anglo-saxon(ist) pasts, postsaxon futures Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig . 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) anglo-saxon(ist) pasts, postsaxon futures. Copyright © 2019 by Donna Beth Ellard. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2019 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-39-7 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-40-3 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.0262.1.00 lccn: 2019947002 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book Design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover Image based upon ‘Tumulus 1’ at Chatham, Kent, in James Douglas, Nenia Britannica; or, A sepulchral history of Great Britain (London: Printed by John Nichols; for George Nicol, in Pall-Mall, Bookseller to his Majesty, 1793). Image courtesy of The Newberry Library. Donna Beth Ellard Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts postSaxon Futures Contents Foreword · 15 First Movement Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts 1 · OED . ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’: Professional Scholar or Anonymous Person · 19 2 · Krákumál, Sharon Turner, and the Psychic Crypts of Anglo-Saxon History · 61 3 · Beowulf, James Douglas, and the Sepulchral Body of the Anglo-Saxonist · 101 Second Movement Interlude—A Time for Mourning 4 · On Being an Anglo-Saxonist: Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Benjamin Thorpe, and the Sovereign Corpus of a Profession · 175 5 · Becoming postSaxon, or, a Biochemical Vita Ælfredi · 239 Third Movement postSaxon Futures 6 · Old/e English Poetics and ‘Afro-Saxon’ Intimacies · 283 7 · Becoming postSaxon · 337 Bibliography · 355 Index · 399 Acknowledgments So many people have had a hand in making this book. I would like to thank Melissa Gniadek (who has been, throughout this process, the most generous reader and friend), Joe Campana, Claire Fanger, Helena Michie, Tim Morton, Judith Roof, Cary Wolfe, Diane Wolfthal, and the wonderful undergraduate stu- dents of Rice University, where the seeds of this project began to grow, while I was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow. At the University of Denver, DU’s First Book Group has been a sustaining force in transforming this project from sev- eral, loosely-conceived essays to a monograph in bloom. Thank you to Alejandro Cerón, Sarah Crockarell, Tayana Hardin, Sa- rah Hart-Micke, Chad Leahy, Ben Nourse, Juli Parrish, Orna Shaughnessy, Armond Towns, and Kristy Ulibarri. Elsewhere at DU, Bin Ramke and Selah Saterstrom have talked about family, writing, and the South with me; Tayana Hardin has lent her ears and given her emotional energy too many times to this project; and Chad Leahy has found precious hours to read, comment, and talk through several chapter drafts, despite his busy sched- ule. Outside Rice and DU, Carol Pasternack, Aranye Fradenburg- Joy, and Alan Liu were extraordinary mentors at UCSB. Jessica Murphy, Megan Palmer, Maggie Sloan, and Mac Test were at- tentive interlocutors in graduate school, when this book was a misdirected dissertation. Alex Cook, Dorothy Kim, Clare Lees, Gillian Overing, Dan Remein, and Cord Whitaker have engaged in conversation and answered many questions from early to late stages of the project. Kathy Biddick, Mary Dockray-Miller, and Robin Norris have graciously served as readers for this project and provided immensely helpful comments. punctum books has magically transformed this manuscript into a book. Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei has electrified the cov- er art in hot pink and made everything beautiful inside and out. Joyce King has done the all-important work of copy-editing the manuscript. Eileen Joy’s unbelievable editorial comments and questions have challenged me to refine and make explicit the global arguments of this book. Her careful attention not only to the book’s arguments but also to its prose are remarkable. I can- not thank punctum enough for taking a chance on it. Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 were previously published as es- says in postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and Rethinking History. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for believing in my work many years before issues of colonialism and race were topics of immediate concern in medieval studies. 