Imagining Anglo-Saxon England

IMAGINING
ANGLO-SAXON
ENGLAND
BOYDELL STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE
ISSN 2045–4902
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Professor Asa Simon Mittman
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and architecture of the Middle Ages. It will cover all media,
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California State University at Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0820, USA
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volume
IMAGINING
ANGLO-SAXON
ENGLAND
UTOPIA,
HETEROTOPIA,
DYSTOPIA
Catherine E. Karkov
THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Catherine E. Karkov 2020
The right of Catherine E. Karkov to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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First published 2020

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CONTENTS
Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 A Plan for Utopia to Come 27
2 Utopia Past and the Heterotopia of Origins 77
3 Utopia/Dystopia: Humanity and its Others in the

Beowulf Manuscript 125
4 Retrotopia: Anglo-Saxonism, Anglo-Saxonists, and the

Myth of Origins 195
Bibliography 240
Index 263
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Anglo-Saxon world map. London, British Library,

Cotton MS Tiberius B.v, fol. 56v. Reproduced by
permission of the British Library Board. 71
2 The Franks Casket, front panel. Reproduced by
permission of the British Museum. 78
3 The Franks Casket, lid. Reproduced by permission of the
British Museum. 78
4 The Franks Casket, back panel. Reproduced by
5 The Franks Casket, left side panel. Reproduced by
6 The Franks Casket, right side panel. Reproduced by
permission of Asa Simon Mittman and by permission
of del Ministero per i beni e le attivitá culturali – Museo
Nazionale del Bargello. 79
7 Donestre, The Wonders of the East. London, British
Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 103v. Reproduced
by permission of the British Library Board. 142
8 Blemmye, The Wonders of the East. London, British
Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 102v. Reproduced
9 Boar-tusked woman, The Wonders of the East. London,
British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 105v.
Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. 147
10 Boar-tusked woman, The Wonders of the East. London,
British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v, fol. 85r.
Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. 149
ILLUSTRATIONS vii
11 Conopenas, The Wonders of the East. London, British

Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 100r. Reproduced
The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals
listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are
offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any
necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Most of this book was written during a year of research leave from the
University of Leeds. For that time away from teaching duties I would
like to thank the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, the School
of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, and our Research
Director Gail Day.
For their helpful discussions of ideas or overall general support
I thank Meg Boulton, Barbara Engh, Martin Foys, Johanna Green,
Chris Jones, Gesner Las Casas Brito Filho, Clare Lees, Francis
Leneghan, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Ian Riddler, Catalin Taranu,
Simon Thomson, Elaine Treharne, and especially John Mowitt who
read and commented on large sections of this book.
For stimulating discussions about ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and Medieval
Studies, the language we use, and the need to change the field, I am
thankful to Roland Betancourt, Seeta Chaganti, Catherine Clarke,
Denis Ferhatović, Jonathan Hsy, Esther Kim, Anna Klosowska,
Kathryn Maude, Adam Miyashiro, and Vincent van Gerven Oei. For
sharing their unpublished work with me I thank Josh Davies, Mary
Rambaran-Olm, Eric Wade, and especially Donna Beth Ellard.
As always, it has been a great pleasure to work with Caroline Palmer
at Boydell & Brewer, and I thank her and the series editors Asa Simon
Mittman and Julian Luxford for their help and encouragement, and
the anonymous readers for their perceptive and inspiring comments.
Finally, I thank Boris who oversaw every word, and Natasha who
remains completely unimpressed by the whole thing. Any errors that
remain are of course my own.
INTRODUCTION
A
‘ nglo-Saxon’ England has always been an imaginary place.1 The
Romans called the island Britannia based on the Brittonic Priden,
modern Welsh Prydain, and the Angles and the Saxons were but two
of the Germanic peoples that settled on the island in the years during
and after the departure of the Romans. The nation and the people to
which they gave their name were from the start comprised of multiple
ethnic identities and maintained a number of differing political and
cultural allegiances. Most notably there were the Britons who had
occupied the land long before the arrival of the Romans, as well as the
Picts and eventually the Scots, but also the descendants of the Romans
and those of other ethnicities who had come to Britannia when it was
part of the Roman Empire. There were other Germanic peoples such
as the Franks and the Jutes who settled on the island at the same time
as the Angles and Saxons, and there were the later invaders, settlers,
and conquerors: the Danes, Norwegians, and Normans, and people
from beyond the Continent.2 In time they all came to be known
collectively as the Anglo-Saxons, whether during the historical
period (ca. 500–1100) that now bears that name or over the course
of the centuries as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came to be applied more broadly to
anyone of English, British, or Germanic descent, and especially an
English speaker.3 Anglo-Saxon England was a construct of the leaders
and educated elite of the people who lived in England prior to the
1 The canonical text on imagined communities is Benedict Anderson, Imagined

Communities (London, rev. edn, 1983). While I will cite his study in the chapters
that follow, my focus is not so much on the global processes of colonial politics with
which he is concerned as on the differing natures of a single place as it was imagined
and reimagined at specific moments in history and the implication of that for the
study of England past and present.
2 On the ethnic diversity of the island in the post-Roman period see Susan
Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the English (Leeds, 2019), who describes the term ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ as ‘a chimera that shimmers into invisibility as one approaches it’ (p. 4).
3
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Anglo-Saxon’.
2 IMAGINING ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
conquest of 1066, but it was continued and expanded by the Normans

and their successors. What constitutes an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity
continues to be imagined and reimagined today, often in violent,
nationalist, and racist ways. While acknowledging its problematic
nature, I retain the term Anglo-Saxon throughout this book because I
am talking about an imagined place that was and is home to a specific
type of identity, and about the ways in which this place and its inhab-
itants were reimagined from the sixth to the twenty-first century. I
argue that Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto
and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating
signifier. In doing so I explore a history to which some in the field still
cling tenaciously. Disciplinary melancholy may be the reason, or at
least one of the reasons, that scholars of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England find
it so hard to let the term go. I acknowledge that I have been guilty of
using the term uncritically in the past, accepting it as the name of a
discipline and a period that were part of an academic tradition and
institutional structure that kept them objectified. I ignored much of
the history of the field because it was in the past, which was admit-
tedly hypocritical as I was arguing at the same time that the people of
Anglo-Saxon England used their art to create a semi-sacred image of
themselves,4 a portrait genre for their rulers that projected them as
authors of a particular image of a nation,5 and that, subject to waves of
colonisation, early medieval England was a postcolonial nation that
extended into the modern world.6
The Continental incomers created for themselves a powerful and
enduring set of origin legends well known to those who study the
period. Chief amongst these was the exodus myth, which cast their
conquest of the island as a migration, a retelling of the biblical Exodus
with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as a chosen people and Britain as a promised
land, a living paradise that was a mirror of the earthly paradise.7 The
story encrypts the violent colonisation of the island and displacement
of the Britons, Scots, and others, by projecting them into another time
and place and reimagining them as, if not entirely peaceful, certainly
4
Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strat-
egies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001).
5
Catherine E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge,
2004).
6
Catherine E. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2011).
7
Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New
Haven, 1999). The idea of Britain as a sort of paradise appears first in Gildas, De
excidio Britonum, in which Britannia is a fallen bride or paradise. Gildas, Gildas: The
Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London,
1978).
INTRODUCTION 3
divinely sanctioned processes. This is reflected in the description of

the island with which Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica begins,8 and by the
embedding of a Christian paradisiacal identity into the pre-Christian
landscape through place-names such as Heavenfield,9 site of the
633–34 battle in which Oswald of Northumbria defeated Cadwallon
of Gwynedd. Bede’s description of the island is based on the earlier
descriptions of Gildas, Orosius, Solinus, and Pliny, but it contains
enough detail and elements observed in the landscape to make it
entirely familiar to an eighth-century reader. Bede’s combination
of idealising and closely observed documentation would go on to
become a characteristic ploy of settler colonialism in the modern
world, in which the settler’s wealth is constituted by land and the
richness or variety of its abundant resources and production.10 The
idea of Britain as a type of earthly paradise was also materialised in art
through such phenomenon as the sculpted and painted high crosses,
many of them decorated with vine-scrolls and other floral or foliate
motifs that covered much of the early landscape, especially in the
north,11 and in the eleventh-century Cotton mappa mundi (London,
British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.5, fol. 56v; fig. 1) on which the
island of Britain is located at one end of the earth and the island of
Taprobane (modern Sri Lanka), an island full of wonders, is located
at the other.12 While the idea that Britain was located at the edge of
the known world gave it a seemingly marginal position, the early
medieval English and their successors turned this position into one
of power by equating marginality with exceptionalism. At the edges of
8
‘The island is rich in crops and trees, and has good pasturage for cattle and beasts
of burden. It also produces vines in certain districts, and has plenty of both land-
and waterfowl of various kinds. It is remarkable too for its rivers, which abound in
fish, particularly salmon and eels, and for copious springs.’ (‘Opima frugibus atque
arboribus insula, et alendis apta pecoribus ac iumentis, uineas etiam quibusdam in
locis germinans, sed et auium ferax terra marique generis diuersi, fluuiis quoque
multum piscosis ac fontibus praeclara copiosis; et quidem praecipue issicio abundat
et anguilla.’) Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave
and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), i.1, pp. 14–15 [hereafter HE].)
9
HE, iii.2, p. 217; Uppinder Mehan and David Townsend, ‘“Nation” and the Gaze
of the Other in Eighth-Century Northumbria’, Comparative Literature 53.1 (2001):
1–26, at 12.
10
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (2012): 1–40, at 6.
11
Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Fallen Angels and the Island Paradise’, in Origin Legends in
Medieval Europe, ed. Lindy Brady and Patrick Wadden (Leiden, forthcoming).
12
Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 290. Connections between the two
islands have a long history. Chrysippus the Stoic (280–208 BCE) had compared them
in size, while the English science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke made Taprobane
the site of the sky elevator in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise.
the known world the island hovered in a liminal space on the border
between the known and the unknown, this world and another world.
It was an exceptional place, and its place mattered to its inhabitants to
an exceptional degree. Kathy Lavezzo has observed that:
Built into the myth of a sublime English frontier was a related imperial
dream. If their otherworldliness made the English exceptional, their
exceptionalism might also suggest how the English should be the
rightful masters of the earth itself. The exaltation of the English world
margin, in other words, could authorize the expansion of England
beyond its borders in the world.13
Lavezzo is writing here of an idea that was only manifested on a global
stage well after the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period, but the idea itself can be
traced back to the way the English represented themselves from at
least the eighth century. The island, its people, and its language were
consistently represented as unique in relation to the geography,
inhabitants, and languages of the rest of the world. Their wars, when
they occurred, were just wars, their migration a justified and relatively
peaceful settlement. But there is no colonial settlement without racial
or ethnic violence, and the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Britons was
the start of a long history of colonial-inspired violence.
The special nature of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ themselves begins in
seventh- or eighth-century Northumbria with the story of Pope
Gregory the Great encountering a group of Deiran boys in the Roman
market, recorded in both the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory the
Great and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. Struck by their beauty Gregory
asks the boys who they are, and when they reply that they are Angli
he famously makes a play between Angli and the Latin angeli. They
are angels: ‘“Good”, he said, “they have the face of angels, and such
men should be fellow-heirs of the angels in heaven”.’14 Like the island,
its inhabitants are fallen yet also worthy inhabitants of paradise. In
time, the Angli and the place they inhabited would become one and
the same.
The exceptional place of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England and the later
medieval authors and artists who wrote about, mapped, and
13
Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and
English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), p. 21.
14
‘At ille: “Bene” inquit; “nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales angelorum in
caelis decet esse coheredes”.’ HE, ii,1, pp. 134–5. For the Whitby version see Bertram
Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (Cambridge, 1968),
pp. 90–1. In the Whitby text Gregory’s response to the boys telling him that they are
Angli is to identify them explicitly as angels of God (Angeli Dei).
INTRODUCTION 5
represented it have been explored in some detail, most notably by

Kathy Lavezzo and Lynn Staley.15 What I will be exploring in this book
is the way in which the early medieval English both recognised and
possibly even critiqued the fallen and flawed nature of their excep-
tionalism and their living paradise at the same time that they were
constructing it and believed in it, or at least appeared to do so, and
at the same time that they encrypted the violence that resulted from
their idea of exceptionalism. In a succinct summary of the psycho-
analytical concept of the crypt Gabriele Schwab writes, ‘Designed
to circumvent mourning, a crypt buries a lost person or object or
even a disavowed part of one’s self or one’s history, while keeping it
psychically alive’.16 That the crypt is both transhistorical and a psychic
phenomenon that can be experienced by nations and peoples as well
as individuals goes back to Freud.17
One way in which the English encrypted their own history of
violence was through an idea of utopia. While some believe that utopia
is by definition a modern phenomenon identifiable only after the
publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1515,18 the concept has been
shown to have existed long before it received its modern name. Ernst
Bloch’s three-volume study of utopia in particular traced manifesta-
tions of the idea from ancient Egypt into modernity, revealing utopian
thought as fundamental to the way in which humanity deals with
the world.19 Bloch identified what he labelled the ‘utopian impulse’,
a hopefulness, or dream of, or way of conceiving of a different future
that is the product of a deep dissatisfaction with the present – a
utopian narrative of the ‘not-yet’.20 Utopia does not necessarily have
to involve a plan for the future, but by the same token it is not just the
15 Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English
Community, 1000–1534; Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation
from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, 2012).
16 Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational
Trauma (New York, 2010), p. 2.

17 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental
Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London, 1950); idem, Moses
and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 23 (London, 2001).
18
Frederic Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of
Utopian Discourse’, Diacritics 7.2 (1977): 2–21; idem, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’,
New Literary History 34.3 (2003): 431–51; idem, Archaeologies of the Future: The
Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London, 2007); Louis Marin, Utopics:
The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, (New York, 1984).
19
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul
Knight, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
20
Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, pp. 1–18.
product of wishful thinking. It is in opposition to the world as it is. It

offers the possibility of change in the future.21 Medieval utopias have
been explored by both Michael Uebel and Karma Lochrie,22 both of
whom focus on dream visions and travel narratives, two of the most
significant genres of utopian literature, and most of the material with
which they are concerned dates from the twelfth century or later;
however, following Lochrie, it is most productive to consider ‘utopi-
anism as a project that takes more than one literary form, incorpo-
rates more than a single philosophical perspective, spans religious
and secular realms, and even anticipates some of the quirks as well
as the characteristic features of More’s own utopia’.23 Prominent
amongst the many utopian forms are the golden age and the earthly
paradise,24 both clearly relevant to the way the English conceived of
themselves as a chosen people and their island as a promised land.
It is not the religious aspects of golden ages and promised lands that
interest me even though they were certainly of interest to the early
medieval English, largely because, as Mannheim points out, there
is a difference between an ever-present idea of paradise and a plan
of action for realising a utopian society.25 Although the Christian
content of their utopia is inescapable, I am interested in the political
and cultural uses to which English utopias and the idea of the ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ as in some way utopian are put, both in the historical period
we have and unfortunately continue to call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and in later
medieval and modern culture.
First and foremost, utopia is about place. Made up of the ancient
Greek οu (not) and topos (place), and the Latin suffix -ia, place is at
its centre. With its identity so heavily invested in place, indeed in the
idea of an exceptional place, utopia and its variants (dystopia, heter-
otopia, retrotopia) are particularly appropriate tools for thinking
through the ways in which the place of Anglo-Saxon England has
been imagined – geographically and in both modern scholarship
and popular culture. As Nicholas Howe and Sarah Semple, amongst
21 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An
Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils
(New York, 1985).
22
Michael Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages
(New York, 2005); Karma Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2016);
see also Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (2006), special issue
‘Utopias Medieval and Early Modern’, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Karma Lochrie.
23
Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, p. 5.
24
Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, p. 92; II, pp. 486, 502–9.
25
Karl Mannheim, An Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of
Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1985), p. 174.
INTRODUCTION 7
others, have noted, place mattered to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ in both the

lived landscape and in their textual worlds.26 Utopia is by definition
both ‘no-place’ and a ‘good’ or ‘happy’ place. More’s Utopia, like so
many that preceded and followed it, existed between past and present,
there and here. It was an island that had been visited in the past but it
could be known only through the present text. It was precisely located
yet it was also nowhere; despite being situated in a known geography
it remained an unreachable fiction. It was a mirror for England, a
satirical fantasy island that was the product of More’s dissatisfaction
with Henry VIII’s England. Lochrie writes of its fictional island nature
that ‘While England’s insularity was a fiction of its geography, Utopia’s
was a deliberate creation of its founders’,27 however it can and will be
argued that historically England’s insularity, its exceptional place on
the edge, was as much the creation of its founders and historians as it
was dependent on its geography. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon England, or
an idea of it, had a profound effect on sixteenth-century scholarship
and religious views. It was in the sixteenth century that an interest in
Old English language and texts re-emerged after having lain dormant
since the Middle English period. With the dissolution of the monas-
teries, scholars such as Matthew Parker began collecting, preserving,
and translating the manuscripts that became available to them.28
Many of these same texts were used to support the new Anglican
Church, vernacular translation, and the separation of the English
Church from the influence of Rome. One of the most important of
these texts was King Alfred’s Preface to and translation of Gregory the
Great’s Regula pastoralis, which survived in multiple copies.29 While
Thomas More died before the collecting of manuscripts dispersed
during the dissolution, and thus was certainly not familiar with either
Old English texts or Alfred’s Preface, one of the ideological roots of
his Utopia was in early medieval monasticism, and one of the catalysts
26 Nicholas Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural
Geography (New Haven, 2008); Sarah Semple, Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-
Saxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape (Oxford, 2013).
27
28
On the Elizabethan discovery and use of Anglo-Saxon England see Rebecca
Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell,
William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English (Cambridge, 2012).
29
Suzanne C. Hagedorn, ‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s
Preface to the Pastoral Care’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social
Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville, FL, 1997), pp. 86–107, at
87–91.
for his writing was Henry VIII’s destruction of the monasteries with
their libraries.30
As a neologism working between Greek and Latin, utopia is also
characterised by a heavy investment in language.31 It is a product
and a sign of interest in translation, a new space opening up between
languages. Before I offer a summary of this book’s chapters and their
exploration of dystopia and other variations on the concept of utopia,
however, there are two characteristics of utopia (and its variations)
that need to be considered: the uncanny and the melancholic. The
former is important because utopias are always established as places
set apart, places of difference, while those places that they are set apart
from, and those peoples that their inhabitants are different to, contin-
ually mirror, haunt, or threaten them in uncanny ways. As Jameson
observes in his reading of More, ‘utopian politics takes place within
this gap between Utopia’s newly created island and its non-Utopian
neighbors: and this gap is the point at which More’s Utopianism
begins to seem indistinguishable from Machiavelli’s practice (whose
codification is virtually contemporaneous with More’s text)’.32 The gap
or boundary that produces the uncanny is thus also crucial to the
creation of dystopia, which might itself be identified as one of the
uncanny presences within utopia. Melancholia is important because
there is so often also a melancholic state of existence that utopia either
sets out to replace or rectify, and/or that acts as a catalyst to its concep-
tualisation. Yet there is also something melancholic about the idea of
utopia itself, a dream of a future that can never be fully realised, and
so often a dream haunted by ghosts of the encrypted past.
THE UNCANNY
The word ‘uncanny’ has its origins in the early medieval north,
un-cunnon in Old English, with similar words and concepts existing
in other languages and cultures (for example Old Irish ingnáth).33 As
a modern English word ‘uncanny’ has its specific origins in Scottish
and northern English, which is ironic as the Scots, like the Britons
30
Jameson, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’: 435–6.
31
Patricia Clare Ingham, ‘Making All Things New: Past, Progress and the Promise
of Utopia’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2006): 479–92, at 479;
Jameson, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’: 432.
32
Jameson, ‘Morus: The Generic Window’: 432.
33
Dictionary of the Irish Language: http://www.dil.ie/
search?q=ingnáth&search_in=headword.
INTRODUCTION 9
as a whole, figure as uncanny others in so many Anglo-Saxon texts.

