Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
12 - Conclusion
from PART I - THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
Summary
IN THIS MONOGRAPH I have sought to anatomize a prejudice which turned into a predilection. Some kind of chronological order has been followed, but I make no pretence that the deliberate selections presented here amount to a chapter in the history of the scholarship of Anglo-Saxon literature. In one view, however, the history of scholarship is a history of error, and looked at that way the search for paganism comes near the centre of any historical account of the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the last hundred and fifty years. In that period the unknown – as I think, the unknowable unknown – was so firmly used to explain the known that scholars felt no doubt in their methods or results.
That is no longer so. At a factual level the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism is, if conducted at all, no longer conducted naïvely; but some of the attitudes to literature and learning characteristic of those earlier scholars, who, like the Wife of Bath, were (mutatis mutandis) on the side of the elves rather than of the limiters, still prevail. Tracing to its origins the error on which these attitudes are based may perhaps help to eradicate them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 110Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000