Exploring Early Medieval Poetry in Anglo-Saxon Britain with Andrew Rader Hansen

So we are talking about something that I think people are going to find surprising , because we are talking about this in a political context , but we are talking about early well , a bus at early modern , but it was actually early medieval poetry , particularly Anglo-Saxon and , say , shavallic French poetry .

But mostly we are going to focus on Anglo-Saxon because while I have read some French stuff , I went through my stupid . I have to learn everything about all the aetherianna period in high school and then had to teach it for a little while back in the day .

I am really more interested in the early medieval period because it is always interesting to fall in love with the period where we have material culture , fragments of poems and like religious texts , but really we don't know shit because no one was keeping records between like the fifth and the eighth century in a lot of these areas , and particularly in the area

that we are talking about , which is Anglo-Saxon Britain , and recently we even had to modify our view of Anglo-Saxon Britain based on genetic evidence that they didn't go and massacre all the Celts after all . They just intermarried them and erased their language somehow .

So he's trying to show how the Britons sinned and this was the reason for the advent of the Anglo-Saxons to England and their subsequent pushing the British out of Eastern Britain , england . So I mean , it's kind of hard to talk about , like do we call it Britain ? Do we call it England ? But yeah , none of this really exists .

In the sense England is not a coherent entity , probably until like the tenth century that it becomes a unified thing .

The king is a fairly weak position when you compare it to all a prior imperial rule and it's interesting because we don't . So one of the things we've learned from before we get into the poetry , I just want to give people a lot of historical context .

But one of the things we've learned from archaeology and from genetic studies on England is there was a massive population drop in the British Isles , but what we don't have evidence for was a strong quality of life drop as far as health conditions , from the bone evidence that we have in that time period .

So you have a loss of technology and you have a loss of population . We don't know really what caused the loss of population either . We don't know if it was lots of people migrating back to Roman areas once Roman rule weakened . We don't have a lot of evidence of stuff like plague .

There were obviously border wars and stuff this entire time period , but we don't have evidence of a massive war . We don't have evidence of an extermination , and we also have this loss of knowledge of technology that I always like to talk about with people like people with the wiggish view of history . I'm like no , they forgot how to make sauce .

They had them , like the Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic peoples of the British Isles at this time had sauce , but they didn't make any new ones . They were all left over from the Roman period and they went back to manufacturing axes .

Now , I would normally find this ridiculous , except that I also know about a similar phenomenon in Egypt after the Roman influence started to decline there and there was a decline of the ability to make pillars to hold up buildings .

So when you see mosque and churches built in like the ninth century of Egypt , you see them with stolen pillars from Greco-Roman and Egyptian pagan sites , or they had to be replaced because they were made out of wood , and so we had a similar loss of technology .

So we have this is we saw this kind of pattern all over the Roman world , but what we don't see is a decline of literacy . There's lots of texts from this time period . We're going to go into that . I mean , there's tons of poetry from this time period .

Actually , we don't see massive signs of like , like I said , like obvious nutritional deficits or anything like that . We do see a major decline in infrastructure , like , but there's there's a lot of evidence that they didn't need the infrastructure either . So it is interestingly this like time period of collapse . Now , how did I get interested in this One ?

I kind of . I think the Dark Ages is a patronizing you know way to talk about this time , but it is . It is dark in the sense that we don't have a lot of historical evidence . It isn't material culture and or like fragments of literary stuff that saved later and most of it's noncontemporary .

You know we have to rely a whole lot on like poem fragments and like one manuscript of Beowulf and and and stuff that's copied later by people like Bede for a lot of what we're going to talk about today . And in the British context , we don't really know how the Romano , british and the Germanic tribes that came in integrated .

We know that the Germanic tribes set themselves up as like a , as a kind of ruling caste , the way the Normans did over the Germanic tribes later . But it seems like there's lots of inner marriage , exactly .

Of course , however , and at the same time , when the Adventists , so Gildas actually suggests that Boyle Bordegorne , who is this British leader at this time , invites these mercenaries over to help deal with some of the northern tribes , like the Pits and the Scotty , I think , and and this is also like a pretty good possibility , because we know that when the Romano

British were were reliant on the Romans to send up lesions to help them deal with their northern neighbors , who often were pillaging , and so there's a good , there's a possibility that that there may have been Anglo-Saxons , or you know , anglo-saxons used these tribes from , you know , denmark , from Scandinavia .

They're serving in a mercenary capacity and perhaps , as with lots of cases throughout the medieval period , the mercenaries end up realizing that they're the ones holding things together and decide okay , we're just going to become the ruling class now and take over .

But yeah , so there are lots of of Germanic place names during this period , but also , like , for example , in Northumbria , lots of these place names just remain British and we're not , we're not , or Welsh , you know , we're not entirely sure why , but also also , for example with , with the word slave in in the Anglo-Saxon period for a long time , it also means

Welsh , you know . So it's . It's a very complicated thing , but it does seem like .

You know , like , I feel like Arthur isn't really a thing in in the early set of the Anglo-Saxon period , but it's not until like the maybe the 12th century that , for example , geoffrey of Mommoth is taking this figure and turning him into something much bigger than he may have actually been . And , yeah , we don't even know if he existed .

And it is interesting where that whole legend comes from , because it's very much rooted in kind of French Brittany , which means there is a kind of ethnic Golic connection to the , the Celtic peoples of the Romano-British period , or what we might call the proto-Welsh .

They are what we would now call a mixture of sercent , free peasantry . They don't really have . They might have communal property , they don't really have any , any title to anything . But there's also the formal wall . Codes have broken down to the greed until B it really happened . They start trying to like do the doomsday book and really record who has titles .

Anything Property is kind of hard to understand and prove during this time period because the law is malleable .

And I'm sure there's medieval historians because you know there are a lot of . There are medieval historians in my audience who are going to point out hopefully you do point out where we know more specific things . But it seems like most of the things I know are from the ninth century forward .

We don't know much at all about the fifth ninth century in Britain , but that does bring us to the poetry . And one of the things that I want to talk to people about today and we're going to talk about like why why I think studying historical poetry is important .

It's similar to why I think studying historical religion is important this is the nerd part of this show is that for a lot of these , these periods of breakdown and you know , the big one is after the fall of the Roman Empire , but it's not just that like we can , we could talk about this and like the warring states period in China , are this , that and the

other that our primary literary evidence comes from , two things and that is later recorded poetry that looks to have enough anachronistic phrasing , or our other things to tell us a little bit , with a lot of historical context and deconstruction . And we'll get into that when we talk about Bay Wolf because , oh my God , yeah .

And yeah , it's very like I've heard a lot of people describe poetry as almost like pure ideology , in the sense that it's distilling like feelings , it's distilling a lot of different understandings that , for example , the chronicles , or if you're reading a chronicle , it's often like you know , on this day in 700 , you know , you know be died , for example , like you

don't really get too much out of that . You don't really get , you don't , you can't really analyze that too much to a certain degree . But , for example , like you can look at the Battle of Brunenburg , which is a very interesting poem . And what's interesting also is that we do not have good archaeological evidence for where Brunenburg happened .

So we don't know where Brunenburg happened , but we have what is a very sensible understanding of perhaps what happened and a praise poem for these two royal figures and lots of different literary tropes being used to extol Edward , for example .

So it can teach us a lot about the time period and what forms the poet is deploying in order to achieve their goal , for example .

But you're not going to get like a date , for example , and what's reconstructed through the poem should not be trusted to be confirmed in archaeology , for example , because something like Battle of Brunenburg we don't have archaeological evidence for , even though we know that it happened . So it's an interesting period .

This is a problem that we have when we deal with , like Indigenous people in the Americas about how much should we trust or not trust their oral traditions , and the spectrum of this goes back and forth greatly . But that's one of the things I like to point out that's not unique to Indigenous people in the Americas . Like we don't know this for Europe too .

Even some place like Rome or England , which are places that are , by historical standards of other cultures , were very well over documented Because of their various imperial importance we don't know a lot about . And we have similar problems when we try to reconstruct , say , the early Mongol Empire . We got lots of material evidence of things happening .

