Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  But even at this moment of triumph for the myth, it was being undermined. Henry VII, eager that his new dynasty should appeal to the long-established monarchies of Europe, had commissioned an Italian scholar, Polydore Vergil, to write a new history. Henry VII died before it was finished but Henry VIII allowed work to continue and it was finally completed in 1513. As a Renaissance scholar, Polydore Vergil was trained to do what few historians had done before–look for the evidence. When he came to scrutinize Geoffrey’s History, it was soon very clear that there was hardly any. His main source, the mysterious book that Geoffrey had been given by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, was never found. Even worse, there was no mention of Geoffrey’s principal hero, Arthur, in any other histories.

  One of these, The Ruin of Britain, a sixth-century polemic by the Breton monk Gildas, was always thought to be extremely shaky, but another, Bede’s History of the English Church and People, published in AD 731, is a far more serious and reliable account–and does not mention Arthur at all. Surely, argued Polydore Vergil, it is inconceivable that a serious history such as Bede’s could have failed even to mention a king who had not only regained territory from the Saxons and Picts but had also conquered Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and much of France only 200 years previously. This was, it had to be admitted, a strong and rational argument. But myth and reason do not necessarily concur. So closely was the court of Henry VIII wedded to, even dependent on, the antiquity of their dynastic claims as ‘authenticated’ by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the King refused to allow Vergil’s work to be published for a further twenty years. That it was published at all was a sign, not of the triumph of reason, but that the myth itself was beginning to lose its political usefulness to the King. The ancient Britons and their affinity to the Catholic Church were becoming an embarrassment.

  But the popularity of Geoffrey’s History was still sufficient for the publication of Polydore Vergil’s alternative Anglica Historica to be greeted with outrage and the author condemned as an unscrupulous papist who had set out to undermine the new self-confidence of the English Church. Even during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, the History was still a source of inspiration to poets like Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene links Elizabeth and Arthur, and, of course, to Shakespeare, whose King Lear draws its characters straight from Geoffrey of Monmouth.

  Nevertheless, the currency of the myth among scholars continued to decline, even though it enjoyed a brief revival of royal enthusiasm in 1601 when the Stuart King James VI of Scotland/I of England cast himself as the embodiment of Merlin’s prophecy and the restorer of the ancient unity of England, Wales and Scotland first won by Brutus and Locrinus. Eventually, the Stuarts were overthrown and the crown passed to William of Orange. Though he, one would have thought, could not possibly claim a link to the myth, coming as he did from Protestant Holland, this did not stop the poet R. D. Blackmore from portraying William as the Christian Arthur. Even more bizarrely, he managed to twist the myth to the point where William became the champion of the true religion of the ancient Britons (Protestantism!) against the heathen Saxons (Catholic!). That shameful episode was the last bow of the myth on the political stage, though its popularity even today is witness to its continuing fascination.

  The real reason for the slow decline of the myth of a united, essentially Celtic Britain with ancient foundations, as elaborated in the History, was that, following the Reformation, it no longer suited the English Church. After Henry VIII’s acrimonious break with Rome, the newly established Protestant Church of England looked back into history to provide it with the historical legitimacy to set itself apart from Roman Catholicism. To do this, scholars seized on a remark made in the sixth century by Gildas in The Ruin of Britain that, in what became England, the original Britons had been completely wiped out by the Saxons. The natural conclusion was that the English were the linear descendants of the Saxons, not the Britons at all. This was an undiluted and direct genealogical connection, not with the defeated Britons and the mythical Arthur, but with the victorious Saxons. In this version of events the Saxons were not the malicious and unprincipled opportunists whose foothold in Britain came about only through Vortigern’s treachery. Far from it: the Saxons were strong, self-confident and adventurous pioneers who had triumphed against the weak-willed Britons through the intrinsic superiority of their moral character and their love of freedom. The English Church no longer looked west and north to the mountains of Wales and Scotland for its natural affiliations, but across the North Sea to the Teutonic Germans whose stout spirit of Protestant independence had triumphed against the corruption of the Roman Church.

  To recreate the myth of an Anglo-Saxon golden age before the Norman Conquest, Protestant historians needed a hero to replace Arthur. They found one in King Alfred, and the PR campaign began: ‘the great and singular qualities in this king, worthy of high renown and commendation–godly and excellent virtues, joined with a public and tender care, and a zealous study for the common peace and tranquillity…his heroical properties jointed together in one piece’, wrote John Foxe in 1563. It clearly worked: even today, Alfred is the one Saxon king that most children have heard of–even if all they remember is that he burnt the cakes. Unlike Arthur, there is no doubt that Alfred existed, but how close the glowing tributes to both his military genius and his humble and scholarly character are to reality is still an open question. He reigned from 871 to 899 and was, as we shall see later, instrumental in preventing the Danish Vikings from overrunning the whole country.

