Arthur vs. the Anglo-Saxons

Obviously there are Anglo-Saxons in Britain. But how did they get there? And why didn't King Arthur keep them out?

it’s a legal requirement that all articles about Anglo-Saxons include an image of the creepy Sutton Hoo war-mask-helmet

I write to you now from a Concord Coach bus somewhere between Portland and Bangor, Maine. Maine and I have a bit of a checkered history, and on this visit I’m hoping to improve on my earlier performance here , which involved eating pickles and swigging from a bottle of Bailey’s in a darkened cellar. I’m on my way to the Word festival in Blue Hill, where I’ll be talking with my friend Laura Miller on Friday night. This comes on the heels of stops in Calgary (met Alice Winn!), New York (missed my panel!) and Wisconsin (saw my son! and Neal Stephenson!)

(nb I wrote this last Wednesday, but with all the festivities I didn’t have time to edit it, so some of the events described have already been borne back ceaselessly into the past.)

A question I’ve been asked a few times on my travels is whether I get much in the way of pushback from hardcore Arthurians on some of the choices I made in The Bright Sword. (In fact this came up in conversation with Alice (Winn, who, I think I mentioned, I met) who is a serious Arthurian, and who introduced me to the term James Cameron uses for Titanic obsessives, which is “rivet-counters.”) I am aware of—and am always happy to hear from—a few Arthurian rivet-counters online, but so far people don’t actually seem to want to get into it in person about hot-button topics like, say, diversity in sub-Roman Britain, or Arthur’s drowning of the Mordred-babies (I left it out), or my shameless mixing and matching of swords and armor from different periods. (Well, there’s a little shame there. But only a little.)

This is good, because as anybody who knows me knows, I have a cowardly fear of controversy. But one hot-button topic on which I found myself taking a reluctant stand is the one about the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes etc. in Britain, from the 3rd or 4th Century on. The particular question there is about whether they invaded Britain, or migrated there peacefully.

It seems on the face of it not the sort of thing that should be hard to pin down. Until relatively recently it wasn’t a controversy at all: the story was always that the Saxons came with fire and blood. It’s a key part of King Arthur’s origin story: he made his bones fighting the invading Saxons. According to Nennius he personally killed 960 Saxons at the Battle of Badon.

And there’s a lot of evidence for the conquest theory, not least the plain fact that Britain went from Brythonic- and British Latin-speaking to English-speaking with striking suddenness and thoroughness. You’d think that English would at least include a robust mix of Brythonic loan-words, considering that that was what a lot of the indigenous Britons spoke before the Saxons came, but in fact there are only a tiny handful, so tiny that I can list most of them here: ass (as in donkey), basket, bin, brat, crag, dun, gull, hog, peat and wan. I probably missed a few, but not very many. Out of the hundreds of thousands of words that make up the English language, fewer than a dozen are properly British. How and why would the language of a foreign minority population become the dominant one within the space of a couple hundred years, if not through conquest?

Then there are the contemporary historical sources, of which there are hardly any, but the most important one, Gildas’s On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, tells a pretty violent story: “In the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated blood” etc. etc. (Though annoyingly, in all this talk of fighting Saxons Gildas never once mentions Arthur. Thanks for nothing, man.)

But then you read about the archeological findings, and things start looking more complex. I feel a lot of empathy for archeologists who study this period, because between the burial practices and brooch designs and population distribution and field layouts it’s difficult to build a coherent narrative of what happened. But the upshot is that there just isn’t much evidence of the kind of violent discontinuity that a serious Anglo-Saxon invasion would have produced.

Likewise there’s the genetic evidence, which I am in no way qualified to interpret, but there’s so much of it and it’s been interpreted so many different ways that I have to think that, again, it reflects an extremely complex social reality. And this isn’t even to get into the strontium and isotopes and whatnot. In fact the historian Susan Oosthuizen has made a fascinating case that the Dark Ages weren’t a time of chaos and collapse at all, that we’ve got them all wrong, and in fact things went on pretty much as normal after the Romans left, and if a few stray Germanic tribes joined the party, that was fine but not a big deal.

What one wants to do in this situation is both-sides it—lay out the evidence and people draw their own conclusions—but the trouble with writing historical fiction, as opposed to history, is that you have to tell a very specific story, in detail, not a hazy probability-cloud. You have to collapse the wave-form (I use that expression way too much). And when the historical evidence is inconclusive, one ends up being driven instead by the kind of story one wants to tell.

It’s interesting how attractive the invasion story is, and how attached to it we’ve been. You can see why it’s been so sticky for all these years. It’s dramatic, and it appeals to populist ideas about nation-building and national purity—poor old Arthur was just trying to keep Britain for the British! But it’s not as interesting as it used to be. We all know that Arthur can face down a Saxon warband. Arthur evolves, that’s his superpower, and like most novelists, although I’m attracted to heroic battles, I’m even more attracted to complexity. Can Arthur cope with immigration, and refugees who need sanctuary, and a multi-cultural, multi-lingual population? That’s what I want to know.