Roots of colonialism in Old English poetry

Abstract

The white nationalist ideologies that drove many colonialist efforts are often built off of a so-called Anglo-Saxon ideal, which involves appealing to Old English epics such as Beowulf as part of the foundation of national and racial origins. However, beyond the problematic associations with white supremacy, such postures towards Old English texts and Germanic culture of the era read race anachronistically into the past and ignore the actual cultural contexts these Old English texts are rooted in. Thus, the goal of this thesis project is to analyze Old English texts through a postcolonial lens, informed by Rambaran-Olm, Hsy, Miyashiro, Kim, and Ahmed. I also bring in the central concept of "Christendom" as defined by Harris and Mittman. Using close reading and comparative translation, I evaluate the Old English poems Genesis A & B, Judith, and Andreas through this postcolonial framework. In Chapter One, I analyze Genesis A & B, which calls attention to the importance of land to the migratory Germanic tribes, to inherited righteousness or wickedness through family lines, and to Christendom's efforts to connect the promise of Abraham to the Christians of the day. Chapter Two covers Judith, which focuses on how leadership is an important factor in the classification of humankind as righteous or wicked and on how these distinctions factor into future destination. Judith, with its positive depictions of Jews and Christian additions, also points to the idea of supersessionism. In Chapter Three, I address Andreas, which complicates the dichotomy of righteousness and wickedness by showing the righteous as flawed and the wicked as capable of transformation. As a conversion story featuring the salvation of an "uncivilized" group (the Mermedonians), there are also protocolonialist ideas that justify mass converting Indigenous and other non-Christian people groups. Taken all together, the themes in these three poems support my initial thesis that protocolonialist ideas are present in these texts, which provides deeper understanding of how nationalist and colonialist ideologies evolved over history and led to the rise of present-day white nationalism. My research is part of a growing trend of medieval literary scholarship: applying a postcolonial approach to tracing the roots of white nationalism. Christendom's classification of humankind, as demonstrated in these three poems as a division of the righteous and the wicked, also gives a frame to apply to other Old English texts. Specifically, the other biblically-inspired texts of the Junius Manuscript, Old English hagiographies like Elene, and epics that follow the apostles such as The Fate of the Apostles would be natural opportunities to explore further consistencies or challenges to these ideas.