In Gildas’s De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, they are part human,
part animal, barbaric in nature, morally bankrupt, and living in caves
and holes in the ground, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle account
of the arrival of the Angles in 449 states that they wrote back to their
continental homeland requesting reinforcements and describing
the choiceness of the land (landes cysta) and the worthlessness
(nahtscipe) of the Britons who inhabited it.34 Gildas of course was a
Briton, Welsh rather than Anglian or Saxon, and was writing about
how the Britons had brought the invasions on themselves due to
their moral and religious failings, but as Lavezzo notes, the Anglo-
Saxons routinely absorbed and reconfigured their others, whether
internal or external.35 Manuscript A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records that in 920 King Edward the Elder secured the submission
of various Scots, Danes, Norwegians, Britons, and English, and built
strongholds at sites in the north.36 Yet, just as the uncanny Donestre
we will encounter in Chapter 3 failed to incorporate fully the human
victims it devoured, the English would never fully subsume the Welsh
and the Scots and would never fully control their lands. Moreover,
throughout the history of England there would remain contradictions
and a doubleness to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity, meaning that some would
be accepted and absorbed into it while others would be repulsed or
encrypted; sometimes it would expand outwards to incorporate other
peoples and sometimes it would declare its isolation from other areas
– as was to be the case with the Scandinavians who are sometimes
figured as ancestors and sometimes as invasive enemies, or on and
off with Europe, or parts of it, in the nineteenth through twenty-
first centuries. In the art and literature of the pre-Conquest period
that doubleness was more often than not manifested as an uncanny
elsewhere that was used to reflect back a particular image of the island.
Made up of the Old English prefix un- and the verb cunnan (to
know), the uncanny refers literally to the unknown, the mysterious,
weird, strange, unfamiliar, or uncomfortably strange – though
in modern use it can also mean simply unreliable or unsafe.37 Old
English, then, did have a word for and concept of the uncanny, even
34
Susan Irvine, ed., A Collaborative Edition: The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, vol. 7, MS
E. (Cambridge, 2004), p. 16.
35
Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English
Community, 1000–1534, p. 20.
36
Janet M. Bately, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 3,
MS A (Cambridge, 1986), sub anno 920.
37
See s.v. uncanny in the Oxford English Dictionary.
if the range of its meanings was slightly different than in modern

usage.38 While it was clearly not identical to the psychological concept
developed by Freud, the uncanny could be something experienced
by the self, and could arguably also be something that resided within
the self.39 Islands in the Middle Ages were often uncanny places, and
England especially so with its location on the edge of the known.
Its representation whether in images or texts from Gildas and Bede
onward was both familiar and unfamiliar, part fiction and part lived
landscape. Bede states that the island of Britain was incognita to the
Romans until the time of Caesar,40 with the word generally trans-
lated simply as ‘unknown’, although as the existence of the island
was known, the word could just as easily be translated as ‘strange’ or
‘unfamiliar’ or ‘mysterious’. By the same token, utopia is always an
uncanny place as it hovers between past and present, somewhere and
nowhere, the real and the fictional.41 At the same time that England’s
construction of its location established its otherness, it created others,
the Britons, the Scandinavians, and eventually the Irish as the others
against whom it identified itself and who would in turn celebrate
their otherness to England and the English. Utopias also ‘crucially
presuppose otherness’.42 Grendel, arguably a figure for the Britons, is
uncuð in Beowulf,43 as are many of the other peoples and creatures
that inhabit the texts comprising the Beowulf manuscript, as will be
discussed in Chapter 3, or of the whalebone of the Franks Casket
discussed in Chapter 2, which renders the casket both a living being
38 I would like to thank Lindy Brady for a discussion of the origins and meaning of
the uncanny in Old English and Old Irish.

39 See Chapter 3 below.
40 HE, i.2, p. 20. ‘Wæs Breotene ealond Romanum uncuð, oððæt Gaius se casere,
oðre naman Iulius, hit mid ferde gesohte.’ (The Old English Version of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Thomas Miller, part 1, EETS os 95
[London, 1890], p. 30.) The word may carry a more sinister connotation in the Old
English translation of Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans, written
at around the same time as the Old English Bede, in which Julian and his army are
lost and wandering in the desert suffering from thirst and hunger when an uncuð
man suddenly appears and kills Julian. (Malcom R. Godden, ed. and trans., The Old
English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius [Cambridge, MA,
2016], vi,31, p. 398). The Latin text (Book vii,30.6) gives a somewhat different version,
specifying that Julian is wandering alone through the desert when he comes across
an enemy horseman who runs him through with a lance (‘imperator tanto rerum
periculo anxius dum per uasta deserti incautius euagatur, ab obuio quodam hostium
equite conto ictus interiit’).
41
Christopher Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival and Commonwealth in Renaissance
England (Toronto, 2004), esp. pp. 74–8.
42
Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 5.
43
For example, Beowulf, line 960.
INTRODUCTION 11
and a manmade object. The primary other in Alfred’s Preface to the

Regula pastoralis, the focus of Chapter 1, is the Viking, an uncanny
figure, an absence in the text itself, but an absent presence that both
motivates the writing of the Preface and lurks just beyond the text,
haunting the nation and national language it constructs. By silencing
the Vikings, the text also sets Norse culture up against the Latin/
English knowledge that the king pursues, and thus against what it is
good to know, to be canny about.
There are elements of Alfred’s writing and his use of language
that are also uncanny. Nicholas Royle highlights the origins of the
uncanny in language, and the very uncanniness of the word with its
origins in the languages of a border area neither purely English nor
Scottish. There are ‘uncertainties at the origin concerning colonisation
and the foreign body, and a mixing of what is at once old and long
familiar with what is strangely “fresh” and new; a pervasive linking of
death, mourning and spectrality, especially in terms of storytelling,
transgenerational inheritance and knowledge, and … a sense of the
strange and irredeemably unsettling “place” of language in any critical
reflection on uncanniness’.44 Cixous locates the uncanny precisely in
writing, in ‘what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of
the text’, and in the author’s ability to seduce and manipulate readers,
turning both writing and reading into uncanny acts.45 In the Preface,
genre, structure, and voice are all uncanny. It is a mix of genres –
history and fiction, epistle and manual of instruction, prose and
poetry – and the same can be said of both the Franks Casket and
the Beowulf manuscript. The prose of the Preface borrows techniques
from poetry and its verse incorporates the language of prose, as well
as hybrid words that work between languages. It situates Alfred in
one spot, the king is in his court writing and dreaming about the past
and future, but at the same time the king’s mind is projected back and
forth in time to speak either for or with the dead, and across space
surveying the land of England and travelling the path northward
from Rome. The structure of the Preface keeps returning the reader
to the king and his dream, or vision, or memories with its repeated
formula of ‘when I remembered all this then’. Past and present merge,
collide, and haunt each other throughout.
44
Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, 2002), p. 12.
45
Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche
(The “Uncanny”)’, trans Robert Dennomé, New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525–645,
quotation at 525.
MELANCHOLIA
Melancholia has multiple meanings. In classical and medieval usage
it meant an excess of black bile (melania- kole). People suffering from
melancholia have generally been understood to be severely depressed
or gloomy, brooding or dwelling on or emotionally attached to a
loss, or something that has been lost, or alternatively to be brooding
or depressed groundlessly, or at least without sufficient cause. They
were also believed to suffer from or be prone to particular diseases.46
Melancholia is also a product of encryption, as one cannot mourn
what remains unacknowledged, unburied, and continues to haunt
the psyche.47 But from antiquity melancholia has also been charac-
terised by a dialectic between complete despondency and emotional
withdrawal, and intense emotion and/or active energy, the latter often
manifested in artistic and literary production or political leader-
ship.48 It has also been intimately linked with the concept of utopia.
Robert Burton constructed utopia as a cure from melancholia but also
identified melancholia as generative of knowledge and understanding
by turning the noun into an active verb. He described himself as
‘melancholizing’, an activity that provided knowledge for him in the
same way that others obtained their knowledge from reading books.49
Wolf Lepenies developed Burton’s analysis of the relationship of
his own melancholia to utopia to argue that just such a dialectical
relationship between melancholia and utopia can be identified
throughout history from Democritus to the twentieth century.50 In
contrast, through an analysis of Günter Grass’s reading of Dürer’s
famous engraving Melancolia I and More’s Utopia, Lochrie identifies
melancholia not as a condition for which utopia is a cure, but as the
‘affective mode of all utopianism’,51 which is perhaps simply another
way of stating the link between melancholy and intellectual or artistic
46 For the variety of (sometimes contradictory) ways in which melancholia has been
interpreted over the centuries see Jennifer Radden ed., The Notion of Melancholy:
From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford, 2000), esp., pp. 3–51.
47 Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy,
trans. Nicholas Rand with foreword by Jacques Derrida (Minneapolis, 1986);

Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psycho-
analysis, vol. 1, ed and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, 1994); Schwab, Haunting
Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma.
48
Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, pp. 3–53.
49
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, introduction by William H. Gass
(New York, 2001), p. 22.
50
Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones
(Cambridge, MA, 1992).
51
INTRODUCTION 13
production.52 As was the case with utopia, melancholia is generally

seen as a purely modern phenomenon despite its roots in classical and
medieval philosophy and medicine.
With the turn to interest in medieval emotions and neuropsy-
chological methodologies, melancholia has been identified in early
medieval authors and texts, including Old English ones, although it is
universally identified in these cases with mourning and not utopia or
the inability to mourn. Mary Garrison, for example, has articulated the
melancholy of Alcuin as rooted in his loss of the monastic community
– his surrogate parents – that raised him, and especially in the loss of
his childhood teacher and father figure Ælberht. Ronald Ganze has
explored the intersection of melancholic emotions and memory in
the poems The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament.53 Both poems feature
solitary and lonely exiles. Solitary dwellers were believed by Cassian
to be particularly prone to melancholia (or accidie, as he described it),
though his focus was on monastic dwellers in the desert.54 In The Wife’s
Lament in particular, the wife describes herself as ful geomorre (‘very
mournful’, line 1), as plagued by modcearu (‘mind-care or anxiety’, line
40), breostcearu (‘heart-care or anxiety’, line 44), and uhtceare (‘early
morning sorrow or anxiety’, line 7). All these terms suggest a constant
state of brooding or depression that has a profound effect on both
the speaker’s mind and emotions, her thoughts, feelings, and perhaps
also her physical body as uhtceare can imply sleeplessness. The wife is
‘unable to move past the traumatic events of her past, which continue
to define and control her present existence’.55 Ganze believes that
she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but a form
of melancholia is also a distinct possibility given the intensity of her
emotion and depression and her inability to overcome her loss or to
take any action. Freud believed that melancholia was produced by
the failure to mourn a loss, which is what I am arguing in this book;
52 See, for example, Raymond Klibinsky, Fritz Saxl, and Erwin Panofsky, Saturn and
Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London,
1964); Laurinda S. Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art
ca. 1500–1700 (Philadelphia, 2015); Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia
and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA, 2008).
53
Mary Garrison, ‘Early Medieval Experiences of Grief and Separation through the
Eyes of Alcuin and Others: The Grief of the Child Oblate’, in Anglo-Saxon Emotions:
Reading the Heart in Old English Literature, ed. Alice Jorgensen, et al. (London, 2015),
pp. 227–61; Ronald Ganze, ‘The Neurological and Physiological Effects of Emotional
Duress on Memory in Two Old English Elegies’, in ibid., pp. 211–26.
54
John Cassian, Of the Spirit of Accidie, excerpted in Radden, The Notion of Melan-
choly: From Aristotle to Kristeva, p. 71.
55
Ganze, ‘The Neurological and Physiological Effects of Emotional Duress on
Memory in Two Old English Elegies’, p. 225.
but there are many parallels between mourning and melancholia, and
melancholia does manifest itself in many different forms and has many
different definitions,56 one of which characterises it as a crippling or
severe depression. It is also associated with the loss of a relationship
and/or agency.57 This seems to be the state of the speaker in The Wife’s
Lament, who can do nothing but mourn endlessly. Looked at another
way, however, it is possible to read the poem itself as the work of art
produced out of the melancholy state of the speaker or poet.
The first chapter of this book reads King Alfred’s Old English trans-
lation of the Regula pastoralis, especially its Preface, as a utopian text,
an outline for a planned social utopia to come, an England united in
language and learning under one king. The movement of both his
thoughts and his writing is from a place – his court in Winchester at
the end of the ninth century – to a no-place, the imaginary realm of
the past and a future world that could be. At its most fundamental
level it is Alfred’s expression of his refusal to accept things as they
are. Alfred looks back to the seventh and eighth centuries, a time
he believes to have been a golden age of peace, learning, and multi-
lingualism as a means of critiquing the present and as a foundation
for his ‘not-yet’ England. Just this sort of use of time, Lochrie has
argued, provides a basis for rethinking the theory and historicity of
utopia, as it imbues the past with a ‘virtuality’ that enables action
in the future, destabilising theories of the present and the way we
categorise time.58 In Alfred’s view, the Angelcynn had become almost
cut off from their past and from translation through the historical gap
created by the Viking invasions; but neither had been completely lost,
and the past comes to Alfred’s present in order to show him the path
to both recovery and the future. The movement creates an uncan-
niness to Alfred’s text. Time and place are familiar yet also strange,
a point to which I will return. As a translation lamenting the lack
of and pointing a way towards increasing learning and translation,
Alfred’s dreamed-of utopia is firmly located in and around language.
Like Gregory’s play on Angli/angeli, it places English in a privileged
relationship to Latin, but it goes further in seeking to establish
English as one of the sacred languages of translation, a successor to
Greek and Latin, and in establishing language as a defining element of
56
Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva.
57
Radden, The Notion of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, p. 47.
58
Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, p. 2. She develops this idea from Elizabeth
Grosz’s theory of temporality. See Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics,
Education and the Untimely (Durham, NC, 2004).
INTRODUCTION 15
community and nation – as it will also be for the British Empire and
far-right groups in the UK and the USA today. In the guise of a plan
for educational reform the Preface also proposes and, indeed, in its
writing enacts a new political structure, a single kingdom rather than
the multiple kingdoms that had covered the island in the past as well
as in Alfred’s own present, and a church firmly under the control of
the king. In doing so it colonises both land and future, but then the
Anglo-Saxons were colonisers from the start, and lays the founda-
tions of empire. Alfred’s English utopia is written in the first instance
against the Scandinavian invaders and settlers, the uncanny others
that haunt his narrative by their very absence from it, but it also sets
the English apart from speakers of all other languages, reinforcing
their insular exceptionalism, and leaving colonialism encrypted.
Alfred’s use of pronouns adds to the Preface’s uncanniness as he
moves from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again, merging the mind of the reader
with his own, and also making it impossible in some instances to
identify just who is speaking or being referred to. At the end of the
Preface it is the book that speaks in verse, and in the verse Epilogue it
could be the book that is speaking, or Alfred, or both. The doubling of
voices, of languages, of the meaning of some words, the repetition and
blurring of boundaries are elements of the uncanny found in many
texts both ancient and modern.59 Moreover, the blending of the voices
of book and author into one another in the verses that end both the
Preface and translation bookend the text with direct speeches that
return us to one of the primal scenes of Alfred’s youth, as well as one
of the origin legends of the nation: the scene of Alfred at his mother’s
knee lured into a love of the English language and its poetry by the
book of poems she offered him.60 A mastery of its contents, whether
by memorisation or actual reading ability, set him apart from his elder
brothers and became one of the signs that marked him as the excep-
tional younger son who would be king.
The melancholia of the wife in the poem The Wife’s Lament discussed
above is not the type linked to Alfred’s textual production or his vision
of utopia, although the later story of Alfred lost in thoughts of his own
misery allowing the cakes to burn suggests that he was perceived in
subsequent centuries as having those sorts of melancholic tendencies,
59
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago, 1981), p. 220 n.32.
60
Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
[Ithaca, NY, 1980], p. 47) has linked the reappearance of a scene or image from
childhood, whether of a person, race, or nation, to the Freudian uncanny.
and he did suffer from illnesses associated with melancholia.61 His

writing, however, is characterised by active energy rather than intense
emotion – indeed, there is nothing emotional about the Preface. While
Alfred may have feelings, he shifts them on to his people as a whole.
In Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton extended the definition of
melancholia to a situation of prolonged interior disorder,62 making it
possible to speak of melancholy societies or nations, and it is precisely
this state of being that brought about Alfred’s (and his peoples’) sense
of loss. They have lost land, learning, and, to Alfred’s way of thinking,
the ideal of a unified country. It is these that Alfred broods over as he
dwells on or remembers all that has been lost or destroyed. Crucially
his brooding is one centred on lack rather than complete loss,63 and
his dwelling on that lack leads him to a plan for recovery. His writing
becomes the ‘affective mode’ of his utopianism. His (and the Anglo-
Saxons’) melancholy is the product of the invasions and settlements of
the Vikings and the destruction and loss of territory that was part of
them, thus very much part of the political problems of the present and
not just something that happened in the past. But what Alfred cannot
speak of is the fact that the golden age he imagines was the product of
precisely the violence, colonisation, and destruction on the part of his
ancestors that he is now suffering at the hands of the Vikings. Alfred’s
brooding might be described as a ‘politicizing, splenetic melancholy’,
in which ‘clinging to things from the past enables interest and action
in the present world and is indeed the very mechanism of that inter-
est’.64 In writing about or from this type of melancholy he extends
it to the community of bishops to whom he is writing, as well as to
the Angelcynn as a whole who, if Alfred is to be believed, have been
hitherto largely unaware of the learning and multilingualism that have
been lost. Here melancholy unites with the uncanny as he achieves
this primarily through his ambiguous use of pronouns, the merging
of multiple voices into one, and his invocation of the learned dead,
who are made to speak. Alfred’s Preface is teaching about the past,
translation, and language, performing the lessons of those books and
scholars who have been lost but, as Nicholas Royle notes, ‘there is no
61
See below p. 28. The story of the cakes first appears in William of Malmesbury’s
Gesta Regum Anglorum.
62
Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 79. See also, Lepenies, Melancholy and
Society.
63
On loss and lack in melancholia see Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London, 2001), pp. 243–58.
64
Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, p. 65.
INTRODUCTION 17
teaching without memory … of the dead, without a logic of mourning

