Gresham College Lectures

Anglo-Saxon Pagan Gods

February 08, 2023 Gresham College
Gresham College Lectures
Anglo-Saxon Pagan Gods
Show Notes Transcript

When the Western Roman Empire crumbled, the Anglo-Saxon peoples who occupied Britain brought their own paganism with them. This was Germanic, with a pantheon of deities that included Woden, Thunor, Tiw and Frig. Its temples were wooden structures that leave scant traces in the landscape, but you can find evidence for their beliefs in cemeteries like Sutton Hoo.

This lecture looks at such evidence and at literature such as Beowulf and the history written by the Christian scholar Bede.


A lecture by Ronald Hutton recorded on 1 February 2023 at David Game College, London.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/anglo-saxon-gods

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(title swooshing)- Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Welcome to the rather brightly lit Dark Ages,(audience laughing) but they'll still be pretty dark for our subject tonight, because this is the paradox of Anglo-Saxon paganism. Although it arrived in Britain later than Roman paganism did in a period we regard firmly in general as historical, much less is known about Anglo-Saxon paganism than that of the Romans. And this is because it was a foreign importation to Britain, which didn't apparently combine well with any native religions, and had no time to put down deep roots. But nonetheless, it left permanent impact on the British landscape and made some lasting creative impact on art and literature. So let's set the scene. It's a pretty dreadful scene. The arriving Anglo-Saxons had the extraordinary experience of occupying a land which had recently gone through what scholars call a systems collapse. In other words, they found an economy and society which was very much a tribal one of petty kingdoms like their own with subsistence farming and wooden huts and halls, yet all around were the imposing stone ruins of Roman towns, villas, fortresses, and factories. Except for the lack of ecological damage and a sudden population crash, it was like a landscape following a nuclear holocaust. It awed and troubled the newcomers, who left poetry testifying to the sense of melancholy and disorientation provoked by a new life among the wrecked constructions of peoples whom the newly-arrived English thought must have been giants. I've put this particular bit of ruined Roman wall on the screen at the city of Wroxeter, the Roman city in Shropshire, because it could actually be the very wall featured in one of the poems to which I'm referring, known as "The Wanderer.""Where now the horse and the rider? Where are the folk and the givers of gold? Where is the hand on the harpstring and the red fire glowing? I mourn the gleaming cups, the helms, and the hauberks, the glory of the prince. Now that time has passed away, darkened beneath night's shadow as if it had never been. Where the loved people were is now a wall of wondrous height carved with serpent forms. The savage ash spears, avid for slaughter, have claimed all the warriors. Fate is mighty. They have passed like the rain on the mountain, like the wind in the meadow. Winter howls, then darkness draws on. The day has gone down in the west, behind the hills into shadow. Nothing is easy in the kingdom of earth. The world beneath the heavens is in the hands of fate. Here man is passing. Here maid is passing. Here life is passing. Here love is passing. All the face of the earth stands empty." Cheerful stuff, isn't it?(audience laughing) But it's one clear reaction to occupying a ruined land, not ruined by them, but by the collapse of an imperial system. But there's also another side which is unusual about the Anglo-Saxons or to the Anglo-Saxons, and that is a tender humanity. I think only an Anglo-Saxon could have written a poem like "Wulf and Eadwacer," giving voice to the complex feelings of a young woman who has just impulsively been unfaithful to her long-absent boyfriend."Its was rainy weather and I wept beside the hearth, thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings. One of the captains caught me in his arms. It gladdened me then, but it grieved me, too. O Wulf, my Wulf. It was my wanting you that made me sick. Your seldom coming, my hollowness at heart, not the hunger in my flesh. And I hear you say it's easy to smash what was not yet made, our life together." So let's look at the particular problems of studying paganism. The pagan Anglo-Saxons were illiterate, and so we have no texts of theirs to testify to their beliefs and practices, and their period of residence in Britain as pagans was too short to leave archeological material comparable with that from Roman Britain or the pre-Roman Iron Age. Early English literature is smaller in quantity than that of medieval Ireland and lacks the medieval Welsh taste for tales of magic and of epic. There's a real possibility that a typical pagan Anglo-Saxon would not have been able to describe her or his religion, even if we could interview them. It shows no sign of having had either clear or universal principles. Much of what we know of it is inferred from later Christian English sources or those of the Romans, or later, Icelandic literature. The Icelandic literature appears