![]()
1
BREAKING THE PAGAN SILENCE
From Geoffrey of Monmouth to William Camden
O powerful goddess, terror of the forest glades, yet hope of the wild woodlands … pronounce a judgement … Tell me which lands you wish us to inhabit.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (trans. Lewis Thorpe)
Writing against pagans
In about 540 AD, a monk working somewhere in the west of Britain, Gildas, wrote a patchy, angry history of Britain that set the pattern for the many us-and-them accounts of paganism to follow thereafter. The adversarial nature of his book was transmitted in part from one of his key sources, Paulus Orosius' Septem Libri Historiarum Adversum Paganos (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans) finished in about 417. Building on the new Christian histories of Eusebius and Augustine, Orosius was answering pagan writers' assertions that Christianity was an impious and damaging innovation that had brought punishment on humanity. Against them, Orosius argued that Christianity was the fulfilment of God's plan for the world, brought about through the rise, fall and conversion of the Roman empire – all history's trials and sufferings were thus explicable by the excellence of the outcome1. Gildas agreed with Orosius' providential vision, and for him the local adversaries were the pagan Saxons (‘hated by man and God’), allowing him to position the people he called ‘the British’, or at least some of them, as ‘us’ – the troubled but ultimately chosen people of God.
However, Gildas despised the British almost as much as the Saxons, since even before the invaders had arrived to despoil their land (his book was entitled The Ruin of Britain) the Britons had been ‘stiff-necked and haughty’, in revolt against God, the Romans and fighting each other2. Their ruin was their own fault, Gildas stated in an admonitiuncula, a ‘little admonition’: the warlord kings were tyrants, their subjects sinners, their clergy fools or worse. Some were Christian, yet behaved unChristianly, while others were pagan like the Saxons – all of them had to do better to justify God's choice of their land as his own. Gildas did not dignify the Britons with a myth of origin or describe their (possibly disparate) paganism(s) – instead he stated:
I shall not speak of the ancient errors common to all races, that bound the whole of humanity fast before the coming of Christ in the flesh. I shall not enumerate the devilish monstrosities [‘portenta … diabolica’, which Giles' translation renders as ‘diabolical idols’] of my land, numerous almost as those that plagued Egypt, some of which we can see today, stark as ever, inside and outside deserted city walls: outlines still ugly, faces still grim. I shall not name the mountains and hills and rivers, once so pernicious, now useful for human needs, on which, in those days, a blind people heaped divine honours [‘divinus honor … cumulabatur’].
This is not just silence, it is militant and signposted silence so that the history of British paganism begins with a refusal to write it. Gildas sums up by noting simply that ‘ever since it was first inhabited, Britain has been ungratefully rebelling’: a resonant, enticing silence3. What was the nature of that pagan ‘rebellion’, already defined as Christianity's turbulent Other? Many readers have disliked Gildas' denunciatory tone and because of his silences they have questioned his knowledge – to the extent that a 1941 article had to remind scholars that ‘he deserves very serious attention’ – but in 1979, E.A. Thompson claimed him as ‘the first man in the entire West to write a provincial history’, the history of a former province of the Roman empire and its tribes. In doing this Gildas offered, very obliquely and disapprovingly, a comment on some of the persistent pagan elements in British and English life4.
After Gildas, silence on the matter of paganism prevailed until the Northumbrian monk Bede's works on the English church were completed in the 730s. Once again, paganism was the Other, so that its representation was a by-product of the history of conversion. There was one major difference, however: Bede was a monk at Jarrow in the north-east, so that he had no attachment to a British identity that did not include England, and his experience of paganism was primarily of the Anglo-Saxon kind.5 In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed around 731), Bede told his readers that Christianity had first reached Britain in the reign of King Lucius before 156 AD, and he charted the fates of Britain's Christian martyrs under pagan administrations led by Romans. These he described as ‘offering sacrifice to devils’ and ‘idols’, and he quoted Pope Gregory the Great's letter to Abbot Mellitus (601 AD) on how to change pagan sacrifices and temples to Christian use. Bede did not specify if the worshipped devils were British or Roman deities or both – all were equally demonic and uninteresting6. However, Bede had found the Anglo-Saxon religious calendar useful in trying to establish a proper dating for Christian festivals, a matter of controversy in the eighth century: and thus he gave an account of it, again almost as an aside. In On the Reckoning of Time (completed around 721), he listed the months under their English names and explained the names of many of them and of some individual days and nights with reference to the goddesses, pagan festivals and sacrifices that he said had once characterized them.7
Bede's list of months is one of the most controversial texts of its era. Nineteenth-century German folklorists were especially exercised by it, since because it dealt with emigrant Angles and other Germanic peoples it either shed a unique light on German national religious history or invented a series of pernicious lies about it. Jacob Grimm accepted Bede's word in 1835 in the foundational work Deutsche Mythologie, even though Bede's assertions were not echoed anywhere in early German literature. But in the other camp, Alexander Tille in particular was sceptical about Bede's knowledge of heathenism. In 1899, he accused Bede of inventing explanations for awkward month-names, in the process fabricating a Germanic ritual year and part of a pantheon. Tille pointed out that, although Bede speaks of the pagan festivals in the past tense, he is likely to have been drawing on slim knowledge of contemporary pagan practices. This may be true; but it is not certain what Bede's sources were and so his level of knowledge of contemporary paganism cannot easily be judged. Yet Tille describes Bede's goddess names as ‘imaginary’ and ‘bad guesses’. He dismisses the notion of a festival of motherhood as ‘an imaginary cult’, a debased Christian nativity custom mistaken by Bede for heathenism. Tille's sharp questioning of names and etymologies mentioned only by Bede and nowhere else is praiseworthy, as Ronald Hutton shows in his history of Britain's ritual year The Stations of the Sun, but for me Tille's conclusions are too negative. It is hard, too, not to wonder if his dislike of Britain inflected his judgement of Bede. Tille was a lecturer at Glasgow University and by the late 1890s, when he wrote on Bede, he regarded the British as arrogant rivals preventing German expansion. In 1898, he had joined an extreme German nationalist group dedicated to social-Darwinist racial ends including economic dominance and empire. A year later, he resigned his post after criticism of Britain's ambitions and military competence in South Africa led to a physical attack on him by university students. He returned home to write scathing attacks on British society, prophesying a ‘bloody struggle for first place’ in the world between Germany and Britain.8 In these circumstances, he was unlikely to laud as authentic Bede's uniquely English additions to the history of Germanic paganism.