We also have records that indicate things , but how much can we trust those records ? We don't know . One of the things I've learned , the trust is . I actually think we can often trust the poetry a little bit more than we can trust the chronicles , because the chronicles tend to be explicitly regime justifying documents .

What you can trust the most is usually business transactions , frankly , because even back then merchants will lie to others but they don't lie to themselves generally . But some of the charters are important documents .

But for experience of what people thought , particularly if you're interested in anybody other than merchants in the ruling classes who are writing the chronicles , usually the only thing you got is material detritus . You can find a trash pile and poetry , and it's usually not the poetry that you think .

I mean the epic poetry is going to tell you a lot , often by what you have to reconstruct from it , and we'll get to that when we talk about Beowulf . But things that we do have more evidence of , such as like poems that are saved in the Anglican Chronicle , are stuff from the Exeter manuscript and stuff like that .

I think that this is incredible , it's an incredible survival , you know , because there is there's certainly no reason for them to to record some of this stuff , for the monasteries necessarily to record it or the ruling classes to want want it recorded , for example . But but we do have the riddles which are often focusing on like laborers .

I mean there are examples of poems about slaves , which is very , very uncommon . We don't don't have very much on slaves , although there is a slave in Beowulf , which is another very interesting thing .

All these are weird hobbies that I've developed over the years . But you , you , you , you read . First time you read the Odyssey in high school you think it's a cool monster story . Then you realize how weird the narrative is constructed . Like it's got layers and layers of of frame .

It's got multiple frame narratives , um , like there's a frame narrative and there's a frame narrative within the frame narrative and then it's all . It's not told in chronological order at all and you kind of have to construct that and figure out what's being said there . The character is is very odd .

And then you have stuff like the difference in the characterization and not just a characterization of , say , an individual person , like like Odysseus is very different in the Iliad than he is in the Odyssey , but also like the difference in the way people are characterized in general .

But there's a difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey is part of the whole , like we kind of know that , that the Homeric Hems are composite because of that and we figure out a lot from that . I recently , you know I hope people listen to this interview , it will be out by the end . I think it's out now . I think it's released .

The damn recording , this where I talked to a scholar , dr Miles , who works in Australia on class struggle in the Old Testament and through the , through the kind of likely historical percentages of Jesus . But what's interesting is like Dr Dr Miles actually doesn't comment that much at all on what we actually can reconstruct from Jesus himself .

He comments on what we can reconstruct about class movements from this religious history , a lot of which is frankly literary and we don't think of it as literary because we think of it as a religious text . But that distinction of secular and religious texts is really a post-enlightenment one and kind of uniquely European too .

But people who hear me mispronounce modern German definitely don't want to hear me mispronounce an ancient form of it . But so we'll read it in English .

But I do think people should approach it , and with the translation on , like Middle English , which I think you can figure out without training if you try , if you have a lexicon of some French words that we dropped . You really can't approach old English without studying at least early German .

But but yeah , so about this poem and we're about to look at , it's a riddle and it actually kind of focuses on one of the characters in it is a woman , and that's another point to to to talk about is the role of women in this period and and I guess , in her culture as well , just before we get into the poem .

And another thing that's stunning about this poem is that this doesn't seem to be an elite or noble woman in in in our poem here . But but women in this period are often , when it comes to the elite , for example , they're considered these peace weavers , and so often the elites were marrying off their daughters , their sisters , in order to secure alliances .

That's a good example . But also , for example , in Beowulf , wealth out , which is Rothgar's wife , is is really enacting this piece of even role by ensuring that Beowulf is is treating Rothgar's sons well , because we know , with dynastic struggles and stuff , beowulf might first go after his arrivals , and so so the role of women in this period .

It shouldn't be like there definitely is Like a form of misogyny in this period , like women are considered , are not considered , like men , are considered at the same time like they're performing extremely important social functions .

But so and it shows up in that and and wealth out again , because you know her name , in the case she had a slave status and that she's not a dane at all or a geek .

And what's interesting about Beowulf indeed is , while it's an English epic , it's actually not even said in England at all , although there's hints of its relationship to England throughout the poem , which is fine . But let's get into this .

This . This is from Exeter Riddle , which is where we have a lot of this really interesting what we would consider .

Maybe you know common life I hate to say I don't want to indicate that it's necessarily low class , because you'd still have to be somebody involved in this is literate and literacy is pretty rare In this time period but it does record slices of common life because they're probably things like when we talk about the Odyssey and the Iliad Both of us talk about that

as well . These are things recorded from things that are set out loud . These are people recording things that the first instance of them is probably significantly before they're written down and may not even be from the class of the people who are writing them down , and that's really important for our ability to reconstruct any of these notions .

So let's get into this , because you can learn a lot from this , this kind of , you know , old Exeter poem .

I'm going to read the Megan Covel translation that you provided me because I don't really want to butcher the Anglo-Saxon , and for those of you who who are listening , I'm going to refer to old English as Anglo-Saxon , because I don't think you can really say anything . Middle English for Effectively different language , in my opinion .

Like there's , that's pretty different , it's radically different . Like , yeah , I mean , we still have we still have most of the the remnants of low German . You know our proto low German in our language . You know , hence why , if , like , an old English speaker was hanging out with a modern Frisian , they would probably be perfectly comprehensible to each other .

But it's still you know , and if you're a modern German speaker you can probably figure it out , but you're not going to know it from from listening to it , and we don't really know how it was spoken .

Unlike with Shakespeare , since there's less rhyme , there's a lot less ability to use , to use , you know , metric indicators involving rhyme to figure out what the likely OP is .

And , and even with Shakespeare , we only reason we do that is that there's so much commentary on when something is a slant rhyme or not that we know that it probably that X sonnet wasn't considered slant Rhyme when it was actually said and therefore we know that we can kind of retroject Okay , well , this rhymed 100 , 200 , 100 , 100 , 500 , 600 years ago .

But in the case of old English we don't have any of that and there's not much rhyming in old English .

And if you read , it's interesting to kind of find parallels to this . I'm like many immediate parallels that come to my head of like , well , if you read Hebrew or I don't know Chinese poetry , even though that works radically differently because it has both a syllabic and an ideogramic structure .

But this is more syllabic , it's more based on pauses , it's more based on alliteration , it's more based on meter and rhythm is really important , but but it is not based on rhyme and it is not really based on meters that we're more familiar with from the Greco romance traditions .

Anyway , so for those of you who just listened to the really nerdy part , let's go on . I am a wondrous creature , a joy to woman , a help to natures . I harm none of the city dwellers except my killer . My base is steep and high . I stand in a bed shaggy .

Somewhere beneath Sometimes ventures the very beautiful daughter of a curl of a churl and made proud in mind , so that she grabs hold of me , rubs me to redress , ravages my head , forces me into into a fastness . Immediately , she feels my meeting the one who confines me , the curly locked woman . What will be that ? I so .

This is like a triple entendre , which I love .

I think leak is proposed , and also , you know all you're really like , your , your long stocked root vegetables that were common in England . Mustard is another one .

And , for example , I think that a lot of us assume that in Christian , in Christian society , or the woman is supposed to be inside the home , or whatever . This is actually like a more Protestant reformation thing .

But back in the day , on the farm , for example , I think that , especially in the middle period that everyone is working , yeah , I mean , there's probably a material necessity for it , because if you , if you miss , if your harvest gets messed up or whatever , then there's a good chance you might die and you might or you might have to sell yourself in slavery ,

right , well , here's the thing I don't want to pretend like in this period there are no markets , that we yeah , we have evidence that there are markets , but like it's a much less marketized society than even the period right before it , which means the distinction between public and private work pretty much doesn't exist , except that you're often working for a lord .

There is also obligations to the monasteries nearby , so some of this could get really oppressive and actually there's an example of , for example , knut , in one of his laws , kind of cutting back on some of these obligations precisely because they were considered very oppressive and so yes , and you know for people don't know comes from the Dane law , even though it

becomes the King of England .

