Review : The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Most of the time, reading the source material of a classic text turns out to be a very good idea. It's not that later interpretations are necessarily wrong or invalid, but they often simplify complex ideas and lack context. And sometimes filtering a piece through the wisdom of later ages does more harm than good, or exaggerates the original message far out of proportion than the author intended, or takes it in wildly different directions from where it should ever have gone, or glosses over vital points that can change the understanding completely.

Examples include the famous "tragedy of the commons", a widely-misunderstood metaphor from a 1968 essay by Garret Hardin which is awash with abject racism that gets lost in basically all modern uses. Wigner's famous "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" is perhaps another, a remarkably boring essay memorable solely for its famous phrase, offering little or no philosophical insight into anything very much. Erasmus' Praise of Folly is a similarly overrated bit of fluff – amusing, perhaps, but too clever by half for its own good.

I may or may not eventually write up something about these. We'll see. Today, though, an example of the opposite case. For the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is mentioned in so many history documentaries and books that it was practically inevitable that I'd try and read the source material for myself. Indeed, I would be surprised if there was a single piece examining the history of the period that doesn't reference this at some point. My penchant for going back to the source drew it to me like a very lethargic moth to a fairly dull flame : a slow progression to be sure, but an inexorable one.

This will not, of course, be a proper review of the source material. That would be silly. No, I'm afraid this one is only a rant. In short, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not for you. Without context provided by proper scholarship, it is useless, tedious in the extreme, and largely devoid of meaning. Don't bother. Trust me, anything you might gain from studying it first-hand is more than offset by wading through its interminable dullness, and vice-versa, anything you might lose by hearing it second-hand from a professional historian will be more than compensated for by their greater contextual knowledge and ability to make material engaging and relevant to a modern audience.

I will, however, offer a few more ordinary review thoughts on the particular edition I have. It is dreadful. It doesn't even say who the translator is, much less offer any kind of explanatory notes about the text. Penguin Classics may have the occasional dud of a translator who won't shut the fuck up and let the reader get on with, well, reading*, but by and large they're very good at providing the basic background needed. They usually give plenty of short, concise notes to explain the more obscure points without ensnaring the reader in a vicious web of petty details. Thus far, all of Penguin's translations of Cicero do this nigh-on perfectly.

* Penguin's Praise of Folly contains about 50 pages of academic-level intro and almost every page is about 50% text, 50% footnotes, making the whole experience more like wading through a swamp than reading a book.

This edition of the ASC is however not a Penguin publication at all, and it shows. No translator listed, no explanatory text, no footnotes of any kind. Maps ? Illustrations ? An index ? Forget it. It even has some bad formatting, like the occasional line where the spacingisallmessedupsoeverythinglookslikeonelongword. Or parts in which WORDS are capitalised AT random or, with wrong! punctuation in places. There's a total and utter lack of paragraphs even in the longest entries, which go on for several pages. And it appears that this edition combines all the different versions of the Chronicle, with some years having (without explanation) multiple separate entries, which usually repeat but with frustratingly minor variations. 

Usually... but not always : sometimes the differences are significant, so you've no idea if a repeat entry is ever worth reading. Oh, but wait, what am I saying ? Of course they're not worth reading, because none of them ever are !

But some final thoughts on the edition before addressing the text itself. The amount of editing done here is absolutely minimal, with maybe three of four place names enclosed in square brackets to give the modern location names. That's it. And often they use spellings of terms, people and places which are quite different from the common standards adopted for the archaic versions, making them difficult to look up. "Reve" for "reeve" is a simple example but often it's a lot worse than this.

The most annoying thing by far is that the translator makes no attempt to clarify who's being referred to. The Chronicle has the bad habit of saying things like, "Then Alfred attacked the Vikings, and they had a great victory" : who's they ? Alfred ? The Vikings ? And the following text (if there is any, because most entries are very short) is often of no help as it usually moves swiftly on to another topic altogether, or worse, maintains the ambiguity. Or it will talk about the conflict of two kings and then refer to "this" or "that" leader without specifying who it means. Now this is because the authors of the Chronicle were, unarguably, pretty shit writers, but the modern translator could at least have included the consensus from modern historians to clarify who the devil they're talking about.

