Abstract
p ]These are God’s words to the apostle Andrew as He sends him on a mission to convert the race of cannibal Mermedonians in the Old English verse life of Saint Andrew, Andreas. Andreas then recounts the conversion of Mermedonia, an island inhabited by a race of cannibals. In its narrative, the poem seems presciently modern: similar accusations that the native islander is a cannibal are today a staple of the Western imagination. So much so that William Arens’ controversial 1979 study, The Man-Eating Myth, argued that cannibalism, as we understand it today, exists solely in the Western imagination as a discourse that functions to both invite and legitimize the imposition of Western cultural and political norms onto the rest of the globe.p2 Although Arens’ thesis has been controversial within the discipline of anthropology,p3 from the vantage point of cultural studies it has greatly facilitated understanding of the ubiquitous presence of “cannibals” in newly discovered lands. That the far reaches of the earth were peopled with cannibals had been an accepted fact of geography since Herodotus’ Histories. This understanding was still current in Anglo-Saxon England, as is indicated by the insular popularity of the Marvels of the East tradition.
Du scealt feran ond frið lædan, siðe gesecan, þær sylfætan eard weardigað, eðel healdaþ, morðorcræftum.
You are to go and commit your being to a journey to visit a place where eaters of their own kind inhabit the country and rule the land with murderous practices.]p1
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Notes
Kenneth R. Brooks, ed., Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 11. 174a–177a
S.A.J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Everyman, 1982), p. 116. Throughout the text, citations of Andreas will be given in parentheses with the line number from Brooks’ Old English edition and the page number from Bradley’s English translation; I have noted where the translation is my own.
William Arens, The Man-Fating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
There is an extended discussion of the controversy in the introduction to Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson, eds., Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). An article by Arens, also revisiting the controversy, is included in the same volume.
There are three Old English versions of the life of Saint Andrew extant: Andreas, the homily in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 198, and the Blickling Homilies. The immediate sources of all three of these versions are unclear. Because of uncertainties of dating, all three Old English versions are potentially each other’s sources. There are two Latin versions of the story that fit the appropriate time scheme—the Recensio Vaticana and Casanatensis—along with a Greek version, called the Praxeis. See Michael J.B. Allen and Daniel Calder, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry: The Major Latin Texts in Translation (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1976), pp. 140–150.
The Praxeis’ version is closest to Andreas, but it seems unlikely to have been known in Anglo-Saxon England. Therefore, a lost exemplar is posited for the poem. See also Marie Walsh, “St Andrew in Anglo-Saxon England: the Evolution of an Apocryphal Hero,” Annuale Medievale 20 (1981): 97–122.
To borrow the title of Robert Boenig’s book-length study of the poem (Robert Boenig, Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991).
Robert E. Bjork, The Old English Verse Saints’ Lives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 110–111; John Casteen, “Andreas: An Old English Poem and Its Contents,” diss., The University of Virginia, 1970, p. 20.
Frederick M. Biggs, “The Passion of Andreas: Andreas 1398-1491,” Studies in Philology 85.4 (1988): 413–427.
Constance Hiett, “The Harrowing of Mermedonia: Typological Patterns in the Old English Andreas,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 77 (1976): 49 [49-62].
James Earl, “The Typological Structure of Andreas,” in Old English Literature in Context, ed. J.D. Niles (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1980), pp. 66–89.
Thomas D. Hill, “Figurai Narrative in Andreas,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969): 261–273.
Penn R. Szittya, “The Living Stone and the Patriarchs, Andreas 11. 706-810,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 72 (1973): 167–174.
See too John Casteen, “Andreas: Mermedonian Cannibalism and Figurai Narration,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974): 74–78.
Marie Nelson, “The Old English Andreas as an Account of Benign Aggression,” Medieval Perspectives 2.1 (1987): 81 [81-89].
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 59–60.
Steven F. Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 158–179.
For precisely this reason, later in the Middle Ages moments of conversion abound in texts that more clearly foreground the goal of territorial acquisition— Middle English crusade romances, for instance. Geraldine Heng has written in the latter context about conversion as cultural imperialism, arguing that “cultural capture” steps in to replace military capture when the latter has failed in imaginative literature of the fourteenth century (Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], pp. 188–190). While I find her analysis persuasive, extending it more generally, I would resist the priority it assigns to military conquest, following instead Edward Said’s suggestion in Culture and Imperialism that culture itself functions on its own as a mode of imperialism alongside other modes.
