"Word Hoard" - the struggle for dialogue authenticity

Today my piece on dialogue authenticity, where I talk about words derived from Old English (with the help of Jim Sinclair, an OE expert) is on the EHFA blog and can be found here: English Historical Fiction Authors
Please pop over and have a read!

Why Not the Anglo-Saxons?

I was privileged to attend a lunch a couple of years ago with, amongst others, Sarah Waters and Fay Weldon. They were kind enough to ask me about my writing and when I told them that my first three novels were set in Anglo-Saxon England, Sarah Waters said she knew little about the period and Fay Weldon commented that their costumes "Weren't very sexy."

A dear friend of mine concurred, adding that the Anglo-Saxons all wore brown sacks instead of dresses. She said that when she reads a novel set in Tudor England, she can envisage the scenery and the costumes.

In 2013, the author Sebastian Faulks was publicising the Chalke Valley/Penguin History prize for secondary school children. Youngsters were encouraged to write stories set in the following 'Periods of importance' : Norman Conquest to Wars of Roses (1066-1485) The English Civil War and the Restoration (1642-1685) The Napoleonic Wars (1798-1815) The British Empire (1759-1947) and the Cold War (1945-1991)

Now, I'm not going to argue that these periods were not important, but why narrow the field? Taken in isolation, these periods of history mean little. Can one really understand the significance of the Napoleonic period without first studying the preceding years, including the circumstances which led to the French Revolution? Periods of history are only important if you set them in context, if you know what's gone before.

1066? How can you realise its significance and the changes it wrought unless you know what England was like pre-conquest?

Is it true; does it simply boil down to the fact that it wasn't 'sexy' enough, that it can't easily be envisaged?

There are stories from the 'Dark Ages' that equal anything of later periods: the mighty Godwin family, the frankly feckless Aethelred the Unready and his struggles against the vastly superior Cnut. What about Alfred the Great, and his children, Edward the Elder and my favourite, his daughter, Aethelflaed, subject of my novel To Be a Queen? She ruled a kingdom and fought against the Vikings.

Did she not have a pretty enough dress? 

Is it just a case of bad press? Ultimately, the English lost out to the Normans. Does history favour the victor? In which case, why does the story of Arthur still resonate, with fiction and non-fiction books published year upon year. Is that down to the seemingly unsolvable riddle of whether or not he existed?

And why, if we don't care too much about losers, has such a cult grown up around William Wallace? Wasn't he just a defeated nationalist, like Harold Godwinson? Maybe being hung drawn and quartered is a more interesting way to be the ultimate loser than just attempting to get too close a look at the quality of workmanship that went into the making of a Norman arrow?

image twbrit.com

The Chalke Valley competition is a good thing - anything which promotes history must be welcomed. Faulks said that "History needs to regain its central place in schools."

I remember when my own children were choosing their GCSE options, that the school produced a list of subjects, and gave the teachers the chance to 'sell' their subject. Each was entitled "What can this subject give me?" Other subjects talked specifics, but history "Gives you everything you need for future study: analysis, argument, memory, understanding." I can't argue with that, but within the discipline itself, why are some periods deemed more important, or interesting, than others? 

So, why do the poor old Anglo-Saxons not come through history to us as sexy and interesting? As it says in 1066 And All That (W.C Sellar and R.J. Yeatman) the period suffered from a "Wave of Egg-Kings - Eggberd, Eggbreth, Eggfroth etc. None of them, however succeeded in becoming memorable, except in so far as it is difficult to forget such names as Eggbirth, Eggbred, Eggbeard, Eggfish etc."

At least he had a pronounceable name!!!

As I found when writing To Be a Queen, the names are tricky - to spell, pronounce, and identify. Those that survived became old-fashioned, for example, Ethel, Edith, Alfred, Edmund, Mildred, Audrey. They were not associated with the upper echelons of society, and that's also true of a lot of Old English words. Many of the words for everyday objects came to signify lowly things: a stool became something less than a chair. This idea of being the down-trodden vanquished persists so that today the period remains somewhat drear, uninteresting. 

But it is precisely because of that we need to look back and find out what was lost.

