--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:
>
> At 10:47:40 PM on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, Andrew Jarrette
> wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> > <BMScott@> wrote:
>
> >>> I said "foreign element in its _identity_", meaning the
> >>> ancestry,
>
> >> That's not a way in which I would use or understand the
> >> word 'identity'.
This is where I got the word "identity" from in Davis:
"Abstract: One of the Beowulf poet's purposes is to inspire a sense of
common _identity_ [my emphasis] in an ethnically complex audience by
reimagining relations between various hero-peoples of a traditional
past with whom members of that audience might have identified.
However, the poem's ethnogenesis failed to achieve broad cultural
authority. It proved superfluous to the task of national
consciousness-building which was already being accomplished on a
biblical model of moral ethnicity adumbrated in the poem itself."
"...According to this model of the late antique and early medieval
formation of national ethnicities in Europe, an otherwise unknown
chieftain successful in war imposes his political authority upon a
multiplicity of competing individuals and groups of various origins
and thus forges a new sense of _ethnic identity_ among them under the
leadership of his new royal clan and its supporting war-band."
"...For the Beowulf poet, the most valuable compensation Hrothgar's
new thegns receive for their subordination is a proud new _identity_.
They are now full members of the mægen Deniga (host of Danes, line
155b) with all the rights, honors and privileges appertaining thereto."
>
> > Not even "cultural identity"? "National identity"?
>
> No, I don't think so. Ancestry might well play a role in
> cultural identity, but the way you actually used the word
> 'identity' is completely foreign to my understanding of it.
>
> [...]
>
The idea of the Anglo-Saxons welcoming foreign elements comes from
this and later:
"Why does the poet choose to valorize the royal family of a foreign,
sometimes enemy nation in the opening lines of his poem? Beowulf is
permeated with pro-Danish sentiment, in spite of the manifold
difficulties which the Scylding dynasty is represented to have
suffered. Why not celebrate the heroic founders of some native
Anglo-Saxon royal family--their victories over the Britons or other
enemies, for instance--as would have poets of most other epic traditions?"
> >> As for the English, I think that you're barking up the
> >> wrong tree altogether. Alfred (notably, though among
> >> others, including his remarkable daughter) did an
> >> impressive job of turning Angles and Saxons into
> >> Anglo-Saxons, and the English are notable for their
> >> rather early development of strong senses of identity as
> >> a nation and then as a state.
>
> > After Alfred had merged various different peoples, i.e.
> > had joined peoples who, though closely related, were to a
> > certain degree foreign to each other. Alfred liked to
> > incorporate foreign elements and liked to believe (not
> > that it was untrue) that he was of foreign extraction,
> > just as Beowulf celebrated the foreign ancestry of its
> > hero; hence the "xenotropic" tendency I allude to.
>
> I think that you're misreading both the history and Davis.
1."With the genealogy of his father Æthelwulf going back to Scyld,
King Alfred could now demonstrate to his new Danish clients, allies
and rivals his direct patrilineal descent from their own royal
ancestors and thus legitimize, by ancient precedent, the superiority
over them he claimed. Such a genealogy would have the further benefit
of uniting in a single race both his own subjects and foreign Danes,
since the genealogist makes Scyld's father Sceaf a fourth son of Noah
born in the Ark."
"Alfred, following Bede and perhaps some shrewd political instincts of
his own, uses this concept of Anglian nationhood for his own purposes.
Instead of coopting the Anglian ethnicity of his new subjects in
western Mercia into a concept of "Saxonkind" (Foot 1996: 25), King
Alfred chose instead to prioritize the Anglian component of the new
national polity he hoped to create in 886 when the Mercian king
Æthelred formally submitted to him. Æthelred was given charge of the
city of London as part of his new western Mercian ealdordom and the
king's own daughter Æthelflæd as wife. For himself Alfred invented a
new royal style calculated to win over his Anglian subjects and
demonstrate their valued inclusion in the new kingdom. He called
himself rex Angul-Saxonum (king of the Anglo-Saxons) which title
replaces the earlier, more limited ethnic styles of the West Saxon
kings (rex Saxonum, etc.). Alfred was already king of the Saxons
through ancient pedigree; it was his Anglian subjects that he had to
worry about. In short, King Alfred's political ambitions, and those of
his son and grandsons, produced a cultural moment in which a number of
traditions, from various sources, could be collected, rationalized and
coordinated into a more comprehensive historical framework--a new
tradition of the past--which could then be used in turn to enhance the
agenda of the royal family."
