Native British Trees and Anglo-Saxon Paganism

Introducing our new series, in which we explore the links between our native British trees and Anglo-Saxon paganism!* This post serves as a caveat for the historical claims in the following posts, as well as the use of certain terminology, before we get to the investigation of different trees in the main series! This series is more academically dense than some of our other posts. For a quicker, more accessible read, take a look at our posts about our native woodland or animals that live in our woods at night!

Detail from Collingwood's Odin's Self-Sacrifice (1908)

Anglo-Saxon Paganism

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of primary written sources for Anglo-Saxon paganism (sometimes called heathenism) in England. The Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain in significant numbers after the Romans left in the fifth century, bringing with them their pagan religion, which persisted until the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century. Some scholars even say that Anglo-Saxon pagan beliefs persisted in fragmented form until the eleventh century, although these scholars do meet with disagreement from their colleagues.

Historian Ronald Hutton details the historiography of paganism in Britain, highlighting the Enlightenment tendency to argue that “a full-blown pagan cult had persisted all through the Middle Ages…” This culminated in the popular imagination with Egyptologist Margaret Murray’s theory that there was a coherent “Old Religion” that included alleged-witches-as-pagans, a horned nature-god and organised cults. Hutton has no patience with this idea, saying that the historical revisionism that came with the rise of secularism and the decline of Empire “proved all the data assembled to argue the case for persisting paganism to be either misunderstood or susceptible to different readings.”

Hutton allows for the idea that pagan religion may have been preserved in folk belief, but says, “We simply do not know, as no evidence survives to determine the matter.” At any rate, Hutton points out that “references to pagan Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian deities disappear completely from English magical recipes after the eleventh century.”

Hutton himself prefers to speak of “pagan survivals,” meaning pagan “customs, beliefs or objects taken into Christian religion, culture or society from ancient paganism and redeployed in the new religious context” as opposed to “surviving paganism,” which would imply a persisting pagan religion. These pagan survivals might be found in ritual magic, popular service magic, folk customs and seasonal rituals and Christian cultures with the deities and spirits of the ancient world.

Hutton’s idea was attacked by later authors such as C. S. Watkins, but I like the “pagan survivals,” approach in many ways.

Runes, characters from ancient Germanic alphabets associated with magic, hint at a possible coexistence of Christian and pagan beliefs in early medieval England. The Ruthwell Cross in Dumfries and Galloway is covered in Northumbrian runes. It is a cross, detailing a theme from the English poem, The Dream of the Rood, which deals with the trials of Christ. Paul Johnson, in his book Runic Inscriptions in Great Britain, points out that this runic version has “strongly heathen overtones” and links it to the sacrifice of Woden on the world tree (discussed in my post on Woden and the ash tree).

This cross also has carvings of a tree with animals, as does the Bewcastle Cross near Hadrians Wall. The latter depicts traditional Christian imagery and (possibly) secular imagery of falconry, with the tree carvings on the opposite side. This, says Johnson, has been paralleled with “Yggdrasil, the world-tree of heathen cosmology.”

Detail from the Ruthwell Cross 

As Hutton points out in his Pagan Britain, “As long as they remained pagan, the Anglo-Saxons were illiterate, and so by definition all the textual evidence for their religion is retrospective. It is also fragmentary and incidental, for after they converted none of them were interested in preserving a full portrait of their former beliefs and practices.”

This means that, for Anglo-Saxon pagan beliefs, we need to rely on later Christian sources, place-names, archaeology, and comparative analysis of Norse and Icelandic sources. There is also linguistic evidence, like cognate names and poetic formulas that shows continuity between Anglo-Saxon and Norse paganism. Archaeological evidence like burial practices, weapons and runes or other symbols might also provide evidence for continuity of worldview. We do need to be cautious in making claims about this though, as evidence is patchy and there might be a lot of regional variation.