that haunts or can always come back to haunt’.65 Melancholy, memory,
the uncanny, and the dead also haunt the images, objects, and texts,
the heterotopias, dystopias, and retrotopias that are the subjects of
Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
It is important to bear in mind that Alfred was writing from
a partially occupied territory, and that historically ‘Anglo-Saxon’
England also enjoyed a measure of diversity. At the same time that
there was pronounced violence against the Britons (Æthelfrið’s
massacre of the monks of Bangor in 603, for example)66 and Scandi-
navians, there was an interest in and contact with other cultures.
Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668–90) was a Byzantine
Greek from Tarsus. He was accompanied north by Hadrian (d. 710),
a North African who became abbot of St Peter’s (later St Augustine’s)
Canterbury. Together they founded arguably the most important
school of music, liturgy, and study in Greek and Latin in the country,
and were instrumental in creating the golden age of seventh- and
eighth-century learning that underpins Alfred’s idea of the past.
Alfred himself was undeniably eager to attract students and scholars
from elsewhere to England, corresponding with Elias III, Patriarch of
Jerusalem and, if the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, sending
emissaries to India.67 Nevertheless, the exceptionalism and English
nationalism that his writing promotes undeniably helped to provide
a historical basis for English imperialism and its sometimes implicit
but more often explicit notions of white supremacy, issues that will be
addressed in the final chapter of this book.68 It has been argued that the
Preface was read in the tenth and eleventh centuries by the homilists
Ælfric and Wulfstan, both of whom wrote with far greater vehemence
against the Scandinavians than did Alfred, especially during the reign
65
Royle, The Uncanny, p. 53.
66
See further N. J. Higham, ‘Historical Narrative as Cultural Politics: Rome,
“British-ness” and “English-ness”’, in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. J.
Higham (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 68–80.
67 On the Chronicle entry and its historical validity see below, p. 74.
68 See also Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and
Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); Allen J. Frantzen and John D.
Niles, eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL,
1997); John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering
Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Chichester, 2015); Barbara Yorke,
‘Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries’, in
Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference, ed. Timothy Reuter
(Aldershot, 2003), pp. 361–80; Barbara Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon
South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Anglo-Saxons and the North, ed. Matti
Kilpio et al. (Tempe, AZ, 2009), pp. 132–49.
of Cnut. It was certainly read by the later royalist Spelman, whose Life
of Alfred the Great made the king a model for Charles I in the seven-
teenth century.69 During the nineteenth century the text was read and
used by scholars in Germany, America, and England both in support
of nationalism and as evidence for their fantasies of the superiority of
the Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic race.70
What Alfred was unable to do, writing at the end of the ninth
century, was to create a critical distance from the idea of England
that was sufficient to allow for serious self-reflection – although later
pre-Conquest texts might well accomplish this – and this separates
his utopia from those of more contemporary authors. If anything, it
might be said that he shifts self-reflection onto reflection on the state
of the English as a people in general. The moral decline of the English
is what had brought punishment and loss upon them in the form of
the Viking invasions and ensuing destruction and occupation of a
large area of the island. He refrains from critiquing that decline in any
detail, but he does drive home the need for moral change in addition
to social action. The educational reform that Alfred proposed did take
place and to that extent his idea of utopia was partly realised. England
in the tenth and eleventh centuries did become a multilingual and
learned culture, perhaps most especially because of the extensive and
complex relationship developed between the Old English and Latin
languages and the wealth of manuscripts it produced. The period
between Alfred’s reign and the Norman Conquest is also now known
as the ‘golden age of Anglo-Saxon art’ due largely to the flourishing
of a nation-wide manuscript culture. It is possible then to consider
Alfred’s dream of the future as a ‘eutopia’, a happy place that could be
realised, however ‘eutopias and dystopias differ from other utopias
only in the degree to which the criteria of good/bad and desirable/
undesirable predominate. Otherwise the same kind of imaginative
processes are involved in understanding them.’71 Alfred’s utopia also
carried the seeds of dystopia and its own destruction, not least in its
establishing England and Englishness in relation to the alterity of the
other people living on the island. Its exceptionalism and colonising
69
Hagedorn, ‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s Preface to the
Pastoral Care’, pp. 88, 92–3, 97–99; on Ælfric and Wulfstan’s writings against Cnut
see Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English 1020–1220
(Oxford, 2012).
70
Hagedorn, ‘Received Wisdom: The Reception History of Alfred’s Preface to the
Pastoral Care’, pp. 97–9.
71
Steven Hutchinson, ‘Mapping Utopias’, Modern Philology 85 (1987): 170–85, at
179.
INTRODUCTION 19
strategy laid the groundwork for later medieval and modern imperi-
alism, for violent forms of nationalism, and for a weaponised idea of
‘Anglo-Saxon’ (in the form of white and English-speaking) supremacy.
The dystopian possibilities that exist within Alfred’s utopian dream
are certainly identifiable in later pre-Conquest manuscripts in
particular, though how aware their authors and readers were of this
fact is another question.
Chapter 2 is concerned with the eighth-century period to which
Alfred looked back for his golden age. It provides a close reading of
the Franks Casket, a whalebone box made in Northumbria, identi-
fying it as both a crypt and a heterotopia, a placeless place. Hetero-
topia has many different meanings and can take many different forms.
It was first used in the medical field to refer to matter out of place
within the body, and was taken up by Michel Foucault to identify
multiple places that were set apart from, while still existing in, the
larger world – worlds within worlds and placeless places or places
out of place.72 The library, the museum, or the cemetery, for example,
are heterotopias in which multiple times and places coexist within an
other place. The mirror is a heterotopia, a placeless place in which we
see ourselves located and looking back at us at the same time that we
know we are standing someplace else looking at an uncanny figure
that is at once both us and not us. As such, they are by their very nature
uncanny, unhomely homes for displaced matter, spectres, reflections,
and imaginings. In particular, this chapter explores the casket as a
crypt, a heterotopia that has death and emptiness at its centre and
that also excludes our entry into it. As a box the casket could literally
have been a crypt in which something, a relic of the dead according
to some, might have been locked away; as the bone of a dead whale
it is also that which is encrypted; as a cipher it encrypts language and
meaning; as a place it is inhabited by cryptids. It also encrypts the
violent origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England by projecting that violence
out away from the island and making room for a different image to
be projected back.
Like the mirror, the casket is also a place of reflection and doubling.
It is itself a double, a mirror place for England as it is just beginning
to consolidate an idea of itself, a place in which a still fragmented
collection of peoples and kingdoms can assemble its parts and see
itself made whole. It is about doubling in many forms: living beings
that turn back at us as dead things, the twinning of the divine and
72
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Architecture/
Mouvement/Continuité (1984): 1–9.
the human, the human and the animal, the sovereign and the beast.
Romulus and Remus appear on the casket being suckled by the
she-wolf, united by both the bond of brotherhood and their infantile
state. Yet they turn away from each other. Romulus would go on to kill
his wolfish twin Remus, but such human-animal brothers are part of
many origin legends, including the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Hengest and Horsa
who the twins could mirror. They are uncanny figures of the sovereign
and the beast.73 The casket is about the telling of stories of the origins
of one place through the origin legends and narratives of elsewhere,
the elsewheres of Rome, the Holy Land, and the northern Germanic
world in which the gens Anglorum located their own origins, and the
elsewhere of the whale/casket.
Heterotopia is always uncanny, but the casket encrypts the
uncanny in multiple small details of its imagery and narratives. Its
stories of exiles and hostages tell of the loss of the heim through the
bodies of the dead and displaced, inhabitants now of a different and
unheimlich place. The whale is uncanny as classical and medieval
stories identified it as both land (island) and not land (sea-creature),
a truly placeless place. One of the stories the casket narrates is that of
the death of the whale from which it was made, making it an uncanny
place in which the dead thing remains haunted by the presence of
the living creature. Both its material and materiality make it far more
uncanny than Freud’s example of the wooden table carved with
crocodiles that causes one to question whether it is a table or a nest of
living creatures.74
Cemeteries and crypts are commonly described as melancholy
places, but the casket is also a melancholic place in additional and
quite specific ways. Both it and the figures that inhabit its panels enact
the condition of being-(always)-towards-death. Its melancholia is
perhaps best expressed, however, in its naming of the whale, Gasric,
a name that I argue is key, the key in fact, to our understanding of
the casket. To name a creature is to claim a power over it that one
can never really have; to name in the language of another is to create
a state of melancholia or mourning; to name is to create a ghost that
will live on after death, a reminder always of being-towards-death,
73
The term of course comes from Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign,
trans Geoffrey Bennington, 2 vols (Chicago, 2009) which informs both this chapter
and Chapter 3.
74
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London, 2001),
pp. 219–56, at 244–5.
INTRODUCTION 21
and the heterotopia of the cemetery or crypt in which the dead and
their names remain encrypted.
Naming, language, and the relationship between the animal and
the human within narratives of conquest and colonisation are also
important themes in Chapter 3, which explores the ca. 1000 Nowell
Codex (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fols 94–209)
as a compilation of dystopian fictions. More popularly known as the
Beowulf manuscript, it contains a collection of prose and verse texts
that, with the exception of the Beowulf poem, are all translations or
paraphrases of Latin sources. In addition to Beowulf, the manuscript
contains a fragmentary Passio of St Christopher, The Wonders of the
East, The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and the poem
Judith. The fact that its contents are concerned with violence, trauma,
war, and invasion, is well established, and it is generally thought to
reflect the time in which it was written, either the turbulent reign of
Æthelred II or the equally turbulent reign of his successor Cnut. It
may well do so, but the range of dates and geographical regions its
texts cover, from the Old Testament world of Judith to sixth-century
Scandinavia, suggests that it is in fact concerned with a longer view
of history and the place of eleventh-century England in relation to it.
Dystopias are unhappy places, frequently colonised places or
oppressive or repressive cultures. I argue that not all the places that
feature in the manuscript’s texts are dystopian in the narrow sense
of the word, but that they are all concerned either with dystopian
places or utopias under threat of becoming dystopias either through
invasion from without or through the breakdown of internal order.
They also offer a series of studies on the limits of the human both as a
biological species and as a moral or ethical order.75 They are concerned
with changes of order and the ways in which the human can become
monstrous and the monstrous human, the two being always present
alongside one another as the beast and the sovereign.
The instability of the beast and the human is one of the dystopian
elements of the manuscript’s world. No order or law can be relied on
as cannibalistic dog-headed beasts become saints and sovereigns,
women become lethal warriors, and villains and heroes exchange
places. Identity in at least some of these texts is something that can be
put on or taken off like a suit of clothes. The instability and exchange
75
I use the phrase ‘the limits of the human’ in reference to the entire manuscript
and so to a far more complex set of relationships between the human, the animal,
and the supernatural than that referenced by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe in her
‘Beowulf, lines 702b–836: Transformation and the Limits of the Human’, Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 23.4 (1981): 484–94.
of identity also render this dystopia uncanny – literally unknowable.

Holofernes and Judith, for example, are opposites in every way,
including gender, but as the poem progresses they exchange places.
It is Judith who wields Holofernes’s sword, defeating the bestial
sovereign only to take his place, receiving his weapons and armour
as her own and displaying more and more of the pride and vanity
that were originally his. They reveal themselves as two forms of a
single state of leadership: the beast and the sovereign. Grendel and
Beowulf undergo a similar confrontation and exchange of identities
in Beowulf.
Voice and naming feature in all five of the manuscript’s texts as
signs both of power and of dystopias in which some are relegated to
eternal silence, some mimic their invaders, some are perceived as
speaking only gibberish, and some gain language and the power that
comes with it. Grendel and his mother never speak and, while the poet
tells us they are human, their lack of language indicates otherwise, or
at least that they are something other than fully human. Most of the
wonders in The Wonders of the East remain silent. Holofernes never
speaks and is described by the Judith poet as making only inarticulate
sounds, although we are told that he gives orders to his troops. The
Donestre in the Wonders is able to mimic the speech of the foreign
travellers who encounter it but it does not have a language of its own.
Perhaps this is the reason that it is unable to consume the heads of its
victims and weeps over them instead. Indic speakers throughout The
Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle are described as speaking
only gibberish. The word used for their language is elreordig, which
can be translated simply as ‘foreign’, but Alexander’s inability or refusal
to understand the people he encounters, along with his dismiss-
iveness of them, suggests that gibberish is exactly what he perceives
their language to be. His identification of them as gibberish speakers
also brings out the irony of the invader and would-be coloniser, the
foreigner who casts indigenous peoples as foreigners in their own
land. Christopher, on the other hand, begins life as a Cynocephalus,
a beast that can only bark, but gains the power of human language
when a divine breath is blown into his mouth.
The uncanny also extends to the land, which becomes an active
force in several texts, in some instances by partaking of the substance
of those associated with it, and in others by becoming a protagonist
in the narrative. The lands inhabited by the wonders of the East are as
wondrous as they are themselves, and the land on which Christopher
is martyred takes on the ability to cure when mixed with his blood
– but these are conventions of many wonder tales and saints’ lives.
INTRODUCTION 23
In the Letter, on the other hand, the land and environment become
forces that inflict more damage on Alexander and his troops than
do the people and animals that inhabit it. In Beowulf the land and
anti-hall in which Grendel and his mother dwell are dark reflections
of the brilliantly lit world of Heorot that rises above them. Beowulf ’s
identification with Grendel is completed by his passage down through
the water into the mother’s home and his rebirth from it, recalling
Freud’s supreme example of the uncanny.
The manuscript also creates a melancholic world, a world in which
the colonisers encrypt their own violence and are haunted by the
ghosts of it. This is conveyed most effectively perhaps by the spectres
of Grendel and his mother who silently haunt the wastelands around
Heorot, and perhaps also by the Donestre who is fated to weep forever
over the heads of its victims. But Beowulf is also melancholic as it is
clear from the start that it chronicles a dying way of life. The same could
be said of the India of The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle and
The Wonders of the East in which Alexander also features. Alexander
leaves a path of destruction in his wake that includes the monuments
that he constructs or orders to be constructed, and that is destined to
be repeated by subsequent invaders and colonisers down through the
centuries. Like the Franks Casket, the Beowulf manuscript encrypts
by projecting its stories of England into the past and onto other lands,
but it does so from a point in history when England perceived itself as
threatened from within and without rather than one in which it might
imagine itself coming into formation.
Edward Said identified Anglo-Saxonism as the ideological partner
of orientalism because ‘orientalism suppressed and exploited the East,
whereas Anglo-Saxonism glorified the West as English civilization
constructed it’.76 These Old English texts and translations portray
the othering of the East and its inhabitants as deeply problematic.
Those who lay claim to foreign lands, like Alexander, the Danes, or
the unfortunate intruders we encounter in the Wonders are doomed
to failure. Yet, these texts also deflect failure away from the Anglo-
Saxons and onto the conquest of other peoples and other places,
keeping England’s own history of conquest encrypted within its own
origin legends and belief in its isolated exceptionalism. In doing so
they lay the foundations on which the glorification of the English-
speaking West and the suppression and exploitation of other lands
and peoples across the globe would rest.
76
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), p. 8.
Chapter 4 moves from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England to the development

of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies, Anglo-Saxonism, and the uses to which the
Anglo-Saxon has been put in the modern world, specifically in the UK
and the USA. An idea of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the image of the special
island that was developed by the English provided a foundation for
both the British Empire and the settler colonialism of the USA. King
Alfred became credited with the development of England as a naval
power and a representative democracy, as well as with the creation
of an educational system and with the birth of English law. He also
became a model statesman for modern leaders, including Thomas
Jefferson and Queen Victoria. The migration legend retold through
works such as the Franks Casket and Beowulf became the justification
for the colonisation of North America and the displacement and exile
of indigenous peoples as the heirs to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ progressed
further and further west.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Beowulf became a
particular focus of scholarly interest and was turned into the national
epic that it remains to this day. Both it and the Old English language
were also claimed by the Scandinavians and Germans as deriving
from their cultures, beginning a scholarly argument over the sources
and primacy of many early medieval works that continues in arguably
less political and contentious forms in much modern scholarship. The
first translations of Beowulf into English were made and it was retold
in multiple forms in popular and children’s literature as an example of
the supposed heroic masculine greatness of the English and the white
Anglo-Saxon world.
Chapter 4 analyses the return to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a form of
retrotopia that involves both a looking back to an idealised past and
a metaphorical migration back to it as a means of creating particular
types of modern presents. In its narrow definition, retrotopia, a word
coined by Zygmunt Bauman,77 refers specifically to the twenty-first-
century loss of hope and community and the resulting location of
happiness and communal identity in an imaginary past. One result
of the turn to retrotopia is the development of tribal groups and
mentalities that deploy history and heritage, texts, and symbols or
monuments from the past to create closed communities for their
members, often through the violent exclusion of others. To be sure,
people have always turned nostalgically to the past in the belief that
things were simpler or better then, but retrotopia is different in that
it is fuelled in part by the digital technologies of the twenty-first
77
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge, 2017).
INTRODUCTION 25
century and uncanny isolated yet overconnected state they create. The
white supremacist groups that use runes, ring-headed crosses, the
Angelcynn, or the heroic masculinity they believe to reside in Beowulf
or Viking mythology are prime examples of such tribes. Their misuse
and weaponisation of the past are deplorable and unfortunately gain
legitimacy through institutional and governmental support and
the structures that have maintained the racism and misogyny of
Anglo-Saxonism over the centuries. The situation has, of course, been
made much worse by the white nationalism and insularity of Brexit
and Donald Trump. As many have pointed out, however, the Anglo-
Saxon and the medieval are not the victims of racism, nationalism,
extreme conservatism, or white supremacy. They are a part of the
foundations on which these beliefs and practices rest, and for which
they have become active weapons. Moreover, at least in the UK, melan-
cholia is intensified by the loss of empire, an empire that was built on
notions of English exceptionalism and nationalism that can be traced
directly back to the age of Bede and Alfred. It was also an empire
that developed hand in hand with Anglo-Saxonism as both a form of
nationalism and an academic discipline. Paul Gilroy has labelled the
contemporary condition ‘postimperial melancholia’, a condition that
arises not just from the loss of empire but also from the multicultural
British society that has developed with immigration from the former
‘colonies’ and other parts of the non-English-speaking world. Postim-
perial melancholia is, ‘An older, more dignified sadness that was born
in the nineteenth century [and] should be sharply distinguished
from the guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to
characterize Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers that have
intruded upon it more recently.’78 While it is important to fight the
weaponisation of the medieval that has been a prominent part of so
much contemporary violence and racism, it is far more important to
help the people who have been its targets. The chapter ends with a
consideration of steps we can all take to help build a more inclusive
and proactive academic field and community.
There is nothing particularly uncanny about retrotopia, aside
perhaps from its creation of an undead past. There is a melancholic
element about it, however, both in the solitariness and isolationism
of the social and political conditions that have produced it as well as
in the emptiness at the heart of the ideologies that drive its racist and
colonialising deployment. Unlike the places imagined as Anglo-Saxon
78
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon, 2004),
p. 98.
England in the first three chapters, retrotopia is generated simultane-

ously by a look back from both within and outside the island rather
than being confined to production from within it. That longer and
more distant look helps to highlight the emptiness within all of the
ways in which ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is imagined. For Alfred there
was an empty historical gap between the late ninth and the eighth
centuries that he sought to fill by populating an imagined geography
with a national language and a united people – a no place that was
home to utopia to come. He did so by erasing the Vikings and the
Danelaw (along with the Britons) from his narrative. For the makers
of the Franks Casket, that precise place to which Alfred looked
back for an imagined historical unity was in fact empty. It was not
England, as Alfred imagined, but only Northumbria, a small kingdom
in the as yet empty space of formation that would eventually become
England. The casket collects other times and places, setting them
alongside each other and carrying them to the island as a heterotopia,
a placeless place of fragmented parts that mirrors and masks the
history of a nation in formation. The casket’s narrative panels with
their stories of other times and places circle around, keep hidden,
encrypt, the emptiness of both the incipient nation and the idea of
exceptionalism that would serve as a foundation for its expansion
out from its island on the edge of the known world. The texts of the
Beowulf manuscript are also all narratives of other places and past
times that encircle the origins of England, but they circle around a
dystopian England and the manuscript is itself a dystopia, a place in
which everything is changing or falling apart by violent means. At
its heart is the emptiness of colonialism and conquest, of the annihi-
lation of peoples and ways of life, and of the failure of the human and
human socio-political orders and classifications.
To imagine Anglo-Saxon England is to confront an emptiness, to
resurrect an undead past and the violence it has done and continues
to do. The damage is not empty, it is very real, but it is enacted in
support of the empty ideas and hierarchies that have emerged within
Anglo-Saxonism. I leave Anglo-Saxon England as an imagined
place, an empty space into which identities and ideologies have been
written, and end with the possibility of eutopia, the hope that we
can create a discipline that reads the narratives of pre-1066 England
differently, in a way that opens our scholarship to alternative ways of
seeing, and that is more inclusive, supportive, and stimulating for all
those who wish to study it, even if that means burning the field down
and starting over.
A PLAN FOR
UTOPIA TO COME
1
I begin chronologically in the middle, in the ninth century with
King Alfred (r. 871–99) and the famous Preface to his translation of
Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis composed in the period 890–93.
I begin in the middle because that is where utopia begins. Utopia is
never in the present but always located elsewhere, in another place,
in a past golden age, or in an anticipated future, a future often based
on the idea of a past golden age from which something lost needs
to be recovered or rebuilt. However, while utopia is never located in
the present it is always a product of the present, a present that is in
some way at odds with itself. In looking persistently back or elsewhere
utopia is melancholic rather than nostalgic. There is a sadness for
what has been lost, or what it is imagined has been lost, but that
sadness can also be a catalyst for action in the present rather than
longing for a simple return of the past, and this is the case with Alfred.
He remembers a lost kingdom very different from the conflicted and
violent one about which Gildas and, to a lesser extent, Bede had
written. He remembers a kingdom filled with peace, learning, and
languages, and his melancholy motivates a plan for the creation of a
new age of peace and learning and a new linguistic community, and
not a simple return to or re-creation of the past. But his memories
are also of an imagined England that never existed, an island that still
survived as an identifiable place but that was now an occupied space.
His is a fictional story of a past that grows out of the gap created by
the invasions and settlements of the Vikings and the destruction and
separation of English speakers and kingdoms from each other that
he believes to have been the result of them. It is this empty space that
Alfred desires to fill, but that space also encrypts the land that was
filled by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ centuries before the arrival of the Vikings.
There is a forgetting in Alfred’s remembering of the country’s origins,
and his refusal to name the Vikings hides the deeper silence and the
violence of Anglo-Saxon origins. Traumas, including the violent
histories of those responsible for them, are transgenerational and can
remain encrypted for centuries, haunting future generations even if
they do not realise exactly what they are haunted by. Settler colonials
in particular often encrypt memory in order to escape the horror of
their own violence.1
There is no specific object for Alfred to mourn, but only an
emptiness, a sense of loss or lack, a lost ideal.2 There are, to be sure,
objects that act as signs of that loss – books, wealth, and wise men
for example – but these are all things that are still present, just not
in the numbers the king would like them to be. Melancholia as a
bodily humour was caused by a lack or imbalance, in this case an
excess of black bile and a lack, rather than a complete absence, of the
other bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, and yellow bile). The melancholic
temperament was identified with specific diseases, including piles,3
from which Alfred is known to have suffered, and a loss of libido,
about which Asser suggests that the king was at the very least ambiva-
lent.4 It is also associated with an early loss of or ambivalence towards
the mother, which might well apply in Alfred’s case as he did lose his
mother quite young and she was, again according to Asser, a central
figure in his love of English books, poetry, and learning, a figure who
would ultimately be replaced by the father figure of Asser himself.
What is tangibly lacking for Alfred in the Preface, however, become
his tools. The books, the learning, the languages, and the wealth need
to be increased in order to aid in the ‘recovery’ of a new kingdom
created and united through learning, through writing, and especially
through language. This is his utopia. The structure and narrative of
1
Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma.
2
Mourning generally involves a distinct ‘object-loss’ while melancholia is generally
not focused on a specific object or refuses to recognise a loss. Melancholics can also
see themselves as in some way responsible for the loss they feel (Freud, ‘Mourning
and Melancholia’), a responsibility that Alfred transfers to the English as a whole,
locating it in the lack of proper Christian devotion and practice amongst the
Angelcynn.
3
See texts by Aristotle (or one of his followers) and Galen in Radden, The Nature
of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, pp. 57, 65.
4
Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King
Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 89–90. Asser
states that in his youth when Alfred ‘realized that he was unable to abstain from
carnal desire’, he prayed to God for the onset of a disease that would strengthen his
love of divine service and was struck with piles as a result. At his wedding he was
struck by another illness that would plague him for twenty-five years. See also David
Pratt, ‘The Illnesses of Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 39–90.
A PLAN FOR UTOPIA TO COME 29
King Alfred’s Preface perform this process, looking to, remembering,

and ‘recovering’ the past as a model of a learning and linguistic
community that can be used to transform the future. It situates itself,
and it begins in the middle. Kathleen Davis has identified the Preface
as part of a nationalist discourse in which translation represents
the ‘strong emergence of a national identity’,5 but it is also one that
colonises both past and future, and one that will be picked up on,
expanded, and distorted in the interests of a far larger colonialism in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Translation is also a process
that exists in the middle, an act that looks backwards and forwards,
centring itself and creating a movement between languages. Trans-
lation brings languages together, but it also sets them apart, and the
king will use translation as a way of setting English apart, creating a
space for it as a special even sacred language. Translation can also be
a movement of people, as in the translation of a saint, and Alfred uses
translation in this sense too as a way of writing the movement of a
people, the Angelcynn, into the utopian space he wishes to fill.
The idea of England and utopia (or as utopia) naturally raises the
spectre of Thomas More’s Utopia. In reading the Preface as a utopian
text I am not arguing that there is a direct connection between it and
More’s Utopia, nor that its utopianism is identical to that of More –
there are many utopias and many forms of medieval utopianism that
lie between the two. Nevertheless, there are some connections between
Alfred’s and More’s visions. First and foremost, both construct utopia
as an England elsewhere, although Alfred’s is a dream of a utopian
past on which a ‘not-yet’ England can be built, while More’s is a satiric
geographical elsewhere. Alfred’s is a historical construction, More’s
a-historical. Both texts are concerned with language and learning and
use language to perform the processes about which they write. Both
texts are also responses to concerns about the destruction of learning
and faith in the present, More’s a response to the monastic destruction
visited on the country by Henry VIII, and Alfred’s a response to the
destruction caused by the Vikings centuries earlier. This is comparison
at a very basic level and the differences between the texts and the
times in which they were written far outweigh any similarities – most
notably, one is a social plan and the other a satire, one is performing
an assertion of royal power, while the other is doing quite the opposite
– but the point is that they are not as comprehensively different from
5
Kathleen Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postco-
lonial Thinking about the Nation’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3
(1998): 611–37.
each other as scholarship upholding the traditional medieval/modern

divide has encouraged us to think. I begin with a close reading of the
Preface, well known yet endlessly rich and revealing territory, in order
to establish just how carefully Alfred builds his vision step by step, and
just how shifting and uncanny his authorial voice and imagined nation
at times become. Shifting back and forth between speakers, between
past and present, between fiction and reality, the lines between all are
broken down, familiar territories become strange, voices difficult to
identify, things speak, and metaphors morph into new metaphors or
things, allowing his dream of both nation and utopia to emerge.
ALFRED’S PREFACE AND THE WORK OF

