual corpus.
81 George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek, ‘Introduction: Sovereignty Crises,’

in Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, eds. George Edmonson and
Klaus Mladek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 13.
208
Sovereignty’s Morbid Ontology: Civil Wars, Alfred’s Corpse,

and the Ghosts of Effigial Portraiture
The royal style, Angulsaxonum rex, remained in circulation for

several decades after Alfred’s death, in the charter language
of Edward and Athelstan. However, the term was under pres-
sure, even during Alfred’s reign, from the alternative and more
inclusively styled rex Anglorum. As an expression of limited
range — one that claimed sovereignty in fiction but could not
sustain it in politics — ‘Anglo-Saxon’ fell out of use by the mid-
1000s, when later medieval historians ceded Alfred’s role as
political unifier to Egbert, first monarch of England’s so-called
Saxon heptarchy. In the sixteenth century, however, ‘Anglo-Sax-
on’ makes a comeback.82 And in the seventeenth, Alfred does,
82 ‘Anglo-Saxon’ returns to print in Sir John Smith’s Dialogue on the Correct

and Improved Writing of English [De recta et emendata linguae anglicae
scriptione, dialogus] (Paris: Ex officina Roberti Stephani Typographi
Regij, 1568), and in William Camden’s Britannia: Or, A Chorographical
Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and
Ireland, and the Adjacent Islands, out of the Depth of Antiquity [Britannia
siue florentissimorum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, et insularum
adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio] (London: per
Radulphum Newbery, 1587). These are the first postmedieval texts to em-
ploy ‘Anglosaxones’ (in contrast to the more popular referents, ‘Saxones’
and ‘Angles’). In Smith’s treatise on spelling reform, he emphasizes the
value of ‘Anglo-Saxon language and writing’ [‘Anglosaxonicæ linguæ &
scriptionis’], which belong to ‘those Anglosaxons, our ancestors’ [‘illos
atavos nostros Anglosaxones’], ‘our esteemed elders’ [‘maiores nostros’],
and ‘those first Anglosaxons [who] considered very carefully the nature
of letters and wrote more correctly, than we do today’ [‘primos illos
Anglosaxones multo curiosius intuitos esse naturam literarum, quam nos
hodie facimus, rectiusque scripsisse’] (22, 23, 32, 32–33). Camden uses
‘Anglosaxones’ as a consolidating term for Angles, Saxons, and Jutes that
marks them as collectively distinct from the ‘Scoti’ and ‘Picti’ of Britain
(55–62). All translations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latin
texts are my own.
As a compound that is tied to issues of language reform and British
history, these early modern re-uses of ‘Anglosaxon’ acknowledge its ties
to ethnopolitical identity. Yet Philemon Holland’s English translation
of Camden’s Britannia repositions the ethnopolitics of the compound
within a contemporary framework of English identity. Holland trans-
209
too. At Oxford University, a passage supposedly copied from

a manuscript of Asser’s Life in the 1590s demonstrates Alfred’s
role as the university’s ninth-century ‘refounder.’83 As Simon
Keynes writes, this ignited ‘a special enthusiasm for Alfred, in
Oxford,’84 where engravings, portraits, stained and etched glass,
and a bust, all bearing his likeness, were located in various Uni-
versity buildings.85
Sir John Spelman’s posthumously published biography, The
Life of Ælfred the Great, addresses this purported relationship
between Alfred and Oxford.86 Moreover, it yokes Alfred’s king-
ship to that of Charles I and his son, Prince Charles. Spelman,
a royalist,87 wrote his biography of Alfred at the outset of the
English Civil Wars,88 a nine-year conflict that disputed the ab-
solute sovereignty of Charles I in battles fought, simultaneously,
lates ‘Anglosaxones’ as ‘English-Saxons,’ and prefaces Camden’s discus-

sion of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes with a map of Britain titled ‘Englalond
Anglia Anglosaxoum Heptarchia,’ under which is written ‘Terra Armis
Animisque Potens’ (image between pages 126 and 127). Image and text
coordinate to nuance the compound’s function as a term by which an early
modern ‘Englalond’ and a medieval ‘Anglia’ are temporal successors to the
‘Heptarchy of Anglo-Saxons,’ but, together, they figure as ‘a land strong
in arms and in spirit.’ Holland’s map not only confirms the a priori status
of a unified and ‘powerful’ Anglo-Saxon England within Britain, but also
inflects the subsequent narrative of English-Saxons, who, unlike the Picts
and Scots, are a people within a nation, possessing a single and singular
ethnopolitical status.
83 Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great,’ Anglo-Saxon England
28 (1999): 244.
84 Ibid., 245.
85 Ibid., 261, 262, and image VIIIa.
86 Sir John Spelman, The Life of Ælfred the Great (Oxford: Printed at the
theater for Maurice Atkins at the Golden-ball in St. Paul’s Church-Yard,
London, 1709).
87 Corinne Comstock Weston and Janelle Renfrow Greenberg explain that
Spelman’s political writings ‘delineat[ed] a theory of a legal sovereignty in
the king’ alone (Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy Over Legal
Sovereignty in Stuart England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981], 109).
88 Roberta Frank notes that Spelman’s biography of Alfred was written c.
1642, the year in which the First Civil War began (‘The Search for the
Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet,’ in Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon
210
in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Spelman’s biography turns to

Alfred, and to sovereignty. It braces the contemporary crisis of
political faith in Charles I (which fragmented Britain into fac-
tionalized territories) against the biography of an early medieval
king who gathers the ‘broken Reliques of the Saxon-Heptarchy’
into one corporate body and becomes the ‘sole Sovereign of the
whole Island [of Britain]’ and ‘King of the English-Saxons.’89
The Life of Ælfred the Great is dedicated to Prince Charles,
and in order to render Alfred a sovereign in whom the prince
(and his father, the king) may have faith, Spelman delinks Al-
fred’s illness from his political tribulations.90 Likewise, he says
nothing about Alfred’s death. However, Spelman meticulously
traces the fate of Alfred’s corpse. After an initial burial at Win-
chester’s New Minster, ‘his Body was taken up from thence in
the Abbey of Hyde, without the Gates of Winchester,’ and, in
1520, his ‘Bones,’ along with ‘several other of our Kings and No-
ble Persons,’ were collected, put into identified lead chests, and
placed on top of a wall built to enclose the Winchester Pres-
bytery.91 Then, ‘at last, Dec. 14, 1642. the Rebells…most sacrile-
giously broke into the Church…and amongst the rest prophan’d
and violated these Sacred Cabinets of the Dead, scattering the
Bones all over the Church, and carrying them in Triumph into
other Places, some whereof were brought to Oxford, and lodged
England: Thomas Northcote Toller and the Toller Memorial Lectures, ed.
Donald Scragg [London: D.S. Brewer, 2003], 145n52).
89 Spelman, The Life of Ælfred the Great, 92, author’s emphasis. See also
Robert Powell, The Life of Alfred, or Alvred (Paul’s Church-yard: Printed by
Richard Eadger for Thomes Alchorn, 1634), the biographical precursor to
Spelman’s work. The subtitle of Powell’s work claims ‘ALVRED’ as ‘The first
Institutor of sub-ordinate government in this Kingdome, and Refounder
of the Vniversity of OXFORD’ in ‘Parallel’ to ‘our Soveraigne Lord, K.
CHARLES’ (title page).
90 While Spelman narrates Alfred’s ‘Pain of the Piles and Emrauds,’ which
God converts, at Alfred’s request, into ‘an intestine Pain’ that appears at
the time of marriage,’ this discussion is limited to one section of text and
bracketed off from his political activities, which have already rendered him
sovereign (The Life of Ælfred the Great, 207, 208).
91 Ibid., 217, 217n2, author’s emphasis.
211
in the Repository adjoyning to the [Bodelian] Publick Library.’92

After death, Alfred’s corpse shows no signs of decay. It shifts
seamlessly from a ‘Body’ to ‘Bones,’ which are translated three
times before becoming ‘at last’ a casualty of the Civil Wars. Yet,
the desecrating acts of the rebels have landed Alfred (along with
several others) in the book repository of Oxford’s library, where
pieces of his unmarked bones are now ‘lodged’ with a corpus of
texts. England’s Civil Wars prove to be the crisis of faith that re-
cuperates Alfred’s corpse: translating it — recoding it — repeat-
edly until there is no more material waste to be found. Alfred’s
physical body is lost in translation. And this enables Alfred to
become, like the body of Christ, sovereign reading material for
Charles I and the Prince, whose living flesh is cause for national
anxiety and therefore truly at risk.
Spelman’s biography is never published in his lifetime, and
as the Civil Wars continue, anxieties over the king’s sovereignty
and his material flesh reach a crisis point. In 1649, Charles I is
beheaded, Prince Charles is exiled, and a short-lived republican
Commonwealth is established. It is not until several decades af-
ter Charles II’s restoration to the throne that a Latin translation
of Spelman’s biography is finally published at Oxford in 1678.93
Still dedicated to Prince Charles (even though his brother, James
II, has succeeded him on the throne), the Latin Life of Ælfred
the Great remains concerned with the body of the king and the
92 Ibid., 217n2, author’s emphasis. Spelman’s history is dubious. In 1538, Hyde

Abbey was given over to Henry VIII’s officers. ‘John Leland, Henry VIII’s
historian recorded that lead tablets bearing the names Alfred and Edward
were found in tombs in front of the great altar at Hyde,’ but there is no
record of their disturbance during the Civil Wars (Eric Klingelhofer and
Kenneth Qualmann, ‘Hyde Abbey,’ in Medieval Archaeology: An Encyclope-
dia, ed. Pam J. Crabtree [New York: Routledge, 2016], 170).
93 Sir John Spelman, The Life of Ælfred the Great, Unvanquished King of the
English, Bound in Three Books [Aelfredi Magni, Anglorum regis invictissimi
vita tribus libris comprehensa] (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1678). The
identity of the translator is uncertain, but Obadiah Walker and Christo-
pher Wase have been suggested as possibilities (Matthew Kilburn, ‘The
Learned Press: History, Languages, Literature, and Music,’ in The History
of Oxford University Press: Volume I: Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 425).
212
Figure 1. Engraving in Sir John Spelman, Life of Ælfred the Great,

Unvanquished King of the English, Bound in Three Volumes [Aelfredi
Magni, Anglorum regis invictissimi vita tribus libris comprehensa] (Ox-
ford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1678), n.p., Tab[ula] I. Image courtesy of
Smith College.
213
post-Restoration fate of sovereignty. Consequently, it introduces

the Life with a series of engravings, the first of which depicts the
body of Alfred (see Fig. 1).94
Copied from a portrait at Oxford that was painted ‘within a
year or so of the Restoration,’ this image depicts the king with a
furrowed brow, sagging eyes, and an ungroomed beard.95 Paint-
ed to the tune of royal politics, Alfred looks exhausted by the
turmoil of previous decades. Nevertheless, his aged body has
weathered England’s crisis of sovereignty, and he remains in
possession of his crown and royal robes. Alfred wears the regalia
of the king’s funeral effigy.96 His portrait showcases the immor-
tal dignitas of English sovereignty, which is vested in Christ’s
corpse, a physical body made into a divine form. Despite the
regicide of Charles I, which materialized the king’s flesh as waste
and decay, Alfred’s biography is not (the portrait seems to say)
a dead letter to royal sovereignty. While the Life’s textual narra-
tive — into which the ‘Body’ and ‘Bones’ of Alfred’s sovereign
corpse was translated — did not fulfill its promises of reuniting
the country’s warring political factions and of keeping Charles
on the throne, Alfred’s effigial portrait provides its own ‘embod-
ied’ assurances. It claims that Alfred’s sovereignty, passed down
94 Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great,’ 261, fig. VIIIa.
95 Ibid., 261. Keyes notes that the portrait was commissioned by Oxford’s
University College and hung in the college Master’s lodgings (ibid.).
96 The Oxford portrait calls forth a relationship between the king’s two
bodies, as theorized in Ernst Kantorowicz’s magisterial study The King’s
Two Bodies. Beginning with the late medieval period and continuing well
through the seventeenth century, the king, like Christ, is a geminated fig-
ure — both human and divine, simultaneously. Consequently, sovereignty
rests within the king’s body, yet upon death it survives in his sacred office.
As Kantorowicz explains, while the king’s dead body was buried ‘naked or
in his winding sheet,’ an effigy of the king, dressed in regalia, was publicly
displayed as ‘the true bearer of royal glory and the symbol of a Dignity
“which never dies”’ (The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Politi-
cal Theology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016], 424). For an
important critique, however, of the ways in which modern theories of sov-
ereignty and biopolitics (whether Kantorowicz or Agamben or Foucault)
have a severe blind spot with regard to the medieval archive, see again,
Biddick, Make and Let Die.
214
in an unbroken succession of English monarchs, is immaterial,

inviolate, and everlasting.
In the wake of the Civil Wars (when the king really is dead,
and Alfred’s sovereign, textualized corpse could not keep him
alive), Alfred returns as an effigy that is out of time with the
political moment in which Spelman’s Life is published. Con-
sequently, Alfred haunts the present tense, zombie-like, hold-
ing out anachronistic faith in an outmoded understanding of
sovereignty that belongs to the political theology of an earlier
moment. And yet, as Paul Downes explains, Alfred’s untimely
effigy shows that ‘sovereignty,’ from the ‘perspective of many
contemporary critics, was always a ghost-in-denial — a walking
fantasy of full and singular presence that refused to acknowl-
edge its own mortality.’97 Sovereignty, Downes notes, has a ‘mor-
bid ontology’ because it belongs to a past that is located in no
particular temporal moment.98
Alfred’s late-seventeenth-century effigy reinforces this point.
As Joseph Roach explains, the effigy is ‘a sacred relic, a medieval
holdover that…attempted to preserve and publicize the image
of an individual in the absence of his or her person.’99 As a verb,
‘effigy,’ Roach continues, ‘evoke[s] an absence, to body some-
thing forth, especially something from the distant past…which,
among other capacities, communicates personas as well as
practices over time and space.’100 Notably, Alfred’s seventeenth-
century effigy is engraved and published just after the death of
Charles II, whose effigial displays mark a shift in how the di-
vine or second body of the king is visually presented.101 As this
ritual of sovereign succession disappeared, Roach explains that
97 Paul Downes, Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25.
98 Ibid., 24.
99 Joseph Roach, ‘Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance, and Painted Ladies,’
in Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II,
eds. Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod (New Haven: Yale
100 Ibid.
101 At his funeral, a crown was placed on top of his coffin. A life-sized wax
figure stood next to his grave for more than a century.
215
Figure 2. Frontispiece engraving in Sir John Spelman, The Life of

Ælfred the Great (Oxford: Printed at the Theater for Maurice Atkins
at the Golden-ball in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, London, 1709). Image
courtesy of Cambridge Library.
216
‘derivative specters’ — full-sized portraits, engravings, busts,

and statuary monuments — came to take its place. It is as if
the ‘corpse-like, piously recumbent effigies on medieval tombs
“raised themselves up…and began to look round”.’102 Roach
quotes John Ruskin here, who explains that as these royal effi-
gies became statues, and statues became portraits, all ‘memory
of death’ was effaced. As Ruskin himself put it, ‘The statue rose
up, and presented itself in front of the tomb…surrounded…by
allegorical figures of Fame and Victory…by personifications of
humbled kingdoms and adoring nations, and by every circum-
stance of pomp, and symbol of adulation.’103
As if aware of the haunting powers of its own morbid on-
tology, Alfred’s sovereign ghost begins to circulate. Beginning
with Spelman, a succession of biographies are introduced by
portraits of the king. In 1709, the English edition of Spelman’s
Life is published (see Fig. 2).
The Alfred on the frontispiece to the English edition of
Spelman’s Life is not a tired and aging king who is burdened by
the weight of rule. His face is youthful-looking and framed by
light curls, and his head is ringed with a laurel wreath. Alfred’s
portrait is set on a pedestal that is inscribed with a passage from
Isaiah 58.12 that fashions Alfred into a political messiah who one
day ‘shalt raise up the Foundations of many Generations’ and
‘shalt be called, the Repairer of the Breach’ and ‘the Restorer of
Paths to dwell in.’104 Alfred’s youthful portrait is marked by a
sovereign destiny, which will one day be fulfilled.
102 Roach, ‘Celebrity Erotics,’ 236, my emphasis; quoting John Ruskin, The
Stones of Venice, Book 3 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853).
103 Ibid.
104 Spelman, The Life of Ælfred the Great, frontispiece.
217
Figure 3. Frontispiece engraving in Francis Wise, The Annals of the

History of Alfred the Great, By the Author Asser of Menevia [Annales
rerum gestarum Ælfredi Magni, auctore Asserio Menevensi] (Oxford,
1722). Image courtesy of British Library.
218
Figure 4. Engraving by George Vertue in Paul de Rapin-Troyas, His-

tory of England: As Well Ecclesiastical as Civil, Vol. 1, trans. Nicholas
Tindal (London: Printed for James and John Knapton at the Crown
in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1726). Image Courtesy of New York Public
Library.
219
As Suzanne Hagedorn,105 Simon Keynes,106 and Joanne Park-

er note, Spelman’s English Life of Ælfred the Great was highly
107
influential within and beyond Oxford. When Francis Wise’s edi-

tion of Asser’s Life of King Alfred adapts the visual architecture
from Spelman’s Latin and English editions, it communicates a
sovereignty that is no longer destined for a future but operates
within one that has already arrived. In Wise’s engraving (see Fig.
3), Alfred’s homespun tunic is abandoned for ermine robes; Al-
fred’s laurel now hovers, nimbus-like, above his head; Isaiah’s
prophecies of a future ‘Repairer of the Breach’ and ‘Restorer of
Paths’ have been replaced with the appellative ‘Alfredus Mag-
nus’; and his portrait’s blank background is filled in with a car-
touche that displays an entire kit of visual symbols that signal a
Life that is as much myth as it is history.
When Wise’s engraving is adapted by George Vertue for Paul
Rapin’s History of England, Alfred’s enlivened and expansive
physical body is given dimension (see Fig. 4). In this new en-
graving, the strands of a chain extend from within the folds of
Alfred’s garment, across the cartouche, and onto the table, link-
ing Alfred’s bosom and two-dimensional portrait to his three-
dimensional political world. Objects that were positioned at the
105 Suzanne D. Hagedorn notes that ‘for close to two centuries,’ Spelman’s
Life was ‘considered the authoritative biography of the king, and as such it
provided a historical basis for the glorification of Alfred and his reign in
the popular imagination’ (‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of
Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care,’ in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construc-
tion of Social Identity, eds. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles [Gainesville:
Florida University Press, 1997], 94).
106 Keynes makes the case for the influence of Spelman on later scholars,
arguing that his Life of Ælfred ‘effectively determined the parameters of
Alfredian studies which have endured to the present day’ and ‘has a seri-
ous claim on our attention, whether judged as a tract for its times, or as
a forerunner of modern scholarship’ (‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great,’
254, 256).
107 Joanne Parker writes that ‘Alfred found a life beyond the scholarly and ec-
clesiastical world and in the realm of popular culture…became intimately
associated with the Hanoverian line.…[A]t the root of almost all this new
Alfrediana was Spelman’s Life’ (‘England’s Darling’: The Victorian Cult of
Alfred the Great [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007], 61).
220
top of Wise’s cartouche are now placed on the table upon which
Alfred’s portrait sits. The tools of Alfred’s scholarship — a stack
of books, an open scroll, a compass, and ruler — are arranged,
as if in use, while Alfred’s harp, his bows, the Danes’ captured
standards, and laurel wreath (the trophies of his recent military
actions) are pushed into the corner. These objects have been,
quite literally, brought out of their frame, and each represents
a moment in the king’s expanding narrative. On a table, these
objects give spatial dimension and material depth to Alfred’s
sovereign narrative. The tablecloth upon which Alfred’s portrait
rests, with its angular lines and corners, provides further dimen-
sionality to it, and the military scenes that appear on each side
create a sense of temporal motion that is, however, nonlinear.
As Alfred ‘sits,’ surrounded by an array of material symbols and
on a field of military scenes, his physical body is rendered om-
nipresent and mythic, capable of crossing space as well as time.
As Simon Keynes writes, Vertue’s frontispiece, ‘directly or
indirectly, exerted a strong influence on the development of Al-
fredian iconography in the later eighteenth century,’ and, in the
wake of its publication, the sovereign, spectral body of Alfred
begins to cross corporeal dimensions as it becomes the subject
of fine art.108 In both small and large historical scenes, Alfred is
portrayed as minstrel, cake-burner, precocious child, and law-
giver.109 Completely dead, yet forever living, Alfred’s form stands
108 Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great,’ 282.

109 Keynes has catalogued a full listing of Alfredian art produced during the
nineteenth century. Here are some of the titles, artist names, and themes:
‘Alfred the Great in disguise of a peasant, reflecting on the misfortunes of
his country’ by Richard Dadd; ‘Alfred submitting his code of laws for the
approval of the witan’ by John Bridges; ‘Alfred in the camp of the Danes’
by Marshall Claxton; ‘King Alfred the Great dividing his loaf with the
beggar’ by Alexander Blaikley; ‘Alfred inciting the English to resist the
Danes’ by G.F. Watts; ‘Alfred, the Saxon king, disguised as a minstrel, in
the tent of Guthrum the Dane’ by Daniel Maclise; ‘The boyhood of Alfred’
by John Callcott Horsley; ‘Alfred the Great when a youth, encouraged by
the Queen, listening to the heroic lay of a minstrel’ by Solomon Alexander
Hart; ‘King Alfred and his Mother’ by Alfred Stevens; ‘Alfred, surrounded
by his family, addresses Edward his son and successor’ by W.P. Salter; the
unfinished ‘Alfred and his First Trial by Jury’ by Benjamin Robert Haydon;
221
in for a sovereignty that was ‘killed’ at the beheading of Charles I

and is realized as ghostly and undead upon the return of Charles
II. Yet, on account of its spectral nature, Alfred’s corpse-like ef-
figy circulates, making its way from Oxford books to London
galleries, from engraved plates and early modern portraiture to
sprawling, multi-bodied, historical scenes of the Victorian pe-
riod. In these new visual environments, Alfred’s ‘flesh’ diffuses
into the flesh of others. (To recall Spelman, his actual body and
bones have been long lost in Oxford’s book repository.) Alfred
can be a youth, young man, or adult; blonde- or brown-haired;
bearded or clean-shaven; in disguise or regally attired; and/
or interacting with men, women, and children from different
walks of life. Alfred’s constantly circulating and shape-shifting
sovereign form exceeds its two- and three-dimensional limits.
He (or, maybe, ‘it’?) comes to inhabit anybody’s body. In short,
an Alfredian ghost of English sovereignty begins to look like an
‘Englishman.’
‘King Alfred in the Neatherd’s Cottage’ by J. Pain Davis; and ‘King Alfred
in the Swineherd’s Cottage’ (‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great,’ 334–41).
222
Figure 5. BobW66, photograph of the Winchester statue of Alfred.

Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 Unported license. No modifications
have been made to this image.
223
Alfred’s ghostly figure changes its shape permanently on the

weekend of September 18–20, 1901 in Winchester, England.
Thousands of people gathered in Winchester — home to Alfred’s
Wessex capital and to his burial place of Hyde Abbey — to cele-
brate the one-thousand year anniversary of King Alfred’s death.
The central activity of this three-day event was not a visitation to
Alfred’s gravesite but the unveiling of a ‘colossal,’ thirteen-foot
bronze statue of the living king (see Fig. 5) placed atop a pedes-
tal consisting of two immense blocks of grey Cornish granite. As
Joanne Parker explains, the statue ‘faced some initial opposition’
by Leonard Cust, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, ‘who
argued that it would be impossible to produce an authentic rep-
resentation of a man for whom no accurate contemporary por-
traiture existed, and that a different form of sculpture…would
be more appropriate.’110 Yet those involved in planning Alfred’s
millenary celebration wanted ‘the closest equivalent to a por-
trait in stone,’ and Parker writes that the chosen sculptor, Hamo
Thornycroft, was known as ‘the leading exponent of the natu-
ralistic and anti-classical movement,’ and was also the son of
Thomas Thornycroft, ‘whose sculptural group, Alfred the Great
Encouraged to the Pursuit of Learning by his Mother, had been
criticised on the grounds of its excessive realism.’111 This tension
between Alfred’s corporeal body and his sovereign, corpse-like
effigy structures Lord Rosenbery’s speech at the unveiling of
Thornycroft’s statue:
the noble statue which I am about to unveil can only be an

effigy of the imagination, and so the real Alfred we reverence
may well be an idealised figure. For our real knowledge of
him is scanty and vague. We have, however, draped round
his form, not without reason, all the highest attributes of man
and kingship… . In him, we venerate not so much a striking
actor in our history as the ideal Englishman, the perfect sov-
110 Parker, ‘England’s Darling,’ 8.

111 Ibid.
224
ereign, the pioneer of England’s greatness… . He is, in a word,

the embodiment of our civilization.112
Rosenbery’s comments, which acknowledge Alfred as a ‘scanty

and vague…form’ around which are ‘draped’ the portraits of ‘the
ideal Englishman, the perfect sovereign, and the pioneer of Eng-
land’s greatness,’ articulate the king as neither a living, fleshly
body nor a decayed corpse, but rather as an ‘idealised’ sovereign
form that ‘embodi[es]…our civilization.’ His missing, organic
form — a biological material that Asser described as ill and
sick, and Spelman acknowledged to have become bones — is no
longer a ghostly, corpse-like figure. Finally, Alfred has been re-
embodied as a ‘portrait in stone’ and a statue made of bronze.
Quarried from stone and ore, Alfred can live forever in death
as a capacious signifier that stands in for the sovereignty of ‘our
civilization,’ past, present, and future.
While Alfred is now made of granite and alloy, his sovereign
endurance and impenetrability relies on the easy interchange
between Alfred’s corpse-like ghost and other Anglo-Saxon
bodies. The night prior to the statue’s unveiling, the life of Al-
fred was presented to millenary guests in a series of tableaux
vivants depicting notable events in the king’s life. As ‘living pic-
tures’ meant to celebrate the death of a king — just as live bodies
whose stationary positions and silence mimic those of a dead
man — these tableaux vivants confuse Alfred’s body with the
bodies of his Anglo-Saxon subjects. In the final tableau of this
series, titled ‘Alfred the Great,’ ‘Alfred’ assumes the position of
the Winchester statue, surrounded by men, women, and chil-
dren dressed in period clothing (see Fig. 6). Having been taught
to read, having burnt the cakes, disguised himself as a minstrel,
and captured the Raven standard of the Danes, ‘Alfred’ appears
for his millenary audience not as a body that ages and chang-
es, but as a statue that stands immoveable in and across time.
112 Alfred Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary: A Record of the Proceedings of
the National Commemoration (London: Macmillan and Company, 1902),
109.
225
Figure 6. ‘Tableaux–Alfred the Great,’ in Alfred Bowker, The King

Alfred Millenary, a Record of the Proceedings of the National Com-
memoration (London: Macmillan and Co, 1902), 101. Image courtesy
of Huntington Library.
‘Alfred the Great’ functions as a sovereign effigy that is staged

through the coordinated efforts of all manner of English peo-
ple who are subjects of Alfred’s sovereign rule, yet inhabited by
their sovereign, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex.
As Oxford’s decorative arts generate and amplify Alfred’s
undead, sovereign form, a new course of study called ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ emerges at the university. During the late seventeenth
century, Keynes writes, ‘the image of Alfred as a scholarly king
began at this time to exercise an important influence on the pro-
motion of Anglo-Saxon studies in their own right.’113 In 1696,
Humfrey Wanley moved to Oxford in order to participate in
the university’s manuscript cataloguing activities. To facilitate
his work, he was given a room in the Master’s Lodgings where
Alfred’s effigial portrait hung — a choice in decor that signaled
113 Ibid., 252, my emphasis.
226
the king’s role as patriarch of Wanley and others who succeeded

him in this scholarly enterprise. ‘[F]rom this “Alfredian” base,’
Keynes writes, ‘Wanley did so much to advance knowledge and
understanding of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Alfred, it seems,
was never far from the collective mind.’114 Wanley’s editorial
labors at Oxford participated in the university’s robust, late-
seventeenth-century activities in the emerging field of Anglo-
Saxon studies. In 1677, the Bodleian Library acquired Franciscus
Junius’s manuscripts, transcriptions, and printer types, provid-
ing the already Alfredophilic university with a much expanded
collection of resources for language study and the tools for print
publication.115 Junius’s collection played no small part in the
appearance of several important books: George Hickes’s Prin-
ciples of Anglo-Saxon and Moesogothic Grammar [Institutiones
Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae]; Christopher
Rawlinson’s Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in Five Books,
Translated into Anglo-Saxon by Alfred [Boethii Consolationis
Philosophiae libri v Anglo-Saxonice redditi ab Alfredo]; Thomas
Benson’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary [Vocabularium Anglo-Saxoni-
cum]; and Edward Thwaites’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar [Gram-
matica Anglo-Saxonica].116 Published in Oxford, by Oxford
academics, and at Oxford’s new scholarly press, these texts — a
series of language-learning, reference materials, and editions
meant for scholarly use — adopt and re-arrange the compound
‘Angulsaxones,’ thereby beginning the process of supplanting
the commonly used term, ‘Saxon,’ with ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ At Ox-
114 Ibid., 268.

115 As John Niles notes, Junius bequeathed his special font of Old English
script to Oxford in order to help with establishing its press (The Idea of
Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering,
and Renewing the Past [Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015], 122).
116 George Hickes, Institutiones grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-
Gothicae (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1689); Christopher Rawlinson,
Boethii Consolationis Philosophiae libri v Anglo-Saxonice redditi ab Alfredo
(Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1698); Thomas Benson, Vocabularium
Anglo-Saxonicum (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1701); Edward
Thwaites, Grammatica Anglo-Saxonica (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano,
1709).
227
ford, visions of Alfred’s sovereign, patriarchal effigy hover over

an Anglo-Saxon textual body, and as the two become entangled,
the corpse-like figure of a king and its morbid ontology become
silently, unconsciously, deposited within a corpus of texts. As-
ser’s predictions, now almost a millennium old, are coming true.
Long after his death, Ælfred is finally becoming Angulsaxonum
rex as Oxford’s scholars carry out the work of translation begun
long ago by their ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ‘father.’
As Wanley, Junius, and others labor at Oxford, they work in
an environment ‘refounded’ by Alfred and marked with artful
reminders of his effigial presence. Their linguistic studies, pale-
ography, and editorial works are scholarly activities and filial
duties that not only fall within the shadow of Alfred, the schol-
ar–king, but are also placed within the wider field of Anglo-
Saxon studies. In Wanley’s catalogues, Junius’s collections, and
the writings by Hickes, Rawlinson, Benson, and Thwaites, the
corpse-like figure of Alfred — ‘father’ to this emerging field — is
positioned within the textual corpus of ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ confusing
the relationship between bodies and words and reanimating a
corporeal ghost of sovereignty via language.117
Benjamin Thorpe, Incorporating Alfred, and Anglo-Saxonist

Being
As John Niles notes, the intellectual work of Oxford scholars

came to a halt in the 1720s due the deaths of Wanley, Hickes, and
Thwaites.118 While few works of Old English scholarship were
published during the latter half of the eighteenth century, inter-
est in the subject remained high ‘not just among the university
elites, but also among a broad range of persons, including cler-
117 Humfrey, along with Hickes and others, played no little part, with their
cataloguing, paleography, and other society- and library-based work in
laying the foundations for the academic discipline of Anglo-Saxon and
Old English studies. On this point, see Eileen A. Joy, ‘Thomas Smith,
Humfrey Wanley, and the “Little-Known Country” of the Cotton Library,’
British Library Journal (2005): 1–34, esp. 21–25.
118 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901, 165.
228
ics, antiquarians, local historians, dramatists, poets, and many

others.’119 This interest was maintained and nurtured, in part, by
the British Society of Antiquaries, a learned society founded by
Wanley and several others in 1707 before his death two decades
later. While the Society of Antiquaries was not expressly de-
voted to Anglo-Saxon topics,120 by the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, it and other learned groups had turned
their attentions to the emerging field of Anglo-Saxon studies.
Among the researchers supported by the Society and other
learned groups is Benjamin Thorpe, who edited the early Eng-
lish law codes, the Old English gospels, the Exeter Book poems,
and Ælfric’s homilies, among other texts. Thorpe’s engagement
with most, if not all, of the Anglo-Saxon corpus is described at
length by Niles:
any one of Thorpe’s editions of major Old English texts…

might have been enough for a person of reasonable stamina
to have presented as the centrepiece of years of labour, after
which point the editor might have rested for a while…it is
quite possible, though there exists no way to quantify such
things, that no human being past or present has ever read
more lines of Old English manuscript text than Benjamin
Thorpe, word by word and letter by letter.
…
Thorpe had very little income other than a small govern-
ment pension and whatever stipends, paid by one learned
society or another, he received for producing a book. Thorpe
could thus be called the first professional Anglo-Saxonist, all
previous scholars in this field having pursued that scholarly
interest among other responsibilities, often of a quite differ-
ent kind.121
119 Ibid.
120 Rosemary Sweet notes that the Society’s minute book displays three war-
riors, one of whom holds a medallion with the portraits of Charles I and
king Alfred on it (Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth–
Century Britain [London: Hambledon and London, 2004], 203).
121 Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901, 228, 229, 225.
229
Niles claims Thorpe to be ‘the first professional Anglo-

Saxonist,’122 a figure whose ‘stamina’ is beyond ‘reason,’ whose
work is unpaid, and whose time spent in the archives is ‘[un]
quantif[iable].’ I want to double down on Niles’s statement, ar-
guing that Thorpe’s extraordinary devotion to the textual corpus
of Anglo-Saxon123 (which motivates Niles’s claim that Thorpe is
an Anglo-Saxonist) implicates Alfred’s sovereign, fatherly claim
upon him. After decades of circulation, in which Alfred’s effigial
form exceeds the frame of its portraiture and diffuses its corpse-
like ghost into the corpus of Anglo-Saxon grammars, diction-
aries, translations, and editions, Niles’s comments bear witness
to the impact of Alfred’s spectral, textualized, sovereign form
upon Thorpe’s body. To say it a different way, Thorpe is capa-
ble of extraordinary — of supernatural — work and accomplish-
ments because he is haunted, unknowingly, by the corpse-like
ghost of a sovereign. He is driven, unconsciously, by a devotion
to its morbid ontology. Thorpe, the field’s first Anglo-Saxonist,
professionalizes a political theology that was articulated, a mil-
lennium ago, in early English charters; imagined by Asser’s de-
ployment of the charter expression, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex;
and made manifest, so to speak, during England’s crisis of sov-
ereignty — the Civil Wars.
Thorpe is Alfred’s devoted subject and ‘son.’ Yet Alfred’s
ghostly figure has located its sovereign, patriarchal presence
within an Anglo-Saxon textual corpus. Consequently, Thorpe
believes his devotions to be to ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ not to Alfred. This
devotional error enables Thorpe to recalibrate sovereignty be-
yond the restrictive limits of Alfred’s body and position it within
a raciolinguistic figure that Thorpe calls ‘the Anglo-Saxon.’124
122 Note that the first printed attestation of the term, ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ appears
in reference to Benjamin Thorpe and John Mitchell Kemble (Anonymous,
‘Retrospective Review. Anglo-Saxon Literature,’ Gentleman’s Magazine
[November 1837]).
123 Niles’s descriptive association of an Anglo-Saxonist dovetails with the
semantics of ‘-ist’ as elaborated in note 3 of this chapter.
124 I borrow the term ‘raciolinguistic’ from H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford,
and Arnetha F. Ball’s recent collection, Raciolinguistics: How Language
230
Thorpe’s translation of Erasmus Rask’s A Grammar of the Anglo-

Saxon Tongue and his language primer, Analecta Anglo-Saxon-
ica, outline the sovereign, racialized shape of ‘the Anglo-Saxon’
and describe a program of self study by which the devotees of
this Anglo-Saxon may become, like Thorpe, Anglo-Saxonists.
The title of Thorpe’s translation of Rask’s Grammar invokes
the ‘Anglo-Saxon tongue,’ and its Preface soon truncates this
expression to ‘the Anglo-Saxon.’125 This shorthand collapses the
distance between speech, anatomy, and language; and as the
Preface moves from an ‘Anglo-Saxon tongue’ to ‘the Anglo-Sax-
on,’ language moves into the body:
It [the Anglo-Saxon] appears then to have been, in its ori-

gin, a rude mixture of the dialects of the Saxons, the Angles,
and the Jutes, but we are not acquainted with it in that state,
these dialects having soon coalesced into one language, as
the various tribes soon united to form one nation, after they
had taken possession of England…Even under Danish kings,
all laws and edicts were promulgated in pure Anglo-Saxon.126
Thorpe’s linguistic assessment points to popular histories by

