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
12 - The undeveloped image: Anglo-Saxon in popular consciousness from Turner to Tolkien
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
A recent volume of essays, edited by Allen Frantzen and John Niles, has as its title Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity. It is the purpose of this essay to argue that Anglo-Saxon studies, if not Anglo-Saxonism, have been affected increasingly over the last two centuries by the destruction, or rather the repression, of social identity for one particular group: a repression the more ironic for having been practised on the group which, in another recent opinion, that of Adrian Hastings, in fact gave the initial model for all later ‘constructions of nationhood’ – the English.
My argument starts with a comment made in an earlier work by Allen Frantzen, his 1990 study, Desire for Origins. Almost at the end of this, Frantzen remarks that his book has been based on the premise ‘that the place of Anglo-Saxon studies in modern intellectual life is marginal’. Given the evidence that Frantzen adduces, there can be little doubt that this premise is correct. Two points might however be added to it. One is that this marginality ought to be surprising rather than taken for granted (an argument pursued below). The other is that if anything Frantzen's summation is an understatement. Within academia, especially American academia, ‘marginal’ may well be a fair description.
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- Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century , pp. 215 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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