to represent a kind of paganism that was very similar to that of the early English. However, that paganism was long defunct by the time the Icelanders wrote of it, and although related to the English brand, it wasn't identical. So let's go to the evidence. Let's look for deities. We know a small amount about individual Anglo-Saxon deities from scraps of native literature, place names, and mostly comparisons with divinities in better recorded pantheons. Both place names and the family trees of early English kings indicates that the most important deity was the god Woden. He's this astonished looking character on the screen. He was noted as equivalent to the Roman Mercury, the German Wotan, and the Scandinavian Odin as a patron of rulers, wisdom, voyages, and skills. A 10th-century homily calls him king of the gods and a cunning deceiver, at home on hills and crossroads. A charm calls him an enchanter. This all seems so similar to the Norse Odin that it's easy to imagine their mythology was identical, but this isn't definitely so. To take what is literally a glaring example, one of the traits of Odin is he has only one eye, having sacrificed the other to gain wisdom. And as you can see in the few medieval pictures, Woden has very clearly two eyes. So the myths don't necessarily match. Place name frequency puts Thunor next and makes him dominant in southeastern England. So if you're a Londoner, Thunor would be your guy as a pagan Anglo-Saxon. A homily compares him to the Roman god Jupiter as a patron of thunder, weather, and farming. So he's also got to be like the Norse Thor from whom this modern image of Thunor is taken. The German Donar and the Rhinelands' Taranis. His symbols were the hammer and swastika, both suggesting thunderbolts. And then there's Tiw. He was equated with the Roman Mars, and his symbol, a T rune, appears on weapons, so he must have been a war god. He, too, appears in a scatter of place of place names. And finally, at last we have a lady. We have Frigg, who was given the day of the week that the Romans had awarded to Venus, and so was presumably also a goddess of love, fertility, and abundance. These were clearly the most important, but there are slight traces of other deities. The kings of Essex traced their descent from a god called Seaxnet. A runic poem mentions one called Ing. A royal biographer speaks another, Geat. The great early English historian Bede recorded two goddesses, Hreda, whose name suggests the earth, and Eostre, whose name suggests the dawn, as worshiped in spring. However, we're not short of the reliability of any of these sources in this respect, and we've certainly almost certainly lost loads and loads of tribal and local deities, as Anglo-Saxon culture lacks the very sources, that's inscriptions and stories attached to places that record these beings in other cultures. So let's look for holy places. The best evidence for these comes from place names. Two place names have been identified by philologists as especially significant, both being found in southern and eastern England. One is hearg, which seems to mean a holy place on a hill, though this is uncertain. It often ends up today as harrow, such as Harrow on the Hill west of London where the famous school is, which was the chief shrine of the Middlesex clan of the Gumenings. And that's a circa 1800 view of the hill at Harrow where the shrine was. At Harrow in Sussex, a dump of over a thousand ox skulls was found, which seem to be the remains of sacrifices. And the other name is weoh, which perhaps indicates a holy place on level ground, especially near roads. Now, both are found near early English settlements. By contrast, interestingly, place names that reference deities tend to be found away from habitation in lonely places close to burial mounds and frontier earthworks. And perhaps those were cult places for the particular divinities concerned, whereas the heogs and weohs were for the divine in general, but we're not sure. So what can archeology tell us? The answer is practically nothing with regard to shrines and temples. So far, archeology has failed to identify a single one. There is a famous letter from Pope Gregory the Great ordering his missionaries in England to convert the heathen temples there to churches, but not a single Anglo-Saxon temple has been found underneath any medieval church. And Gregory had sent an earlier letter ordering his people to destroy the temples, and the only records we have indicate this was the instruction that was obeyed. So do we have a good candidate for an Anglo-Saxon temple? Yeah, Yeavering in Northumberland. It's the seat of seventh-century Northumbrian kings. They had a big palace complex there in a valley, and it included a large rectangular wooden building. It's reconstructed up there on the screen inside a fenced enclosure along with posts that may have been totem poles or poles from which trophies were hung. The enclosure also had a pit full of animal bones, especially ox skulls, and more such bones were buried along one side of the enclosure. So all this looks pretty good for a pagan temple, the pagan temple of the kings of Northumbria. And what's more, it was burned to the ground, which could mean that Christianity destroyed it. On the other hand, burning things to the ground was