  At the same time that Alfred was being resurrected in England, Protestant scholars, including Martin Luther in Germany, were creating their own origin myths for the same reason. To reinforce their independence from the Catholic Church, they drew heavily on classical writers for their justification. One of these was the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote in AD 98, ‘For myself I accept the view that the people of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other peoples and stand out as a nation peculiar, pure and unique of its kind.’ Luther himself even managed to concoct a genealogy for the Germans right back to Adam, who for Christians like Luther was the father of the human race.

  What began as a declaration of religious independence from Rome transformed over the years into a virulent doctrine of Saxon/Teutonic racial superiority over the other inhabitants of the Isles that has had immense and far-reaching political and social consequences. The reinvention of a glorious English past gathered pace. The Magna Carta, in essence an unimportant concordat between King John and his Norman barons, was reborn as a declaration of Saxon independence every bit as important to the English as the US Bill of Rights is to Americans. The Puritans appealed to the myth in their bitter struggle with the Crown during the English Civil War when John Hare, one of the leaders of the Parliamentarians, wrote about his side in 1640, the first year of the war:

  our progenitors that transplanted themselves from Germany hither did not commixe themselves with the ancient inhabitants of the country of the Britain’s, but totally expelling them, they took the sole possession of the land to themselves, thereby preserving their blood, laws and language uncorrupted…

  Gradually the monarchy changed allegiance to suit the new origin myth. James VI/I even switched sides during the course of his own reign. Having at first asserted his entitlement to rule over both Scotland and England, based on his claim to be Merlin’s Arthur reborn, he very soon afterwards basked in the appellation of the ‘chiefest Blood-Royal of our ancient English-Saxon kings’, according to a dedication in the influential book Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, written in 1605 by Richard Verstegen.

  In the context of the genetics we will come to later, Verstegen was the first author to point out the potential embarrassment that the purity of the Saxon line must surely have been ‘diluted’ or ‘contaminated’ by the later arrival of large numbers of Danes and Normans. He countered this by claiming, first, that their numerical contribution was slight and, second, that both the Danes and t
he Normans were themselves of Germanic origin anyway, so they could have no effect on the essential racial purity of the Teutonic English.

  As the myth gained momentum, the voices raised against it became fewer and further between. The writer Daniel Defoe was one exception, parodying the whole idea of English racial purity and superiority in his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’, written in 1701:

  The Romans first with Julius Caesar came

  Including all the Nations of that Name

  Gauls, Greeks and Lombards; and by Computation

  Auxiliaries or slaves of ev’ry Nation

  With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came

  In search of Plunder, not in search of Fame

  Scots, Picts and Irish from the Hibernian shore:

  And Conquering William brought the Normans O’re.

  All these their Barb’rous offspring left behind

  the dregs of Armies, they of all Mankind;

  Blended with Britons, who before were here,

  of whom the Welch ha’blest the Character.

  From the amphibious Ill-born Mob began

  That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.

  But dissenting voices were definitely in the minority, and the myth grew and grew, finding a new outlet in the development of the African slave trade. Though European attitudes to black people and a readiness to exploit them for personal gain were nothing new, the resurgent racial pride which accompanied the growth of the Teutonic myth encouraged further victimization. While there may have been some uncertainty about the purity of the Saxon pedigree within England, there could be no cause for doubt that black Africans had no claims whatsoever to the Teutonic blood-line with its attendant virtues of enterprise, independence and high moral character.

  During the eighteenth century, the myth had grown to such prominence that it was scarcely, if ever, questioned. It attained an invincibility equal to that of the Arthurian legends of Geoffrey’s History 500 years earlier. But now its effects were felt not just in Britain, but throughout the world. The influential French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu wrote in 1734 that the English political system came straight from the forests of Germany, imported and elaborated by their Saxon descendants. Even the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who constantly required evidence as the foundation for any belief, accepted without question the purity of the German race first expressed so long ago by Tacitus. Thomas Jefferson, one of the draftsmen of the Declaration of Independence, who became the third President of the United States, wrote in 1774 that it was the Saxon ancestry of the American colonists that gave them a natural right to build for themselves a free and independent state, liberated from British colonial rule.

  The triumph of the Teutonic myth was almost complete as its popularity reached its peak during the nineteenth century. Indeed the superiority and self-belief with which its adherents cloaked themselves was central to the construction and administration of the British Empire. The myth gave to the Englishmen abroad the absolute conviction that their ancient Saxon pedigree imbued them with inherited qualities of honour and leadership, and the political institutions to go with it, that were far superior to any in the world. Bolstered with that ingrained sense of destiny the English did, indeed, rule the world–for a while.

  But the triumph of the myth came at a price. The growing sense of racial superiority among the English set them increasingly at odds with the other inhabitants of the Isles, the Welsh and the Scots on the British mainland, and with the Irish. The simple racism of the myth collapsed all three into the same denomination, ‘the Celts’, and poured scorn on them.