Evidence from Iceland

Icelandic literature like the Sagas (collections of thirteenth-fourteenth century stories about Norse settlers who had come to Iceland in the ninth and tenth centuries) and Eddas (medieval prose and poetry about Norse mythology and Scandinavian history) does show a Germanic style of paganism which could have been similar to Anglo-Saxon religion. This is because of the shared Germanic origins of the Anglo-Saxons and Norse people: Anglo-Saxons came mainly from Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in what is now northern Germany and Denmark, whereas Norse peoples came from Scandinavia. Genetic evidence shows that there was a large-scale substantial migration across the North Sea into Britain during the Early Middle Ages.

Again, this literature should be treated with caution, as it was written much later than when the Anglo-Saxons were known to be practising paganism in Britain in an organised way. Having said this, there are a lot of things that we can say—and there is more that we can speculate about that provides reasonable, intriguing possibilities for reconstructing Anglo-Saxon paganism.

Gods and Sacred Trees

Gods that we can identify in Anglo-Saxon religion include Woden (equivalent to the German Wotan and the Scandinavian Odin; associated with kingship, magic and inspiration), Thunor (equivalent to the Norse Thor and the German Donner; a storm god and symbol of strength), Tiw (equivalent to the Roman Mars; a war-god associated with oath-keeping) and Frigg (goddess of love, fertility and abundance).

Detail from the Bewcastle Cross

There were also definitely Anglo-Saxon sacred-tree cults. Tacitus’ Germania noted that German pagans “deem it to be inconsistent with the majesty of the gods to confine them within walls or to represent them after any similitude of a human face; they dedicate groves and woods and call by the name of gods that invisible thing which they see only with the eye of faith.”

Scholars like Audrey Meaney and Andrew Rabin point to Old English law codes that forbid pagan worship at trees and groves. Michael D. J. Bintley quotes some of these from the eleventh century: Anglo-Saxon monk, abbot, and scholar Ælfric’s complaints in his homily De Auguris about offerings made to trees, stones and springs; King Cnut’s law codes addressing the worship of heathen gods as well as natural objects, including trees and Northumbrian law codes, which recommend fines for those worshipping trees. There is also place-name evidence that indicates that trees were a ritual feature of major local importance.

Of course, many claims about the religious significance of trees in this period must be exploratory. Using the available evidence, though, this blog series will reconstruct what we can say or speculate about our native British trees in Anglo-Saxon paganism—so local historians and new researchers have a place to start!

*A note on the use of the terms “native” and “Anglo-Saxon”: 

There are two possible candidates in this blog series for words which might be deemed unsuitable, but which I have chosen to use: “native” and “Anglo-Saxon.”

Use of the term “native”: There have been complaints about the use of the term “native” even in biological contexts due to its connotations of xenophobia as well as the problem of defining what counts as “native” without choosing an arbitrary boundary. In a letter to Nature, Mark Davis and colleagues argued that conservationists should assess organisms on environmental impact rather than on whether they are “natives.” This was on the basis that “Nativeness is not a sign of evolutionary fitness or of a species having positive effects.”

This argument was addressed in another letter to Nature asserting that Davis and colleagues “assail two straw men”: firstly, that most conservation biologists and ecologistsare not indiscriminately opposed to non-native species but rather those that  threaten ecosystems, habitats or species. Secondly, the benefits of introduced species for erosion, food and timber are not ignored: “Nobody tries to eradicate wheat, for instance.”

Usually, the term ‘native’ when it comes to British trees means those that arrived in Britain following the last Ice Age, before the UK was disconnected from mainland Europe and I do think that it is helpful to use the term for a number of reasons. Native woods are important for biodiversity partly because they support specialist species that have evolved close relationships with these trees. Click the link to read about how we planted our own native wood!

Our newly planted native wood glistens in the snow

That’s not to imply that non-native trees and animals are morally “bad”—I’m very proud of our mix of the historic, ecologically rich mix of native and non-native wildlife in our Victorian spinney! Also, of course the Anglo-Saxons in Britain would have interacted with non-native trees. But I do think the lens of native British trees is an interesting one when considering our cultural—as well as ecological—heritage.