the favorite pastime of feuding early English kings and rival kings for the same kingdom, and so it could be the what we're looking at is not a temple at all, but a royal hall with trophies and with feasts there, and it got burnt by a rival. The early English king, Bede, wrote of idols having been made by people in early England. If so, they're probably of wood and so wouldn't have survived even if they hadn't been burned by Christians as well. So what about holy people? The great historian Bede often mentions pagan priests, so they must have been there, and he says that the Northumbrians, his own people, had a high priest, an overall charge called Coifi, and he's the chap up on the screen in a modern or actually a Victorian reconstruction. The Roman historian Tacitus and the famous early English poem "Beowolf" speak of divination in the Anglo-Saxons' continental homeland by wise men, including the casting of lots, the flight of birds, and the motion of horses all being used as means to predict the future. There's also some evidence of taboos that bound religious functionaries. For example, Bede tells us that the Northumbrian high priest, Coifi, could not carry weapons or ride a stallion. Now, you'll observe that's exactly what he's doing in the picture(audience laughing) but the whole point is he's just converted to Christianity and so he can shout, "Yay!" and indulge in all the things he was tabooed to do before his conversion. So there's a happy-looking Coifi. Kings also seem to have had some sacred status, being blamed for natural disasters and being proclaimed king by being seated on special stones like the one that survives at Kingston in Surrey, and of course gave its name to the town Kingston on Thames. There's no trace of priestesses, but some of prophetesses, at least in ancient Germany, from which the English came. The Romans mentioned them as really important there, but alas, once the Anglo-Saxons get to England, you don't hear more of them. The Romans said no more of the matter, so we're left to dream it. What seems completely missing from Germanic paganism is a learned class of religious functionaries, like the Druids of Celtic-speaking peoples. There's very little evidence for pagan Anglo-Saxon beliefs. Bede told a famous story of how Coifi, the rather overworked Northumbrian high priest, likened the pagan view of human life as being that of a sparrow flying through a winter storm, and that's before life, and then the sparrow flies through the window of a feasting hall, suddenly in the warmth and the light and comfort, and then has to fly out the window of the opposite side back into the winter storm again. So the feasting hall is our brief experience of the joy of life, and everything else is misery. Now, this could actually be vital testimony about Anglo-Saxon pagan belief, or it could have been invented by Christians to prove the superiority of their message. Later Anglo-Saxon literature has a powerful and characteristic sense of Wyrd, the implacable force of destiny, fate, and this may reflect earlier pagan tradition, a paganism heavy in Wyrd and the way of Wyrd. But, spoilers again, it may instead reflect the great influence in early English culture of a learned and miserable Christian writer called Boethius in sixth-century Italy, who also emphasized the overwhelming power of a person's fate and fortune. So what about archeology? Can it get us somewhere after all? And the answer is yes. It really comes into its own with burial customs, which provide the only good material evidence of Anglo-Saxon paganism. And at last, I've got something to talk about properly, because it's very abundant. There are almost 1,200 Anglo-Saxon pagan cemeteries discovered to date. Most have less than a hundred graves, but 50 have more, and that at Spong Hill in Norfolk had over 2,000. Later literary sources like the famous epic poem "Beowulf" are very hazy with respect to pagan belief and ritual, but quite well informed on funeral customs, either because they remembered them really well or because they dug up pagan graves when tilling new fields or planting new settlements. They agree that cremation was the dominant mode. On the whole, that seems true, though the Angles, those who settled on the eastern side of the country, seemed to have preferred cremation, the burning of bodies and then the burying of the burnt bodies, and the Saxons preferred inhumation, which is burying bodies complete in the earth. But both modes are found almost everywhere. There are cremated Saxons and there are inhumed Angles, and they're often found together in the same cemetery, so there seems to have been individual choice involved over such a dramatic choice and a dramatic matter as to how your body is treated in a funeral.'Cause if you burn a body or you inhume it, it does suggest different ways in which you view how you should enter the afterlife, and that may suggest there was a variety of opinions about it among the Anglo-Saxons, exactly as there certainly was a variety among the pagan Romans and Roman British. The only safe generalization is that the pagan English liked to bury people in the earth and often with goods, and these are far more common than in the British Iron Age or in Roman Britain. In fact, if you're looking for grave goods left