Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
5 - English and German views on the conversion of the English
from PART I - THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
Summary
WE MUST NOW turn to England. English opinion in the early nineteenth century was not anti-Christian. Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnet ‘Glad Tidings’ (1821) on the conversion of the English is probably typical in recognizing the benefits of Christianity and in thinking that the Anglo-Saxons were barbarians:
By Augustin led
They come – and onward travel without dread,
Chaunting in barbarous ears a tuneful prayer,
Sung for themselves, and those whom they would free!
Wordsworth based his Ecclesiastical Sonnets on wide reading, for which his editor, Professor de Selincourt, held fast in a critical attitude which Wordsworth had outgrown, takes him to task. His principal modern authority for the Anglo-Saxon period was the third edition of Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, where we read, ‘Till Gregory planted Christianity in England, there was no means or causes of intellectual improvement to our fierce and active ancestors.’
An extreme view of pagan England and the conversion is expressed fully and forcibly by John Lingard in The History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, the third edition of which appeared in 1845, the year of Vilmar's paper on the Heliand. A writer in The Edinburgh Review describes the third edition as ‘almost a new work’, but the passages quoted here are, with some changes as in the editions of 1806 and 1810, and presumably represent what Lingard thought abidingly true:
The Anglo-Saxons, when they first landed on our shores, were hordes of ferocious pirates: by religion they were reclaimed from savage life, and taught to admire and practise the virtues of the Gospel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 24 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000