Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxon paganism is attested by scraps. Bede names two goddesses, Hretha and Eostre, in the course of explaining month names, and Eostre gave English the word Easter. Royal genealogies trace descent from Woden; place names preserve the gods in Wednesbury, Thundersley and Tuesley; and the days of the week carry Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frig. David Wilson's study assembles the material and is candid that it does not add up to a theology.

The archaeology gives more. Furnished burial with weapons, jewellery and food, cremation under mounds, the ship burial at Sutton Hoo with its extraordinary deposit, and the temple Bede describes being destroyed by its own priest at Goodmanham together indicate a religion concerned with lineage, with the display of standing, and with the passage of the dead.

The Old English Rune Poem, preserved in a Christian manuscript, names each letter with a verse, and some of those verses appear to carry older material inside a Christian frame. The atlas records the gods as attested by name and by place, and marks the rest as not recoverable, rather than filling it in from the Norse sources, which are three centuries later and belong to a different branch of the family.

The conversion began in 597 with the mission Gregory the Great sent to Kent under Augustine, and proceeded kingdom by kingdom, with reversions, across most of a century. Irish missionaries working from Iona converted Northumbria from the north, and the Synod of Whitby in 664 decided in favour of Roman practice on the dating of Easter, which settled the question of which church the English kingdoms belonged to.

Bede, writing at Jarrow by 731, is the source for nearly all of this, and his history is a work of argument as well as of record. His account of the sparrow flying through the lighted hall, offered in a Northumbrian king's council as a reason to accept the new teaching, is the most quoted description of a conversion in English.

What followed was one of the earliest vernacular Christian literatures in Europe. Caedmon's hymn, the Dream of the Rood in which the cross itself speaks as a retainer, and the biblical poems collected among the Anglo-Saxon minor poems were composed in the alliterative verse of the older tradition. Beowulf, a poem about pagan heroes written by a Christian, sits exactly on the seam. Old English became a language of preaching, of law and of scripture translation, unusually early and unusually fully.