Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction. The Anglo-Saxons: fact and fiction
- 1 Victor and victim: a view of the Anglo-Saxon past in LaƷamon's Brut
- 2 Kings, constitution and crisis: ‘Robert of Gloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon remedy
- 3 The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon saints and national identity
- 4 King Ælle and the conversion of the English: the development of a legend from Bede to Chaucer
- 5 Saxons versus Danes: the anonymous Edmund Ironside
- 6 New times and old stories: Middleton's Hengist
- 7 Crushing the convent and the dread Bastille: the Anglo-Saxons, revolution and gender in women's plays of the 1790s
- 8 Anglo-Saxon attitudes?: Alfred the Great and the Romantic national epic
- 9 ‘Utter indifference’?: the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth-century novel
- 10 The charge of the Saxon brigade: Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh
- 11 Lady Godiva
- 12 The undeveloped image: Anglo-Saxon in popular consciousness from Turner to Tolkien
- Index of Anglo-Saxons mentioned in the text
- Index of authors and works cited
5 - Saxons versus Danes: the anonymous Edmund Ironside
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction. The Anglo-Saxons: fact and fiction
- 1 Victor and victim: a view of the Anglo-Saxon past in LaƷamon's Brut
- 2 Kings, constitution and crisis: ‘Robert of Gloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon remedy
- 3 The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon saints and national identity
- 4 King Ælle and the conversion of the English: the development of a legend from Bede to Chaucer
- 5 Saxons versus Danes: the anonymous Edmund Ironside
- 6 New times and old stories: Middleton's Hengist
- 7 Crushing the convent and the dread Bastille: the Anglo-Saxons, revolution and gender in women's plays of the 1790s
- 8 Anglo-Saxon attitudes?: Alfred the Great and the Romantic national epic
- 9 ‘Utter indifference’?: the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth-century novel
- 10 The charge of the Saxon brigade: Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh
- 11 Lady Godiva
- 12 The undeveloped image: Anglo-Saxon in popular consciousness from Turner to Tolkien
- Index of Anglo-Saxons mentioned in the text
- Index of authors and works cited
Summary
Defending his decision to write of the distant past rather than to reflect upon contemporary events, Sir Walter Ralegh commented in the Preface to his History of the World (1614):
I know that it will be said by many, that I might have been more pleasing to the Reader, if I had written the Story of mine own times; having been permitted to draw water as near the Well-head as another. To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern History, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth. There is no Mistress or Guide, that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries… It is enough for me… to write of the eldest times: wherein also why may it not be said, that in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living, in their persons that are long since dead; and have it laid to my charge. But this I cannot help, though innocent.
Ralegh's wisdom (born of bitter experience) in refraining from drawing his water too near the wellhead is amply vindicated by the private histories of those writing for the Elizabethan-Jacobean stage.
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- Information
- Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century , pp. 93 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000