Spelman and Wise, which figured Alfred’s role as the sovereign
unifier of the early English kingdoms into ‘one nation.’ Likewise,
Thorpe’s language acknowledges the ethnolinguistic origins of
‘Anglo-Saxon,’ a term that, to recall the beginning of this chap-
ter, was introduced in early English charters to identify Alfred’s
politically unified subjects according to their shared language
Shapes Our Ideas about Race, which considers how we ‘race language’ and
‘language race’ by dismantling racial hierarchies in order to consider an
opening for the ‘transracial subject’ (H. Samy Alim, ‘Introducing Raciolin-
guistics: Racing Language and Languaging Race in Hyperracial Times,’ in
Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race, eds. H. Samy
Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball [Oxford University Press,
2016], 1, 7).
125 Benjamin Thorpe, ‘Preface,’ in Erasmus Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-
Saxon Tongue, with a Praxis, trans. Benjamin Thorpe (Copenhagen: S.L.
Møller, 1830), v.
126 Ibid., xlvi.
231
and Christian faith. While Thorpe suggests the arrival of Anglo-

Saxon sovereignty as an Alfredian event in which various tribes
‘united’ into ‘one nation’ and various dialects ‘coalesced’ into ‘one
language,’ the agent of this process is not Alfred, but ‘the Anglo-
Saxon,’ an embodied figure that neither originates with Alfred’s
late ninth-century kingship nor is restricted to the use of his
charter formula, Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex. Rather, the Anglo-
Saxon is present ‘as a rude admixture’ when the Saxons, Angles,
and Jutes arrive in Britain; it coalesces and unites to become
‘one’ figure ‘possessed’ of English sovereignty; and it remains
‘pure’ despite Danish incursions. Thorpe’s Preface presents a
linguistic body (not the king’s body) as the site from whence
political sovereignty emerges. As he tracks the emergence of this
linguistically sovereign Anglo-Saxon figure, Thorpe explains it
to be a racially miscegenated body that becomes homogenous
and uncontaminated by way of nation-building processes. For
Thorpe, raciolinguistic makeup, rather than ethnolinguistic
similarity, is the precondition to English sovereignty.
Yet sovereignty (as Alfred’s effigial portrait indicates) is a
morbid ontological state. Consequently, the raciolinguistic pu-
rity of this Anglo-Saxon sovereign deadens it:
We have here an ancient, fixed, and regular tongue, which,

during a space of five hundred years, preserved itself almost
without change… . In the year 1066, William the Bastard con-
quered England, but the highly cultivated, deep-rooted, an-
cient, national tongue could not be immediately extirpated,
though it was instantly banished from the court… . We may
therefore fix the year 1100, as the limit of the Anglo-Saxon
tongue, whose structure we shall consider in the following
work…but the Anglo-Saxon was preserved no where but in
ancient writings, and therefore is, and long has been, a dead
language, not very accessible to the learned themselves.127
127 Ibid., xlvii–xlviii.
232
Again, linguistic statements run cover for a discussion about

racial bodies. As an ‘ancient,’ ‘fixed,’ and ‘preserved’ ‘tongue,’
‘Anglo-Saxon’ occupies an aged and homogenous state. Yet these
lexemes, used repeatedly across the passage in relation to other,
shifting terms, begin to signal the increasingly decrepit raciolin-
guistic body of the pure Anglo-Saxon, which can survive only in
an unchallenged political state. When William the Bastard con-
quers England, his unknown, ‘bastard’ origins deracinate the
‘deep roots’ of Anglo-Saxon. Once this ‘highly cultivated’ fig-
ure is ‘banished from the court,’ it quickly loses its vitality. Like
English sovereignty after the Norman Conquest,128 Anglo-Saxon
becomes ‘fix[ed],’ ‘limit[ed],’ and, finally, ‘dead.’ Its morbid on-
tology is evidenced by the ‘inaccessible’ state of its language and
textual corpus.129
128 Here, I use a term of nineteenth-century historicism in order to highlight

Thorpe’s nineteenth-century argument.
129 When Thorpe’s Grammar traces the outline of a racially pure, yet dead
Anglo-Saxon corpse within a discussion of linguistics and language learn-
ing, Thorpe does not announce but rather implicates it as a sovereign,
national-imperial presence at the expense of other nations and races. As
Catharine Karkov remarks, ‘[n]ationalism was a continuing problem in
Thorpe’s scholarship’ (Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative
Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010], 197). Karkov continues, noting that Thorpe’s 1830 Grammar
intentionally omitted Rask’s ‘highly nationalistic dedicatory epistle with its
reference to a glorious pagan Scandinavian past,’ and its second and third
editions, published in 1865 and 1979, further effaced the authorial presence
of Rask, a Dane, by eliminating his Preface completely (ibid.). Likewise, as
Robert Bjork explains, Thorpe conspired with the London Society of Anti-
quaries to ‘st[eal] the ambitious ideas of N.F.S. Grundtvig from Gruntvig’s
1803 prospectus for the publication of a large number of central Anglo-
Saxon texts’ (‘Nineteenth–century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-
Saxon Studies,’ in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity,
eds. Allen Frantzen and John Niles [Gainesville: Florida University Press,
1997], 112). By erasing Rask and Grundtvig from the project of Anglo-
Saxon philology and editorial work, Thorpe ‘rendered Anglo-Saxonism
distinctly, stubbornly British’ (ibid.). While Thorpe’s editorial maneuvers
assert Anglo-Saxon supremacy over other Germanic peoples, past and pre-
sent, his pedagogy of incorporation and encryption — of positioning the
racial purity and ancestral likeness of ‘the Anglo-Saxon’ within ‘the student
of Anglo-Saxon’ — allows Aryanism to also enter Thorpe’s nationalism. As
233
While the death of ‘the Anglo-Saxon’ occurs within Thorpe’s

Preface, its sovereign, effigial, corpse-like ghost begins to stir
by way of the student’s ‘tongue.’ In Thorpe’s Grammar, a section
on morphology reminds the student of her purpose of study:
‘an accurate knowledge of…the gender, inflection, derivation,
and primitive signification of words…is, in the dead languag-
es…indispensable to the understanding and translating them
correctly.’130 Across the pages of the Grammar, an ‘Anglo-Saxon
tongue’ generates ‘the Anglo-Saxon,’ a sovereign figure of racial
and linguistic purity that is never classed as ‘living’ because it
has already been made ‘dead.’ This silent, dead, raciolinguistic
corpse may be interpolated in Thorpe’s student as she stud-
ies his translation of Rask’s Grammar and translates his edited
compendium, Anelecta Anglo-Saxonica, a wide selection of
Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry followed by an extensive glos-
sary of terms. Thorpe’s language pedagogy, like Sharon Turner’s
historicism outlined in Chapter 2, and James Douglas’s archae-
ology discussed in Chapter 3, facilitates acts of incorporation
and encryption. His Grammar and Analecta plot the process
by which the student of Anglo-Saxon magically takes custody
of the racialized body of a dead language because its sovereign
claims on her are too great to endure their severance.131 This
Tony Ballantyne writes, ‘[b]y the time [Orientalist] Max Müller arrived
in England, John Kemble and Benjamin Thorpe had elaborated a strong
Anglo-Saxonist tradition, which emphasized the linguistic connection
between English and its Germanic and Indo-European ancestors. Within
such a context, Aryanism fortified both nationalist and imperialist ideolo-
gies’ (Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire [New York:
Palgrave, 2002], 6).
130 Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, 97.
131 Note that incorporation along with encryption are major concepts of this
book and have been discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3. The concepts
were initially developed in psychoanalytic theory by Maria Abraham and
Nicholas Torok, in relation to Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia,
in The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press, 1994). As Abraham and Torok write, this ‘sealed-off
psychic space’ warehouses the ‘exquisite corps[e] of a loved one who we
cannot bear to mourn,’ and it is metaphorically evidenced in relation to
eating, drinking, and silent ingestion (141, 128–29).
234
Anglo-Saxon corpus is ‘swallowed whole’ and thereby psychi-

cally relocated within the self such that one is inhabited by its
sovereign ghost. Through silent self-study, the racially pure and
ontologically morbid, yet sovereign, Anglo-Saxon inhabits the
student of Anglo-Saxon. And through this ghostly inhabitation,
she becomes an ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’
Thorpe’s Grammar and Analecta are featured in the No-
vember 1837 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine, in a short ar-
ticle titled ‘Retrospective Review: Anglo-Saxon Literature.’ An
Anonymous reviewer explains the process by which the ‘stu-
dent of Anglo-Saxon’ should systematically go about learning
the language. Using ‘Thorpe’s translation of Rask, a good and
tangible grammar — a dictionary, it is true…and, at the same
time, attractive, elementary books in Thorpe’s Analecta and
Apollonius…will enable him to ground himself perfectly in the
language without the need of a dictionary. When he has well
studied the Analecta, he may confidently venture on to [John
Mitchell Kemble’s] Beowulf,’ followed by Benjamin Thorpe’s edi-
tions of Caedmon and the Vercelli MS.132 Thorpe’s textbooks and
editions (along with Kemble’s Beowulf) are ‘the only ones which
ought to be put into the hands of a student.’133 In other words,
Thorpe’s pedagogy, his textual corpus, and the sovereign racio-
linguistic corpse that Thorpe possesses (and that possesses him)
are the tools by which the student of Anglo-Saxon becomes an
Anglo-Saxonist.
The Gentleman’s Magazine lays out the ‘correct’ process for
transitioning from a student of Anglo-Saxon to an ‘Anglo-Sax-
onist,’ a professional change that is also, to borrow the arguments
of Lesley Scanlon and David Beckett, an ontological one. From
the 1830s until around 1960, Scanlon explains that the process
of entering a profession was a matter of ‘being,’ a term that ‘de-
notes the notion of arriving at a static point of expertise.’134 Scan-
132 Anonymous, ‘Retrospective Review,’ 494.

133 Ibid.
134 Lesley Scanlon, ‘“Becoming” a Professional,’ in ‘Becoming’ a Professional:
An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Professional Learning, ed. Lesley Scanlon
(New York: Springer, 2011), 14.
235
lon’s statement is expanded upon by Beckett, who writes that

‘traditionally…professional formation was…individualistic.’135
‘Theories of professional learning,’ Beckett continues, were ‘con-
structed through a cognitive process involving the transmission,
acquisition, storage and application of a “body of data, facts and
practical wisdom” which resided in the head… . Central to this
“standard paradigm” view of learning is the assumption that
“coming to know and understand something” involves arriving
“at a state of mind as evidenced in accounts of what is cogni-
tively the case”.’136 These definitions of being ‘professional’ attend
to the description of the Anglo-Saxonist’s educational process
in the 1837 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The anonymous
reviewer, who addresses ‘the student,’ presumes language learn-
ing as an independent course of study. Further, the reviewer’s
nod to ‘Thorpe’s Analecta and Appollius [of Tyre]’ as beginning
texts that will ‘enable him to ground himself perfectly in the lan-
guage without the need of a dictionary’ presumes two additional
points about language learning: firstly, that it is a program of in-
tensive cognitive study and memorization by rote; and, second-
ly, that by way of these acts, one comes into ‘perfect’ possession
of Anglo-Saxon grammar and its lexicon. Even at the beginning
stages, a sense of ‘arrival’ has already been forecasted. As the
independent student proceeds, systematically, ‘without the need
of a dictionary,’ through Beowulf, the Junius manuscript, and the
Vercelli Book, he acquires possession of more of the corpus — he
‘arriv[es]’ at what could be called an Anglo-Saxon(ist) ‘state of
mind,’ or ‘a static point of [Anglo-Saxon] expertise.’
135 David Beckett, ‘Learning to Be–At Work,’ in ‘Becoming’ a Professional: An

Interdisciplinary Analysis of Professional Learning, ed. Lesley Scanlon (New
York: Springer, 2011), 59.
136 Ibid. Beckett’s quotations are from Silvia Gherardi and Davide Nicolini,
‘To Transfer is to Transform: The Circulation of Safety Knowledge,’ Organ-
isation 7, no. 2 (2000): 330, and David Beckett, ‘A Useful Theory of Agency
at Work,’ in Philosophical Perspectives on Educational Practice in the 21st
Century: Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Conference of the International
Network of Philosophers of Education (Msida: University of Malta, 2006), 4,
author’s emphasis.
236
Professional being, as Scanlon and Beckett imply, points to-

wards philosophical Being, an ontological category that, from
the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, is bound up in a
Cartesian cogito. For professionals and philosophers alike dur-
ing this period, thinking is being. Yet, for Nelson Maldonado-
Torres, ‘the significance of the Cartesian cogito for modern Eu-
ropean identity has to be understood against the backdrop of an
unquestioned ideal of self in the notion of the ego conquiro.’137
Maldonado-Torres claims that Descartes’s ontological para-
digm, which governs the philosophical Being of Hegel in the
nineteenth century and Heidegger in the early twentieth, ex-
presses a ‘coloniality’ that presumes that not all have the capac-
ity or equal capacity to think and therefore to ‘be.’ Consequently,
for anti-colonial philosophers of the twentieth century, an en-
tirely cognitive formula of being is a colonial position: for Em-
manuel Levinas, Being is a philosophy of power and violence;
for Enrique Dussel, it is a ‘Totality’ that articulates the history of
colonialism; and for Franz Fanon, an encounter with an impe-
rial and racist Other.138
The arguments of Scanlon, Beckett, and Maldonado-Torres
frame Thorpe’s pedagogy in ontological terms. Being an Anglo-
Saxonist means having perfect possession of the Anglo-Saxon
corpus. It means occupying a professional state of mind that
is capable of acquiring, storing, and transmitting all facts and
data contained within a body of Anglo-Saxon knowledge. This
emphasis on perfect acquisition, complete understanding, and
data-oriented recall generates not merely a professional identity
but, moreover, a philosophical ‘self ’ that accords with a system
137 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being,’ Cultural Studies

21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 245.
138 Ibid., 242–43. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay
on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1969); Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina
Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003) and The
Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Liberation, trans.
David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego (Earth: punctum books, 2019); and
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York:
Grove Press, 1965).
237
of colonial knowledge and its racial hierarchies. To be an ‘Anglo-

Saxonist’ is to know. Moreover, it is to presume that certain non-
European, non-white others do not have the cognitive abilities
to know and therefore have less right to be.
From the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century,
Anglo-Saxonist being (an ontological state that is generated via
the relationship between Alfred the sovereign ‘father,’ his Anglo-
Saxon corpus, and Anglo-Saxonist ‘children’) remains produc-
tive. Yet, as decolonization gains momentum in the 1950s, and
the (post)colonial era approaches in the 1970s, being an Anglo-
Saxonist — being inhabited by a dead sovereign — reveals itself
to be a truly morbid enterprise. The next chapter tracks the fate
of Alfred’s corporeal body in the late twentieth century. It revis-
its key moments of this chapter in order to discover the limits of
‘being’ an Anglo-Saxonist after the fall of Empire and the means
by which we might subvert and exceed them.
238
5
Becoming postSaxon, or, a

Biochemical Vita Ælfredi
The previous chapter began with a discussion of Susan Reyn-

olds’s ‘What Do We Mean When We Say “Anglo-Saxon”?,’ which
explored the initial attestations of this compound in the political
language of King Alfred. Discussing Reynolds enabled Chapter
4 to argue that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was invoked by Alfred to claim
sovereignty over his political subjects. However, it was not un-
til much later that the compound became vested in a political
theology of sovereignty, to which Benjamin Thorpe, the nine-
teenth-century’s first Anglo-Saxonist, was professionally and
ontologically bound. Thorpe’s writings express the emergence of
an Anglo-Saxonist ‘being,’ a state of mind that is devoted to (and
inhabited by) a racial-colonial Anglo-Saxon sovereign. While
Reynolds’s essay provides an important starting point for con-
sidering the development of ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ it likewise meditates
upon the continued scholarly devotion to this Anglo-Saxon sov-
ereign. Consequently, this chapter returns to a different moment
in ‘What Do We Mean When We Say “Anglo-Saxon”?’ in order
to consider the racial-colonial politics that keep scholars of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‘being’ Anglo-Saxonists.
After tracing the ninth-century etymology of ‘Anglo-Saxon,’
Reynolds quotes its definition in the first 1844 edition of the Ox-
239
ford English Dictionary (OED) by James Murray. The adjective

‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a ‘collective name’ that is not only ‘extended to
the entire Old English people and language’ prior to 1100 but
also stands in for contemporary ‘English’ peoples ‘who are of
Teutonic descent…whether subjects of Great Britain or of the
United States.’1 Murray’s definition, as quoted by Reynolds, in-
vokes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a ‘collective’ adjective that is set upon
‘exten[sion]:’ from body to voice, past to present, Britain to
America. It manages the perceived relationship between racial
origins, national unification, and political destiny in the Victo-
rian period. As a term of expansion, the OED’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ be-
comes an all-encompassing expression that ‘subjects’ the entire-
ty of a person — mind and body — within its semantic domain.
Indeed, as Chapter 4 argued, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ suggests itself to be
a signifier marked by a sovereign.2
Upon quoting Murray, Reynolds’s essay draws connections
between its ninth- and nineteenth–century uses, and she cau-
tiously writes that ‘right through the “Anglo-Saxon period,”
therefore, the term “Anglo-Saxon” invites us to beg questions
and confuse our own ideas with those of the period we study.’3
In other words, Reynolds surmises that whether or not Alfred’s
ninth century offers a premonition of the nineteenth, what mat-
ters is that we are ‘invited’ to be caught up in the semantic orbit
of ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ Such an assessment asks us to consider, very
carefully, not simply the word’s expansionist enterprise or its
ethnopolitical and raciolinguistic aspirations during ninth and
nineteenth centuries, respectively, but, moreover, the sovereign
disposition of ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ upon which the field of Anglo-Sax-
on studies continues to turn.
Yet as soon as Reynolds articulates the ‘questions’ and
‘confus[ions]’ ‘invited’ by the semantics of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ — as
1 Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edn. (Oxford University Press,

2019); cited in Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and
“Anglo-Saxons”?’ Journal of British Studies 24, no. 4 (1985): 395, 396.
2 Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?,’
396.
3 Ibid., 414.
240
a Biochemical Vita Ælfredi
soon as she points towards the risks that we run by using termi-
nologies that locate late-twentieth-century scholarship within
the trans-temporal orbit of the ninth and nineteenth centu-
ries — Reynolds follows up with a conclusion that prohibits
pause, short-circuits contemplation, and reveals its continued
sovereign status. ‘It would be overpresumptuous,’ she writes,
‘to attempt to stop the terminological world of historians — let
alone of the general public — and try to get off.’4 Although ‘An-
glo-Saxon’ shows itself to be a signifier that is fundamentally
troubled at both temporal ends (in Alfred’s early medieval mo-
ment and in our own contemporary one), Reynolds’s study of it
leads to questions and confusions but not reflection. Although
her essay shows the ethnopolitical impetus behind the com-
pound Anglo-Saxon, which, in the nineteenth century, becomes
racialized and nationalized, Reynolds, herself, begs her readers
not ‘to stop’ using it and not ‘to get off ’ the academic merry-go-
round that keeps this term in circulation.
Reynold’s position can, perhaps, be understood in its political
and academic context. In 1980, Rhodesia, Britain’s final colony,
achieved independence after 14 years of conflict, to which The
Guardian stated, ‘Britain is no longer a colonial power.’5 In 1982,
Britain attempted to assert its claims against Argentina in the
Falkland’s War, a failure that has been considered the last action
of its Empire. And, in 1983, the constitutional establishment of
the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) institution-
alized a formal community of scholars who study ‘Anglo-Saxon
England.’ Is there a connection between the neocolonial politics
of Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain, the postcolonial establish-
ment of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and the
cautionary words of Reynolds, published in 1985? Yes. Does the
terminological duty to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ shared by ISAS and Reyn-
olds act as an unconscious, scholarly, post-facto bulwark against
the political realities of decolonization? Yes. The professional-
ontological project of ‘being’ an Anglo-Saxonist — a process
4 Ibid.
5 ‘Born in Unwonted Tranquility,’ The Guardian, April 18, 1980.
241
that requires the incorporation of a racial and colonial Anglo-

Saxon sovereign — cannot ‘be’ in a postcolonial ‘state.’ To say it
a different way: our signifiers, inherited long ago, have shaped
our professional being into a figure that has limited our means
of being or becoming postcolonial.6
As Chapter 4 likewise argued, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a sovereign
term that continues to ‘rule’ its Anglo-Saxonists because it en-
codes, within its conceptual fibers, the sovereign figure king
Alfred, whose body has been translated from a fleshly material
into a corpse-like specter of sovereignty (and, as Thorpe’s schol-
arship indicated, a sovereign textual corpus). As the previous
chapter explained, Alfred no longer inhabits a living, corporeal
body that is chronically ill and sickly as he once did in Asser’s
Life of King Alfred. Nor can Alfred’s material corpse be found
as it could in John Spelman’s The Life of Ælfred the Great. In
the process of rendering Alfred sovereign, all of Alfred’s mate-
rial remains are lost, giving leave for ‘him’ to be imaginatively
reconstructed and circulate — in portraiture, in painting, and,
ultimately, in the bronze statue at Winchester — as a ghostly ef-
figy of English sovereignty.
Yet Alfred’s sovereign, effigial form, has not lasted, despite
being cast in bronze. In the early 1990s, a few years after Britain
was no longer an empire and could not exercise sovereignty over
the Falklands (and a few years after ISAS and Reynolds insisted
upon their postcolonial devotion to ‘Anglo-Saxon’), writings
about Alfred’s sickly body began to proliferate. While concern
over his illnesses has, since the eighteenth century, been an is-
6 The professional and political activities of the 1980s discussed in this para-
graph give texture and nuance to Chapter 1’s statements about the feminist
and poststructuralist scholarship that was championed by a small number
of scholars of the 1980s and 1990s and was also brought into sharp relief
in Allen Frantzen’s Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and
Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). In
comparing the establishment of the International Society of Anglo-Saxon-
ists (ISAS) in the early 1980s to the publication of Frantzen’s book in 1990,
one can see more clearly the battle lines that were drawn within the field
during these decades and the ways in which critical theorists understood
themselves in relation to the politics of postcolonialism.
242
sue that scholars were wont to elide,7 a 1991 article, ‘Alfred the
Great: a diagnosis,’ published in the Journal of the Royal Society
of Medicine reconsidered them within a modern medical con-
text. Using Asser’s Life and Bald’s Leechbook in order to build
its case report, the essay diagnoses Alfred’s adolescent troubles
with ficus as hemorrhoids or ‘perianal lesions,’ which often sig-
nal the early onset of Crohn’s disease:
an illness that begins in early adult life, approximately one

half beginning during the twenties, and 90% between the
ages of 10 and 40 years…characterized by relapses and re-
missions. In an attack there is abdominal pain, diarrhoea
7 While Spelman’s Life of Ælfred the Great and Wise’s Life of King Alfred
acknowledged Asser’s discussion of Alfred’s suffering body, Charles Plum-
mer’s lecture series, ‘The Life and Times of Alfred the Great,’ perceives
this material as an interpolation that creates an ‘atmosphere of morbid
religiousity’(The Life and Times of Alfred the Great: Being the Ford Lectures
for 1901 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902], 28). In other words, Plummer
cannot bear to contemplate Alfred as a human body, whose material flesh
is subject to unsovereign decay. After finding Alfred’s ficus and his un-
named, adult illnesses improbable (footnoting that, if one should wager a
diagnosis, it would be epilepsy), he claims that ‘[p]ersonally, I should not
be sorry to let all these passages go; for it seems to me quite inconceiv-
able that Alfred could have accomplished what he did under the hourly
pressure of incapacitating disease’ (ibid.). While Stevenson’s 1904 edition
of Asser’s Life includes this ‘interpolated’ material, he follows Plummer’s
assessment, stating that chapter 74 ‘is supplied entirely by the author, and
it is an instructive specimen of his confused arrangement and puzzling
phraseology’ (Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint
Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. William H. Stevenson [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1904], 294n74). After quoting Plummer’s statement re-
garding the morbidity of Asser’s narrative, Stevenson continues to discuss
Alfred’s illnesses for several pages that end by assessing the ficus, which
Alfred may have had in youth, as ‘haemorrhoids’ (296n74). Deep concern
for Alfred’s fleshly, physical body continues into the twentieth century:
Dorothy Whitelock omits chapter 74 from her own translation of Asser’s
Life (English Historical Documents, 500–1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock,
volume 1 [2nd, revised ed., New York: Routledge, 1979], 290n5). Likewise,
she admits that concern over Alfred’s adult illness underlies the desire
among Plummer, Stevenson, and others to discredit the Life tout court
(The Genuine Asser [Reading: University of Reading, 1968]).
243
sometimes with mucus and blood, that may alternate with

periods of constipation. There may be fever and wasting de-
pending on the severity of the illness. Some sufferers, a mi-
nority, experience eye problems (iritis), joint pains (without
any destructive pathology) and skin problems.8
For the first time, Alfred’s body and its mysterious symptoms
are discussed from within the terminological frame of medical
scholarship, which documents his age, symptoms, treatments,
and the pathology of Crohn’s disease. This clinical approach
to Alfred — written in the postcolonial moment of the early
1990s — implicitly acknowledges England’s diminished sover-
eignty from an empire to a nation-state via its medical assess-
ment of the king. For the first time in centuries, Alfred has a
corporeal body with an anus, eyes, joints, and skin. No longer
cast in bronze — no longer monumentalized as a static and un-
moving figure — Alfred’s body emerges as a non-cognitive, bio-
logical actor with atypical bowel movements, ‘pains,’ ‘problems,’
and (potentially) a variety of debilitating side-effects. While
the case report presents him as a diseased organism, all faith
is not lost in Alfred’s (or Anglo-America’s) sovereign form. ‘As-
ser gives us a picture of a stricken monarch who suffers almost
unremittingly from his symptoms,’ yet the report maintains that
Alfred ‘was able to fight, study, pursue his leisure interests, wor-
ship and govern.’9 While the king’s body becomes unsovereign,
the sovereignty of his kingship remains unchallenged.
Shortly after the Royal Society of Medicine published an ar-
ticle on Alfred and Crohn’s disease, Anglo-Saxonists began to
take into account this diagnosis. Consequently, a very different
8 G. Craig, ‘Alfred the Great: A Diagnosis,’ Journal of the Royal Society of

Medicine 84, no. 5 (1991): 304.
9 Ibid. Note that a response to Craig’s essay appears in the ‘Letter to the
Editor’ section of the same journal, in which it is argued that Alfred’s ex-
tended pain may have resulted from ‘haemorrhoidal disease and complica-
tions’ rather than Crohn’s. St. Ficare’s disease is suggested as an alternative
to ‘haemrrhoids’ (F.I. Jackson, ‘Alfred the Great: A Diagnosis,’ Journal of
the Royal Society of Medicine 85, no. 1 [1992]: 58).
244
kind of Alfredian biography arises in Alfred’s Smyth’s 1995 King

Alfred the Great. Smyth’s Introduction, which critiques Alfred
scholarship as a field not only ‘enmeshed in polemic and the
politics of academe’ but also a casualty of ‘the networks of pa-
tronage which have come to control the subject in England,’ styl-
izes his biography as ‘iconoclastic’ and ‘polemic.’10 Smyth insists
that Asser’s Life of King Alfred is a forgery that paints the king as
a ‘neurotic saintly invalid,’11 who is, moreover, ‘depressive,’ ‘ob-
sessive,’ ‘sickly,’ ‘fanatical,’ and suffering from an illness that was
‘ghastly,’ ‘gruesomely,’ ‘mysterious,’ ‘repulsive,’ ‘crippling,’ and
worst of all, perhaps, ‘self-inflicted.’12 Whereas previous gen-
erations of scholars had simply omitted Asser’s claims regard-
ing Alfred’s illnesses or elided a discussion about them, Smyth
is overly attentive to Alfred’s disease-ridden body. He depicts
it as a grossly unsovereign from — physically and psychologi-
cally — in order to dismiss Asser’s Life. By focusing his attention
on Alfred’s embodied, ‘fleshy,’ and ‘obscenely alive’ figure,13 an
insistent, scholarly ‘we’ emerges:
even when we discard the monastic image of the invalid…

king, it is still a daunting task to cross a thousand years in
time and hope to recover the picture of the genuine Alfred…
we can never make the bold claim of having sat in the royal
chamber with this man. There are times however, when Al-
fred allows us to draw near to his presence and when through
his own writings, we can observe him through an opaque
screen. And what we perceive then, is no ordinary man, but a
10 Alfred Smyth, King Alfred the Great (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995), xxii.
11 Ibid., 204.
12 Janet L. Nelson, ‘The Political Ideas of Alfred of Wessex,’ in Kings and
Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (London: King’s College,
1993), 22–23. I cite Janet Nelson’s review article, ‘Waiting for Alfred,’ not
only because of its tidy listing of Smyth’s descriptors but also because it
articulates them within a poetic orbit. Note how rhyme ties together word
pairs (Early Medieval Europe 7, no. 1 [1998]: 115–24).
13 Here, I point back to the language of Eric Santner and Elaine Scarry, which
I discussed at length in relation to sovereignty in Chapter 4 of this book.
245
gifted ruler who was himself ever concerned with how we in

succeeding generations, would view him.14
Smyth’s consideration of Alfred’s physicality re-embodies the

king, so to speak, in such a way that he is no longer simply a
bronze statue. For Smyth, Alfred, once again, has a body. Con-
sequently, Alfred can be thought of in relation to an embodied,
scholarly ‘we’ who study him.
While Smyth’s biography was the subject of many scathing
reviews by members of the small, but tight-knit network of
Alfredian history, it has enabled these scholars to contemplate
biographical relationships between Alfred and those who write
about him. In so doing, Anglo-Saxonists approach the realities
of postcoloniality, yet renew their allegiances to Alfred and to
Anglo-American sovereignty. Essays appearing in the years fol-
lowing Smyth’s biography articulate present-tense connections
between the king and his historians. Janet Nelson’s review of
Smyth’s book highlights an interview by Dorothy Whitelock
about her highly-anticipated but never-completed book about
the king:
Whitelock’s Alfred, she told her interviewer, was above all ‘a

very valiant man.’ ‘But what disclosures will there be?’ the
journalist persisted. ‘It’s straight history,’ Whitelock replied
briskly, ‘it’s not going to be anything startling.’ Whitelock’s
translation of Asser in English Historical Documents, volume
I, had omitted chapter 74, and also omitted Asser’s two other
episodes, chapters 14–15, and chapters 95–7, involving revela-
tions of ninth-century sexuality which could qualify as star-
tling. That a scholar of Whitelock’s generation and experience
should have found unpalatable Asser’s account of Alfred’s ill-
ness, and its intimate relationship with his spirituality and his
sexuality, calls for our understanding… . John Cunningham
in the Guardian interview [on Whitelock’s commissioned
but never-completed biography of Alfred] achieved the right
14 Smyth, King Alfred the Great, 602.
246
combination of shrewdness and sympathy: ‘On why she nev-

er married, Dorothy Whitelock says just: ‘A vast number of
young men of my generation died in the First World War… .
I never had that feminine desire to run a home… . I can cook
adequately: I can grill chops and steaks and make chicken
casserole. Fresh vegetables can I cook and I can boil eggs.’
She smiles… .’15
Richard Abel’s self-reflective essay, ‘Alfred and his Biographers,’

contemplates Smyth and Plummer’s work in relation to his own:
And what of my Alfred? When I signed the contract to write

my book back in 1988, I, like Smyth, had planned to say
something new on the subject… .I was going to drag Alfred
off his pedestal at Winchester as surely as American soldiers
and freed Iraqis were to pull down the statue of Saddam
Hussein… . And I failed… . To paraphrase Plummer, I found
myself putting the received story into my own words, and
‘arranging in my own way, what has been previously written
by others or myself.’16
Patrick Wormald suggests, in ‘Living with Alfred,’ that these au-

tobiographical attachments may be about family ties as well as
personal ones:
Might one even nurse a suspicion that Professor Keynes,

great-nephew of [John Maynard Keynes,] the most distin-
guished civil servant the British government has ever had
and the one economist universally acknowledged as a genius,
naturally prefers to dwell on the title ‘king of the Anglo-Sax-
15 Nelson, ‘Waiting for Alfred,’ 123, 123n28; quoting from John Cunningham’s
interview with Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Waiting for Alfred,’ The Guardian
(August 18, 1978), 9.
16 Richard Abels, ‘Alfred and His Biographers: Images and Imagination,’ in
Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow,
eds. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Rochester: Boydell,
2006), 73.
247
ons’ that our hero bears in his official documents and (by
implication) on his coins…as opposed to the hazier vision of
an Angelcynn, ‘English people,’ which as yet subsisted only in
the dreams of the likes of Bede?17
In which case, I [Patrick Wormald] would have to admit
that my own conception of a scholar-king at odds with his
military nobility’s indifference to learning probably grew out
of my experiences as an Eton ‘King’s Scholar.’…If post-mod-
ernism teaches us anything, it is that any text must be read as
an artefact. But with Alfred, texts bring us uniquely close to
their protagonist.18
Whitelock’s ‘valiant’ Alfred and her promise of writing ‘straight

history’ point to an ‘Alfred’ shaped by her memories of the First
World War, where ‘a vast number of young men of [her] gen-
eration died.’ Abels’s references to ‘American soldiers’ and ‘freed
Iraqis’ track his position as a professor in the U.S. Naval Acad-
emy. Keynes’s family ties him to the British government and to
academic virtuosity. Wormald’s youthful identity as a ‘King’s
Scholar’ (my emphasis) marks his intellectual precocity at Eton
as one in future service to the Crown. These anecdotes from
some of Anglo-Saxon studies’ most gifted scholars, all of which
were published in the late-nineties and early two-thousands, re-
veal deep devotions to British and American sovereignty in a
postcolonial era — devotions which are expressed in and main-
tained by their scholarly interpretations of Alfred.
Consequently, while Patrick Wormald claims that Alfred’s
‘mind and body’ should be medically assessed, discussions that
consider Alfred’s physical illnesses still return to representation-
alist readings of him.19 Paul Kershaw, Janet Nelson, and David
Pratt have written about Alfred’s piles, or hemorrhoids, and his
Crohn’s disease, then directed attention away from these con-
17 Patrick Wormald, ‘Living with King Alfred,’ Haskins Society Journal 15

(2006): 3.
18 Ibid., 3, 4.
19 Ibid., 6.
248
ditions, by assessing his medical symptoms in relation to cri-

tiques of warrior-aristocrat values,20 conflicts between Alfred’s
clerical and lay callings,21 Continental sources vested in physical
suffering,22 and the pressures of ‘excess education.’23 In the writ-
ings of these scholars, Alfred returns, if not to his place as An-
gulsaxonum rex, then to one who is still Anglo-Saxon. Through
their Anglo-Saxonist devotions, the racial and colonial empires
of England and the United States remain undiminished.
While Anglo-Saxonists evade the material realities of Al-
fred’s physical body, his corpse finally makes its appearance. On
January 17, 2014, British news outlets published stories claim-
ing that a piece of Alfred’s pelvis may have been found.24 Below
the headlines, images of the engraving of Alfred used in John
Spelman’s 1678 Life of Ælfred the Great and the 1901 Winchester
Statue of Alfred — effigial figures discussed at length in Chapter
4 of this book — appear next to a photograph of the pelvic frag-
ment (see Figs. 1–4). Alfred’s sovereign form sits across from a
supposedly material fragment of ‘the man himself.’ The unde-
cayed, corpse-like figure of a king is confronted with a broken
piece of ‘his’ corpse.25
A year after ‘Alfred’s’ pelvic fragment is found — as if in re-
sponse to its recovery — John Niles’s The Idea of Anglo-Saxon
20 Paul Kershaw, ‘Illness, Power and Prayer in Asser’s Life of King Alfred,’
Early Medieval Europe 10, no. 2 (2001): 201–24.
21 Nelson, ‘Waiting for Alfred.’
22 David Pratt, ‘The Illnesses of King Alfred the Great,’ Anglo-Saxon England
30 (2001): 39–90.
23 Wormald, ‘Living with King Alfred,’ 17.
24 For example, see Maev Kennedy, ‘Archaeologists May Have Found Re-
mains of Alfred the Great,’ The Guardian, January 17, 2014, https://www.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/17/alfred-the-great-edward-elder-
remains-found-winchester; Nick Collins, ‘King Alfred the Great Bones
Believed to be in Box Found in Museum,’ The Telegraph, January 17, 2014,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10579315/King-Alfred-the-Great-
bones-believed-to-be-in-box-found-in-museum.html; and ‘Bone Frag-
ment “could be King Alfred or son Edward”,’ BBC News, January 17, 2014,
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-25760383.
25 Notably, osteological and genetic testing of this bone fragment proved
inconclusive.
249
Figure 1. Detail from Sarah Griffiths and Ben Spencer, ‘King Alfred
the Great’s Bones Discovered in a MUSEUM: Remains Inside Box are
Thought to Belong to Anglo-Saxon Ruler,’ Daily Mail, January 17, 2014.
Image Courtesy of Alamy.
Figure 2. Detail from Maev Kennedy, ‘Archaeologists May Have Found