by pagans, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are the place to go. They're found with most inhumed bodies and about half of all cremations. The Anglo-Saxons were clearly inclined to believe one of two things. One is that you needed to kit out the dead for the afterlife. They couldn't travel light. They needed a suitcase full, in effect, of possessions to make for a better afterlife. Or it was believed that people's possessions were infected by their spirit. They were so intimately connected that if you didn't dump them in the grave, then that person would hang around you after they'd died and make life difficult. So let's look at cremations. They're generally buried in urns, which got larger and better decorated the older and richer the person inside had been, reasonably enough. And as said, you get a lot of goods with cremations. You get crystal and glass beads, combs, shears for hair, tweezers, and razors. Now, these are really intimate articles, so again, you have this paradox, this choice. Either people needed to look really good in the afterlife, you know, perfectly shaved, good haircut, well-combed hair, and the ability to stay like that, or these are the very articles that are so intimately connected with the dead you dare not keep them around and reuse them after the dead have passed on. They may have been intended to provide gifts, or they may have been intended to exorcize ghosts, but either way, they weren't burnt themselves, and sometimes miniature models were substituted if the real thing wasn't available. And it's hard to believe that dying people would carelessly have lost their combs or their razors or their tweezers, and so it does seem as if objects that hadn't belonged to the dead were regarded as needed to go with them, and this is the bit of evidence that persuades me that it really is about dolling up your beloved dead to look as glamorous as possible when they pass into the next world, rather than being afraid of their possessions and having to get rid of them. 80% of the funerary urns were decorated with a very complex iconography. The most common symbol was a serpent or a dragon, which may have been a spiritual protector to scare off bad luck or evil spirits from the person inside the urn, or it could be that dragons and serpents are a symbol of fire themselves, and so connected with the spiritual process of cremation. Next comes the swastika, which of course, has not had a good press in the 20th century, but was a very common and beloved Germanic and Anglo-Saxon decoration, and it seems to have represented fire again. Interestingly, none of these motifs seem to be linked to gender. In other words, female cremations have the same range of goods and the same range of symbols on their urns as men. One of the things we don't know is who chose the symbols on the urns. It's a worthwhile question, because they could simply have been potter's brand marks, in other words, indicating the firm that locally made your cremation pot for you and therefore you had a favorite brand. Or it could be that the dead, as part of last wishes, chose what they wanted on their urn, or it could be those who arranged the funeral. Either the relatives themselves or expert functionaries decided which symbols should go in somebody's urn. These are all rather different scenarios. Once again, the glory of this is you can dream it for yourselves, take your own choices. Now for inhumations. We have a wonderful sample of these. By the end of the 20th century, 5,476 had been properly excavated and recorded. Children were often buried crouching, perhaps like fetuses, so they could be returned to the womb of the earth or of the deity who gave birth to humans. They were often given adult weapons and jewelry as if you expected your kids to keep on growing in the next world, which if so, suggests again a really optimistic sense of what's waiting when you go out, contradicting flatly Coifi's story about the howling winter night waiting at the end of life. Adults were buried fully clothed on their backs and with their heads pointing to the east, the direction from which dawn new light, new life comes, as if it would raise them up again to head off into the next life. I'm being imaginative here, but the material is so rich, I think that we can do this. Almost all men had belts and knives, and this is not because they expect to have knife fights on the far side. It is because the knife is the only eating utensil. Forks don't arrive until the Italian Renaissance invents them, so the knife is your staple kitchen utensil. And again, they're expected to go on eating in the afterlife and clearly to enjoy themselves. Some had tools or weapons, and many were given food or drink vessels. All this points to a genuine if not necessarily standard concept of an afterlife. But there's also a huge range of items. I've gone over the most common, but there are lots of ornaments, which goes with looking great, but also maybe magical objects like crystal balls and amulets to be hung around the neck to keep you lucky. So again, people are fitted out with practically every need for what's expected to be a big new adventure. Now the bath news, the sinister stuff. There's quite a bit of this. A quarter of all inhumations, that's a lot, were buried with