Dragons in the Sky: English-Speaking Communities at the Close of the Millennia

Stuart Lee & Patrick W. Conner, editors

Title: We have chosen our title from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 793:

"In this year terrible portents appeared in Northumbria, and miserably afflicted the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air"

While we in 2000 CE are unlikely to see dragons in the sky, and the Anglo-Saxons do not report seeing them in 1000 AD, the approach of the millennium then and now occasions both the dread and the excitement of expectation. It is difficult to imagine a better image for both of those emotions than dragons above, flying under their own sublime power and for their own hidden reasons. Some Anglo-Saxons may have imagined the reference in the Chronicle to signify genuine flights of real dragons in the air, and they are not, perhaps, very different from people today who know that somehow we are threatened from the same direction to which we usually look for the beneficence of our gods by holes in the ozone layers, mushroom clouds, and exploding airplanes. Some Anglo-Saxons, however, knew that dragons serve us as metaphors, and they may have been like many of us today who search less poetically for ways to embody the magic and power of the ciphers we assign to our lives when we tally our own age or that of our world. If the very number is significant when a person turns 16, 21, 30, 50 or 100, how much more significance is felt when we perceive our whole civilization to have reached such a numerical plateau. Indeed, there are dragons in the sky.

Synopsis: This book is a snapshot of two communities. The present day society of English-speaking communities (i.e. the United Kingdom, USA, Australasia, etc.) and the society of Anglo-Saxon England. Using the approaching millennium as a milestone in human history, this book will compare and contrast human experience in England of the tenth/eleventh century with the conditions of English-speaking people today, now spread over the earth since the last millennium.

The editors have compiled a substantial list of contributors to the book from universities in the United Kingdom and the USA, all of whom are highly respected scholars in the field of early medieval studies. Our audience, however, is not an academic one. Instead we aim to make this book available to the general public in high-street/main-street bookstores. We think that current interest in approaching the year 2000 will invite English speaking people to look to the last millennium and to compare their experience today with that of their peers one thousand years ago. We shall use a plain style to explain concepts as clearly and straightforwardly as possible, and we shall provide extensive illustration of every point. Smithsonian or New Scientist magazines represent the kind of informed, but non-patronizing approach to complex materials we want to emulate in Dragons in the Sky.

Following an introduction designed to provide our readers with a basic orientation, we shall confront the link between the concept of the millennium and apocalyptic notions, and explore in turn such topics as time and culture, religious practice, human relationships and sex, popular entertainment, politics and society, and heroic deeds and war in six chapters, as described below. Each section will consider attitudes of the Anglo-Saxons in the several areas, drawing on literature, art, and historical documents, and compare them to our own attitudes as demonstrated by current events, popular culture and contemporary analysis.

I. Introduction: Lee and Conner will draft the introductory essay together, offering a brief background to Anglo-Saxon culture of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and explain our methods and motivations for the study.

II. Apocalypse Now! Religion and attitudes towards it, sacred and profane time time, technology, and the search for "holy" icons come together in this grouping of essays.

1. Forecasting the Apocalypse [Conner & Lee]: We shall explore those Anglo-Saxon writings which concentrate on the Apocalypse in the year 1000 and link these to a growing sense of unease in contemporary America and England as the year 2000 approaches.
2. Concepts of Time [Peter Baker]: The essay will explore attitudes to the past, present, and future, and discuss how concepts of time and the ending of time become essential elements of the two cultures.
3. The Worship of Technology [James McNellis]: The reliance of religion has been replaced by the reliance and worship of technology. Do we see technology as the modern God, or the modern harbinger of the Apocalypse?
4. Religious Icons [Elaine Treharne]: What were the religious icons of the past? How did they function, and how have we replaced these in the modern day?

III. Private Lives: This section will concentrate on the individual in the 10th and 20th centuries. In short, what made or makes people tick in terms of their relationships with other individuals, their concept of a place in the family and society, and their escapes from the hardships of everyday life?

1. Individual Psyches &Psychologies [Martin Foys]: How have people defined themselves apart from the societies in which they live. The evidence in this area for the Anglo-Saxon period is abundant, but it is tantalizing, while in contemporary society, we have come so far in empowering the individual that "identity politics" is a subject taught in many of our universities. This essay will illustrate some of the constant and universal responses to the construction of indivuality we find in both of our communities.
2. Sex and the Family [Julie Coleman]: This article will explore attitudes towards sex, and sexual practices within or without the family. It will also explore the importance of the family structure and marriage.
3. Fashion and Display [Gale Owen-Crocker]: Individuals express their attitudes toward their own and other cultures, and toward their places in their culture in the ways they respond to fashion and the ways they present or display themselves in public.
4. Literature and Public Entertainment [Roy Liuzza]: Poetry and sermons, saints' tales and retold adventures all made up the body of materials available to Anglo-Saxons. We have new technologies for presentation, but do our texts really function differently from theirs? Are there really new uses for ÒreadingÓ considered broadly?