Remains of Alfred the Great,’ The Guardian, January 17, 2014. Image
Courtesy of Martin Argles and The Guardian.
250
Figure 3. Detail from ‘Bone Fragment “could be King Alfred or son

Edward”,’ BBC News, January 17, 2014.
Figure 4. Detail from Nick Collins, ‘King Alfred the Great Bones
Believed to Be in Box Found in Museum,’ The Telegraph, January 17,
2014. Image Courtesy of Alamy.
251
England, 1066–1901, a survey of the history of Anglo-Saxon

studies, asks, in its introductory chapter, ‘Has the time come
to retire that hyphenated term “the Anglo-Saxons” as one that
has outlived its usefulness?’26 ‘Like all terms of classification,’
Niles continues, ‘we should feel free to discard them if they are
felt to imprison us in habits of thought that have outlived their
usefulness.’27 Niles concludes his book by discussing the Win-
chester Statue, where he ruminates on the ‘usefulness’ of Alfred.
In 1901, Niles writes, Alfred’s statue rendered him ‘fully human,’
yet of ‘transcendent dignity.’28 However, Alfred’s ‘high point…
in the modern period…also marked the end of an era, for in
that same year Queen Victoria passed away.’29 The year 1901, he
explains, ‘has seemed a fitting stopping point in part because it
marks the start of a new century and hence represents a special
moment in the eternal, if vain, quest for a future that is more en-
lightened than the past,’ because ‘the concerns of one generation
are often a dead issue for the next.’30 Niles’s association between
the erection of Alfred’s statue and Victoria’s death and his asser-
tion that Alfred’s ‘high point’ at the turn of the century is now a
‘dead issue’ for the post-Victorian ‘generation[s]’ doubly marks
the king’s body as a corpse. Yet Niles continues to allow ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ and Alfred to take pride of place as ‘matter[s] of habit
and convenience’ rather than acts of faithful allegiance. For
while he claims that the ‘concerns of one generation’ are ‘dead’
and gone, Niles’s book title includes the phrase ‘Anglo-Saxon
England,’ and Alfred’s Winchester statue serves as its cover art
(see Figure 5). Although materialized into a corpse, the sover-
eign force of Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon corpse-like presence keeps
us circling it — keeps us from ‘getting off ’ — as a consequence of
ambivalence and melancholy, affective states of those haunted
26 John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering,

Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Malden: Wiley Blackwell,
2015), 34.
27 Ibid., 35.
28 Ibid., 366.
29 Ibid., 328.
30 Ibid., 355, 354, my emphasis.
252
Figure 5. Cover art for John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England
1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing
the Past (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). Image Courtesy of Wiley
Blackwell.
253
by a ghostly ‘old guard,’ as discussed in the first chapter of this

book.
In order to understand the process by which nineteenth-
century Anglo-Saxonists became devotees of Alfred (and subse-
quent generations have maintained these devotions in the face
of postcolonial politics), Chapter 4 concluded with a discussion
of Anglo-Saxonist ‘being.’ It argued that in the nineteenth cen-
tury, becoming a professional Anglo-Saxonist was a disembod-
ied, cognitive process by which the student arrived at a perfect
and complete understanding of the entire Anglo-Saxon corpus,
a body of grammar and texts into which Alfred’s sovereign,
corpse-like ghost was folded. Being an Anglo-Saxonist was a
professional and an ontological state of mind that, on account
of its cognitive emphasis, expresses a being that is inhabited by
and consequently devoted to a ghost.
For twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonists, the ontological
force of our professional appellative weighs heavily upon us.31
31 As this book was in the final proofing stages, the International Society
of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) voted to change its name, but not without
fierce debates and divisive fractiousness among its membership, and
as of this book’s publication, ISAS is still ruminating what its new name
might be. For a brief overview of events leading up to the votes and why
the matter was so contentious, see Hannah Natason, ‘“It’s All White
People”: Allegations of White Supremacy Are Tearing Apart a Prestig-
ious Medieval Studies Group,’ The Washington Post, September 19, 2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/19/its-all-white-
people-allegations-white-supremacy-are-tearing-apart-prestigious-
medieval-studies-group/ and Colleen Flaherty, ‘It’s About More Than a
Name,’ Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.
com/news/2019/09/20/anglo-saxon-studies-group-says-it-will-change-
its-name-amid-bigger-complaints-about. For relevant background, see
also Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem,’
JSTOR Daily, May 3, 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/old-english-serious-image-
problem/; Daniel C. Remein, ‘ISAS Should Probably Change Its Name,’
conference presentation, 52nd International Congress on Medieval Stud-
ies, May 11, 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34101681/_Isas_should_prob-
ably_change_its_name_ICMS_KalamazKa_2017; Adam Miyashiro, ‘De-
colonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu,’ In The
Middle, July 29, 2017, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/07/de-
colonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html; Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘Anglo-Saxon
254
Living not in a colonial but in a post-colonial age, positioned

not towards a Cartesian ‘being’ but a Deleuzian ‘becoming,’
we are personally out of step with the ethnopolitical, raciolin-
guistic, and professional orientations woven, long ago, into the
semantic fibers of ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ Yet, as the previous chapter
argued, if the dead sovereign ‘Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons,’
which lies at the bedrock of our professional signifier, keeps us
being Anglo-Saxonists, might it, consequently, prohibit us from
becoming something else so long as we maintain, by ‘habit’ and
‘convenience,’ signifiers that are not our own? For, as Nelson
Maldonado-Torres argues, Being is not simply a matter of colo-
nialism, but also of coloniality:
…long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result

of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective
relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict
limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives
colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria
for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common
sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and
so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way,
as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and
everyday.32
Maldonado-Torres’s discussion of coloniality leads him to con-

sider the philosophical, ethical, and juridical processes of de-
coloniality, its apposite state. However, in order to locate one’s
self within a decolonial subjectivity, this chapter argues that one
must first turn away from colonial ‘being’ and open oneself to
Studies, Academia, and White Supremacy,’ Medium, June 27, 2018, https://
medium.com/@mrambaranolm/anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-
white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3; and ‘Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting
“Anglo-Saxon” Studies,’ History Workshop, November 4, 2019, http://www.
historyworkshop.org.uk/misnaming-the-medieval-rejecting-anglo-saxon-
studies/.
32 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being,’ Cultural Studies
21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 243.
255
decolonial ‘becoming.’ Such political-ontological repositioning

invokes Deleuze, and his intellectual partner, Guattari, whose
initial writings not only challenge a Hegelian ontology of Be-
ing but are also written during the second half of the twentieth
century, in (and to) the time of mid-to-late–century European
decolonization. Consequently, Deleuze can be understood as
a philosopher whose refiguration of ‘Being’ as ‘becoming’ ar-
ticulates philosophical decolonization from a European vantage
point.33 Deleuze, I believe, offers Anglo-Saxon studies and its
Anglo-Saxonists one (of many) possible paths towards decolo-
nizing the field. His philosophy, which understands the criti-
cal value of ‘becoming’ as a conversation between participants,
requires that we take experiential positions with diverse and
multiple others; make alliances with heterogenous organisms
whose ‘populations…vary from milieu to mileu’; and sidestep
the structuralist efforts of taxonomic classification and genea-
logical trees via rhizomatic conceptual mapping.34
Embracing becoming requires, first, that we emotionally give
up, or at least loosen the ties that bind us to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and
33 Despite the timing of his oeuvre, Deleuze has only recently been put in
conversation with postcolonial theory. As Simone Bignall and Paul Patton
write in ‘Deleuze and the Postcolonial,’ ‘the problematic lack in mutuality,
or else the mutual disregard, which previous scholarship has highlighted
as characteristic of the relationship between Deleuze and the postco-
lonial…[,] despite the abundance of Deleuzian motifs in postcolonial
discourse,’ may express ‘the more worrying possibility that his silence on
colonialism conceals a certain Eurocentric self-interest, a neo-imperial
motivation or a hidden or unacknowledged desire to deflect attention
away from the political concerns of the postcolony’ (‘Deleuze and the
Postcolonial: Conversations, Negotiations, Mediations,’ in Deleuze and
the Postcolonial, ed. Simone Bignall [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2010], 1–2). Yet Bignall, Patton, and the collection of writings that
they introduce short-circuit this problem by explaining that Deleuzian
philosophy does not, and can never, express postcolonial theory. Rather,
the two are engaged in conversations ‘between participants and between
the respective terms and stances they bring to the discussion’ — in other
words, between Deleuze and the postcolonial (8).
34 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press, 1987), 238–39.
256
‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ Yet, for each of us, this is a personal process.

For myself, I found it necessary to return to the body of King Al-
fred, the dead sovereign around which the nested terms ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ are formed. I began to write a spec-
ulative micro-history of Alfred’s body that tracks its purported
engagements with ‘piles’ and Crohn’s disease, its eventual death
and decay in the grave, and its fragmentary ‘recovery’ during
the 1999 and 2013 excavations of Hyde Abbey. I wanted this
work of creative non-fiction to attend to Alfred as a biochemical
organism that, in life and in death, challenges and exceeds his
‘Anglo-Saxon’ parameters. And I hoped that by allowing Alfred
to become something other than ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ I might be able
to mourn him. As an act of mourning, however, it required my
own participation as well. As I narrated Alfred’s organismic de-
cay, I found myself — like Alfred’s other biographers — writing
about my own family, namely, its obsession with a genealogy
that descends from fathers to sons. His story of sickness and
decay became interleaved with a story about my schizophrenic
mother who took it upon herself to research all seven branches
of the Ellard family who migrated from pre-Revolutionary Vir-
ginia to the Mississippi Territory. While my mother’s research
was a product of her mental illness, her outsider’s perspective on
the Ellards enabled me contemplate my family differently and
with skepticism, for the first time. As I narrated physical chang-
es to Alfred’s living flesh as it endured illness, old age, death,
and post-mortem decay, I had to confront my attachments to
a series of Ellard men — the sovereign patriarchs of my family.
While I drew connections between my professional and
personal selves, unlike the autoethnography of Chapter 1, this
was not a retreading of old paths. As I made a new narrative
for Alfred, for the first time in my life, I had an open conversa-
tion with myself about my family’s ghostly presence in my life. I
was forced to recognize that Jonathan Ellard, who homesteaded
in northern Alabama during Andrew Jackson’s administration,
was involved in the removal of Chickasaw native peoples. I was
challenged to come to terms with the activities of his son, James
Bennett Ellard, who moved to northern Mississippi, fought in
257
the 8th Mississippi Calvary, and owned slaves, possibly as late

as the 1880s. Yet it was not the biographical particulars of these
men that were hard to acknowledge. The names, photographs,
and stories of these and other Ellard men were lionized by my
family, especially my father, who became a member of the Sons
of the Confederacy through his descent from James Bennett.
What was hard — and ‘hard’ is not the word for this process, be-
cause feelings have no words — was facing an idyll of the South
that is maintained by the Ellards through its unbroken narrative
about family. Writing their stories forced me to put into words
and, consequently, to narrativize my intergenerational, emo-
tional attachments to the South. Namely, that, like my father,
and his father, and his, I have possessed a repugnant love — and
have embraced the terrible violence — of American colonialism,
slavery, and racism. That, like all of these Ellard men, I could not
bring myself to whole-heartedly disavow the Confederate flag,
the sovereign signifier that not only haunts my family’s geneal-
ogy but moreover maintains it. That I have loved — and have not
known how to stop loving — something that has been passed on
to me as a trans-generational haunting.
Writing about Alfred’s physical body required that I con-
sciously confront these realities about my family, engage the
emotions that result from admitting something so horrid about
oneself, and give narrative voice to all of it. It required that I
look these ghosts in the face and bury them so they might ‘Rest
In Peace,’ and I might find a way out of Anglo-Saxon studies and
the Anglo-Saxon South. By attending to Alfred’s material corpse
rather than his sovereign, corpse-like ghost in my writing, I
have been able to unfix a narrative about Alfred, my family, and
myself. I have been able to recognize that Alfred is no longer (if
he ever was) ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ and I am no longer (if I ever was) an
‘Anglo-Saxonist’ but a scholar of postSaxon becoming.
A Biochemical Vita Ælfredi
Named after Dr. Burrill B. Crohn, who first described the dis-
ease in 1932 along with colleagues Dr. Leon Ginzburg and Dr.
258
Gordon D. Oppenheimer, Crohn’s disease belongs to a group

of conditions known as Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD).
Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory condition of the gas-
trointestinal tract that most commonly affects the end of the
small bowel (the ileum) and the beginning of the colon, but it
may affect any part of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, from the
mouth to the anus. While the signs and symptoms can range
from patient to patient, and some may be more common than
others, Crohn’s presents by way of the following: abdominal
pain, fever, and clinical signs of bowel obstruction or diarrhoea
with passage of blood or mucus, or both.35
It all started when he was much younger: Ficus. Fic. Figs. Fuck.
As Alfred sat for hours over a wooden trough filled with hot
stones and steaming herbs, he experimented with alliterative
poetry. While the warmth gave him some immediate relief, the
figs always came back. They were disgusting. He felt disgusting.
Alfred’s body was always there, calling attention to itself in the
most embarrassing ways.
When these heat treatments didn’t work, Alfred’s physician
recommended a more aggressive course of action. Herbs were
gathered. A wolf was killed, its jaw was burnt, and its ashes col-
lected. It’s hard to know which was worse: the hot, cakey smears
that were applied to his bottom, the herbal drinks meant to
purge the figs (and everything else) from his body, or the time-
consuming rituals passed down from some magician of the very
dark and deep past.
Although problems with the body were, as they always have
been, the cost of living, there is a certain unspeakability sur-
rounding the asshole. No one wants to talk about a real, func-
tional one even though it’s the first insult every schoolboy learns.
For the asshole really is the perfect metaphor for an unlikeable
body until things — like hemorrhoids — make their presence
known. On the toilet, the asshole suddenly retreats from its sta-
35 Daniel C. Baumgart and William J. Sandborn, ‘Crohn’s Disease,’ The Lan-

cet 380, no. 9853 (November 2012): 1590–1605.
259
tus as a delightful signifier to a sphincter of painful, burning

materiality that no one wants to name, much less to talk about.
Even the Lacnunga, in a detailed recipe for relieving hemor-
rhoids, becomes prim when approaching the asshole, instruct-
ing the afflicted to apply a hot ointment ‘to þæm setle’ [‘to the
seat’] of the patient’s body.
With the Lacnunga’s statement as the only Old English guide
for approaching the material asshole, we might return to Alfred,
who may or may not have felt a similar obliqueness towards dis-
cussing his medical dolors. Unfortunately, for him, hemorrhoids
were the first and early sign of a much worse condition. If, as a
young man, he was able to keep quiet about the problems with
his setl, by the time Alfred was an adult, there was no privacy
to be had regarding the matter. While one can usually grin and
bear the discomfort of walking, riding, and even shitting with a
hemorrhoid, frequent diarrhea is a far more difficult problem
to hide.
The constant back and forth, back and forth, back and forth
to the toilet, waiting for his bowels to stop churning; the dehy-
dration and fatigue that often times left him pale and sometimes
kept him in bed; the painful swelling of his abdomen and upper
thighs — all these symptoms, inevitably apparent to those who
shared in the close quarters of his living environment, disclosed
that Alfred was not well. Worse than a hemorrhoid, this shit,
this bloody, mucusy, shit, which he felt himself to be living in,
was unbearable. It marked the asshole as an oozing commu-
nicant, which mouthed vile, rotten, and painful things. And it
was not just Alfred’s asshole that was talking. From inside his
body, Alfred found himself in constant, excruciating conversa-
tion with the real voices behind his problems. The thousands
of anaerobic microbiota that had colonized his gut sent him a
message of abdominal pain, fever, and cramping.
Alfred soon understood the dynsfunctional communications
messaged to him by these bacteria. When he looked at the mu-
cus and blood facing him in the toilet, his healthcare worries
turned to feelings of personal disgust, shame, and depression. It
was then that Alfred’s alliterative experiments turned from ficus
260
towards the halig fæder, from the setl of his asshole to that of the
heavenly throne:
Halig fæder, thu on heofon, Ac, min fæder, pater noster,
dismiss us, no, debit me
from each of evils from coming temptations
from þis shit, from min self,
from þis body, from min corpus,
Ælfred, Amen.
As Alfred transformed the material sounds of his body into

the familiar tones of spiritual comfort, he burnished the abject
within into a poetics of his rightful self.
Poetic self-fashioning is not only the gambit of kings and princes,

despite what historians may say. Because it is not just regal fig-
ures who have bodies in disrepair. Such is the case of Dora Lou.
Legally blind, Dora Lou is my mother’s first cousin, who was
born and still lives in the piney woods of McHenry, Mississippi.
In the dirt road that leads to her home, in the outhouse that sits
squat in her yard, she is the face of a poverty rarely seen these
days in the rural South. For my mother, Dora Lou’s blindness is
that site of disrepair against which she has always situated her
upbringing. ‘Poor Dora Lou,’ my mother would say as she shook
her head. It was an expression that ignited other memories: of
an alcoholic uncle, of a Pentecostal grandfather, of a mother she
disdained. But above and beyond all these things which she hat-
ed about her childhood past, Dora Lou and her McHenry home
reminded my mother that she was descended from a father born
out of wedlock. Her father’s illegitimacy stuck in my mother like
261
a sand spur, and when she traded her name in for ‘Ellard,’ my
mother tried her hand at poetry. She researched the genealogy
of her husband’s family in order to creatively figure herself as the
newest member of its long history.
The comforting projects of poetry are often short lived, how-

ever. Not only for my mother but also for Alfred. Despite his
alliterative prayers, during periods when his intestinal problems
were especially violent, no foods could sit with him, and at last
he called for a new physician. Upon his arrival, Bald palpated
the king’s swollen stomach. He considered the location of his
fingers, feeling the tautness of muscle, hidden beneath swollen,
spongy tissue. He examined Alfred’s setl, touching a fissure — a
tear — that seemed to extend at least a few inches up the muscle
tissue into the anal canal. That would explain the sharp, burning
pain, which Alfred complained of during his bowel movements.
When he slid his fingers out, Alfred’s microbiota delivered a fart
that declared their interior victory over his body. Bald smelled
his fingers, wiped them, then looked in the toilet, examining
the mucosal leavings of Alfred’s last shit. While he had seen this
presentation before, in those cases, the patients, all of them old-
er and much poorer, had not lived long.
No one — neither the physician nor the patient — wants to
examine a body in this condition. A visit with the doctor can be
embarrassing and painful, and speaking to one’s gastroenterolo-
gist is grossly intimate. Such intimacy might begin with a medi-
cal history, describing the problem. But talk, inevitably, leads to
feeling, and feeling to touching, and touching leads to hidden
places, and the body yields itself to hands that search, clinically,
for non-verbal evidence of infection, disease, metastasis, para-
site. Although Alfred’s body was that of a king, by the time Bald
had finished with him, its royal patina had worn off, and Alfred
was just another chronically sick man who couldn’t stop shitting
himself. Intimacy can do that to you.
262
So: Bald prescribed a treatment. Perhaps a change in diet

would help. He told the cook not to prepare meat for a week. He
cautioned against milk and eggs. He consulted several books in
the Winchester monastery and wrote Northumbria to ask what
resources might be available there. Wearmouth and Jarrow had
several Mediterranean texts on healing, or so he had heard.
Aside from a few charms, Bald found nothing written on the
subject, but the change in diet did seem to help at first. After a few
weeks, Alfred’s abdominal swelling subsided, and his morning
trips to the toilet decreased from 10 to 7. Small, but meaningful
victories for a body in pain. Relief, unfortunately, was not long
lasting. Alfred was under stress, and his illness began to return.
Unable to find a recipe for lasting, palliative treatment, much
less a cure, Bald was dismissed from the court. In his absence,
other physicians appeared. They, too, wouldn’t keep their hands
off Alfred, feeling him up from the inside-out before prescribing
tinctures, pulses, pastes, and teas. Although food masked the
taste of some remedies, others were terrible. They left a bitter-
ness in Alfred’s mouth that went straight to his intestines. When
local doctors exhausted their attempts at a remedy, those from
outside Winchester were consulted. More roving hands. More
searching for answers inside his ass. More intimacy. Alfred’s
undiagnosable condition became widely known, and a steady
stream of healers, some well-intentioned, others charlatans, ar-
rived at the king’s hall, hoping to take their turn and, by skill
or by luck, deliver a biological miracle unto Alfred and his setl.
More often than not, however, the combination of unpalata-
ble brews and searing topical remedies administered by Alfred’s
revolving door of physicians sent him to the shitter, where he
continued to contemplate his situation in silence:
Ac, min fæder, rex aeternalis,
make min wholebody min poorbody whole
halig, as þu eart a halo around the heart.
263
As ic sit upon þis setl, min setl,
sinful setl kingly in its aeternality,
Ælfred rex, Amen.
‘Poor Dora Lou.’ The sound of her name, like an arrow of time,
shot into the past and landed on my mother’s father. He was
born in the small house in McHenry where Dora Lou now lives.
He was a bastard, my mother never failed to remind, because
his last name — Herring — belonged to a man he never knew.
My grandpa’s illegitimacy was a canker and an obsession for my
mother. She would burst into tears when she talked about it. In
those moments, when her face showed the terror of sexual sin,
I could see the straightjacket of the Pentecostal South buckle
tight around her.
Although my mother talked incessantly about her upbring-
ing, she did not like going home. Actually, she was hostile to-
wards it. When we did go to my grandparents’ house and to see
Dora Lou, what I remember most was driving down the Gulf
Coast. Crossing Pascagoula and Moss Point into Kreole (where
my grandma and grandpa lived); then on to Gautier and Biloxi,
on the way to McHenry, was an experience of wonder and dis-
gust. Even if I was asleep as we crossed the truss bridges that
connected these towns, the pogy plants always woke me. The
smell of fish meal processing was revolting, and it meant that
we were almost there. While the stench of the pogies lasted
only as long as the bridges did, the highway that stretched from
Moss Point to Biloxi passed by a coastal slurry made up of sea-
food, maritime industries, and filth. After Omega Protein (from
whence the pogy smell came) and Ingall’s shipyard, we’d stop,
sometimes, at inlets where my mother used to gig flounder.
Here, brown sand met browner water. As a kid, these brackish
waterways were polluted by her refrain, ‘Poor Dora Lou,’ and the
story of sexual transgression that followed from it.
264
Many rivers and their tributaries lead into the Gulf Coast: the
Tombigbee and Coosa flow into Mobile Bay; the Chickasway
and Leaf head to Pascagoula; and, of course, the great Missis-
sippi runs the spine of the state and empties into New Orleans.
While frequently imagined as highways for people and goods,
these rivers are likewise the intestinal tracts of the South. Rivers
pass sediment and waste to coastal wetlands, which act as kid-
ney filtration systems. Once this water is cleaned, it moves into
river deltas that pour into the Gulf, where seafood, ships, and
processing plants have moored themselves for nearly a century.
Up river, where it is cleaner, is where the Ellards live. Up
river, where there are fewer digestive problems, is where the El-
lards live. Down river, where the smell of fish guts pollutes the
air, is where my mother is from. Down river, where things are
filtered and flushed out with no thought to memory, is where
my mother is from.
Down river, no birth certificates, cemetery plots, or family
stories exist that would locate a past worth finding. Not only
was my grandpa a bastard, but his family was poor and illiterate.
Herring men wore coveralls and got their hands dirty at the ship-
yard. Herring ladies did not play bridge or bake cakes — their
kitchens smelled of gumbo and boiled shrimp. There was no
thought to the past or to pedigree. When my mother married
my father, she left the Herrings and McHenry. She left Dora Lou.
She turned her nose up at the chickens, the outhouse, the screen
door, the boggy woods, and Mississippi’s wastewater. She could
no longer smell the industrialized coast; she would no longer
gig flounder at dusk or travel rickety bridges. Her home and her
surname would be my father’s. Her house would be full of the
Ellards’ old furniture and photos. Her past would now be trace-
able from here to the Civil War and the American Revolution.
In grafting herself to my father’s family tree, my mother would
claim the sexual cleanliness and legitimacy denied her on ac-
count of her father and become a ‘Southern Lady.’ She would
write herself into its shoots, branches, and blossoms; she would
carve her name into its sturdy trunk and deep roots. In an at-
tempt to rid herself of a sin that smelled like the entrails of Pas-
265
cagoula’s Gulf Coast, my mother began a project of arboreal

poetry.
Had physicians of the late ninth century benefitted from twen-

ty-first-century urulogy, biomedical diagnoses, and pharmaco-
logical advances, Alfred might have been medically healed. At
the first signs of stool problems and abdominal pain, he prob-
ably would have been given a colonoscopy and an endoscopy.
He might even have been admitted into the hospital, where a
CT scan and barium x-ray would have been ordered to diagnose
his problems. Once his asshole had been handled with light and
heavy machinery, photographed from the sphincter all the way
up to his guts, and discussed (in the most sanitary terms) by a
medical team, Alfred may have been discharged with a treat-
ment plan that entailed a daily dosage of 6g sulfasalazine, 1mg
folic acid, and Mesalamine enemas as necessary. Yet, it’s hard to
say for sure. Crohn’s, like its sister conditions, IBS, colitis, and
leaky gut, is treatable with a variety of medications, but rarely do
patients find themselves symptom-free. For the Western medi-
cal community does not know what causes, or cures, Crohn’s.
While alternative practitioners have found success by eliminat-
ing high-roughage vegetables, soft cheeses, and other difficult-
to-digest and bacteria-flourishing foods, biomedicine has yet to
advocate for treatment plans other than pharmacological ones.
Yet Alfred, like so many of us today, was not ambivalent
towards his illness. Absent the benefit of Western medical sci-
ence and modern, alternative medicines, Alfred began to find
the timing and rhythm of his flare-ups. His body’s ear became
attuned to a bacterial orchestra that would play after certain
meals. While Alfred learned to order and avoid certain foods,
fasting was, most often, the only way to stay away from the toilet
and from the doctors’ roving, searching, cold hands. One could
not, however, avoid food forever, and alongside the continued
medical remedies prescribed to the king were religious ones, as
some believed that Alfred was not afflicted by an undiagnosable
266
illness but possessed by spiritual darkness, a sin which his own

biographer attributed to sexual desire. Perhaps Alfred could be
cured if the devil was chased from his hiding place, and Alfred
atoned for his sinful thoughts and actions. Holy water and in-
cense cleansed his body and his royal residence. Pater Nosters
were prescribed. An amulet was made for him to wear. On a
scrap of parchment, which was rolled up and tied to Alfred’s in-
ner thigh, was a charm that had been a long time in the making:
Ac min fæder ond the angels of heofan
from feondes costung and physicians hands
free me, Ælfred Angulsaxonum rex.
Can alliterative poetry become an arboreal project? Did the root

bulb of Alfred’s medical intimacies grow into a tree from which
my family branches? As my mother muttered, ‘Poor Dora Lou’
and repeated the story of her family’s disgrace, she looked up the
Ellards’ birth, death, and marriage records. She began to build
upon what was known about the family from its Calhoun Coun-
ty homestead to those in Trussville, Alabama; Anderson and
Pendleton, South Carolina; and Hamilton County, Virginia. As
she left the cemeteries of Calhoun and looked elsewhere for vital
records, my mother’s research began to track the Ellard family
line back through time and place from the Mississippi Territory
of the early 1820s to America’s pre-Revolutionary colonies.
In drawing up the Ellard family tree, my mother found a long
colonial history sheltered in the first names of its many men. She
pruned and shaped these branches to give more light to them
so they could grow, lopping off the many women and girl chil-
dren who could have been touched and would not pass on their
surname, cutting away other, incontinent brothers and sons
who had neither children nor patriotic spirit. Through Wil-
liam Washington Ellard and Andrew Jackson Ellard, my mother
267
found cleanliness, godliness, and legitimacy. Surely, there was

no sin in these names, which refracted the whitewashed narra-
tives of American sovereignty and settlement. These men had
not been stained by the hands of sexual misdeed. Their bod-
ies knew nothing of noxious, downriver pollution. In them, my
mother escaped the damnation of her own body, raised near the
dirty, intestinal waterways of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. In their
names, she cultivated alliterative connections between the Jon-
athans, Jameses, and Jesses of the many generations. Through
her labors, the Ellard family tree grew straight and tall in clean
waters. She refigured narratives of American colonialism into a
romance of the Confederacy, carving out a place for herself at its
base. Here, under the branching shade of my family, she purged
from herself the intimate sins of adultery, illegitimacy, and the
consequent genealogical void that had made her not only un-
clean but also suffering from environmental dyspepsia.
268
In Virginia, she found a man,

Amos Issac Allerd, whose son, Jonathan Ellard,
travelled with his wife, Rutha McAdams, to Pendleton,
South Carolina, after Independence Day after the Cherokees
had been removed. But the Carolina mountains were too steep:
they needed flatter land. So they followed the Appalachians
southward, so they followed the path of ‘Indian’ removal,
so they made their way for themselves towards Alabama,
then Mississippi, where they named their children
William Washington and Andrew Jackson in celebration
of America’s victories. There was also another son — James
Bennett — who founded Ellard, Mississippi, owned slaves,
fought for the Confederacy, and became
the trunk of my family tree.
So James B.
begat
Jesse Jonathan,
who begat
Chester Dare,
who begat
Jesse Jonathan,
who begat
Jesse Sugg
who married
Margo Herring
E
L
L
A
R
D
269
While my mother never knew it, her research trod old paths. In
a book that I used to look at when I visited my grandmother’s
house as a kid were pages and pages of genealogical charts that
traced the family line back through time. From north Mississip-
pi to Virginia, then across the Atlantic, the Ellards set sail from
Britain sometime around the mid-eighteenth century. At this
point, the Mississippi genealogist’s research became speculative
and aristocratic. There was a knight in the family and, shooting
off of some branch, a duke. As the Ellards began to resemble the
characters of a medieval bedtime story, their surname started to
reshape itself in the direction of an even more distant and earlier
moment of the ‘Middle Ages.’ Ellard elasticized from Allerd into
Elward, Allard, Aillard, and Aylward. Recently, I looked up the
spelling variations on a less-than-reputable ancestry website.
From its own ‘archives,’ the site ‘excerpts’ the following:
The origins of the Ellard surname lie with the Anglo-Saxon

tribes of Britain. The name Ellard began when someone in
that family worked as a keeper of a hall. The surname El-
lard is composed of the elements hall, which denoted one
who was employed at such a manor-house or hall, and ward,
which was originally applied to one who was a watchman.36
As if conjuring the ghosts of its surname, an Anglo-Saxon ‘hall

ward’ returns in the ancestors of my family. William Washing-
ton and Andrew Jackson — the sons of Jonathan Ellard — valor-
ize American coloniality and settler colonialism, part of the glo-
rious duties of the Anglo-Saxon race. Likewise, upon arriving in
north Mississippi, giving the area his name, owning slaves, and
fighting for the Confederacy, James Bennett Ellard exercised his
patronymic right as a ‘hall ward’ of what so many have called
‘the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland.’37
36 ‘Ellard Surname, Family Crest & Coat of Arms,’ House of Names, https://
www.houseofnames.com/ellard-family-crest.
37 ‘Inaugural Address of Governor George Wallace, Which Was Delivered at
the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama,’ Alabama Department of Archives
and History, January 14, 1963, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/
270
Ellard, Allerd, Aylward, Hall-Ward: surnames and specious

etymologies make their way down, down, deep into Calhoun
County soil, where the tap root of my family’s tree draws water
from Alfred’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ signifier.
Yet, all organic things, no matter how attentive the arborist,
are subject to aging. Crowns flatten. Branches droop and sag,
tired of carrying the weight of the past. As a child without sib-
lings, the only name that my mother could add to the trunk of
the Ellards’ family tree — which had begotten so many sons of
colonial America and the Confederate South — was my own.
Unfortunately, as a girl, my name would never do. Without an-
other James or Jesse or Jonathan to keep it strong and healthy,
the survival of my family’s tree was questionable. I girdled its
trunk. I could get pregnant. Hands. Touching. No. The poten-
tial for illegitimacy all over again was too much to contemplate.
Something must be done.
Something would have to be done about all this body. Alfred

couldn’t take it. Yet, it kept coming, and they kept coming, and
the touching, and the remedies, and the touching, and the inti-
macies, and the touching, and the coming. Nothing was clean
anymore, even his amulet. Although he had tried, at first, to
keep it neat and dry, over time it had become soiled. When he
finally took the thing off, the ink had worn off the parchment,
and the only writing legible was Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex,
smudged, in reverse, onto the inside of this thigh. At a distance,
it just looked like a shit stain.
collection/voices/id/2952, 2. It is noteworthy that when invoking the ‘Great