1 Any errors and omissions in this book are strictly my own. Outside academia, a very big thank you to my husband and girls, who continue to remind me what is really important in life. 1 Donna Beth Ellard, ‘Ella’s Bloody Eagle: Sharon Turner’s History of the An- glo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxon History,’ postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studie s 5, no. 2 (2013): 215–34 and ‘“Anglo-Saxonist, n.”: Professional Scholar or Anonymous Person,’ Rethinking History 23, no. 1 (2019): 16–33. For Virginia Sugg, Virginia Dare, Virginia Anne, and Pressly Virginia—the Ellard women and girls. For Brandon. and For Mississippi, whom I still love, despite it all. 15 Foreword We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of unwanted and often shunned memory, of a history whose infiltrations are at times so stealthy we can pretend otherwise, and at times so loud we can’t hear much of anything else. We’re still here — there differently than those before us, but there, otherwise known as here. And that matters for writers. That’s the first intuition. The second one is that it seems a lot of us here when asked to talk about race are most comfortable, or least uncomfortable, talking about it in the language of scandal. It’s so satisfying, so clear, so easy. The wronged. The evildoers. The undeserving. The shady. The good intentions and the cyclical manipulations. The righteous side taking, the head shaking. Scandal is such a helpful, such a relieving distraction. There are times when scandal feels like the sun that race revolves around. And it is so hard to reel conversations about race back from the heavy gravitational pull of where we so often prefer them to be. — Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine 1 The scandals of Anglo-Saxon studies do not need to be re- hearsed here, although they do need to be worked through, in 1 Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, ‘Introduction,’ in The Racial Imagi- nary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (East Peoria: Versa Press, 2015), 13–14. 16 anglo-saxon(ist) pasts, postsaxon futures the sense that Freud gave to that phrase: the field needs bet- ter accounts of its intellectual history, as well as reconciliation and reparation, and that is a big part of what this book is about. These scandals continue to erupt, monthly — weekly — daily, in online platforms, professional conferences, and classrooms. 2 They are a repetition-compulsion, a symptom of our inability to work through ‘a history...so loud we can’t hear much of any- thing else.’ But they are also an opportunity. To my white colleagues: this book is an offering. It is the story of my family, myself, and a Mississippi world in desperate need of healing. As an offering, this book is written with the great hope that we might learn to speak about race in the profession and in our personal lives from outside the framework of scandal, and within the framework of decentering our whiteness in our scholarly work, and listening better to our colleagues of color. To my colleagues of color: this book is also an offering. It is the story of my family, myself, and a Mississippi world in des- perate need of healing. As an offering, this book is written with the great hope that (once, again) you will forgive the field previ- ously known as Anglo-Saxon studies. 2 I want to briefly express my gratitude as well to the early career, and also precarious, scholars in the field formerly known as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies who have been so brave, so smart, and so vigilant in exposing, confront- ing, and challenging the structural racism of our shared field, as well as urging others to commit to change, especially Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade. In the midst of the current ‘scandals,’ they shine a much-need- ed light on the past and show different, better paths forward. First Movement Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts 19 1 oed . ‘Anglo-Saxonist, noun’: Professional Scholar or Anonymous Person In the 1990s, a wave of new forms of critique and critical theory broke over Anglo-Saxon studies, an interdisciplinary field that focuses on England’s early medieval, ‘Old English,’ or ‘Anglo- Saxon’ period. Spurred by decades of European decolonization and American desegregation, Anglo-Saxonists reflected upon their field’s nineteenth-century academic origins; its associa- tions with nation, empire, and race; and the editorial and meth- odological practices that silently maintained these connections. 1 1 See, among other representative works, Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Languages, Old English, and Teaching Tradition (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Allen Frantzen, ed., Speaking Two Languages: Tra- ditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (Albany: State University of New York, 1991); Allen Frantzen and John Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: Flor- ida University Press, 1997); John D. Niles, ‘Locating Beowulf in Literary History,’ Exemplaria 5, no. 1 (1993): 79–109; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Reading Old English Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbon- dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990); James W. Earl, Thinking About ‘Beowulf ’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Roy Michael Liuzza, ‘The Return of the Repressed: Old and New Theories in Old