Another interesting thing is that this is pre-reformation , or sorry , pre-protestant Reformation .

But but you have lots of sexualization in in the Anglo-Saxon poetry and this is a really good example of it .

It's almost like a soft power and is much easier to maintain Then then an empire with incredible amounts of troops , for example .

So people who don't know your Christian history which you know well and behold the , the jubu , explain Christian history to you .

But that's what I'm going to have to do today is that the monophysite schism , which is what kicks the Ethiopian and the Armenian and the Egyptian church out of the Chaldean church or the Chaldean church , which would become what we consider the Catholic Orthodox Church hyphen still together , is is early on .

Plus , you know , unified Christianity who fuck knows how actual unified it really was ?

A vicious Bishop , for example , might visit more fruit frequently , but but you know Higher officials from Rome , you know there's not , really they're not coming over to check in on on monasteries and there is quite a bit of of what might be considered to the church , corruption and a lot of sin , so to speak .

And there are big movements towards reformation in England because you have Monks , for example , drinking a lot and singing poetry . And a good example of this is Alpuin , who sends a letter to England , to one of these monasteries , and says what does Engeld have to do with Christ ? Basically telling these people stop singing about these pagan , these pagan heroes .

You know Engeld is this pagan , pagan or heroic figure and so so it's a persistent problem . Lots of these , lots of the monks are getting married and such like and stuff like this .

One of the things that we also need to remind ourselves whether papacy is an important institution .

It's by no means clear during all this time period , even in the West , it is the dominant Episcopal institution , because the papacy is considered first among equals with the other Apostolic seats , which is going to include Antioch , it's going to include Eastern Rome or Constantinople , it's going to include Egypt , etc .

Now Egypt gets Sawed off in the first skiz , in the first great schism , and we also have to remind ourselves the Arians are still existing . So , like even the idea that the first great systems , the first break , the Christian unity , implies that there's a Christian unity in the first place , which which there wasn't .

Constantinople constant , with Constantinople and Eastern Orthodox before , potentially before they might be in contact with , well , with a the , with the Western , with Western Rome , right , yeah , this is actually interesting comes up with when , when , when you meet British Eastern Orthodox believers and priests , when they talk about the Anglo Anglo-Saxon Catholic and Celtic

Catholic .

not a political attachment To the emperor , which is kind of where the beginning of that in the language differences , that the Eastern Church is so concentrated in Greek that's a big part of it , yeah but you're right , like the Varyngian guard , for example , as well as the Kiev and ruse , both had extensive relations with the Byzantines and we also know from slightly

there , like the 9th century , the Anglo-Saxons had extensive trade routes through these , through these Scandinavian Rulers , that we have coins and I'm bringing this up at the time , but it's important we have coins in places like Mercia with Arabic on them .

I mean , basically , we know a little bit about this because Because , for example , olga , kiev is a thing and that is probably the first you know , one of the people who Christianized the Kiev and Russe , who , for those of you don't know yet , kevin use , are from the , they're from the , the Rick line of skin , and even Vikings .

How , now , now this gets into all your weird . Nazi stuff that exists today about the difference between the Kiev and Russe and the Moscovite Russe and the asianic , I don't even want to think about that stuff .

Yeah , it's tied into this actually weirdly , but but racialized in a way that no one in this time period would have done it , because they didn't say exactly yeah .

Kent and this is pretty early on in Anglo-Saxon period Kent is has close connections to the , the mayor of engines , and Very early on , kent is marrying off , is marrying off to the mayor , the mayor of engines , and so so , and the elites , for example , like , in a sense there's a closer connection between the elites .

The elites in this society would have seen themselves like the nobility are at least within a language . Family Would have seen themselves as being more related Then , then not .

And that includes the Normans , because even though we associate the Normans with French , because they are , you know , the Normans speak their own dialect of Frankish Latin , which becomes French , or we might call old French , that which is a Germanicized Latin in the first place , because the Frank surgery , but the the , the way that we we encountered , so that we

think of them , the norm is this clear French . But they're actually Also a different group of Viking invaders who had also taken over Sicily and like yeah , yeah , some were part of them , took over .

ranged from me to extremely dark In the same , in the same area . And it's weird when , when skin tone Dean Mark haters come up in the ancient world , they do come up . It's not like they're never mentioned , but they're usually mentioned in periods of breakdown and they don't really . They're not really like coherent races there .

Like like , for example , if you're reading knownness from like the the fifth century , this time period , but on the Latin side , down in the south , he's describing black people , but he's describing , he's not describing them as Africans . He's actually describing scary Indians that are coming in and he sees as invading and that the Dionysus cults gonna fight .

But then the same guy and this is this is something to think about about this time period this same guy also writes Christian poetry and we don't know if it's like post conversion , we don't know , we have no idea , you know , but this is when it's mentioned a lot During the , during the Greek periods of the of warring states , people start mentioning race more in

terms of color . But what's interesting ? As the color there Is not what you think it is , because white people are Greeks , the yellow people are Germans , and you realize . Oh well , one case they're referring to the hair and the other case they're referring to Skin tone .

And then Ethiopians are their own thing , and that may or may not be what we think of as black Africans , but it may be also like dark Levantines . It's not , we don't have that we like . We also talk about Like early church fathers .

We have no idea what race a lot of these people were , by our standards , like is is Augustine of hippo , black , white , arab , levantine , greek . Well , he's culturally Roman , but but do we know his race ? Absolutely not . We don't like . It wasn't even considered that important to record .

Yeah , so , but also also , yeah , the , the Anglo-Saxons and , for example , the Noel codex , which is the Beowulf manuscript , is a very interesting manuscript because it has the wonders of the east , and the wonders of the east are this are these representations of these monsters ? That Are they ?

They're the , these representations of these monsters scattered throughout the world , and so there is , there's this sense in which there is a much better sense of wonder to the , the outside world .

Then would be , for example , today , when we can look up , you know any , anything on on Google , for example , well , obviously , but but travel is like a huge is not happening , like it's happening , and especially with the pilgrimage , pilgrimage is not happening at this period , like it's happening later , and so so everything is very local to a certain degree .

what we now call Byzantium , you don't really have a lot , but we know a lot that these people in County show there , because we also know it from , like the Arab side , like Like we have . We have recordings of who the Varendian guard was from , like Arab observers to the court , and that's late in this time period .

We're talking about from 500 to a thousand , but we have it and we have actually probably more of that than we do . A lot of other excitation because , well , the Arabs are a lot of shit down .

But one of the things that I like to think about you know , class is really important here and I think people need to understand that elites travel , these there are like raider , warrior class people who travel , but the majority of people are not traveling around , you know it , and it's because it's fucking dangerous and like .

themselves because you have a . You have a scale there that makes it possible , although they might starve the peasants along the way . The , the individual traveler can probably have about two days of sitting . Cheese keeps for a little while , but not in the heat , not that long , and A smoked meat will keep , and you got a few days of wine or mead .

Our beer water goes stagnant pretty quick though , and so you know you got a couple days between needing to reprevision . You have the Roman roads that they were built really well . Some of them still exist , but they're like if they're not finished or if there's something have broken them up . You don't really have that .

You have sea roots , but you know one of people wonder , like why people didn't get that far out , and again , just think about food preservation . That alone Makes it different . Like , imagine I'm carrying enough beer Are whatever alcohol , but at this time here it's probably gonna be beer , our wine to .

To maintain people on a ship that's gonna be man by galley slaves , to sail for very long periods of time and , like some of the like , some of these epic journeys , it's possible to do . But the food , the food limitation alone is , I don't think modern people even think about it .

I didn't think about it until I Really started digging in this history and thinking about why there were such limits , why there had to be raids . Like , if you're a traveler , you're relying on Rating or hospitality . If you're an individual traveler , you can pretty safely rely on hospitality . If no one kills you on the road , yeah , because you're .

Also , when you're not known To people around you , who's gonna vouch for you , particularly if you don't speak the language and you're not an elite who can , yeah the guard . There are accounts of like important bishops like just Just getting . Getting off .

