The interconnectedness of Europe has a long history, as we’re reminded when we explore the roots of the English language – roots that stretch back to the 5th Century. Anglo-Saxon England “was connected to the world beyond its shores through a lively exchange of books, goods, ideas”, argues the Medieval historian Mary Wellesley, describing a new exhibition at the British Library in London – Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War – that charts the genesis of England.
“Something like 80 percent of all surviving Old English verse survives in four physical books for the first time in recorded history they are all together,” she tells BBC Culture. “The period that is represented by Old English is about 600 years, which is like between us and back to Chaucer imagine if there were only four physical books that survived from that period, what would that say about our literature?”
What we understand as English has its roots in 5th-Century Germany, from where the Anglian, Saxon and Jute tribes came. As the Roman legions withdrew around 410AD, so the Saxon war bands landed and an era of migration from the Continent and the formation of Anglo-Saxon England began. The word “English” derives from the homeland of the Angles, the Anglian peninsula in Germany. Early English was written in runes, combinations of vertical and diagonal lines that lent themselves to being carved into wood and were used by other closely related Germanic languages, such as Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German.
“The earliest fragments of the English language are likely to be a group of runic inscriptions on three 5th-Century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk,” Wellesley has written. “The inscriptions simply read alu, which probably means ‘ale’. Perhaps the early speakers of Old English longed for ale in death as well as life.”
The exhibition gathers together an array of documents, books and archaeological evidence to form a dense picture of the Anglo-Saxon period, including a burial urn with runic inscriptions in early English from Loveden Hill, Lincolnshire, England.
Anglo-Saxons cremated their dead and interred their remains in earthenware vessels. About 20 objects with runic inscriptions from before 650AD are known from England, making this vessel – which seems to feature a woman’s name and the word for tomb – one of the earliest examples of English.
The exhibition also includes a charming 11th-Century English map of the world, which gives us an insight into Anglo-Saxon identity. Britain and Ireland are squeezed into the bottom left-hand corner.
The Mediterranean Sea is at the centre of the world’s land mass, with Rome prominent near the bottom on the left; across the water, Jerusalem is also prominent. Africa looms large on the upper right and India is the roughly triangular mass at the top centre.
This worldview was inherited from the Romans, who regarded Britain as being on the far edge of the world, but remained tied to the ‘centre’ by the Christian religion. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, which ended with the Norman Conquest in 1066, there was religious traffic across Europe.
Venerable Bede, an English monk and historian, noted in the early 8th Century that Britain was inhabited by four peoples who used five languages: the Picts, the Scots, the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons. The fifth language was the Latin of the church, which eventually provided an alphabet to replace runes. On top of all of this, the Viking invasion of Britain began in the early 8th Century, adding Danish culture to the mix.
Published in Daily Times, January 22nd 2019.