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English Studies

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Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East

Heide Estesa a Department of English, Monmouth University, USA Online publication date: 09 June 2010

To cite this Article Estes, Heide(2010) 'Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East', English Studies, 91: 4, 360 373 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00138381003637575 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138381003637575

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English Studies Vol. 91, No. 4, June 2010, 360373

Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-Saxons and the East

Heide Estes

What the Anglo-Saxons knew about Asia and its inhabitants was drawn from Biblical exegesis, saints lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English and Anglo-Latin texts of varied genre and contents give evidence of an intense interest in the East that serves both to dene Anglo-Saxon origins and to depict outsiders of varying types that are made to perform as Other to members of the Anglo-Saxon community. lfric follows Augustine and Isidore in his division of the world into three regions whose people are descended from the biblical Ham, Shem, and Cham; the division is depicted in Anglo-Saxon world maps and referenced in poetry such as the Old English Genesis. The Beowulf-manuscript contains several texts about the East including the prose Wonders of the East, Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and Life of Saint Christopher, as well as the poems Judith and Beowulf. The outlandish creatures described and illustrated in each of these texts gure as outsiders to Anglo-Saxon culture and function to structure masculinity and social cohesion. Images of monstrosity are interwoven with gurations of femininity to bring the ideation of the other closer to home. Old English texts that refer to the East have more to do with Anglo-Saxon preoccupations with locating themselves geographically and temporally in Christian Europe than with historical realities. The East becomes at once monstrous, marvellous, and mysterious, a place of the imagination in quasi-historical accounts ranging from the Letter of Alexander to Beowulf, each of which depicts a realm whose wild characters and characteristics opposed the wished-for stability of roles and functions at home among the English. With all of these gurations existing together in a single manuscript, it becomes possible to argue that Asia as a whole functions in the same position to medieval Christian Europe in a comprehensive fashion, anticipating the orientalism of the post-medieval period. The ties between Anglo-Saxon England and Rome are close enough that Nicholas Howe once referred to Rome as the capital of Anglo-Saxon England.1 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains several references in ninth-century entries to the ongelcynnes scole (Anglo-Saxon quarter)2 in Rome, where English expatriates and visitors could stay in
Heide Estes is afliated with the Department of English, Monmouth University, USA. 1 Howe, 147. 2 OKeeffe, ed., entries for the years 816, 874, and 885.

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ISSN 0013-838X (print)/ISSN 1744-4217 (online) 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00138381003637575

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an English hostel or worship at an English church. An Anglo-Saxon bishop who travelled to Rome to receive the pallium left an account of his journey,3 and the AngloSaxon Chronicle and other Old English sources mention numerous other Anglo-Saxons voyages to Rome. However, the Chronicle makes almost no mention of places beyond Rome to the east. In the C-Text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle alone, it is recorded that in 982 for Odda Romana casere to Greclande, 7 a gemette he ara Sarcena mycele fyrde (the Roman emperor Otto [I] went to Greece, and there he met a large army of Saracens); after large losses on both sides, Otto is the victor.4 The same manuscript of the Chronicle makes reference to the exiled Norwegian Swein, who in 1052 for ror to Hierusalem . . . 7 wear hamweard dead t Constantinopolim (rst went to Jerusalem and died afterward at Constantinople).5 There is no description in either entry of places visited or of the routes travelled by Otto or Swein. Perhaps also not insignicantly, neither Otto nor Swein is English. According to lfric, one east dl middaneardes . . . is gehate Asia (the eastern portion of middle-earth . . . is called Asia).6 This Asia is a locale of the AngloSaxon imagination, a place with which writers and scribes of the time had no direct contact. What the Anglo-Saxons knew about Moslems and Jews, and about Babylon and Egypt and India, depended upon Biblical exegesis, saints lives, and other texts derived from Latin sources. Numerous Old English texts, as well as Latin versions that circulated and were copied in Anglo-Saxon England, concern Asia; these are quite varied in genre and in content. Such variety gives evidence of intense interest in the East, an interest that serves, paradoxically, both to dene Anglo-Saxon origins and to depict outsiders of varying types that are made to perform as Other to members of the Anglo-Saxon community. Augustines De Civitate Dei survives in two complete texts written in Anglo-Saxon England; another English scribe recorded a series of extracts from the text.7 In the work, Augustine describes the division of the world: si in duas partes orbem dividas, Orientis et Occidentis, Asia erit in una, in altera vero Europa et Africa (if you divide the world into two parts, east and west, Asia will be in one, and Europe and Africa in the other).8 Elsewhere, Augustine comments that all of the peoples of the world are divided among three groups, according to the sons of Noah.9 Isidore combines these two methods of dividing the world and its peoples, and assigns the descendants of Shem to places in Asia, those of Cham to regions in Africa, and those of Japheth to parts of Europe.10 Isadores Etymologiae survives in nineteen full, fragmentary, or excerpted manuscripts written in Anglo-Saxon England, and was quite inuential in bringing Patristic ideas to the English. Writing near the end of the
3 4

