Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited

229 Pages·2010·11.82 MB·English

by  Alex Sanmark

Signals of Belief in Early England
Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited

Signals of Belief in Early England
Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited
edited by
Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark and Sarah Semple
Oxbow Books
Oxford and Oakville
Published by
Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK
© Oxbow Books and the individual authors, 2010
ISBN 978-1-84217-395-4
This book is available direct from:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Signals of belief in early England : Anglo-Saxon paganism revisited / edited by Martin
Carver, Alex Sanmark, and Sarah Semple.
p. cm.
Based on 2 conferences held 2005-2006 at Oxford University.
ISBN 978-1-84217-395-4
1. Anglo-Saxons--Religion--Congresses. 2. Civilization, Anglo-Saxon--Congresses. 3.
England--Religious life and customs--Congresses. 4. Paganism--England--History--To
1500--Congresses. 5. England--Church history--449-1066--Congresses. I. Carver, M. O.
H. II. Sanmark, Alexandra. III. Semple, Sarah, 1973-
BL980.G7S54 2010
293.0942’09021--dc22
2010017469
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Hobbs the Printers, Tott on, Hampshire
We off er this collection to Audrey Meaney
in appreciation of her studies of Anglo-Saxon paganism.

Contents
Preface .....................................................................................................................................ix
List of Contributors ...............................................................................................................xi
Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................xii
Foreword: Heathen Songs and Devil’s Games (Neil Price) ...........................................xiii
Chapter 1: Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda (Martin Carver) ..............1
Chapter 2: In the Open Air (Sarah Semple) .......................................................................21
Chapter 3: At the Water’s Edge (Julie Lund) .....................................................................49
Chapter 4: At the Funeral (Howard Williams) ...................................................................67
Chapter 5: In the Hall (Jenny Walker) ................................................................................83
Chapter 6: Animal Magic (Aleks Pluskowski) ..................................................................103
Chapter 7: Horses in Mind (Chris Fern) ..........................................................................128
Chapter 8: Living On: Ancestors and the Soul (Alexandra Sanmark) ..........................158
Chapter 9: Creating the Pagan English (Sue Content and Howard Williams) ..............181
Aft erword: Caveats and Futures (Ronald Hutt on) ...........................................................201
Index .......................................................................................................................................207

Preface
Our aim in this book is to throw new light on the intellect of the earliest English
– the way they thought, the way they viewed the world, and the way they viewed
worlds other than this. Previous understanding of the topic, well rooted in the ideas
of its time, regarded the English as adherents of two consecutive religions: Paganism
governed the sett lers of the 4th–6th century, but was superseded in the 7th–10th
century by Christianity. Of the two, Christianity, a religion of the book, documented
itself thoroughly, while in failing to do so Paganism laid itself open to centuries of
abuse, conjecture or mindless admiration.
In developing new objectives, our premise is threefold: fi rstly, that our true quarry
is a set of beliefs that varied from place to place. Secondly, that what people believed,
whether pure reason or intellectual mish-mash, was expressed in their material culture
– so that, thirdly, archaeology can rediscover them. We here align with the modern
advocates of cognitive approaches, for whom the study of early thinking holds no
terrors. However we know that even the best archaeology provides no open access
to the mind. We begin from the material culture: landscapes, sites and objects, and
extract from them those non-functional aspects that we ascribe to expressions of the
imagination – but know that we cannot necessarily enter that imagination itself. We
record, and study, signals of belief rather than what was believed. We know that this is
only the beginning, although it is a new beginning. Since every community is likely
to have its own take on cosmoslogy, there will be many hundreds of communities to
study before an underlying system – if there was one – is to emerge.
Our premise is therefore that paganism was not a religion with supraregional rules
and institutions but a loose term for a variety of local intellectual world views (Martin
Carver). More controversially, we extend the same courtesy to Christianity. Although
insisting on its universality, Christianisation too hides a multiplicity of locally negotiated
positions, that probably did not amount to a religion (in the orthodox sense) until the
8th century or later. Neither paganism nor Christianity are treated here as independent
agents, out to confront and bett er each other. They are sources on which people, local
people – the true agents of Anglo-Saxon England – eclectically drew.
Those sources were themselves widely spread: on the shores of the Baltic, the
North Sea and the Mediterranean. In seeking to discover and defi ne signals of belief,
we roam widely across the range of material culture and widely too over Northern
Europe. Our chapters explore signals from the landscape (Sarah Semple), water cults
(Julie Lund), burial rites (Howard Williams), the hall (Jenny Walker), animals in life
and art (Pluskowski) and the horse in particular, king of animals (Chris Fern). In the
fi nal chapters, Alex Sanmark digs for the character of the Anglo-Saxon soul and Sue