As I say, dreadful. I give it 2/10, and I only don't give it 1 because the price is at least reasonable. Physically too it feels rather cheap, like someone printed it at home and bound it in an oddly-stiff cover.

But to move on, I repeat that the original authors were shit. Their choice of what to include is downright bizarre. When I gave a lecture course on galaxy evolution, I included a history of astronomy in the 20th century and made the joke that this was a lot more fun than the more general history, which is largely one of blood and death. The authors of the Chronicle would not have understood the joke at all, thinking nothing amiss in reporting who was bishop of so-and-so, briefly reporting that half the country had died of plague and then immediately moving to the much more important matters of some paltry church needing a new roof or whatnot. Sometimes it becomes pretty obvious that they're reporting some things at length as a direct, look, this is what you said, we wrote it down in black and white maneuver : an insurance policy against kings reneging on their promises. 

Mostly, though, it's just weird. Occasionally this makes it at least vaguely amusing. The entry for 671 AD consists in its entirety of, "This year happened that great destruction among the fowls." Absolutely nothing else is given to explain "that great destruction", leaving the reader mystified. Later entries are particularly concerned, equally inexplicably, with fruit.

There are probably no more than two somewhat interesting points in the whole thing. The first is that the Viking invasions did not begin with 793 at Lindisfarne, which modern historians still seem to take as the beginning of the Viking period. No, the Chronicle says the first invasion (of unspecified size) was actually a few years earlier, in 787. It doesn't actually specify where, referring only to the Wessex king's sheriff driving them away – so presumably somewhere on the south coast. This relatively minor incident doesn't have the dramatic appeal of the Lindisfarne raid, but still, it's odd that this is overlooked in the usual histories.

The second more general point is one not which I attach any blame to modern historians to, but to which I will say reflects the poor school-level history education of my day. Of course, any good book of the period will tell you about Canute and the other Viking invasions after Alfred's time, and the Chronicle makes clear that Alfred's victory was limited – and by no means assuaged fear of further Norse incursions. In my day, the story was basically : Vikings invade, Alfred bashes them, establishes the Danelaw, gradually everyone pushes them back into the sea, and then the Normans came. The whole bit about being under Viking rule after Alfred was cheerfully ignored.

The Chronicle tries its meagre best to portray Alfred as the all-conquering hero, of course, but its rhetoric is clumsy in the extreme. Describing him as "king of all England except the Danish bits" is like me declaring myself Supreme Overlord of the Couch, though to be fair it does make the exact same claim for a Danish king in the Danelaw region. This mediocre hyperbole at least isn't as annoying as later entries, though, which start saying, "the king William" or the "the king Harald", a downright irritating and unnecessary use of articles. 

The Chronicle is never itself any sort of literary work and doesn't try to be. But on occasion the entries are given in quite passable verse in the Beowulf style, which does at least make those parts somewhat more interesting (thereby making the other entries worse, since they could have done better if they'd tried to). Often, however, it degenerates into little more than lists of names, places and dates, the proverbially bad style of history-telling. 

But its biggest literary flaw by far is to introduce new people without any explanation whatever as to who they are, frequently just to say that so-and-so was made bishop of such-and-such, or, equally, that someone never before referred to had died. Following the text as any sort of coherent narrative is all but impossible. It's something that you don't so much read as parse, and usually only with great difficulty.

In short, the text is wretched bad. I practically missed Alfred's most famous battle, so brief was its description in comparison to the relentless relation of random people being appointed as bishops or dying horrible but pointless deaths. If it contains anything relating to Harald's famous promise to William that he wouldn't compete for the throne, or that William killed all the people applauding his coronation, then I didn't spot it. Mind you, it could well be there and I simply didn't see it on account of having to wade through the endless tedium of the rest of the text. It had an overpowering tendency to dull my brain.

By the end, I was really just persevering so I could have the bragging rights needed to write this post, because ranting about an unfinished book is obviously cheating : now I have a marginally more qualified position from which to pronounce my damning verdict. Of course, the whole experience was a colossal waste of time. It probably took me some months to finish the stupid thing, because I got so bored I read maybe half a dozen other books as a distraction.

Well, we live and learn. That particular millstone is now firmly flung from neck and shall never return.