What have the Anglo-Saxons ever done for us?

It has been a while since I’ve considered the vexed question of Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’. More than 30 years, in fact. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my Anglo-Saxon tutorials with dear, lovely, gentle Richard Hamer. And now he is the author of the standard translation being used by my children on their own university English Literature courses. (I suppose the Latin equivalent would be having been taught by the author of Kennedy’s ‘Eating’ Primer.)

Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’ is the pivotal word in ‘The Battle of Maldon’, a 325-line fragment of Old English poetry about an otherwise obscure skirmish between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, and much studied on English courses because it’s one of very few surviving examples of our island’s nascent literature. The Vikings won, but was it nonetheless a sort of moral victory for the Anglo-Saxons, who set a noble example through their heroic self-sacrifice? Or is the poem a veiled criticism of the arrogance and tactical stupidity of Byrhtnoth which helped bring about an unnecessary defeat?

Well, it depends on how you translate ‘ofermod’, which elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon literature is used to describe the overreaching pride of Satan. Not that I expect you to care very much either way, unless you read English yourself and it gives you a frisson of nostalgia. Which does rather invite the bigger question: why would anyone wish to spend three years of their lives and tens of thousands of pounds poring over such recondite linguistic nuances?

Lots of people now say that we shouldn’t: that ‘soft’ degrees like English Literature lead to dead-end jobs; that they’ve been irredeemably corrupted by teachers obsessed with feminism, Marxism, race, etc; that they lack the rigour of the Stem subjects everyone should be encouraged to do because then we’d be a world-beating tech economy.