Tea at Trianon: “Anglo-Saxons aren’t real.”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

“Anglo-Saxons aren’t real.”

From The National Review:

Hwæt! News has just come down from the U.K. Telegraph that the venerable dons of the Cambridge University (est. 1209) Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic History — apparently suffering from a profound crisis of identity — will now be instructing their students that “Anglo-Saxons aren’t real.” Apparently, anti-racists at Cambridge have determined that the phrase smacks too much of “the myth of nationalism.”
Britain being the multicultural melting pot it is, emphasizing its Anglo-Saxon roots now apparently seems as churlish as emphasizing its Norman French ones during the Napoleonic Wars. (The Welsh, Scots, and Irish are also purportedly not supposed to have ever “existed” as coherent ethnic groups under Cambridge’s new rubric, which will be news to my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty at the very least.)
This alone suggests why the entire exercise is such insultingly ahistorical nonsense. First of all, nationalism is not a myth. While in its modern form — as a politically unifying force giving coherence to an internationally recognized state — it is certainly a creation of the 19th century, the idea of ethnically or culturally coherent identity groups goes back, transparently, to the dawn of humanity. (The German word Deutsch literally descends from a proto-Indo-European root that functionally means “us people as distinct from them.”)

It must be understood that the complexities of British identity are various and ongoing, and the idea of a “national identity” as one that binds together different races, native languages, or ethnicities is as old as . . . well, as old as the British Isles themselves. Once upon a time these islands were occupied by dark-skinned, blue-eyed hunter-gatherers. Then those were wiped out by neolithic Anatolian farmers. Then those were almost entirely genetically replaced by Indo-European horse-warriors, first presumably Celtic-speaking and then later (this time documented historically) by Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons. (Read more.)