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Ethnonationalism and medievalism: reading affective ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ today with the discovery of Sutton Hoo

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Abstract

This essay argues that English imaginaries of the early medieval Western world have long been, and continue to be, crafted by emotions. To demonstrate how the cultural formation of affective Anglo-Saxonism has taken shape across time, I compare how “Anglo-Saxon” studies and stories have been presented in twenty-first-century media with strategies used by newspaper contributors to make sense of the first Sutton Hoo excavation in 1939. So often have emotional attachments and felt connections between past and present shaped the ways in which the “Anglo-Saxon” is written about, that these affective modes of engagement are often understood as neutral or objective. However, the emotions which circulate around “Anglo-Saxon” things have made possible – and continue to make possible – ethnonationalist uses and meanings of “Anglo-Saxon”. The ways in which “Anglo-Saxon” stories, and stories about “Anglo-Saxon” studies, are told in public sustain exclusionary mythologies about past and present identities. Traversing disciplinary divides in early medieval English studies, and interrogating how work from different disciplines emerges into public spaces, is identified as vital for working against exclusionary affective Anglo-Saxonism.

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Notes

  1. Martin Carver comprehensively explains and interprets the Sutton Hoo burial sites and excavations from 1939 to 2000 (Carver, 2017).

  2. On histories of methodological tensions in early medieval studies from the 1980s to the 2000s, see Clare A. Lees and Gillian Overing (2010), and Eileen A. Joy (2008).

  3. Work done in this journal addresses Kim’s point; see Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake and Micah James Goodrich (2020) and Sierra Lomuto (2020). Sierra Lomuto’s 2016 essay was one of the first open-access pieces to call upon scholars to address the ways in which we teach and research medieval literature in relation to race, with a follow up piece in 2020. Nahir I Otaño Gracia’s paper at the Islands of the North Atlantic conference was also instrumental in shaping my thinking on complicit, alongside explicit, forms of exclusion in medievalism (2019).

  4. When first excavated, no human remains were found in Mound 1. Further testing revealed traces of chemical deposits in the acidic, sandy soil which suggest a body was once interred there (Carver, 2017).

  5. Tim Ingold’s writing on ‘meshworks’ is instructive for understanding the co-constitutive social lives of objects, stories, and people (Ingold, 2011).

  6. Mark Perryman examines how English media periodically revisit questions of whether the flag has irredeemably become an ethnonationalist symbol. Perryman proposes that proximity to sport most defines whether the flag is associated with ‘multiculturalism’ or the ‘White Anglo-Saxon’ (2005).

  7. For an example of how to explicitly define “Anglo-Saxon” for specific scholarly use while denouncing understandings of the term as an ethnic identifier and warning against racist interpretation, see Duncan Sayer’s ‘Note on Terminology’ (2020).

  8. Ellard’s work also engages with the ‘ghosts’ of medieval studies, with metaphors of ‘haunting’ providing another richly emotive way in for rethinking ‘disciplinary attachments’ (Ellard, 28). In a 1999 keynote, Timothy Reuter argued “quote” (2006). For more on haunting see also Joshua Davies (2019a).

  9. ‘English’ and ‘British’ have long been conflated by English nationalists, politicians, and in scholarly and popular writing about ‘England’ or ‘Britain’ (Langlands, 1999). I do not wish to repeat the conflation here, but rather show how this conflation is sustained in the texts under analysis.

  10. Subha Robert William’s unpublished PhD thesis examines how the East Anglian Daily Times was a venue for Anglo-Saxonist archaeological writing through the nineteenth century, especially by women archaeologists.

  11. The first notice of the excavation, without illustrations, came three days earlier, (Staff writer, East Anglian Daily Times, 26 July, 6). The first national coverage was in the London Evening News, July 27, (1939, 5). Francis P. Magoun Jr. proposed that the national article was a ‘leak’, forcing the excavation team to speak to the press sooner than planned (1954, 117).

  12. The ghostly aesthetic of the sand-ship, akin to these uncredited photos in the EADT, as photographed by Mercie Lack, Barbara Wagstaff, O. G. S. Crawford, Margaret Guido, and Charles Philips, becomes important in television documentaries and exhibitions. Angela Care Evans writes on the influence of the images on how Sutton Hoo is imagined (Care Evans, 1999).

  13. Christina Lee and Nicola McLelland’s collection comprehensively analyses iterations of the ‘Teutonic’ ideal (2013).

  14. Classicists have written about this phenomenon in their field, and noted that this is a trope across historical television documentaries (Bell and Gray, 2007; Hobden, 2013).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Joshua Davies, Clare A. Lees, Catherine E. Karkov, Andrew B. R. Elliott, and Catherine A. M. Clarke for comments on earlier versions of this essay. Newspaper clippings are used with permission of the Archant Library and East Anglian Daily Times and should not be reproduced elsewhere without permission.

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  1. Department of English and Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London, London, UK

    Fran Allfrey

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Correspondence to Fran Allfrey.

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Allfrey, F. Ethnonationalism and medievalism: reading affective ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ today with the discovery of Sutton Hoo. Postmedieval 12, 75–99 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-021-00209-9

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