We have that's where we have the , the full copy in our unique complete copy of Beowulf , and we're gonna get into how Weird Bear Wolf is , because Beowulf has fascinated me for how weird that poem is , weird in that like it you definitely see a lot of transition .

You also have the letter of Alexander to Aristotle , which is a forgery but it's interesting that it's in there . You have a poetic translation of Judith which is , you know , which is a Retailing of the book of Judith From the Catholic and Orthodox Bible .

So for those of you have your deuterocanonical books , but it's not even like a translation , it's a retelling in in like an angle and like an angle sex inform . You have the life of st Christopher .

Oh , you have , and you have , but it's , but it's pretty incomplete and you have Not the most complete text of the wonders of the east , but one of the most complete text and there's two code X's and it's been damaged like it survived a fire in a library but also like it kind of feels what's ? It's kind of random , it's just like okay .

We've been mostly talking about the second code X , which is where Beowulf was from , but the first code X .

thing . Do you know about the whole dissolution of the monasteries and stuff ?

A whole lot of stuff is lost .

like an antiquarian type who is going around collecting these kinds of things , and they put it in , they put these kinds of things in the Ash Burnham House , which is just a hilarious name to keep all of these manuscripts and to have Ash Burnham .

It's a synagogue that dates back to I think it's been Moses , to probably the eighth or ninth century and Coptic Cairo , so in the Christian part of Cairo . Today it would have been the Christian part of Proto Cairo then .

One of the things that we one reason why we know so much about the Fatimids and all this is anything that had the name of God written on it couldn't be burnt .

And so in the Ganesa , which is this great document , trash pile , basically , and the that Jewish community just stored all these documents because it , just just because you can't burn the name of God , the name of God even and that includes , by the way , since they were speaking Arabic , or Judeo Arabic , more than even were like Aramaic that includes Muslim texts

too . So the reason why we know a whole lot about 19th century Egypt is because of a trash pile Like , and so the texts that we have are random , other than the fact that they have God in them somewhere , right . Similarly , I think the Noah manuscript like random antiquarian quotes , random old English texts , and they store them in a shitty place , yeah .

But but yeah , it also looks like someone like Lawrence is running around sewing these things together randomly and just you know , sewing them together and taking them for himself , you know .

The more you learn about the limits of physical technologies , about why things are what they are in their length like , why are the Bible books ? They're particularly with . That's because how big you can make a scroll like and .

It's a huge , huge process , herculean . And so who is going to control manuscript production ? It's not going to be , it's not going to be the peasants , it's not going to be the fruit of the animal , it's going to be usually , you know , landed elites who have the kind of money to support something like this .

The church , which has the money to support this kind of thing . Yeah , so the context for lots of literary production is mostly church and elite you know .

Like weird illuminations don't have anything to do with what's actually being . So you have the , and it's an art form , but also it's Valium is . You know you have animal skin paper . I don't know how we lost paper . The East has paper , egypt has paper . I think the Arab world has paper , but like Europe doesn't have paper .

We do have some attestation to something like it , at least among the Druids . Who knows what the fuck they were up to ? Because no one really does , except for Roman slander but in Christian like Christian reconstructions , post facto .

I mean , we have this problem with Viking religion like , because most of our sources for that are actually Icelandic and also post Christian . But although we do have , we do have a lot of authentic fragments and like Futhark and whatnot to kind of reconstruct stuff with , and we have a lot of material evidence and we have the runes are pretty important .

Yeah , and we have Tacitus and stuff like that . Although Tacitus was writing for rumors Although some of it is quite Some of it ends up being accurate . So that's the thing about throwing out oral culture .

And this it comes from the first century , but it's a very accurate description of the war band and this war band , the way that it would work . It would last for like 1000 years to , you know , maybe like the 12th or the 13th century , you know , in which you have these .

You have a king and his retainers and the , the king and the retainer are are tightened by bonds of loyalty and the thethanes are expected to give their life in battle at a moment's notice for the king , and the king is often distributing rings , distributing gold , and so this is almost like a kind of economic unit , you know , in a sense . Yeah , honor .

Well , before we have standard currency and I want people to remember that we didn't really have standard currency to laugh at the Civil War your local currency may only be taken a couple of cities away if you didn't have , like a state currency or whatever .

Our banknotes are in IOU and IOUs were super important when you did not have standard currency and you didn't , as I said , you did in cities , but you often didn't outside of them and and so if your name was slandered and you lost honor , your coin was not as good Like . You literally had trouble spending .

Spending money are making IOU trades and banknote trades because you probably didn't have a lot of legal tender .

Yeah , culture is a very important , is an important , very important thing and it comes up all over like pre industrial society , I feel like , yeah , one of the things that I have , one of the things that I you know , we talked about this when I was talking about tokens , you and like how I kind of like a token nerd but I'm also I also like , do you push

back on some of the conceptions he pushes through ?

Because , like he does not seem to completely , even though he's a medievalist , like fully grok , how much this honor stuff is also economic Like and I don't say this to be like a vulgar economic determinist , because I don't think it's that simple but this honor stuff is not just that , but it's tied into that in a very real way , so very important .

And we know that we also see this is not unique to Scandinavian German peoples . We know , like we have a similar system that we know from the Iliad with the Attic Greeks and the Mycenaeans . We , we , we know , for example , that honor and trade and value and rings and all these things are all tied together .

Now , these rings are weird , like I always thought they were like Roman wedding rings and I realized , no , they're like these weird neckband things .

But when you look at like the ancient world , particularly in time periods , it's not to say people were totally pre technological they weren't . But like in time periods of breakdown , like they have beautiful artisan craft stuff and we have all kinds of material evidence for this .

But also , like you're going to have , if you're , even if you're fairly well off , unless you stole it in a raid , you don't have a lot of that because it's going to take a long time for some to make it and you're going to want to really keep it up , and so , like you're not going to have a lot of clothing , clothing is going to be fairly , fairly simple

. You're going to have , like it's one of these things , for example , even again to think about pre modern , pre modern , pre , pre fast clothing . There's a whole lot of like things that we don't do anymore , that we associate with formality , such as like overcoats and stuff like that .

But then when you think about like , oh , I have a suit , I have you know , if I'm a worker , I'm gonna have one suit , right , and I'm not have one work suit and I'm going to have under clothes and that's where my t-shirts going to be , and I might have three or four of those so I can change those out and that's , and maybe one or two hats and a

couple ties and that's and that's if I'm doing well , like now , and I'm going to really work to maintain those clothes . We're not going to wash them all the time . So I'm going to wear layers more , not only because it's more practical , because I have to also protect its fucking investment . So , like there's a lot of that , there's .

There's a lot of stuff in this time period that we know from material culture , like sleeves that you just cut off and put back on because , like you know you , you only have like two tunics and you don't want to waste it .

It's very specific , which is also where a lot of weird what we would now consider weird religious rules about what people wear come from , because it's tied in the sanctuary laws and demarking who belongs , who's in what class and what you are like , because it needs to be visually recognizable to people very quickly , and we also know this .

To bring it back to the , to the , to the topic of this , because a lot of this seems very tangent from the poetry , but we know a lot of this because of tying hints in the poetry , particularly these riddles that we were talking about earlier , and then like aligning that with these epic poems which tell us much more about elite culture , aligning that to these

religious texts and looking at material evidence that we have , and now , in the last like 40 years , tying in genetic evidence too . We can construct a whole lot of this , but it's it's a lot of like , you know , triangulation and speculating off of what you can , what you can tie together in this time period in particular .

But it's a good way to think about a lot of other time periods that are closer to you , because in some ways we tend to over rely on non-literary literary texts so what I mean by that like business reports or newspapers or , you know , official official documents et cetera . We tend to trust them and for some good reason .

And the closer you get to you know , the more you get to mass literacy , the more the more there you have multiple access stations , you can verify stuff .

