I.

Myths of origins play a crucial role in the emergence and strengthening of an idealised sense of collective identity. Inscribed in a community’s shared memory, they are a means through which a particular group or society expresses its sense of itself. These real or imagined origins include both a genealogical and a geographical component, thus situating an individual and the group to which he or she belongs in time and space. They offer a narrative of how a particular community came into being, they shed light on its present situation and, by implication, they foreshadow its rightful future. Many elements combine to create a sense of collective identity: the one I will focus on here has to do with localisation, that is, with the establishment of a privileged link to a particular geographical area, ‘one’s own place’. As Anthony Smith points out, the land in question need not actually be occupied or possessed; what matters is that the community has a ‘homeland’ and that a certain bond is felt to exist between people and land.

There are several ways in which a people may lay claim to a given land. Through myths of autochthony, a population can imagine itself as stemming from the present space occupied by the community. An autochthon (etymologically ‘sprung from the land’) necessarily postulates and justifies the existence of an essential link between land and people. As a product of the land and as its first inhabitants, an autochthonous people often sees itself as its rightful possessors: the population does not come from afar but is home-grown. Other myths of origins imagine the geographical roots to lie elsewhere. A people may either have been exiled from its rightful homeland, or may be marching toward a promised destination. In the latter case, the union between people and land is actualised only at the end of a migration journey.

As Nicholas Howe demonstrated in his now classic Migration and Myth-making in Anglo-Saxon England, the Anglo-Saxons adopted the second model for their myth of cultural identity. The memory of their ancestors’ migration from the Continent to the British Isles in the fifth century became the starting point in a process of mythmaking which, as Howe contends, juxtaposed the Anglo-Saxons’ ancestral migration to the biblical exodus. This convergence shaped the Anglo-Saxons’ collective memory and, consequently, their perception of themselves as a people.