Anglo-Saxon Southland’ in this address, Gov. Wallace also said, ‘In the
name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line
in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny…and I say…
segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever’ (ibid.).
271
Some days the smudge was so faint it seemed like it would

come off with just a little more scrubbing. On others, the writing
stood out in high contrast to his near-translucent skin. No one,
except probably Alfred, could even read the letters. But because
Alfred could read it, it bothered him. Bothered him so much
that he kept trying to remove it, applying oils, pastes, soaps:
any kind of topical that might remove the brown stain. Once,
he rubbed the area raw only to find that when the redness had
abated and new skin had grown back, so had the words.
After a while, Alfred’s relationship to this mark extended
from intense, focused attention to absented-minded caress.
Sometimes his hand would drop to the inside of his thigh, and
his palm would press down on the small area. Other times, it
would trace the lettering with a finger. Ælfred, Angulsaxonum
rex, hot within him.
As his body aged, Crohn’s gave way to a phenomenon more
insistent than the microbiota which had caused it. Alfred’s joints
ached. His teeth started to rot. He began to stoop, to lose his
hearing, to be short of breath. He felt stiff in the mornings, and
sometimes he forgot things. It was unclear whether or not the
Crohn’s had relented or gone into remission, but these days Al-
fred’s trips to the bathroom seemed to result from incontinence
rather than from microbial activity. Perhaps he had just gotten
used to it. For Alfred had learned, many years ago, to stay away
from inflammatory foods, fast regularly, and keep to an exact-
ing routine, mostly in avoidance of the psychological effects that
shitting oneself on a regular basis can have on people with even
the sunniest dispositions. At any rate, the physicians had failed,
a long time ago, to give Alfred any relief, and he sent them all
away. He could not abide any more conversations about his
bowels. He could not abide any more fingers inside his skin. Yet,
no matter how many years passed or how many hot baths he
took, the inky phrase from his amulet remained, a loose and dis-
torted tattoo on his inner thigh. It now looked like a birthmark,
or maybe a blood vessel that had ruptured:
272
Ac min fæder, Ic feel myself aging.
From inside to outside, my entrails chase me,
the soft stink snakes down, figure-eights down
my intestinal highway, passing kidneys, gall bladder, and colon:
organs that have long since failed to function appropriately. Ic

find myself loose, min
fæder, a fleshy falling softness that rolls off the bone, that tears
at the first
touch of my parchment, casting shadows of a phrase once ar-

ticulate but now only
a faint murmur Ælfred Angul x rex.
Perhaps the relationship between Cleanliness and Godliness

is less about being clean and more about the preparative acts
of scrubbing, pressing, starching, covering up, sitting straight,
crossing your legs, chewing with a closed mouth, peeing with a
closed you-know-what, keeping yourself to yourself, all so that
that you remember: 1) God is the only man who cannot get you
pregnant; and 2) love is a close and touching word — say it, and
someone might get hurt.
Despite her adherence to Cleanliness, Godliness, and these
Two Cardinal Rules, my mother was afraid. Although she had
managed to excoriate her body through faith in God and in the
Ellards, her daughter’s name challenged her talent as an allit-
erative arborist. It was not Jessica or Jacqueline or Joanna, but
Donna Beth. It did not refract the patriarchs of the Ellard line
but sounded like a cry for Dora Lou.
273
Poor Dora Lou. A reverberation, a noise, the sound of leaves

rustling. The hall wards felt a chill breeze blow past them. Alfred
felt it rapping at his arthritic bones. His vision was leaving him
now, and as the world grew dark around him, he smelled pine
and dirt. He heard chickens and the creak of a door swing open.
Something scraped against the floor. In the dark of Alfred’s new-
found blindness, he was not sure if he was living, or if death had
come. A tiredness pressured his body. He was losing form.
Ac min fæder Ic feel within myself a failing falling. A flail-

ing felling. A folding feeling. Smells radiate towards touch,
fingering me with a clinical strength that does not make me
shy away from my fleshiness. Sounds take me in arms and
tenderly caress the flabbiness of my body, like a blind woman
who knows the world by hand. As these senses feel each
crease, they transmit their olfactory and vibrations into my
body as Ic flail and fail to find some gospel text. Noli me tan-
gere will not prevent her. She folds the pieces of skin together
and feels me, Ælfred, rex.
Alfred awoke on the toilet. Uncertain how he got there, more

uncertain how to get up, he remained slumped over the latrine
until its odor got the best of him. Reaching out, he used the wall
as a guide to find his way back to bed. His breath was rattling and
shallow. Fluid had begun to fill his lungs. As Alfred fell asleep
for the last time, the microbiotic orchestra, which had been so
rhythmically active within him for so many years, made way
for other ‘players.’ These new wards of his body did not abide
the same processes of biological life. Cells and tissues became
disorderly as Alfred slipped into a state of permanent metabolic
failure. In death, his body no longer pulsed to the rhythms of
Crohn’s, which had become so familiar to him. It moved in what
could be called a disorganized arrhythmia: changing color, ooz-
ing liquids, becoming limp, then turgid. There was no regular
274
speed or predictable timing to anything. And so they buried

him.
Underground, however, Alfred was not inert. He became
even busier than ever as the biochemical operations of his body
attuned themselves to a subterranean, biotic ecosystem. Alfred
began to move in time — to be touched and, now, for the first
time, to touch back — to move with the rhythms of blowflies,
rodents, and microbes; the temperature of his coffin; and the
fibers of his linen shroud. Alfred engaged wholeheartedly in the
micro-ecosystem of his burial site, whereby his skin pigmenta-
tion, biological sex, and defining physical features were becom-
ing unknowable, at least without the help of a taphonomist or a
forensic osteologist.
Through the years, Alfred was dug up and moved several
times over. At first his ligamented body, which held together
cartiledge and bone, was able to tolerate the disturbance. Sev-
eral translations later, it fell apart, unable to endure the physical
stress of it all. First situated in the microclimate of Winchester’s
new cathedral, then in Hyde Abbey, Alfred started to petrify.
Sedimentary particles filled interstitial spaces, making his bones
denser and heavier. Isotopes from the soil concentrated in them.
Alfred became radioactive.
While my mother’s pruning restricted unwanted growth at the

trunk, branches, and leaves of the Ellard family tree, she could
not control what happened below ground. Here, the women,
second sons, and stillborn and non-surviving children grow.
Here, the illegitimate, insane, and mixed-race relatives take
refuge. Unbeknownst to her, the tap root of the Ellard tree is
not neat like its foliage. It snakes and knots. It folds over itself.
Its hidden tubers thwart the linear poetics of her genealogy. To
know this, however, she would have to go digging in the dirt:
275
M
i BennEtt C r e m a
n a L C a e k wo n
s e r L ovelady m
a h t Ao A Girl Child (1905–1907)
Jonathan’s FaT o R k m r
e Unknown DAre S m i t H e
s r(?-1802) G a
l a n i Wife
v e m i t ress k
r s Child (1844–1844) i ns
At first, he was found by accident. In 1788, convicts digging in

the rubble of Hyde Abbey came across three lead coffins. The
coffins were opened, the bones dumped out, and the lead fittings
were sold. In 1866, amateur antiquarian, John Mellor, claimed
to have recovered some of the scattered bones, which he attrib-
uted to Alfred. He sold them to the vicar of St. Bartholomew’s
Church near Winchester, who reburied them in an unmarked
grave in the churchyard. Still, Alfred was sought out. Again, he
was handled. In 1999 and 2013, excavations of the abbey and
churchyard, respectively, exhumed more bones, tested them,
and then shelved them for storage.
Then, in March 2013, click — click . — click, click, click . —
.. .. — . ccccccc — cc-cc-cccccccclick, click . — . cccccccccccc-
cccccclick. — .. The crackle of a Geiger counter detected 14C.
Its long-distance transmissions, the telegraphy of radiocarbon,
spelled out the letters A – L – F – R – E – D. Or did they?
I don’t know. But it was springtime. In Dora Lou’s front yard,
trumpet daffodils began to bloom. She had planted them years
ago, like my grandmother, like my mother, like everyone else in
Mississippi. And on the label of the brown paper sack, which the
bulbs came in, read: Narcissus ‘King Alfred.’
276
No one can predict the paths of mourning, and no one can

predict where these mourning paths will lead. The second
Movement of this book began by revealing a professional gene-
alogy that positioned Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, as the
sovereign ‘father’ to Anglo-Saxon studies’s many British ‘fathers’
described in the first Movement of this book. Alfred’s patrilin-
eage not only guards and maintains the professional signifier
‘Anglo-Saxon’ but also keeps us being ‘Anglo-Saxonists.’ ‘Being’
and ‘becoming’ are ontological positions and processes. In the
context of this book, they are generated and maintained by the
narratives we construct for our professional selves. When I set
out to write Alfred’s ‘Biochemical Vita,’ I meant to uproot the
family tree of Anglo-Saxon studies by creating a new narrative:
a biography that tracks Alfred’s physical body as an organism
of dynamic change, death, and decay. By focusing on the ‘life’
of Alfred’s body, I hope to render him unsovereign and there-
by create narrative conditions that would enable us to mourn
him. Mourning, however, is an act of unmooring that refigures
the entire self. Approaching Alfred’s patrilineal relationship to
Anglo-Saxon studies quickly became a family matter, and the
early drafts of Alfred’s ‘Biochemical Vita’ interleaved a story of
the king with one of my Southern family. These intersections
created an imaginary genealogical connection between Alfred,
‘father’ of the Anglo-Saxons, and the Ellard’s settler-colonial and
Confederate ‘sons.’ Yet, as Alfred’s body failed him, and it began
to deteriorate, the Ellard narrative of settler-colonialism and
slave-holding met a similar fate: it was exposed and uprooted.
Being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ — now expressed in personal as well as pro-
fessional terms — is no longer tenable.
The Alfred–Ellard genealogy of ‘Biochemical Vita’ is an act
of mourning that generates what Tayana Hardin calls a ‘new
fiction.’38 ‘Biochemical Vita’ takes, as its conceptual entry point,
38 I would like to thank my colleague, Tayana L. Hardin, for introducing me

to her expression, ‘new fictions.’ New fictions serves as a guiding concept
in her recent essay, ‘The I Who Arrives: A Meditation on History as
Inheritance,’ which understands that the ‘power of imagination’ can ‘build
277
first, an understanding that the narrative of Alfred’s sovereign,

undecaying corpus is an ‘old’ story made up of Asserian half-
truths that maintains itself under the sign of coloniality; and,
second, it understands that in order to displace Alfred and the
narratological and ideological worlds that he shoulders, a new
story — a new fiction — must be attempted. This act of casting
aside one dodgy account of Alfred (for Asser’s Life is more ‘court
propaganda’ than historical ‘fact’) for another is not a simple ex-
change because, as I just mentioned, Asser constructs Alfred’s
form out of a sovereign cloth that is limned with colonial aspira-
tions. Generations of Anglo-Saxonists have genuflected before,
blessed, and kissed these garments in acts of faith, love, and trust
in an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ power that stretches between the triangulat-
ed poles of academic scholarship, race, and empire. Abandoning
such a sovereign narrative form requires the emotional work of
mourning, a scholarly-affective labor that can only come from
that place within me that needs to be made to feel, and to ac-
knowledge my feelings as matters of bereavement, so that I
can direct all this emotional energy towards finding words that
describe what is inside me and root ‘it’ out. ‘Biochemical Vita’
confronts the ghosts of my Southern family. It interleaves their
presence with this most ghostly father of Anglo-Saxon studies
in order to mourn them. To give them organismic bodies that
live, die, and decay so that they can no longer haunt us. Absent
this haunting, we can imagine other, non-fatherly genealogies
and rhizomatic, narrative routes for a once-Anglo-Saxon stud-
ies. This is mourning. This is a new fiction — for the field and
for myself.
As a new fiction, it trespasses all manner of borderlands:
professional and personal boundaries, critical and literary gen-
res, stories taken as academic truths and those dismissed as
folklore; prose and poetic forms; and Englishes, old and new.
While such supposed disrespect for how scholarship should
compose itself may seem inappropriate, ‘Biochemical Vita’ be-
a world together,’ in the classroom and in the poetics of literary criticism

(Pedagogy 18, no. 3 [2018]: 532).
278
longs, in fact, to a relatively old form called ‘paraliterary’ writ-

ing or ‘fictocriticism.’39 As Gerrit Haas writes, fictocriticism is a
term ‘evoked to subsume motivated experimental writing prac-
tices that confound, and thereby problematise’ literary genres.40
These practices are ‘playful in tone,’ ‘experimental in attitude,’
and ‘ethically motivated.’41 Yet for anthropologist Michael Taus-
sig, fictocriticism is not a flighty distraction from hard-nosed
criticism but ‘a love of muted and even defective storytelling
as a form of analysis,’ whose ‘swerve in writing…is what trips
up thought in a serpentine world.’42 As Taussig recognizes the
disruptive, necessary force of ‘defective’ stories, he underscores
his work as that which strays from customary paths in order to
alter lines of thinking. Fellow anthropologist Kathleen Stewart
takes this Taussigian line one step further by writing fictocriti-
cism as a mode that can topple our preoccupation with grasping
the world, intellectually, by channeling the power of affect. Her
writing ‘perform[s] some of the intensity and texture that makes
them [affects] habitable and animate’ so that she may show the
limits of intellectual abstractions.43
‘Biochemical Vita’ disrupts and ‘trips up’ the biography of
Alfred, the Ellards, and their shared racial-colonial metanarra-
tive. In so doing, it affectively performs the work of mourning
these Anglo-Saxon fathers. Further, in joining together the pro-
fessional and personal in this new, postSaxon fiction, ‘Biochem-
39 Rosalind Krauss writes of the ‘paraliterary works of Barthes and Derrida’

(The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths [Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1986], 292). In so doing, she underscores poststructural-
ism as theory that not only recognizes the literary value of criticism but
also allows for a confusion to what genre ‘theory’ belongs (ibid.). Unlike
paraliterary writing, fictocriticism is not associated with one critic but
emerged in the Canadian art-scene of the 1990s.
40 Gerrit Haas, Ficto/critical Strategies: Subverting Textual Practices of Mean-
ing, Other, and Self-Formation (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017), 7. I
would like to thank Selah Saterstrom for pointing me in this direction.
41 Ibid.
42 Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2006), vii.
43 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007), 4–5.
279
ical Vita’ joins together and shifts the book’s focus from the role
that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ play in British contexts
to the role of these terms in America. In the U.S., ‘Anglo-Saxon’
and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ remain attached to fantasies of nation and
empire that are inseparable from an American racism that is
trenchantly directed at both Native peoples and African Ameri-
cans. Mourning my profession’s terms in relation to America’s
colonial and racial histories requires that I abandon the familiar
topics and comfort zones of my field and become completely
lost in unfamiliar academic waters. Mourning is truly an un-
mooring, and I become intellectually decentered and emotion-
ally upended. No longer an ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ or a ‘medievalist,’ I
feel homeless yet open, for the first time, to processing the wide-
reaching, ongoing impact of my field’s signifiers on non-white
bodies, identities, and narratives in America. This intellectual
and emotional process becomes, for me, a ‘becoming postSax-
on’ — an ontological repositioning that is both professional and
personal.
The third Movement of this book, ‘postSaxon futures,’ invites
a once-Anglo Saxon studies to reposition itself in relation to
temporalities, bodies, and methods once excluded by its racial
and ethnopolitical signifiers so that the field might enter into a
speculative conversation about what it might mean to become
‘postSaxon.’
Third
Movement
postSaxon
Futures
6
Old/e English Poetics and

‘Afro-Saxon’ Intimacies1
In 1987, the Compton-based rap group N.W.A. released its first

LP album, N.W.A. and the Posse. On its cover, original N.W.A.
members Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Arabian Prince, plus
a number of friends and relatives, are photographed in front
of a graffiti-covered building. Some people in the photo wear
oversized clock necklaces set to 11:25, while many others are sur-
rounded by empty and half-drunk Olde English ‘800’ 12-ounce
cans and 40-ounce bottles. A conspicuously placed pair of white
pumps is the only sign of a woman’s presence in this crowded
picture of men. The cover art for N.W.A. and the Posse coor-
dinates with Track 2 of the album, titled ‘8-Ball,’ popular slang
for Olde English ‘800’ malt liquor. As if amplifying the visu-
als of N.W.A.’s cover art, on this track Eazy-E proclaims him-
self an ‘8-ball junkie.’2 He drinks Olde English ‘like a madman’
1 I would like to thank Tayana Hardin for her many insightful comments on
early and later versions of this chapter. Dr. Hardin brought to my attention
the importance of considering gender and sexuality in readings of race.
These considerations have dramatically shaped my arguments regarding
the marketing history of Olde English malt liquor.
2 Ice Cube,‘8-Ball,’ N.W.A. and the Posse (Los Angeles: Macola Records,
1987).
283
from morning ’til dark, and, under its influence, cruises through
Compton, pulls out a ‘silver gat’ on a ‘sucker punk,’ and harasses
women at a party.3 While Olde English ‘800’ is the source of
E’s actions and lyrics, drinking it enables him to express certain
gestures, sounds, and language politics that are solicited by the
‘Olde English’ brand itself, which has always capitalized upon
the ‘medieval’ quality of its name.
This chapter considers the history of Olde English malt liq-
uor and its frequent appearances in rap music in order to enter
into a conversation with Old English, the early medieval lan-
guage, and its linguistic history as a term of identification for
Anglo-Saxon studies as an academic discipline. At first blush,
nothing connects these ‘Englishes’ of popular culture and aca-
demic scholarship. Yet, in tracing the product design, market-
ing, and advertising history of Olde English malt liquor along-
side the development of Old English historical linguistics, this
chapter reveals that these two terms — ‘Olde’ and ‘Old Eng-
lish’ — operate according to the same logic as the double-edged
signifier ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’ They reference, at once, a linguistic
representation used by academic scholars and a popular con-
cept that communicates ideologies of nationalism, colonialism,
and racism. While ‘Old English’ and ‘Olde Englishes’ (emphasis
on the plural, in terms of cultural appropriations) circulate in-
dependently in scholarly and popular domains, they function
together as cloaked agents of Anglo-Saxonism.
Beginning with N.W.A., these independently circulating
terms show their relationship to one another: the Anglo-Saxon-
ist ideologies that bind ‘Old English’ and ‘Olde Englishes’ start
to unravel, and rap artists begin to recode Old English into an
expression of African American sociolinguistics. As rappers
reference Olde English not simply as an alcoholic beverage
but, moreover, as a signifier of rap’s poetic displays, they revise
the spelling of this term. This revision reveals ‘Olde’ and ‘Old
English’ as word concepts that participate in what Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. calls ‘Signifying,’ a term derived from African Ameri-
3 Ibid.
284
Old/e English Poetics and ‘Afro-Saxon’ Intimacies
can sociolinguistics, and what Samy Alim calls ‘Hip Hop Na-
tion Linguistics.’4 As a sociolinguistic expression, these rap art-
ists expand the semantics of ‘Olde’ and ‘Old English’ to include
(rather than exploit) black bodies and black voices and thereby
reclaim an Anglo-Saxonist term as an African American one.
The poetics of rap music not only disrupt and challenge funda-
mental assumptions about Old English as a language of limited,
academic circulation that operates outside the boundaries of
Anglo-Saxonism. Moreover, the use of ‘Olde’ and ‘Old English’
in rap music (which is also a form of critical poetics) challenges
academics to disinvent, reinvent, and decolonize Old English as
part of the ontological project of ‘becoming postSaxon.’
Brewed originally by Peoples Brewing of Duluth, Minne-
sota, in the early 1940s, Olde English ‘800’ was initially called
Ruff ’s Olde English Stout before it was renamed Olde English
‘600’ Malt Liquor in 1947, in reference to its six-percent alco-
hol content.5 As an expression that communicates a jaunty nos-
talgia for something that is vaguely past tense, ‘Olde English’
neither carries the academic heft of ‘Old English’ nor presumes
a scholarly audience with any language training or familiarity
with medieval studies. Yet the product itself directs consumers
towards mistaking ‘Olde English’ for what Sinfree Makoni and
Alisdair Pennycook call a linguistic ‘representatio[n]’ of Old
English: a word that stands for a language.6 This mistaken re-
lationship between Olde English and Old English is supported,
firstly, by the similar spelling and pronunciation of both expres-
sions and, secondly, by the physiological proximity and psycho-
logical partnership between drinking and speaking, acts of oral
4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-Ameri-

can Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); H. Samy
Alim, Roc the Mic Right (New York: Routledge, 2006).
5 Tony Dierckins and Pete Clure, Naturally Brewed, Naturally Better: The
Historic Breweries of Duluth and Superior (Duluth: Zenith City Press,
2018), 147, 146.
6 Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, ‘Disinventing and Reconstitut-
ing Languages,’ in Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, eds. Sinfree
Makoni and Alastair Pennycook (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2007),
1–41.
285
Figure 1. Paper label from Ruff ’s Olde English Stout glass bottle.
Peoples Brewing Company, Duluth, Minnesota, ca. 1943. Courtesy of
the collection of Chris Olsen.
Figure 2. Paper label from Olde English “600” glass bottle. Peoples
Brewing Company, Duluth, Minnesota, ca. 1940s. Private Collection.
286
Figure 3. Paper label from Olde English “600” glass bottle. Peoples
Brewing Company, Duluth, Minnesota, 1950. Private Collection.
intake and oral expression. These connections between drink-

ing Olde English and speaking Old English are reinforced by
the graphic elements of early malt liquor bottle labels, in which
the gothic script and scribal points of ‘Olde English’ reference
the manuscript culture of this medieval language (see Fig. 1).
The coupling of these linguistic and graphic elements with vis-
ual ones constitutes what Jürgen Spitzmüller calls an ‘ideologi-
cal message’ that indexes certain historical, social, or cultural
backgrounds refracted by the text and its author.7 Spitzmüller’s
arguments bear extensively on the product design and adver-
7 Jürgen Spitzmüller, ‘Floating ideologies: Metamorphosis of graphic

‘Germanness’,’ in Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity,
and Power, eds. Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba,
and Sally Johnson (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 257. Siân Echard extends
Spitzmüller’s discussion of graphic power and its participation in ideologi-
cal messaging to early medieval scripts such as Old English: ‘Even at the
turn of the twenty-first century, the link between English text and Saxon
letterform persists. In 1999 and 2000, the graphic artist Gareth Hinds
produced his own version of Beowulf, using the 1910 translation by Francis
Gummere as the base text. He worked with a calligrapher in developing
the script, which was designed to suggest insular letterforms… . [T]he
“Gothish” characters still stand as powerful signs of the past’ (Printing the
Middle Ages [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008], 59).
287
tisements of Olde English in the 1950s,8 when Peoples Brewing

changed its company emblem from a heraldic crest flanked by
two horses (see Fig. 2) to the portrait of Daniel Greysolon Sieur
du Lhut, the French explorer after whom the city of Duluth was
named (see Fig. 3).
As a consequence of this design change, the linguistic and
graphic elements of Olde English become attached to an ide-
ological message of colonialism. In a series of advertisements
titled ‘Do You Know These Facts About Sieur du Luth?’ (see
Figs. 4a–b) Peoples Brewing recounts du Lhut’s career in North
America as a trader, treaty-maker, and arbiter of justice between
Frenchmen and Native peoples. One ad celebrates his capture
and execution of two Ojibwe who have been accused of killing
two French colonials. A sketch of these blindfolded and bound
Native American men appears above a caption explaining that
du Lhut, who seeks their death as recompense for that of the
Frenchmen, ‘taught the Indians to respect the Law for years to
come!’ While the portrait of a seventeenth-century Frenchman
has nothing to do with an ‘English’ brand of malt liquor, by po-
sitioning an emblem of Sieur du Lhut on the label and collar of
Olde English bottles, Peoples Brewing makes a colonial persona
the figurehead of its ‘medieval’ beer. By way of product nam-
ing and design, a signifier of medieval language and manuscript
culture becomes sutured to a historical reality and a posthis-
torical fantasy, imbuing Olde English ‘600’ with an intoxicating
spirit that it has inherited, by ancestry and violent force of ‘law,’
from its founding, pan-European fathers.
That Peoples Brewing so easily tilts the product design and
marketing of Olde English towards an ideological message of
American colonialism begs further questions about the language
politics of Old English. While language, as Richard Bauman and
Charles Briggs argue, may be perceived to be ‘contain[ed] in an
autonomous realm set apart from things and social relation,’ it is
the often-silent frontispiece for ‘metadiscursive regimes,’ ideo-
logical discussions about language that create frameworks for
8 Dierckins and Clure, Naturally Brewed, Naturally Better, 159.
288
what counts as language.9 The use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (as it was

popularly called in previous centuries, and to which it is still
referred in some academic quarters) as referent for both a lan-
guage and a people highlights the implication of this term in
a meta-discursive regime that Mary Dockray-Miller notes, ‘in
the nineteenth-century United States…was almost exclusively
racial and racist.’10 Old English and its partner terms ‘Middle’
and ‘Modern’ Englishes likewise date to the nineteenth century.
They are based on Jacob Grimm’s evolutionary characterizations
of ‘the oldest,’ ‘the middle,’ and ‘the modern,’ a schema that or-
ganizes languages according to ‘bounded and discrete linguistic
wholes,’ which, in turn, ‘correspond to distinct nations.’11 The
‘temporal logic’ of Grimm’s old, middle, and modern schema
arranges the languages of English into a progress narrative of
world languages that ‘hierarchically organiz[es]’ them on a
‘global evolutionary scale’ and ‘implicitly function[s] as a ra-
tionale for the political subjugation of its producers and their
descendants.’12 The foundational role that Old English plays in
this progress narrative and its colonial politics is measured by
the ‘nostalgic rhetoric’ that Grimm uses to describe it and the
other ‘oldest languages’ of historical linguistics. For Grimm,
these languages express a nation’s original ‘tradition[s]’ which
are ‘embodied’ by a ‘masculine national virility that rendered
a people creative, powerful, and cohesive.’13 While Old English
appears to be a benign term of historical linguistics, it nonethe-
less functions as the agent of Anglo-Saxonism. As the first and
oldest stage of English, it not only presumes a sense of linguistic
superiority but, moreover, leverages this stance as a rationale
for politically subjugating those who do not share a similarly
9 Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language

Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 20, 17.
10 Mary Dockray-Miller, Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the
American Women’s College (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2017), 1–2.
11 Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 201, 203.
12 Ibid., 203.
13 Ibid., 206.
289
Figure 4a. Advertisement: ‘Do You Know The Facts About Sieur du
Luth?’ Du Luth ‘established pacts of peace and arranged for reciprocal
inter-trial marriages to strengthen the new ties,’ ca. 1952. Courtesy of
the collection of Pete Clure.
290
Figure 4b. Advertisement: ‘Do You Know The Facts About Sieur du
Luth?’ Du Luth ‘taught the Indians to respect the Law for years to
come!’, ca. 1952. Courtesy of the collection of Pete Clure.
291
ancient linguistic ‘tradition.’ Likewise, as a term that remains

overtly wedded to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period and people, the
‘nostalg[ia],’ ‘masculin[ity],’ and ‘virility’ with which Old Eng-
lish is associated thereby identifies it with the meta-discusive
regime of Anglo-Saxonism: a belief in the superiority of Eng-
lish-speaking peoples that often is associated, in both scholarly
and popular imaginations, with a northern European/Germanic
homosocial, ethnically separatist, and racist heroism typified by
these very characteristics.
Although worlds apart, Olde English malt liquor and Old
English language fall under the common sign of Anglo-Saxon-
ism. As variants of one another, these terms index the deeply
rooted partnership between the popular and the scholarly
Anglo-Saxonist — a figure introduced in the first pages of this
book and explored at great length in previous chapters. Yet, as
partners that circulate freely across and between academic and
lay audiences, Old and Olde English reveal themselves as non-
proprietary signifiers. While early medieval scholars may make
special claim to expertise in the linguistic aspects of Old Eng-
lish, we do not own nor fully control the many valences of this
term, but we are beholden nevertheless to the politics sediment-
ed within its nineteenth-century origins and twentieth-century
uses. These politics are not only European but also American,
yet distinctive racial histories underwrite America’s colonial
past. In the following pages, this chapter enters into an expan-
sive discussion of Olde English (then returns, much later, to Old
English) in order to talk about how the Anglo-Saxonist politics
of this particular brand of malt liquor perpetuate racist and co-
lonialist myths about African American race, sex, and alcohol
consumption. This chapter develops a deep sense of how Olde
English operates as an agent of American Anglo-Saxonism,
which rap artists resist and recalibrate in sociolinguistic terms.
Ironically, critically ruminating upon Olde English malt liquor
enables us to think more clearly and openly about the stakes of
colonialism and racism in Old English and Anglo-Saxon studies
from within a distinctively American context.
292
Despite its popularity in Duluth, Peoples Brewing could not

keep up with regional or national competition, and, in 1957, the
company liquidated its holdings. Olde English ‘600’ was sold
to Bohemian Breweries of Spokane, Washington, which ‘trans-
ferred rights to Atlantic Brewing,’ also of Spokane.14 Atlantic
brewed and distributed Olde English until 1962, and, in 1964,
Blitz-Weinhard of Portland, Oregon, bought the brand, brew-
ing and distributing it for almost two more decades.15 Olde Eng-
lish ‘600’ maintained its name, gothic font, and scribal points
throughout these moves, and Sieur du Lhut remained the label’s
figurehead. Still, it never sold well. Marketed to a white, mid-
dle class, suburban consumer, Old English ‘600,’ like other malt
liquors during the 1950s and 1960s, was advertised as a cham-
pagne alternative that had a much higher alcohol content than
regular ale. In the late 1960s, when Blitz-Weinhard examined its
customers’ demographic information, it discovered that almost
one-third of malt liquor consumers were African Americans,
who were exposed to the same medieval branding and colonial
advertisements as the white drinkers to whom the product was
marketed.
Just as the so-called ‘Middle Ages’ and its signifiers have of-
ten been imbricated within America’s long history of colonial
politics and racism, African Americans have frequently been
entangled within the medieval. For example, in De Bow’s Re-
view, an agricultural and industrial periodical popular in the
antebellum South, the behaviors and attitudes of ‘Puritan’
Northerners and ‘Cavalier’ Southerners are attributed to their
differing medieval European ancestries.16 These genealogical
discrepancies became popular in the decades leading up to the
Civil War,17 and as the Southern cavalier made way for the Con-
14 Dierckins and Clure, Naturally Brewed, Naturally Better, 161.

15 Ibid.
16 Anonymous, ‘The Puritan and the Cavalier,’ DeBow’s Review 31, no. 3 (Sep-
tember 1861): 209–52.
17 Inspiration for tournaments in the antebellum South originated in an in-
stance of life imitating art. In 1839, Lord Eglinton organized a tournament
in Britain that was inspired by and modelled on the Ashby-de-la-Zouche
293
federate chevalier, medieval reenactments in the form of ring

tournaments spread from Maryland and Virginia to the Deep
South, continuing as a sport and entertainment for the Confed-
erate cavalry throughout the Civil War. In the post-war period,
these tournaments expanded to include not only white South-
erners, who used them as fundraisers for Southern relief efforts,
Confederate veterans, and Civil War memorials,18 but also Afri-
can Americans, who organized all-black tournaments across the
South from 1865 to about 1875. While some white newspapers
express concern that these black-organized events are spurred
by ‘Northern’ politics,19 others view them from within a racist
frame of ‘innocent amusements’ that attempt to participate in
the ‘polite arts’ of Southern society.20 Whether subversive acts or
spectacles for whites, Texas artist Merritt Mauzey offers a visual
commentary of this phenomenon in his undated ‘Tournament
Practice’ (see Fig. 5).21 This small lithograph on paper depicts the
back of a black rider on horseback, who holds a jousting spear
and heads towards a series of rings that dangle from ropes on
poles. As the eye moves from the circle made by the rider’s head
to those of the rings, the latter begin to look like nooses, and
a ring tournament suggests the site of an imminent lynching.22
tournament in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The event was reported in American

newspapers, and when an American spectator, William Gilmor, returned
to his home in Maryland, he organized a similar tournament on his
Baltimore estate in 1840 (Ann Rigney, ‘The Many Afterlives of Ivanhoe,’ in
Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, eds.
Karin Tilmans, Frank Van Vree, and Jay Winter [Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2010], 217–18).
18 Esther J. Crooks and Ruth W. Crooks, The Ring Tournament in the United
States (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1936).
19 ‘The Colored Tournament,’ The Louisiana Democrat, September 27, 1876, 2.
20 ‘The Young Colored Men of our Parish…,’ The Louisiana Democrat, Sep-
tember 13, 1876, 2.
21 I would like to thank Alexandra Cook for bringing this image to my atten-
tion.
22 Merritt Mauzey’s father was a Union soldier, and after the Civil War, the
Mauzeys moved to Texas, where they sharecropped cotton before purchas-
ing 160 acres of land to farm. Merritt was born in 1897 in the central Texas
town of Clifton and would have been a young adult when Birth of a Nation
294
In Mauzey’s depiction of the postbellum South, medieval fanta-

sies turn towards racial terrorism when the African American
‘knight’ is imagined in the company of the white knights of the
Ku Klux Klan.23
Despite Mauzey’s allusion to the deadly undercurrents of
American medievalism, among other African Americans artists
and writers, such as Jessie Fauset, medieval iconography was
perceived as a fantastic way beyond American race prejudice.
In Fauset’s essay, ‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein,’
she imagines herself within a ‘fortress’ as ‘a queen come into her
very own.’24 Published in NAACP’s The Crisis, Fauset’s depiction
of queenly sovereignty is given a medieval patina when her nar-
sparked a revival of the Klan in Texas in the 1920s. Dallas dentist Hiram
Wesley Evans was elected imperial wizard, or national leader, at the KKK’s
first national convention in November 1922, and Klan-sponsored lynch-
ings in Texas contributed to a total of 232 killings in the state — the highest
recorded number in the United States. ‘Tournament Practice’ is undated,
and Mauzey’s oeuvre includes several portraits of black cotton farmers
(including one called Madonna in the Fields) that depict African American
subjects and sharecroppers in Texas within a romantic framework. Despite
Mauzey’s romanticism of the Middle Ages and his idealization of black
sharecropping in Texas, Mauzey’s lived experience of racial politics in early
twentieth century Texas affords a reading of ‘Tournament Practice’ that is,
at best, highly ambivalent. The African American rider suggests a scene
of medievalist possibility (‘tilting’ against racism and racist volence) and
at the same time reveals the unvarnished realities of race relations in rural
Texas (lynchings).
23 Paul Christopher Anderson writes that ‘[e]nthusiasm for the joust in 1866,
in the springtime of Confederate defeat, flowered in tandem with the
formation of the Ku Klux Klan. Between them were obvious connections
of ritual. Tournament rider and night rider became knights on horseback;
both were liberated by masquerade and costume’ (‘Rituals of Horseman-
ship: A Speculation on the Ring Tournament and the Origins of the Ku
Klux Klan,’ in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges,
ed. Stephen Berry [Athens: Georgia University Press, 2011], 217). When
Reconstruction-era Klan activity is associated with Klan-sponsored lynch-
ings of the 1920s (see footnote 22), Mauzey’s lithograph seems to docu-
ment a relationship between the medievalist fantasies and racist atrocities
of the Ku Klux Klan.
24 Jessie Fauset, ‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein,’ The Crisis 8,
no. 3 (1914): 144.
295
Figure 5. Merritt Mauzey, ‘Tournament Practice,’ lithograph on paper,

undated. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum.
296
rative is accompanied by visual elements printed in the maga-

zine: a decorated initial begins the essay, as if it were appearing
on a manuscript page; and a photograph of Fauset, dressed as a
pre-Raphaelite, is flanked by text from her essay about ‘valiant
knights,’ ‘distressed ladies,’ and ‘lorn damsels.’25 Unlike Mauzey’s
‘Ring Tournament,’ which positions African Americans within
the threatening frame of American racism, Fauset appropri-
ates the medieval as a space of African American possibility.
In ‘My House,’ she can be, at once, queen of her castle-fortress,
distressed lady within it, or forlorn damsel in need of knightly
rescue. Fauset uses both narrative and visual strategies to con-
jure herself within a medieval world. At the end of her essay, she
moves into the medieval by concluding, ‘my house is construct-
ed of dream-fabric, and the place of its building is — Spain!’ A
very real place in modern Europe where light-skinned Afri-
can Americans may be presumed Hispanic,26 Spain is likewise
the site of medieval Iberia where, Alexandre Dumas famously
stated, Africa begins.27 In Spain, Fauset ‘passes’ into a medieval
25 Ibid.
26 These claims to Spanish ‘passing’ can be traced to mid-nineteenth-century
American literature. For example, in the ‘Spanish masquerade’ scene of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Harris makes his skin darker so he can pass
for a Spanish gentleman in order to escape enslavement; James Fenimore
Cooper’s The Prairie heroine, Inez, is a Spanish ‘Creole’ who is taken
prisoner by a slave trader and slave-owning family; and African American
writer Pauline Hopkins’s short story ‘Talma Gordon’ sends her protagonist
to live in Italy because her darker skin could be more easily explained as
Iberian.
27 Fauset’s geography of ‘Spain’ is a fraught place where medieval Oriental-
ism and medieval utopianism meet. On the one hand, Spain is the site of
an Orientalizing exoticism where the ‘Moorish’ woman functions as an
object of desire enclosed in her fortress. In this medievalist fantasy of early
modern Spain (during which time, Moriscos endured mass persecu-
tion), 15th- and 16th-century stories tell of a Christian knight who finds
himself at a castle, where a dark woman ‘opens her doors wide’ for him.
This trope of the exotic, entrapped, and sensual female Other finds its
way to America in the nineteenth century by way of ‘The Legend of the
Three Beautiful Princesses’ in Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra.
Irving’s contemporary, Alexandre Dumas, famously claims that ‘Africa
begins in the Pyranees,’ a mountain range in which Spanish Iberia — home
297
Figure 6. Paper and foil label from Olde English ‘800’ one-quart glass
bottle. Pabst Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ca. 1970s.
Private Collection.
‘dream fabric’ that can offer inclusion and welcome to black

bodies when contemporary America does not.28
Whether African Americans of the early twentieth century
are viewed as racial subjects or sovereigns, black men and wom-
en understood and responded to the visual and literary iconog-
raphy of medievalism and the Middle Ages, finding in them
fantasies that could conjure up home-grown terror or empower-
ing dreamscapes. Consequently, while African Americans were
not the intended audience of Olde English ‘600’ advertising
to Maghrebi Muslims, Berbers, and Sub-Sahran Africans — is located.

