Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
For over a hundred years Anglo-Saxon attitudes have been a reproachful cry of those who perceived themselves
downtrodden (and in some cases were) by a confident triumphalist culture emanating from Britain. Like most resilient cultures,
the "Anglo-Saxons" turned all criticisms to humour. (Compare also the Quakers' embrace
of the term "Quaker".)
"Anglo-Saxon attitudes" was a cliché by the time Lewis Carroll spoofed
the phrase in Through the Looking Glass
(1871):
- "All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody
now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!'
- (For the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out
like fans on each side.)
- 'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes.'"
The cliché remains lively: Angus Wilson's satiric novel, Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes was published in 1956. In it, a grotesque idol discovered in Bishop Eorpwald's tomb has scandalized, mystified and
inspired a whole generation of scholars. As a young man Gerald Middleton was involved with the dig. Now an eminent historian, he
is privately haunted by a sense of failure, both as a man and as a scholar. The novel was turned into a made-for-TV movie in
1991.
When John Maddocks reviewed Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of
Races for the first issue of New York Review of
Books in February 1963, the header was "Anglo-Saxon attitudes". And when a new museum was opened at Canterbury in Kent,
on the site of St. Augustine's abbey, History Today headed its report, "Anglo-Saxon attitudes".
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was a historical conference "in pursuit of the English" to define the evolution of this cultural
self-image. It was held at the University of Salford, on July 9–11, 1999.
Compare "gringo" and "wasp" (the tautological
"white Anglo- Saxon protestant").
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