But when we're dealing with like anything before the 13th century , we're like well , we got an epic poem and we got like a bunch of prose novels for rich people and we have to be a letter that somebody read out loud to the local peasants that somehow survived in a trash heap somewhere . Yeah .

You have to be looking at multiple different things looking at archaeology , you know , looking at the handwriting , the manuscripts , like all these different things , because there are just so few sources , you know , so many of us are really having to work with what they have , you know , but also not limit themselves to one area , for example literature .

You know you want to incorporate other forms of evidence and such , and you know post with capitalism and stuff and the way that the university ends up being broken off into the different subjects .

We lose some of that because we're focusing on literature , we're focusing on archaeology , when in reality , to get like the real picture of what was going on , you have to be looking at a bunch of different fields at the same time . You know , to get a holistic picture of what is going on .

That actually makes this really hard to fucking understand , because paleontology and history , et cetera , are technically separate departments in the university and while there's always talk of , you know , interdisciplinarity and breaking down the barriers , it's hard to do , you know it's very hard to actually do yeah .

You know , there's this elegy which we don't have a lot of elegies from the Anglo-Saxon period , but we do have a couple and it's the ruin . Oh , the ruin is very interesting .

Yeah , I'm going to read an English translation , I think by Dr that you sent me , by Dr Aaron Hostetter , but , and we can talk a little bit about it , and for those who want to keep up , I'm going to put these links in the show notes so you can go read them .

And if you're you know , and where we have that , where we can , I'm also going to put it where you can read them in the original Old English . If you want to try to figure that out , and if you're not a specialist in don't read German , good luck . But although , yeah , you can learn in a few months if you know German .

I have read Beowulf in the original with little help , but it's doable . It is doable and it actually .

Once you do that as a side note as an English educator , a whole lot of weird shit about why English doesn't have consistent rules starts to make sense because you start seeing like almost in our language and archeology of where the English the only conquest is visible in the English language as it exists .

I have my theory that Middle English is a Pigeon language originally , which is not , I will also say is not a conventional theory . I don't think in its first dissertations it was commonly spoken in the home but that people were either speaking French or Anglo-Saxon and that was like a street patois between the two , but that it quickly becomes a Creole .

And then modern English is really from that and standardized post-Reformation , when the national projects really start and you have the printing press . And we know that .

Because if you look at even Middle English spellings , you're like there's no way , these people , if you were from a village , just I don't know , 30 miles away , you might say stuff completely differently .

And if you , even in modern English dialects in England , if you find people who still speak like I don't know , I'm gonna pick something because it's in the news recently , because PJ Harvey wrote an album and it Dorset or Yorkshire or something like that . It's a dramatically different English like .

But just imagine that before there's a standard printing and you quickly get like , oh , that you could probably go One county to another in these counties , that these counties are also kind of remnants of formal kingdoms . Let's also remind ourselves of that but like , and you will understand kind of what is going on .

But it might be like if you've ever heard , if you've ever , if you've ever went drinking with a Scotsman and had them have them switch back into Scotch to in front of you , which is , you know , kind of comprehensible to English , and by that I mean Scotch , not not Scotch Gaelic , you know scotch , which which we can have the great debate whether or not it's a

dialect , our , our language , but it's not , it's pretty not comprehensible . But just imagine that everything is like that a couple counties over . And yeah and the US To tie this again into our literary culture . Part of our whole mission was , like the knower speller , to make sure that we were standardized for moment one , one a .

We wanted to be distinguished from the fucking British and you know , more power to them , you stupid . But to , and more importantly , we had strong regional dialects , but there was a big push even in the beginning to standardize them In this time period .

Going back this far , there is not there , there's not a way to really figure out how you do it like like okay , the Kings English are gonna fix . You know , you're gonna do official Kings in this prostration . Have you heard the King ever ? Really do you even know ? Probably not .

And , and this time period also , you might not be speaking the same dialect , although it's also interesting how mutually comprehensible some of these things were .

So , like old Norrish and old English are different languages , but if you tried you could probably figure each other out , like if , like Absolutely I don't speak and I don't speak our read any old Norse not not pretending that I do , but I've been reading on the history of German , actually partly to prepare for this podcast , and People do think that like , oh ,

the Dan law and old Norse and English were still somewhat mutually comprehensible at this time period in particular , and it also it affected both ways , and that shows up in Beowulf . But let's get to the ruins , because this is interesting to me , because it's like we .

We have a literary evidence of people also dealing with this collapse of material culture and what it meant , and I don't even think we know exactly when this , when this poem is from .

.

You know , I guess you could say something like individual author authorship is doesn't , doesn't exist .

Calamities crumpled them , these cities , the city's sites crashed , the work of giants corrupted . The roofs have rusted to the earth , the towers and ruins I set . The joints have unroofed , the barred gates sheared . The scarred storm walls have disappeared . The years have nondom . From beneath a grave grip holds the master crafters .

You crepit and departed in the grounds , harsh graft , until 100 generations of human nations have trod past Subsequently this wall , looking gray and rust stained , often experiencing one kingdom after another , standing still under storms high and wide . It failed . The wine halls , mold are still hewn , as if by weapons penetrated by blank . We don't know lost .

Salvage polarized by blank . We don't know lost blank shine blank , blank , blank , blank , blank a joint , a joint ancient anaphas Bound with crusted mud . As a side note , I'm really worried about digital corruption because it happens faster than paper corruption . But um , anyway , back to this . This the strong purpose .

Mine was urged to keen minded , desire and concentric struggles , the stout hearted bound While roots wondrously together would wire . The halls of the city once were bright . There were many bath houses , a lofty tre-trat treasury of peaked wolves , many troop roads , many mean halls filled with human joys , until a terrible chance that changed all that .

I actually want to point out here that there's an interesting conflation . This author is clearly describing Roman ruins .

There once , many men , glad minded and gold , bright , adorned and gleaming and proud , and wine fluff shown and war tackle .

There , there one could look upon treasure , upon silver , upon on eight jewelry , upon prosperity , upon Possession , upon precious stones , upon the illustrious city of the broad and wow , stone houses standing here , where heart streams were cast in the wide-willing and enfolded everything in bright bosom , where there were baths , heated at its heart .

That was convenient when they let forth , when they pour forth , blank , blank , blank , blank , blank , over the whorey stones and countless heated streams , by my blood , by blank , until read Ring pool hot by my blood , by my bank .

Where there were baths , then is by my blood , by my blood , by blank , the kingly thing , a house play by blank , blank , blank , blank , a city . And so One of the things interesting about this on one hand , we're portraying a culture that is obviously somewhat ignorant of its past .

Now for those of us who , before we get all presentest about this and start thinking these things , people are dumb . Shakespeare did this to like . One of the things about Shakespeare is Like Shakespeare in dramaturgy is almost always wrong because it basically projected what they did not have literary evidence for .

It projected the current back into the past , and that makes sense . If you don't have a strong material notion of the past and it's not generally taught , you're just going to assume that people in the past are broadly like you .

So Well , this is , this is one of the things we have to ask ourselves .

usually elegies aren't preserved like this and let it has Preserved like this orally ? I mean like yes , of course , and preserved like this otherwise , but like if we have them , they were preserved .

But but I mean like you know , it's not like a rhyme or a nursery rhyme are riddle , where there's gonna be a strong oral component that's gonna be maintained and repeated . You know how many of us actually read any of the nursery rhymes that we all know and how many variants are there , etc .

I mean , while this may be a fading tradition , I don't know , the kids don't learn nursery rhymes . I was like thinking about this the other day .

And you know that's a conviction of language that sometimes so deep that no one knows what the original idiom was about , like we've completely lost what their reference was . The most famous one is rule of thumb . No , it is not about beating your wife with a stick smaller than your thumb .

We actually don't know where the rule of thumb comes from , and a Lot of times , even even in like late medieval or early modern Manuscripts , or even actually fuck , relatively modern manuscripts the first time some things that's tested to literary Errolly is probably not the first time it is said or experienced as far as like phrases or whatnot .

And we all know this because we probably know that that while a lot of things in internet culture come out of you know , weird Appropriations and slang or whatever , good luck figuring out where they originally come from and how many of them have verbal Pre-predecessors and and what they may have meant .