one body lying on top of another. Now, in many cases, this is fine. It may have been to indicate a family relationship, reuniting people intimately in the grave, but in nine well scattered cases, high status burials, rich people, female or male were accompanied by a lower status person, put unceremoniously over or under them. In other words, the rich person was laid out really carefully and had the goods, and then some unfortunate was thrown in either on top or thrown in and then the body laid out over them. At Welbeck Hill in Lincolnshire, a woman had been beheaded and buried over a man who had prestigious grave goods. At Portway in Hampshire, a man had been laid over a woman who had apparently been put into the grave with bound wrists. In four cases, this is where it gets really dreadful, it was actually suspected by archeologists that people had been buried alive. But don't worry, this is now disputed, as the bones were in all cases badly deranged, so analysis is difficult. So you can believe the creepy interpretation if you like, but you don't have to. At Worthy Park in Hampshire, a girl was thrown into a grave with both her wrists and her heels apparently tied together. So she could have been a human sacrifice or an executed criminal. Most of the bodies which accompany other burials in an apparently subservient relationship are also face-down. And this is so rare in general, it's one case in every 145 bodies, that it must be deliberate. It may have been to keep the person's corpse or ghost from prowling and causing trouble. After all, if you've chucked them in unceremoniously, you don't want their ghost tapping you on the shoulder later and demanding an explanation or restitution. Or it could have been to keep the spirit of the person in the grave to guard it and prevent it from being desecrated. So you've kind of got a, you're posting a sentinel there for good. Note, folks, the modern East Anglian ghost stories of M.R James stand in a very long tradition here of creepy guardian sentinels for burial places. Some burials were beheaded, where they're found in mass graves, such as the 50 headless bodies found in a pit near Thetford in Norfolk. They are probably battle victims whose heads were taken as trophies. That leaves 29 scattered around various cemeteries who could have been victims of war or execution or human sacrifice. I've used that phrase or human sacrifice or possibly human sacrifice a number of times now, and that's all that I can do. There's no more definite proof of it among the pagan English than among the Iron Age British. In both cases, the main evidence consists of accusations made by Roman enemies. The historian Tacitus held the German tribes were very fond of human sacrifice, but then that's a charge which Romans tended to make against peoples of whom they weren't very fond. And since the pagan Germans had had the extraordinary misjudgment and bad taste, according to the Romans, of refusing to be conquered by Rome, any kind of opprobrium that could be heaped upon them in this regard could be welcome. But Tacitus did say that the Germans were especially fond of sacrificing people to a god he compared to Mercury, and that was perhaps Woden. A later Roman writer, Sidonius, claimed the heathen Anglo-Saxons drowned or crucified a slave chosen by lot before going on each raiding expedition against the Romans. Objective ethnographic observation? Enemy propaganda? We can't tell which at this remove, but we can talk about the way in which graves were marked with a bit more objectivity. Most graves are not marked at all, but they could have had wooden memorials which would have rotted away completely. Burial mounds, barrows were known in the Anglo-Saxons' German homeland, but for the first century in England, their graves all seem to have been flat. Then round mounds start to appear there in the sixth century. They may have been copied from prehistoric British barrows, which the English indeed often reused for their own dead, and putting your own dead people into an ancient mound that has been there for centuries is not a bad way of claiming the land for yourself. Whether you have a mound or not over you remains a matter of individual choice. They're not a prestige item, particularly. In other words, the richest graves don't always have mounds covering them, and some quite poor graves have got mounds. So again, there's no rubric. It's a matter of pick and mix, individual taste, from a palette of possibilities that appeal in different ways to different people. And it's worth making the point in connection with all this diversity that the sixth and seventh-century English were a very adaptable people with wide horizons, taking ideas and images from all over the Scandinavian and the German world and the Mediterranean one, as well as from the native British and from British prehistoric monuments. The huge cemetery at Spong Hill in Norfolk shows goods and designs from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, and these are all distinctive styles. So the way in which you kit yourself out as an Anglo-Saxon and the way in which you buried is almost as cosmopolitan as a modern person deciding where to eat out, you know, which ethnicity of cuisine you're going to choose. And it does show a remarkable open-mindedness