Although Dumas’s statement is meant to Orientalize and therefore
exclude Spain from western Europe, Fauset’s call to ‘Spain!’ rescripts and
destabilizes the Hispano-American medievalism that would entrap Fauset
within a ‘Moorish’ trope. My very great thanks go out to Chad Leahy, who
brought these points to my attention.
28 As Cord Whitaker writes, Fauset’s ‘My House’ ‘reevaluat[es] blacks’
engagement with the Middle Ages as a positive element that predicates
blacks’ full involvement in American history’ and ‘create[s] something
radically new: the recognition of a spiritual home for African Americans
in the idyllic and imaginary European medieval past’ (‘B(l)ack Home in
the Middle Ages: Medievalism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “My House and
a Glimpse of My Life Therein”,’ postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural
studies 10, no. 2 [2019]: 164).
298
campaigns, they understood the racial politics of its medieval

branding very well.
In 1968, after more than a decade of ownership by Portland-
based Blitz-Weinhard Brewing, the company applied for a pat-
ent that rebranded their malt liquor as Olde English ‘800.’29 This
name change was accompanied by a redesign of the brand’s me-
dieval iconography, in which the gothic lettering of ‘Olde Eng-
lish’ was replaced by a font that approached the broad strokes
and round forms of Insular Half-Uncial, a script used during
the Anglo-Saxon period. The white, Half-Uncial lettering of
Old English ‘800’ appears on a circular background of deep red,
and the rest of the can is stamped in gold (see Fig. 6). The por-
trait of Sieur du Lhut was replaced by golden crowns — which
look like castle battlements — that trace the circumference of
the product’s red background and punctuate its initial ‘O.’ The
font changes maintained the brand’s conceptual reference to
an early medieval language and manuscript culture but reposi-
tioned both within a vaguely Anglo-Saxon context. In addition,
the visual contrast between red and gold, in association with
the golden crown-like and fortress-like shapes, display a fantasy
that is limned with potency and strength. On tap for drinkers in
1968 were graphic and visual iconographies that mapped explic-
itly onto Grimm’s nostalgia for the ‘masculin[ity],’ ‘virility,’ and
‘power’ of the ‘oldest’ English language. Blitz-Weinhard’s new
packaging associated its product, Olde English, with the linguis-
tic representation, Old English, and its meta-discursive regime
of Anglo-Saxonism.
While the new can design of Olde English ‘800’ extended
popular perceptions of Old English linguistic and writing sys-
tems towards an Anglo-Saxonist regime, Blitz-Weinhard’s new
ad campaign did not target white drinkers. Advertisements
which appeared in the 1968–69 editions of the New York Am-
29 Blitz-Weinhard filed for a patent for Olde English ‘800’ on April 23, 1968.
The patent was registered on June 17, 1969. See United States Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO), https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-applica-
tion-process/search-trademark-database.
299
sterdam News, New Pittsburgh Courier, and Los Angeles Senti-

nel announced the arrival of Olde English ‘800’ exclusively in
African American newspapers. Marketed explicitly and specifi-
cally for an urban, black, male consumer, these Olde English
ads took advantage of key moments in 1960s African American
history: the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Civil Rights era
giving way to the Black Power movement; and a constellation
of political and social efforts that recognized the insufficiency
of desegregation and sought to make a space for economic em-
powerment, racial pride, and African American cultural and
political institutions.30 Blitz-Weinhard’s new ads first appeared
in August 1968, just months after King’s death, capitalizing on
the loss of King and the arrival of Black Power. In one ad, a
12-ounce can is photographed from below, presenting it as tall,
vertical, and dripping with ‘sweat,’ while bracketed by the state-
ments ‘MIGHTY’ and ‘Big Daddy.’31 In another, a light-skinned,
innocent-looking young black woman finds herself positioned
in the middle of two well-built, dark-skinned African Ameri-
can men. A caption below claims, ‘You get more out…because
we put more in. More flavor, more pleasure, more king-sized
30 Put a different way, as Roland Murray argues, the Black Power movement
sought to ‘reconstitute the patriarchal black family, reclaim the autonomy
of the masculine black body, retool the politics of male oratory [and]
assert the necessity of new forms of masculine sexuality…in interpola-
tive models that were intended to counter historically entrenched racial
subordination’ (Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power, and
Masculine Ideology [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2007],
4). Textually and visually, the advertisements for Olde English ‘800’ in
African American newspapers attempted not only to appeal to an African
American consumer who desired to ‘reconstitute…patriarch[y],’ ‘reclaim
masculin[ity],’ and ‘assert…sexuality,’ but also to present Olde English
‘800’ as an alcoholic drink that offered these things, easily and cheaply, if
only for a short while.
31 ‘New! Now Here in New York,’ New York Amsterdam News, August 16,
1969, 16; ‘New! Now Here in New York,’ New York Amsterdam News,
August 30, 1969, 18; and ‘Try Mighty ‘800’,’ New York Amsterdam News,
January 31, 1970, 30.
300
satisfaction.’32 These ads conjure up a supposedly safe, ‘integra-

tionist scene,’ in which an extremely light-skinned black woman
(whose bouffant flip hairstyle and wide headband — popular-
ized by stars such as Mary Tyler Moore and Sally Field — ac-
cenuate her ‘whiteness’) smiles innocently at two dark-skinned
men who wear turtlenecks. Further, the ads signify a ‘king-sized
satisfaction’ that resonates with the recent memorialization of
Dr. King, thereby pulling the crown-shaped iconography of
the new can design towards both Anglo-Saxonist imagery and
King’s Civil Rights-era leadership. At the same time, the place-
ment and timing of these advertisements appear to celebrate the
arrival of a more oppositional, less assimilationist ‘Black Power.’
Yet by summoning a ‘Big Daddy’ who stands ‘mighty’ in the
transitional moment from Civil Rights to Black Power move-
ments, the language of these ads promulgates long-standing
myths about black men that are positioned at an intersection
between race, sex, and alcohol.33
32 ‘Olde English Is Taking Over’ (advertisement), Los Angeles Sentinel, May

2, 1968, Display Ad 27; ‘Olde English Is Taking Over’ (advertisement), New
York Amsterdam News, September 20, 1969, Display Ad 35; and ‘Olde Eng-
lish Is Taking Over’ (advertisement), New York Amsterdam News, October
4, 1969, Display Ad 28.
33 The arguments in this chapter, which reference racist myths about African
American sexuality and alcohol, are repeatedly associated with nineteenth-
and twentieth-century us political movements, legislation, and legal
disputes. In its attention to the triangulation of race, the law, and power,
this chapter acknowledges the work of Critical Race Theory. More specifi-
cally, this chapter attends to myths that operate at the intersection of race
and sexuality, and it acknowledges the role which black women have been
forced to play as ‘light-skinned’ objects that stand in for ‘white’ women.
Consequently, this chapter draws upon and acknowledges, in particular,
the work of legal scholars and social scientists who have been mapping
the complex landscape of self and identity under overlapping modes and
forces of subordination and oppression: see, among others, Kimberlé
Crenshaw (‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 [1991]:
1241–79), Kathy Davis (‘Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of
Science Perspective on What Makes Feminist Theory Successful,’ Feminist
Theory 9, no. 1 [2008]: 67–85), Elizabeth R. Cole (‘Intersectionality and
Research in Psychology,’ American Psychologist 64, no. 3 [2009]: 170–80),
301
As William James and Stephen Johnson write, when the

National Prohibition Party was organized in 1874, ‘[m]uch of
the party’s focus was on the link between alcohol use, race, and
crime (especially sexual crimes).’34 White southerners, James
and Johnson continue, ‘used the Prohibition movement to
promulgate their prejudices against and fears of African Ameri-
can males. They spread the rumor that liquor sometimes gave
the African American man, stimulated by the pictures of semi-
naked women on the labels of the whiskey bottles, the courage
to overcome his inferior status and to loose his sexual desires
on white women.’35 Although popularized during the Recon-
struction-era temperance movement, the portrayal of black
men as drunken, primitive, and sexually dangerous extended
into the twentieth century, when the Eighteenth Amendment,
which outlawed the sale or transportation of alcohol from 1920
to 1933, ‘gave the Ku Klux Klan the majority of its four mil-
lion members.’36 By trading on white myths of the danger that
intoxicated black men posed to white women,37 the KKK was
and Moin Syed (‘Disciplinarity and Methodology in Intersectionality

Theory and Research,’ American Psychologist 65, no. 1 [2010]: 61–62).
For comprehensive overviews of the history of Critical Race Theory and
Intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and
Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed
the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995); Patricia Hill Collins and
Sirma Blige, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); and Felice Blake,
Paula Ioanide, and Alison Reed, eds., Antiracism Inc.: How the Way We
Talk About Racial Justice Matters (Earth: punctum books, 2019)
34 William H. James and Stephen L. Johnson, Doin’ Drugs: Patterns of African
American Addiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 16.
35 Ibid.
36 Adam Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess (New York: Harper and Row,
1962), 18.
37 These movements of the 1920s coincide with the artistic and cultural
developments that take place in urban, black neighborhoods as a conse-
quence of the Great Migration. As Denise A. Herd explains, some blacks
turn to bootlegging in order to supplement their small incomes, and white
drinkers turn to the ‘wet’ nightclubs of urban black communities. Herd
continues, arguing that ‘these factors set the stage for the creation of black
cultural images in which intoxication, sensuality, and black “primitivism”
were dominant’ (‘Contesting Culture: Alcohol-Related Identity Movements
302
enabled to act as ‘the extreme militant wing of the temperance

movement.’38 Fearful of maintaining control in America’s post-
slave society, whites obsessively articulated the bodies of black
men as dangerous and threatening, generating myths about Af-
rican Americans and alcohol that pathologized blackness as ra-
cially aberrant in terms of physical strength and sexual appetite.
The weight of American racism, which treats the bodies of
black men as terrifyingly aberrant, is refracted in Blitz-Wein-
hard’s advertising campaign and drawn into conversation with
its newly redesigned cans, which join together an Old English
language representation and font type with an Anglo-Saxonist
rhetoric of masculinity, virility, and strength. Ads that ran in
the New York Amsterdam News, New Pittsburgh Courier, and
Los Angeles Sentinel emphasize sexual ‘size’ and a supposed lust
for light-skinned women. They invite male drinkers to claim the
recent benefits of the Civil Rights movement and the emerging
political and ideological goals of the Black Power movement by,
paradoxically, participating in myths from the Jim Crow era that
in Contemporary African American Communities,’ Contemporary Drug

Problems 20 [1993]: 752). While the trope of black primitivism stretches
much further back in time — to the rhetoric of slavery — Herd’s body of
scholarship draws attention to the use of this trope in the early part of the
twentieth century. The Prohibition Era, during which ‘the Klan became the
leading law-and-order spokesgroup,’ is a historical moment in which black
men are figured as a dangerously ‘primitive’ power of ‘savage lust’ that
must be kept in check by the vigilante actions of white Americans (Linda
Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
and the American Political Tradition [New York: W.W. Norton, 2017], 96).
It is not a coincidence that the racial politics of Prohibition coincided with
the end of the Great War and the return of black soldiers, whose service to
their country positioned them as threats to America’s white patriarchy.
38 Ben F. Johnson, III (Barleycorn Must Die! The War Against Drink in Arkan-
sas: 1920–1950 [Little Rock: Old State House Museum exhibit]), quoted
in Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK, 95. Consider ‘Big Daddy’ of
Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a character modeled in
part on G.D. Perry, owner of a large plantation near Tunica, Mississippi,
and played by robust actors such as Burl Ives (dir. Richard Brooks [Culver
City: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., 1958]) and James Earl Jones (dir.
Debbie Allen, Broadhurst Theatre, New York, 2008). Big Daddy has been
figured as white and black, depending on the production.
303
portray intoxication as a vehicle by which black men become

‘mighty’ ‘Big Daddies’ — physically powerful and sexually vig-
orous. These very claims about blackness, which pathologized
it as a condition to be feared and kept in check, bear a distinct
likeness to the characteristics of Grimm’s Anglo-Saxonist rheto-
ric, which are broadcast visually across the cans of Olde English
‘800.’
While the placement and context of these advertisements
present Olde English as a product that is in step with and in ad-
vocacy of the Black Power movement, the print and visual rhet-
oric used to market it to black consumers continues to project
racist myths of what ‘black power’ means, physically and sexu-
ally. Further, while these ads lean on the trope of the innocent
and vulnerable white woman, they do so at the expense of the
light-skinned black woman photographed in the ad, who is ren-
dered invisible, yet is nevertheless the visible agent of this racist
myth. When potential consumers arrive at the liquor store and
purchase Olde English ‘800,’ the product that they hold, open,
and drink bears the fantastic markings of Old English iconogra-
phy and Anglo-Saxonist ideology. Racist fears of black men, ra-
cial fantasies about white women, and the racial (in)visibility of
black women coordinate in the linguistic-ideological signifier,
‘Olde English.’ Marketed to a black consumer, its joint promise
of terror and possibility interpolates men and women within a
medievalist logic that dates to the late-nineteenth century ring
tournaments of Mauzey’s ‘black knight’ and the early-twentieth-
century queenly fantasies of Fauset.39
Although its rebranding efforts and bi-coastal advertising
campaign were successful in reaching African American urban
communities, Blitz-Weinhard was, ultimately, a regional brewer
and could not keep pace with the growth of national brands,
which increasingly dominated American beer sales. On April 2,
39 As my colleague, Tayana Hardin, pointed out, as if to show the hidden

hand of racism at work, the Olde English advertisement’s claim that ‘we’
white brewers ‘put more in’ so ‘you,’ the black consumer, ‘get more out,’
has homoerotic undertones that suggest the extent to which Olde English
‘fucks over’ its target demographic (personal communication).
304
1979, the company sold Olde English ‘800’ to Pabst, which kept
the brand’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ design but recalibrated Blitz-Wein-
hard’s racist depiction of African American men in order to cap-
italize upon changes in the Black Power movement during the
1970s, when this movement was dynamically reshaped by Pan-
Africanism and Afrocentrism — intellectual, social, and cultural
philosophies and practices that emerged hand in hand with Af-
rican decolonization and African American desegregation. Two
key cultural events that recognized the mainstream popularity
of the Black Power movement, and of the constellation of ideas
that circulated around it, were the 1977 and 1979 broadcast of
Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family and Roots:
The Next Generation,40 which depict the capture and enslave-
ment of Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka warrior who strives to pass
on his West African ‘roots’ to the African American generations
that succeed him. Two months after Roots: The Next Generation
was broadcast, Olde English was sold to Pabst, which imme-
diately launched the ‘It Is the Power’ campaign. This multime-
dia outlet campaign openly co-opted the language of the Black
Power movement, leveraged the popularity of Roots, exploited
the decolonizing activities taking place across Africa, and ma-
nipulated the popularity of Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism
in order to sell Olde English ‘800.’
The ‘It Is the Power’ campaign, which ran in print, radio, and
television media, features the image of another black woman
whose light skin, feathered hair, and sweatband anticipate aero-
bic culture of the early 1980s and thereby orient her racial iden-
tity towards whiteness. Yet, she is scantily clad in a yellow bikini
and stands between two Bengal tigers. Sexual prey and jungle
40 For example, Herman Gray argues that Roots provided ‘some of the
enabling conditions necessary for the rearticulation of the discourse of
Afrocentric nationalism’ (Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for
‘Blackness’ [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], 87), and
Mark Anthony Neal asserts that the series ‘resurrected the possibilities
of an “enabled” African heritage and a reconstructed black patriarchy’
(Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic [New York:
Routledge, 2002], 71).
305
predators populate the visual world of Olde English, which

emerges as a tour-de-force of essentialised, pan-African, tribal
desire. And just as the woman and tigers occupy the shared po-
sition of an exotic, native Other, the viewer is asked to imagine
himself a ‘Kunta Kinte’ warrior. Pabst’s poster appeals, at once,
to Black Power, Pan-Africanism, and Afrocentrism. However, it
manipulates these political, social, and cultural ideas and phi-
losophies in order to reinscribe blackness as a pathology that
operates, once again, by triangulating race, sex, and alcohol con-
sumption via images of black women.41 The woman on the Pabst
poster no longer figures desire in relation to white women but
rather to exotic animals and animalization. Through her body
and its relationship to a pair of Bengal tigers, Pabst repackages
a myth of American racism into a myth of Anglo-American
colonialism as expressed in narratives that extend from Rud-
yard Kipling’s India,42 William Blake’s ‘The Tyger,’43 and William
Jones’s ‘Hymns’ to Hindu deities,44 to the African travels in R.M.
Ballantyne’s youth fiction,45 where hunting elephants, gorillas,
lions, and tigers associate the virile huntsman-explorer with an
erotics of ravishment. These literary images were produced in
relation to the British Raj (1858–1947) and the Scramble for Af-
rica (1881–1914) — periods of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries during which Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent
and pursued military campaigns across Africa under the sign of
England’s Anglo-Saxon past and Anglo-Saxonist future. Refer-
encing them in Pabst’s advertising expresses an anxious desire
on the part of white America to suppress the realities of mid-
century decolonization, which threaten to impact the balance
41 On intersectionality, see especially Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins,’

1241–12 and Davis, ‘Intersectionality as Buzzword,’ 67–85.
42 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (New York: The Century Co, 1894).
43 William Blake, ‘The Tyger,’ in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William
Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 24.
44 Sir William Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Frank-
lin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995).
45 R.M. Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (Edin-
burgh: T. Nelson & Sons, 1861) and Hunting the Lions; or, The Land of the
Negro (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1869).
306
of racial power in the United States. Despite the poster’s images

of primitive, sexualized tribalism, it still asks the viewer to lust
after a light-skinned woman while drinking malt liquor. Once
again, Olde English positions the markings of an Old English
linguistic signifier and manuscript culture against the visual
rhetoric of an Anglo-Saxonist meta-discursive regime and its
fantasies about the non-Anglo Saxon Other.
When Pabst’s print ad was televised, its imagery asked Afri-
can American consumers to not only look but also participate
in the African world of Olde English.46 A tiger’s roar breaks the
commercial’s on-screen silence. The close-up shot of a woman’s
eyes fades to those of a Bengal tiger and back again. A masculine
voice calls out ‘Smooth!’ as a large, black hand slams a can of
Olde English onto a hard surface in slow motion. The sound of
thunder and a flash of purple lightning accompany the jingle, ‘It’s
the Power…Olde English “800”,’ and, in a new scene, the woman
of the campaign’s print advertisements breaks into a run. The ad
cuts to a shot of the black hand, which now reaches towards the
aluminum tab on the can, and then the video cuts again to a pair
of running Bengal tigers. These quick-moving shots transition
to a slow-motion scene in which the woman jumps on the back
of the Bengal tiger. As she ‘rides the tiger,’ the hand opens the tab
on the Olde English can, and foam sprays from it, visualizing a
thinly veiled sexual innuendo. The jingle continues, ‘[i]t’s that
smooth, mellow taste that gets ya,’ and the ad returns to a facial
shot of the now-smiling woman, and then to the tiger’s open-
mouthed roar, and, finally, to the label on the can. Throughout
the advertisement, camera shots of woman, tiger, and Olde Eng-
lish pivot on the image of the hand, a synecdoche that enables
any black drinker to imagine himself a Kunta Kinte warrior re-
turning to his African homeland and taking physical and sex-
ual possession of the inhabitants of Pabst’s tribal, pan-African
‘world’ by opening up a can of Olde English. While the viewer is
46 The ‘It Is the Power’ tv commercial can be viewed on YouTube (Martin L,

‘Old English 800 Commercial 1988,’ YouTube, September 23, 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH1-3yUH84A).
307
summoned to enact the brand’s Anglo-Saxonist fantasies, these

heroics are not characterized by feats of actual dominance but
by drinking cheap beer. Thus, the African American viewer is
hailed to access Anglo-Saxonist empowerment by playing his
part in a centuries-old myth of blackness. Intoxicated by cheap
beer and the allure of a light-skinned woman, he becomes, like
the woman and the tiger, a target of white America’s medieval,
racial, and colonial desires.
Pabst’s ad campaign was an immediate success. By 1980, Olde
English ‘800’ was the second bestselling malt liquor in the coun-
try, and the company’s annual report to its shareholders boasts
that ‘[i]n many markets, the “It is the power” radio theme music
is as popular as some hit recordings.’47 Pabst leveraged this cor-
porate information to further promote Olde English. In the fall
of 1980, African American newspapers in New York, Pittsburgh,
and Norfolk, Virginia, ran a photo of three singers in a record-
ing studio, announcing that the ‘It Is the Power’ jingle had been
‘expanded and modified’48 into a ‘full length recording’49 avail-
able to disc jockeys and jukebox operators. Disguised as news,
the photo advertisement celebrates the campaign and thereby
encourages black consumers to purchase and drink more Olde
English ‘800.’ While African Americans living in the northeast
may have been privy to the music of Olde English ‘800,’ the brand
began to build a significant presence in LA minority communi-
ties.50 Articles and advertisements from the Los Angeles Sentinel,
a newspaper that enjoyed wide circulation in the South Central,
Inglewood, and Compton neighborhoods, document the rise
of Olde English ‘800’ as a major philanthropist and corporate
47 Pabst Brewing Company Annual Report (1980), 5 (sourced from ProQuest’s

Historical Annual Reports).
48 New Pittsburgh Courier, November 29, 1980, A6.
49 ‘It Is the Power,’ New York Amsterdam News, October 4, 1980, 4. See also
New Journal and Guide, October 1, 1980, 15.
50 This statement is not meant to elide the post-industrial conditions of poor
areas in New York City, particularly the Bronx, where hip-hop culture and
rap music were born. See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press,
1994), 27–61.
308
sponsor of events in these urban communities. Throughout the

1980s and early 1990s, Olde English lent its name, charitable
contributions, and sponsorship to golf tournaments, minority
scholarship drives, music and comedy talent showcases, a drum
festival, hip-hop ‘jams,’ and a Martin Luther King, Jr. march fol-
lowed by a prayer breakfast.51 All of these events were held in
LA’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, and all
were presented under the ‘It Is the Power’ slogan.
As Maria Luisa Alaniz and Chris Wilkes write, ‘it is critical
to consider the historical context of alcohol in ethnic minority
communities…as a form of social control,’52 and David Grant of
the Institute on Black Chemical Abuse connects alcohol adver-
tising to racism, stating that the people ‘who are being hit the
hardest by the high octane beverages are the very market for
which these products are intended.’53 This rings true for Pabst’s
‘It Is the Power’ ad campaign, which fully exploits the expres-
sion ‘Black Power’ and the politics of Black Power by promis-
ing access to both by drinking high-alcohol content malt liquor.
Through its marketing campaign and corporate philanthropy,
Pabst also refigured Black Power in Anglo-Saxonist terms such
that, in drinking Olde English, African American consumers
51 From 1982 to 1984, the California State Package Store and Tavern Owners
Association teamed up with Blitz-Weinhard (which still distributed Olde
English on the West coast) for the Olde English ‘800’–Cal-Pac Scholarship
Funds Golf Tournament, an LA charity event that raised money for minor-
ity scholarships. In 1990–1991, Olde English ‘800’ sponsored the ‘Educa-
tion Is the Power’ campaign, in which Pabst donated a portion of all case
sales in southern California to scholarship programs sponsored by African
American, Korean-American, and Mexican-American package store and
grocer associations. See Los Angeles Sentinel, March 15, 1984, B4; ‘Watts
Tower Day of the Drum Festival,’ Los Angeles Sentinel, September 20, 1984,
A3; ‘Olde English 800 Giving Something Back to the Community,’ Los
Angeles Sentinel, November 29, 1990, B6; and ‘Olde English 800 Supports
Minority Education,’ Los Angeles Sentinel, June 20, 1991, B8.
52 Maria Luisa Alaniz and Chris Wilkes, ‘Pro-Drinking Messages and Mes-
sage Environments for Young Adults: The Case of Alcohol Industry Adver-
tising in African American, Latino, and Native American Communities,’
Journal of Public Health Policy 19, no. 4 (1998): 453.
53 Grant, quoted in ibid., 465–66.
309
imbibe — materially and metaphorically — a fantasy of empow-

erment that is wholly disempowering.
That these advertisements span the late 1970s through the
early 1990s, and that they come to target African American
neighborhoods in Los Angeles, is a critical point. These decades
were, as Patricia Hill Collins writes, ‘a period of initial prom-
ise, profound change, and for far too many, heart-wrenching
disappointment.’54 In many cities, particularly in Los Angeles,
the closure or relocation of blue collar manufacturing jobs from
central to suburban LA devastated African American commu-
nities living in South Central, Watts, and Compton.55 Com-
pounding this problem was the deleterious effect of LA’s freeway
system, which, by the 1970s, had circumscribed and carved up
these neighborhoods, ‘reinforc[ing] patterns of segregation and
marking physical boundaries’ that ‘cu[t] African Americans off
from other parts of the city.’56 ‘[F]or those without automobiles,’
especially blue collar workers who had been laid off and could
not travel to plants that had opened in the suburbs, ‘the freeways
and inadequate public transit system make movement across
Los Angeles’s vast expanse difficult’ and same-sector reemploy-
ment a logistical problem. As Josh Sides writes, ‘[t]he personal
consequences of industrial plant closures for black male em-
ployees could be frustrating at best and devastating at worst… .
For an already disillusioned minority of these children, watch-
ing their parents lose hard-won jobs confirmed the fruitlessness
of playing by the rules.’57 Amid rapidly rising unemployment,
the ‘It Is the Power’ campaign promised physical and sexual
power in a bottle, and Olde English ‘800’ became a community
partner. From its availability at corner store markets to its con-
54 Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism,
and Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 3.
55 Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2003), 180–81.
56 Loren Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2015), 89.
57 Sides, L.A. City Limits, 181.
310
stant participation in minority events, Olde English embeded

itself within LA’s urban communities, functioning as a power-
ful double agent that claimed African American empowerment
but maintained Anglo-Saxonist ‘social control.’ While it offered
cheap and easy access to the promise of Black Power and sup-
ported educational and career opportunities for LA’s black com-
munities, Olde English ‘800’ was nevertheless a major force of
social disempowerment among African American men.58
While the Bengal tiger and ‘It Is the Power’ slogan became
integral parts of the brand’s official product logo, the women of
Pabst’s campaign changed during the 1980s. The light-skinned
woman of a Roots-inspired African fantasy was replaced with
darker-skinned women, who were sometimes dressed in linge-
rie and other times holding pool sticks. In these ads, they adver-
tise a larger 40oz bottle and reference Olde English ‘800’ as an
‘8-Ball,’ slang for an eighth-ounce of crack cocaine,59 encourag-
ing consumers to drink more Olde English and to associate its
‘power’ with illegal drugs. While Olde English advertising has
always conscripted the bodies of black women in the service
of pathologizing blackness in relation to race, sex, and alcohol
consumption, these new ads used the women of Olde English
in order to criminalize blackness. These posters, which were
distributed to corner store and liquor mart owners, asked black
men to find ‘power’ in the rampant alcoholism and drug ad-
58 Olde English acts as a litmus test for Denise Herd’s extensive study of cir-
rhosis mortality among African American men, which finds that ‘among
blacks, frequent heavy drinking is more common in men over 30, suggest-
ing that it is a stable pattern of mid-life’ (‘Migration, Cultural Transforma-
tion and the Rise of Black Liver Cirrhosis Mortality,’ British Journal of Ad-
diction 80, no. 4 [1985]: 398). Herd finds that by 1955, non-white deaths had
surpassed white deaths; from 1960–70, cirrhosis deaths among non-whites
had doubled; and between 1950 and 1973, this rate increased 242 percent
(398, 399). Olde English likewise serves as a case study for Herd’s linking of
Prohibition Era stereotypes of black men as ‘sensual, exotic primitives’ to
late twentieth-century alcohol advertisements that ‘promot[e]…drinking,
sexuality and violence’ (‘Contesting Culture,’ 753).
59 D. Kirk Davidson, Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable
Products, 2nd edn. (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 165.
311
Figure 7. N.W.A. and the Posse (Los Angeles: Macola Records, 1987).
Private collection.
diction of LA’s inner city neighborhoods and thereby become

subject to Reagan-era policies of trickle-down economics and
the War on Drugs.
In the context of Pabst’s philanthropic relationship with la’s
minority neighborhoods and their ‘It Is the Power’ campaign
of the 1980s, Compton-based rap group, N.W.A., summons the
Anglo-Saxonist ‘powers’ of Olde English.60 The cover art from
their 1987 single, ‘Panic Zone,’ which re-appears on their first LP,
N.W.A. and the Posse (see Fig. 7), positions Olde English ‘800’ as
60 Note that N.W.A. is not the only LA-based group to name-check Olde Eng-
lish ‘800.’ On his 1989 album, No One Can Do It Better, the DOC claims,
‘I gotta take one o’ them long-ass 8-Ball pisses — take me to a commercial’
(DOC, No One Can Do It Better [Los Angeles: Ruthless, 1989]).
312
a de facto signifier for the group’s most famous members: Eazy-

E stands on two empty 40-ounce bottles of Olde English, while
Ice Cube leans back with another in his hand, and an empty bot-
tle and can are positioned in front of Dr. Dre. Other people in
the photo hold open Olde English cans and bottles, while empty
containers are strewn on the ground and perched on the build-
ing ledge. Large clocks, which hang around the necks of some
members of the group, are set to 11:25, marking Olde English as a
mid-morning brew. In many ways, the N.W.A. photograph is an
ad hoc poster for Olde English and Pabst’s ‘It Is the Power’ cam-
paign, yet the only sign of a woman is figured in the two white
pumps on the ground in front of the men. Now that N.W.A. and
its posse have entered the advertising frame of Olde English, all
that is left of the woman who once stood there are these rem-
nants of a physical or sexual encounter.
Track 2 of this album is titled ‘8-Ball.’ It refracts the cover
art’s visual message and is an underground hit on Panic Zone
and N.W.A. and the Posse. It is then re-mixed for Straight Outta
Compton, the group’s 1988 triple-platinum follow-up album. Ea-
zy-E’s day-long adventures with an 8-Ball include pulling a gun
out on a liquor store operator, pushing around some ‘sissy ass
punk’ in the neighborhood, and calling his girlfriend a ‘bitch.’
In addition to these encounters with Compton residents, Eazy-
E’s other statements about his 8-Ball are interleaved within a vi-
gnette that describes his narrow escape from the cops:
Police on my drawers, I have to pause

40 ounce in my lap and it’s freezin my balls
I hook a right turn and let the boys go past
then I say to myself, ‘They can kiss my ass!’
…
Olde English 800 cause that’s my brand
Take it in a bottle, 40, quart, or can
Drink it like a madman, yes I do
313
Fuck the police and a 502. 61
Olde English ‘800’ is the ‘brand’ that permits Eazy-E to say to

himself (but not to the cops), ‘kiss my ass’ and ‘fuck the police.’
In other words, it is the ‘brand’ by which he articulates his resist-
ance to, yet conscription within, a system of American racism
that, in the 1980s criminalized blackness through new socioeco-
nomic and legal policies that are enforced by the lapd’s paramil-
itary presence in Compton.62 In ‘8-Ball,’ Eazy-E’s engagements
with Compton residents and the la police refract the decades-
long presence of Olde English ‘800’ in Los Angeles’s minority
neighborhoods. Consequently, ‘8-Ball’ is the signifying means
by which Eazy-E expresses a presumed position of hyper-mas-
culinity and hyper-sexuality in relation to the liquor store oper-
ator, some neighborhood ‘sissy,’ and the sissy’s girlfriend. And it
is the brand by which Eazy-E lyricizes what hip-hip scholar Tri-
cia Rose has called a ‘counterhegemonic’ resistance to the cops,
the real and present Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist figures
of institutional racism who operate within Compton.63 With a
40-ounce bottle of Olde English in his lap, Eazy-E plays the part
of the intoxicated black man in order to become a force of lyri-
cally intoxicating resistance to this racist myth about black men.
Put another way, Eazy-E drinks Olde English, then speaks ‘Olde
English’; he is brought under the sway of the ideological ‘powers’
of Anglo-Saxonism, then reclaims these powers for the African
American ‘gangsta.’
When Eithne Quinn assesses the sociocultural relationships
between malt liquor and rap music, she writes, ‘forty-ounce
61 N.W.A., ‘8-Ball (Remix),’ Straight Outta Compton (Los Angeles: Ruthless,

1988). The original lyrics of ‘8-Ball,’ recorded on N.W.A. and the Posse (Los
Angeles: Macola, 1987) are slightly different: ‘Police on my tail, I don’t
like jail / 40 ounce in my lap and it’s cold as hell’ — and reflect the group’s
original, less ‘gangsta’ persona.
62 N.W.A. explores this theme visually in ‘Straight Outta Compton’ (music
video), directed by Rupert Wainwright, 1989. See also Kajikawa, Sounding
Race in Rap Songs, 96–99.
63 Rose, Black Noise, 102.
314
bottles…became iconic accessories of gangsta rap, homologous

with the focal concerns, activities, and collective self-image of
the working-class subculture from which the music sprang.’64
The ‘40,’ Quinn further explains, acted as an ‘objec[t]’ that
‘held and reflected’ the values of the ‘gangsta’: ‘it stands, just as
gangsta does, in opposition to respectable or acquired bour-
geois tastes.’65 Over a decade later, Quinn’s assessment holds
true of Olde English, which continues to appear frequently in
rap songs and videos as an ‘accessory’ that signifies ‘gangsta…
tastes.’ However, the use of Olde English ‘800’ by N.W.A. and
Eazy-E exceeds Quinn’s assessment. Their album cover art and
‘8-Ball’ lyrics explore Olde English not merely as an ‘object’ but
also as a consumable object that ‘is the power,’ not only for their
posse but, moreover, for their musical sound, lyrics, and iden-
tity politics. Eazy-E drinks his ‘40,’ then spits a rhyme of em-
powering rage and political energy, exposing Olde English not
simply as a prop for the ‘gangsta’ but more importantly as an
object of conspicuous consumption that draws its power from
the brand’s long-standing reference to the Old English language
and the Anglo-Saxonist meta-discursive regime of masculin-
ity, virility, and strength that surrounds it. As an ‘8-Ball junkie,’
Eazy-E imbibes — incorporates — Olde English, transforming it
into a substance which lends a subversive pedigree to the sound
of N.W.A., to Eazy-E’s voice, and to the lyricized frustrations of
an urban youth that has been ghettoized and criminalized by
Anglo-Saxon(ist) America. N.W.A. and Eazy-E are possessed by
Olde English in order to take musical possession of it, expand-
ing its semantic limits from a brand of malt liquor to a genre
of music — so-called ‘gangsta rap’ — that coordinates the ‘old-
est’ language of English with African American English, and a
Grimmian rhetoric of Anglo-Saxonism with the group’s articu-
64 Eithne Quinn, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang: The Culture and Commerce of
Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3.
65 Ibid., 14–15.
315
lations of what it means to be an African American man who

lives in inner-city LA.66
Three years after ‘8-Ball’ appeared on Straight Outta Comp-
ton, malt liquor advertising drew widespread, national con-
troversy. A June 17, 1991 article in the the Wall Street Journal
discussed Heileman Brewing Company’s plan to launch a new
malt liquor called PowerMaster, a beverage that contained 5.9%
alcohol — 31% more alcohol than Colt 45, the company’s best-
selling brand.67 PowerMaster was expressly targeted at ‘inner-
city blacks,’ and its ad campaign ‘played to this group with
posters and billboards using black male models’ which ‘assured
consumers that PowerMaster was “Bold Not Harsh”.’68 Power-
Master’s alcohol content and its advertisements were in no way
unique from other malt liquors. In addition to Olde English
‘800,’ brands such as Schlitz, Hurricane, King Cobra, and St.
66 The extent to which Olde English played a role in N.W.A.’s group identity
can be tracked in relation to the break-up of the group. Although N.W.A.
had been a de-facto advertiser for Olde English ‘800’ since their first
album, when business tensions between Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre
resulted in the departure of the latter two members from the group, malt
liquor played a visible role in the public feud that ensued. While Eazy
continued his open loyalty to Olde English, Ice Cube and Dre shifted
their allegiances to competitor St. Ides. Ice Cube, who wrote the lyrics for
N.W.A.’s ‘8-Ball,’ starred in a 1990 St. Ides commercial, in which he ‘t[ook]
part in a “Pepsi challenge” of malt liquor brands…a clear rebuke to chief
competitor Olde English 800, known as “8-Ball”’ (Quinn, Ain’t Nuthin’
But a ‘G’ Thang, 2). In his 1991 single, ‘Steady Mobbin,’ Ice Cube raps,
‘Told all my friends: don’t drink 8-Ball, cos St. Ides is giving ends’ (‘Steady
Mobbin,’ Death Certificate [Los Angeles: Priority/EMI, 1991]). Shortly after
Ice Cube left N.W.A. and signed on with St. Ides, Dr. Dre did the same,
rapping in a 1993 commercial for the brand with his new partner, Snoop
Dogg. Remaining N.W.A. member Eazy-E responded to these business
and brand ‘betrayals’ in the cover art of his 1993 EP, It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um
Killa (Torrance: Audio Achievements), which not only strikes out ‘Dr. Dre’
in the title but also depicts Eazy-E pouring out a 40-ounce bottle of Olde
English ‘800,’ an action that acknowledges the death of a friend or relative
and references a scene from Ice Cube’s 1991 film Boyz in the Hood (dir.
John Singleton [Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1991]).
67 George G. Brenkert, ‘Marketing to Inner-City Blacks: PowerMaster and
Moral Responsibility,’ Business Ethics Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1998): 2.
68 Ibid.
316
Ides contain 6 to 8 percent alcohol (compared to less than 5%

in other beers); they are targeted at poor and disenfranchised
inner city black communities; and their brand names, slogans,
and ad imagery link malt liquor to physical and sexual prow-
ess.69 A ‘nationwide coalition of African American public health
activists’ quickly began to form around the PowerMaster ad
campaign,70 and censure mounted against an industry that had,
for decades, targeted low-income and high-risk racialized com-
munities. The PowerMaster controversy resulted in a July 1991
citation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF),
which changed the advertising regulations not just for Power-
Master but for all malt liquor brews,71 including Pabst’s Olde
English ‘800.’ Despite the controversy, sales soared as many rap
artists, including N.W.A. members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr.
Dre, had become de facto and paid spokesmen for a variety of
malt liquor brands.
In the wake of the PowerMaster controversy and BATF ruling,
Dr. Dre, who had just filmed a commercial for St. Ides — the pri-
mary rival to Olde English — with his protege, Snoop Dogg, re-
leased ‘Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang,’ the first single from his de-
but studio album, The Chronic. It takes as it subject the ‘gangsta,’
transforming him from a figure of counterhegemonic resistance
69 For a recent, general discussion of alcohol in African American communi-

