Anglo-Saxon posting, PART ONE
Thank you for officially activating my trap card. First: the story of how I even got interested in this. For this, as much as people hate it, I will genuinely have to go back to my childhood.
Ever since I was four, I've been into world history. I have been studying as much as possible, beyond the things I was compelled to read for school reasons. One of these things was the Roman Empire.
I had the chance to go to the United Kingdom about 3 years ago. I am the only history buff of my intensity in my family. I wanted to go EXCLUSIVELY to the old Roman cities. My mom wanted to go shopping, so the only time our interests coincided was when I wrangled her to Bath. She enjoyed it, I was squealing my head off explaining things.
Our family friend says "if you liked Bath, you'll LOVE London!"
I did not love London. I never have. As a kid my greatest dream was to magically teleport into the British Museum's paleontology department, give a twice-look-see around the place, and teleport to back to my room to live out the rest of my days never having visited the city of London.
So I'm here, in the Tube, suffering from the overwhelming smell of Human in there, and then we get taken to the first surprise location of the trip: the British Library, AKA, the only place in London I was actually surprised by. Keep in mind that this trip all started because I was and still am a massive nerd. Came for the Romans, stayed for the rough outline of English kings which was drilled into me in school.
We go into the library and hit the Old English manuscripts. Then: there it is. My pride and honor. The crown jewel of Overly Sarcastic Productions before Journey to the West. My special interest in dragons since I was 7: the manuscript of Beowulf.
I barely remember what noise I made but I made SOME sort of inhuman racket contained by my fingers and the decorum of having to stay quiet in a nearly dark museum room, but the noise makes my mom join me. She does not speak British English and had never heard of Beowulf because she was raised on Medieval Spanish poetry the likes of El Cid. She thought Beowulf was fictional in the Hollywood sense.
A little added context: Beowulf pronounced in Spanish is far closer to the accurate Germanic way it was supposed to be said in Old English. Keep this in mind.
Two tall boys (they looked like BOYS, 16 or 17) dressed for a grammar school had been following my little family friend group around the library, and alighted on the Old English manuscripts. They had notepads and were, so far, polite to hang back when we were trying to look at the same manuscripts they were, so I'm assuming they were taking notes on the Old English language for class. I had dismissed them as the background NPCs of life and was mentally wishing them good luck on whatever they were doing.
Back to me in the presence of THEE Beowulf manuscript: I was excitedly whisper-screaming to my mom trying to translate the first stanza of Beowulf (which I have, roughly memorized, in modern English, to Spanish. Obviously, this required me to say “Beowulf” over and over….In the Spanish pronunciation, which I already said is more accurate to how it’s supposed to be pronounced. This was the only time in the library that I had ever turned to nerd out to anyone in my group, which means it’s the only time the schoolboys would have heard me speak.
Infodump over, Mom nods politely and slinks away to where the rest of the family friend group has abandoned us in favor of the non-western manuscripts like edits of the Q’ran or Hindu texts.
But I am not fast enough. I did not have my white cane back then and have no peripheral vision. I am stuck without orientation gazing at the Beowulf manuscript. Oh well, I like this fake Dane-Saxon blorbo from my scop poetry. So I didn’t fully notice that I was now shoulder to shoulder with the boys from before. I can hear the shorter one of the two kind of snickering. The taller one shoulder brushes me. I move because I think he wants to get a closer look at the lettering (I was trying to READ it, not the blurb). The taller kid shoulders me again, softly but more intentionally, and leans down to whisper, “You look like you’re not from here. Stop acting like you know what this is.”
Before I could try to figure out what to say, I bumped my nose in the glass (oh the wonders of being visually impaired), and they both shuffle me like an action movie super agent arrest towards where they saw my mother.
THAT turned me off the entire trip. In fact, it turned me off history in general for a few months.
And then I got into Assassin’s Creed a year after this incident. Which led me into Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Which reminded me that, when I was thirteen, school made me read a biography on some christian Anglo-Saxon king…by the name of Alfred the Great.
And I remembered a smidge of what I knew…I remembered liking Beowulf.
To discredit those boys, wherever they may be, I threw myself into studying the history of the Anglo-Saxons from 400 to 990CE.