and versatility. There's a tendency for funerals and graves to get more and more ornate towards the end of the pagan period as Anglo-Saxon society grew more sophisticated, and also as it began to be infiltrated by and challenged by Christianity. There's a sense that the last Anglo-Saxon pagans are seeing their game being raised by these characters with stone churches and formal priests and ornate burial liturgy and mausolea, and are trying to do something pagan that will be equally impressive. The greatest of all its pagan cemeteries were those of the kings of East Anglia in the late sixth and early seventh centuries at Snape and of course Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Both of these cemeteries began with simple inhumations in coffins and cremations in urns. So flat graves, business as usual. Then came wooden chambers, and finally, the great ship burials, like the really celebrated one, the one that's made the movies and DVD in Sutton Hoo right in the screen there, reconstructed. Even there, however, there's nothing standard about them. Of the ships at Snape, one was 50 feet in length and the other was a dinghy. In fact, it could actually have been the dinghy of the 50-foot ship, but they had prestige burials in each, so it looks as if somebody wanted a kind of maisonette for a grave and somebody else wanted a palace. At Sutton Hoo, one ship measured 65 feet and the other 90 feet, and that's the one on the screen reconstructed containing the famous treasure found in 1939, the Sutton Hoo treasure in the British Museum which has provided most of the iconic objects for our knowledge not just of Anglo-Saxon England, but for early medieval Britain. Practically anybody in the late 20th century who wrote a novel about Dark Age or early medieval Britain was at least tempted to stick the Sutton Hoo helmet on the front of it, and most of the other objects have turned up as our standard illustrations ever since. For me, the most emotive of the objects is what had been a leather bag containing 37 coins and three gold pieces. Now, why is this interesting when it's surrounded by treasure of much greater beauty and of many different kinds? Well, the answer is that the 90-foot ship needed, and you can actually in the impression in the sand, see the berths, 40 rowers. So what what we have there is payment for 40 oarsmen to keep on rowing into the afterlife. It's a further sobering sign of how little we actually know, still, even about something as famous and well recorded as Sutton Hoo that the identity of the king who is buried there is disputed. There are about three different candidates. And so is the significance of the mixture of pagan and Christian objects in the treasure. The armor, the weaponry looks really pagan, but it also contains, the treasure contains Christian baptismal spoons and hanging bowls. And it shows you again how little we know that you can head off in totally different directions. If you want the savage view of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, then the prone burials tossed in over higher status people are human sacrifices, and the Christian objects were looted from Christian churches by the forebears of the king, whoever he was, buried in the ship. But if you want the fluffy and friendly view of pagan Anglo-Saxon society, which is equally valid and suits the evidence equally well, then the people put in the graves with the higher status people were not sacrificed at at all. They were faithful retainers who had died around the same time and wanted to accompany their master or mistress into the afterlife. So in this view, the mixture of pagan and Christian objects indicates a friendly, happy, open-minded society in which pagans and Christians practice side by side and their objects end up with the king who ruled over both. You take your choice. Within 50 or 60 years of the burial at Sutton Hoo, pagan England was already gone. It had been swept away in one long lifetime between 597, when the first Christian mission was sent to England from Rome, and 665, when the last pagan kingdom formally converted. This was a stop-start process because individual kingdoms often go back to paganism for a while if rulers and circumstances changed, but in the end, and the end came, as I've said, quite quickly. It was inexorable. The Christian effort was utterly sustained and utterly determined. If a kingdom relapsed to paganism, fresh missionaries were just sent in and pressure applied from neighboring Christian kings. And pagan England was totally surrounded by kingdoms which had already converted to Christianity, Irish, Scottish, and to the south and east on the continent, Frankish, who were all really keen that England should have their brand of Christianity and ally with them and would offer considerable political and commercial advantages to the union. And there was nothing by contrast in native paganism that set it up as an ideology of resistance to an imperialist and determined evangelical faith. It was too decentralized, it was too organic, it was too incoherent, and it had too much choice, individually. There was no doctrine, there was no creed that could bond people together for a holy war. And in a way, that's good, because the conversion was accomplished with no wars of religion and