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Ortenberg, 197246. OKeeffe, 85. 5 Ibid., 114. 6 MacLean, ed., 38 (lines 3701). 7 Gneuss, 32, 51, 95. 8 Augustine XVI. 17, pp. 92, 93. 9 Augustine XVI. 3, pp. 1425. 10 Isidore, IX. 2.

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tenth century in England, lfric follows Isidore in the apportionment of the world among the descendants of Noah: Of Cham, Noes suna, com t Chananeisce folc, & of Iaphet, am gingstan, e ws gebletsod urh Noe, com t norerne mennisc be re Nors, for an e ri dlas sind gedlede urh hig, Asia on eastrice am yldstan suna, Affrica on sudle s Chames cynne, & Europa on nordle Iaphees ofspringe (The Canaanite people come of Ham, Noahs son, and of Japheth, the youngest, who received Noahs blessing, come the northern peoples, by the North Sea, because the three parts are divided through it, Asia on the east for the oldest son, Africa in the south for Hams kin, and Europe in the northern part for Japheths offspring).11 In other words, Europeans are descended from Japheth, Noahs youngest son and recipient of his paternal blessing; and Africa is assigned to Ham, who is cursed by God among the descendants of Cain. Shem, neither blessed nor cursed, is associated with Asia, a place characterised above all by variation in its inhabitants and ambiguity in their interpretation. Asia is not only a place of mystery: for Isidore, as for Augustine and the AngloSaxons, Paradisus est locus in orientis partibus constitutus (Paradise is located in the part established as the Orient).12 Many medieval maps of the world place Paradise at the very top, which is to say at the eastern edge of the worlds land masses. Far at the other side of Asia, and often at the very centre of the map, is to be found Jerusalem. This Jerusalem is the home of the Hebrews, who are understood to be descendants from Shem in a link the Anglo-Saxons imagine as being quite direct. In the Old English poetic Genesis, for example, the line from Shem to the Hebrews is drawn without intermediary:
On re mge wron men tile, ara an ws Eber haten, eafora Semes; of am eorle woc unrim eoda, a nu elingas, ealle eorbuend, Ebrei hata. Of that tribe were good men, of whom one was called Eber, Shems heir; of that man were born countless peoples, whom now men, all earth-dwellers, call Hebrews. (Genesis, lines 16448)13

Jerusalem was, as the Anglo-Saxons knew from numerous homilies, saints lives, and other texts, the location of Solomons temple; for Anglo-Saxon and other medieval Christians, Solomon represents Christian wisdom.14 Jerusalem is also the home of Christianity through its central place in the life of Jesus. Between Jerusalem and Paradise lie vast unexplored territories lled, in the medieval Christian imagination, with a host of wonders and monsters. From Paradise to Jerusalem via
11 12

Crawford, ed., 27. Isidore, XIV. 3. 13 Krapp, ed., 188, 16198. 14 Menner, ed., xix.