The Norman language, despite the lordly overtones, did not take hold; we do not speak a version of French. Nor, according to recent BBC research, did the Norman bloodline. Is is important to know about the Government of the Anglo-Saxons, their administrative systems, their laws and justice? I think so. When university undergraduates debate whether or not the Normans introduced the Feudal system at all, then there is an argument for saying that we should understand what it was that they were trying to replace, subdue, change. It's worth noting that whilst many people accept the 'truth' that in the middle ages, wives were legally beaten by their husbands and treated as his property, the Anglo-Saxon women were not.

So why don't we know more? Why aren't we taught more about it? Is it all just too far in the past?

But if that's true, why is the Roman period so popular?

Well, it is and it isn't. It's popular in the sense that there are many books, fiction and non-fiction, and telly programmes (Thanks, Professor Mary Beard!). But it's still not routinely taught in schools. The Tudors and the Egyptians are. So is the second World War. Diverse topics, spanning great distances in terms of years. 

So maybe it really does, as Fay Weldon said, come down to the costumes. In my Ladybird book, The Story of Clothes and Costume, the illustrations lump the Saxons and Normans together. There is nothing between this: (500BC)

and this:

apart from the Romans!

And the cover picture (of later editions) ? Yes, you guessed it - those wonderfully 'gussied up' Tudors ...

Maybe those Anglo-Saxons should have designed the bodice - then they could have them ripped!!

Culture, Language and amateurish Romans ! Old English Specialist and Author Stephen Pollington casts some light ...

Today I have the enormous pleasure and honour of speaking to Stephen Pollington:

I asked him -

You grew up in what was then countryside - was it idyllic, and how old were you when you were first aware of 'history'?

The presence of the past was part of the backdrop to everyday life from a very early age. Saturday mornings were spent with friends in the local cinema (which was still painted with WWII camouflage!) followed by the mandatory trip to the nearby site of a motte-and-bailey castle where we acted out the key events from the films we had just seen - most often westerns, wartime thrillers or historical dramas.

My strongest recollection is of being impressed by the age and size of a church tower that stood on the hilltop above my grandparents' home - compared to the humble dimensions of my house it seemed immensely tall and sturdy, and being made from stone - in Essex, where the soil is mostly clay - it struck me a s a strange structure, a relic of a time when all the effort and resources it took to build it could be concentrated on such a project.

image by oneblackline

What were history lessons like at school - did they nurture or stifle your interest? (People's experiences of school history lessons vary so widely and I wonder what periods you were taught about and whether it fired your interest)

History was taught as a narrative back then - it was a LONG time ago - with a focus on key events and personalities, and an unspoken theme of human progress as the underlying assumption. This was in the days of the 'Space Race' in the 1960s when the nation was encouraged to look to the future and ignore the past - Thunderbirds and Dr Who were the key items of children's TV viewing. History in school was used as a means of explaining how we got to where we are now, with the assumption that the future would be better, cleaner, healthier and more affluent. I am still waiting for my jet-powered skates and three-course meal in tablet form.

I always enjoyed formal lessons with a specific theme and I think they awoke in me an urge to share my own (flawed) understandings with others.

Image from blastr.com

You obviously have an abiding love for the Anglo-Saxon period. It's perceived though as not 'popular' - do you think we English have a problem connecting with our past? (The Irish, Scots and Welsh don't feel the same - have we lost sight of our own heritage somehow?)

The Anglo-Saxon period gave rise to the modern nations: there was no 'king of all the English' before Athelstan in the mid 10th century. But you are right - it is no longer popular perhaps because the height of its popularity coincided with the period of Victoria and Albert. After the First World War, opinions of things 'German' nosedived, and after the Second World War the situation got a whole lot worse. The extent to which the historical 'Saxons' have anything to do with the more recent German political unit of the same name is usually ignored.

Palgrave's book was first published in 1831

I think we have been encouraged to downplay English history in favour of the inclusive term 'British' while simultaneously celebrating the Irish, Scots and Welsh. This leaves people confused at to where the English fit into this picture. Even the name 'Anglo-Saxon' creates the impression that these were a foreign people, not really 'English' at all.

You are fluent in Old English. How easy was it for you to find the resources you needed to study the language?