I mean , and that's , that's what Google and Urban Dictionary and stuff to help us . We can't figure this out . So in a time period like this who the fuck knows ? But it's clearly in this culture they are in a material culture that they are experiencing this ancient past and they weren't stupid about it .

They knew that it was different from their own lives , but they also can't either can't describe it or , if they can , they can't describe it to everyone in a way that is gonna make sense to them . And we know that , ironically , from the litter , the literature try us we have from them .

I mean , one of my favorite things Again to tie this in , about this literary stuff and how we learn about class and all this is reading the graffiti in the Pyramids , because people know I lived in Egypt for about two , two and a half years , two years , roughly little over two years , and it there is crazy like I went to the Valley of the Kings , did the

thing that you do right as a tourist , but one of the things that just fascinated me Is there's 2000 year old graffiti on the motherfuckers , like there's little Coptic Graffiti is from like the first century , when people are hiding out from a diacletian , and some of these ancient tombs which were already four thousand years old or something .

I think some of them were more like two thousand years old , this one , but but like they were to To these people what the Colosseum is to us , and not only do we have the original stuff that was there , we also have the graffiti on top of it . I also remember , you know , going the same site .

Actually there was graffiti from like French soldiers in the 17th century and it's still there . But you learn a lot from from this kind of literary . Detroit is , and poetry Was where a lot of this is maintained , because in a pre literate culture , poetry is an earworm , it's like a song . You can remember it . Why ?

You're probably gonna substitute things , but the meter is gonna guide you Right , just like with a song , there's only so many things that are gonna fit in that spot and you're you know .

That's why you remember it so well , because , well , well , you know , you start to forget it and know that , yeah , well , nighttime rhymes with lifetime and all these songs , so , our right time , those are the things in which one of these sounds better here contextually .

understood them . This is where , or cultures where this kind of stuff would be , for example .

But you and your , your student to be lawyer friend , need to tell us why this is important for us to understand . I'll get to that a minute , but let's talk about Beowulf for a second . I'm fascinated with Beowulf . I've been fascinated with Beowulf since I read it . I , I Believe . Actually I read Grindel by John Gardner first as a 10th grader .

The only reason why I care about it is because I speak the language , it to send it from it and to some ways , like , yes , I have , I do have , like , some ancestry on the British Isles , mostly , well , scotland and and to a lesser degree , northern Ireland , but , and you know , ethnically I'm just as much more of African as I am from the Isles and yet I

have this attachment to it because of the language .

And I do think people , I Think we , you know , we're very , we're very instigated in notions of race and I always like to remind people that most national notions , even when they're racial , religion and Language , playing Much bigger role even in the construction of modern race , like who counts as wide in North America ? Well , they're Protestants , motherfucker .

Like even though the person who came up , I mean the groups that came up with that , were Portuguese or Catholics , they weren't considered Clearly white in all parts of the United States themselves . So it's the irony of this needs to be understood when you understand this transition to our racialized view of human difference .

But how , like , how that actually plays out is complicated because , as we mentioned , from the genetic evidence it wasn't purely biological , like it wasn't even all , just like , oh , we're gonna call them in and married women . It's not even that like .

There's plenty of evidence that people went back and forth between these cultures , that people often have multiple identities and even in this time period , that , yes , there wasn't that much intermarriage between social classes social classes super important . That's one thing that I think Marx and Ingalls hopes you understand .

Actually , this is the Marxist people like where's the Marxism in this ? We're getting there .

And and actually the periods of a unified social , social , economic , political , economic world where Really are quite rare in human history . We just happen to come out of one that's pretty clean , and so we we tend to try to find them . But that's why I like for , for Marxist . This is bracket at all .

But I think one of the most important questions that I started thinking about when thinking about , well , how did capitalism come about ? Would be like well , why didn't the antique world turn in ?

The capitalism with all the stuff you need for capitalism , including machinery , really Exist in the second and third century in the West and exists actually multiple times over in the Islamic aid , in Chinese world , in the Indian world and probably in the indigenous Americas too , although that's a little bit more complicated . And why doesn't it happen ?

Why wasn't you know ? So I and I actually , you know , I kind of take a Rosa Luxemburg view of this and like , think these , like we have to look at these other societies more cruelly and kind of . You know , yes , we have to be dialectical and all this , but we do have to go by dialectical .

Look at the way these things are complicated , in the way they produce Tensions and antagonisms , that that lead to all kinds of problems . And we could talk about that in medieval society meaningfully from this literature . All right , and Beowulf is where we can really get into that actually , but it's not the same .

So what I mentioned to you , for example , you're like is there a proletariat or a working class in this time period ? And the answer is Not in the way we mean it now and it is very confusing to assert it as such . People will do it .

. This time period Europe is hard for us to understand because it is so rural and village based we're as urban societies which had existed . It is not like they were not there . There was no urban societies before capitalism , you , and it wasn't just Rome either . There's been cities going .

I mean we have cities going pretty far back as pretty much as soon as we got agriculture . We started in cities . And how those cities worked . We don't always understand they weren't always as hierarchical as we tend to think of cities from the European perspective , absolutely .

But what we get from this time period is is like Class tensions and class collaborations and the whole conception of human social order One . The schisming of the social , economic and religious that we have post reformation , post enlightenment , post , you know , does not exist in this time period .

It is , but it's also , you know , while individuals may live very local lives I mean people probably didn't go more than 20 miles from where I really lived for most of their life it's not also that they were caught off from the world trade . Goods were flowing everywhere . I mean , you know we got , as I mentioned , in 9th century mercy or 10th century mercy .

We have coins that are clearly being minted to be traded with Arab traders On the other side of Byzantium , like and they're being minted in mercy and we know it . We have the molds like and so these are things that we have to do , these are things that I Think it's hard to kind of grok both nations and both notions , not nations at once .

So beowulf , let's get in that I , I was taught beowulf . I had a decent high school English teacher actually , but but I also had the same responses like oh , this is in Denmark , who cares ? I mean , like , I'm interested in it because I'm a narrative .

My mom was , my mom was a dirty hippie and in the Tolkien , so of course I have to be into the stuff , but I'm also interested in it . I become interested in it because I become obsessed . But if people know my background , I come from a multi religious , multi-confessional family and so I'm obsessed with these religious transitions , even as a child .

And and beowulf , there's clearly some kind of Religious transition going on , being maintained in this man's word . The culture is Christian eyes , but it's not , and it's unclear , like one of the things about it is beowulf a Christian text that has remnants of pagan past . Is it a Christian eyes pagan text ? Frankly , we don't know .

At the same time , at the same time , beowulf is describing Grendel and and Grendel's mom as the kin came right , which is a very clearly a Christian understanding from Bible and it's a really great metaphor for the exile , in a sense , the , the kin slayer , right , and this was a huge stigmatization in anglosaccent society .

You know , when you portray your Lord , when you portray , you know , a family member , for example , and you flee your community , this is like being an exile and they use cane , you know the cane enable . Text from the Bible , genesis , to demonstrate this .

So so , yeah , you can see that that the fact that the monsters are lifted straight from sagas and that that they're also described as the king of cane , it is , it's very much a transition , transition period . You know , that's in body with the text .

There can't be made an argument that , for example , when Beowulf goes off alone to fight the dragon and the fact that he dies and subsequently the tribe that Yeats are worried about being invaded by another tribe because they have lost their king , this could be a condemnation of pride in a sense .

But there's really no open , there's no textual , I guess sorry , like open example of this . It's not like the narrator comes out and says oh , beowulf was prideful and he went to fight the dragon alone when he had Weedloff and Weedloff alongside him .

You know the epic origin story , just like the Greeks , although once you actually study Greece , realize that like , well , the Mycenaean Greeks and the modern Greeks they're related . But , like you know , similarly with this , like this is a poem that's important to peoples that live in England and we can talk specifically about it .

There's been a great debate whether or not it should be associated with the Dane law , the Anglo-Saxons . That's not clear , even though it's written in Anglo-Saxon Not clear , but there's hints everywhere in it , like so , who are the , the Geats ?

Well , the Geats actually do have a relationship to East Anglia , which is in England , because apparently they had some ties to a royal house in the Geats called the Wolf , the Wolfingindas , the Rufingindas , but again , we're not totally clear on the association . Is this an attempt to one of the things that we have to deal with ?

Depending on when we think this oral tradition lives ? Is this part of a Christianization attempt for Anglo-Saxons who are closely related to Scandinavians but are Christians and Scandinavians who are not completely Christianized yet , to somehow form a joint culture that is Christian . Is this part of the attempt here Unclear ? We don't know .

But that's an interesting reading of the poem . That's perfectly viable . We also have hints , even though this is about Denmark and Sweden , that it's tied into the English world in stuff that we've talked about , like the hints from the names that , well , some of these people are Welsh or Anglo-British .

I think that that's like eighth century , you know so much earlier than the 10th century period if you're trying to tie Weigolf to the Viking era , right , so it's just , it's really difficult to date Weigolf , and scholars are like almost .

I mean , probably most of the scholarship on Beowulf could be about dating Beowulf , attempting to locate it historically , you know , right , and the context for figuring out the context for Beowulf which it's it is .

I wrote my papers on Robert Browning , actually , and on Shakespeare .

But one of the things I'm fascinated about about this text is like you could almost learn a lot about the modern world by doing a reception history of the theories about Beowulf , because and this is true , for I mean like we have avoided it except the beginning you want to get into like , wanting the reception history of the modern world , talk about trying to

make Arthurian a coherent like into a coherent which which is early on . I mean one of the first . You know , one of the first secular texts printed in Caxon's printing press outside of the Bible is Mallory right , which , which is partly pretty clearly about the roar of the roses by using author as a metaphor .

But also that's really really late and so and so there's this period , particularly in the Victorian times , where there's this attempt to like , turn author into a national origin myth and come up with this coherent thing .

And it's interesting because even at that time it is deconstructed almost simultaneously to being constructed like it's like you know it's very similar with Beowulf like you have .

I mean , a boy's hesitant to put was like the history books in the Bible , almost like it's a random collection of histories that are edited to be coherent by probably a priest class or or or some kind of kingly class , but they aren't and it's pretty clear that they're not actually like , even even with their all the redactions and stuff in it .

Similarly , with the Anglo Saxon Chronicles , this just it's not a major religious text . We don't give as much of a shit With Beowulf . One of the interesting things about Beowulf that , if I'm fascinating and this is an argument for it being Christian in its origins is we don't have a version of it in any other saga . Like . We just don't like .

People have posited that one should exist but we don't have it . We don't have it even referenced . Now we don't have a lot of ancient sagas from this time period . I mean we have , we have , we have there . There are , yes , that we have the Icelandic cycle and some other cycles and we have the Eddas and we have some .

We have , we have saga fragments and stuff from the runes and stuff like that we have that , but we don't have a narrative like Beowulf .

But they also , the Scandinavians , wouldn't have thought of themselves as singular people either the that that , like some of those barings , maybe because they're a Scandinavian , or that maybe they were already an English accent tradition , anyway , because they were already just there , like we would have to have if we had , for example , similar manuscripts from , like I

don't know , the Goss or something like an old Gothic or something like that , maybe we could attest more to whether or not it was borrowed or not . But we don't have those kinds of texts from the Goss , even though we do have texts from the Gothic , like there wasn't . That's the only really early German language that we actually have a lot .

Well , not a lot , but we actually have a translation , yeah we have a Bible translation and we have a script which is more than we can say for a whole lot of these other old German languages that we're like . Well , we're kind of guessing what this is based off of the Romans description and the language evidence we have in in the Germanic language family .

It's like my favorite thing to do is when people try to tell me what like proto-Indo European religion was , and I'm like , okay , good luck figuring what the fuck you can figure out from that .

Because you're like you're doing comparisons to like modern Hinduism and like Celtic myths and Roman myths and being like , well , these words rhyme , therefore we must have this God concept . I'm like , well , the words are similar , but that's about . I don't know . I don't know if you can actually do that .

Sometimes it invades against these practices that that the popular Anglo-Saxon , that the populace was doing we're doing right , and this might be something like a pagan practice . It could also just be , like , you know , surviving folk practice . You know it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to , you know , paganism , for example .

So it's really difficult to discern what paganism would have looked like . And often these , the church people who are describing this , are often even projecting their own theological understandings onto what might be something like paganism .

We know what that is , but , like , we are doing a whole lot of rebuilding with this and this is why studying this is important and this is when we want to broaden out and talk about these early cultures .

If we're going to talk about , like all the history world , the class struggle , we need to know what the class struggles were , and the only way to reconstruct some of this is through these texts .

And one of the things that we do know , for example , we get to this that we're talking about this to Beowulf , but we know , for example , we're dealing with a warrior culture , we're dealing with pastoral and agrarian raiders , we're dealing with fairly settled rural peoples with , you know , the centralization is the meat hall .

I'm not going to go into those arguments here , but one of the things I can tell you that we've learned from the actual history of the anthropology and history of money is , in the deep history , the states are cities , they're centralized rulers if they exist , are their religious organizations , and , in fact , most of the reason why we had trade in metal or

anything like that at all was trade between , like , people traveling for religious tithing and stuff Like . That's why , so , of course , they're going to base so much of this off like the central administration , which also makes you wonder , though , what's holding this together during the pre-Christian time periods , because it's not entirely clear .

The other thing that we realize is a lot less centralized , like for example , in Scandinavia .

But what changes in the Renaissance is literacy and the cheapness of producing manuscripts , like and yeah , still a large part of the population is illiterate , but like it's no longer . I mean , most nobles weren't literate in this time period , from what we can tell , like there was no reason for them to be either .

It's not just that they were , like you know , barbaric . It wouldn't have been that useful for them .

So I guess my challenge here of people , yeah , I always I have in the back of my mind , and this is this is a way to kind of turn this conversation towards what people want other than you and I nerding out on what we can learn historically from poetry , fragments and manuscript histories .

But and I hope I hope the real English nerd come out for this and Andrew , I'm going to tell you in a couple months we're going to come back on and talk about this again in a more specific context . Maybe we'll do a whole episode on Beowulf , I don't know .

But one of the things I tell you from the political standpoint , from constructing , is from this historical materialist and for those of you who are not watching and listening and putting in quotation marks , because that word is often abused or phrase Perspective is , we do have to approach the development of our society because they do come out of these societies .

I mean one of the reasons why , okay , why is Beowulf still relevant to me , a person who has , like , no ties to the geets or whatever , and like is a thousand years past when this was written down , and probably between 12 and 1400 years between when it was actually initially began to be composed . Maybe who knows , why is that ?

. Like part of the fascinating thing about the history of Beowulf is the history of the reception of Beowulf and how people try to explain what it is , as much as the poem itself . I often tell people , like reception histories you learn a lot about , like how people are trying to build a nation . What is a national identity ? Why is this important ?

I became , even before I was a Marxist . I became fascinated with this when I tried to , when I realized that , like English literature as a curriculum was explicitly designed in the 19th century to compete with German philology and that , yeah , and both classicism and Greek studies were both trying to give that a pedigree .

That went all the way back to ancient Rome without , without appealing to the church . That's the new thing , right , because that's going to be the the way around .

This is when I talk about , like the national and God-shaped whole in an American concept of race even well , it kind of goes back to some of this stuff because people were trying to read this stuff and use it to justify later notions and then read them back and to the past , which is why we thought that like oh well , of course the the Anglo-Saxon came in

and slaughtered all those useless , dirty Welsh and Irish you know , because they're useless and you belong in the Dirk Ben History and it's not true , and and and . When you read the text it's not even clear that they thought it was true .

Like we don't have a lot of text in the first place , we mentioned Gildus earlier and like Gildus is what we have for you know , an example of of a Welsh person who is purportedly in the ruling class , you know . Right . So there is all this interesting stuff tied in here , I think , for for someone like us , but we also have to go .

I was about , but I there's so much for I want to talk about whenever I talk about medieval stuff because , as people know , I have a lot of hobbies and this is one of them . But why do I think people should know this ?

Because in a , in a , in a way , like if I'm talking to an African American kid in a class today , I do have to be like you know , why are we opposing this on you ?

Like in some way , and and that's a legitimate question , and it's a legitimate question that I think there there are some answers that are fucked up this national nation building project , as we were talking about , there's also a sense in which , like you want to understand our , our history and our culture of the language that you've been speaking by historical

accident , like you're , you're part of this too because you speak this language . And , yes , there are other things that we should know and and we should , like I've always been like , we need more stuff in the canon and blah , blah , blah .

These are old debates amongst English majors that I've avoided for 20 years by largely not moving in those circles , but but I also think there's truth to it , like I don't know why we don't know more about African American literature , and I've always been a big proponent of us studying it in schools and stuff like this but I also think it's we need some of

this to remake this past alien , to understand it and I know that sounds strange to say make it alien and to understand it .

But it's because we don't understand it , because we read it in the context , maybe not our own , maybe we're not reading in context of 21st century America , but we probably are reading it in the context of 19th century England , which is still wrong , Right , like , in fact , it's probably more wrong , frankly , and we need to understand what these people were like .

Is there a proletariat in England in the 19th century ? No , because there's not one anywhere in the sense that we mean it in Marxism , right . That does not mean there's not a proper to least class .

The term proletariat has a history before it's picked up by socialists Like it , but and there's plenty actually but they're not the same kinds of people and they're not dealing with the same kinds of struggles and they're not capable of the same kinds of things for good and ill Like and this is not to be wiggish about it either there's also things which we over

read as different , like like guilds being somehow , you know , more foreign to what we do today than they actually are . Like every trade association works like a guild does and they're almost like they're almost like a mixture of a craft advocacy and a consumer protection agency and and a blatant competition for resources .

Like it's , you know , and in a way when we like it seems completely foreign to us in another way , like if we thought about it in a different you know , in a way where there are our analogous institutions . It might make them more easy to understand , but even there we have to be careful .

Like and I don't say this because I'm not one of the people think , like there's no thread , the humanity is universal . Like we read these , I would tell people go back and read these Exeter manuscript riddles . They're great , actually , they're awesome .

They're some of my favorite pieces of literature period , but we can relate to those people we get like I relate to that onion poem a lot , you know .

However , they aren't us either , even if they're totally relatable because , you know , there's a certain sense in which modern human beings are kind of consistent , but there's ways in which we're not too , and we have to parse that out . And why is this politically important ? Because that's going to be . You know , people hear me make these comparisons all the time .

Well , we know this , because this is like this . And then this happened over here in Egypt . And this happened over here Like because I do think , like if we're going to understand how we can try to conceptualize ourselves now , understanding the past and how , where , where these social structures and religious ideas and etc .

Are like what we have now and where they aren't , is really important to figuring out . Well , what is unique to right now , what are about , our culture is is part of being human , and what is unique to this particular social , social , social , social , cultural , political , you know , political , economic stratum .

And if you don't understand , if you can't come to actually I'm gonna be careful how I say this because understanding the past is Maybe the wrong way , because we can't completely understand the past . It is a foreign country , right , but it's a foreign country . It's not something completely , completely different .

It's not Silicon life based on Uranus , like it's not that , like it is still conceptually us and so approaching where the we realize the past is both not us and are in the in the disconfinity is what we learn about peoples in the past and how this did and didn't work .

This is really important and this is why you know Anthropology is important , but this is also why classicism is a point , intellectual history is important , etc .

You know , politically I mean we're gonna also talk about this in another episode because you study law but understanding like literary history and English common law is actually really important to understanding even where capitalist property rights came from .

I've become more obsessed with this greatly because someone pointed out to me that , like the commodity rent , fungibility and modern capitalism really is kind of like an English common law thing and then it wasn't always true and other laws and that's part of why Stuff could happen in England . You're just like , oh , this legal stuff actually matters .

It's not just about development of the base , whatever the fuck that means , and most of people who say that don't really know they have very bad answers . And and this also means approaching history and how we got here and where this comes from , because there's so much of this still with us .

You don't ever get rid of the prior world entirely , like even after a revolution or whatever . That's not how this works . Like history is still with us and still part of how we are building our lives today .

And Even if it's not your history , and like it's not your genetic history , it's not your racial history or whatever , if you're speaking that language and dealing with that culture , it's part of your history .

Just like when I lived in Korea , I became really obsessed with Korean cultural history and the different kingdoms and all this Because in some ways , I was encountering a culture that was not mine , that I did not understand , that know , like knowing what happened in Sheila and like and like the 9th century probably isn't gonna really help me understand how certain

things are going on in my Korea , but it might help me understand where some of this stuff may begin to come from and why certain things , like I used to really One of the things I used to always think about and this is just from traveling the world it's like why is capitalism so similar and yet so different in different nations and cultures and whatnot ?

Like it's Koreans don't administrate South Koreans do not administer capitalism in the exact same way as Americans . Like that's just a fact . But why , like what's like there are many ways in which they also do . I mean , there's things that are like universal to capitalism , things that aren't . How do we figure that out ?

You could go like I know some my friends over at the member school go so far as to save , like capitalism is not useful for us to talk about , like we just need to talk about historical power relations , stuff like that . I don't go that far .

I'm not sure that that's not throwing the baby out with backwater , but there is a sense in which , like , we do have to kind of tease this apart and , and a lot of cases , understanding this literature is a way to do

it . Now that I come to this literature because I wanted to understand Anglo-Saxon society , so that could be better Marxist . No , I came to this literature because I enjoyed reading it and that's . That's another thing I should . Should close off . People should .

People should study what they like , particularly when you're not gonna work in it anyway , because you know our , our future is what it is . It's one of the most fascinating things . So what do you do ?

To go to law school , you know you study literature and philosophy so that you can learn to write and then , like , ignore everything you learned in law school and philosophy school .

I mean that probably you know , but but it's an interesting , like weirdly roundabout way of training for something and yet also kind of useful , because that's why a JD even if you're Don't work as a lawyer and as you know about how to be good at JD don't that's a lot of grief for people who don't know that .

That kind of Having to think about language and thinking in that particular way , in the way that it comes out of like Literary culture , and having to deal with history and these concepts and the way all this stuff interplays , is actually really important .

And I should do a solo show one day going through everything that I know that I've said that's been incorrect somewhere . Yeah , it happens a lot and I and I actually try like like I'm one of the few people that on my solo shows I cite my sources , but even then it's not always helpful .

So , and one of the things that people will come to me is like , what book did you get this from ? And I'm like you can't get some of this stuff From one book . You're having to correlate all this stuff together . That's another thing and I would tell people to take from this you got to be able to correlate stuff , to understand the stuff .

No one source no , either primary or secondary , are for sure as fuck theoretical . It's gonna give you all you need to know to really approach anything with any levels of Of confidence and security . Anyway , I've been talking a lot and we've been going for two and a half hours , so I'm gonna give you the final word and shut the hell up .

So what would you like our listeners to take away from this conversation , andrew ?

So going before the pre-renus , but going to the pre-renus on superior , to actually understand pre-capitalist Social relations , will help you appreciate , in a sense , where we are now and and it's , I would say , that it's not enough just to study , you know , since the founding of , since the beginning of capitalism .

So , yep , but yeah , no thanks for having me on .

And then I'd like to talk to you about the way poetry and common law tell us a lot more About these sides , particularly when we talk about law , because they're this stuff is related , like I'm always fascinated by like an ancient Greek logos means word , like like word . It also means logic and it also kind of implies law .

So like these are conceptually highly tied together . So thank you so much for coming on . I'm gonna put the link shoe shared with some of these poems in the show notes and I'll talk to you again on the show in a couple months . All right , sounds good fun , take care .