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a map full of marvels, Asia is diverse in its inhabitants and ambiguous in its gurations. The Cottonian world map, a product of the early eleventh century in England, contains actual Asian places and geographical features, including Babylon, the Nile, and India, in quae sunt Gentes XLIV (in which there are 44 peoples) alongside such curiosities as Noahs Arc, gryphons, and Gog and Magog. The Cottonian map appears in Cotton Tiberius B. v., a manuscript of miscellaneous materials including the itinerary of Archbishop Sigerics journey to Rome; lists of popes, abbots, and priests; computistical materials and a calendar; astronomical and scientic texts; and both Latin and Old English versions of the Wonders of the East.15 The text of Wonders is accompanied by colour illustrations.16 The wonders of the text and illustrations include animals or monsters clearly identiable as nonhuman, as well as human or semi-human gures.17 Descriptions of the various creatures in the Wonders are located with reference to places named on the Cottonian map, such as Babylon and Egypt. The rst place named in Wonders is the island of Antimolima, whose main city, Archemedon, is populated by merchants and by rams as big as oxen. Here, we are still in the realm of possible reality: to someone unfamiliar with it, an animal such as the aurochs or the eland could reasonably have been described as a large goat. Wonders also includes reference to ylpenda (elephants, x10), well-known to modern generations of zoo-goers but surely marvellous to someone who knew only the smaller wild and domestic animals of northern Europe. Early on, the text describes familiar-looking animals such as roosters and wild beasts; however, these burst into ame if they are touched by any person. t syndon ungefregelicu lyblac (Those are unusual witchcraft, x3) the text comments rather laconically. As the text progresses, the animals become more and more marvellous: a nddran habba twa heafde, re eagan scina nihtes swa leohte swa blacern (the snakes have two heads, and their eyes shine at night as bright as a lantern, x5); soon after this, Alexander and his readers encounter unusual dogs called Conopoenas that have horses manan 7 eoferes tucxas 7 hunda heafda, 7 heora oru by swylce fyres lig (horses manes and boars tusks and dogs heads, and their breath is like a res ame, x7). Perhaps more wondrous than grotesque, there are also dragons (x16), gryphons (x34), and phoenixes (x35). Also woven into the text are descriptions, accompanied by illustrations, of a variety of human or partially human beings. Two different kinds of creatures are called homodubii which, the text explains in each case, means in Old English twylice (doubtful or ambiguous, x8, x17). The rst creatures so described are six feet tall and extremely hirsute, but the others seem far more dubious in their humanity: Hi beo o ene nafelan on menniscum gescape 7 syan on eoseles gescape; hi habba
15 16

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Hill, 23; Gneuss, 69. See Orchard, 175203, for the texts of Wonders. Illustrations are in Kevin Kiernan, ed., Electronic Beowulf. 17 Freedman, 124; Kim, 16280.

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longe sceancan swa fugelas 7 lielice stefne (They are of human shape until the navel, and after that in the shape of a donkey; they have long shanks like birds, and soft voices, x17). Other creatures referred to as moncynn (people) or menn (men) are creatures fteen feet tall and with two faces who, onne hi kennan willa, onne fara hi on scipum to Indeum, 7 r hyra gecynd on weorold bringa (when they wish to give birth, then they go in ships to India, and there they bring their offspring into the world, x11); headless creatures a habba on heora breostum heora eagan 7 mu (who have on their breasts their eyes and mouth, x15); and humans recalling the snakes already mentioned, ara eagan scina swa leohte swa man micel blacern onle on ystre nihte (whose eyes shine as bright as if someone lit a large lantern in the dark night, x22). The text also describes creatures with huge heads and ears like fans, and when they sleep, oer eare hi him on niht underbreda, 7 mid oran hy wreo him (they spread one ear out underneath themselves at night, and wrap themselves with the other, x21). Perhaps most sinister are the cannibalistic Donestre, a syndon geweaxene swa frihteras fram an heafde o one nafelan, 7 se oer dl by mannes lice gelic (who grow like soothsayers from the head to the navel, and the other half is like a mans body, x20). They capture foreigners, captivate them with lies, and fter an hi hine freta ealne butan his heafde 7 onne sitta 7 wepa ofer am heafde (after that they eat him, all but his head, and then sit and weep over the head, x20). In a return to the real world, we meet Ethiopians sweartan hiwes (with black faces, x32), but the placement of these actual people among a list of monsters suggests that the Anglo-Saxons may not have viewed them as entirely human. Besides all of these, there are two kinds of monstrous females: a race of hunters a habba beardas swa sie o heora breost (that have beards so long that they reach their breast, x26) as well as a group of women thirteen feet tall with skin as white as marble a habba eoferes tucxas 7 feax o helan side, 7 on lendenum oxan tgl . . . 7 hi habba olfenda fet 7 eoferes te (who have boars tusks and hair down to their heels, and ox-tails on their loins . . . and they have camels feet and boars teeth, x27). Near the end of the text there is mention of a fremfulle (generous) people who give visitors a woman, whom Alexander the Great has spared annihilation because he found their humanity wondrous (a ws he wundriende, x30). That the races of men include members able to give birth and include women who can be given as gifts suggests that the term menn should be translated as tribe or people, not as male creatures. The existence alongside mixed gender groups of specically feminine categories of monstrosity indicates that gender is perceived as a category of difference and, simultaneously, suggests that the conception and ideology of difference itself is gendered in Anglo-Saxon England. The idea of woman as distinctly different from man, and of man as normative, is given explicit formulation by Jerome: . . . quamdiu mulier partui servit et liberis, hanc habet ad virum differentiam, quam corpus ad animam. Sin autem Christo magis voluerit servire quam saeculo, mulier esse cessabit, et dicetur vir ( . . . as long

