Gerald of Wales

Abstract

In the post-classical period, records of the customs of ‘the Celts’ (or their various successor ethnicities) become very sparse. Historical records of various kinds are available, but there are few attempts at ethnography. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of England, however, undoubtedly provided rich opportunities for the observation and construction of boundaries between Anglo-Saxon and Welsh, and for elaborations upon the relative character of these two peoples, as they were coming into being in opposition to one another. The early Icelandic material presented by Hastrup¹ shows, within the best documented early Germanic example, sophisticated use of the boundary between the social and the non-social: beyond the domestic space of family and farm was an area of the breakdown of law, morality and reason, the habitat of outlaws, monsters and goblins. Early Anglo-Saxon society no doubt made similar moral use of its ethnic and geographical frontiers. In Beowulf, Grendel lies beyond the frontier:

a fiend from hell

was that grim guest Grendel called

infamous march-stepper, he who moors held

fen and fastness;

… Cain’s kin …

thence were born monsters and elves

and orcs, likewise giants

they against God strove²