no martyrs clearly proven on either side. The last great pagan king in England was Penda the king of Mercia, the kingdom that covered the Midlands, and he was feared by Christian kings because he really enjoyed killing them. He wiped out five of them before he fell in battle himself against a sixth. But he didn't enjoy killing them because they were Christians. He enjoyed killing them because they were rival kings, and Penda disposed of those with an extraordinary dexterity. He never at any point positioned himself as a pagan warrior, as such, a pagan crusader, and although he died a pagan and presumably set off for the pagan afterlife which I've been discussing, he was apparently totally happy that his own son and heir converted to Christianity before his father's death. Penda did not see his religion as something worth fighting for. He saw things like glory, loot, honor and expanded territory as the staff for which to fight, and did so superbly. In a way, therefore, the famous burial at Sutton Hoo sums up the enigma of Anglo-Saxon paganism with its combination of cultural richness and profusion and abiding unanswered questions. Like the Sutton Hoo cemetery itself, Anglo-Saxon paganism begins in obscurity and ends in mystery, and yet its remains still have the capacity to thrill the senses and inspire the imagination. When Beowulf can end up being played by Ray Winstone so far, and Grendel's mother by Angelina Jolie, which is the bit that none of us expected,(audience laughing) and the dig at Sutton Hoo can end up as a very successful movie streaming now and with A-list stars, the Anglo-Saxon pagans still have a lot to say to us, even if we can't always hear exactly what they are saying.(audience applauding)- Professor Hutton, thank you very much for another fascinating lecture. I have a lot of questions for you. Many of them have come from online, but I'll take a couple from here before I open up to the floor. So the first one for you. What visible or other remnants of the Anglo-Saxon theology can we see in London?- Wonderful question. The answer is practically nothing, and this is because the pagan Anglo-Saxons didn't live in London. They had a look at all the crumbling des res there and decided probably it was too spooky. And so they built a new town, the old port, Aldwych, just to the west of the ruined Roman city, and Aldwych, at least as a name, is still there today. And they remained there until Alfred the Great stomped over from Wessex to the west and insisted that Aldwych be destroyed and the inhabitants relocated in Roman London as part of the re-Romanization and rebuilding of England, which Alfred, copying Rome at every stage, was instituting. And that's why the remains of Anglo-Saxon London are invisible. They're underneath St. Clement Danes Church and St. Mary in the Strand and some rather expensive restaurants on that corner.- I'll take another one. There are so many on here. Just give me one second. Were Anglo-Saxon women found with weapons and would they suggest female warriors?- They are sometimes found with weapons. They're found with weapons a lot more rarely than men. They tend to have ornaments instead. But then there are quite a few men without weapons. But on the whole, this is a society in which a male kit is supposed to consist of a weapon, just as naturally as is a need to shave, and so there is some gendering there, but there's no other gendering visible. What we haven't had yet, as far as I know, is a reclassification of Anglo-Saxon pagan burials with weapons from being thought to be male to being thought to be female, which is what's going on in Scandinavia with Viking graves there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it began to happen.- [Audience Member 1] Thank you very much indeed. If the Christians were so successful at wiping out indigenous paganism, how come is it that we still today are using their pagan names for the days of the week, whereas, for example, in Portuguese, they've renumbered them in a entirely acceptable fashion to the Christians, but here clearly they survive. And secondary question to that, might that not account, if it was stronger than you've suggested, for the huge success of pagan invaders not very long afterwards?- I'm with you on the first of those. The problem with the huge success of the Vikings thereafter was that it happened in all too many cases, literally, over the Anglo-Saxons' dead bodies. They did their best to fight off the Vikings, and in Wessex, did so very successfully, and of course did force the frontier north and create England. The reason why there are pagan names for the days of the week, I would love to think, is because of the affection that Anglo-Saxon Christianity had Anglo-Saxon paganism. But it seems instead to be part of the ongoing post-Roman admiration for Rome. In other words, that Christianized people in other Roman territories adopted the names that the Romans had given to the days of the week, which were named after pagan gods, and didn't want to change that system by working out, well, shall we give Monday to St. Peter and Tuesday to St. Andrew, and so on. It never even seems to have been discussed. There were Christians who grumbled about it, but no official attempt to review it. But what is really interesting is there was enough of a local pride in specifically English paganism for the English to be most unusual in peoples within the old Roman Empire in not taking the Roman names. So the French, the Franks were equally Germanic, but their Wednesday is still Mercredi after Mercury, and here it's Woden's Day.