Lesley Abrams, “Conversion and Assimilation” in Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, ed. Dawn M. Hadley and Julian R. Richards (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), p. 138; 140 n5 [135-154]; Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, intro. and trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 85.
Fred Robinson notes a further interesting aspect to the Mermedonians’ capitulation in the poet’s strange use of gumcystum: “The striking feature here is that the Mermedonians are said to pledge their obedience not to Andreas, but to gymcystum’ manly virtues.’ Editors have coped in various ways with this curious use of an abstract noun to designate the saint…Kenneth R. Brooks, in the most recent edition of the poem, retains gymcystum with the explanatory note ‘gumcystum: lit. “manly virtues,” hence (abstract for concrete) “the virtuous one.” ‘This judgment is sound, I believe, but one might fairly ask what motivated the peculiar abstract-for-concrete figure at this point in the poem. If, recalling the Anglo-Saxon’s general interest in onomastic lore, we turn to the standard medieval authorities on the meaning of Andrew’s name, an answer may be at hand…[Jerome interprets Andrew as] virilitate, ut pugnemus. The Hieronymian interpretation of the name is repeated by Bede, Isidore, Rabanus…and even the Latin poets of the period pick it up.” Fred Robinson, “Some Uses of Name Meanings in Old English Poetry,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 69 (1968): 163–164 [161-171].
See the introduction of Robert Boenig, trans., The Acts of Andrew in the Country of the Cannibals: Translations from the Greek, Latin and Old English (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991) for a comparative study of the tradition.
Quoted in Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 39.
Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: The British Library, 1999), pl. IV (The Hereford Map); pl. 1.5 (the Anglo-Saxon World Map). See also pl. 6.3, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 66, for another representation of the island of Britain at the edges of the world.
At least one critic has previously noted this similarity: “In the Andreas, the apostles go to the land of Mermedonia as Vikings on their raids.” G.A. Smithson, The Old English Christian Epic: A Study in the Plot Technique of the Juliana, the Elene, the Andreas and the Christ in Comparison with the Beowulf and with the Latin Literature of the Middle Ages, University of California Publications in Modern Philology 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1910), p. 314.
P.J. Frankis, “The Thematic Significance of Enta Geweorc and Related Imagery in the Wanderer,” Anglo-Saxon England 2 (1973): 254 [253-269].
Beowulf, ed. F. Klaeber 3rd Edition (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1950).
The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. E.V.K. Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. VI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 11. la-3a, my emphasis; Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 513.
The Exeter Book, ed. E.V.K. Dobbie and G.P. Krapp, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 11. 85a-87b, my emphasis; Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 324.
The specific lines from the Ruin that most demand the identification with Bath are the following: “There were bright city buildings, many bathhouses, a wealth of lofty gables, much clamor of the multitude, many a mead hall filled with human revelry—until mighty Fate changed that…and the stone courts were standing and the stream warmly spouted its ample surge and a wall embraced all in its bosom where the baths were, hot at its heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour…the warm streams across the gray stone…until the round pool hotly…where the baths were” (Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 402). For a long and persuasive argument identifying the ruins in the poem with those of Bath see R. F. Leslie, Three Old English Elegies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 22–28.
Michael Hunter, “The Sense of the Past in Anglo-Saxon England,” Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974): 35 [29-50].
See, for example, Ivan Herbison, “Generic Adaptation in Andreas,” in Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. Jane Roberts and Jane Nelson (Exeter: Short Run Press, Ltd., 2000), pp. 181–211, esp. pp. 181-187 for a detailed summary of critical opinion of the poem.
Paschasius’ treatise is to be found in BL Royal 8.B.ix, a manuscript contemporary to the Vercelli Book and probably from Worcester (Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1000 [Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001], p. 82). Although there is no longer an extant Anglo-Saxon version of the opposing De corpora et sanguine domino by Ratramnus, it seems to have been known by Ælfric. Boenig suggests that the poem’s overt eucharistic imagery may explain its current location in Vercelli Cathedral in northern Italy. He proposes that the manuscript was brought to the Vercelli Synod of 1050, which was considering the orthodoxy of Ratramnus’s eucharistic theology, in order to be evaluated for orthodoxy itself (Boenig, Saint and Hero, p. 77).
See D. Hamilton, “The Diet and Digestion of Allegory in Andreas,” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972): 147–158 for a discussion of irony in Andreas.
The Vercelli Book is dated to the second half of the tenth century (See Neil Ker, Catalogue of the Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957], p. 464), while Andreas is traditionally assigned a ninth-century date of composition. It may be possible, however, that Andreas is more nearly contemporary with its manuscript than has previously been assumed.
