By Rich
Lowry
Friday,
June 09, 2023
It’s official.
The Anglo-Saxons are getting canceled.
The move
comes more than 1,000 years too late for the previously ascendant
Romano-British who couldn’t resist these Germanic peoples who showed up on the
shores of England beginning in the fifth century, but surely, they would
appreciate the gesture.
As part
of an effort to make its instruction more “anti-racist,” Cambridge University
is going to teach students that identities such as Anglo-Saxon are “constructed
and contingent.” The school’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic is
hoping to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism,” and also is keenly
aware of “recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived
connection to ethnic/racial English identity.”
To be
honest, the Anglo-Saxons have been living on borrowed time for a while now.
In 2019,
the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists — worried about their association
with, yes, the Anglo-Saxons — changed their name to the International Society
for the Study of Early Medieval England.
The
change came after Mary Rambaran-Olm, the group’s second vice president,
resigned and denounced the organization for allegedly encouraging white
supremacy. As the Washington Post put it, the group
effectively conceded that “‘Anglo Saxon’ is code for whiteness.”
There is
no doubt that the term has been used by malicious and ignorant people over the
years to make racist arguments and promote a simplified or outright false
version of early English history. But that doesn’t mean the Anglo-Saxons didn’t
exist or the term must be banished.
For all
that the “woke” scholars warn against anachronisms, they should be careful not
to imply that the Anglo-Saxons came to England wearing white hoods.
To
simplify, the island’s defenses weakened after the Romans exited and tribes of
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived and established dominance, although they’d
subsequently be involved in desperate struggles for survival against Viking
invaders.
The term
Anglo-Saxon isn’t exactly a neologism. The authoritative book by Nicholas J.
Higham and Martin J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World, notes that it was
in use by the eighth century, when writers on the continent apparently used it
to distinguish between Saxons in England and those back on the continent. King
Alfred the Great, one of the important figures in English history, called
himself the “king of the Anglo-Saxons.”
The
opponents of the term argue that it was nonetheless used infrequently by the
Anglo-Saxons. Okay, but how often did the Anglo-Saxons refer to themselves as
“insular Saxons,” a term that is proffered as more accurate and less
problematic? (The terms “Saxons” and “Angles,” by the way, were used quite a
lot at the time.) And if “Anglo-Saxon” is allegedly too white, does “early
medieval English,” another allegedly better phrase, evoke a kaleidoscopic
multiracialism?
The
Anglo-Saxon ascendancy ended in 1066, when the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold,
suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Normans, who were notably
brutal and, one must say, as white as the Anglo-Saxons — but “Anglo-Norman”
hasn’t become politically incorrect.
The
Anglo-Saxon contribution to English history isn’t merely incidental, as Higham
and Ryan write.
The name
England means “land of the Angles.”
The
Anglo-Saxons gave us the most foremost language in the world, English, which
derives from Old English or Anglo-Saxon.
They
unified what came to be England as we know it, while the English monarchy dates
to the Anglo-Saxon period.
The same
is true of English Christianity, with the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
beginning in the sixth and seventh centuries.
The
Anglo-Saxons set out the shires that were the units of local government until
the lines were redrawn in the late 20th century.
What the
academics hostile to their own field of study want to do is take a term that is
readily recognized, broadly understood, and generates public interest and
replace it with something more obscure for no good reason.
It
doesn’t require a gauzily romantic view of the Anglo-Saxons to conclude that
they deserve better than today’s self-loathing Anglo-Saxonists.
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