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as woman is for birth and children, then she is as different from man as body is from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man).18 Men who devote themselves to Christ are still menthey do not transmute into some other kind of being. Women, on the other hand, are of a different order, fundamentally different from men unless they become brides of Christ. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued, Anglo-Saxon texts place giants in an originary position in English history, by assigning to them the construction of Roman stonework at London and Bath, yet gure them concurrently as the enemy, as seen in the cannibalism of the monster Grendel. Such is the vexing duality of the monster, especially in northern tradition. The giant is simultaneously the origin of the world and its greatest enemy.19 In guring Eve as the source of the fall of man, but also subsequently as the mother of all humanity, and Mary as the source of Jesus and thus of Christian grace and redemption, Christianity arguably also gures woman as simultaneous origin and enemy. The ability to give women as gifts, to use them as a medium of exchange, appears to be the characteristic that guarantees humanity for the group the Wonders states is spared by Alexander and his armies. Gift-giving is, of course, crucial to Anglo-Saxon social networks, not only in the Germanic past of heroic poetry, but also as demonstrated when, for example, in the late ninth century King Alfred sends manuscripts to several English bishops along with valuable jewelled pointers. AngloSaxon social networks are also enabled by the role of women as peace-weaver, in which a woman of one tribe makes a union of marriage to a prominent member of another tribe in the attempt to guarantee social stability. While such union is sometimes gured as consisting of the giving of the woman from one man to another, in fact the role of peace-weaver suggests agency. As the example of Wealhtheow in Beowulf suggests, a successful peace-weaver will be a woman who is rhetorically skilled, generous with gifts, and able to read and react to shifting power balances. The women given as gifts by members of the tribe favoured by Alexander appear to possess no such agency. Rather, they are under total control of the groups men. This is what places them in sharp contrast to the groups composed solely of women, who are under no masculine power and whose humanity is suspect. In a study of Beowulf, Mary Dockray-Miller has argued that in the world of the poem masculinity is power, most emphatically the power to control the actions of others.20 DockrayMiller suggests that Modthryth and Grendels mother are masculinised by the violence of their actions in Beowulf; in Wonders, the women who do not live within the inuence of masculine power are rendered monstrous. Women whose physical appearance suggests masculinitywith beards down to their breasts, for exampleare also presented as grotesques. The text works to establish clear
18 19

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Jerome, PL 26: 533B-C. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 10. 20 Dockray-Miller.