As a young man it was very difficult to find the resources, especially in a small market town. But I was always a bit of a language-nerd and haunter of the public library. I studied not just individual languages but began to see the relationships between them - in the way that even a basic knowledge of French can help you recognise words in Italian or Spanish, poulet and pollo for example.

In my early teens I acquired a second-hand book on Old Norse and began to study that language with great enthusiasm. Further purchases provided an insight into Old English. I bought a worn copy of Beowulf which someone had heavily annotated in pencil, and that set me off on a voyage of discovery from which I have never ceased.

How important do you think it is to keep the language 'alive'? Is it a difficult language to learn, in comparison, say, to learning Modern English as a foreign language?

It rather depends where you start from. If you are a native speaker of English, Dutch or German a lot of it is very familiar and things that are puzzling in modern English start to fall into place - the relationship between 'old' and 'elder', 'slow' and 'sloth' or 'steal' and 'stealth', for example. Most of the basics of Old English are still present in the modern language, despite the vast influx of Greek, Latin and French vocabulary. When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the moon, his immortal words, 'One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind' are all taken directly from the language that King Alfred used in the 9th century.

Without a detailed understanding of its history, a full appreciation of the modern language is not possible. This applies as much to words introduced in relatively recent times as to those with roots stretching back millennia.

A few talented people who may have no formal training instinctively know which words fit together - we call them 'poets'.

This blogger used Sweet's when she was a student!

Are there any common misconceptions about the Anglo-Saxons which you'd like to take the opportunity to correct?

If you watch TV dramas, Hollywood films or other superficial forms of entertainment, you quickly find two standard stereotypes for the Anglo-Saxons. The first is of marauding warriors with no organisation or loyalty whose sole aim is to despoil and destroy. 

The second group are the downtrodden serfs who lost the battle of Hastings and are forever destined to be cannon-fodder for their social superiors. These 'Saxons' all wore brown sacks for clothing, lived in mud huts and were covered in soot, soil and sticky stuff and had only a rudimentary grasp of any skills or crafts.

Image from luckinlove.com

Both these portrayals leave me exasperated because they are the inventions of lazy media people who are too self-obsessed to do any actual research - you know, reading a book or looking at some artefacts, or just asking someone who might know a little about the period.

Anyone who has seen even photographs of the best-known material - such as the finds from Sutton Hoo, the Staffordshire Hoard, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Alfred Jewel, the Franks Casket - cannot fail to be impressed by the quality of the workmanship and the skilful combination of a variety of materials into a unified and beautiful object. Then look at the range of books the Anglo-Saxons produced in their own language - everything from detailed laws and land charters to translations of Roman and Greek religious texts, chronicles, medical books, poetry, legends and rude jokes - they are all there.

Look at the garnet and gold wargear from the Staffordshire Hoard and explain to me in what sense this was 'the Dark Ages' - it was a Golden Age when some of the finest decorative items produced north of the Alps were put together. Bear in mind that Anglo-Saxon goldwork could not be replicated to anything like the same quality as the originals until the 19th century. No doubt I will get into trouble for saying this, but a lot of the allegedly superior Roman and medieval material looks pretty amateurish by comparison.

The Sutton Hoo Gold belt buckle - image from the British Museum

Are there important lessons to be learned from studying the Anglo-Saxon period?

All history is important and should be instructive. The Anglo-Saxon period laid the foundations of our social structure, our language, our political organisations and to a large extent our identities. As with the language mentioned above, if you don't understand how modern counties came into being and what they replaced, you will never fully understand modern British political geography. A knowledge of the effects of the Norman invasion is no bad thing either, if you are interested in social structures and elitism.

Can you sum up why you love the Anglo-Saxon history, culture and language so much?

It is the beginning of so much that we take for granted: many of our warmest and most powerful words, our ideas about family and society, our regional identities, the framework by which our lives are lived. To me, that is endlessly fascinating.

Thanks to Stephen for his insights. To discover more about him and his work:

www.stevepollington.com

Wordcraft ~ The English Warrior ~ First Steps in Old English ~ Meadhall - Feasting Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England ~ Leechcraft - Early English Charms, Plantlore and Healing ~ Rudiments of Runelore ~ Anglo-Saxon Burial Mounds ~ Anglo-Saxon FAQs ~ Wayland's Work – Elder Gods – The Sutton Hoo Stone