ties, including the PowerMaster controversy, see Nicholas Freudenberg,
Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 192–96. Freudenberg cites also
the 40-ounce container size, inexpensive price (malt liquor is often less
than $2 a bottle), and high-sugar content (calories and carbohydrates that
contribute to diseases such as diabetes) of malt liquors (193–94).
70 Lawrence Wallack, Lori Dorfman, David Jernigen, and Makani Themba,
Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention (Newbury Park:
SAGE, 1993), 31.
71 Public health activists argued that PowerMaster’s marketing ‘not only
preyed immorally on communities at risk but also violated the Federal Al-
cohol Administration Act’s prohibition of beer advertising that promotes
potency,’ and in 1991, the BATF ‘revok[ed] label approval for PowerMaster
based on the potency rule’ (ibid., 32). The following year, ‘BATF extended
the ruling to require changes in seven advertising campaigns by other malt
liquor brands to be found in violation of the potency rule’ (ibid.).
317
to the LAPD to an apolitical character whose lifestyle of parties,

women, drugs, and, above all, malt liquor is characterized by ‘G-
Funk,’ a sound produced explicitly for southern California car
culture. When ‘Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang’ appeared on MTV in
1993,72 it did more than introduce America to the visual world of
Dr. Dre’s ‘gangsta’ lifestyle and G-Funk beats. The video likewise
contemplated the impact that malt liquor had on intergenera-
tional relationships between fathers and sons in LA’s black com-
munities, and it drew attention to the impact that malt liquor’s
myths about black men had on their relationships with black
women.
As the video opens, Dr. Dre parks his 1964 Chevrolet Im-
pala — the same ‘6 four’ that Eazy-E drives while drinking his
8-Ball, and the vehicle that is transformed into the ‘I’ of St.
Ides in Dre and Snoop’s recent commercial — in front of Snoop
Dogg’s Long Beach house. As the Impala travels across Los An-
geles, against a backdrop of competing brands of malt liquor, it
carries Dr. Dre ‘straight outta Compton,’ a place and a profes-
sional past from which he became, in the mind’s eye of America,
a ‘gangsta rapper.’ Now an Original Gangsta, Dr. Dre is about to
brook a new, paternalistic collaboration with the young Snoop
Dogg that will refigure the style and sound of gangsta rap. Yet,
before the first musical bars of ‘The Chronic’ are played, Dr. Dre
crosses a landscape that narrativizes a story of ‘black power’ and
the role malt liquor has played in shaping it. Once Dre steps out
of his Impala, he walks towards the front door of a house, pass-
ing a man who holds the chain on a barking Rottweiler as two
others shout encouragements at a man who attempts to bench
press 180 pounds. The sounds and sights that accompany these
performances of physical strength and virility in the front yard
appear in high contrast to scenes inside the house. Here, Dr.
Dre encounters a middle-aged man in an undershirt, who sits
on a couch and watches TV with a 40-ounce bottle in his hand,
while a woman in a housecoat and curlers moves busily around
72 Dr. Dre, feat. Snoop Dogg, ‘Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang’ (music video),
directed by Andrew Young (1992).
318
the room. Unlike the men outside, his physical potency is spent,
and his entire, shiftless being broadcasts the long-term effects
that plant closures, unemployment, and malt liquor consump-
tion has had on a generation of black men in urban Los Angeles.
As a video directed by Dr. Dre himself, who grew up in inner
city LA during 1970s and 1980s, the visual prelude to ‘G Thang’
introduces us to an image he knows well: a Janus-faced figure of
‘black power’ that strives, in public, to actualize itself, yet in the
domestic sphere, has become sedentary under the influence of
malt liquor.
Although Dr. Dre’s presence tracks this visual narrative as
one that unfolds across space, as his own youth in Compton at-
tests, it is a story that has likewise been written across time. Dr.
Dre, however, bears no likeness to any of the men he encounters
at the beginning of the music video. As a former N.W.A. mem-
ber, he has drunk Olde English for many years, incorporated its
‘Anglo-Saxonist’ mode,73 and now harbors a smooth, laidback,
gangsta style that forces the representations of black power on
display at Snoop Dogg’s house to the visual margins. As Dr. Dre
walks across the yard and then through the house, the men at the
bench press and the man with the Rottweiler appear partially,
and only for a split second, at the corners of the screen, having
been banished to the conceptual borders of the ‘G Thang’ video.
Yet Dr. Dre’s arrival within the house causes the man on the
couch to challenge the comfort with which Dre passes through
these landscapes. While this man is, at first, marginalized by the
camera, the movements of the woman inside the house bring
his presence into focus. As he holds his ‘40’ in one hand, the
73 Kajikawa puts this another way, writing, ‘Dr. Dre portrays himself as a
gangster of stature. He asserts on The Chronic’s “Let Me Ride” that he can
“make a phone call” to dispose of any unwarranted adversaries. In other
words, Dre has the ability to have someone killed on demand from afar.
In a sense, this statement evidences the shift from his relatively powerless
position with N.W.A. to his role as an established hit maker and business
partner in Death Row Records. Rather than having to scrap for his daily
bread, he now occupies a comfortable seat at the table’ (Sounding Race in
Rap Songs, 102).
319
man points a finger, accusingly, at Dr. Dre, stating, ‘Hope you’re

pickin’ him [Snoop Dogg] up to find a job.’ To which, Dr. Dre
retorts, ‘Yeah. We’re goin’ to work, so we can grow up and be
just like you.’74 Suddenly, ‘G Thang’s’ video narrative about black
power becomes generational. This delinquent ‘father’ abdicates
his responsibilities of paternal guidance to his ‘son’ Snoop Dogg,
calling Dr. Dre to step into the breach and take Snoop job hunt-
ing. Yet the 40-ounce-drinking man attempts to refigure father-
son relationships from within the framework of a gangsta rap
video, wherein Dr. Dre is not a father, but an O.G., and Snoop
is not a son, but a gangsta protege. Consequently, Dr. Dre walks
away from this proposition. He declines to accept the fatherly
role that has been thrust upon him and insists, instead, that
neither he nor Snoop Dogg have ‘grow[n] up’ yet. In this mo-
ment, the long-term effects of unemployment and alcoholism
in LA’s African American neighborhoods reveal themselves as
problems that threaten another generation of black men. And
Dr. Dre is forced to ask himself (as director) and be asked (as
actor) what role he plays in an ongoing narrative of black power
that is partly sustained via the valorization of malt liquor in his
community and in his professional career.
Just as Dr. Dre’s spatio-temporal movements track an inter-
generational narrative of malt liquor use among black men in
LA, the musical rhythms of the ‘G Thang’ prelude parallel his
gangsta storyline. Dr. Dre’s beat-making on The Chronic elabo-
rates and builds upon the production style he developed while a
member of N.W.A. By layering a breakbeat, drum machine, and
sampled performances of live studio musicians, Dre ‘create[d]
a thick and intense sound’ for the group, which filled the ‘sonic
space…to capacity.’75 In The Chronic, Dr. Dre continues to lay-
er beats, but ‘G Thang’ is composed of ‘multilayered leisurely
loops…characterized by deep bass, prominent keyboards, and
74 Dr. Dre, ‘Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang.’

75 Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs, 95.
320
samples of George Clinton’s P-funk classics.’76 Although ‘every

register of sonic space is filled,’ gangsta cool is coordinated
with ‘a laid-back, sensual soundscape,’ where the absence of
acoustical conflict permits ‘a promise of [African American]
transcendence.’77 Thus, as Dr. Dre exits his Impala and makes his
way across the yard, the ‘leisurely loop’ of a whiny synthesizer
follows the path of its composer. As he moves past men in the
yard and the house, the sonic fluidity of Dr. Dre’s G-Funk loop
underscores ‘gangsta’ as a powerful aesthetic that has become
smooth and effortless. It produces a musical counternarrative
to the grunts and cheers of weight-lifting men, the barks of a
Rottweiler, and the background noises of a domestic environ-
ment which Dre passed by and through at the beginning of the
video. Dr. Dre’s established and authoritative gangsta presence
accompanies the first, tentative bars of his G-Funk sound as it
makes its way across a field of ‘black power’ that has been inter-
pellated within Anglo-Saxonist socioeconomics, police control,
and malt liquor. In ‘G Thang,’ this coordination between Dr.
Dre’s physical body and the sonic body of his music enables the
video to query the extent to which ‘gangsta’ operates in tandem
with this generation of LA ‘fathers,’ whose misguided faith in
40-ounce culture has dissipated their agency. Does ‘G Thang’
destine LA’s ‘sons’ for a cycle of dissipation, or, like Dr. Dre, does
it offer them physical movement past it and sonic ‘transcend-
ence’ from this cycle?
After Dr. Dre leaves the house with the young Snoop Dogg
in his 1964 Impala, they drive to a picnic, where the camera fo-
cuses, casually, on scantily clad women and armed men. Un-
like Eazy-E’s lyrics, which coordinate the 8-Ball in his lap with
acts of sexual and physical assault that enable him to vocalize
his rage at the lapd, malt liquor and law enforcement are kept
at the visual margins of these scenes. By screening both from
76 David Diallo, ‘From Electro-Rap to G-Funk: A Social History of Rap

Music in Los Angeles and Compton,’ in Hip Hop in America: A Regional
Guide, 2 vols., ed. Mickey Hess (Denver: Greenwood, 2010), 1:241.
77 Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs, 103, 105, 109.
321
direct view, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg present sex and violence,
passively, as the organic elements of a laid-back gangsta lifestyle
and its G-Funk sound.78 At the end of the day, the central role
that malt liquor plays in this lifestyle is finally brought into di-
rect view at a house party, where the ‘sons’ drink the same booze
as their ‘father.’ At the house, a young, black man reaches into a
refrigerator full of 40-ounce malt liquor bottles. As the camera
lingers over this shot, Snoop raps, ‘Pimping hoes and clocking
a grip, like my name was Dolemite / Yeah, and it don’t quit / I
think they in the mood for some mothafuckin’ G shit.’79 A re-
frigerator full of ‘40’s comes into focus when Snoop suggests
that we are ‘in the mood for some mothafuckin’ G shit,’ and the
moments that follow express precisely what this ‘G shit’ is. A
new scene opens in which Snoop tells Dre, ‘we gotta give ‘em
what they want,’ and Dre responds, ‘what’s that, G?’ The camera
then moves to a young, light-skinned black woman — a figure
seen many times before in Olde English advertising — dressed
in a tank top and miniskirt who makes her way through the
crowded house party. Her dress and manner indicate that she
is not from Compton or Long Beach, and upon rebuffing the
sexual advances that are made towards her, two men corner the
woman and spray her with 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor, an
act that echoes the ‘It Is the Power’ TV advertisement from the
1970s. As they enact physical and sexual assault by symbolic
malt liquor proxy, revelers dance. The party scene fades, and
Dre’s car rolls up to Snoop’s house at dawn. As Snoop gets out of
the car and stumbles up the driveway, drunk, one assumes from
malt liquor, this ‘son’ returns to his ‘father’s’ house. Although
78 When a caravan of lowrider convertibles playing ‘G Thang’ from their

sound systems pass a single motorcycle cop, the cop waves them past, and
the camera relegates him to the corner of the screen. The visual ‘cornering’
of elements that would politicize the ‘gangsta’ figure or create conflict for
him should be considered in relation to its film date. ‘G Thang’ was shot
just after the 1991 PowerMaster controversy and BATF ruling (which hap-
pened in the same months as the Rodney King beating) and the 1992 LA
Riots.
79 Dr. Dre, ‘Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang.’
322
Dr. Dre no longer makes music with N.W.A., his solo career is
launched by a video in which he continues to query whether the
lifestyle and sound of gangsta rap simply ‘loops’ LA’s inner-city
black men into a narrative of black power — crafted by Pabst’s ‘It
Is the Power’ campaign — that tethers race and sex to alcohol-
ism. Or whether the new, laid-back sounds of G-Funk offer its
African American listeners ‘transcendence’ by marginalizing its
most troubling elements.
Many critics have voiced their concern regarding Dr. Dre’s
G-Funk’s aesthetic and its apolitical refiguring of ‘gangsta rap.’80
Yet the ambivalence with which ‘G Thang’ navigates the history
of malt liquor among LA’s African American men can be un-
derstood, to borrow the language of Loren Kajikawa, as ‘a cool
and cynical accommodation with the realities of the neoliber-
al era. Sociopathic easy-listening indeed.’81 In other words, ‘G
Thang’ visually and musically performs what Eithne Quinn calls
the ‘analytic of ambivalence’ that ‘characterize[s] the gangsta
mode.’82 Such ‘ambivalence,’ Geoffrey Baker explains, accounts
for rap’s ‘most powerful transformative energies,’ which ‘may
reside where they are least examined and never taken seriously,
in lyrics that shun realistic portrayal of the effects of centuries
of violent colonization and that commit their violence against
the reigning order at the level of language and culture itself.’83
The literary ‘ambivalence’ and ‘deep tension’ that N.W.A. and its
members associate with Olde English render it a site of ‘trans-
formative energ[y],’ and while songs such as ‘8-Ball’ and ‘G
Thang’ do not loosen Olde English from its function as a brand
of malt liquor, contemporaries of N.W.A. begin to leverage the
ambivalent position Olde English has begun to occupy in rap
music. A generation of rappers who are active in the 1990s and
80 For a very recent summary of these debates from the 1990s, see Kajikawa,
Sounding Race in Rap Songs, 116.
81 Ibid., 117.
82 Quinn, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang, 33, 34.
83 Geoffrey Baker, ‘Preachers, Gangsters, Pranksters: MC Solaar and Hip-
Hop as Overt and Covert Revolt,’ The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 2
(2011): 233, 234.
323
early 2000s reframe ‘Olde English’ as a signifier that references

the language and poetry of rap music. These rappers slowly re-
code ‘Olde English’ such that becomes an expression that repre-
sents certain sociolinguistic aspects of Black English.
For example, as LL Cool J raps on ‘Mama Said Knock You
Out,’ ‘Olde English filled my mind / And I came up with a funky
rhyme,’ a statement that acknowledges the intoxicating func-
tion of Olde English but also aligns it with word play.84 Likewise,
Tash from The Alkaholiks invokes the ‘power’ of Olde English as
a language that generates creative lyricism:
While I’m leavin’ niggas puzzled like I said my shit in French

But it’s all Olde English that I’m bringin’ from beneath
Try to bite my style on wax and watch these lyrics crack your
teeth
Cause I make words Connect like West Side when I test glide
My drunken lyrical hanglider85
Tash braces ‘Olde English’ against ‘French,’ a standard language.

Upon claiming that he is ‘bringin’ Olde English, Tash follows
with an entire line (save one word) that, on account of his oral
delivery, is comprised of strong, stressed mono-syllables:
Trý tó bíte mý stýle ón wáx ánd wátch thése lýrĭcs cráck yóur
téeth.
Tash displays his ‘flow’ and ‘slang’ in this staccatoed challenge to

other emcees.86 He continues, ‘Cause I make words Connect like
84 LL Cool J, ‘Mama Said Knock You Out,’ Mama Said Knock You Out (New
York: Def Jam, 1991). Note that LL Cool J is from New York, and, while
beyond the scope of this chapter, the influence of Olde English’s ‘It Is the
Power’ campaign was not limited to the minority neighborhoods of Los
Angeles.
85 Tha Alkaholiks, ‘Hip Hop Drunkies,’ Likwidation (New York: Loud Re-
cords, 1997).
86 Try to bite [steal] his style on wax [a track], and his lyrics [complex flow]
will break your teeth.
324
West Side when I test glide / My drunken lyrical hanglider,’ a

statement that transforms the name of another LA group, West-
side Connection, into the materials by which he ‘test glides’ (not
test drives) ‘my drunken lyrical hanglider.’ Intoxicated by Olde
English malt liquor, Tash raps in what he calls ‘Olde English,’ a
language of rhythm, wordplay, flow, and slang that bests other
emcees, yet confirms his participation in LA’s rap community.
Aware of the destructive history of Olde English alcohol
consumption in urban African American communities, these
rappers leverage this brand of beer to ‘Signify’: to recognize
and create a space for ‘the figurative difference between the lit-
eral and the metaphorical, between surface and meaning…to
say one thing but to mean quite another.’87 Signifying is one of
many sociolinguistic aspects of Black English that ‘has allowed
blacks to create a culture of survival in an alien land.’88 As Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., explains, it ‘disrupt[s] the nature of the signi-
fier/signified equation,’ ‘critiques’ the nature of a word’s mean-
ing, and ‘supplant[s]’ standard English associations and white
conventions of a signifier.89 By transforming signs and sign sys-
tems, they become expressions that are both ‘decolonized’ and
‘double-voiced.’90 As Gates remarks, ‘hip-hop took signifying to
a new and electrifyingly original level.’91 Thus, while LL Cool J
recognizes Olde English as alcohol, he Signifies it as generative
of a ‘funky rhyme.’ And when Tash compares Olde English to
French, he exceeds its conventional definition as a malt liquor
brand and suggests it as a standard language. As these rappers
Signify Olde English, they extend its semantic range from a
brand of alcohol towards a poetic category, turning it into a sign
that stands in for a whole system of rhetorical strategies that
align with what Samy Alim calls ‘Hip Hop Nation Language’
87 Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 89.

88 Geneva Smitherman, ‘“The chain remain the same”: Communicative Prac-
tices in the Hip Hop Nation,’ Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 1 (1997): 2–3.
89 Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 51, 52.
90 Ibid., 55.
91 Ibid., xxx.
325
(HHNL), a ‘linguistic culture’ situated ‘in the broader context of

Black American speech.’92 Alim continues:
[HHNL] refers not only to the syntactic constructions of the

language but also to the many discursive and communicative
practices, the attitudes towards language, understanding the
role of language in both binding/bonding community and
seizing/smothering linguistic opponents, and language as
concept (meaning…body movements…and overall commu-
nication…).93
Tash’s wordplay is therefore not just limited to his meter and

rhyme. It is, moreover, an ‘attitude towards language,’ and he
uses the expression ‘Olde English’ to represent and introduce a
variety of poetic strategies that simultaneously ‘seize/smother’
his opponents and ‘bind/bond’ himself to LA’s rap community.
Likewise, Tash’s ‘drunken lyrical hanglider’ underscores his ‘lan-
guage as [a] concept’ that is expressed in his ‘body movements’
and ‘overall communication,’ which claim to be under the dou-
ble influence of alcohol and hip hop. For Tash, Signifying Olde
English (as a sociolinguistic strategy of Black English and a lin-
guistic category of HHNL) is an act that not only transforms a
reference to malt liquor into rap but also figures the language of
Olde English as spoken lyrics and oral performance that, in this
instance, transform alcoholic intoxication into an ‘Alkaholik’
display. As Tash Signifies Olde English, he disrupts, critiques,
and supplants all previous associations that American brewers
have sought to generate for this brand of malt liquor and thereby
‘flips the script.’94 That is to say, Tash ‘revers[es] the power of
the dominant culture’ and ‘free[s] [his rhymes] from linguistic
colonization’95 by ‘positioning speakers of “standard English” as
92 Alim, Roc the Mic Right, 70.

93 Ibid., 71.
94 H. Samy Alim, ‘Hip Hop Nation Language,’ in Language in the USA:
Themes for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Edward Finegan and John R.
Rickford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 395.
95 Ibid.
326
“limited” and the speakers of “Black Language” as “limitless”.’96

By flipping the script on Olde English, Tash ‘frees’ it from its
sedimented relationship to a ‘limited’ Anglo-Saxonist metadis-
cursive regime and reclaims it as a ‘limitless’ signifier descriptive
of African American rhetorical arts, Black English, and HHNL
that can be doubled and (re)doubled, sustained and altered in
its form.
As Olde English continues to appear in the rap lyrics of other
artists, its limitless signifying capacity shuttles it towards a post-
colonial form. For example, as RZA rhymes:
Right eye squinted; I speak brok-len english

Stumble off the cold four-oh of Olde English Wu brew.97
As Ol’ Dirty Bastard claims:
You know me
My mouth is sugar, sweet as a honey bee
Taste like a forty, stinkin like Old-E
But I drink Ol’ English so I speak Ol’ English98
And as J-Ro from the Alkaholiks boasts:
It’s the Olde English, linguist, distinguished genius99
As Olde English, Old-E, and Ol’ English are rearticulated by

RZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and J-Ro, the phrase reveals its trans-
formative energies. Not only does the sign itself become multi-
ple, redoubled, and transformed by their language games, but
96 H. Samy Alim and Alisdair Pennycook, ‘Glocal Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop

Culture(s), Identities, and the Politics of Language Education,’ Journal of
Language, Identity & Education 6, no. 2 (2007), 121.
97 RZA, ‘Must Be Bobby,’ Digital Bullet (New York: Koch, 2001).
98 Ol’ Dirty Bastard, ‘Dirty & Stinkin’,’ Trials and Tribulations of Russell Jones
(Los Angeles: Riviera, 2002).
99 Xzibit, feat. Tha Alkaholiks and King T.,‘Louis XIII,’ Napalm (Detroit:
Open Bar Entertainment, 2012).
327
as these rappers alter the sound and spelling of Olde English,

they claim it as a linguistic signifier that responds to critics’ de-
risive claims that rap is the provenance of ‘semi-literate’ youth
by transforming Olde English into a postcolonial sign that ac-
knowledges rap lyrics and rhymes as sites of linguistic virtu-
osity.100 RZA’s use of ‘Olde English’ references an English that
appears, on the surface, to be ‘brok-len,’ yet this ‘multilayered’
statement simultaneously signifies his Brooklyn dialect even as
it Signifies on a white, ‘dominant discourse’ that fails to recognize
a tradition of African American rhetoric at work in his rhyme.101
Just as RZA claims Olde English as his own Brooklyn accent, Ol’
Dirty Bastard manipulates it as a referent for his notable style
of free-associative rhymes and partially sung, partially rapped,
delivery, which he describes via the conceptual triptych of Ol’
Dirty Bastard, Ol’ English malt liquor, and Ol’ English speech.
ODB’s famed capacity as a rapper to distort sound and sense
enables him to bend the representative contours of a linguistic
sign so that it aligns with his stage name. In transforming ‘Olde’
into ‘Ol’,’ English becomes, like the rapper himself and the song
title in which this lyric appears, ‘dirty and stinkin.’ It no longer
participates in an Anglo-Saxonist metadiscursive regime and
belongs instead to Alim’s HHNL. RZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s
solo projects were released at the turn of the milennium, and
a decade later, when J-Ro from the Alkaholiks returns to the
expression, he expresses the decolonizing after-effects of these
lyrics in the line, ‘Olde English, linguist, distinguished genius.’
100 H. Samy Alim, ‘Global Ill-literacies: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities,
and the Politics of Literacy,’ Review of Research in Education 35 (2011): 122.
Alim locates rap within the larger sociolinguistic category of ‘ill-literacy,’ a
term that ‘highlight[s] the irony of youth described by educational institu-
tions as “semi-literate’’’ and takes this perception to task by ‘draw[ing]
attention to the multiple, textual interpretations made possible by Hip
Hop’s use of coded language or ‘“counterlanguage,” which is often used
as a means to critique dominant discourse’ (ibid.). In other words, ill-
literacy ‘deliberately creat[es] multilayered, subtextual understandings
for participants while at the same time producing potential confusion for
non-participants’ (ibid.).
101 Ibid.
328
No longer a dialect, an accent, or an expression of personal style,

this triple rhyme Signifies ‘Olde English’ as a motivating, decol-
onizing sign. Its sound generates a rhyme that not only claims
rap as a language but, moreover, boasts the linguistic virtuosity
and exceptional creative powers of its rappers.
Olde English’s Signifying capacity is in conversation with an-
other virtuosic element of rap: sampling. As Paul Miller (a.k.a.
DJ Spooky) and Alisdair Pennycook explain, sampling a beat is ‘a
new way of doing something that’s been with us for a long time:
creating with found objects. The rotation gets thick. The con-
straints get thin. The mix breaks free of the old associations.’102 In
addition to the sample’s function as a sound that is both repeti-
tive and different, Pennycook highlights the sample’s relation-
ship to temporal flow: ‘repetition always entails difference, since
no two moments, events, words can be the same. Once we make
an understanding of the flow of time central to an understand-
ing of difference, “any repeated event is necessarily different
(even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor)”.’103
Pennycook draws upon the work of Michael Taussig and Homi
Bhabha to argue that such use of creative sampling — repetition
or ‘mimicry’ — is key to postcoloniality, and he suggests that ap-
propriating ‘the dominant powers, arts, and discourses unsettles
those powers and creates a new relationship between colonized
and colonizer.’104 The statements of Miller and Pennycook pro-
vide a temporal lens through which to assess the function of
Olde English as both a Signifying form and an ‘object’ found
and sampled by emcees like RZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and J-Ro
of the Alkaholiks. It transforms and is transformed as these rap
artists drink, lyricize, and repeat across several decades of rap
music. By way of creative repetition, Olde English moves from
102 Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 25;
quoted in Alistair Pennycook, ‘The Rotation Gets Thick, The Constraints
Get Thin’: Creativity, Recontextualization, and Difference,’ Applied Linguis-
tics 28, no. 4 (2007): 580.
103 Pennycook, ‘The Rotation Gets Thick,’ 585; quoted from Claire Colebrook,
Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2002), 121.
104 Ibid., 586.
329
a colonial signifier to an ambivalent prosodics, from a Signify-

ing term of Black English and HHNL to a postcolonial language
politics. Through repetition, not only does the rotation get thick
but the fantastic ‘flow of time’ also bends Olde English from its
function as a marker of Old English linguistic iconography and
Anglo-Saxonist ideology — academic and popular lenses that
are grounded in looking back into the past — towards a post-
colonial linguistic ‘now.’105 This ‘now’ is not the present but, as
Michelle Wright writes, is an ‘epiphenomenal’ spacetime that
coordinates with ‘the Blackness of the Black Atlantic and the Af-
rican Diaspora…in which the present and future are conflated
and as many past and present moments exist as we can currently
discuss, actively linked to Blackness.’106 As a spacetime that is
embodied and experienced rather than historicized, the ‘now’
of Olde English ‘is always in process’ and therefore stands in
contrast to the linear progress narratives of Western civilization
and the colonial and racial politics that attend them.107 Likewise,
it is an epiphenomenal language that attends to a new aesthetics
of place, race, and rules of linguistic use.
As if to signal its arrival as a postcolonial expression and ob-
ject of epiphenomenal spacetime, LA rap group Dilated Peoples’s
2006 track, ‘Olde English,’ opens with the statement, ‘this ain’t
the new, it’s the old from way back,’ then follows with the hook,
Four by four, eight by eight

Twenty by twenty bars, I demonstrate
Four by four, eight by eight
Twenty by twenty bars, I demonstrate108
As in much popular music, rap is organized in four-measure

cycles and groupings divisible by four lines per stanza. How-
ever, as Evidence and Rakaa ‘demonstrate,’ each of their stanzas
105 Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Episte-
mology (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015), 60.
106 Ibid., 41, 60.
107 Ibid., 41.
108 Dilated Peoples, ‘Olde English,’ 20/20 (Los Angeles: Capitol, 2006).
330
is twenty ‘bars,’ or lines, long. While the hook seems to claim the
duo’s lengthy lyricism as evidentiary of the ‘way back’ style of
‘Olde English,’ Rakaa expounds upon this claim in a later verse,
which begins:
Richard Pryor, Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali

Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Salvador Dali
Now we rap Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou
Out the disco Xanadu, hip-hop for the streets.
Now the beat swing numchuk style
I’m like Jim Kelly tellin sucker MC’s duck down
Heavy artillery with the heavenly spittery
And third strike energy109
Rakaa’s lyrics and his rhymes transform ‘Olde English’ from an

expression that references the track’s ‘way back’ style to a phrase
that acts as shorthand for the artistic work of a diverse group of
mostly African American figures whose art and politics span
the twentieth century. To Dilated Peoples, ‘Olde English’ is no
longer, as it was for Eazy E, a means of articulating resistance
to Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist ‘powers’ on the streets of
Compton. Nor is it an ambivalent signifier that enables Dr. Dre
to query the role of malt liquor in constructing an intergenera-
tional narrative of ‘black power’ that loops LA’s fathers and sons
into a cycle of unemployment and alcoholism. As that which
has been drunk materially, visually, and lyrically by genera-
tions of rap artists, ‘Olde English’ flows across times and spaces,
pasts and presents, realizing its function as an epiphenomenal
language of the ‘now’ that connotes the arts and politics — the
written words, oral expressions, and embodied experiences — of
visionary African Americans.
As rap artists continue to query the sociolinguistic stakes
of Olde English and further claim it as a signifier for African
American experience, the term shifts its spelling to ‘Old Eng-
lish,’ even as academics begin to query the relationship between
109 Ibid.
331
rap music and Old English language arts. When Derek Attridge
discusses Old English alliterative metre in his 1995 book, Poetic
Rhythm: An Introduction, he takes a five-page detour into rap
music. Attridge discusses rap’s ‘verse form, which bears many
resemblances to Old English strong-stress meter,’ and he talks
about rap lyrics, which ‘like Old English verse…are written to be
performed to an accompaniment that emphasizes the metrical
structure of the verse.’110 The following year, Dana Giola’s essay,
‘Meter-Making Arguments,’ repeatedly positions rap in relation
to Old English, remarking that the ‘four beat accentual [meter is
the] line that English has favored from the Beowulf bard to the
Beastie Boys.’111 While specialists in Old English and Anglo-Sax-
on studies likewise have noted the metrical and performative
similarities between Old English poetry and rap music,112 only
Alta Cools Halama has recognized the ethical stakes of making
these connections:
such a genre comparison [between Old English and rap mu-

sic], approaching the unknown from the known, could not
only bring multi-culturalism into Old English studies but
also move Old English study into multi-culturalism. When
my students see Beowulf so carefully separate the superior
Geats from the lesser Danes, I hope those students hear the
words of Clarence Page: ‘Racism is the belief or practice that
110 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge

111 Dana Giola, ‘Meter-Making Arguments,’ in Meter in English: A Critical En-
gagement, ed. David Baker (Little Rock: Arkansas University Press, 1996),
86.
112 Alta Cools Halama, ‘Flytes of Fancy: Boasting and Boasters from Beowulf
to Gangsta Rap,’ Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 81–96; Timothy
Tangherlini, ‘Afterword: Performing through the Past: Ethnophilology and
Oral Tradition,’ Western Folklore 62 (2003): 143–49; and Irina A. Dumitres-
cu, ‘Verbal Dueling,’ Dragons in the Sky, January 2003, http://users.ox.ac.
uk/%7Estuart/dits/content_verbal.html. On Icelandic connections, see
Roberta Frank, ‘Conversational Skills for Heroes,’ in Narration and Hero:
Recounting the Deeds of Heroes in Literature and Art of the Early Medieval
Period, eds. Victor Millet and Heike Sahm (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 36.
332
devalues other races as biologically and morally inferior… . It

has been called America’s original sin. It is.’113
In these lines, Halama argues that coordinating Old English and

rap is not just an analogical or multicultural endeavor but is, in
fact, a process of recognizing American racism and of mitigat-
ing against ‘America’s original sin.’
It has been 20 years since Halama’s article was published,
yet little has changed regarding the position of Olde English
to Old English. While hip-hop theorists trace the influences of
rap to Signifying, the dozens, toasts, American blues, and the
African diaspora, early medieval scholars continue to discuss
Old English linguistics, poetic composition, and oral perfor-
mance within the historical context of Anglo-Saxon England.114
113 Halama, ‘Flytes of Fancy,’ 92.

114 Cheryl L. Keyes discusses the tradition of griots, oral storytellers who
perform by way of musical accompaniment, ‘mak[ing] use of formulaic
expressions, poetic abstractions, and rhythmic speech — all recited in a
chantlike fashion that prefigures rap’ (Rap Music and Street Consciousness
[Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2004], 20). Halifu Osumare points
to ‘Africanist aesthetics’ such as complex rhythmic timing, rhetorical
strategies, and multiple layers as an African-based expressivity of dance
and music that is manifested in hip-hop (The Africanist Aesthetic in Global
Hip-Hop: Power Moves [New York: Palgrave, 2007]). See also Imani Perry,
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004); Genera Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases
From the Hood to the Amen Corner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) and
‘“The chain remain the same”’; and Rose, Black Noise, 65–69, 74–76.
Hip-hop scholar Adam Bradley is among the few who consider the
interrelatedness, as opposed to analogical relationship, between rap and
Old English, and he argues that argues that ‘[w]hile rap may be new-
school music, it is old-school poetry… . [R]ap bears a stronger affinity to
some of poetry’s oldest forms, such as the strong-stress meter of Beowulf
and the [thirteenth-century] ballad stanzas of the bardic past’ (Book of
Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop [New York: Basic Civitas, 2009], xv, 18).
Using Wonder Mike, a member of the Sugarhill Gang (whose 1979 ‘Rap-
per’s Delight’ introduced rap music to mainstream radio audiences) as an
example, Bradley explains, writing: ‘Wonder Mike’s likely unwitting use of
ballad stanzas underscores two essential facts about rap poetics. Rap was
created by black Americans. Rap is a Western poetic form. These are not
contradictory assertions’ (19).
333
It would seem that the unspoken rules of linear time, periodiza-

tion, and language not only police the boundaries between Olde
English and Old English but also regulate the boundaries we set
on conversations between scholars of hip hop and of early me-
dieval poetry. And yet Tha Alkaholiks, RZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard,
and Dilated Peoples, Attridge, Giola, and certainly Halama, are
actually trying to have a conversation — a conversation that
would create an epiphenomenal wormhole between medieval
and modern languages, temporalities, and the meta-discursive
regimes of racism and colonialism that sustain the conceptual
infrastructure of old, middle, and modern Englishes and the
historical periods to which they belong.
To return to the opening discussions of this chapter, a first
step towards locating an epiphenomenal ‘now’ across lan-
guages and historical periods might be to recognize, as Makoni
and Pennycook argue, that ‘languages…are inventions’ which
occur simultaneously with the invention of the nineteenth-
century nation and European colonialism; and to understand
that linguistic invention occurs in ‘parallel’ with ‘metadiscur-
sive regimes’: ‘representations of language…reinforced by the
existence of grammars,’ ‘dictionaries,’ and ‘autonomous texts’
that reconstruct a past language and ‘inven[t]’ a ‘tradition…
into which the present is inserted.’115 Following Richard Bauman
and Charles Briggs,116 Makoni and Pennycook explain that these
nineteenth-century linguistic projects anchor languages to his-
torical, geographic, and racial territories, and they theorize that
unmooring languages from these sites requires ‘strategies of dis-
Bradley credits not only Old English meter and the later-medieval
ballad form but also the rhyming patterns of Emily Dickinson, Lord
Byron, and Piers Plowman; the similes and puns of Shakespeare; and the
kennings of Old English and Lewis Carroll as poetic materials with which
rap is entangled. Yet Bradley explains that rap takes these poetic elements,
which draw from the many sedimented layers of ‘Western poetic form,’
and stylizes them according to jazz and the blues, toasting and the dozens,
personal and local experiences of artists and their neighborhoods.
115 Makoni and Pennycook, ‘Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages,’ 1, 2,
8.
116 Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity.
334
invention and reconstruction,’ both in terms of the naming of

languages and also with respect to the ways in which scholars
conceptualize linguistic difference.117 ‘If anything,’ Makoni and
Pennycook write, ‘we would like to argue that all languages are
creoles, and that the slave and colonial history of creoles should
serve as a model on which other languages are assessed. In
other words, what is seen as marginal or exceptional…should
be used to frame our understandings of language.’118 To refig-
ure languages as creoles — even those that predate the advent of
colonialism — allows for a ‘discontinuous’ linguistic history: an
understanding of language that is not predicated upon linguistic
continuity or stages, and provides ‘latitude for multiple tempo-
ralities’ and ‘overlapping, translingual language uses.’119
As a a linguistic ‘representatio[n]’ conceived in the heyday of
Anglo-Saxonism,120 Old English and its pedagogical tools bear
the semantic weight of this metadiscursive regime. Olde English,
however, exposes the colonial and racial ideologies of ‘Old Eng-
lish’; it takes on the metadiscursive regime of Anglo-Saxonism
that underwrites this term; and it uses the African American
rhetorical trope of Signifying and the hip-hop art form of sam-
pling in order to disinvent, decolonize, and reinvent Old English
as a language of postcolonial subjectivity and epiphenomenal
nowness. This work by African American artists asks scholars
of Old English not only to recognize the Anglo-Saxonist regime
embedded in our linguistic signifier but, moreover, to disinvent
and reinvent Old English according to a ‘discontinous’ history
that provides ‘latitude for multiple temporalities’ and ‘overlap-
ping, transtemporal uses.’ This is not a project for one person
but for a discipline as a collectivity, and there are a few possible
ways we might start trying to begin this process. One possible
way is to rethink how we name, conceptualize, and teach the
Englishes of historical linguistics. While old, middle, and mod-
117 Makoni and Pennycook, ‘Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages,’ 27.