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boundaries between masculine and feminine in terms of acceptable social roles as well as of physical conguration.21 The location of these monstrously dubious women in Asia highlights the conuence of gender and other kinds of difference in Wonders and other Old English narratives of the East. In addition to appearing in Cotton Tiberius B. v., the Wonders of the East is also preserved in a manuscript containing the unique text of Beowulf as well as a poem based on the Biblical book of Judith and two additional prose pieces, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle and a fragmentary Life of Saint Christopher. These texts, like Wonders, all gure Asia and/or woman as Other. The Letter is addressed to Alexanders tutor, Aristotle, and narrates Alexanders travels through Asia in his quest to conquer the world. In it, Alexander describes the humans, beasts, marvels, and monsters he encounters. Much of the Letter is more prosaic than Wonders, describing animals and humans within the realm of probable experience. Alexander repeatedly mentions in passing that he and his armies must contend with missenlican cynd ndrena 7 hrifa wildeora (various kinds of serpents and wild beasts, x9).22 When Alexander pauses to describe these beasts and serpents, those creatures are marvellous indeed. But the rst thing Alexander mentions in his Letter about which he writes to his teacher, Aristotle, a wundrode ic (then I wondered, x8) is the vast quantity of gold to be found in the castle of Porus, king of Fasiacen. The rst encounter with adversity that Alexander describes in detail is neither monster nor beast, but the difculty of coping with the heat of the desert. The problem of obtaining clean water to drink occupies ve longish sections in Alexanders letter (out of forty-one sections in all). The land itself, relentless in its parched heat, becomes the rst threat to Alexander and his men. Interestingly, eore (earth) is gendered feminine in Old English.23 It may perhaps not go too far to suggest that the Old English translator, if not Alexander himself, saw the earth of the East as a hostile feminine presence in a text in which women are either monstrous or are little more than things to be exchanged by men, in an analogue to the way in which the earth is a thing to be traversed by Alexander and the men of his army. Having at last located a source of clean water, Alexander then describes various encounters with wondrous and monstrous beasts, some actual animals, others existing only in imagination. In short order, his army encounters wyrmas (serpents) with three-pronged tongues and breath swylce byrnende ecelle (like a burning torch, x18); bats with te in monna gelicnisse (teeth like those of humans, x19); hwite leon (white lions, x19); boars of unmtlicre micelnesse (immeasurable size, x19); a rhinoceros, which is egeslice gewpnod (terribly
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Kim, 124. For the text of the Letter, see Orchard, 22453. Translations are my own. 23 Hall, s.v. eore. Does this foreshadow Allan Quatermains encounter of a breast-like mountain (or is it a mountainous breast?) in King Solomons Mines (Haggard) or the naming of the Grand Tetons in the Rocky Mountains of the American West?

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armed) with rie hornas on foran heafde (three horns on the front of its head) and which tramples several dozen of Alexanders warriors before they are able to kill it with arrows and spears (x20); and Indisce mys (Indian mice) the size and shape of foxes, which do considerable damage to Alexanders horses and cattle (x22). After these setbacks, Alexander once again encounters King Porus with his army. Rather than ght, however, Porus surrenders and gives gifts of great gold to Alexander and his men. Alexander then comments somewhat listlessly that he and his men woldan ma wunderlicra inga geseon 7 sceawian 7 mrlicra. Ac a ne gesawon we swa we a geferdon noht elles buton a westan feldas 7 wudu 7 duna be m garsecge, a wron monnum ungeferde for wildeorum 7 wyrmum (wished to see and witness more marvellous and noteworthy things. But as we travelled we saw nothing but desolate expanses and woods and hills by the ocean, which were impassable for men because of wild beasts and serpents, x26). Suddenly, however, they are set upon by a crocodile, which they bludgeon to death because edged weapons are useless, and then an immense herd of elephants, which they frighten away with pigs, of which Alexander says elephants are afraid. Then, on oer eodlond India (in another district in India, x29) Alexander and his men encounter ruge wifmen, 7 wpned men wron hie swa ruwe 7 swa gehre swa wildeor (hairy women, and men who were as hairy and as shaggy as wild animals, x29). Moreover, they are nine feet tall, naked, and of the habit of catching whales with their bare hands to eat. As in Wonders, women who resemble menwhose difference from men is less obvious than expected or, perhaps, desiredfall into the realm of dubious humanity. In the same paragraph, Alexander mentions halfhundinga micle mngeo (a great number of half-dogs, x29) who attempt to harm his army but ee when subjected to a hail of arrows. The hairy women may perhaps be read as half-female in analogy to these beasts. Alexander gives a longer description to the falling snow and the rain of re his men next encounter. He concludes his narrative with a description of his search for the realm of the trees of Sun and Moon, his journey there, and his posing of questions and receipt of answersabout the time and place of his death. In an interesting touch, the names of the beasts and serpents he encounters on this journey, rather than the creatures themselves, are wunderlicum (wondrous, x33). He arrives in the realm of these trees to nd them guarded by men and women who dress only in animal skins. The person in charge of this place is a three-hundred-year-old male bishop, ten feet tall, with black skin and pierced ears, who tells Alexander that gif ine gerefan beo clne from wif gehrine (if your companions are innocent of womans touch, x35), they may approach the trees. For a monk, innocence of womans touch would mean absence of sexual activity, but in a non-Christian, non-monastic context this doesnt seem quite right. Given the paucity of representations of the feminine in the Letter, one might conclude that any contact with the feminine denotes, de facto, contamination. The absence of the feminine in Alexanders masculine, militaristic, imperialist world is emphasised by