TRANSLATION
The text of the Preface is well known to students and scholars of
Old English, far better known indeed than is the translation of the
Regula pastoralis that it introduces.6 The prose section of the Preface
is also far better known than the verse section with which it ends.
The prose Preface can itself be divided into five sections, each one of
which moves from the present time in which Alfred writes, back in
time to a vision of the past, then returns to the present before finally
mapping out a vision for the future. It begins quite precisely in the
middle, in the present of the court with an address to the individual
bishops. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20 begins: ‘Ælfred kyning
hateð gretan Wærferð biscop his wordum luflice ond freondlice’
(King Alfred commands Bishop Wærferð to be greeted with his
loving and friendly words).7 The Preface then shifts into a first-person
direct address to the bishop and begins the structural formula that
articulates each successive section of the text. As many have noted,
this beginning is an expression of the king’s authority and gives the
Preface the force of a legal text, but it also captures the movement of
that text out from king and court across the historical geography that
6
The Old English translation is preserved in the following manuscriptfs from
the Anglo-Saxon period: London, BL, Cotton Tiberius B.xi (5 fols) + Kassel,
Gesamthochschulbibliothek 4° MS theol. 131 (1 leaf) (890–96, Winchester?); Oxford,
Bodleian Librry, Hatton 20 (890–96, southern England, possibly Winchester);
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 12 (southern England, second half 10th
century); Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.5.22 (717), fols 72–158 (10th/11th century,
Sherborne?); London, BL, Cotton Otho B.ii and Otho B.x, fols 61, 63, 64 (10th/11th
century, south-east England, possibly London).
7
All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
Alfred envisages as an always already extant yet still to come England,

an empty space into which, and ultimately out of which, he is persis-
tently writing. Alfred desires his bishops to know that:
me com swiðe oft on gemynd, hwylc witan io wæron geond An(g)
gelcyn,8 ægðer ge godcundra hada ge weoruldcundra; ⁊ hu gesæliglica
tida ða wæron geond Angelcyn; ⁊ hu ða cyningas ðe ðone onweald
hæfdon ðæs folces Gode ⁊ his ærendwrecum hiersumedon; ⁊ hu hie
ægðer ge hiora sibbe ge hiora sido ge hiora anweald innanbordes
geheoldon, ⁊ eac ut hiora eðel rymdon; ⁊ hu him ða speow ægðer ge
mid wige ge mid wisdome; ⁊ eac ða godcundan hadas hu georne hie
wæron ægðer ge ymb lare ge ymb liornunga ⁊ ymb ealle ða ðiowot-
domas ðe hie Gode don sceoldon; ⁊ hu mon utanbordes wisdom ⁊
lare hieder on lond sohte, ⁊ hu we hie nu sceoldon ute begietan gif we
hie habban sceoldon. Swa clæne hio wæs oðfeallenu on Angelcynne
ðætte swiðe feawe wæron behionan Humbre ðe hiora ðenunge cuðen
understondan on Englisc, oððe furðum an ærendgewrit of Lædene on
Englisc areccan; ⁊ ic wene ðætte nauht monige begeondan Humbre
næren. Swa feawe hiora wæron ðætte ic furðum anne anlepne ne mæg
geðencean be suðan Temese ða ða ic to rice feng. Gode ælmihtegum
sie ðe ðonc ðætte we nu ænigne onstal habbað lareowa. Forðæm ic
ðe bebeode ðæt ðu doo swa ic gelyfe ðæt ðu wille, ðæt ðu ðe ðissa
weoruldðinga to ðæm geæmetgige swa ðu oftost mæge, ðæt ðu ðone
wisdom ðe ðe God sealde ðær ðær ðu hiene befæstan mæge, befæste.
Geðenc hwelc witu us ða becomon for ðisse weorulde, ða ða we hit
nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufedon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lifdon: ðone
naman anne we hæfdon ðættte we Cristene wæron, ⁊ swiðe feawe ða
ðeawas.9
(It has come into my mind very often what wise men there once were
throughout Angelcynn; both in religious orders and secular and how
there were happy times throughout Angelcynn; and how the kings who
had power over this people obeyed God and his messengers; and how
they both upheld peace, morality and power within their borders, and
also enlarged their territory outside; and how they succeeded both
in war and in wisdom; and also how eager the religious orders were
in both teaching and in learning and in all these services that it was
their duty to give to God; and how people from foreign lands sought
8
I leave Angelcynn untranslated as the word can refer to people, territory, or both,
and there is no modern equivalent for it. The meaning of the term and its ambiguity
are discussed further below.
9
The text is based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 12 as edited by
Carolin Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s
Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context (Munich, 2002), pp. 191–9.
wisdom and teaching in this land; and how now we would have to
obtain them from abroad if we wished to have them. So thoroughly
had they declined amongst the Angelcynn [or in Angelcynn] that there
were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their
divine services in English, or even translate a single letter of Latin into
English; and I think that there were not many beyond the Humber
either. There were so few of them that I cannot think of even a single
one south of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom. Thanks be
to God Almighty that we now have any supply of teachers. Therefore I
command that you do as I believe that you wish to do, that you detach
yourself from these worldly matters as often as you can so that you
can apply that wisdom that God has given you wherever you are able
to. Consider what punishments came upon us in this world when we
ourselves neither loved learning nor allowed it to other men. We were
Christians in name alone and we had very few Christian practices.)
The opening sentence establishes the golden age of the past to which
Alfred is looking back as the period before the Viking invasions began,
the happy times of the seventh and eighth centuries. This was the age
of Bede and other ‘wise men’, and Alfred’s statement that thoughts
of them have often come into his mind suggests a certain amount
of reverie or brooding over or dwelling on the past, a melancholic
act that here positions the king as a passive recipient of thoughts but
will be carried through the text by the repeated return of thoughts or
memories of the past that articulate its structure. In the first section,
however, it is the past that is active. This is, in part, a logical way to
begin as so much of the Preface is about the act of remembering and the
role of memory as a basis for present action, but also because this is an
age beyond Alfred’s memory. It must come to him. The construction
of these opening passages also sets up Alfred as a figure for England
itself. He sits alone, an island in a sea of thoughts. Wise men once came
to England in search of learning and wise men now come to Alfred
in what develops into a plan for the reinstatement of that learning.
This idea is reinforced at the end of the Preface when Alfred names
the wise men who came to his court to help him with his programme
of translation. Three of the four named are from outside Alfred’s
kingdom: Asser from Wales, John from Saxony, and Grimbold from
St-Bertin. At the same time, Alfred establishes himself as one with the
kings of the past who, in his mind, maintained a peaceful, Christian,
and learned kingdom within their borders, but fought to extend their
territory beyond them. Wars took place in an unnamed elsewhere,
whilst foreign students and scholars from unnamed elsewheres came
to England in search of learning. Now, if only there was an end to the
unnamed punishments that have been visited upon them, learning

along with Christianity and prosperity could be restored, although
they had certainly not declined to the extent that Alfred suggests in
this passage.10 Underlying the passage is not just the beginning of a
plan of learning but also one for the expansion of West Saxon power
over the island. For war to be associated with national prosperity, as it
is in Alfred’s version of the past, it can only be a war against another
people. But territorial expansion need not necessarily be achieved
through war, or at least not through war alone. Just as the kings of
old expanded their territory outside their borders, so Alfred seeks to
expand his territory outside of the kingdom of Wessex that he ruled
at the time that he wrote across the whole of the English land and
people, filling both the chronological gap between the eighth and late
ninth centuries and the geographical emptiness he constructs the
Danelaw of his day as being with the unfinished business of Anglo-
Saxon claims to the island. Writing and translation are the tools
with which he will begin that process and we can see that strategy
at work throughout the Preface as words and texts are projected out
across the land by the king. Expansion will, of course, be furthered
through military activity, but details of the current war and ongoing
battles are kept out of this particular narrative, and the image of the
king as a peaceful proponent of and centre for intellectual activity is
maintained throughout.
The identification of the king with both the land and the wise kings
of the past begins the process of destabilising the reader’s location
in time and place. The destabilisation or blurring of boundaries
between times, places, people, and lands seems to be a deliberate
strategy of the Preface, and one that can be identified in many of
the texts associated with Alfred and his reign.11 In this text it begins
with the terminology used for the land and its people. One of the
most remarked upon features of the Preface is Alfred’s choice of the
word Angelcynn for both England and the English. According to the
Dictionary of Old English, the word can mean variously the English
10 On the exaggeration of the decline of learning and scribal culture in the ninth
century, both in Alfredian texts and modern scholarship on them, see especially
Simon Keynes, ‘The Power of the Written Word in Alfredian England’, in Alfred
the Great: Papers from the Eleventh Centenary Conference, ed. Timothy Reuter
(Aldershot, 2003), pp. 175–95.
11
Daniel Anlezark (Water and Fire: The Myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England
[Manchester, 2006], pp. 245–72), discusses the fusion of kings from the heroic
Germanic past with Old Testament figures and historical Anglo-Saxon kings in
the Alfredian genealogies. See also Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia:
Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009), pp. 175–7, 189.
race, or the English people, or the land of England. The exact trans-
lation of Angelcynn has been the subject of debate, and it may well
be that it was used to mean something different in different contexts.
Patrick Wormald equated it with the English Church and understood
it to correspond to Bede’s gens anglorum (translated variously as the
English people, race, or nation).12 Sarah Foot interpreted it as having
a much broader meaning, one that was not limited to just the idea of
a shared identity in the church, but represented a ‘conscious effort
to shape an English imagination’ that included a shared identity,
history, and heritage.13 Davis has questioned whether or not Alfred
would have had the ability to grasp and manipulate all the ideological
implications that Foot attributes to the word and its use, but acknowl-
edges that the term does do political work in presenting the reader
with a ‘continuously existing linguistic and political community’.14 As
Davis notes, Angelcynn is repeated seven times with, in her reading,
some references clearly to people and others clearly to land, but with
many more ambiguous and open to being translated as either people
or land – for example, the first two uses of the term in the opening
section quoted above.15 I am not convinced that the distinction is ever
as clear as Davis suggests because just this type of ambiguity is charac-
teristic of so much of pre-Conquest culture,16 but however one wants
to translate any given instance of the word, the ultimate effect of all
this is to equate the Angelcynn as a Christian people with the land
itself. The idea of the Angelcynn as a single united people ultimately
goes back to Gregory, whose ideas were elaborated by Bede,17 and
it is thus particularly appropriate for a preface that both looks back
12
Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’,
in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald
(Oxford, 1983), pp. 99–129; idem, ‘Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal
of Historical Sociology 7 (1994): 1–24; idem, ‘The Making of England’, History Today
45.2 (1995): 26–32. On the translation of gens see s.v. Gens, Dictionary of Medieval
Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham and D. R. Howlett (London, 1975–2013).
13 Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman
Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996): 25–49, at 28,
34–5.
14 Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 614.
15
Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 618–21, citation at 618.
16
See for example, Sarah Larratt Keefer, ‘Either/And as “Style” in Anglo-Saxon
Christian Poetry’, in Anglo-Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin
Brown (Albany, NY, 2003), pp. 179–200.
17
Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’,
pp. 122–6; Patrick Wormald, ‘The Venerable Bede and the “Church of the English”’,
in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell
(Wantage, 1992), pp. 13–32; Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before
the Norman Conquest’: 26; Janet L. Nelson, ‘The Political Ideas of Alfred of Wessex’,
to the age of Bede and introduces the translation of a text authored

by Gregory. It is important to bear in mind that Alfred did have a
choice of terminology as there was no agreed collective noun for the
‘Anglo-Saxons’ at the time that he wrote. The Old English translation
of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, which is roughly contemporary with
Alfred’s programme of translation, uses multiple terms to translate
gens anglorum, with an overall preference for Ongelþeod.18 Alfred’s
consistency in using Angelcynn is thus remarkable,19 and marks a
subtle yet central part of his writing into being of a united land and
people. This was a colonising move, embedding the Angelcynn into
what had never been a historically unified people or a unified land
that they occupied. There had been, and there still were, Mercians,
Northumbrians, West Saxons, and so forth. There had been, and there
still were, rival, often warring kingdoms rather than a united land or
people.
The king also uses pronouns to construct a sense of communal
identity for himself, his bishops and ultimately the Angelcynn over
whom he is claiming rule, shifting back and forth between the
first-person singular and plural pronouns and at times making it
ambiguous as to whom those pronouns refer. In this opening section
Alfred moves from his own thoughts in which the past and its
kings come to him, to the idea that ‘we’ – here most likely referring
specifically to Alfred and his bishops, but a more general reference
to the Angelcynn as a whole is also possible – need to do something
to recover the learning of the time in which those kings ruled. The
modulation of ‘we’ will grow more complex as the Preface progresses.
Such a use of the first-person plural pronoun was a common ‘device
for the entrapment of the unwary reader’ in Old English poetry,20 and
although this section of the Preface is not poetry, Alfred does use the
first-person plural to similar effect, bringing his readers into the text
so that they become one in the formation of his plans and unable to
escape agreement with him. Moreover, as we know from Asser, Alfred
had loved Old English poetry from childhood and would certainly
in Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (London, 1993), pp. 125–58, at

135.
18
Sharon M. Rowley, The Old English Version of Bede’s ‘Historia ecclesiastica’
(Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 62–70.
19
Nicole Guenther Discenza, Inhabited Spaces: Anglo-Saxon Constructions of Place
(Toronto, 2017), pp. 60, 61. Discenza notes that ‘Engla lond’ does not appear before
the eleventh century.
20
T. A. Shippey, ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English
Pastoral Care’, The English Historical Review 94 (1979): 346–55, at 350.
have been familiar with its conventions.21 After establishing the need
for communal action he addresses the bishops directly, bidding them
to do as he is sure that they wish to do, that is apply themselves to
learning as a first step in putting his/their plans of renewal into place.
He closes the section by again invoking both a communal identity
and a moral lack, asking his bishops to consider how ‘we’ have been
punished for abandoning learning, and this is where melancholic
guilt is shifted from the person of the king to the people as a whole.
The implication is also that if ‘we’ don’t act now as the Preface directs,
then those punishments will continue – the unnamed punishment
being, of course, the arrival of the Vikings and the ensuing wars
and destruction. The opening of the Preface establishes above all
that a common English identity is vested in learning in the English
language and the Christian religion, an identity that excludes those
– like the unnamed Vikings – who, it is implied, are non-Christian
and speakers of a foreign tongue, dehumanised others in every
way to the Angelcynn. Of course many of the Scandinavian settlers
were Christian and did speak English, and it is possible that Alfred’s
intention was that they should be included amongst the Angelcynn,
but such a model of ‘inclusivity’ could create as many problems as that
of complete alterity, creating split selves caught between identification
with both the dominant and dominated linguistic communities and
their respective ideologies.22
The structure of the Preface is one of return and progression that
mirrors its larger project. Alfred began the first section of the Preface
with a fiction, thoughts of an imagined past and people, thoughts of
a past beyond his memory and before his lifetime, and in the second
section of the Preface, he returns to his reverie on the past, this time
using his own memories of more recent history to connect the lost
golden age with the present.
Đa ic ða ðis eal gemunde,23 ða gemunde ic eac hu ic geseah, ærðæmðe
hit eal forheregod wære ⁊ forbærned, hu ða cirican geond eal Angelcyn
21
Asser, Vita Alfredi, chs, 22, 23, 75, 76 (Keynes and Lapidge, eds. Alfred the Great:
Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other Contemporary Sources, pp. 74, 75, 91).
22
Mary-Louise Pratt, ‘Linguistic Utopias’, in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments
between Writing and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb et al. (Manchester, 1987), pp. 48–66.
See also Elaine Treharne’s excellent discussion of Cnut’s later manipulation of
languages in the texts addressed to the different linguistic communities over which
he ruled in her Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English 1020–1220.
23
Gemunan can mean ‘reflect on’, ‘think about’, or ‘be mindful of ’, but however
it is translated Alfred’s movement from thoughts of one period to another creates
intimate connections across distant times and geographies.
stodon maðma ⁊ boca gefylda, ⁊ eac micel menigu Godes ðeowa, ⁊ ða

swiðe lytle fiorme ðara boca wiston, forðæmðe hie heora nan wuht
ongietan ne meahton, forðæmðe hie næron on hiora agen geðiode
awritene. Swylce hie cwæden: Ure yldran, ða ðe ðas stowa ær hioldon,
hie lufedon wisdom ⁊ ðurh ðone hie begeaton welan ⁊ us læfdon. Her
mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð, ac we him ne cunnon æfterspy-
rigan, forðæm we habbað nu ægðer forlæten ge ðone welan ge ðone
wisdom, forðæmðe we noldon to ðæm spore mid ure mode anlutan.
(When I then remembered all this, then I also remembered how I
saw, before everything was harried and burned, how the churches
throughout all Angelcyn stood filled with treasures and books, and
also many multitudes of God’s servants, and they received very little
knowledge from those books because they could understand nothing
from them because they were not written in their own language. It was
as if they had said: Our predecessors, those who previously inhabited
these places, they loved wisdom, and through it they acquired wealth
and left it to us. Here one can yet see their track, but we do not know
how to follow their track. Therefore we have now lost both the wealth
and the wisdom because we would not bend our minds to that track.)
The opening words, ‘Đa ic ða ðis eal gemunde’, echo the ‘swiðe oft
on gemynd’ with which the Preface began while simultaneously
signalling a new beginning. Thoughts of the distant past have led
Alfred to memories of the more recent past and the punishments, the
destruction that bridges the gap between the two, connecting them
yet also marking their separation from each other and the emptiness
between them. What could in the first section only be imagined gives
way in the second to what has been witnessed. Alfred saw (geseah)
churches filled with treasure and books before everything (eall) had
been harried and burned. Who is responsible for the destruction is
again not stated, although contemporary readers would have known,
or at least assumed, that it was the Vikings. The king’s refusal to name
them again silences the internal conflicts between kings and within
kingdoms that also occurred,24 as well as other internal factors that
might have contributed to a loss of Latin learning, a strategy very
different to Gildas’s one of naming and blaming.25 It also deepens the
24
One could cite, for example, the various battles associated with the rise of Mercia
in the eighth and early ninth century, the 825 battle of Ellendun between Egbert of
Wessex and Beornwulf of Mercia, Egbert’s conquest of Mercia in 829 as well as the
extension of his authority over Northumbria and parts of Wales, and so forth.
25
See for example Susan Kelly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word’,
in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Rosamund McKitterick
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 36–62; Jennifer Morrish, ‘King Alfred’s Letter as a Source of
textual gulf between past and present, creating a space of unknown

history and emptiness (where? who? for how long?) that can be neither
remembered nor witnessed, the source of Alfred’s melancholic lack,
and an empty crypt for the history and people he refuses to name.
Language and learning are prominent in this section of the Preface,
both in what Alfred actually writes and in the words he chooses to
write with. The English as a race and English as a language become
even more clearly equated with each other through Alfred’s use of the
phrase ‘on hiora agen geðiode’, books written ‘in their own language’.
The noun geþeode is generally translated as ‘speech’, ‘language’, or
‘tongue’, but it can also mean a ‘people’ or ‘nation’, and there is good
reason to suspect that this is a deliberate wordplay equating race
with language as just this sort of wordplay is evident elsewhere in the
Preface.26 Nation and race become encrypted within language, and
if language is equated with national or racial identity then those not
of that nation or race can never really possess its language, forever
remaining other.27 Alfred then enters into an imaginary dialogue,
another favourite strategy of Alfredian prose,28 with clerics from the
recent past and their words provide a tangible link, a path, back to
the wise men from the distant past who entrusted them with their
now lost wisdom and wealth. ‘Her mon mæg giet geseon hiora swæð.’
But where is ‘her’? Does it refer to the country as a whole or does it
refer to the ruined churches and monasteries? ‘Her’ can refer to time
as well as place in Old English, so does it here refer to the present in
which Alfred writes, to the past from which the clerics speak, or both?
And who is speaking? Although Shippey reads the first pronoun ‘we’
in this passage as spoken by the clerics of the past (we him ne cunnon
æfter spyrigean), the second as spoken by the English of the present
(we habbað nu ægðer forlæten ge ðone welan), and the final one as
spoken by the English both past and present (we noldon to ðæm spore
Learning in England in the Ninth Century’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed.
Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, 1986), pp. 87–107.
26 E. G. Stanley, ‘King Alfred’s Prefaces’, Review of English Studies, new ser. 39 no.
155 (1988): 349–64. Stanley comments specifically on his use of the words spyrigean
and spor, which have etymologically identical stems, to produce a play on ‘a track’
and ‘in their tracks’ (350–51).
27
One can see the evolution of Alfred’s use of English in ideas such as Daniel
Hannan’s image of the ‘Anglosphere’. See his How We Invented Freedom and Why it
Matters (London, 2013), and below, p. 223–4.
28
Imaginary dialogue is a favourite strategy of Alfredian prose. See Dorothy
Whitelock, ‘The Prose of Alfred’s Reign’, in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G.
Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 67–103, at 92–3; Shippey, ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King
Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care’: 346.
mid ure mode onlutan),29 the distinction in voices is not that clear
cut. There is no agreement on the issue of who speaks or when they
speak, as is made clear by the different transcriptions and translations
that put the inverted commas indicating the speech of the clerics in
this internal dialogue around different phrases.30 Nevertheless, the
effect of the multiple pronouns is to bring past and present together
no matter how ambiguous – and perhaps deliberately ambiguous –
specific referents might be. It is a rhetorical strategy commonly found
in narratives of nation building that creates an ‘uncanny simulacral
moment’ in which a people, in this case the Angelcynn, appear as ‘a
ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogenous empty time’.31
While the reader has difficulty tracking the voices, the track that
the speakers cannot follow is that of learning. Much has been made
of Alfred’s use of what appears to be a hunting metaphor prompted
by his personal love of hunting in this passage, but both swæð and
spor can refer to the track of anything, not just the animal droppings
or tracks that some translate here.32 The tracks could just as easily be
those of a different sort of animal, the tracks left by a quill pen made
from the feathers of a bird, as appear in a number of early medieval
riddles.33 This would make complete sense as Alfred is writing here
29 Shippey, ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English
Pastoral Care’: 350.