118 Ibid., 21.
119 Ibid., 28.
120 Ibid., 2.
335
ern Englishes are standard nomenclatures, they presume a linear

temporality that is always flowing from a specific past towards
a specific future (all falsely assumed by many to be only ‘one
thing,’ however difficult to pin down at times). If we disinvent
the names we give to former instantiations of English — and
with it, the illusion of linguistic unity — past morphologies and
syntaxes of English might find a linguistic meeting space with
those of the present tense. In addition, disinventing and thereby
destabilizing Old English from the territory of ‘Anglo-Saxon’
and/or ‘England’ might enable it to reinvent itself as a language
that interacts with other languages and geographies in conti-
nental Europe, the Baltic region, the Mediterranean, and North
Africa. Further still, disinventing West Saxon — the long-stand-
ing linguistic agent of King Alfred’s ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ — as
the dialectical standard by which Old English is taught, read,
and edited might enable the field to reinvent itself as dialecti-
cally plural and non-hegemonic. And, finally, all of these disin-
ventions and reinventions of historical linguistics might actually
make inclusive room for the Old/e English of African American
art forms and Hip Hop Nation Language.
336
7
Becoming postSaxon
The last four years have witnessed a disciplinary reckoning for

Anglo-Saxon studies and medieval studies more broadly. Be-
ginning in 2014, outcries against misogyny and sexual miscon-
duct among notable Anglo-Saxonists and medievalists turned
quickly to discussions of racism within these fields.1 Not unsur-
1 For a sense of the initial starting conditions for the more recent (and
necessary) agitation in the fields of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Old English’
studies over misogyny and sexism, and especially related to the revela-
tions in 2016 that the prominent (and recently retired) Anglo-Saxonist
Allen Frantzen had been maintaining a private website in which he was
espousing viewpoints closely associated with certain extremist corners of
the Men’s Rights and ‘antifeminist’ movements (https://web.archive.org/
web/20160109140100/http://allenfrantzen.com/), see Dorothy Kim, ‘Me-
dieval Studies, Sexual Harassment, and Community Accountability,’ In the
Middle, October 31, 2014, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2014/10/
medieval-studies-sexual-harassment-and.html; Lavinia Collins, ‘The
Problem With Allen Frantzen’s FemFog Post,’ Lavinia Collins [author
blog], January 15, 2016, https://vivimedieval.wordpress.com/2016/01/15/
the-problem-with-allen-frantzens-femfog-post/; ‘Laughing at Misogyny,’
The Syllabub, January 16, 2016, http://thesyllabub.blogspot.com/2016/01/
laughing-at-misogyny.html; J.J. Cohen, ‘On Calling Out Misogyny,’ In the
Middle, January 16, 2016, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/
on-calling-out-misogyny.html; Dorothy Kim, ‘Antifeminism, White-
ness, and Medieval Studies,’ In the Middle, January 18, 2016, http://www.
inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/antifeminism-whiteness-and-medieval.
html; Donna Zuckerberg, ‘Should Academics Fear the Manosphere?’
337
prisingly, problems within the profession keep pace with An-

glo-American and European political climates. Extremist, na-
tionalist sentiments, leavened with various forms of racism and
xenophobia, which have been mounting in Europe and America
since 9/11 in tandem with growing social conservatisms, have
finally come to a head in the political arena. They have taken
the form of the Brexit movement, the political maneuverings
of pro-Brexit prime minister Boris Johnson, and the December
2019 electoral victory of Johnson’s Conservative party; the 2017
French presidential runoff between centrist Emmanuel Macron
and nationalist Marine Le Pen; America’s 2016 election of Presi-
dent Donald Trump, who has formalized and discussed with-
drawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, the
Open Skies Treaty, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and
Iraq and Afghanistan; and the November 2019 parliamentary-
seat wins by Spain’s virulently nationalist and openly Islam-
phobic Vox party.2 I have revised much of this book to the time
of these headlines.3 And I have also gone home. Last spring, I
Jezebel, January 27, 2016, https://jezebel.com/should-academics-fear-the-

manosphere-1754937735; Rio Fernandes, ‘Prominent Medievalist’s Blog on
“Feminist Fog” Sparks an Uproar,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, February
5, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Prominent-Medieval-Scholar-
s/235014; and Eileen A. Joy, ‘Building a Tribe Outside the System: Allen
Frantzen, Jack Donovan, and the Neomedievalist Alt-Right,’ keynote
lecture, University of Richmond, March 27, 2018, YouTube, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=qWt0xdhLoeU.
2 This is not a comprehensive list of nationalist and nativist political activi-
ties in Europe and in the United States, nor does it account for the global
rise of these ideologies. To be clear: nationalism and xenaphobia are not
exclusive to Euro-American politics. Examples of alt-right or far right
presidents can be seen, for example, most prominently in Latin America,
where Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Chile’s Sebastián Piñera, and Argentina’s
Mauricio Macri espouse Trump-like rhetoric despite a lack of support
from Trump, himself.
3 Under the aegis of the Trump presidency and the resurgence of ethno-
supremacist hate groups around the world, medieval studies has also
been convulsed with rifts and debates around the ways in which the field’s
subject matter has been appropriated and weaponized by these groups,
and around what, if anything, scholars of medieval studies should do
about this. The field’s resistance to recognizing, admitting, and working
338
Becoming postSaxon
through the structural racism of its own intellectual history, which is

painful for many to confront, is symptomatic of the political moment in
which we live. On how this affected one of the largest scholarly gatherings
in medieval studies, the annual International Congress on Medieval Stud-
ies, held at Western Michigan University every year, see Colleen Flaherty,
‘Whose Medieval Studies?’ Inside Higher Ed, July 12, 2018, https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/12/medieval-studies-groups-say-major-
conference-trying-limit-diverse-voices-and-topics; BABEL Working Group,
‘Letter of Concern,’ July 18, 2018, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI
pQLSdReGZAQJiSSDWTRV0kT2tO2b9LEaAPLTjDJLEaA6auDczBhA/
viewform; and Seeta Chaganti, ‘Statement Regarding ICMS Kalamazoo,’
Medievalists of Color, July 9, 2018, http://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-
the-profession/statement-regarding-icms-kalamazoo/. For controversies
that have erupted in the fields of ‘Old English’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies
more particularly, relative to the structural and ongoing racism of these
fields, and their seeming inability to grapple with that, see Mary Dockray-
Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem,’ JSTOR Daily, May 3,
2017, https://daily.jstor.org/old-english-serious-image-problem/; Adam
Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in
Honolulu,’ In The Middle, July 29, 2017, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.
com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html; Peter Baker, ‘Anglo-
Saxon Studies After Charlottesville: Reflections of a University of Virginia
Professor,’ Medievalists of Color, May 25, 2018, https://medievalistsofcolor.
com/race-in-the-profession/anglo-saxon-studies-after-charlottesville-
reflections-of-a-university-of-virginia-professor/; M. Rambaran-Olm,
‘Anglo-Saxon Studies [Early English Studies], Academia, and White Su-
premacy,’ Medium, June 27, 2018, https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/
anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3; Han-
nah Natanson, ‘“It’s all white people’: Allegations of White Supremacism
Are Tearing Apart a Prestigious Medieval Studies Group,’ The Washington
Post, September 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa-
tion/2019/09/19/its-all-white-people-allegations-white-supremacy-are-
tearing-apart-prestigious-medieval-studies-group/; Colleen Flaherty, ‘It’s
About More Than a Name,” Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2019, https://
www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/20/anglo-saxon-studies-group-
says-it-will-change-its-name-amid-bigger-complaints-about; M. Ram-
baran-Olm, ‘Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-Saxon” Studies,’
History Workshop, November 4, 2019, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/
misnaming-the-medieval-rejecting-anglo-saxon-studies/; Matthew Gabri-
ele and Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘The Middle Ages Have Been Misued by the
Far Right,’ TIME Magazine, November 21, 2019, https://time.com/5734697/
middle-ages-mistakes/; Erika Harlitz-Kern, ‘Academics Are at War Over
Racist Roots of “Anglo-Saxon” Studies,’ The Daily Beast, December 2, 2019,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/academics-are-at-war-over-racist-roots-of-
anglo-saxon-studies; Michael Wood, ‘Is the Term “Anglo-Saxon” Racist?’
339
walked across the now grassy foundation of my grandmother’s

house for the first time since it burned down in 2009.4 (I have
not, in the past, had the heart to trespass there. It seemed, some-
how, a violation.) I checked in on James B. Ellard’s grave and
talked to my dad about repairing its broken marker,5 which now
leans against an old oak. I have retreaded old territory while
trying to write my way towards a new one. Consequently, last
spring, when I stopped by the lot where my grandmother’s
house once stood, I found King Alfred daffodils blooming in
my grandmother’s front yard. Planted decades ago by my grand-
mother, the bulbs would not be suffocated by the smoke from
her house fire. They continue to come up every spring as if to
say, ‘Come in. We still live here, and it’s okay that you do not.’
At James B.’s gravesite, I remembered my mother’s first cousin,
Dora Lou,6 and saw the rhizomatic signs of many other Ellard
relatives hidden just beneath the trunk of the oak.
While these discoveries about my Mississippi home have
helped me leave the ‘home’ of Anglo-Saxon studies, un-homing,
in any context, is always a fraught process. It has left me without
a professional appellative and the disciplinary coherence that
BBC History Magazine, December 2019, https://www.historyextra.com/

period/anglo-saxon/professor-michael-wood-anglo-saxon-name-debate-
is-term-racist/; and Howard Williams, ‘Should “British Archaeology” Stop
Using “Anglo-Saxon”?’ ARCHEAOdeath [blog], December 12, 2019, https://
howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/12/should-british-archaeolo-
gy-stop-using-anglo-saxon/.
4 In 2009, my grandmother’s house, which I had inherited from her, caught
fire and burned down. This event, as I write in Chapter 1, prompted me to
face my family’s Anglo-Saxon(ist) past and write this book.
5 James B. Ellard was my great-great-great grandfather. He homesteaded in
what would become Ellard, Mississippi, served in the Mississippi Cavalry
during the Civil War, and owned slaves, my family has suggested, several
decades after the Civil War had ended. James B. is the patriarch of my
Mississippi family, and in chapter 5 of this book, I mourn my personal, fa-
milial relationship to him in conversation with mourning my professional
relationship with King Alfred, the patriarch of Anglo-Saxon studies.
6 Dora Lou was a figure of deep love, yet strange obsession, for my mother.
She appears as an agent of my mother’s genealogical research about the
Ellard family and my personal mourning of this genealogy in chapter 5 of
this book.
340
Becoming postSaxon
comes from the safe terms we use to introduce ourselves and

our work to other academics. When asked what I ‘do,’ I have
found myself searching for words, calling myself ‘a former An-
glo-Saxonist,’ ‘a recovering Anglo-Saxonist,’ or one who simply
‘works with Old English and Latin.’ Often, these professional
statements are not well-received, and on one occasion, I im-
mediately recognized that all credibility evacuated my air space
once I tried to explain my area of specialization absent the field-
identifying signifiers of ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ and ‘medievalist.’ I was
simply illegible. Despite repeated awkwardness and embarrass-
ment, I still can’t bring myself to return to the comfort of these
old, inherited terms, and I have learned to sit in the professional
blank space that has, for me, come to replace ‘Anglo-Saxonist.’
Although this un-homing process has been fraught with self-
doubt and various insecurities, climbing out from under the
weight of ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ has allowed me room to reflect upon
the ethics of what it means to be a professional academic and the
ways in which our signifiers deliver us into conversations or bar
the door from them. More importantly, leaving my disciplinary
home has given me permission to stray far from the comforts of
an early medievalist time zone and its centering of whiteness so
that I might knock on others’ doors and learn how to listen to
the conversations going on among my fellow scholars in other
fields and disciplines. This process has been extremely difficult,
not simply because the learning curve of another’s field is always
steep. Rather, in reading about African American histories,
poetries, and linguistics, I have had to confront my own tone-
deafness to racism (structural and otherwise) and learn how to
listen to that which I can only try to comprehend. Listening,
or, as Lisbeth Lipari terms it, ‘interlistening,’ is not about acous-
tics.7 It is about being receptive to the frequencies of another, be
they audible or merely felt sensations, for the purpose of ethical
‘attunement.’8 Listening and interlistening are no easy or small
7 Lisbeth Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
8 Ibid., 8–10, 51, 50, 205–22.
341
things because they require that we abandon self-soothing fre-

quencies and the agentive privilege of white forms of knowing.
And we are most resistant to listening when most need to do
just that. I can’t say that I am any closer to being a better (inter)
listener than I have been in the past. However, as a consequence
of no longer being at home in Anglo-Saxon studies, I was will-
ing to exit my field’s scholarly conversations and the boundaries
that limit what the field reads and how it reads, so that I might
approach African American studies as a true learner. Standing
at the doorstep of this field has been fraught with discomforts
that exceed the ones we all face when trying to write beyond our
disciplinary depth. Despite having presented parts of this chap-
ter to African American audiences and despite having had Af-
rican American readers, I feel and fear my whiteness is still too
centered in this work.9 I struggle with the likely possibility that
in writing this chapter, I have failed entirely to listen and have
instead just talked over and thereby silenced a story that was
never mine to tell. However, if I am willing to be honest at the
beginning of this book, I am obliged to do the same at the end in
the hopes that, if nothing else, a conversation can arise between
you and me or between yourself and others — a conversation
that is productive beyond the judgements that will be passed
regarding the successes or failures of this book. I am willing to
risk attempting a conversation between African American and
Anglo-Saxonist narratives and scholarly traditions so that the
things I do wrong will enable others to do them better. Likewise,
and most importantly, despite all my embarrassments, anxieties,
and feelings of failure, I can say that my journeys back home and
to others’ homes have enabled me to find a path away from mel-
ancholy. Consequently, while I know that mourning, like decol-
onization, is an always unfinished project, I can be in the lands
of my family and not feel haunted by the presence of its ghosts.
9 On the importance of decentering whiteness at a time when many white

persons do not want to examine too closely their own privilege and the
ways in which they have benefited from structural racism, see Robin
DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About
Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018).
342
Becoming postSaxon
I can be in the presence of those who have been crippled by the

Anglo-Saxonism of my personal and professional ‘fathers’ and
believe that somewhere in the future, there will be healing.
As Homi Bhabha writes, ‘the home does not remain the do-
main of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its so-
cial or historical counterpart. The unhomely is the shock of rec-
ognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world…
[of] the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history
to the wider disjunctions of political existence.’10 When I first
began writing this book, I had no idea that my confusions sur-
rounding personal and professional ‘unhomeliness’ would bear
the mark of colonial disruptions explored in Bhabha’s shrewd
translation of Freud’s ‘unheimlich,’ or ‘uncanny’ (both home-
like and un-home-like, simultaneously, such that the ‘home’
becomes a site of both familiarity and strangeness).11 While
my fraught relationship to home can never be compared to the
conditions of those counted among the disenfranchised of em-
pire, the (post)colonial diaspora, and racial state capitalism, this
shared understanding of home as ‘unhomely’ underscores de-
colonization as a ‘process,’ which, as Devika Chawla and Ahmet
Atay explain, ‘positions the colonized and the colonizer as in-
herently entwined.’12 Or rather, to reshape the words of Chawla
and Atay and position them within a postcolonial frame, such
a sharing of the unhomely marks the children of colonizers and
the children of colonial subjects as materially-affectively entan-
gled. For myself, these multi-generational kinships are figured
personally and professionally. I descend from one of Mississip-
pi’s many settler-colonial and slave-holding families and from
the ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ ‘fathers’ of Turner, Douglas, Kemble, and
Thorpe. Decolonizing has been, consequently, an often painful,
discomfiting, and even terrifying process of sitting (and strug-
gling) with the unhomely feelings that arise from the rattlings
10 Homi Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home,’ Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141, 144.
11 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”,’ in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Alix
Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 368–407.
12 Devika Chawla and Ahmet Atay, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing Autoethnog-
raphy,’ Cultural Studies — Critical Methodologies 18, no. 1 (2018): 6.
343
of a semi-closeted, ghostly old guard. It has entailed allowing

myself to bear witness to how these feelings about my families’
pasts provoke in me the overlapping responses of prejudice and
shame, indignation and horror, emotional paralysis and con-
stant worry. It is has involved committing myself to take on and
own, and work through, all of these responses which come from
within me, in order to leave my Anglo-Saxonist home in Missis-
sippi behind, and to learn to try and listen better to the voices of
the colonized and the children of the postcolonial with whom
I am entwined by way of the unhomely. Because I am obligated
to understand my part, and my family’s part, in all of this. Read-
ing texts, historical narratives, and first-person accounts of how
colonialism has unhomed others has not only helped me begin
the process of unlearning inherited beliefs, inherited feelings,
and inherited affects but also enables me to begin the process
of decathecting from personal and professional homes that had
become too unhomely, unheimlich, and haunted to dwell in.
While this decolonizing work is never finished, it does aspire
towards an ‘outcome,’ which Chawla and Atay describe as ‘the
ability of subjects (both the colonized and the colonizers) to
achieve disidentification…a survival strategy for resisting eve-
ryday colonizing practices’ that, in turn, ‘leads to the emergence
of hybrid cultures and identities’ and also ‘creates borderline or
in-between experiences’ that require ‘constant cultural negotia-
tions or cultural maneuvering.’13
As both the introductory and concluding chapters of this
book evidence, a clearing can be made for these border spaces
by way of autoethnography, a genre of writing that has recently
been explored as postcolonial praxis. As Archana Pathak ex-
plains, autoethnography requires an ‘examin[ation of] oneself
and one’s life in a way that fosters thoughtful, engaged, genuine,
and rigorous critique,’ and it also requires ‘introspection, hones-
ty, and courage.’14 Because of these requirements, the practice of
13 Ibid.
14 Archana Pathak, ‘Musings on Postcolonial Autoethnography: Telling the
Tale of/through My Life,’ in Handbook of Autoethnography, ed. Stacy Hol-
344
Becoming postSaxon
autoethnography ‘disrupt[s]…the intellectual training that most

of us have received’ and is therefore a method ripe for postcolo-
nial framing.15 Pathak is not alone. Devika Chawla and Amardo
Rodriguez include the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks,
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cheríe Moraga, and Sandra Cisneros in the
emergent category of postcolonial autoethnography even as they
wonder why this ‘other’ body of ‘writing that was intricately per-
sonal and inherently political…[has been] treated as “outside”
of discussions about autoethnographic writing.’16 From these
musings, Chawla and Rodriguez consider writing as a ‘medium’
that is ‘complicit in the formation of an intellectual imperialism’
when we perceive it as a product rather than a process because,
as they explain, when we treat writing as a product, this ‘mask[s]
the integral role that our fears, anxieties, insecurities, vulnera-
bilities, and paranoia play in shaping our view and knowledge of
our world.’17 In contrast, the autoethnographic ‘I,’ as expressed by
scholars of color such as Anzaldua, hooks, Minh-ha, and others,
articulates a writing process that ‘striv[es] to embody a project
that fundamentally alters our ways of being and understanding
the world.’18 A 2018 special issue in Cultural Studies — Critical
Methodologies on postcolonial autoethnography reflects upon
the genre as ‘a site for interrogating…coloniality’ and ‘a criti-
cally reflexive tool.’19 Postcolonial autoethnography gives voice
to the personal, individual, and powerfully anecdotal ways in
which coloniality and racism (whether cultural, institutional, or
interpersonal) impact academics of color. Moreover, it provides
a platform that asks all of us to listen with our hearts, interlisten
with the force of our entire bodies, and learn to feel, as best we
man Jones (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2013), 595.

15 Ibid.
16 Devika Chawla and Amardo Rodriguez, ‘Narratives on Longing, Being,
and Knowing: Envisioning a Writing Epistemology,’ International Journal
of Progressive Education 4, no. 1 (2008): 16.
17 Ibid., 18.
18 Ibid., 20.
19 Mohan J. Dutta, ‘Autoethnography as Decolonization, Decolonizing Au-
toethnography: Resisting to Build Our Homes,’ Cultural Studies — Critical
Methodologies 18, no. 1 (2018): 96.
345
can, the impossible, yet ethical task of what it is like for others
who bear the hardest burdens, and also the worst forms of psy-
chic and material violence, wrought by racism and the institu-
tions, including academic disciplines, that sustain that racism.
While the writers of postcolonial autoethnography are pri-
marily people of color who speak from the many subjectivities
and identity positions generated within and on the margins of
the (post)colonial diaspora, Esther Fitzpatrick asks us to consid-
er a place for the ‘Pākehā’ in this genre,20 a Māori term for white
as opposed to Māori New Zealander. Fitzpatrick’s autoethno-
graphic writing ‘enact[s] a methodology of decolonization’ by
‘reject[ing] a settler future and instead consider[ing] “opening
the possibility of other futures”.’21 Like Bhabha, she also turns to
the question of home in the form of ‘reaching back to stories
that have traveled through family genealogies and social histo-
ry’; recognizing them as a ‘narrative inheritance’ that haunts us;
‘remembering, interrogating, and retelling our stories’ as acts of
colonial disruption; and imagining, from these inherited narra-
tives, ‘postcolonial counterstories’ about ‘cultural diversity and
social justice that includes everyone.’22 As an example, Fitzpat-
rick’s autoethnography stages a series of imaginary conversations
between her great-grandfather, Charles, and Hira Te Popo, an
honored kaumatua (chief) of Ngāti Ira, which she claims are not
idealized, but of course these imaginary conversations cannot
entirely escape idealizations of various sorts. While Fitzpatrick’s
essay offers one example of how white academics can do post-
colonial ethnography, I cannot write a similar ‘counterstory.’ The
family stories passed on to me, which involve encounters with
Chickasaw peoples and African Americans, pivot on the violent
resettlement of native peoples, slave ownership, and lynchings.
Although the Ellards were not born to be hateful people, neither
‘diversity’ nor ‘social justice’ were considerations of my great-
20 Esther Fitzpatrick, ‘A Story of Becoming: Entanglement, Settler Ghosts,

and Postcolonial Counterstories,’ Cultural Studies — Critical Methodologies
18, no. 1 (2018): 44.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 44, 45.
346
Becoming postSaxon
grandfather, nor of his father, and so on. Further, stories of set-

tler colonialism, the Confederacy, and the Jim Crow South were
woven into my life, from childhood forward. I was taken, with
frequency, to Confederate battlefields, Civil War reenactments,
and Sons of the Confederacy functions by my dad; my mother
sewed my standard-bearer costume and stars-and-bars flag for
an elementary school play; and my family, friends, teachers, and
community members thought these actions were completely
normal. To be clear, while my childhood exhibited what could
be called a ‘deep’ Southern pathology, it is not only Southern-
ers who believe in and fantasize about such a South. America
desires this from The South as much as, if not more than, South-
erners do. Between the lines of this book, I have written and
re-written these and many other family stories in an attempt to
disentangle and work through a multi-generational narrative
inheritance that will allow me to ‘open the possibility of other
futures’ for my daughters, so that they can one day write their
own postcolonial counterstories. Within the lines of this book,
I have also tried to do the same work of disentanglement and
‘working through’ for Anglo-Saxon studies. By tracing the nar-
ratives we have inherited from the early medieval literatures of
Krákumál, Beowulf, and Asser’s Life of King Alfred and the early
medievalist writings of Sharon Turner, James Douglas, John
Mitchell Kemble, and Benjamin Thorpe, this book aims to ‘open
the possibility of other’ scholarly ‘futures’ that are not ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ but ‘postSaxon.’ Before turning to what these speculative,
postSaxon futures may entail, it is my hope that in the writing
of this book, I have learned to listen to the postcolonial autoeth-
nographies of Pathak, Chowla and Rodriguez, Anzaldua, and
hooks, to name a few, so that I might offer a corollary contribu-
tion to that of Fitzpatrick and other Pākehās of settler-colonial
descent. Which is this: that narratives of open reflection upon
one’s ‘family’ inheritances (both personal and professional),
and the bereavement that ensues, challenge the genre restric-
tions of much of academic writing, and are critical to necessary
field change, because they underscore scholarship and scholarly
347
writing as entangled processes of personal, embodied, and emo-

tional acts of postcolonial becoming (rather than being).
While this book begins and ends with autoethnography, its
central, ‘Interlude’ Movement turns on fictocriticism. ‘Becom-
ing postSaxon, Or, a Biochemical Vita Ælfredi’ leverages this
mode of creative writing as a companionable partner to literary
criticism. While the first part of the book talks about the need
for mourning, ‘Biochemical Vita’ enacts in real time this process
of mourning, affectively doing the labor that academic prose is
not only ill-equipped to serve but, moreover, openly resistant
to do. Some problems, as I have learned, cannot be addressed
critically. They are too tender and too close, too complex and
too affectively overwrought. Creative writing can sometimes be
the only way to approach a critical problem so that we might
view, in different and complex ways, its multiple, contradic-
tory dimensions without having to organize them rationally–
taxonomically, take an argumentative position, or neglect some
strand of ideas for the sake of making a more streamlined and
‘logical’ argument. As professional readers of creative writing,
we know its world-making powers, and we know (and teach)
its life-changing powers. As an attempt to make myself post- or
decolonial, writing this book has required that I rethink literary
criticism as an activity that accesses multiple genres: autoeth-
nography, creative writing (or fictocriticism), and traditional
academic prose. In turn, I have had to rethink the literary critic
as one who not only writes about others’ literary labors but also
identifies herself as a member of the literary community.
One of a handful of Anglo-Saxonists I know of who has
worked across these genre divisions is Allen Frantzen,23 and
given the strange closeness between this book and his Desire For
23 I am grateful to Robin Norris for pointing this out to me. Other scholars in
the field of early medieval English studies who have employed autoethnog-
raphy in their work, that I am aware of, include James Earl, Gillian Over-
ing, and in collaboration with Overing, Clare Lees. Detailed statements
regarding their autoethnographic writings appear on the following pages.
348
Becoming postSaxon
Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition,24

it is, perhaps, critical to address Frantzen directly at the close
of this book. As Anglo-Saxon studies well knows, Frantzen was
an editor of two collections that took up critical theory in the
field — Speaking Two Languages and Anglo-Saxonism and the
Construction of Social Identity.25 These two volumes both ampli-
fied and added other scholars’ voices to the arguments Frantzen
advocated in Desire for Origins. Speaking Two Languages, es-
pecially, collectively argued that the critic’s voice and identity
should be allowed into the scholarly frame as a valuable strat-
egy for raising, sorting out, and adjudicating certain arguments
within the field. In this collection, Gillian Overing positions
herself in relation to fellow ‘female critic’ Elizabeth Elstob and
to Eve: three ‘female reader[s], translator[s], and interpreter[s]’
in and of Old English.26 Further, James Earl, ‘like Freud,’ consid-
ers cultural analysis in relation to self-analysis in an essay that
locates Anglo-Saxon studies’ dreams of a heroic, tribal Beowulf
in relation to Earl’s own dreams about the poem.27 Yet, as much
as Frantzen’s introduction lobbies for and enacts the first-per-
son voices of ‘I’ and ‘we,’ it also sets strict limits on them. Crit-
ics are professionals who speak in order to express ‘leadership
and communication’ about the shifting terrain of ‘tradition,’
24 Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and
Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
25 Allen J. Frantzen, ed., Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines
and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1991); Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-
Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University of
Florida Press, 1997).
26 Gillian Overing, ‘On Reading Eve: Genesis B and the Readers’ Desire,’ in
Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory
in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991), 36.
27 James Earl, ‘Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization,’ in Speaking Two
Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval
Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), 65–89.
349
‘reestablishing and renewing’ it for a new generation.28 While

voice, according to Frantzen, may reflect the scholar’s individu-
ated position, it should be ‘leader[ly]’ and ‘communicati[ve],’ it
should ‘reestablis[h]’ and ‘rene[w].’ Frantzen’s position serves
as both a statement of ‘house style’ for the volume as well as
editorial blockade against Overing and Earl’s contributions,
which are the most self-articulate and self-aware of the collec-
tion. Frantzen’s editorial discussion of how voice should be used
in scholarly writing cannot be viewed separately from his criti-
cism of colonialism, neither of which make room for self-doubt,
self-reflection, or self-critique because both assume a posture of
leadership within Anglo-Saxon studies. Decades later, Frantzen’s
words in Speaking Two Languages sound like dangerous omens
that foretell of his own fate in the field’s critical ‘tradition.’
Before turning to this fate, however, I would like to linger
for a moment with Frantzen’s monograph that followed Desire
for Origins, Before the Closet,29 which discusses ‘same-sex love’
in early medieval Britain and its relationship to later cultural
moments in Anglo-America. While the chapters of the book
conform to the voice, mode, and perspective that we expect of
a certain type of ‘learned’ academic scholarship, Frantzen’s ‘Af-
terword: Me and my Shadows’ takes an autobiographical turn:
In the course of my work I found myself wondering about the

lost experience of the Anglo-Saxons. I found myself extrapo-
lating from modern to medieval worlds of sexual behavior
and from Anglo-Saxon texts to the larger, unknowable, and
hence shadowy worlds around them. It is not the contem-
porary sexual culture of queer theory and media-generated
homosexual stereotypes that I find comparable to medieval
28 Allen J. Frantzen, ‘Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference

and Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Medieval Culture,’ in Speaking Two
Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval
Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), 3,
29 Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from “Beowulf ” to
“Angels in America” (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).
350
Becoming postSaxon
cultures, but rather the world of American life of the 1960s

and before, the world in which I was raised. By way of con-
cluding this study I want to speculate on similarities between
some social conditions in my past and social conditions at
levels of Anglo-Saxon society that the texts do not discuss,
levels lost to us but perhaps recoverable if we consider some
possible similarities between our culture and theirs.30
The ‘world of American life of the 1960s’ is characterized by

Frantzen’s youth spent on a farm in rural Iowa followed by his
enlistment in the Army, when he was stationed in Korea during
the Vietnam War. His Afterword contemplates memories from
his past in a first-person voice that extends (and perhaps also
subverts, or unsettles) the purview of Frantzen’s more critical-
scholarly ‘I,’ enunciated in the Introduction to Speaking Two
Languages. Specifically, the Afterword affords the critic’s voice
a reprieve from sounding out positions of ‘leadership and com-
munication’ so that it can be autobiographical. Yet Frantzen’s
autobiographical ‘I’ announces its arrival at the conclusion of
his book — after he has fulfilled his scholarly duties. This ‘I’
remembers an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ past as one that has resolved the
questions, anxieties, and silences of Frantzen’s youth. One might
ask, for what purpose does Frantzen use his first-person experi-
ences in order to ‘speculate’ upon certain unknown and ‘undis-
cussed…social conditions…of Anglo-Saxon society’? I would
answer that, perhaps, Frantzen finds, in his own coming-of-age
story, points of reference that can be mapped onto a rural, agrar-
ian, and militarized perception of Anglo-Saxon masculinity
and homosexuality. By coordinating his lived experiences with
those who inhabit a speculative, Anglo-Saxon past, Frantzen le-
gitimates his own ‘masculinist’ sexual identity amid the ‘queer
theory’ and ‘homosexual stereotypes’ of the late-nineties, which
figured gayness in fluid or effeminate terms. Although Before
the Closet offers Frantzen’s ‘I’ more narrative latitude than the
tight-laced voice of Speaking Two Languages, both projects limit
30 Ibid., 293.
351
that voice to one that already knows certain things (or hunts for
historical evidence to affirm certain beliefs: about masculinity,
about sexuality, etc.) and has no room to grow, or to change un-
der the pressure of others’ thought and work.
As a scholar whose work has been shaped by Anglo-Saxon
studies’ unwillingness, for the most part, to engage the logics of
settler colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as critical theo-
ries of gender and sexuality — and as a scholar who has come
under fire for his betrayals of postcolonial and feminist posi-
tions — we have to look at the kind of ‘I’ that Frantzen enacted
in his scholarship. For Frantzen’s ‘I’ so frequently cannot bear
to be introspective: it is an ‘I’ that speaks rather than listens, an
‘I’ that is afraid to voice itself until the critical work has already
been done. At the end of the day, this is an ontological ‘I’ — a
‘being’ that does not realize that its dynamism could only ever
come from an earnest pursuit of becoming a better, more ethical
self, which itself entails a willingness to be continuously upend-
ed and unsettled in one’s thinking. And this is also a dynamism
which Frantzen’s scholarship works very hard to disavow, as it
is suffused with a belief in fairly static (and tradition-bound)
states of identity, such that ‘men’ and ‘women,’ for example, do
not occupy spaces where their supposedly singular and invio-
lable ‘genders’ or ‘sexes’ could ever really mix or blend (And he
expresses quite a bit of hostility in his work toward scholars who
see gender and sexuality as more fluid and non-essentialized.)31
With Frantzen in mind as a cautionary negative exemplum,
‘postSaxon’ is meant to signal a process of becoming. Not a key
term but a placeholder (and therefore meant to be ultimately,
eventually, replaced), postSaxon suggests the many and multi-
ple in-process futures of early medieval studies that arise from
a multitude of ‘I’s seeking experimental, dynamic change, self-
31 See, for example, the entries for ‘Femininity,’ ‘Gender,’ ‘Identity,’ ‘Masculin-
ity,’ and ‘Sex,’ in Allen J. Frantzen, Anglo-Saxon Keywords (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2012). On Frantzen’s hostility towards and disapproval of much
work in contemporary queer theory that views gender and sexuality as a
fluid state of affairs, see his ‘Introduction: Straightforward’ in Before the
Closet (1998).
352
Becoming postSaxon
renewal, and disciplinary renovation.32 In using ‘postSaxon,’ this

book does not employ ‘post’ as a prefix that signals rupture, be-
cause the future is never divorced from the past.33 Rather ‘post-
Saxon’ recognizes that early medieval studies no longer pledges
allegiance to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ politics, yet it still remains po-
liced by its Anglo-Saxonist spectres, an ideological old guard
that we continue to struggle against and which many scholars
within the field are still unable to part with or condemn.34
As this book has explained, our relationship to these signifi-
ers predates us by many generations and many, many centuries.
However, as signifiers that were enunciated by the ‘sovereign fa-
ther’ King Alfred and organized by the interdisciplinary ‘fathers’
historian Sharon Turner, archaeologist James Douglas, philolo-
gist Benjamin Thorpe, and polymath John Mitchell Kemble,
‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ are genealogical terms that
render us ‘children’ to these men. In using them, we declare al-
legiance to our field’s interdisciplinary methods even as we as-
sume a set of racial-colonial ideologies built into them. To be an
Anglo-Saxonist is, therefore, to stand in the ghostly shadows of
‘fathers’ that stretch back a millennium and to assume a position
of interminable mourning that has become melancholic — for
their ‘fatherly’ presence and the nation-empire to which they
32 One could be, for example, ‘Old/e English,’ but this book does not augur
the future.
33 For example, ‘postcolonial’ is a term that can be used to mark the end of
the decolonial period, a political era that extended from the mid- to late-
twentieth century, in which colonialism ended as a system of European
rule; however, the ideological forces of colonialism continue to linger
within and without these so-called (post)colonial nations. As many Latin
American scholars argue, ‘coloniality,’ the living legacy of colonialism,
continues to maintain the racial, political, and social hierarchies created by
and maintained by European colonialism. In America, I consider colonial-
ity to operate, for example, by way of institutional racism. While we live in
a politically postcolonial world, we are not ‘post’ colonialism but remain
struggling towards a time of decoloniality.
34 See, for example, the recent collective statement signed by over 60 scholars
in the field of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies, ‘The Responsible Use of the Term “An-
glo-Saxon”,’ n.d., http://www.fmass.eu/uploads/pdf/responsible_use_of%20
the%20term%20_Anglo-Saxon.pdf.
353
belonged. This book has exorcised the ghosts of Alfred, Turner,

Douglas, Thorpe, and Kemble so that I might mourn the terms
‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ and free myself from their
crushing ideological freight. In so doing, I have freed myself
to travel scholarly paths that have led me to African American
studies, a field that reveals the role that ‘Old English’ plays in
Anglo-Saxonist discourse even as it shows a once-Anglo Saxon
studies how African-American poetics ‘disinvent’ and ‘reinvent’
the temporal and linguistic parameters of a postSaxon field.
Many other paths, however, are possible, and in invoking
the place-holder ‘postSaxon,’ this book hopes to begin a con-
versation within a once-‘Anglo Saxon’ studies that does not set
its sights on coming up with new signifiers to replace old ones
without excavating their troubled histories and the ways in
which they give support to some of the most violent support-
ers of white supremacist beliefs. Rather, I hope that our shared
field, whatever we might call it, will work privately and publicly
to recognize that, whatever the ‘love objects’ that keep us affec-
tively tied to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ we must value
and enact the work of mourning that will free us from these
harmful ghosts.
354
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Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material.
9/11 attacks 94
Abels, Richard 186–87, 247