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the fact that the letter is addressed to Alexanders mother and sisterswomen placed outside the reach of the world described in the letter by the very fact that they can be reached only through the medium of written communication. As readers, they may be as distant as tenth-century Anglo-Saxons or as twenty-rst-century AngloSaxonists. Andy Orchard notes several passages in which the Old English translator of the Latin version of Alexanders Letter makes the character of Alexander less sympathetic, more self-absorbed and arrogant, a monstrous gure of pride, a monster-slayer who, in Christian eyes, is every bit as outlandish and inhuman as the creatures he ghts.24 Yet he is a European man in Asia; the letter, written from his point of view and disseminated widely in medieval Europe, constructs the peoples and creatures he encounters as opportunities for conquest. The Asian King Porus retreats rather than engaging Alexanders army, thus surrendering his status as wpnedman. Wpen (weapon) also refers to the male genitalia; Poruss surrender of weapons, then, suggests that he surrenders masculinity altogether. In an oppositional parallel to the female gures reduced to half-women by the presence of apparently masculine quantities of hair, King Porus is reduced to half-man, or not man at all, by his withdrawal from conict with King Alexander. The dynamic of European traveller in Asia, narrated explicitly in Alexanders Letter and implied in the catalogue of Wonders, is reversed in the Old English Life of Saint Christopher.25 In one of the nice little ironies of Old English textual scholarship, the Life of Saint Christopher is acephalous, its opening lines or, more likely, pages having been lost at some point in the history of the Beowulf manuscript. Though it is not stated in the extant portion of this text, traditions current in Anglo-Saxon England describe Christopher as having the head of a dog. According to the Old English Martyrology, Christopher comes of re eode r men habba hunda heafod and of re eoran on re ton men hi selfe (from the people where men have the heads of dogs and from the land where men eat one another).26 In the context of the Wonders of the East, this land must be in Asia. Moreover, Christopher cannot speak until he prays for human speech and an angelic gure breathes into his mouth. As the Beowulf-manuscripts extant text of the Life of Saint Christopher opens, Christopher is already in Samo, an island off the coast of Greeceand, therefore, in Europewhere he has encountered the pagan king Dagnus, who is furious that Christopher denies the divinity of his pagan gods and is having him tortured to try to get him to recant. The king has Christopher killed, but he ultimately accepts Christianity. In this tale, then, a monstrous Asian, a being of dubious humanity with a dogs head and without the capacity of speech, perhaps even a cannibal, accepts faith and brings it to Europe, where he is responsible for the conversion to Christianity of European men. Monstrosity, like femininity, can be transcended by Christian faith.
24 25

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Orchard, 139. For the text of the Life of Saint Christopher, see Rypins, ed., 6876. 26 Herzfeld, ed., 66, 68.

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The Beowulf-manuscript concludes with the Old English poetic Judith, another Asian narrative set in Bethulia, a legendary city near Jerusalem. The city is besieged by Nebuchadnezzars army for refusing to pay tribute; Judith inltrates the enemy encampment and returns home several days later with the head of Holofernes, the general in charge. Judiths prayer of the Bible addressed to Lord, God of Israel (13.9) is transformed in the poem into an appeal to a tripartite God:
Ic e, fryma god ond frofre gst, bearn alwaldan, biddan wylle miltse inre me earfendre, rynesse rym. Of you, God of all creatures, Holy Ghost and Son of the Almighty, glory of Trinity, I, needy one, wish to ask mercy. (lines 836)