2."It seems clear that one way or another Goths were popular in
Alfred's court and that the Jutes of southern England, the Geats of
southern Sweden and the Goths of southern Europe had all come to be
considered the people from whom King Alfred traced his descent on his
mother's side."
"It was Osburh who challenged Alfred and his brothers to memorize
poemata Saxonica, vernacular poems, which probably recounted the kind
of dynastic traditions which she felt to be of special value. Perhaps
Osburh chose this method of cultivating among her West Saxon sons an
appreciation for her own distinguished ancestors, that is, her own
Jutish/Gothic heritage. There are, in fact, only two Anglo-Saxons whom
we know 'by name' valued these old legends in traditional poetry: King
Alfred and his mother Osburh.
In addition, some indication of the positive sympathy King Alfred may
have felt towards his supposed Gothic ancestry through his mother can
be seen in the remarkable characterization of Alaric the Visigoth in
the West Saxon translation of Orosius (cf. Harris)."
>
From the quotes above as well as much else in the text, I would not
say that I have misread Davis. The history I have not read.
> >> I don't see much basis for 'identity-challenged' at any
> >> point, let alone a dubious connection with the high
> >> proportion of borrowings in the English lexicon.
>
> > I just meant that we English have always seemed rather
> > eager to celebrate, praise, pay tribute to, or adopt
> > foreign elements, whether in words, ancestry, or political
> > affiliations.
>
> I'm not at all sure that I agree with this, but in any
> case it's very different from what I understand by
> 'identity-challenged'.
Davis uses the term "identity" several times in making his argument
about "the failure of Beowulf to establish itself as an effective
contribution to the English nation's sense of itself in the tenth
century."
>
> >>> It seemed to me that the English developed a
> >>> "xenotropic" tendency early on that developed into a
> >>> torrent through much of the history of their language
> >>> (as mentioned, English is now only about 20% English).
>
> >> I prefer to look for less fuzzy reasons. For instance,
> >> there's a layer of borrowings from Latin that came with
> >> Christianity. The borrowings from Scandinavian look to
> >> be a fairly normal result of language contact. Early
> >> loans from French are generally of the kinds that one
> >> would expect in the situation that obtained after the
> >> Conquest; the much more numerous later medieval loans
> >> from French owe much to French cultural prestige, and the
> >> English were by no means the only borrowers
>
> > But by far we borrowed the most and in the highest
> > proportion.
>
> A fact for which perfectly good historical reasons can be
> offered that don't depend on anything so fuzzy as a
> '"xenotropic" tendency'.
Yes, the historical reasons are there but I was merely hinting at the
possibility that the English already had a tendency towards welcoming
foreignness, which I wass offering as a potential starting-point for
the high degree of foreign borrowing in our language.
>
> >> ; and so on. Note too that we sometimes underestimate
> >> the percentage of loans in some other languages. French,
> >> for instance, borrowed quite extensively from Latin at
> >> various times, but because it's a Romance language, we
> >> tend not to notice this.
>
> > Yes, but that's only going back to the language of one's
> > ancestors, as though English would have borrowed from
> > Anglo-Saxon.
>
> Not really, no, especially in the case of the later
> borrowings: the important point was that Latin was the
> language of learning, not that it was the ancestor of
> French.
But it doesn't hurt that the scribes of that time knew it was the
ancestor of French -- I think this would aid in the welcoming of Latin
words in the language, unlike German and Dutch for instance.
>
> >> I'm not denying that English has for some time borrowed
> >> rather freely from a wide variety of languages. It
> >> wouldn't surprise me if such a tendency were
> >> self-reinforcing. But tracing it back to the
> >> ethnogenesis of the English seems hard to justify.
>
> > OK, it's not related to the ethnogenesis of the English.
> > But I would like to know why then have we borrowed so
> > profusely from outside sources, compared to other Germanic
> > languages for example? Germany is close to France, the
> > Netherlands are close to France, not separated by an arm
> > of the sea, yet they have borrowed nowhere near as many
> > words from French and Latin as we have.
>
> For starters, they had very different historical
> relationships with the French.
What about what I said about Greece and its conquest by the Romans?
Is there no parallel there?
>
> I'll probably not have much more to say on this: I'm not
> enormously interested, and it's at best borderline on-topic.
>
I hope you will at least read this attempt at a defense of my
statements. I don't think they were so unfounded as you make them out
to be.
Andrew