30 I have left inverted commas out altogether to indicate the difficulty and to refrain
from imposing a particular reading.

31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 145; see also Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Dissem-
iNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and
Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London, 1990), pp. 291–322, at 309.
32 See for example Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King
Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, p. 295 n.10. See also Janet M. Bately, ‘Alfred
as Author and Translator’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, ed. Nicole Guenther
Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2015), pp. 113–42, at 130; Seth Lerer, Literacy
and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln, NB, 1991), pp. 77–8.
33 See Exeter Book Riddle 51 in which a quill leaves swaþu seiþe blacu (very black
tracks), or Aldhelm’s Enigma 59 in which the quill’s dark tracks in a white field lead
those who can follow them to heaven:
Me dudum genuit candens onocrotalus albam,
Gutture qui patulo sorbet de gurgite limphas.
Pergo per albentes directo tramite campos
Candentique viae vestigia caerula linquo,
Lucida nigratis fuscans anfractibus arva.
Nec satis est unum per campos pandere callem,
Semita quin potius milleno tramite tendit,
Quae non errantes ad caeli culmina vexit.
The bright pelican, which swallows the waters of the sea in its gaping throat, once
begot me [such that I was] white. I move through whitened fields in a straight line
and leave dark-coloured traces on the glistening path, darkening the shining fields
about books and reading, and it is the path of learning preserved

in books and writing that has been lost and needs restoration. The
treasures and books that were lost will be replaced, most immedi-
ately by the translations of the Regula pastoralis and the costly æstels
(book-pointers or markers) that accompany them. The æstels would
quite literally have allowed readers to follow the track of the letters
and words and to mark their place in the terrain of the text. The æstels
are important to any reading of the Preface as it is with them, their
value, and the injunction that both they and the books they mark
should remain in the church when the books are not in active use that
the Preface closes.
The third section begins with Alfred returning again to his
memories of the losses of the past, and this leads him to a moment
of wonder. He wonders why the wise men of the seventh and eighth
centuries had not translated their Latin books into the vernacular for
those who came after them.
Đa ic ða ðis eal gemunde, ða wundrode ic swiðe swiðe ðara godena
witena ðe gio wæron geond Angelcyn, ⁊ ða bec be fullan ealla
geliornod hæfdon, ðæt hie hiora ða nanne dæl noldon on hiora agen
geðiode wendan. Ac ic ða sona eft me selfum andwyrde ⁊ cwæð: Hie
ne wendon ðætte æfre men sceoldon swa reccelease weorðan ⁊ sio lar
swa oðfeallan; for ðære wilnunga hie hit forleton, ⁊ woldon ðæt her ðy
mara wisdom on londe wære ðy we ma geðioda cuðon.
(When I then remembered all this, then I wondered very greatly why
the good wise men who were formerly throughout Angelcyn and had
thoroughly learned all those books, did not wish to translate any
portion of them into their own language. But then at once I answered
myself and said: ‘They did not think that people should ever become
so negligent and learning so declined. For this reason they left them,
that they wished that the more wisdom would be in the land through
the more languages we knew.’)
This is a moment in which two different types of wonder converge.
Alfred begins by wondering in the sense of not knowing yet being
curious about something, but wonder, as Albert the Great wrote, ‘is
the movement of the man who does not know on his way to finding
with my blackened meanderings. It is not sufficient to open up a single pathway

through those fields – rather, the trail proceeds in a thousand directions and takes
those who do not stray from it to the summits of heaven.
Text and translation from Dieter Bitterli, Say What I am Called: The Old English
Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition (Toronto, 2009),
p. 143.
out’.34 Alfred’s not knowing leads him to a moment of actual wonder

in the sudden revelation of the answer. Through an internal dialogue
with himself he suddenly comes to understand – or imagines that
he understands – the thoughts and motivations of those long dead
seventh- or eighth-century wise men. They had never believed that
learning would decline to the extent that it had, and they expected that
those who came after them would be able to acquire more wisdom, to
read and to understand more languages.
The king’s conversation with himself moves him gradually back in
time and takes him into yet another memory, this time one about the
history of language and translation and the place of English within
that history.
Đa gemunde ic hu sio æ wæs ærest on Ebrisc geðiode funden, ⁊ eft, ða
ða hie Crecas geleornodon, ða wendon hi hie on hiora agen geðiode
ealle, ⁊ eac ealle oðre bec. ⁊ eft Lædenwære swa same, siððan hie hie
geleornodon, hie hie wendon ealla ðurh wise wealhstodas on hiora
agen geðiode. ⁊ eac ealla oðra Cristena ðioda sumne dæl hiora on
hiora agen geðiode wendon. Forðy me ðyncð betre, gif eow swa ðyncð,
ðæt we eac sume bec, ða ðe niedbeðyrfesta sien eallum monnum to
witanne, ðæt we ða on ðæt geðiode wenden ðe we ealle gecnawan
mægen, ⁊ gedon swa we swiðe eaðe magon mid Godes fultume, gif
we ða stilnesse habbað, ðætte eal sio geoguð ðe nu is on Angelcynne
freora monna ðara ðe ða speda hæbben ðæt hie ðæm befiolan mægen,
sien to leornunga oðfæste, ða hwile ðe hie to nanre oðerre note ne
mægen, oð ðone fierst ðe hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit arædan: lære
mon siððan furðer on Lædengeðiode ða ðe mon furðor læran wille ⁊
to hierran hade don wille.
(Then I remembered how the law was first composed in the Hebrew
language, and afterwards, when the Greeks learned it, they translated
it all into their own language, and also all the other books. And after-
wards the Romans did the same, after they had learned them they
translated them all into their own language through wise translators.
And also all other Christian peoples translated some part of them into
their own language. Therefore I think it better, if you think so, that we
also certain books, those that are most necessary for all men to know,
that we also should translate them into the language that we can all
understand, and do this, as we very easily might with God’s help, if we
34
Albertus Magnus, Metaphysicorum, tract 2, ch. 6, in Opera omnia, vol. 6, ed.
Auguste Borgner (Paris, 1890), p. 30; quoted in Karma Lochrie, ‘Sheer Wonder:
Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 36.3 (2006): 493–516, at 494. On wonder and utopia see also Ernst Bloch, A
Philosophy of the Future, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1970), p. 4.
have enough peace, so that all free-born young men of the Angelcynne
[or of Angelcynne], those who have the means to apply themselves to
it, might be set to learning, as long as they are not in any other useful
occupation, until the time that they are able to read English writings
well. After that one can teach them the Latin language, those who one
wishes to teach further and bring into holy orders.)
The opening sentence of this passage maps a genealogy of translation
and of learning from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English. Other
peoples may have translated sacred texts into their own languages
but only English is named as the successor to those sacred languages.
The opening sentence also maps a genealogy of acquisition with each
successive culture acquiring the sacred language(s) of the past. This
spirit of acquisition or collection of languages (and alphabets) can
be traced throughout early English culture,35 and will be explored
further in the next chapter. It, of course, continues on into English
culture, empire, and Anglo-Saxonism in the modern world. In
this passage, however, it not only provides a direct line of descent
from sacred language to sacred language, it also maps the journey
of the Angelcynn, the new chosen people, back to the world of Old
Testament language and learning, the same world from which the
West Saxon royal genealogies claim their kings descended.36 The close
special relationship documented here between English and Latin
builds on that established in the Angli/ angeli wordplay of Gregory
the Great when he encountered the group of Angle boys in Rome as
recounted by the author of the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great and
by Bede,37 two of the canonical golden age authors, and strengthens
the concept of English exceptionalism that will underpin the nation’s
later medieval and modern colonialism and empire.38 Yet Latin is also
decentred in this passage, becoming just one in a series of languages
that culminates in English, the language that ‘we can all understand’.
Learning for all those who have the means and rank will be first and
foremost in English, and only those destined for higher occupations
35
Daniel Anlezark, ed. and trans., The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn
(Cambridge, 2011), pp. 28–31, 34–8.
36
See above, n. 11.
37
Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, pp. 90–1;
HE, ii.1. See also the discussion of the translation of these passages in Mehan and
Townsend, ‘“Nation” and the Gaze of the Other in Eighth Century Northumbria’.
38
See further Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and
English Community, 1000–1534; Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of
Nation from Gildas to Marvell; and Chapter 4 below.
need be schooled in Latin.39 The fact that there was at this time no
standardised English but rather a series of dialects, developed within
the separate early English kingdoms, receives no mention.40 The result
of Alfred’s promotion of his own dialect out from the court would be
that West Saxon (along with the square minuscule script developed
at Winchester)41 would become standard in line with imperial Latin,
and Alfred has here positioned himself as ‘the father of a new English
national grammatical culture’.42 A sacred community is constituted by
and within this sacred language and, as Uebel observes in speaking
of the construction of alterity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
the ‘utopian drive’ that supports this model of Christian community
‘posits a harmonious and nostalgic social world in which language
functions as a device for linking the members of that world. Matters
of admission to membership are grounded within the notion of a
privileged, legitimate script and language.’43 (Alfred will take the
privileged nature of the language even further in the verse Epilogue
to the Regula pastoralis discussed below.) ‘We’ in this passage again
slips between referents, clearly referring to the king and his bishops in
relation to those who will do the actual work of selecting and trans-
lating books, but to the kingdom as whole in relation to those who
can understand the language and who wish for peace. By the end of
the passage, language, people, and place have become united, as have
the bishops, with Alfred’s own thoughts. What began as a plan that
Alfred suggests will work, if the bishops think so too, has become an
established plan of action written out from the mind of the king into
the people and their institutions.
39 Alfred’s plan was echoed in the latter half of the nineteenth century when it was
believed in both Britain and the United States that Old English would replace Latin
as the foundational language of learning. See Chris Jones, ‘Old English for Non-Spe-
cialists in the Nineteenth Century: A Road not Taken’, in Saints and Scholars: New
Perceptions on Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture in Honour of Hugh Magennis, ed.
S. Williams (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 234–51.
40 Though of course no language exists in an entirely ‘pure’ form.
41 Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 627–8. However, all three of the
earliest copies of the Old English Regula pastoralis do contain features from other
Old English dialects (see Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope
Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 86–110). On the
standardisation of language and script see Mechthild Gretsch, ‘Winchester Vocab-
ulary and Standard Old English: The Vernacular in Late Anglo-Saxon England’,
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 83 (2002): 3–49.
42
Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 416–17.
43
Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 40.
In the final section of the prose Preface Alfred relates how he has
already put into action the plan for learning and translation that his
bishops will now help him to develop. He begins again with a memory,
this time one that reaches back to the first section of the Preface and
the decline of Latin learning that he ‘remembered’ there. In effect,
he returns to the beginning, reminding his bishops of just what is
now lacking before beginning anew with his own work of translation
aided by the cooperation he has already received from the clerical
community.
Đa ic ða gemunde hu sio lar Lædengeðiodes ær ðysum oðfeallen
wæs geond Angelcyn, ⁊ ðeah monege cuðon Englisc gewrit arædan,
ða ongan ic ongemang oðrum missenlicum ⁊ monigfealdum bisgum
ðissses cynerices ða boc wendan on Englisc ðe is genemned on Læden
Pastoralis ⁊ on Englisc Hierdeboc, hwilum word be worde, hwilum
ondgiet of ondgiete, swa swa ic hie geleornade æt Plegmunde minum
ærcebisceope ⁊ æt Assere minum bisceope ⁊ æt Grimbolde minum
masse<prioste> ⁊ æt Iohanne minum mæssepreoste. Siððan ic hie ða
geleornod hæfde, swa swa ic hie forstod <7> swa ic hie andgietfull-
icost areccan meahte, ic hie on Englisc awende; ⁊ to ælcum biscepstole
on minum rice wille ane onsendan; ⁊ on ælcre bið an æstel se bið on
fitigum moncessa. Ond ic bebeode on Godes noman ðæt nan mon
ðone æstel from ðære bec ne do, ne ða boc from ðæm mynstre: uncuð
hu longe ðære swa gelærede bisceopas sien, swa swa nu, Gode ðonc
wel hwær siendon; forðy ic wolde ðætte hie ealneg æt ðære stowe
wæren, buton se bisceop hie mid him habban wille oððe hio hwær to
læne sie, oððe hwa oðre biwrite.
(When I then remembered how the knowledge of the Latin language
had earlier declined throughout Angelcyn, but yet many could still
read English writings, then I began amongst the other various and
manifold cares of this kingdom, to translate into English the book
that is called in Latin Pastoralis and in English the ‘Shepherdbook’,
sometimes word for word, sometimes meaning for meaning, just as I
learnt it from Plegmund my archbishop, and from Asser my bishop,
and from Grimbold my mass-priest, and from John my mass-priest.
After I had learned it, I translated it into English as most intelligibly I
understood it, and I will send a copy to every bishopric in my kingdom,
and in each will be an æstel [book-pointer] worth fifty mancuses. And
I command in God’s name that no one shall take that æstel from the
book, nor the book from the church: it is not known how long there
will be as learned bishops as there are now nearly everywhere, thanks
be to God. Therefore I wish that they always remain in their place,
unless the bishop wants to have the book with him, or it is on loan
somewhere, or someone is writing another copy from it.)
For the Angelcynn, the English language and English writings are the
means through which a new utopia of learning might be achieved and
so, amongst all his kingly duties, Alfred has found time to translate
into English the Hierdeboc that follows, just as Gregory wrote his
original text amidst and about his own duties. His translation will be
sent out not just to bishops within the kingdom of Wessex over which
he currently ruled but, as surviving manuscript evidence shows, to
bishops across all those parts of the island that were under Anglo-
Saxon control, as part of the very act of unification that Alfred envis-
aged.44 By the time that Alfred wrote, Wessex had already extended
its power over parts of Mercia and Kent, but Alfred’s policy as laid out
in the Preface is new in that his political actions were ‘supplemented
ideologically by the creation and active promotion of a new common
identity for this newly-formed “Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons”.’45
These works of wisdom to be distributed throughout the land will
be accompanied by an æstel, which, it has been convincingly argued
on the evidence of the Alfred Jewel,46 functioned as a seal accompa-
nying what was in effect a royal writ. He then ends the prose Preface
with a second assertion of royal authority similar to the one with
which he had begun, he commands (bebeodan) that both book and
æstel, wisdom and wealth, will be kept safe in the homes to which
he has assigned them. If the Alfred Jewel is indeed one of the æstels
that accompanied the translation of the Regula pastoralis, and if the
other æstels were of similar iconography, not only would they have
been signs of the king’s authority, they would also have suggested that
the king was always watching. But Alfred also ends with a note of
caution that both reminds the reader of the fact that the Preface deals
44 Those bishops known to have received a copy are Wærferth of Worcester,
Hehstan of London, Wulfsige of Sherborne, Swiðulf of Rochester, and Archbishop

Plegmund. Schreiber speculates that others to receive a copy may have included
Denewulf of Winchester, Wulfred of Lichfield, Alhheard of Dorchester, Wighelm
of Selsey, and Edgar of Hereford (Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of
Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 77–8.)
45
Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 131.
46
Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature; Catherine E. Karkov, The
Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 31–4. See also Matthew Kempshall,
‘No Bishop, No King: The Ministerial Ideology of Kingship and Asser’s Res
Gestae Aelfredi’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to
Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford, 2001),
pp. 106–27.
with lack rather than complete loss and underscores the fragility and
contingent nature of utopia, ‘it is not known how long there will be as
learned bishops as there are now nearly everywhere’. Firstly, learned
ecclesiastics have not completely disappeared as Alfred worries that
bishops in the future might be less learned that those in the kingdom
now. Secondly, this passage brings us back to the gap of the unknown
and unknowable and raises the spectre of the unnamed troops that
have harried and burned the country. It is unknown how long the
destruction might persist, or whether it might occur in another form
at some time in the future – just as it had occurred previously with
the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic peoples about
whom Alfred cannot speak. The unnamed and the unknown converge
here at the end to remind the reader of the melancholia of loss and
lack that was the catalyst for Alfred’s utopian desire, and to remind
Alfred and his bishops of the possibility of failure and further loss.
If the prose part of the Preface mapped a temporal descent from
Hebrew to English and a converging of past to present, the verse
section that follows it maps a geographical movement of the text of
the Regula pastoralis from Rome to England and from Gregory to
Alfred.47
Đis ærendgewrit Augustinus
ofer sealtne sæ suðan brohte
iegbuendum, swa hit ær fore
adihtode Dryhtnes cempa,
Rome papa. Ryhtspel monig
Gregorius gleawmod geondwod
durh sefan snyttro, searoðonca hord.
Forðon he moncynnes mæst gestriende
rodera wearde, Romwara betst,
monna modwelegost, mærðum gefrægost.
Siððan min on Englisc Æl(f)fred cyning
awende worda gehwelc, ⁊ me his writerum
sende suð ⁊ norð, heht him swelcra ma
brengan be ðære bisene, ðæt he his biscepum
sendan meahte, forðæm hie his sume ðorfton,
ða ðe Lædenspræce læste cuðon.
(Augustine brought this letter over the salt sea from the south to the
island dwellers, just as the Lord’s champion, the pope in Rome, had
47
On the verse Preface and issues of language, authorship, and authority see
especially Nicole Guenther Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and
the Chain of Authority’, Neophilologus 85 (2001): 645–33.
written it earlier. The wise Gregory had studied many noble writings
through his wise mind, his hoard of wisdom. Therefore he acquired
most of humanity for the guardian of the heavens, the best of Romans,
most intelligent of men most renowned for his honours. Afterwards,
King Alfred translated every word of me into English and sent me south
and north to his scribes, commanded them to produce more of the
same from the exemplars, so that he could send them to his bishops
because some of them, those who least knew Latin, needed them.)
In the verse Preface the focus is on authority, authorship, and land
rather than language or people. The book is brought over the sea
from the south to the ‘island-dwellers’, a term that captures England’s
isolation at edge of the known world and its special nature, set apart
from the rest of Europe. It also marks its inhabitants as somehow
different and unique to this space, elevated by their angelic nature
as established by Gregory – ‘angels’ or Angelcynn ‘at the edge of the
world’.48 Moreover, it traces without naming the earlier sea travels of
those who came to be the island-dwellers and returns the journey of
the Angle boys that Gregory met in Rome. Alfred then distributes
the book both south and north across the island. Language and
translation remain important, but as signifiers of England’s simulta-
neous links to Rome yet distance and difference from it, rather than
as carriers of royal directives. The names of Gregory and Augustine,
the Romans who respectively wrote and brought the Latin text to the
island, remain in their Latin forms but the name of Alfred, who the
book tells us translated it into English, is in its Old English form.49
In the middle and at the end of the verses are a pair of hybrid Latin/
Old English words, Romwara and lædenspræc, signs of the process of
negotiation between the two languages and cultures, in which neither
Latin nor English culture or language have remained untouched by
the other, but also putting English on an equal footing with Latin.
In receiving, translating, and mediating between the two languages
Alfred establishes himself as the book’s new English author, reinforcing
the position established in the prose Preface of the king as the restorer
of wealth and wisdom. It also suggests that water is the conduit or
48
Community 1000–1534, p. 11.
49
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 6; Schreiber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Trans-
lation of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great,
ed. Nicole Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach [Leiden, 2015], pp. 171–99, at
172–3, states that it is perfectly possible that Augustine did bring a copy of the Regula
pastoralis north with him, and it was certainly known to both Bede and Aldhlem.
carrier of that which will be restored, learning and languages. This is