This supplication is quite clearly in the tradition of Christian and not of Jewish prayer. Judith and her people are named Hebrews in the poem, in a shift from their Biblical afliation as Israelites, because in medieval Christian exegesis, the peoples of the Hebrew scriptures or Old Testament are divided into two opposing groups. Those individuals idealised in the Old Testament books are adopted as ancestral gures for European Christians; those whose presentation is more ambiguous or fully negative are taken as ancestral gures for the Jews, a people at best tolerated and at worst reviled in Christian commentaries of the Middle Ages, accused of denying the divinity of Christ and either wilfully or perversely blind to the signicance of their own scripture, gurations Rosemary Radford Ruether and Jeremy Cohen, among others, have explored.27 As the originary people of the book, their disagreement with late-coming Christian interpreters about its meaning occasions anxiety; Patristic and medieval Christian exegetes expended a not inconsiderable amount of energy in explaining the spiritual impoverishment and theological blindness of post-Christian Jews. As a body, then, Jews mirror the land of Asia in being both source of and threat to medieval European Christianity. Moreover, as I have argued in detail elsewhere, Judiths status as a powerful woman is inherently problematic for the Old English author of the poem.28 In this poem, then, the tropes of femininity, Jewishness, and eastern setting intersect in their guration as simultaneously originary and menacing. I turn nally to Beowulf which, in the taxonomy I have been developing in this paper, is the exception. Generally the poem has been seen as central to the manuscript in which it is preservedit is by far the longest text in the codex, and to students of Anglo-Saxon England who have privileged poetry over prose and work without a known source over materials translated from Latin sources, it has long been considered not only the most important work in the manuscript in which it is preserved, but one of the most important artefacts of Old English literature. Attempts
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Ruether; Jeremy Cohen. Estes.

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to read the manuscript as a coherent whole have centred on the themes and characteristics of Beowulf, most famously its monsters. The Letter of Alexander and the Wonders of the East fall easily into place in a reading of the manuscript that foregrounds monstrosity, and the fragmentary Life of Saint Christopher can be read as belonging in the same group because of the tradition (current in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere in early medieval Europe) that ascribes to Christopher the head of a dog. The poetic Judith becomes, in such a reading, the problematic poem. Some readers have found that the monstrosity of Holofernes gives the poem a place in the manuscript, or have argued on palaeographic and codicological grounds that it was an original part of the codex, while others have suggested that it was a late, accidental addition based on the fact that the scribe of part of Beowulf is the same as the scribe of Judith.29 The vastly overwhelming majority of materials preserved in Old English are prose texts, primarily religious materials and mostly those with Latin sources. Such materials often survive in multiple manuscripts, unlike Old English poems, almost all of which exist in a single text only. The fact that the Anglo-Saxons seem to have devoted signicantly greater resources to the copying of prose texts suggests that they may have privileged these texts over poems. The three prose texts and the poetic Judith found in the Beowulf-manuscript all exist in various Anglo-Saxon versions, albeit not necessarily in multiple identical or nearly identical Old English texts.30 For Beowulf, there is duplication in survival of some of the embedded narratives, including a fragmentary version of the Fight at Finnsburh31 as well as non-Anglo-Saxon reference to Scyld and Hygelac: Scyld is identied with Skjoldr of Scandinavian tradition, and Hygelac with Chlochilaichus, who appears in the Historia Regum Francorum of Gregory of Tours.32 However, for the controlling narrative of the poem, in which Beowulf challenges and kills three successive monsters (and is killed by the last of the three), there is no duplication, in Old English or in analogous Germanic legend. If we take multiple survival of texts as an index of their importance to Anglo-Saxon writers and compilers, Beowulf is the least signicant of the works in the manuscript. If we view Beowulf as the afterthought in the codex, we can see that the remainder of the manuscript collects materials about Asia, materials that portray the region in an ambiguous relationship to Europe. As the locus for Paradise, Asia is the source for all humanity. With Jerusalem located in Asia, the region is the source of the Hebrews, the original Chosen People, and their bible; and of Christianity, in that much of the narrative of Jesus life and death takes place in Jerusalem. Through the monsters described in the various texts, Asia becomes a threat to European travellers such as Alexander. But in the gure of Saint Christopher, Asia becomes the source of conversion for the Greek king of Samo and his people. Reading the manuscript from this point of view, we might notice that Beowulf is also a book about the East. The events narrated take place among Danes and Geats, in
29 30

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Kevin S. Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, 15067; Lucas; Grifth, ed., 23. For the prose Judith, see Assmann. 31 For the text of The Fight at Finnsburh, see Klaeber, 21938. 32 Klaeber, 121; Bjork and Obermeyer, 13; Hills, 306.

