r/anglosaxon

https://preview.redd.it/rf61ux5zjujh1.jpg?width=831&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f3b6115693042b52383914c1823667eae9632117

Alfred secured the throne of Wessex in 871 through a highly questionable political manoeuvre that sidelined his nephews who had a better claim.

 So, he badly needed to solidify his doubtful right to take the throne. To do this, he ordered scribes in his scriptorium literally to invent a 300-year-long genealogy claiming he had descended from a semi-mythological Germanic founder, Cerdic. 

This ignored great historical gaps, civil wars and usurpers to create a largely fictional unbroken line of father-to-son royal-blood succession. 

By this means, Alfred claimed his forebears were Germanic heroes descended from Woden. In fact, his family were Romano-British native and he claimed to rule Wessex by right of a conquest that never happened.

To read the full extract, click below: 

https://wessexxfiles.substack.com/p/alfred-the-great-built-a-myth-and

3 Attitudes to Same‐Sex Activity in Anglo‐Saxon England: earg, the Penitentials, and OE bædling | Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature | Oxford Academic

This paper suggests that being the masculine male "top" was socially just fine in that society, but being the receptive "bottom" as a man was highly stigmatized.

Being an "ergi" - or effeminate male - was socially prohibited. The Catholic Church would later have influence in England.

This was very similar to ancient Greek society in that regard. There were no so-called "gay people." There were just what we would call today "male tops" (whether it was with a woman or a man) or an effeminate "male bottom".

We know that Tacitus says that men were drowned in swamps for receptive homosexual acts. However, men in these continental tribes were still often free to rape pre-pubescent boys as they pleased, since they were the dominant masculine penetrator. This culture crossed Britain as it became early England. (Homosexuality isn't even mentioned by the Laws of Wihtred, however.)

I thought this was interesting, and I have never thought about it before.

note: Also, being a "feminized" victim of sexual violence in ancient was clearly stigmatized and played a role in shaping the social hierarchy. This stigma extended to consensual relationships.

Their language itself was gendered.

"Man" and "woman" translated to "he-person" and "she-person."

Did they have a strict sense of what was "proper" for males and females? Their society was quite chaotic, and there were no overarching rules at first about who was "allowed" to start bearing rings or raiding other tribes. (This was before King Alfred began stifling this primitive warrior society with organized statecraft with a system of laws and writing and so on.)

In what anglo-saxon texts I can find (in west-saxon and ingvaeonic) I've never come across passages saying things like "this is the man's role and this is the woman's role," and so on. Maybe I do need to read more, but no one back then seemed excessively interested in the distinction between the sexes.

Together they broke Viking invasion. But King Edward erased sister Æthelflæd from history to stop her fame destroying Alfred’s legacy.

The brilliant military achievements of Alfred the Great’s daughter, the Lady of the Mercians, Æthelflæd, were both a blessing and a political nightmare. 

She played an indispensable role in saving the Anglo-Saxons from destruction by the Danes. 

But the image of a woman successfully commanding armies, taking a foreign queen hostage and executing brilliant grand strategies threatened, on her death, to cause her nationalistic supporters to split Mercia from Wessex. 

So, her brother and military partner Edward the Elder reduced the legendary warrior queen to a mere footnote, “the king’s sister.”

To read the full extract, click below:

https://preview.redd.it/37q0mw2wkjjh1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36ba9766811ba0291dc562098c2494ead379aa1a

https://wessexxfiles.substack.com/p/alfred-the-greats-daughter-was-such

Now I dont really know if I have to look more into this but as far as I searched I couldnt find the origins or at least evidence for the lives of the kings (such as *Mordaf ap* *Hopkin* or *Eluid ap Fferferdynof* ) of"West Wales" in the period 790s-890s.

Vague names appear and it seems that the "kingdom" was conquered by the West Saxons in the early 9th Century. Donyarth, the only king I found in wikipedia (a questionable source for some) that has at least some background appears to have died in the 875. Thus my question arises, who were the kings from the battle of "Gafulforda" when the kingdom largely fell to the death of Donyarth and where can I find more information on them? Thank you.

Would the Franks, Saxons, and Angles of the Migration Period have recognized the later Vikings and Normans as culturally similar peoples? Would they have noticed significant similarities in language, customs, religion, or social organization, or would the cultural differences created by the intervening centuries have made the Vikings and Normans seem largely foreign to them?

I understand that there were some threats within the court of treason, and I also understand that he was receiving poor counsel convincing him that the Danish settlers in his land were dangerous, but no matter how I think it, it seems incredibly near-sighted for somebody who was previously a pretty decent king, and had a substantial amount of history fighting against Danes/Vikings, so I feel that it was a given on what would happen. Did he think there was a chance he would win?

One thing I've never seen discussed here is the remarkable Old English poem "The Husband's Message" from the famous Exeter Book (its copying typically dated to the 900s).

This poem is in the voice of a rune-inscribed message stick from husband to wife as a form of long-distance communication and it features a series of Old English runes, apparently to be read as an ideographic puzzle, perhaps reflecting utilization of ideographic sentences as a kind of code.

As noted by scholars like MacLeod and Mees (2006: 55-56), this sounds very much like the many little rune-inscribed message sticks found in Bryggen in Bergen, Norway from the medieval period, some of which are little messages between husband and wife.

Lets see it, and state why.