Jacob Grimm, of course, also wrote in a nationalist context as did the other German scholars who either criticized or supported Bede. Grimm set the tone in the latter grouping by choosing to analyse Bede's wider work as well as the contested section on goddesses, and to trust his scholarship and experience on that basis. As Grimm first argued, ‘it would be uncritical to saddle this father of the church, who everywhere keeps heathenism at a distance, and tells us less of it than he knows, with the invention of these goddesses’.9 It seems to me too that Bede's dismissal of Roman paganism demonstrates his unwillingness to fabricate details of pagan deities where he neither knows nor cares about them. When he refers to Anglo-Saxon deities and rites, it must surely be knowledge that drives him to specifics. So I would argue that we can see Bede in the long tradition of writing against the pagans, describing their authentic but despised rites in passing as he tries to give us a Christian history instead.10
Bede tells us that the eighth kalends of January (December 25) marked the start of the pagan year and the night of December 24 was known by ‘the heathen word Modranicht’ (‘tuncgentili vocabulo Modmnicht’). Mothers' Night was so-called ‘because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night’ (‘ob causam, ut suspicamur, ceremoniarum quas in ea pervigiles agebant’). But Bede does not describe these. He may either refuse us the details because they are in some way offensive to him or because he feels they are unimportant. At the start of this chapter, he tells us carefully that what he is giving us is a history of the months as calculated in different cultures including Roman and Greek as well as English (‘it did not seem fitting to me that I should speak of other nations' observance of the year and yet be silent about my own nation's’). This could be read as a disclaimer (‘please don't imagine that I'm interested in this heathenism simply because it is local!’) or a statement of a qualified sense of ownership (‘the Greeks and Romans have had their chapters and the English deserve one too, even though what is described is not creditable’). Either way, Bede moves on smartly to state that cakes were offered to the gods in February. Two goddesses are named: Rheda and Eostre, whose festivals were in March and April respectively. Bede explains that the Christian festival of Easter is so-named because of the continuation of the goddess' name – a claim that Tille rejected on the grounds that ‘it has not been proved that the principal feast of the Church could be called after a heathen goddess’ (but if Bede wasn't shocked by that thought, why should Tille be?). September was Halegmonath, a month of ‘sacred rites’ (‘mensis sacrorum’), and, finally, Blodmonath was named after its annual slaughter of cattle, which were ‘consecrated to their gods’ (‘diis’).11
If we accept that Bede may well have made untraceable mistakes in his account, but did not invent it ex nihilo, it is noteworthy the goddesses in the Anglo-Saxon pantheon are what seems to catch his eye the most. He named them because he thought that they had months named after them, but one suspects that he found goddesses particularly notable because they were unlike the Christian god. He did not name rival gods: he mentioned the name Woden, but only as a human ancestor of the Anglo-Saxons. Bede regarded the details of heathenism as ‘vanities’ and ended his chapter professing delight that the true god had turned many of his countrymen away from their pagan past12. Similar relief was expressed in Anglo-Saxon chronicles thereafter and it would be 800 years before an English writer paid more than passing attention to the Anglo-Saxon pantheon again.13
Moving in the same Christian intellectual world, although on the British rather than English side, the next contribution to British history was a ‘highly composite’ work, possibly by a Welsh monk usually referred to as Nennius. He offered more scope to future writers who wished to speculate about the pagan past.14 He began his History of the Britons by situating British history in biblical time (the 2,042 years in which he believed the world to have been in existence by the time that he wrote in about 820). But as well as placing Britain securely in the Christian narrative, Nennius made a surprising statement about its original population, drawing on classical and early Christian historians working in Rome, the Levant and north Africa. Britons, he said, were descended from Brutus who was descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas.15 Ultimately they
trace their origins from the Romans and the Greeks, that is, on the mother's side, from Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, king of Italy, of the race of Silvanus, son of Inachus, son of Dardanus. This Dardanus was son of Saturn, king of the Greeks, who took a part of Asia and there built the city of Troy.16
Saturn was, of course, a god of the classical world but here he is identified as a human king in the way that deities often were by Christian writers trying to rationalize their existence: euhemerism, the theory that non-Christian deities were deified rulers or heroes. So Nennius sidestepped the assertion th...