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lands now called Denmark and Swedento the east of England. The people described are the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons; the lands are the places of the AngloSaxons origin. The text is a narrative about monsters that threaten the social coherence of the community, as well as its spiritual integrity, in that Hrothgars people resort to idol-worship for lack of another way to rid themselves of the pestilence of Grendel. From Hrothgars point of view, Beowulf himself comes from the east. Like Christopher, monstrous in his size and physical conguration, Beowulf is monstrous in his strength and stamina, in that he has the power of thirty men in his hand, can swim fully armed through the ocean for a week, and travel underwater toward Grendels mothers lair for the better part of a day. Like Christopher, who brings Christian salvation to Dagnus and his people, Beowulf brings to the Danes salvation from the predations of Grendel. Beowulf (as poem rather than as title character) also gures gender as intersecting with monstrosity in the character of Grendels mother. Grendel is monstrous because he kills thirty men at a time and eats them. We can assume that Grendels mother ate Ascheres body before leaving his head as a signpost to her lair, but this is left unstated; as I have already noted, Dockray-Miller argues that Grendels mothers monstrosity consists in her appropriation of masculine acts of violence and vengeance rather than in the cannibalism she perhaps shares with her offspring. I have been arguing that Old English texts that refer to the East have more to do with Anglo-Saxon preoccupations with locating themselves geographically and temporally in Christian Europe than with historical realities. The texts the AngloSaxons chose to render into Old English, and the ways in which they adapted them, demonstrate the importance of Latin Christian texts in constructing their world view, as well as the ways in which they used those texts to dene their own identity. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues, England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest was a heterogeneous collection of peoples who were constantly forced to examine who they were in relation to a shifting array of alterities; and further, Anglo-Saxon England was relentlessly pondering what it means to be a warrior, a Christian, a hero, a saint, an outlaw, a king, a sexed and gendered being.33 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen gures the giantthe appearance and destruction of the giant, as well as the giant as excluded from human communityas what enables masculine identity formation and the development of a sense of community in Anglo-Saxon England. The giant is, however, only one gure of alterity to serve that function. Jews serve as gures simultaneously originary and abjected for medieval Christianity, and Jews are, it could be argued, the absent presence in texts such as Wonders, because Jerusalem and Babylon (which during the Anglo-Saxon period was the centre of Jewish culture) are repeatedly referenced, but the text then always swerves immediately away from discussion of their inhabitants to describe, instead, monsters or marvels inhabiting some territory near by. The monsters of texts such as Wonders gure as outsiders to Anglo-Saxon culture and function to structure masculinity and social cohesion in a
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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 45.

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manner comparable to the work Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes of legends about giants. The point is sharpened when the monsters are gendered specically as feminine; the Jews present in Judith and absent in references in Wonders to Babylon and the Red Sea function comparably in medieval Christian theology. Clearly, Anglo-Saxon authors, translators, adaptors, editors, and scribes have absorbed ideas and ideologies about the East from Latin sources. lfric, moreover, is clearer and more direct than Isidore in linking morally charged Biblical gures to specic regions of the known world. Yet the scribal collocation of materials in the Beowulf-manuscript shows that the Anglo-Saxons made of their Latin sources something new. Boundaries between masculine and feminine are eroded; the line between human and monster continuously crossed with the imagination of various marginal creatures. The East becomes at once monstrous, marvellous, and mysterious. It is a place of the imagination, in quasi-historical accounts ranging from the Letter of Alexander to Beowulf, and the imagination is given free rein in the creation of a realm whose wild characters and characteristics opposed the wished-for stability of roles and functions at home among the English. If Anglo-Saxon women and men do not t the oppositional models suggested as ideals by Jerome, at least the women are un-bearded and the men weaponed. With all of these gurations existing together in a single manuscript, it becomes possible to argue that Asia as a whole functions in the same position to medieval Christian Europe in a comprehensive fashion, anticipating the orientalism of the post-medieval period. References
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