Celtic and Anglo-Saxon history, saga, and poetry
Bede tells the story as a tradition handed down from the elders. Before he became pope, Gregory passed through the Roman slave market and saw boys for sale, fair-skinned and fine-featured, and asked where they came from. Britain, he was told, and the people were called Angles. He answered that they had the faces of angels and ought to be fellow heirs with the angels in heaven. Whether or not the exchange happened as Bede gives it, what followed is plain history. In 597 Gregory, now pope, sent the monk Augustine and forty companions to Kent, and the English began to become a Christian people.
The last shelf ended with Rome giving up Britain. This one picks up the island Rome left behind, and the two peoples who held it after: the Celts who were there first and the Germanic settlers who came over the sea. It is the first shelf in the library where the reader watches pagan peoples become Christian, and it carries a fact worth keeping in view from the start. Nearly everything we know of the pagan past of the Irish, the Welsh, and the English was written down by Christians, in monasteries, by men who thought that past worth keeping.
Who the Celts Were
The Celts, Nora K. Chadwick
If a reader buys one book on the Celtic peoples, it should be this one. Chadwick was a Cambridge scholar of the early Celtic world, and her survey runs from the continental Celts the Greeks and Romans wrote about to the Christian Ireland and Wales of the early Middle Ages. She is strongest on what most surveys hurry past: the literature, the law, and the church that grew up on the Atlantic edge of Europe while the West was falling apart.
The Celts: Conquerors of Ancient Europe, Christiane Eluère
A short, heavily illustrated book by a French archaeologist, and the right companion to Chadwick. Where Chadwick works mainly from texts, Eluère works from the ground: the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures, the hill forts, the gold. It shows how far the Celts once reached across the continent before Rome pushed them to its edges, and it is the book to hand a reader who needs to see the Celts before reading about them. Caesar’s account of the Gallic Celts is already on the Rome shelf and reads well beside it.
What the Celts Remembered
The Táin
The great epic of early Ireland. Queen Medb of Connacht raises an army to seize the Brown Bull of Cooley, and the boy-hero Cú Chulainn holds the ford for Ulster alone. It is the nearest thing the Celtic world left to an Iliad: violent, boastful, often strange, and full of the warrior code the earlier shelves traced back to the steppe. It survives in manuscripts copied by Irish monks around the twelfth century, who preserved a pagan heroic world they no longer shared. Thomas Kinsella’s translation is the one to own.
The Mabinogion
Eleven medieval Welsh tales, preserved in fourteenth-century manuscripts and given their collective name in the nineteenth century. The Four Branches at their core are the oldest stratum, a world of shape-shifting, enchantment, and kings of the Otherworld, set down by Christian storytellers who kept the old gods as half-remembered heroes. The collection also holds Culhwch and Olwen, the earliest Arthurian prose in any language. Read it after the Táin: the Irish epic is harder and more martial, the Welsh tales stranger and more courtly.
Who Came Over the Sea
Germania, Tacitus
A short Roman treatise, written in AD 98, describing the Germanic peoples beyond the Rhine: their tribes, their gods, their chiefs and war-bands, their marriage customs and their loyalty to a lord. It is the only extended ancient portrait of the peoples from whom the Angles and Saxons came. It is also a Roman book written for Romans. Tacitus never went to Germany, and he drew his barbarians partly as a mirror for Roman decadence. Read it as evidence for what an intelligent Roman saw and wanted his readers to see, and it remains indispensable.
The Anglo-Saxons, James Campbell, Eric John, and Patrick Wormald
The best single history of the English from the end of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest. Three Oxford historians divide the six centuries between them, and the book is lavishly illustrated with the coins, crosses, manuscripts, and buried treasure that make up much of the evidence. If a reader buys one book on the Anglo-Saxons, this is it. Everything else in the post can be read against it.