both appropriate and ironic in the context of Alfred’s melancholia as
water is one of the elements lacking in the melancholic temperament,
which, with its excess of black bile, is associated with land rather than
water.50
As previously noted, utopia is always an uncanny place as it hovers
between past and present, somewhere and nowhere, the real and the
fictional.51 The internal dialogues in which voices from the past are
made to speak and the multiple ambiguous pronouns of the Preface
add to the uncanniness of this particular utopia, but it is brought out
most clearly at this point by the speaking book. There is always already
something uncanny about things that speak,52 as what appears to be
an inanimate object is suddenly brought impossibly to life. In this
case the book positions itself in exactly the same uncanny location
as utopia – between past and present, there and here, somewhere
and nowhere. It materialises utopia in the book. It also establishes
the book as a historical witness. In its ongoing manifestations, travels,
translations, and copying, it has witnessed the different times and
movements it records. It speaks with the authority of a witness, and
authority is as much at the heart of Alfred’s message as utopia.
The Preface (prose and verse) is an appropriation of Gregory’s
Latin text to a more secular and royal purpose, albeit one centred
on the origins of England as a Christian nation. The prose Preface
is a letter to Alfred’s bishops commanding their obedience.53 It is
modelled generically on Gregory’s own preface to his Latin text,
which takes the form of a letter to John, bishop of Ravenna. The
primary purpose of such letters, like that of so many other medieval
documents, was performative,54 they made narratives real rather than
simply using narrative to describe or critique reality.55 Uebel observes
that ‘letters, like histories, work to bring the past into the present, to
50 The sanguine temperament was associated with an excess of blood and the
element of air, the choleric temperament with an excess of yellow bile and the
element of fire, and the phlegmatic temperament with an excess of phlegm and the
element of water.
51
See above, p. 8.
52
Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New
York, 2004).
53
Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, pp. 84–5; Davis, ‘National
Writing in the Ninth Century’, p. 627; Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral
Care and the Chain of Authority’: 627.
54
Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections (Turnhout, 1976), p. 13.
55
Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian
Discourse’: 7–8.
collapse the distance between historical alterity and present reality, to

ensure continuity between two temporal realities’.56 Letters perform
this process through their direct address to the recipient. In repli-
cating the format of Gregory’s preface, Alfred’s Preface presents
the king’s voice and authority as parallel to those of Gregory, but
its language is ‘startlingly innovative’,57 with its internal dialogues,
multiple ambiguous voices, and blurring of the boundaries between
past and present. None of these authorial strategies are to be found
in Gregory’s Latin letter. The nature of authority claimed by Alfred
is also different. Most importantly, Gregory was a pope writing to
the bishops who were directly under his authority. Alfred, however,
is a secular ruler, using his Preface to place himself in a position of
authority over his bishops and the church they lead. On the one hand,
this allows Alfred to establish the Regula pastoralis as an appropriate
model of governance and pastoral care for secular rulers in addition
to those in charge of the church and religious communities but, on
the other, it makes it quite clear that the king now wields power over
the church. As Nicole Guenther Discenza notes, Alfred’s rhetorical
claim to authority over the church was accompanied by, in fact had
been preceded by, his appropriation of church lands to be used in his
defence of the kingdom against the Vikings, lands which then became
part of his own holdings.58
At the same time that it makes explicit the authorial connection
between Alfred and Gregory, bringing their voices together as one in
the production of this book, the verse Preface provides a transition
from Alfred’s epistle to the translation of Gregory’s text that follows.59
While Alfred’s prose Preface borrowed some of the elements of poetic
composition, the verse Preface borrows from the language of prose
with nine of its words being normally found in learned Latinate prose
rather than in poetry.60 The technique lends an air of royal authority
to both the verse form and the voice of the book, at the same time
56
Uebel, Ecstatic Transformations: on the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 105.
57
Irvine, ‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, p. 156.
58 Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’:
631. See also, Robin Fleming, ‘Monastic Lands and England’s Defence in the Viking
Age’, English Historical Review 100 (1985): 246–55; Janet L. Nelson, ‘“A King Across
the Sea”: Alfred in Continental Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society 5th ser. 36 (1986): 45–68.
59
Susan Irvine notes that in the preface to the Alfredian-era translation of
Gregory’s Dialogues first-person plural pronouns are used to create the same effect
(Irvine, ‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, p. 149).
60
Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’:
628–9.
that it performs the cultural translation from Latin to English. One

of the learned prose words that it borrows is ærendgewrit (a letter
or writ of authority), a word that here refers to the text of the Regula
pastoralis that follows, but one that also appears in the prose section
of the Preface, where it refers to an alphabetical letter. Though the
meanings differ, the repetition furthers the connection between the
different texts and also constructs Gregory’s text as a letter with the
king as its intended recipient and thus the authorised mediator of his
text.61 But ærendgewrit also echoes the ærendwrecum (messengers –
in this case messengers sent by God) of the opening lines of the prose
Preface, setting both Gregory and Alfred in a chain of authority and
authorship that stretches back to God. That the church saw Alfred’s
claims to power over it very differently is demonstrated by another
letter, a letter of 877–78 from Pope John VIII to Archbishop Æthelred
of Canterbury in response to a letter of complaint he had received
from the archbishop. The pope states that he had written to Alfred
reprimanding him for his appropriation of church land, urging him
to be obedient to the archbishop and the church, and threatening him
with divine sanction if he failed to obey. He also urges Æthelred to
resist both the king and anyone else who acted against the church.62
It may be that in light of this, and because Gregory was long dead,
Alfred saw him as a ‘safe pope to invoke’ in his assertion of authority
over the church,63 but Alfred was claiming power over far more than
just the church and its bishops and, as the pope identified most closely
with the origin of the Christian church on the island, Gregory repre-
sented the twin ideals of recovery and a new beginning that were so
central to Alfred’s vision. Moreover, as Pratt notes, all the texts in the
Alfredian programme of translation are concerned with power and its
proper use,64 not just those associated with Gregory.
61 David Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007),
p. 142; see also Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of
Authority’: 627.
62 Nelson, ‘“A King Across the Sea”: Alfred in Continental Perspective’: 46. For
the text of the letter see Erich Caspar, ed., MGH, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, V (Berlin,
1928), pp. 71–2. (https://www.dmgh.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00000540_00095.
html?sortIndex=040%3A010%3A0007%3A010%3A00%3A00); trans. in Dorothy
Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 1, c.500–1042 (London, 1955), no.
222. See also Richard Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-
Saxon England (New York, 1998), pp. 244–5; Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the
Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’: 631.
63
Discenza, ‘Alfred’s Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority’:
631.
64
Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, pp. 132–3, 172. It is worth
noting that mirrors for princes texts were one of the genres that influenced More’s
I am not going to analyse the text or translation of the Regula pasto-

ralis itself in any depth as it is not Alfred’s composition and as it is for
the most part a close literal translation of Gregory’s Latin text, indeed
it is the most literal translation in the Alfredian canon. However, this
text was chosen for translation in order to make a specific statement
and to project a specific image of the king and there are points at
which the translation differs subtly from Gregory’s text, appropriating
it to Alfred’s own agenda. The differences between Alfred’s English
and the Latin have been analysed in great detail by Carolin Schreiber
and I offer merely a summary of her findings here.65 The essential
differences all relate to the secularisation of Gregory’s Regula pasto-
ralis, although the Latin text did already have numerous secular
features,66 and as a text fundamentally about the duties and behaviour
of those who care for a group of people it had always been potentially
applicable to anyone in a position of leadership, religious or secular.
It also had a long history of association with the learned men of the
past to whom Alfred was looking back, having been known and used
by Bede, Aldhelm, and Alcuin, as well as a tradition of use in support
of reform movements. Gregory himself wrote in order to educate
and reform his bishops, many of whom he believed were ill prepared
for their positions both intellectually and morally.67 In 747 Boniface
recommended it to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury in a letter
criticising the irregularities and improprieties of the English church,
and it was used by both Alcuin and Charlemagne during the educa-
tional and monastic reforms associated with the Carolingian court
and the learned ecclesiastics that were a part of it.68 We can certainly
question how well Alfred knew the history and previous uses of the
Regula pastoralis, but whether by design or serendipitous chance,
he could not have chosen a better text to inform and initiate the
work he was proposing his bishops help him to achieve. It was a text
authored by Gregory and part of what for the Angelcynn was certainly
a golden age of the Roman church and its association with their land
and people; it had been brought to England by Augustine as one of
Utopia.
65
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context; Schreiber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation
of Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’.
66
Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, pp. 135, 194.
67
Bruno Judic, Charles Morel, and Floribert Rommel, eds. Grégoire le Grand: Règle
Pastorale, 2 vols (Paris, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 77–88; R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and
his World (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 107–11.
68
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 7–9.
the foundational texts of the English church and a guide for its first
bishops and archbishops; it had been a source text for the seventh- and
eighth-century churches and writers of Alfred’s lost golden age; and it
had been one of the texts underpinning the Carolingian reforms that
were so influential on Alfred and other pre-Conquest rulers, as well as
on many aspects of early English culture in general.69
The most important alterations Alfred made in the process of
translation were to increase the language of secular relationships
and contemporary social hierarchies by incorporating terms such
as ealdorman and comitatis, making the text applicable to all men in
positions of social leadership, not just those at the pinnacle of church
or state.70 He also provided sources for biblical passages, in some cases
elaborating on their meaning as well, replacing ‘abstract concepts’
with ‘more concrete’ terms, such as divine dispensation with God,71
and put increased emphasis on the need for sinners to repent and the
possibility of God’s mercy,72 quite plausibly because he expected his
readership to include individuals less familiar than his bishops with
the text of the Bible and the strict moral conduct demanded by the
church. Indeed, it is quite likely that the translation was also meant
to function as a type of mirror for princes guide for both the king
and those members of the aristocracy responsible for supporting and
enforcing his rule.73 It certainly had a deep influence on the image
of the king that Asser presented in his Vita Alfredi,74 and the same
idea of Alfred leading his people to a new utopian future, a promised
land, appears in different form in the Mosaic preface to the king’s law
69 Joanna E. Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian
Francia c. 750–870 (London, 2003); Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent
in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946); David Rollason, Conrad Leyser, and Hannah
Williams, eds, England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of
Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947) (Turnhout, 2010).
70 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, p. 138; Schreiber, King Alfred’s
Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural
Context, pp. 41–3; Schreiber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation of Gregory the
Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, pp. 187–9.
71 Schreiber, King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, p. 41.

72
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 41–3.
73
Nicole Guenther Discenza, ‘The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian
Social Imaginary’, in Rome and the North, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Kees Dekker, and
David F. Johnson (Paris, 2001), pp. 67–81, at 68; Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-
Saxon England, p. 44.
74
Kempshall, ‘No Bishop, No King: The Ministerial Ideology of Kingship and
Asser’s Res Gestae Aelfredi’; Schrieber, ‘Searoðonca Hoard: Alfred’s Translation of
Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis’, p. 191.
code discussed below. Most importantly perhaps, Alfred heightened

the divinely ordained nature of secular lordship with the forthright
statement that it should not be opposed because ‘God ðe hlafordscipe
gescop’, and to offend one’s lord was to offend God.75
THE GEOGRAPHY OF UTOPIA

The image of a wise king leading a chosen people into a new promised
land is an inherently utopian one. That this is what Alfred is doing is
implied rather than explicitly stated in the Preface, but it is present
nonetheless, and is but one aspect of the text that locates its narrative
structure firmly within the genre of utopian literature; another is that
it can be read as a type of travel narrative that incorporates journeys
over both real and imagined geographies. The book’s journey to the
island narrated in the verse Preface not only documents Augustine’s
journey north, it also enacts a reversal of that of the Anglian boys
who met Gregory in Rome, as noted above, and narrates the journey
of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and other peoples from the Continent to Britain
via the peaceful metaphor of the arrival of wisdom and the Christian
church, a move that foreshadows the trope of the white Anglo-Saxon
saviour of a ‘backwards’ people. It thus maps the colonisation of the
island by both the Continental peoples and the Roman church, and in
doing so the book retells the exodus myth that was so much a part of
English culture from the seventh century on.76 The idea that Britain
was a promised land was nothing new in itself, but in writing himself
into that myth Alfred became a new Moses leading his people into
the new promised land of learning. This is very much the image of the
king preserved in the preface to the Domboc, which is of uncertain
date but most probably contemporary with the Preface to the Regula
pastoralis as it is both about and a part of the passage of the law and
learning from Hebrew to English described there, even incorporating
some of the same language.77
75 As Schreiber notes, Gregory’s language is far more ambiguous: ‘Nam cum
praepositis delinquimus, eius ordini qui eos nobis praetulit obuiamus’ (King Alfred’s
Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and its Cultural
Context, p. 44).
76
Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England; see also Fabienne
Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of
Space in Old English Literature (Oxford, 2006).
77
Simon Keynes dates the Domboc to the late 880s (‘Alfred the Great and the
Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, ed. Nicole
Guenther Discenza and Paul E. Szarmach (Leiden, 2015), pp. 13–46, at 25 n.44),
Þis sindan ða domas þe se ælmihtega God self sprecende wæs to

Moyse ⁊ him bebead to healdanne; ⁊ siððan se ancenneda Dryhtnes
sunu, ure God, þæt is hælend Crist, on middangeard cwom, he cwæð,
ðæt he ne come no ðas bebodu to brecanne ne to forbeodanne, ac mid
eallum godum to ecanne; ⁊ mildheortnesse ⁊ eaðmodnesse he lærde.
Đa æfter his ðrowunge, ær þam þe his apostolas tofarene wæron
geond ealle eorðan to læranne, ⁊ þa giet ða hie ætgædere wæron,
monega hæðena ðeoda hie to Gode gecerdon. Þa he ealle ætsomne
wæron, hie sendan ærendwrecan to Antiohhia ⁊ to Syrie, Cristes æ to
læranne.
(These are the laws that God Almighty spoke to Moses, and commanded
him to keep; and when the only begotten son of the Lord our God, that
is the Saviour Christ, came into the world he said that he came not to
break the commandments nor to countermand them, but to extend
them with everything good, and he taught mercy and humility. Then
after his passion, before the apostles set out to teach throughout all the
earth, and when they were still together, they converted many heathen
peoples to God. When they were all assembled, they sent messengers
to Antioch and to Syria, to teach Christ’s law.)78
The law passes from God to Moses and through Christ to the apostles
and on to the church fathers and, eventually, to the Angelcynn,
a process that mirrors the passing and translation of the law from
Hebrew to Greek and to Latin before it became fragmented as it
passed into the multiple languages of early medieval Europe: ‘7 eac
ealla oðra Cristena ðioda sumne dæl hiora on hiora agen geðiode
wendon’. After carefully picking and choosing from the laws of his
predecessors past and present, Alfred’s Domboc then translates and
clarifies the law for ‘all men’.
Ic ða Ælfred cyning þas togædere gegaderode ⁊ awritan het, monege
þara þe ure foregengan heoldan, ða ðe me licodon; ⁊ manege þara
þe me ne licodon ic awearp mid minra witena geðeahte, ⁊ on oðre
wisan bebead to healdanne. Forðam ic ne dorste geðristlæcan þara
minra awuht fela on gewrit settan, forðam me wæs uncuð, hwæt þæs
ðam lician wolde ðe æfter us wæren. Ac ða ðe ic gemette awðer oððe
on Ines dæge, mines mæges, oððe on Offan Mercna cyninges oððe
while Mary Richards dates it to ca. 895 (‘The Laws of Alfred and Ine’, in ibid.,
pp. 282–309, at 282). For further discussion see Patrick Wormald, The Making of
English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1, Legislation and its Limits
(Oxford, 1999), pp. 265–85.
78
F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols (Tübingen, 1960), I, pp. 42–3;
trans. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century,
p. 421.
on Æþelbryhtes, þe ærest fulluhte onfeng on Angelcynne, þa ðe me

ryhtoste ðuhton, ic þa heron gegaderode, ⁊ pa oðre forlet.
(Then I, King Alfred, gathered these together and commanded to be

written down many of those which our predecessors held, those which
pleased me; and many of them that did not please me I rejected with
the counsel of my wise men, and ordered that they be observed in
other ways. I dared not presume to put in writing all the many of my
own, because it was unknown to me which of them would please those
that are after us. But those that I found either in the time of Ine my
kinsman, or of Offa king of the Mercians, or of Æthelberht who first
among the English received baptism, those that seemed most lawful, I
gathered them herein and left out the others.)79
It is noteworthy that the laws he chooses to include are all three
from the ‘happy times’ before the arrival of the Vikings, those of Ine
(688–726), his most powerful West Saxon predecessor, along with
those of kings of Mercia and Kent, the same areas over which Wessex
had already extended its power. It may also be significant that Æthel-
berht (550–616) was king of Kent at the time of Augustine’s arrival in
Canterbury, and that Offa (757–96), perhaps the most powerful of
all the early kings, asserted his power over the church by initiating
the creation of the archdiocese of Lichfield, splitting the power of the
archdiocese of Canterbury in two, and setting a precedent for Alfred’s
own claim to power over the English church. Like the translation of
the Regula pastoralis, the Domboc is also unusual in the emphasis it
places on the power of the king and loyalty to one’s lord, including
the statement that ‘one should love one’s lord as oneself ’.80 The text
is, in the words of Simon Keynes, ‘subsumed with a sense of its own
grandeur’.81 More importantly, in the Domboc the exodus legend is
written into early English law as well as history, becoming yet another
tool in the expansion of West Saxon rule across the land.82
Both the prefaces to the Domboc and the Regula pastoralis locate
England in relation to other countries or cultures at the same time
that they set it apart from them, leaving it in its island isolation with
a direct line of travel to and communication with Rome and the
classical or biblical cultures of the past. There is only Angelcynn, heir
79
Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, I, p. 46; trans. Patrick Wormald, The
Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, p. 277.
80
Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century,
pp. 283–4, citation at 283; Richards, ‘The Laws of Alfred and Ine’, p. 306.
81
Keynes, ‘Alfred the Great and the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’, p. 25.
82
Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 38–42.
to both the land of the Israelites and classical and early Christian
Greece and Rome. In the Domboc the lands of all those other Christian
peoples who translated portions of the law into their own languages
go unnamed, just like the countries from which wise men came to
England in search of knowledge in the Preface to the Regula pastoralis.
The descent of languages and laws does create a genealogy for both,
but it also suggests new beginnings. Alfred has chosen from all those
laws of the past to form a new law code for the future, just as he will
choose from all those books of the past, those that are ‘most necessary
for all men to know’, to begin his revival of learning, and a new golden
age.
In the prose Preface to the Regula pastoralis it is Alfred’s mind that
does the travelling. His memory travels across the island tracing the
path that his translations will eventually take, but here too his memory
is selective. The Humber and the Thames rivers mark specific but
porous borders between learning communities of different abilities,
but he is silent as to the significance of both as shifting political
boundaries between kingdoms (and dialects) past or present. In the
past the Humber had been the boundary between Northumbria and
Mercia while the Thames formed the northern border of the kingdom
of Kent. At the time that the Preface was written, however, the Danes
controlled most of the land north of the Thames, including eastern
Mercia, and their rule extended north beyond the Humber to the
Tees. The areas in which learning had fallen off are thus confusing.
To state that learning had fallen off south of the Thames implies that
the Viking invasions and settlements to the north are the cause, but to
state that it had fallen off north of the Humber includes the northern
Danelaw in the area of decline along with Northumbria lying to the
north of the Tees. In using these two particular rivers to define the
decline Alfred is quietly reinscribing the borders of the old kingdoms
into the landscape, the kingdoms of the age of Augustine and of Bede
before the coming of the Vikings, but establishing them as bound-
aries of cultural contact that must be crossed rather than as lines
of political difference. It is also a move that erases the presence of
the Danelaw, inserting that empty space into which his dreamed-of
England can expand, an emptiness from which the spectre of an
England that never existed can seem to rise anew. The borders thus
become markers of commonality and a shared history that must be
crossed, signs of a unified and only temporarily fragmented identity
rather than lines of cultural, historic, or ethnic difference. This mental
travelling across a lost landscape of unity could only trigger Alfred’s
melancholy as it fails to recognise the earlier ‘empty’ land in which
his ancestors had settled. He hopes that the unity he identifies is