Anita Riedinger, for example, points out that the tradition of assigning Andreas to the ninth century is, in fact, based largely on tradition alone: “It is possible that a major reason for favoring the ninth century arose from Fritzsche’s 1879 study of the poem, which argued both that the Andreas-poet’s work was Cynewulfian and that Andreas was modeled on Beowulf”. Perhaps because Beowulf has been so often assigned to the eighth century, Andreas was then merely assumed to belong to the ninth. But the potential Cynewulfian connection seems to have been even more influential in effecting its date; certainly the connection is an old one. In his first edition of the poem in 1840, Andreas und Elene, Grimm argued that Cynewulf wrote Andreas. Thus scholars both before and long after Fritzsche found that the poem was written either by Cynewulf or by one of his followers. In 1967, for example, C. L. Wrenn still speaks of a “School of Cynewulf,” in which he includes Andreas (Anita Riedinger, “The Formulaic Relationship Between Beowulf and Andreas,” in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period, ed. H. Damico (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 305–306 [283-312].
Riedinger herself accepts the ninth-century date, but her project is not to fix a chronological date, but to establish that the poem is later than Beowulf). Furthermore, the criteria for linguistic dating studied by Ashley Crandall Amos in her influential Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts allow a date as late as the end of the tenth century— a date contemporary to that of its manuscript (Ashley Crandall Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts [Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1980]).
This analysis leaves out metrical evidence, which is more controversial than the work of Amos. I should note, however, that one strong objection to this mode of dating Andreas is the metrical analysis of R.D. Fulk, who argues that “Beowulf, the biblical poems, the Cynewulf canon, and Andreas cannot belong to the tenth century, and probably not to the second half of the ninth either.” R.D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 337. The debate between these two methods of dating is on-going and will probably remain so. It is for this reason that scholars of Old English have turned to the date of the manuscript as a locus of contextualization.
See, for example, the range of approaches to dating Beowulf in Colin Chase, ed., The Dating of Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).
See, for example, Fred C. Robinson, “Old English Literature in its Most Immediate Context,” in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John Niles, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980), pp. 11–29
Roy Michael Liuzza, “The Texts of the Old English Riddle 30,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87 (1988): 1–15
Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Douglas Moffat, “Anglo-Saxon Scribes and Old English Verse,” Speculum 67 (1992): 805–827.
Gary D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth Century Britain to the Fifteenth (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995), p. 23.
There is evidence of continuous Christian worship from the pre-Viking era straight through to the reconquest of the Danelaw. See Dawn M. Hadley, “Conquest, Colonization and the Church: Ecclesiastical Organization in the Danelaw,” Historical Research 69.169 (1996): 109–128 for a discussion of the evidence as well as a discussion of the political uses to which the West Saxon kings put monastic lands in and on the borders of the Danelaw.
On this last, see also Robin Fleming, “Monastic Lands and England’s Defense in the Viking Age,” The English Historical Review 100.395 (1985): 247–265.
John Niles, “Locating Beowulf in Literary History,” Exemplaria 5.1 (1993): 91 [79-109]. For a more in-depth treatment of cultural accommodation within the Danelaw, see the essays in Hadley and Richards, ed., Cultures in Contact.
The third history associated with Alfred is, of course, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. On this topic, see A. Scharer, “The Writing of History at King Alfred’s Court” Early Medieval Europe 5 (1996): 177–206.
This is a common move, which Asser may have borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. See R.I. Page, “A Most Vile People”: Early English Historians on the Vikings (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1987)
Lesley Abrahms, “The Conversion of the Danelaw,” in Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21-30 August 1997, ed. James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons, (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), pp. 31–44.
The Old English Martyrology uses a similar formulation in its life of Saint Christopher. Christopher’s native race of dog-headed cannibals are described as, “of þære eorðan on þære æton men hi selfe” (of the country in which men eat themselves). G. Herzfeld, ed., An Old English Martyrology EETS os 116 (London: Longman, 1900), pp. 66–69.
Paul Lyons, “From Man-Eaters to Spam-Eaters: Literary Tourism and the Discourse of Cannibalism from Herman Melville to Paul Theroux,” Arizona Quarterly 51 (1995): 41 [33-62].
These terms are Mary Louise Pratt’s in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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© 2007 Heather Blurton
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Blurton, H. (2007). Self-Eaters: The Cannibal Narrative of Andreas. In: Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11579-9_2
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