Use of the term “Anglo-Saxon”: Some scholars have been calling for a reassessment of the term “Anglo-Saxon” and this has spooked even such universities as Cambridge to reconsider its use. Medievalist Mary Rambaran-Olm complains that the term has been used in racist ways. Rambaran-Olm does not actually argue that the term should be eliminated in all contexts (for instance, in the three cases in which Latin records use the term or quoting previous scholarship) but she does recommend limiting its use much more than I think is helpful.

One point of contention seems to be the extent to which the people who arrived in Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire formed a coherent ethnic group, although recent scholarship does provide evidence of this. In an article called ‘The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool,’ the authors find “…a substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in early medieval England, which is closely related to the early medieval and present-day inhabitants of Germany and Denmark, implying large-scale substantial migration across the North Sea into Britain during the Early Middle Ages.”

These people were confronted with a land abandoned by the ruling Romans, it’s urban centres in decline, desolate in some ways although not entirely apocalyptic (as new research suggests that some parts of the economy did not collapse). Historian Will Bowden disputes the idea that “the end of Roman Britain was sudden, dramatic and apocalyptic.” Bowden agrees that “By the early fifth century…Roman life was apparently over. Towns had vanished, not to be revived for several centuries, while the everyday use of coins was abandoned, and dress, diets and buildings changed beyond all recognition.”

However, although “Barbarian troops had been part of the Roman army for centuries and were a mainstay of most late Roman forces” and “The Anglo-Saxon ‘colonisation’ of eastern Britain doubtless involved blood and violence,” it is also true that “the widespread appearance of Germanic styles of dress, burial and building suggests that many natives adopted such things rapidly, perhaps viewing them as a new way of participating in a changing and fragmented cultural and political landscape. Evolution, then, not armageddon.”

I’ve chosen to use the term Anglo-Saxon to describe the Germanic-speaking Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians who arrived in Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire and their descendants. This is not on the grounds that they were ethnically or culturally unified (although this may have been the case in some respects). Rather, it is the interactions of these new arrivals with Britain’s landscape, its existing infrastructure and its people that built this new, post-Roman world, which I why I think it is useful to have a hyphenated term that denotes the group as a whole.

As I argued in my recent publication, ‘Negotiating With Tides and Tigers’, I don’t think it’s helpful to abandon terms as they undergo pejoration as it results in a kind of academic whack-a-mole in which more time is spent eliminating or rehabilitating terms than actually doing the work. In that case, I was talking about religious “syncretism,” about which many scholars complain. In the context of ethnography in the Sundarbans, I argued that it is more useful—and more ethical—to revise the concept of syncretism while in the field, in collaboration with local people, rather than to abandon it. There might be other contexts in which the term “syncretism” merits a different treatment, but I wouldn’t abandon the term altogether.

In my blog post about Wittgenstein’s language games, I argued that it’s useful to be flexible with our use of important terminology. I used the example of the word “indigenous,” which, in some contexts, the term implies self-identification; in others, historic residence, and in others cultural specificity. All these meanings are helpful in the right contexts and in some cases it can harm already marginalised groups if we ignore that fact, so I wouldn’t insist on the term having one fixed meaning. I certainly wouldn’t recommend abandoning the term altogether.

As a philosopher, my instinct is that thinking things out when it comes to opposing claims is only a good thing, but I’ve started to think that the debate is so distorted already that giving certain ideas the time of day is actually making things worse. My worry is that we are spending more time justifying or demonising terminology than actually doing the interesting or useful work. I found the same worries at a recent conference I attended from people at universities all over the world: “a lot of people have made a lot of money out of academic activism”; “we spend more time arguing about this stuff and moving words around than actually doing the work.”

For this reason, I’m limiting my caveats to this post so that we can get on with the really interesting conversations in the upcoming series. I recommend the same flexibility when it comes to the terms “native” and “Anglo-Saxon” as I argued for in my Wittgenstein post, which is why I’m using them in my own blog posts here!

In our next post, learn about the ash tree, England’s link to the ancient runes!

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