  By now, science had been harnessed to the myth in an enthusiastic attempt to build a solid frame to underpin its more extravagant assumptions. And when science and racism are mixed, the cocktail becomes increasingly volatile. At the end of his rambling book The Races of Men, published in 1850, Robert Knox MD, surgeon and enthusiast for the new science of comparative anatomy, concludes after 350 pages of Saxon worship and Celtic insult that, ‘The Celtic Race must be forced from this soil. England’s safety requires it’. This outrageous suggestion, as it appears to us now, was completely in tune with the prevailing view, if not of an actual genocide, then certainly of cultural and spiritual suppression. In a superbly argued defence of the value of Celtic literature, published in 1867, the literary critic Matthew Arnold quotes a leader from The Times on the subject of the Welsh language:

  The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even now exclude, the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English neighbours. An Eisteddfod [the annual Welsh literary and musical festival] is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of civilisation and prosperity. If it is desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry would be sheer ignorance. The sooner all Welsh specialists disappear from the face of the earth, the better.

  Even taking into account the often strident and provocative language of a Times leader, it is a chilling piece.

  The decline of the myth’s supremacy came as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In a parallel with the undermining of the factual basis of Arthurian legend and the ancient succession of British kings recounted in Geoffrey’s History, the absolute belief in the Teutonic myth suffered a similar fate. There was no single scholar assassin like Polydore Vergil, but rather a series of snipers. One of these, the literary critic J. M. Robertson, concluded that, far from being the heralds of a superior race honed to perfection in the forests of Germany, the first Saxons were ‘pagan, non-literate and barbaric, heroes of a northern society so disorganized that they had little concept of national, racial or political loyalties’.

  But it was political developments in Germany, rather than Britain, that finally sealed the fate of the Teutonic myth. Not surprisingly, Germans also favoured the good light the myth cast on their own racial purity and superiority with the almost genetically linked qualities of freedom and independence. Also keen to distance themselves from Rome, German scholars had worked in a parallel effort to reinforce their independence with a racially based justification. It was in the late nineteenth century that the German origin myth first became firmly attached to the concept of the Aryan.

  The creator of the Aryan myth was a German linguist, Max Müller, working in Oxford as a Professor of Modern Languages. Müller did more than anyone to create this myth by falling into the trap of unquestioningly conflating language with race–a temptation which even contemporary scholars often seem quite unable to resist. As a linguist, Müller was very well aware of the similarities of the major European languages to Sanskrit and Persian. This similarity hinted at a common origin and led directly to the concept, widely accepted today, of an ‘Indo-European’ language family. The language family was originally known as ‘Aryan’, from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘noble’. Müller took the natural but unjustified step of mutating this theory of language to a theory of race. He concluded that there must have been, as well as an original Aryan language, an original Aryan people. That most promiscuous and malignant of racial myths was born. As his career progressed, Müller came to doubt his invention and by 1888, to his credit, he positively rejected it. But it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle.

  As we have seen throughout this chapter, the career of a myth depends far less on its factual accuracy than on its congruence with contemporary political ambition, and the fervour with which people believe it. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Germany, through its Chancellor Bismarck and later under Kaiser Wilhelm, recruited the Aryan myth, with its closely linked connotations of German racial superiority, to justify its own cam
paign of imperial expansion. These ambitions soon became a direct threat to the British Empire, also fuelled by the same myth. Enthusiasm among the British for the close affiliation with Germany that was so much part of the Teutonic myth rapidly dwindled as the two countries became enemies. Not surprisingly, after the First World War it vanished completely.

  The growing distaste of the British did nothing to halt the rise and rise of the Aryan myth in Germany itself. The Nazis, now seeing themselves the sole inheritors of Aryan racial superiority, exploited it ruthlessly against their ‘enemies’ both within and without. Nothing underlines the dreadful power and the dreadful danger of racial myth more than the smoke rising from the chimneys of Belsen and Dachau, Treblinka and Auschwitz.

  3

  THE RESURGENT CELTS

  As I write, the 2006 World Cup Finals draw closer and one of the few remaining expressions of English patriotic nationalism is beginning to show itself. The red cross of St George on the white background of the English flag is seen hanging from first-floor windows and fluttering from the rear windows of speeding cars. Supermarkets have ‘Come on England’ signs hanging above the aisles. If the 2004 European Cup Finals are anything to go by, the flags will be hastily taken down as soon as England are knocked out of the competition. Even the appointment of a foreign manager to the English football team is received with only mild remonstrations. That, and the enthusiasm surrounding the victory over Australia in the Ashes test series in the 2005 cricket season, is about all you are likely to see these days. The English national day, St George’s Day–23 April–is barely celebrated. The new ethnic myth is not to be found on the Saxon streets of London, but in the Celtic west. On St Patrick’s Day–17 March–the streets of Dublin and of New York are packed with parades and partygoers. While the Teutonic myth has submerged beneath the surface, if only for the time being, the Celtic myth grows stronger as each year passes.