How the English Told Their Own Story
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede
Finished in 731 by a monk of Jarrow, and the foundation of English history. Bede tells how the English came to Britain, how they were converted, and how a scattering of warring kingdoms came to think of itself as one people under one church. He is careful with his sources and names them, and his use of the year of the Lord to date events did more than any other book to spread the practice through Europe. He also gives the scenes that stay with a reader: the poet Caedmon given the gift of song in a cowshed, and the counsellor of King Edwin comparing a man’s life to a sparrow flying through a lit hall out of the winter dark and back into it.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
A year-by-year record of English history, begun in Alfred’s reign in the 890s and kept up in several monasteries afterward, one copy running to 1154. It is written in English, not Latin, which no other people in Europe was doing on that scale at the time. Its entries can be one line or several pages, and they record raids, battles, deaths of kings, comets, and famines with the same flat voice. Read it beside Bede: Bede tells the story of a church, and the Chronicle tells the story of a kingdom at war.
Life of King Alfred, Asser
A biography of Alfred the Great, written in 893 while the king was still alive by Asser, a Welsh monk from St Davids whom Alfred brought to his court. It describes the years when the Danes had nearly overrun England and Alfred was driven into the marshes of Somerset, the victory at Edington that turned the war, and the king’s labour, at nearly forty, to learn Latin and have the books he thought “most necessary for all men to know” translated into English. The Penguin edition by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge prints it with Alfred’s own prefaces and his will, and that is the one to buy.
What the English Sang
Beowulf
The longest surviving poem in Old English, and the great epic of the Germanic north. Beowulf crosses the sea to kill the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and returns home to rule, and dies an old king fighting a dragon. It survives in a single manuscript from about the year 1000, which was nearly lost in a fire in 1731. The poem is set among Danes and Geats in a pagan past, but it was written by a Christian, and it carries both worlds at once. Seamus Heaney’s translation is the one most readers start with.
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, J. R. R. Tolkien
The 1936 lecture that changed how Beowulf is read. The scholars of Tolkien’s day mined the poem for history and complained that its author had wasted his talent on monsters. Tolkien answered that the monsters are the point: the poem is about man’s long defeat in a world of darkness, told by a Christian poet who looked back on his heathen forebears with sorrow and with sympathy. Short, and best read after the poem.
The Anglo-Saxon World, Kevin Crossley-Holland
An anthology of the whole Anglo-Saxon inheritance in modern English: heroic poems, laws, letters, charters, riddles, sermons, and extracts from Bede, the Chronicle, and Asser. It contains a full Beowulf, but its real value is everything around it. Here are The Battle of Maldon, where an English lord’s retainers choose to die beside his body; The Wanderer and The Seafarer, the great elegies of exile; and The Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross itself tells of the Crucifixion and speaks of Christ as a young hero who strips for battle. Taken together, those four poems are the best short account there is of what the English were.
The Inheritance
The two peoples on this shelf handed on different things, and the faith is what joined them. While the continent was being carved up, Irish monks kept Latin learning alive on the edge of the world and carried it back into Britain and Europe: Columba founded Iona in 563, and Irish missionaries were in Gaul and Italy within the century. The English, converted from both Rome and Iona, turned within a few generations from the converted to the converters. Boniface, a monk from Wessex, became the apostle of Germany and died a martyr in Frisia in 754, taking the gospel back to the lands his people had come from.
What the English kept of their own was just as lasting. They kept their language and wrote it down, and they gave it a literature centuries before most of Europe wrote in anything but Latin. Under Alfred’s house they made a single kingdom, with shires, laws, and a church that outlasted the Danes and the Normans both. The old heroic code did not vanish when they converted. It was taken up into the faith, so that an Old English poet could imagine Christ on the Cross as a young warrior going to battle, and a lord’s household at Maldon could die in his service in a poem written by a Christian.
But in 793 the Chronicle records fiery dragons in the air over Northumbria, famine, and then heathen men destroying God’s church at Lindisfarne. The next shelf turns to the Norse world, and to the men who came over the sea after the English.
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