- [Audience Member 2] My question is about the grave goods, really. I mean, it does seem, you described it at the beginning as subsistence agriculture and very sort of poor communities. So the grave goods are funny, aren't they? Because why would you give away your father's... Why would you bury your father's sword with him, and not inherit it and use it yourself? And I suppose the other thing is about, and I maybe that's a sort of evolution over time, but for a subsistence agriculture to get goods from Denmark and Norway and other places must have been quite difficult and very limited in what they were able to get.- It's a good point. They did have trade. Trade was very important, but whereas in the Roman economy, it's a cash economy big time, and so you produce objects often in factories, and then you sell them for cash and the cash circulates. In a subsistence society, and this is the case right across the planet, traditionally, objects are exchanged in gift and that bonds people together, and also it creates a trade system by extension, which means you're able to get products that you can't produce locally, but might need, especially quite high prestige products. And so an economy of honor and of reciprocity is founded. When I talk about subsistence agriculture and I talk about relative impoverishment, it is relative. It's going from a place that had towns and stone buildings and reinforced concrete and literature and enormous country houses and big military installations to a place that has none of these, just small, really small, relatively small wooden halls and huts, and that's it, nothing really approximating to what the Romans would regard as a town. So it is quite a crash in terms of they even forgot how to make pottery because the factories are gone and home potting had to be revived painfully, but they got there, but it really is a dramatic change.- [Audience Member 3] Do folklore customs and traditions give us any knowledge of Saxon beliefs and way of life?- Yes, yes it does, but it's very, very hazy. Place names are the great unmined resource for news about folklore and local beliefs. One of our best current folklorists, Jeremy Harte, is preparing a new book on medieval fairy lore using the place name evidence, which is I think going to crack that one finally, take the lid off a wonderful body of sources. With what we've got so far, we know that there's quite a fear of spiritual beings. There's a distinct lack of glamour in what we can recover of Anglo-Saxon fairy lore. In other words, if you go over to Wales and to Ireland, you do have these immensely charismatic, glamorous, romantic non-human beings, Tuatha De Danann, the people of Annwn, like Rhiannon in Wales, and what you get in Anglo-Saxon folklore is horrid giants, horrid trolls, beastly things with names like Thurs, which can translate as goblin. Even their elves are awful, because say you only ever hear about Anglo-Saxon elves in medical textbooks as blighting people with disease or misfortune. Now, there are hints here and there that Anglo-Saxon elves have a more glamorous side to them, but it's never explicit and I can't really account for this, but it's definitely a dark tone that isn't quite there in the other mythologies of what we call in Britain, the British Isles.- I've got another question about the buried goods.- Yeah.- It seems to be quite a popular topic in the questions. Do graves have artifacts that could suggest an occupant's profession such as masons, blacksmiths, woodworkers?- They don't seem to have had professions in pagan Anglo-Saxon England. It's all the same farming society with a lot of fighting, apparently, and a lot of trading, apparently, and that's kind of it. You get the occasional grave that's really big on crystal balls and amulets, and we all get really excited then and say,"Ah, can we use words like shaman or shamaness or wise person or cunning person about these people?" And the answer is probably yes, but they're kind of all-purpose folk magicians rather than being specialized professions.- One more question from the online audience. Prone burials in Eastern Europe sometimes indicated people thought the person was one of the living dead. Any indication of vampiric beliefs in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic people?- Yeah. Trouble is that practically every people in prehistoric and early historic Europe seem to have been worried about their dead or somebody else's dead, because all over, you find evidence, including Roman Britain of corpses being staked or decapitated and their heads placed between their knees, or waved down with heavy stones. There's definite anxiety about certain dead people, and this goes with a kind of worldwide or at least very widespread belief globally, that bad people are inclined to want to come back.(audience laughing)- Sorry, I'm afraid that's all the time we've got for this evening. Please join me in thanking Professor Hutton one more time, and we'll see you soon.(audience applauding)