possible, but in his recognition that his utopia is possible only under
certain circumstances, the possibility of failure remains very real. As
he writes, Alfred can only think across the river boundaries but this
provides added incentive, in fact signals the absolute necessity for the
king to cross them physically in order to know. His claim of uncer-
tainty, as Davis notes, creates nameless voids into which he is able to
project his vision and power:
In this Preface description, a uniform language and anonymous
individuals merge into an apparently pre-existing national landscape,
where the moral and military decay brought on by the decline of
wisdom corresponds both to the isolation of individuals (“very few,”
“not many,” “so few,” “a single one”) and to linguistic failure and disin-
tegration – the inability to understand or to translate “one written
message” (an ærendgewrit). The rivers function here as naturalising
figures for these discontinuities that threaten national unity and
success, but that will be crossed over (as internal boundaries they have
already been crossed out) by the restorative and unifying program of
translation.83
The speaking book of the verse Preface implies just this crossing over
and crossing out when it states that it had been sent south and north
to be copied, the copies populating the land in advance of West Saxon
conquest. As bodies of water that have been crossed mentally and
will be crossed physically, they once again allude to the Anglo-Saxon
origin myth of exile, each new crossing becoming a new search for
and step in the recovery of the promised land, but they also mark the
melancholic lack, delimiting areas in which, as the above quotation
makes clear, there remain only a few or ‘not many’ or ‘a single one’.
In Alfred’s verse Epilogue to the Regula pastoralis the book and its
wisdom also become territories to be traversed whilst simultaneously
being the means of traversing them. The book is a body of water, a
vessel dispensing water, and the water that is dispensed. It writes and
it looks forward to the recovery of all that is currently lacking.
Đis is nu se wæterscipe ðe us weroda God
to frofre gehet foldbuendum.
He cwæð ðæt he wolde ðæt on weorulde forð
of ðæm innoðum a libbendu
wætru fliowen, ðe wel on hiene
geliefden under lyfte. Is hit lytel tweo
83
Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’: 621.
ðæt ðæs wætersciepes welsprynge is

on heofonrice; þæt is Halig Gast.
Đonon hiene hlodon halige ⁊ gecorene,
sieððen hiene gieredon ða ðe Gode hierdon
ðurh halga bec hieder on eorðan
geond monna mod missenlice.
Sume hiene weriað on gewitlocan,
wisdomes stream, welerum gehæftað,
ðæt he on unnyt ut ne tofloweð.
Ac se wel wunað on weres breostum
ðurh Dryhtnes giefe diop ⁊ stille.
Sume hiene lætað ofer landscare
riðum torinnan. Nis ðæt rædlic ðing,
gif swa hlutor wæter, hlud ⁊ undiop,
tofloweð æfter feldum, oð hit to fenne wyrð.
Ac hladað iow nu drincan, nu iow Dryhten geaf
ðæt iow Gregorius gegiered hafað
to durum eowrum Drihtnes wille.
Fylle nu his fætels, se ðe fæstne hider
kylle brohte, cume eft hræðe.
Gif her ðegna hwelc ðyrelne kylle
brohte to ðys burnan, bete hiene georne,
ðylæs he forsceade scirost wætra,
oððe him liefes drync forloren weorðe.
(This is now the body of water which the God of hosts promised for
the comfort of us earth-dwellers. He said that he wished ever-living
waters to flow continually in the world from the hearts of those under
the sky who fully believed in him. There is little doubt that the source
of the body of water is in the kingdom of heaven, that is, the holy ghost.
From there saints and the elect drew it; then they, being obedient to
God, directed it by means of holy books here on earth in various ways
through the minds of men. Some guard the stream of wisdom within
their minds, keep it captive with their lips, so that it does not flow away
useless, but the pool remains deep and still in the man’s breast through
the Lord’s grace. Some let it run away over the land in small streams.
It is not advisable for clear water thus to flow away loud and shallow
across the plains until it becomes a marsh. But draw yourselves water
to drink, now that the Lord has granted you that Gregory has directed
the Lord’s stream to your doors. He who has brought a watertight
pitcher may now fill his vessel, and may come back quickly. If any
man has brought here a leaky pitcher to this stream, let him repair it
speedily, so that he may avoid spilling the clearest of waters or losing

the drink of life.)84
The Epilogue again suggests a direct textual link back from Alfred to
Gregory to God as the source of the flowing waters is heaven. One
result of this is to identify the king and pope with divine inspiration
and wisdom, but another is to imply once again divine and church
sanction for the king and his agenda. Yet these waters also flow
through Alfred in his production of the text, and then out through
his kingdom in its dissemination, being directed by means of halga
bec with bec being both the plural form of books and a word meaning
a flowing stream, forming a sea of knowledge that readers must both
travel with their minds and drink from. The metaphor unites readers
with the book as they now become receptacles for the waters of
wisdom that flow through its words and unites learning communities
in its waters – in contrast to the rivers, the Humber and the Thames,
that served to divide them. It also equates both king and people with
the land, its waters ultimately flowing through all, and figures the
utopian Christian kingdom of English speakers that Alfred sought
to create. It carries the living word of God into the vernacular and
through it into a space that makes Angelcynn into a living paradise.
Water and travel over water are also central to the portrait of Alfred
as king in Asser’s Vita Alfredi written in 893, so around the same time
Alfred’s translation of the Regula pastoralis is believed to have been
completed. Asser’s Vita was also influenced by Gregory’s text, so it
is difficult to believe that the imagery of king and country he and
Alfred created from and around it was not the product of close collab-
oration.85 Much of the Vita is devoted to the comings and goings of
people over the waters (such as Viking attacks or Alfred’s childhood
trip to Rome) but there are three key points at which Asser deploys
the metaphor of both the text and the kingdom as ships sailing on the
seas. The first comes when he turns from the events leading up the
point at which Alfred is about to become heir apparent to recount
84
Pastoralis and its Cultural Context, pp. 451–3; trans. Irvine and Godden in Irvine,
‘The Alfredian Prefaces and Epilogues’, p. 159 n.52.
85
On the Vita Alfredi and its central role in both later English colonialism and
empire and the development of Anglo-Saxonism see Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Sax-
on(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (Punctum Books, 2019), ch. 4. Ellard discusses the
same nautical metaphors discussed here, though her focus is on the body of the king
and its relationship to those who wrote about him. I am grateful to Donna Beth for
allowing me to read sections of her book prior to its publication.
Alfred’s development as an exceptional child and rightful king of the

Anglo-Saxons:
Sed, ut more navigantium loquar, ne diutius navim undis et velamentis
concedentes, et a terra longius enavigantes longum circumferamur
inter tantas bellorum clades et annorum enumerationes, ad id, quod
nos maxime ad hoc opus incitavit, nobis redeundum esse censeo,
scilicet aliquantulum, quantum meae cognitioni innotuit, de infan-
tilibus et puerilibus domini mei venerabilis Ælfredi, Angulsaxonum
regis, moribus hoc in loco breviter inserendum esse existimo. 86
(But (to speak in nautical terms) so that I should no longer veer off
course – having entrusted the ship to waves and sails, and having
sailed quite far away from the land – among such terrible wars and in
year-by-year reckoning, I think I should return to that which particu-
larly inspired me to this work: in other words, I consider that some
small account (as much as has come to my knowledge) of the infancy
and boyhood of my esteemed lord Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons,
should briefly be inserted at this point).
He then launches into the story of how Alfred acquired his love of
English learning at his mother’s knee before returning to events
from the annals, Alfred’s career fighting alongside his brother King
Æthelred, and his elevation to king at the latter’s death.
While Alfred’s use of water metaphors is quite subtle, Asser’s
use of the naval metaphor is anything but. He draws the reader’s
attention to its introduction and deployment as a narrative strategy
in no uncertain terms. It’s second appearance comes in Ch. 73 when
Asser again turns from his account of battles against the Vikings at
home and abroad to Alfred’s marriage to Ealhswith of Mercia. He
turns back to the moment from which he digressed, i.e. his first intro-
duction of the metaphor and Alfred’s learning to read English, so that
he will not ‘sail past the haven of my desired rest as a result of my
protracted voyage’.87 This time we learn about the marriage, but more
importantly about Alfred’s illness, Christian devotion, the measures
86
William Henry Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals
of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford, 1959), p. 19; trans. Keynes and
Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary
Sources, p. 74.
87
Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other
Contemporary Sources, p. 88. Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with
the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, p. 54: ‘Igitur, ut ad id, unde
digressus sum, redeam, ne diuturna enavigatione portum optatae quietis omittere
cogar’.
he put in place for the education of his children, and his bringing to
the court those men who he credits with helping him to translate the
Regula pastoralis in the Preface. It is only after their arrival at court
and Asser’s instruction of the king in Latin that Alfred is able to take
over as helmsman of the kingdom and its people, and in the third and
final use of the naval metaphor Asser shows us exactly the portrait of
the king we see in the Preface, the king able to turn his bishops and
people to his will:
Sed tamen ille solus divino fultus adminiculo susceptum semel regni
gubernaculum, veluti gubernator praecipuus, navem suam multis
opibus refertam ad desideratum ac tutum patriae suae portum, quamvis
cunctis propemodum lassis suis nautis, perducere contendit, haud
aliter titubare ac vacillare, quamvis inter fluctivagos ac multimodos
praesentis vitae turbines, non sinebat. Nam assidue suos episcopos et
comites ac nobilissimos, sibique dilectissimos suos ministros, necnon
et praepositos, quibus post Dominum et regem omnis totius regni
potestas, sicut dignum, subdita videtur, leniter docendo, adulando,
hortando, imperando, ad ultimum inoboedientes, post longam
patientiam, acrius castigando, vulgarem stultitiam et pertinaciam
omni modo abominando, ad suum voluntatem et ad communem
totius regni utilitatem sapientissime usurpabat et annectebat.
(Yet once he had taken over the helm of his kingdom, he alone,
sustained by divine assistance, struggled like an excellent pilot to
guide his ship laden with much wealth to the desired and safe haven
of his homeland, even though all his sailors were virtually exhausted;
similarly, he did not allow it to waver or wander from course, even
though the course lay through the many seething whirlpools of the
present life. For by gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding,
and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising
those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and
stubbornness in every way, he carefully and cleverly exploited and
converted his bishops and ealdormen and nobles, and his thegns most
dear to him, and reeves as well (in all of whom, after the Lord and the
king, the authority of the entire kingdom is seen to be invested, as
is appropriate), to his will and to the general advantage of the whole
realm.)88
88
Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint Neots
Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, pp. 77–8; trans. Keynes and Lapidge, eds, Alfred the
Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, pp. 101–2.
The remainder of the Vita is devoted to Alfred’s good works on behalf

of both the church and his people, and to describing the king as very
much the model of Gregory’s idea of the good leader.
AN UNCANNY DREAMSCAPE
Alfred’s Epilogue to the Regula pastoralis establishes a direct link
between the king and Gregory, but rather than doing so with Asser’s
clarity, it creates uncanny connections across time and space and
between voices and identities. Firstly, whose voice is speaking in the
Epilogue? It could equally well be Alfred’s, the book’s, or both. Voice,
along with metaphor, make Alfred and the book one. This lends the
book the authority of the king’s voice and vice versa, but it is also
disorienting and confusing. I have discussed the mutability of Alfred’s
use of pronouns in terms of his manipulation of voice and the coercing
of readers into agreement with him, but the blending of identities
into each other is also one of the things that make the Preface and
Epilogue so uncanny. Indeed, the unreliability and unsettled nature of
identity that we find in Alfred’s writing is one of the hallmarks of the
uncanny.89 Alfred’s mixing of genres, prose and poetry, history and
fiction, might also be understood as uncanny, although it is certainly
possible to question whether or not the early English had as rigidly
defined literary genres as came to exist in the modern world.90
Seth Lerer has argued that Alfred’s appropriation of identities and
genres reaches back into a broader past, bringing personal history
together with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ history and Roman authors and literary
forms in a way that allows us to read the Preface as ‘a chronicle of
the creation of an author’.91 He reads the Preface not only in relation
to the writings of Gregory, Augustine, and Boethius and the dialogic
genres they favoured, but also in relation to Asser’s Vita Alfredi and
the scenes of reading and writing that it stages. In it, Alfred stands
out amongst his brothers for, amongst other reasons, his attraction
to writing. The beautiful letters of the book of English poetry his
mother offers is his initiation into reading in the vernacular, and this
89
Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche
(The “Uncanny”)’; Royle, The Uncanny, p. 39.
90
Both the Franks Casket and the Beowulf manuscript discussed below, for
example, mix prose and poetry, while the prose Anglo-Saxon Chronicle includes
a number of poems, Aldred embeds earlier verses into his tenth-century prose
colophon to the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Ælfric is known for his rhythmical prose.
91
Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 77.
becomes the originary moment for his use of language and writing
to both restore the past and dream the future.92 In later life he carries
a booklet with him in which he can copy texts that interest him,
and Asser, his literary father figure, gives him a separate booklet of
Latin texts on his initiation into the Latin language and translation.93
Together these scenes gradually build up a community of scholars that
begins in the court and spreads outward culminating in the union of
authors and readers, past and present, far and near that we find in the
Preface and Epilogue to and translation of the Regula pastoralis.94 I’ll
return to Alfred’s intellectual endeavour below, but what I want to
examine here is the mental space or state that Alfred authors in the
Preface. It is a dreamlike space in its simultaneous existence in and
out of time and geographic space. Alfred’s meditations form a sort
of daydream in which the king dreams of a better life in a land that
does not yet exist and populates it with echoes and voices of both
the dead and the living.95 To meditate on or brood over a lost golden
age is in and of itself a daydream as, while such thoughts may have a
basis in historical fact, they are always beyond the realm of experience
or memory and thus always to a greater or lesser extent fictions or
fantasies.96 At the very least Alfred’s meditation is a daydream-like
vision of a longed-for future. As such, Alfred’s narrative does have
similarities with the accounts of other types of dreams known
from pre-Conquest England, some of the most prominent of which
relate to the production of English, of texts, and of the promotion
or defence of the kingdom. There is the dream at the centre of the
Cædmon story, which, while a nocturnal dream, is the origin point
(fictional or not) of English poetry and to a lesser extent translation.97
The story of Cædmon belongs to the lost golden age and is indeed an
example of the type of learning that Alfred was anxious to recover.
In other dreams space and/or time are distorted and figures from the
past appear to speak to or through the living, often with the purpose
of warning individuals or communities of the need to change their
behaviour in order to escape punishment or initiate reform. Two
92
See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 154 for the extension of this image of
language and nation in the modern world.
93
Asser, Vita Alfredi, chs 23, 87, 88.
94
Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, pp. 95–6.
95
See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, pp. 88–90, 115 on the utopian nature and
function of daydreams. See also Lochrie, ‘Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the
Middle Ages’: 496.
96
Hutchinson, ‘Mapping Utopias’.
97
Bede, HE, iv.24.
such notable dreams or visions were granted to kings from the golden
age on which Alfred meditates and from the latter half of the ninth
century, the period of destruction that he has seen around him.
While in exile and under threat of assassination at Rædwald’s
court, Edwin of Northumbria was sitting outside in the dead of night
when a spirit came to him and told him that he would live through
his present miseries, regain his kingdom, and surpass in power all of
his ancestors and all who had reigned before him over the Angelcynn
(omnes qui ante te reges in gente Anglorum fuerant) if he obeyed a
sign. That sign was the hand of Bishop Paulinus placed upon his
head. Edwin fulfilled his word and converted to Christianity, along
with many in his kingdom, ushering in the seventh- to eighth-century
golden age of Northumbria.98 And while Alfred was still a child,
his father, King Æthelwulf, wrote to Louis the Pious about a vision
granted to an English priest in which:
A man appeared … one night while he slept, not long after Christmas,
and ordered him to follow. He was led into a strange land filled with
remarkable buildings and entered a church where he found many
boys engaged in reading. With trepidation, the priest approached the
boys and saw that they were reading books with alternating lines of
black and blood-red letters. The guide explained that the bloody lines
represented the many sins that Christians had accumulated because
they cared little of what was commanded in holy books. The reading
boys were the souls of the saints who daily deplored the sins and
crimes of Christians who attempted to intercede for them and to lead
them to penance. You will remember, the guide informed the priest,
that in the present year there had been an abundance of fruit in the
fields and trees, but because of the sins of many men a great deal of it
had perished. He warned him that if men did not quickly repent and
observe the Lord’s day, great danger would fall upon them. For three
days and nights a great mist would cover the land and out of it would
sail the Northmen (homines pagani) who would randomly murder
men and destroy property with fire and sword. Only through proper
penance for their sins would they escape this disaster.99
In a not dissimilar series of visions St Swithun (d. 863) would appear
some one hundred years after his death to a smith, ordering him to
98
Bede, HE, ii.12–13.
99
Paul Edward Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln,
NB, 1994), pp. 107–8. Æthelwulf ’s letter is preserved in the Annals of Saint-Bertin
for the year 839 (Janet L. Nelson, ed. and trans., The Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester,
1991), pp. 41–8).
instruct one of the canons expelled from the Old Minster Winchester
by Bishop Æthelwold to tell the bishop that his body was to be dug
up and his bones translated into the church, an act that was at the
centre of the reform and rebuilding of Winchester by Æthelwold and
King Edgar in the latter half of the tenth century. Swithun would
continue to appear in dreams when the behaviour of the Winchester
community displeased him.100
One does not have to be asleep to have a dream or dreamlike
vision, as the story of Edwin makes clear. In The Wanderer, dreams
of the wanderer’s lost lord provoke memories of his kinsmen and the
joys of his former life, and both dream and memory are part of the
private meditations or reflections that form the poem: ‘Swa cwæð
snottor on mode, gesæt him sundor æt rune’ (line 111) (So spoke the
one wise in mind as he sat by himself in meditation). The epilogue to
Elene consists of the poet’s reflections (and one can question whether
he is dreaming or pondering) and echoes the words and images of
Constantine’s dream that sets the events of the poem in motion.101
Finally, it is unclear whether one of Old English’s most famous
dreamers, the narrator of The Dream of the Rood, is awake or asleep.
He calls his vision a dream but then says that it came to him in the
middle of the night while everyone else was asleep:
Hwæt ic swefna cyst secgan wille,
þæt me gemætte to midre nihte,
syðþan reord-berend reste wunedon. (lines 1–3)
(Indeed I wish to tell the choicest of dreams, that I dreamt in the
middle of the night after the speech-bearers were asleep.)
The Cross that the dreamer sees tells him the events of the crucifixion,
mediating between the distant past of Christ’s death and the present
of the dreamer in something of the same way that the clerics who
speak to Alfred in his internal dialogue mediate between the distant
golden age and the present of the king and his memory and, like the
Cross, they lead the daydreaming Alfred to a clear path for the future.
All three of these waking dreams are meditations on the past and
have the production of a narrative of the past in English at their core.
Cædmon’s dream too was about the production of texts in English.
The royal dream/visions are concerned with kingdoms, their defence
100
See Michael Lapidge’s translation of Lantfred’s Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni,
in Lapidge, ed., The Cult of St Swithun, Winchester Studies 4/2 (Oxford, 2003),
pp. 252–3.
101
I thank Catherine Clarke for pointing this out to me.
and the power of the king. Both subjects connect them to Alfred’s
daydream, which brings the production and dissemination of texts
in English into the service of king and kingdom. Unlike all these
other dreams, however, Alfred dreams of a national social utopia, a
living rather than an otherworldly paradise or an exclusively religious
utopia like Augustine’s City of God.102 And while he looks to the past
he does not simply convey a nostalgic longing for what is lost, as does
The Wanderer, but uses the past both to critique the present and as
the basis of a plan for the future. Alfred is not resigned to accept the
world as it is.103
Alfred’s dream allows him to imagine that he has (or ‘we’ have) lost
a kingdom, a golden kingdom filled with wealth and wisdom, and this
fills the Preface with a sense of melancholy. While melancholy might
be a mental state, it is also something ‘one does: longing for lost loves,
brooding over absent objects or changed environments, reflecting on
unmet desires, and lingering on events from the past’.104 The structure
of the Preface allows Alfred to do just this. The first three sections
of the prose Preface chronicle what has been lost, even as they leave
open exactly when and where and what this lost kingdom was. They
effectively create a sense of having been exiled from a communal
past, and this is augmented and made more acute by the fluctuation
between singular and plural pronouns. Alfred moves back and forth
in time from dreaming of the distant past to remembering the more
recent past to contemplating the problems of the present. From this
activity a plan for the future emerges, and this is outlined in the final
two sections of the prose Preface. By the end of the Preface we have
moved from private dreams and thoughts of the loss of a past and
a unity, that are now detectable only in traces, through a series of
internal dialogues, into what seems to be a realm of collective thought
and communal history that makes possible the realisation of utopia
future. While that utopia was never to be realised – no utopia can
be – Alfred’s promotion of the English language and the significant
body of writing in English that was produced during his reign not
only helped to cement a sense of English identity, but also to keep
that language and identity alive through the Conquest of 1066 and
beyond. His programme for translation succeeded in developing the
largest corpus of vernacular literature to survive from early medieval
102
On The City of God as utopia see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, II, pp. 502–9.
103
Not accepting the world or the present as it is is a central element of utopian
thinking – see further Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I, pp. 146–7; Ruth Levitas, The
Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY, 1990).
104
Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, p. 2.
Europe and created what has been described by many scholars as a