Abraham, Nicolas 63, 66, 72, 77, 82, 86, 139n77, 234n131
Adémar de Chabannes 85n71
African Americans: and Ku Klux Klan 295, 302–3; medieval
amusements and iconography 294, 295–98; and prohibition
movement 302–3; and social control 308–11; as targets of
alcohol advertisements 299–301, 303–8, 311–12 (see also Rap
music)
Age of the Vikings, The (Sawyer) 86n73
Alaniz, Maria Luisa 309
Alcohol and alcohol consumption: advertisements, connec-
tions to race and sex 300–301, 303–8, 311–12; in black power
narrative 300–301, 303–5, 318–23; PowerMaster contro-
versy 316–17; prohibition movement 302–3; and social
control 308–11 (see also Olde English malt liquor)
Alfred, King: Angulsaxonum rex title, in biographies 186,
187–88, 189, 194; Angulsaxonum rex title, in charters 179–81,
183–85; body of, in Anglo-Saxon corpus 227–28, 230–32;
body of, as corpse 249–52; body of, in fictocriticism 259–
399
61, 262–64, 266–67, 271–75, 276; body of, physical and sick-
ly 191, 242–49; body of, physical and vernacular 192–94,
205–6; body of, textual and Latinized 76, 195–99, 200–202,
205–7; body of, translation during English Civil Wars 211–
12; sovereignty of, in annal records framework 187–90,
194–96; sovereignty of, in crucified Christ framework 205–
8; sovereignty of, effigial presence 213, 214–26, 216, 218, 219,
223, 226, 249, 250, 251; sovereignty of, in royal piety frame-
work 193–94, 198–99; in Turner’s History 75–77
Alim, Samy 285, 325–26, 328n100
Al-Qaeda 93–95
Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (Rask; and Thorpe’s translation) 231,
234–35
Anasemia, as concept 72 (see also Encryption and psychic
crypts)
Anderson, Paul Christopher 295n23
Anglo-Saxon England (Stenton) 82–83
Anglo-Saxon ideologies see Colonialism; Race and ethnicity
Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity
(Frantzen) 349
‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ OED definition 20–24, 178n3
Anglo-Saxons: as ekphrastic figures 104, 137–38, 141–42, 144–
45; as military figures 134–37; as racialized figures 147–49,
165–66; as raciolinguistic figures 230–35, 289; as term 178–
83, 209–10, 239–41 (see also Alfred, King)
Anglo-Saxon studies: ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ OED definition 20–24,
178n3; collaborative mourning of 49–51; early reception
of critical theory 26–27, 35; emergence at Oxford 226–28;
failure of postcolonial approach 36–41; fathers of 24–25
(see also Douglas, James; Kemble, John Mitchell; Thorpe,
Benjamin; Turner, Sharon); and medievalists of color 51–54;
philology 30–31, 90n87, 168, 227–28, 230–35; and post-
Saxon concept 352–53; professional ‘being’ and ‘becom-
ing’ 235–38, 241–42, 254–57; ‘state of the field’ conversations
(2006-2010) 28–34; un-homing process 340–44 (see also
Old English)
Annal records 188–90, 194–95
400
index
Antiquarian archaeologists: ekphrastic pairing with barrow

excavations 104, 137–38, 141–42, 144–45; emotional connec-
tion to barrow excavations 138–41, 145–46; incorporation
of barrow excavations 104, 138–41, 162; professionalization
of 149–56; racial identification of barrow excavations 147–
49, 165–66
Anzaldua, Gloria 345
Arabian Prince 283
Archaeology: Alfred fragment discovery 249, 276; Douglas as
father of Anglo-Saxon 103–5; transformation of field 105–7
(see also Antiquarian archaeologists)
Arizona Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 54
Ásatrú Alliance 92n92
Asser, Life of King Alfred: overview 186–87; on Alfred’s physical
and vernacular body 191–94, 205–6, 243; on Alfred’s textual
and Latinized body 195–99, 200–202, 205–6; annal records
as political framework 187–90
Atay, Ahmet 343, 344
Attridge, Derek 332
Autoethnography: as academic approach 43–45, 344–46; as
mechanism for mourning 42–43, 45–49, 347–48 (see also
Fictocriticism)
Baker, Geoffrey 323

Bald’s Leechbook 243
Ballantyne, Tony 234n129
Barrows 116, 130; accidental vs. intentional excavations 131–34;
in Beowulf’s poetic structure 115–19, 116, 128–29, 130; as
boundary markers 109–11, 129n57; Douglas’s excavation
model 102, 103–4, 132, 133, 134–35, 144, 156; early medieval
function 107–11; ekphrastic performance of 104, 137–38,
141–42, 144–45; as identity-making sites 112–15; incorpora-
tion and mourning of 104, 138–41, 145–46, 162; mortuary
interior of Beowulf 119–20; and mound-breaking 121–22;
and racial identification 147–49, 165–66; re- and de-terri-
torialized in Beowulf 122–25; re- and de-territorialized as
military territory 134–37
401
Baudrillard, Jean 141, 142

Bauman, Richard 288–89, 334
Beckett, David 235–36
Before the Closet (Frantzen) 350–52
‘Being/becoming’ 235–38, 241–42, 254–57
Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi 186
Benson, Thomas 227, 228
Beowulf: and archaeology 167–68; ekphrasis in 126–29; Hinds’s
graphic presentation 287n7; mortuary interior 119–20;
mound-breaking in 120–22; and Nenia Britannica 142–43;
ring structure and interlace 114, 115–19, 116, 128–29, 130; ter-
ritory transformation in 122–25
Beowulf (character): chiasmus of living and dying 115–19;
ekphrastic transformation of 126–29; as mound-break-
er 120–22
Bhabha, Homi 329, 343, 346
Biddick, Kathleen 99–100, 199–200n65
‘Big Daddy’ figure 300–301, 303–4
Bignall, Simone 256n33
Bjork, Robert 233n129
Black power: Black Power movement in alcohol advertis-
ing 300–301, 303–5; Olde English recoded as black resist-
ance 283–84, 312, 312–16; Olde English recoded as intergen-
erational narrative of 318–23
Blaikley, Alexander 221n109
Blood eagle: encryption of 89, 99–100; in Krákumál, over-
view 62, 77; in literary fiction 94–96; in popular culture,
overview 91–94; scholarly debates on 88; Stenton’s inter-
pretation 82–83; in television 96–99; Turner’s interpreta-
tion 77–79; Wallace-Hadrill’s interpretation 84–87
Blood Eagle (Russell) 94–95
Blood Red Eagle 92n93
Body see Corpus
Bradley, Adam 333–34n114
Bridges, John 221n109
Briggs, Charles 288–89, 334
Britannia (Camden) 209–10n82
402
index
British Society of Antiquaries 229

Brooks, Nicholas 27, 181
Broom, Kent 138–40
Browne, Sir Thomas, Hydriotaphia 139
Bruhn, Siglind 125n48
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) 317
Burial mounds see Barrows
Camden, William, Britannia 209–10n82

Campbell, James 88
Carver, Martin 106, 111n22, 123
Charles I, King of England 210–11, 212, 214, 222
Charles II, King of England 210, 211, 212, 222
Charters 179–81, 183–86, 195–96
Chatham, Kent 102, 132, 134–38
Chawla, Devika 343, 344, 345
Christ 199–202, 204–8
Christian, Fletcher 94n95
Christianity: and charters 183–85; and ethnicity 182–83; mod-
els of royal piety 193–94, 198–99; sovereignty of Christ 199–
202, 204–8
Cisneros, Sandra 345
Civil Rights movement 300–301, 303–4
Civil Wars, English 210–14
Claxton, Marshall 221n109
Clunies Ross, Margaret 70
Collectanea Antiqua (Smith) 149–56, 152, 155, 164
Collins, Patricia Hill 310
Colonialism: in alcohol advertising 288, 290, 291, 306–8; and
decolonization 85–87, 241–42, 256, 305, 306–7, 329–30,
343–46; encryption of 71–74, 78, 80–81; French and Indian
War 67–68; Krákumál in rhetoric of 67–70; Olde English
recoded as postcolonial language politics 329–31; and Old
English 288–92; and old guard ghost 31–33, 36–38, 40–41,
353–54; and ontological ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ 237–38,
241–42, 254–55; and postcolonial approaches 36–41, 344–46;
World War II 83 (see also Race and ethnicity)
403
Cooper, James Fenimore, Prairie, The 297n26

Corpus: of Anglo-Saxon studies 227–28, 230–35; of
Christ 199–202, 204–8; effigial presence of Alfred’s 213,
214–26, 216, 218, 219, 223, 226, 249, 250, 251; shifting seman-
tics of 202–4; and translation of Alfred’s corpse 211–12;
vernacular body into Latinized 195–99, 200–202, 205–7
Crania Britannica (Davis and Thurnam): illustrations 157–63,
158, 159, 160, 161, 164; physical and racialized descrip-
tions 163–66
Craniology 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165–66
Creative writing see Autoethnography; Fictocriticism
Criminality and violence 302–3, 311–12
Critical race theory 301n33
Critical theory: approached through multiple genres 348–52;
early reception in Anglo-Saxon studies 26–27, 35; postcolo-
nial approach vs. postcolonial medievalist 36–41; in ‘state of
the field’ conversations (2006–2010) 28–34
Crohn’s disease 243–44, 258–59, 266
Crucifixion, of Christ 199–202, 204–8
Crusader Gold (Gibbins) 95–96
Crypts see Barrows; Encryption and psychic crypts
Cunningham, John 246–47
Cust, Leonard 224
Dadd, Richard 221n109

Dailey, Patricia 26
David, King (biblical figure) 187, 198–99
Davies, Joshua 27
Davis, Craig 119n36, 182n19
Davis, Joseph Bernard see Crania Britannica
Davis, J. Pain 222n109
Davis, Kathleen 27, 36, 38–39
Davis, Rocío G. 45, 51
Decolonization 85–87, 241–42, 256, 305, 306–7, 329–30, 343–46
Deleuze, Gilles 33, 111, 113–15, 256
Dennis, Michael Robert 48
Desire for Origins (Frantzen) 26, 36, 39, 348–49
404
index
Dialogue on the Correct and Improved Writing of English

(Smith) 209n82
Dilated Peoples 330–31
Dockray-Miller, Mary 26, 29, 34n19, 289
Douglas, James, as father of Anglo-Saxon studies 25, 103–5,
175–76 (see also Nenia Britannica)
Downes, Paul 215
Dr. Dre 283, 313, 316n66, 317–21
Drout, Michael 28, 30–33
du Lhut, Daniel Greysolon Sieur 288, 290, 291, 293
Dumas, Alexandre 297
Dumitrescu, Irina 27
Earl, James 26, 349, 350

Eazy-E 283–84, 313–15, 316n66
Echard, Siân 287n7
Eckardt, Hella 122
Effigial presence 213, 214–26, 216, 218, 219, 223, 226, 249, 250,
251
Einarsson, Bjarni 88
Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 187, 193–94
Ekphrasis: barrow-antiquarian ekphrastic pairing 104,
137–38, 141–42, 144–45; in Beowulf 126–29; as performative
agent 104, 125–26
Ella, King of Northumbria: in Krákumál, overview 61–62;
silenced voice of 77–81; in television adaptation 99
Ellard family: imaginary genealogy 261–62, 264–66, 267–71,
273; and postcolonial autoethnography 346–47; transgen-
erational haunting 42–43, 258–59, 343–44
Elstob, Elizabeth 349
Embodiment see Incorporation
Encryption and psychic crypts: of Anglo-Saxon corpus 234–35;
of blood eagle 89, 99–100; of colonialism 71–74, 78, 80–81;
as self-preservation 71, 77; through incorporation 71–74,
138–41, 162; and transgenerational haunting 86–87, 89
English Civil Wars 210–14
Ethnicity see Race and ethnicity
405
Eusebius, Life of Constantine 193–94

Evans, Hiram Wesley 295n22
Evidence (rapper) 330–31
Exoticism 305–6
Fairford Graves (Wylie) 145–49, 150

Fairholt, F.W. 151, 163
Fanon, Frantz 237
Fauset, Jessie, “My House and a Glimpse of My Life There-
in” 295–98
Feminism and feminist theory 34n19, 53, 337n1
Fictocriticism: applied to Alfred 259–61, 262–64, 266–67,
271–75, 276; as genre and scholarly approach 277–79; as
mechanism for mourning 277–80, 348
Fitzpatrick, Esther 346
Flesh see Corpus
Folger Shakespeare Library 54
Foot, Sarah 27, 62, 179
Fradenburg, L.O. Aranye 91, 118–19, 126
Frank, Roberta 83–84, 88, 210n88
Frantzen, Allen: Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social
Identity 349; Before the Closet 350–52; critical theory ap-
proach 26, 35, 348–52; Desire for Origins 26, 36, 39, 348–49;
and feminism 53, 337n1; Speaking Two Languages 349–50;
on Turner 62
French and Indian War 67–68
Frosh, Stephen 64, 99
Gangsta rap and lifestyle 314–15, 317–23

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 284–85, 325
Geary, Patrick 120
Gender: feminism and feminist theory 34n19, 53, 337n1; mas-
culinity 299, 300–301, 303, 314, 318–19, 351–52; misogyny 53,
337 (see also Sex and sexuality)
Geroulanos, Stefanos 186
Gesta Danorum (Saxo Grammaticus) 77–78
G-Funk 318–23
406
index
Ghosts see Haunting/ghosts

Gibbins, David, Crusader Gold 95–96
Gilmor, William 294n17
Giola, Dana 332
Goodrich, Micah 54
Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, A (Rask; and Thorpe’s
translation) 231–35
Grant, David 309
Grave-robbing 121–22
Gray, Herman 305n40
Greenberg, Janelle Renfrow 210n87
Gregory, Pope, Regula Pastoralis 187, 193–94, 205–6n75
Grief see Mourning
Grimm, Jacob 289, 299
Guardian (newspaper) 20, 22–23, 30–31, 241
Guattari, Félix 33, 111, 113–15, 256
Gummere, Francis 287n7
Gupta, Pamila 202
Gurteen, S. Humphreys 20, 21–22
Haas, Gerrit 279

Hadley, D.M. 110n18
Hagedorn, Suzanne 220
Hagman, George 48
Halama, Alta Cools 332–33
Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, A (Stodnick and Trill-
ing) 35–38
Hardin, Tayana 277, 304n39
Härke, Heinrich 106
Harris, Stephen 27, 36–37, 182
Hart, Solomon Alexander 221n109
Haunting/ghosts: of Alfred in Anglo-Saxon corpus 227–28,
230–32; of Alfred’s effigial presence 213, 214–26, 216, 218,
219, 223, 226, 249, 250, 251; of old guard 31–34, 36–38, 40–41,
353–54; transgenerational 42–43, 86–87, 89, 258–59, 343–44
(see also Encryption and psychic crypts; Mourning)
Haydon, Benjamin Robert 221n109
407
Heavy metal bands 92

Herd, Denise A. 302n37, 311n58
Hickes, George 227, 228
Hinds, Gareth 287n7
Hip Hop Nation Language 285, 325–29
Hirst, Michael 98–99
History of England (Rapin-Troyas) 219, 220
History of the Anglo-Saxons (Turner): critical reception 62–63,
81–82; incorporation and encryption in 75–81; Krákumál as
inspiration 61–62, 64–65, 74–75
Hoare, Sir Richard Colt 143
Holland, Philemon 209–10n82
Homosexuality 351–52
hooks, bell 345
Hopkins, Pauline, “Talma Gordon” 297n26
Horner, Shari 26
Horsley, John Callcott 221n109
Howe, Nick 27
Hydriotaphia (Browne) 139
Ice Cube 283, 313, 316n66

Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, The (Niles) 39, 249–52, 253
Identity-making: of barrow-antiquarian ekphrastic pair-
ing 104, 137–38, 141–42, 144–45; barrows as sites of 112–15;
ekphrastic transformation of Beowulf 126–29; of funeral
tableau 123–25; professional ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ 235–38,
241–42, 254–57; racialized barrow excavations 147–49,
165–66; and territory concept 111–12 (see also Signifying)
Incorporation: of Anglo-Saxon corpus 234–35; of barrow
excavations 104, 138–41, 162; encryption through 71–74,
138–41, 162; in Krákumál 66–67, 75, 139n78; of Krákumál in
colonialism rhetoric 67–70; vs. mourning 66–67; transla-
tion as 76; in Turner’s History 75–77
Interlistening 341–42
International Medieval Congress (Kalamazoo) 29, 34n19,
52–53
International Medieval Congress (Leeds) 34n19, 52
408
index
International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) 34n19, 52 ,

241–42, 254n31
Islamic terrorist organizations 93–95
Ivanhoe (Scott) 294n17
James, William 302

Jerr, Nicole 186
Jessup, Ronald 138n75
John, Eric 88
Johnson, Samuel 138n74
Johnson, Stephen 302
Johnstone, James, Lodbrokar Quida; or The Death-Song of
Lodbroc 69–74
Jones, Chris 27
Jones, Gwyn 83
Jones, Stacy Holman 44
Joy, Eileen 26, 28, 29, 33–34, 49–50
J-Ro 327, 328–29
Junius, Franciscus 227
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara 27, 36

Kajikawa, Loren 319n73
Kalamazoo, International Medieval Congress 29, 34n19, 52–53
Kantorowicz, Ernst 214n96
Karkov, Catherine 26, 27, 36, 233n129
Kemble, John Mitchell: as archaeologist 166–68; as father of
Anglo-Saxon studies 25, 169, 176; in OED ‘Anglo-Saxonist’
definition 20, 22; racial ideologies 119n36, 167
Kershaw, Paul 193n47, 248–49
Keyes, Cheryl L. 333n114
Keynes, Simon 179, 180–81, 187n31, 195n49, 210, 220, 221,
226–27
Kim, Dorothy 53, 54
Kim, Susan 26
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 300–301
King Alfred the Great (Smyth) 245–46, 247
Klass, Dennis 48
409
Klein, Stacy 26
Krákumál: overview 61–62, 65–66; in colonialism rhetoric 67–
70; encryption of 71–74, 78, 80–81; incorporation in 66–67,
75, 139n78; Turner’s interpretation 74–75, 77–81 (see also
Blood eagle)
Krauss, Rosalind 279n39
Ku Klux Klan 295, 302–3
Lacan, Jacques 113n27, 203

Lacnunga 260
Language see Old English; Rap music; Vernacularity
Lapidge, Michael 195n49
Lawton, David 22n5
Leake, M. Breann 54
Leeds, International Medieval Congress 34n19, 52
Lees, Clare 26, 34n19, 49–50
Le Pen, Marine 338
Levinas, Emmanuel 237
Life of Ælfred the Great, The (Spelman) 210–14, 213, 216,
217–20, 243n7
Life of Alcuin 193–94
Life of Alfred, or Alvred, The (Powell) 211n89
Life of Charlemagne (Einhard) 187, 193–94
Life of Constantine (Eusebius) 193–94
Life of King Alfred (Asser) see Asser, Life of King Alfred
Life of King Alfred (Wise) 218, 220, 243n7
Lingard, John 81
Lipari, Lisbeth 341
Listening and interlistening 341–42
Literary criticism see Critical theory
LL Cool J 324
Lodbrokar Quida; or The Death-Song of Lodbroc (John-
stone) 69–74
Louvel, Liliane 128, 138
Lovedon Hill, Lincolnshire 108–9
410
index
MacKintosh, Sir James 81

Maclise, Daniel 221n109
Macron, Emmanuel 338
Maiolo, Francesco 184–85n25
Makoni, Sinfree 285, 334–35
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 237, 255
Malt liquor see Olde English malt liquor
Masculinity 299, 300–301, 303, 314, 318–19, 351–52
Material crypts see Barrows
Mauzey, Merritt 294–95, 296
Mayer, Joseph 163
McCann, Kathrin 183, 184
McCracken, Peggy 185n25
Medieval Academy 54
Medievalism: among African Americans 294, 295–98; among
whites 293–95; in Olde English branding 285–87, 286, 287,
298, 298–99
Medievalists of Color (organization) 52–53, 54
Medieval studies: medieval historians in popular fiction 94–
96; medievalists of color 51–54; postcolonialism in 36–41
Mehan, Uppinder 36
Mellor, John 276
Metal bands 92
Military territory 134–37
Miller, Paul 329
Mills, Charles 81
Minh-ha, Trinh T. 345
Miolo, Francesco 199n64
Misogyny 53, 337
Moraga, Cheríe 345
Mortensen, Peter 74
Morton, Timothy 126
Mortuary archaeology 104–7 (see also Antiquarian archaeolo-
gists)
Moser, Stephanie 144n87
Mound-breaking 121–22
Mounds see Barrows
411
Mourning: autoethnography as mechanism for 42–43, 45–49,

347–48; collaborative 49–51; and emotional connection
to barrow excavations 138–41, 145–46; vs. encryption 71
(see also Encryption and psychic crypts); fictocriticism as
mechanism for 277–80, 348; in funeral context 123; vs.
incorporation 66–67 (see also Incorporation); process of,
overview 41–42; and un-homing process 340–44
Murray, James 240
Murray, Roland 300n30
Music, heavy metal bands 92 (see also Rap music)
‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein’ (Fauset) 295–98
Nationalism 233–34n129, 338

Nazis and neo-Nazis 93–96
Neal, Mark Anthony 305n40
Neimeyer, Robert 48
Nelson, Janet 27, 179, 245n12, 246–47, 248–49
Nenia Britannica (Douglas): overview 101–2; accidental vs.
intentional excavation in 131–34; as archaeological mile-
stone 103–5; barrows refigured as military territory 134–37;
and Beowulf 142–43; critical reception 143–44; ekphrastic
performance in 137–38, 141–42; as excavation model 102,
103–4, 132, 133, 134–35, 144, 156; incorporation of barrow
excavations 138–41
New fiction, as genre 277–78 (see also Fictocriticism)
Niedorf, Leonard 119n36
Niles, John 26, 114, 115–17, 120, 227n115, 228–30; Idea of Anglo-
Saxon England, The 39, 249–52, 253
Nokes, Scott 28
Notæ Uberiores in Historiam Danicam Saxonis Grammatici
(Stephanius) 77–78
N.W.A. 283–84, 312, 312–16
Olde Englishes see Rap music

Olde English malt liquor: advertising, colonial branding 288,
290, 291, 306–8; advertising, medieval branding 285–87, 286,
287, 298, 298–99; advertising, race and sex branding 300–
412
index
301, 303–8, 311–12; and oral expression 285–87, 324; owner-

ship and distribution 285, 293, 304–5; in rap music 283–84,
312, 312–16, 324; and social control 308–11
Old English: and academic study of rap music 331–36; and
colonialism 288–92; and drinking 285–87; and graphic
power 287–88, 299; as sociolinguistic expression 284–85
(see also Rap music)
Ol’ Dirty Bastard 327, 328
Online gaming 92
Ontological ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ 237–38, 241–42, 254–55
Orton, Daniel 199
Osumare, Halifu 333n114
Overing, Gillian 26, 34n19, 49–50, 349, 350
Oxford English Dictionary (OED): ‘Anglo-Saxon’ definition 239–
40; ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ definition 20–24, 178n3
Oxford University 210, 226–28
Ozengell, Kent 149–53, 157–63
Pagan religious organizations 92

Pantos, Aliki 109n17
Paraliterary writing see Fictocriticism
Parker, Joanne 220, 224
Pasternack, Carol Braun 26–27
Pathak, Archana 344
Patton, Paul 256n33
Pennycook, Alisdair 285, 329, 334–35
Percy, Thomas 67–68
Performance: of barrow-antiquarian ekphrastic pairing 104,
137–38, 141–42, 144–45; ekphrasis as agent of 104, 125–26; of
identity-making 111–12
Periodization, and sovereignty 38–40
Perry, G.D. 303n38
Philology 30–31, 90n87, 168, 227–28, 230–35
Philosophical ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ 235–38, 241–42, 254–57
Piety, royal 193–94, 198–99
Plummer, Charles 243n7, 247
413
Popular culture: blood eagle in, overview 91–94; blood eagle in

literary fiction 94–96; blood eagle in television 96–99 (see
also Olde English malt liquor; Rap music)
Posel, Deborah 202
Postcolonialism: in Anglo-Saxon vs. medieval studies 36–41;
and autoethnography 344–46
Postmodernism see Critical theory
postSaxon, as concept 352–53
Powell, Robert, Life of Alfred, or Alvred, The 211n89
Power see Black power; Colonialism; Sovereignty
PowerMaster controversy 316–17
Prairie, The (Cooper) 297n26
Pratt, David 179, 180–81, 187n31, 193n47, 248–49
Precedent, as concept 38
Professional ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ 235–38, 241–42, 254–57
Prohibition movement 302–3
Psychic crypts see Encryption and psychic crypts
Psychoanalysis: and incorporation 66, 71–72; and mourning
theory 48
Quinn, Eithne 314–15, 323
Race and ethnicity: ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as ethnic term 181–83; bar-

row excavations as racialized 147–49, 165–66; and black
power 300–301, 303–5, 318–23; critical race theory 301n33;
and interlistening 341–42; and medievalists of color 51–54;
Olde English recoded as black resistance 283–84, 312,
312–16; Olde English recoded as Hip Hop Nation Lan-
guage 324–29; and old guard ghost 31–33, 36–38, 40–41,
353–54; progressivist model 40–41; and raciolinguis-
tics 230–35, 289; racist potential of white medieval amuse-
ments 294–95, 296; and sexuality in alcohol advertise-
ments 300–301, 303–8, 311–12 (see also Colonialism)
Ragnar Lodbrog: call for incorporation 66–67, 139n78; in
colonialism rhetoric 67–70; encryption of 71–74, 78, 80–81;
in Krákumál, overview 61–62, 65–66; in television adapta-
tion 96–99
414
index
Rakaa 330–31
Rambaran-Olm, Mary 54
Rapin-Troyas, Paul de, History of England 219, 220
Rap music: in academic study of Old English language
arts 331–36; Olde English recoded as black resistance 283–
84, 312, 312–16; Olde English recoded as Hip Hop Nation
Language 324–29; Olde English recoded as intergenera-
tional black power narrative 318–23; Olde English recoded
as postcolonial language politics 329–31
Rashkin, Esther 72
Rask, Erasmus 22n4; Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (Thorpe’s trans-
lation) 231, 234–35; Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, A
(Thorpe’s translation) 231–35
Rawlinson, Christopher 227, 228
Regula Pastoralis (Gregory) 187, 193–94, 205–6n75
Reimitz, Helmut 182n18
Religion see Christianity
Reynolds, Andrew 106
Reynolds, Susan 178–79, 184n25, 239–41
Rix, Robert 67–68
Roach, Joseph 215–17
Rodriguez, Amardo 345
Roots (television series) 305
Rose, Jacqueline 29–30
Rosenbery, Lord 224–25
Royal piety 193–94, 198–99
Ruskin, John 217
Russell, Craig, Blood Eagle 94–95
RZA 327, 328
Sacrifice see Blood eagle

Salter, W.P. 221n109
Sampling (rap music) 329–30
Santner, Eric 203–4
Sawyer, Peter, Age of the Vikings, The 86n73
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 77–78
Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles 850–880 (Smyth) 87–88
415
Scandinavian literature see Krákumál

Scanlon, Lesley 235–36
Scarry, Elaine 203–4, 205
Schizoid theory 33
Schwab, Gabrielle 68, 73, 86–87
Scott, Sir Walter 81; Ivanhoe 294n17
Screen memories 68
Semple, Sarah 106
Sex and sexuality: and homosexuality 351–52; and race in
alcohol advertisements 300–302, 303–8, 311–12; in rap mu-
sic 313, 314, 322
Sharma, Manish 111n25
Shippey, Thomas 73n36, 89–90
Sides, Josh 310
Siewers, Alfred 27, 112n26
Signifying: as concept 284–85; in Olde English malt liquor
advertisements 285–88, 298–301, 303–8, 311–12; Olde Eng-
lish recoded as black resistance 283–84, 312, 312–16; Olde
English recoded as Hip Hop Nation Language 324–29; Olde
English recoded as intergenerational black power narra-
tive 318–23
Simmons, Claire 62–63
Smiles, Sam 144n87
Smith, Charles Roach 162; Collectanea Antiqua 149–56, 152,
155, 164
Smith, John, Dialogue on the Correct and Improved Writing of
English 209n82
Smyth, Alfred 84; King Alfred the Great 245–46, 247; Scandi-
navian Kings in the British Isles 850–880 87–88
Snook, Ben 185–86
Snoop Dogg 317–22
Sociolinguistics see Rap music; Signifying
Southey, Robert 81
Sovereignty: of Alfred vs. Ella 75, 78–79; of Christ 199–202,
204–8; corpus as site for 202–4; in effigial presence of
Alfred 213, 214–26, 216, 218, 219, 223, 226, 249, 250, 251;
of England during Civil Wars 210–14; of England during
416
index
World War II 83; and periodization 38–40; as raciolinguis-

tic state 230–35; translated into charters 183–85; translation
from vernacular physicality into Latin textuality 187–90,
194–99, 200–202, 205–7; vs. unsovereign physical body of
Alfred 191–94, 245, 277
Spain, and medievalism 297
Speaking Two Languages (Frantzen) 349–50
Speculative fiction see Fictocriticism
Spelman, John, Life of Ælfred the Great, The 210–14, 213, 216,
217–20, 243n7
Spiegel, Gabrielle 45, 51
Spitzmüller, Jürgen 287–88
Stanton, Robert 198–99
Stenton, Frank, Anglo-Saxon England 82–83
Stephanius, Stephanus, Notæ Uberiores in Historiam Danicam
Saxonis Grammatici 77–78
Stevens, Alfred 221n109
Stevenson, William Henry 195n49, 243n7
Stewart, Kathleen 279
Stodnick, Jacqueline, Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies,
A (with Trilling) 35–38
Stokes, William 168
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 297n26
Sutton Hoo 111n22, 116, 130
Swain, Larry 27, 28, 29
Sweet, Rosemary 229n120
“Talma Gordon” (Hopkins) 297n26

Tash 324–27
Taussig, Michael 279, 329
Taylor, Ros 23n5
Temperance movement 302–3
Territory: of barrow-antiquarian ekphrastic pairing 137–38,
141–42; barrows as boundary markers 109–11, 129n57; bar-
rows refigured as military territory 134–37; of dying 123–25;
and ekphrastic transformation in Beowulf 126–29; in
identity-making, overview 111–12
417
Thorkelin, G.R. 22n4

Thorkelin, Grímur Jónsson 70
Thormann, Janet 27
Thornbury, Emily 22–23n5
Thornycroft, Hamo 224
Thornycroft, Thomas 224
Thorpe, Benjamin: as father of Anglo-Saxon studies 25, 169,
229–30; in OED ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ definition 20, 22; raciolin-
guistic scholarship 230–35
Thurnam, John see Crania Britannica
Thwaites, Edward 227, 228
Torok, Maria 63, 66, 77, 82, 86, 139n77, 234n131
Townsend, David 36
Translation: of Alfred’s corpse 211–12; in emerging Anglo-
Saxon studies 227–28; as incorporation 76; and raciolin-
guistics 230–35; of sovereignty into charters 183–85; of
vernacular physicality into Latin textuality 187–90, 194–99,
200–202, 205–7
Treharne, Elaine 22n5, 27, 36
Trilling, Renée 27; Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, A (with
Stodnick) 35–38
Trump, Donald 99, 338
Tumuli see Barrows
Turner, Sharon: as father of Anglo-Saxon studies 25, 175–76; in
OED ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ definition 20, 22; progressivist model
of race 40–41 (see also History of the Anglo-Saxons)
Turville-Petre, Gabriel 83
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 297n26
Vernacularity: of Alfred’s physical body 192–93; and racio-

linguistics 230–35, 289; translation of sovereignty from
vernacular physicality into Latin textuality 187–90, 194–99,
200–202, 205–7 (see also Old English)
Vertue, George 219, 220–21
Vickers, Margaret 44
Victoria, Queen of England 252
418
index
Victorian antiquarians see Antiquarian archaeologists

Viking literature see Krákumál
Vikings (television series) 96–99
Violence and criminality 302–3, 311–12
Walker, Obadiah 212n93

Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. 84–87
Wanderings of an Antiquary (Wright) 157, 162
Wanley, Humfrey 226–28, 229
Wase, Christopher 212n93
Watt, Diane 49–50
Watts, G.F. 221n109
Weston, Corinne Comstock 210n87
Weston, Lisa 27
Wharton, Thomas 67n20
Whitaker, Cord 54, 298n28
Whitelock, Dorothy 243n7, 246–47
Whites and whiteness: in alcohol advertising 301, 304, 305, 307;
and interlistening 341–42; medieval amusements 293–95;
as Olde English target audience 293
W.H. Rolfe company 162–63
Whyte, Nicola 129–31
Wilkes, Chris 309
Williams, Howard 27, 104–5, 106, 108, 118, 120, 122, 146n91, 167,
169, 175–76
Wintle, Michael 85
Wise, Francis, Life of King Alfred 218, 220, 243n7
Women: in alcohol advertising 300–302, 303–8, 311; feminism
and feminist theory 34n19, 53, 337n1; and misogyny 53, 337;
in rap music 313, 314, 322
World War II 83
Wormald, Patrick 88, 247–48
Wright, Michelle 330
Wright, Thomas 166; Wanderings of an Antiquary 157, 162
Wylie, William 166; Fairford Graves 145–49, 150
419
Yorke, Barbara 36
Young, Helen 40–41
420

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anglo-saxon(ist) pasts, postsaxon futures

Before you start to read this book, take this

If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the

Vive la Open Access.

Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500)

First published in 2019 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way.

ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-39-7 (print)

Book Design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

1 · OED. ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’: Professional Scholar or

4 · On Being an Anglo-Saxonist: Asser’s Life of King Alfred,

6 · Old/e English Poetics and ‘Afro-Saxon’ Intimacies · 283

So many people have had a hand in making this book. I would

For Mississippi, whom I still love, despite it all.

We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of

The scandals of Anglo-Saxon studies do not need to be re-

1 Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, ‘Introduction,’ in The Racial Imagi-

oed. ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’:

In the 1990s, a wave of new forms of critique and critical theory

These were important (if occasionally contentious) conversa-

1. an expert in or student of Old English language, literature,

1837 Gentleman’s Mag. Nov. 493 Gibson edited that valu-

1896 S.H.V. Gurteen Epic of Fall of Man 21 There will arise

1991 Guardian (Nexis) 18 July The Anglo-Saxonists…were

2. a person who believes in the importance or superiority of

English Literary Criticism,’ in Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings,

The OED’s lexicographer presents, by way of the entry’s defini-

2 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Anglo-Saxonist,’ http://www.oed.com/.

Sharon Turner, Benjamin Thorpe, and John Mitchell Kemble are

4 The OED’s second quotation under sense 1 of the headword, ‘Anglo-

‘I think there’s a personality factor involved in separation from the

painstakingly separates the ‘expert in or student of Old English’

and methods of our field. These first Anglo-Saxonists, whom

contemporary, and postcolonial world. By exposing the entan-

Pasternack, Alfred Siewers, Elaine Treharne, Janet Thormann,

I examine my own disciplinary attachments via an autoethno-

May 2008, a conference panel titled ‘Is There a Theory in the

8 Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A

political ‘state’ work together to interleave the literary imagina-

Anglo-Saxon studies and philology are a highly irritating

In positioning ‘Anglo-Saxon studies and philology’ as a ‘highly

constitution, nature, or structure’; III. ‘A commonwealth or polity, and

14 Drout, ‘An Example.’

stead 100% politics. Some of it sophisticated, some less so, but

OED suggests, the specter of previous scholarly generations or, as

19 Essays by Mary Dockray-Miller (‘Old English Literature and Feminist

forecasted sunshine. In 2012, Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée

[O]ur discussion of the word handbook has thus far been

In returning to Frantzen, whose scholarship in the early 1990s

media and textuality theory; new or post-philology; semiotics and

ies, long dominated by textual study and philolog[y].’ Theory is

21 Catherine Karkov, ‘Postcolonial,’ in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies,

not name other scholars within Anglo-Saxon studies who spe-

Influential nineteenth-century scholars, whose interpreta-

While the Handbook announces that, as a field, Anglo-Saxon

24 Stephen Harris, ‘Race and Ethnicity,’ in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Stud-

nitive academic methods such as critical theory cannot reason

25 Kathleen Davis, ‘Periodization and the Matter of Precedent,’ postmedieval:

an ethnic temporality from which all English legal, linguistic,

26 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism