Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While on his mission to convert pagan Germanic tribes on the Continent, the Anglo-Saxon Bishop Boniface wrote home to his fellow Englishmen imploring them to pray for the conversion of the Germanic pagans, adding, “Take pity upon them; for they themselves are saying, ‘We are of one blood and one bone with you’” (Emerton 1976: 75). The Germanic pagans' awareness of their common ancestry with the Anglo-Saxons was shared by the English themselves, who from the time of Bede and Aldhelm (who identifies himself as “nourished in the cradles of a Germanic people”) (Lapidge & Herren 1979: 45) through Alcuin and as late as Wulfstan in the eleventh century constantly acknowledged their Germanic derivation. Individual Germanic groups' awareness of their common ancestry finds expression as early as Tacitus, who says, “The Treviri and Nervii even take pride in the German [i.e., Germanic] descent to which they lay claim. Such a glorious origin, they feel, should prevent their being thought to resemble the unwarlike Gauls” (Mattingly 1970: 125). In Old English (OE) literature this sense of intertribal kinship among Germanic peoples is most clearly expressed, perhaps, in the poem about the wandering scop (i.e., minstrel) named Widsith, whose “interest in the Germanic heroic age was that of an antiquary and a historian” (Malone 1962: 112), although this sense of kinship is equally clear in Beowulf ... log in or subscribe to read full text