culture of translation.105
WRITING UTOPIA
There is no reason to believe that Alfred’s melancholia and a shared
sense of having been exiled from a communal past were not real,
especially as brooding over the past or something lost in or from
the past pervades so much of early medieval English culture from
the Franks Casket to the poems Beowulf or Durham. But the way
in which Alfred writes about that loss and recovery is carefully
contrived, convincing, and coercive in equal measure. His choice of
select bits of the past to ‘remember’ creates a realistic yet always only
partial history and there is a tension between the ecclesiastical and
monastic learning of the past and the secular and explicitly hierar-
chical plan of learning and governance that he is formulating. Like
More’s Utopia, Alfred’s utopias – whether past or future – can only be
known through description and will always remain for him and his
contemporaries unreachable elsewheres. His modulation of pronouns
and his blending of Gregory’s voice with his own create a fictional
space within the text that crosses the temporal borders between past,
present, and future just as the physical borders of the Thames and
the Humber will be crossed. Alfred’s translation is intended to be
carried into the future, performing that crossing, as the voice of the
book makes clear. It (Đis ærendgewrit) had been written by Gregory
and carried north by Augustine, and it (me) had been translated into
English by Alfred. Many separate books – the one written in Rome,
the one carried north by Augustine, Alfred’s English translation,
and the copies that will be made of it by his scribes – become one in
each copy of the text that the king sent to his bishops. This temporal
displacement is as much a part of utopia as is its more conventional
geographical displacement, as utopias are usually intended to hold
105
See further Robert Stanton, ‘The (M)other Tongue: Translation Theory and Old
English’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer
(Kalamazoo, MI, 1997), pp. 33–46; idem, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon
England (Cambridge, 2002); Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English
Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon
England (Toronto, 2007); Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon
England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001).
out the promise of escape from the problems of the present.106 Alfred
does not accept the world as it is, a present at odds with itself. It is also
a colonising move, writing into being a future into which the king’s
plan and West Saxon rule can move.
As the ‘chronicle of the creation of an author’, and read alongside
the images of Alfred becoming a learned author and translator
provided by the Vita Alfredi,107 the Preface is unusual in establishing
the king as both a power to be obeyed and an intellectual figure, the
king who writes English history in English for the English people.
This is an image of kingship that will be taken up by subsequent kings
(and queens), and one that sets ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rulers apart from those
of other early medieval territories,108 although Alfred remains unique
amongst them for his personal engagement in and commitment
to writing and translation. ‘Intellectual passion’, Frederic Jameson
writes, ‘is one of the drivers of utopia’ specifically as regards trans-
lation, the ‘reappropriating [of] the original text, whether in Greek
or in Hebrew … this is the intellectual vocation at its most feverish
and committed, at the very height of its potential excitement, in a
mission that more than any other seems to concentrate what defines
the intellectual as such, namely the relationship to writing. Not the
Socratic committed to ideas, but rather this one of the text and its
translation.’109 Alfred’s intellectual work and commitment may be
bound up inextricably with his sovereign nationalist agenda, but
they are present nonetheless. The love of English, of letters, and of
learning given to him as a child by his mother, grows into the ability
to translate, to teach, and to rule that emerge under the tutelage of
Asser and the other wise men of the court and are what will translate
the Angelcynn into a utopian future. But utopia is always located in
the book, even though it may not be limited to it, a place or space that
is both a ‘happy-place’ and a ‘no-place’. As Marin describes it, it is the
writing of space and place.110 Alfred’s utopian vision is based in and
moves across real history and geography, but it is only in his text that
England as a happy peaceful nation, past or future, emerges. It is also
only in his text that the limits of time and geography are broken down
in the creation of an island united to yet distinct from both Rome and
the eighth century. Moreover, they are narrated by an authorial voice
106
Daniel Birkholz, ‘Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint’, Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (2006): 585–618, at 591.
107
See above, n. 60.
108
Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England.
109
Jameson, ‘Morus’: 438.
110
Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces.
that is both identifiable and impossible to pin down. Time and place
shift and morph repeatedly as Alfred’s mind wanders back and forth
in time, across continents, seas, and rivers from the word of God to
the Holy Land in which the law was written, to early Christian Rome,
to Britain. It traces and takes the reader along a path of multiple exiles
into one lost promised land and on towards the reclaiming of all that
has been lost from it, or at least all that Alfred is willing and able to
imagine. It writes into being a lost land and a linguistic community
that must remain imaginary places or spaces no matter how based
on historical facts and events they might be, and it writes into being
a not-yet England, an uncanny home into which the Angelcynn and
their language can expand. It ends where it began, in the middle,
looking simultaneously to the past and future that are the focus of the
next two chapters of this book.
Both Alfred’s idea of a utopia that looks simultaneously backwards
and forwards and that both exists in and traverses an uncanny combi-
nation of real and imagined territories would be developed by later
authors and artists. In a national context we can see it at work in the
tenth-century programme of reform and refoundation promoted by
Alfred’s great grandson Edgar (that king to whom we are told that all
the Scots, Britons, Welsh, and Danes submitted) and his bishops and
archbishops. Like Alfred they looked back to the age of Bede, in part
for a model of monastic learning but also in part for a claim to land on
which a utopian vision of a reformed church could be built, a church
that, as the New Minster Charter of 966 (London, British Library,
Cotton MS Vespasian A.viii) makes clear, existed in the exceptional
border space between heaven and earth.111 The Scots and the Welsh,
of course, saw things rather differently, and it has been suggested
that Welsh animosity towards the picture of the close Anglo-Welsh
relationship that Asser had portrayed in his Vita Alfredi was, along
with the submission of the Welsh to the kings that succeeded Alfred
if not to Alfred himself,112 the motivation for the composition of the
tenth-century Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr, which describes the
English as treacherous and pagan foxes in contrast to the Christian
111
London, BL, Cotton MS Vespasian A.viii. For a discussion, text, and translation
of the charter see Alexander R. Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Medieval
Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman
City and its Minsters, Winchester Studies 4.iii (Oxford, 2002), pp. 65–97.
112
Asser describes the submission of the Welsh to Alfred in ch. 80 of the Vita
Alfredi, but what exactly this meant is not clear.
Welsh, and which calls for the English to be driven from the island.113
These are the descendants of the ghosts of conquest and colonisation,
the silence that Alfred hides beneath his story of English loss and
Viking colonisation.
We can see the success of Alfred’s colonising agenda at work both
ideologically and geographically in the mid-eleventh-century Cotton
Map contained in British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v (fig. 1).
The island of England, identified by its Roman name Britannia, lies
at the lower-left corner of the map. Wales sits just under the word
Britannia and is labelled with the name Morenwergas (the ‘w’ repre-
sented by the letter wyn), which Martin Foys has identified as a
form of the Welsh Morgannwg or Glamorgan,114 but which it is also
possible to read as, or possible that the spelling of the place-name
can be read as, an allusion to, Old English mor (moor) and wearg/
werg (criminal, monster, evil spirit), terms that establish the Welsh
as evil or monstrous. Rory Naismith has asked if the name should be
translated as ‘moor-dwellers’, a term that conjures up Grendel and his
mother, monstrous inhabitants of the moors and wastelands that I
will discuss in Chapter 3,115 while Neil McGuigan translates the name
as ‘wild men of the moors’.116 The map, as Foys has demonstrated,
celebrates the origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture at the same time that
it projects a colonising agenda not only inward but outward onto
the Continent and beyond. Across the Channel from England is the
area of Brittany labelled suðbrytta (South Britain) in Old English.117
Of course England was shortly to be absorbed into the expanding
Anglo-Norman empire, but that event was still in the future, and
anyway the map is not about political or historical realities. On a
much grander scale, the map projects the angular shape of the island
outward, mirroring and expanding it across the waters by repeating
it in the shape of both the European continent and the giant land
mass composed of Africa, India, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and
113 Rebecca Thomas and David Callander, ‘Reading Asser in Early Medieval Wales:
The Evidence of Armes Prydein Vawr’, Anglo-Saxon England 46 (2019): 115–45.

114 ‘Morenwergas (Cotton Map, BL Cotton Tiberius B v, f. 56v)’, Virtual Mappa,
ed. Martin Foys, Heather Wacha et al. Schoenberg Institute of Manuscript Studies,
2018: http://sims.digitalmappa.org/workspace/#965fe731. I thank Martin Foys for
directing me to further suggested interpretations of the name.
115
https://twitter.com/rory_naismith/status/973146027736825856?lang=en.
Accessed 4 August 2019.
116
Neil McGuigan, ‘Neither Scotland nor England: Middle Britain c. 850–1150’,
unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015, p. 110.
117
Martin K. Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early
Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville, FL, 2007), pp. 138–42.
FIG. 1. ANGLO-SAXON WORLD MAP. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, COTTON MS TIBERIUS
B.V, FOL. 56V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.
Asia that fills the upper-right-hand side of the map, an appropriate

way of visualising the idea of England’s exceptional place within the
larger geographic and temporal order of the world. It is once again
both at the edge of the known world and entirely central. Like Alfred’s
Preface, it lays claim to time and space, but a much larger time and
space. It also exists in the middle. It is an image but it is based almost
entirely on texts, on the descriptions contained in Orosius’s Historia

adversus paganos of 417–18 (translated into Old English in or around
the time of Alfred’s reign), and the biblical account of the journey of
Moses and the Israelites in Exodus. However, the map, like Alfred or
Bede before him, combines that fictionality with surprisingly accurate
details of places and features and suggestions of coastlines.118 It
reaches out across the waters and gathers back to England the Anglo-
Saxons’ legendary origins in the Old Testament Exodus and imperial
and Christian Rome to create an uncanny utopian space that is partly
real and partly imagined. Asa Simon Mittman has observed: ‘In order
to link disconnected individuals, groups and events, English illumi-
nators had to collapse differences in time and space, they thereby
reconstructed their kingdom so that England became everywhere
and the present moment became everywhen.’119 Mittman is referring
in this passage to later medieval English maps but we can see very
much the same thing happening both here on the Cotton Map and in
the Old English word her as used by both Alfred and the makers of
the Franks Casket to be discussed in Chapter 2.
Alfred’s vision and that of the Cotton Map have a structural compo-
sition to them that expresses very specific ideas about expansion. They
place precise images of England at their ideological centres, even if
England is physically decentred on the Cotton Map. While travelling
outwards in space and backwards in time they position the island as
an ever-changing place repeating, or attempting to repeat, itself across
the world, as it would eventually do with the creation of the British
Empire. But emptiness remains at its heart. The map locates England’s
cities along its coastline looking out over the water, but at the centre
of the country is emptiness, the seemingly uninhabited area in which
the name ‘Brittannia’ floats above Wales, while at the centre of the
map as a whole, as Martin Foys has pointed out, is an empty space and
not the usual Jerusalem.120
In the post-Conquest period the image of England that Alfred
created was picked up and expanded by both chroniclers and poets,
and Alfred himself became an important link to both the past and
the image of the past. Immediately following the conquest of 1066,
the Normans began re-creating past and place to suit their own needs
118
Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies
in the Late Age of Print, p. 126.
119
Asa Simon Mittman, ‘England is the World and the World is England’, postme-
dieval 9.1 (2018): 15–29, at 16.
120
Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies
in the Late Age of Print, 225 n.66.
and vision. Henry I married Matilda, daughter of Malcom III and

Margaret of Scotland, and a direct descendant of King Alfred, as a
means of writing himself into the pre-Conquest past and popular-
ising, if not legitimising, himself in the eyes of the now ‘native’ Anglo-
Saxons. Old English texts were rewritten to suit a Norman agenda, as
the Alfredian era had rewritten the texts they translated to suit the
agenda of the ninth-century court. St Cuthbert’s Life, for example, was
rewritten turning him into an angry and aggressive saint defending the
now Norman stronghold of Durham against all would-be intruders,
especially any English with nationalist tendencies. Figures such as
Symeon of Durham, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth,
and Henry of Huntingdon were retrospective, taking an interest in
pre-Conquest history and updating its documentation and narrative
as well as its mythology. Symeon (d. after 1129), for example, provides
the earliest surviving account of the loss and miraculous rediscovery
of Cuthbert’s gospel book in the sea,121 a way of affirming the power
of Cuthbert and the Cuthbert community in a new order, yet another
invocation of the crossing of water, and a story likely to have been
his own invention. His success in rewriting the past is measured by
the number of scholars who continue to assume that the miracle
was recorded in Cuthbert’s own day despite there being absolutely
no evidence of this. The half-Norman Henry of Huntingdon (ca.
1088–1157) rewrote the history of the island as a succession of legit-
imate governments from the Romans to the Normans, each of its
chronological periods or geographic regions eventually growing weak
and succumbing to a stronger and more violent culture. Henry was
clear that there was warfare and violence and that the English had
gained control of the island through warfare and not through peaceful
settlement. He saw the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as invaders and occupiers of a
foreign land, but no matter what their flaws they were not as bad as
the Normans, the most savage of all the island’s invaders. Despite all
the violence, however, Henry portrayed each conquering culture as
having a right to conquest and sovereignty.122 William of Malmesbury
(ca. 1095–1143), also half-Norman, composed a more straightforward
rewriting of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, updating and extending it
into his own time. Like Bede (and Alfred) he maintained England’s
isolated specialness while at the same time emphasising its multiple
121
Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius hoc est Dunhel-
mensis, ed. and trans. David Rollason (Oxford, 2000), pp. 112–21.
122
Henry of Huntingdon, Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum, ed.
and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 78–137, 338–411.
historic and contemporary connections with the Continent and

Scandinavia, and even beyond, including reports that Alfred sent
envoys to Armenia and India,123 stories that would be taken up in the
nineteenth century by Sharon Turner and others to create an image
of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England as a nascent British Empire.124 For William,
the arrival of the Normans was not a conquest but in the self-fash-
ioned image of more modern empires just a civilised progression of
sovereignty that was especially necessary given the chaos of places
like Yorkshire, which was a stronghold for the barbaric Danes and
Saxons.125 Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1095–1155) produced a very
different history in which the island was inherently beautiful, again
a kind of paradise, but it was also isolated by violence and subject to
cycles of conquest and brutality due largely to the weakness of human
nature. He was concerned with the oppression of the Britons, and
rewrote the pre-Conquest story of migration to the island so that it
began not with the arrival of the Saxon brothers Hengest and Horsa
but with the arrival of Brutus from Troy,126 a story that has its roots
in the earlier Historia Brittonum and Isidore’s Etymologiae, but that is
greatly embellished in Geoffrey’s account. For him, British civilisation
reached a high point under King Arthur and Camelot but, though
noble, the Britons became weak and corrupt, leading to their own
conquest by the Saxons, just as Gildas had recorded. At the same time,
he was clear that the English were barbaric invaders interrupting a
glorious British past and preventing its development into a new
golden age – which was now to come under Norman rule – replacing
the demonisation and erasure of one group with that of another.
Geoffrey’s writings were much more blatantly fantastical than those of
123 William of Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury. Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed.
and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thompson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford,

1998), I, pp. 190–1. MS F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains an entry for the year
883 stating that Alfred sent men with alms to the shrines of St Thomas in India and
St Bartholomew, though it has also been claimed that India (Indea) is a scribal error
and that the alms were sent to Judea, though most accept that a journey to India was
perfectly possible. See for example Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture
in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 192; Daniel Anlezark, Alfred the Great (Bradford, 2017),
p. 54.
124
Chris Jones, Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-
Century Poetry (Oxford, 2018), p. 112; Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon
Futures, p. 23.
125
William of Malmesbury, William of Malmesbury. Gesta Regum Anglorum, I,
pp. 462–3.
126
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth. The
History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge,
2007), pp. 8–30.
his contemporaries including, for example, an account of the invasion

of Britain by an African king, Gormundus, who chastised the Britons
for their weakness.127 He also included a section on the ‘Prophecies
of Merlin’ in which the red dragon of the Britons triumphed over the
white dragon of the Saxons, a sign that the Britons would eventually
overcome the violent intruders and recover the island.128
Like Alfred, each of these Anglo-Norman chroniclers of England
had his own particular agenda. Each produced a combination of what
he wanted to project as more or less accurate history taken from Bede,
Gildas, and others, with a few fictional or anecdotal additions. Each is
also somewhat contradictory in his attempt to simultaneously suggest
a good or noble people(s) and to justify violence, invasion, and
conquest. That is hardly surprising given the immediately post-Con-
quest time in which – and Anglo-Norman readership for which – they
were writing, but they helped to keep alive the ethnicism that would
eventually be picked up by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
historians who studied these sources as part of their justification of
modern colonisation and racism. For these early authors the past was
not a dead and distant object of history but part of a living and teleo-
logical progression in which they were caught up, a way of thinking
that is also present in the writings of many, if not most, of these same
modern historians, as discussed in Chapter 4. What is noteworthy,
however, is that at least three of the four authors wrote about the
conquest of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and others as a conquest,
no different in nature from those of the Romans and Normans, rather
than as a peaceful process of migration and settlement. Their modern
heirs still argue over the accuracy of these terms.
The location of England in an exceptional space at the margins
of the world continued to be celebrated in world maps and texts
such as Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.129 Its otherworldly paradisiacal
nature features in the Faerie Queene, and its lush landscape is repro-
duced in miniature in monastic gardens, aristocratic parks, and
manuscripts such as the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter (London,
British Library, Add. MS 42130), and in a rather different form in the
agrarian and communal landscapes of Langland – even if the latter
also expressed concerns over the enclosure of traditionally communal
127
History of the Kings of Britain, pp. 256–7.
128
History of the Kings of Britain, pp. 144–7.
129
Community 1000–1534.
land and the loss of a way of life. Oppression of and violence towards
the Celtic languages and peoples continued, with Spenser, for
example, arguing that the Irish language and way of life should be
exterminated by any means possible. His description of the Irish is
reminiscent of Gildas’s description of the Britons or the Beowulf poet’s
description of Grendel, although the Irish do not have the strength
or resilience of either of their predecessors: ‘Out of everie Corner of
the woodes & glennes they came creeping forth upon their hands, for
theire legges could not beare them, they looked Anatomies of death,
they spoke like ghostes cryinge out of their graves, they did eat of the
dead carrions.’130 It is a trope of settler colonialism that indigenous
populations or previous settlers of a territory must be made into
ghosts.131 England’s geography, history, and its ability to either repel
or assimilate invaders and foreign peoples to its white Christian order
were celebrated in the Middle English romances of King Horn and
Havelock the Dane,132 keeping the spirit of nationalism and excep-
tionalism alive. Perhaps its ability to reach out from its marginal
position and make itself central on the world stage was expressed
most definitively in Henry VIII’s split from Rome and the events of
the Reformation, events that are often taken to mark the end of the
Middle Ages, but they can also be seen to be replayed to a certain
extent today in the debates surrounding ‘Brexit’ and the nationalism
and religious, ethnic, and racial prejudice that are so much a part of
it. The view that England can withdraw from the European Union
(EU) but still remain a privileged trading partner, or end freedom of
movement for EU citizens in the UK but expect UK citizens abroad
should retain their freedoms, are indicative of the continued belief in
English exceptionalism, a topic to which I will return in Chapter 4.
130
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick
(London, 1934), p. 135. The pamphlet was originally written in 1596 but not published
until 1633.
131
Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’: 6.
132
Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell,
pp. 145–51.

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IMAGINING

Professor Julian Luxford

This series aims to provide a forum for debate on the art

Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors

Professor Julian Luxford, School of Art History, University of St

Professor Asa Simon Mittman, Department of Art and Art History,

Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

THE BOYDELL PRESS

The right of Catherine E. Karkov to be identified as

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

First published 2020

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

1 A Plan for Utopia to Come 27

2 Utopia Past and the Heterotopia of Origins 77

3 Utopia/Dystopia: Humanity and its Others in the

4 Retrotopia: Anglo-Saxonism, Anglo-Saxonists, and the

1 Anglo-Saxon world map. London, British Library,

11 Conopenas, The Wonders of the East. London, British

1 The canonical text on imagined communities is Benedict Anderson, Imagined

conquest of 1066, but it was continued and expanded by the Normans

divinely sanctioned processes. This is reflected in the description of

represented it have been explored in some detail, most notably by

Trauma (New York, 2010), p. 2.

product of wishful thinking. It is in opposition to the world as it is. It

21 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An

others, have noted, place mattered to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ in both the

26 Nicholas Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural

as a whole, figure as uncanny others in so many Anglo-Saxon texts.

if the range of its meanings was slightly different than in modern

the uncanny in Old English and Old Irish.

and a manmade object. The primary other in Alfred’s Preface to the

trans. Nicholas Rand with foreword by Jacques Derrida (Minneapolis, 1986);

production.52 As was the case with utopia, melancholia is generally

and he did suffer from illnesses associated with melancholia.61 His

teaching without memory … of the dead, without a logic of mourning

of identity also render this dystopia uncanny – literally unknowable.

Chapter 4 moves from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England to the development

England in the first three chapters, retrotopia is generated simultane-

King Alfred’s Preface perform this process, looking to, remembering,

each other as scholarship upholding the traditional medieval/modern

ALFRED’S PREFACE AND THE WORK OF

Alfred envisages as an always already extant yet still to come England,

unnamed punishments that have been visited upon them, learning

to the age of Bede and introduces the translation of a text authored

in Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (London, 1993), pp. 125–58, at

stodon maðma ⁊ boca gefylda, ⁊ eac micel menigu Godes ðeowa, ⁊ ða

textual gulf between past and present, creating a space of unknown

Pastoral Care’: 350.

from imposing a particular reading.

about books and reading, and it is the path of learning preserved

with my blackened meanderings. It is not sufficient to open up a single pathway

out’.34 Alfred’s not knowing leads him to a moment of actual wonder

44 Those bishops known to have received a copy are Wærferth of Worcester,

Hehstan of London, Wulfsige of Sherborne, Swiðulf of Rochester, and Archbishop

carrier of that which will be restored, learning and languages. This is