Bog Myrtle & Peat

The Saxons are fashionable again, and a number of recent books have reimagined Saxon culture as a kind of “Dreaming” in which pagan warlords overlap with giants and goblins on the fringe of early Christian reason. Viewed through the lens of Tolkein’s Middle Earth, modern writers find plenty of light in Anglo Saxon England – and at a time of collapse and loss in the natural world, it’s not surprising that readers should reach for expressions of “indigenous” spirituality. The Saxons can be made to align with ideas of wiccan, animism and a greater awareness of mindfulness and seasonality – it’s become a trend on social media, and if nature’s what we need nowadays, it’s no surprise the English are turning back in time for guidance. We’re used to doing the same in Scotland, and the cultural significance of a Celtic past allows us to stare longingly back to a vision of purer, more natural stories (even when the idea is sometimes nonsense). It would be harsh to deny the English something similar, but there is a devil in certain details of belonging.

Twenty years ago, it was trendy for kids to hang dreamcatchers in their bedrooms; teenagers burnt Indian sandalwood to conceal the smell of their weed-smoking, and the scent was allied to a sense of mysticism and adolescent curiosity. But we’re not so sure of these things nowadays. We’ve been thinking hard about ideas of cultural appropriation, and we sometimes feel uneasy about leaning into things which don’t belong to us. The Saxon story is fascinating because it offers a local kind of solace for a world which seems to be unravelling – and instead of buying white sage or moose antlers to engage with this loss, Saxon spiritualism allows the English to make far more immediate connections with the world on their doorsteps; with ash trees, holly bushes and hares. That’s bright and exciting, and I remember my own delight when I first picked rushes from my own yard to make a cross for imbolc. Big ideas came close to home that day, and it’s inevitable that we should be drawn to spiritualism which speaks directly to our experience of life.

This blog has charted my pursuit of the writer Henry Williamson, from the blood-stained mud of Flanders to the chortling streams of Devon. Williamson’s enthusiasm for fascism has cast a dark shadow over much of his work, but his political thought sprang from many of these same ideas of origin stories and ancient myths. Through his preoccupation with Richard Jefferies, Williamson became fixated with “sons of the soil” – the eternal, resourceful archetype of “Hodge” the landsman. Away from Tarka, Williamson’s work sometimes aligned with a Europe-wide trend towards literary ruralism, a movement which placed close emphasis on the roots of belonging. In principle, there’s plenty to be said in favour of ruralist narratives – they show how people and places are intertwined in a pattern of co-dependence. But ugliness arrives when places can only belong to certain to people – there’s a fine dividing line between “This is where I’m from” and “This is not where you are from”. 

Aspects of Nazi propaganda express a surprisingly tender engagement with environmental concerns, even when it’s couched in terms of national exceptionalism. Before he gained widespread appeal in Germany, Hitler’s early popularity depended almost entirely on farmers and country folk. Naziism spoke to their values (there’s more to come on this), and Williamson’s deliberate enshrinement of rural Devon, England and Englishness gets similarly muddy at times, particularly in his determination to find divides which have a grounding in ideas of a Saxon race and ethnicity. These are the dangerous conclusions of mining your own sense of belonging too deeply – and while it’s a stretch to link Williamson’s politics to the resurgence of a far more innocent interest in Saxon spiritualism, the roadmap is ready. 

Ted Hughes is a useful foil to Williamson, and the two writers chewed many of the same bones. Hughes placed a tight focus on England, Yorkshire and the ancient Brittonic kingdom of Elmet – but he was at pains to avoid the line at which “mine” becomes “not yours”. Despite what Sylvia Plath’s fans have sometimes implied, Hughes was nothing like a Nazi – and in pushing beyond specific claims of ownership, he also read and wrote across a global span of stories. Hughes was gripped by creation myths, and many of his children’s books are involved in retellings of “world literature”; he borrowed extensively from Welsh, Irish and Canadian mythologies, and his vacana cycles at the end of Gaudete reveal the poet at work on ancient Hindu literary traditions. In fact, Hughes was so emphatic in his rejection of Williamson’s English England that he sometimes seems downright cosmopolitan by comparison. But in occupying the role of “global citizen”, he opens himself to criticism from modern readers who could accuse him of cultural appropriation. There are some well-established controversies around the idea of permission – who can write about what is a sliding scale, but it’s easy to see why Hughes has sometimes fallen on the wrong side of changing trends – and if Williamson was damned for digging too narrowly, Hughes has suffered at the opposite end of the scale.

There’s plenty to ponder in the upsurge of interest in Saxon culture – it’s mostly good stuff, and ancient spiritualism can contribute to a clearer awareness of the world around us. But much like Celticism, the reality of “Saxon England” is too confused and distorted to do more than provide an occasional lens of engagement. Even as a Scotsman, I am surprised by how much skin I have in this game – Galloway was Saxon once, and I am far more engaged by ancient Northumbria than I am by tales of Picts or Gaels. The reality is that “Saxon culture” is nothing like a source-code for modern Englishness; it amounts to little more than a bundle of confusing and contradictory stories which are too strange and insubstantial to carry the weight of that expectation (and if you’d reached that point, you’d also need to think hard about why you were looking for such a source-code in the first place…).

The Saxons do provide enough material to create a sense of “something”, but there’s not enough meat on those bones to provide any concrete, guiding form – and in that sense, “Saxonism” needs to be treated with care because it can be made to support a host of divergent ideas, some of which are downright unpleasant. It’s no attack on England to ponder this aloud – all nations have a tendency to look back and imagine themselves in earlier, earthier times – but the leap is never simple.