IV. The Birth of Nations: Politics, social organisation, the effects of law and governance will make up the subject matter of this part of the book. We will explore data relevant to current debates on socialism versus capitalism, the production and reproduction of Althusser's 'ideological state apparatuses' then and now, and the ways in which power is created and apportioned among members of a community.

1. Birth Pains [Conner]: While it is common to suppose that the very notion of nationhood is a modern notion, the Anglo-Saxons clearly were aware of themselves as a single political entity. How were these stirrings of nationhood replicated in the English colonies, and how did/do such stirrings suggest security in the face of the uncertainties of the approaching millennia?
2. Binding the Nation: the Technology of Communication [Marilyn Deegan]: While the Internet (and satellites and telephones) bind us into a communicating nation and world now, we are often not cognizant of the fact that communications have always been central to political definition. Although communications have increased immensely quantitatively, how have they changed functionally?
3. Binding the Nation: Commerce [Patrick Wormald]: Commerce drives economy which empowers the nation. On the brink of the last millennium, Anglo-Saxon England had begun to develop a complex commerce dependent upon the wool trade, craftmanships, and the manufacture of agricultural products, while the trade in such items served to establish reputations and power abroad. Many of the functions of commerce today are extensions of commerce in the past, but there is much to learn about contemporary nation-building by focusing on those areas where we do differ.
4. Rules of Monks, of Law, and of the Aristocracy [Mary Richards]: English speaking communities inherit their law codes from the Anglo-Saxons, not only from royal law codes, but also from the traditions of the Church and the ruling classes. Where do our own laws come from? This essay will explore not merely written code, but the social conditions which generate the rules we lived by then and now.

V. The Warrior Society: This section will focus not only on war, but on the whole social and psychological dimension of war and warfare, including the examination of military societies, the development of heroism, and the problematics of individualism within militaristic societies, as well as the general social and historiographic conventions which are associated with war and warfare.

1. Attitudes to War [Lee]: The twentieth-century has witnessed the two most savage conflicts in the history of mankind. In addition it has seen the transformation of war from a remote, but justifiable event, to something that appears on TV screens each evening, more akin to a soap opera. This section will explore the attitudes of the Anglo-Saxons to war, and their attempts to justify it. It will then compare these with the modern-day perception of war ranging from the jingoism pre World War One, the awareness of the brutality of War that arose during 1914-1918, to the media analysis devoted to such conflicts as the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
2. The Hero [Jonathan Myerov]: The hero is traditionally constituted in battle, and although we use the term metaphorically to call great men and women heros generally, on the eve of both millennia the patterns generated from then and now for military accomplishment are similar in fascinating ways.
3. The Enemy Without [Joy Jenkyns]: The enemy without has always been there, or so we have thought. Whether beyond the campfire or beyond our gunfire, nevertheless, there is always a group we define as "not us" in whom we find our greatest enemies.
4. The Concept of Peace in Our Times: [Rosemary Cramp]: Peace is always the goal of the commonweal; what it means changes from time to time, sometimes finding its locus in the monastery and sometimes finding its locus in general civic order. This essay will explore "peace" as the ultimate goal in both millennium communities.

VI. Epilogue: Here we shall attempt to reinforce trends and significant observations with two essays by the editors:

1. Making this book, 998 A.D.
2. Making this book, 2998 C.E.

In these essays, we shall try to tease apart much of what we have been trying to integrate in the book; we shall, in other words, try to leave the reader in the position of understanding how similar we are in many ways to the people who lived 1000 years ago, but what is distinct about them, and how our knowledge of that might tell us how we shall be viewed differently from our heirs in another 1000 years.

Notes to Contributors

This book rests on the following assumptions:

• The millennium is a significant time period in our history, then and now, and the millennium provides a milestone for us to compare then and now.
• There is a general interest in the past amongst the public and this market can be reached through the convenient comparison of the tenth and twentieth centuries.

The aims of this book:

1. To compare the two societies by exploring similarities and differences in terms of general human attitudes.
2. Though it is debatable as to how much we can learn from the society of Anglo-Saxon England to help with modern-day perceptions, this book will aim at the very least to show that England in the last millennium was not in a Dark Age, and it may point to interesting insights into our own culture.
3. To create a groundswell of interest in Anglo-Saxon England amongst the general public.

Each contributor will be asked to submit an essay of no longer than 4,000 words in length. A limited number of illustrations can be included but individual contributors must provide camera-ready copies of these and have secured the rights to their use in this context.

The editors intend to negotiate an up-front fee for each essay, allowing the editors to retain the rights to the essay for this collection only. Fees will be based on our negotiations with the publisher.

Deadline for final submission of each essay will be 31 July 1997 with an aim to publish in early 1998.

1. Your essay for Dragons in the Sky should not be seen as a major research exercise. Instead, contributors should see their contributions as an opportunity to draw together their ideas relating the past to the present. Enjoy the exercise of exploring areas which would normally be excluded from standard academic journals.
   
2. Assume the need to explain the elementary to the reader without patronizing him or her:
   

"the liturgy was central ..." [assumes that reader understands liturgy]

"the Church's formal rituals such as daily Mass, special feasts and fasts on prescribed occasions and the sevenfold daily recitation of psalms and prayers known as the "Divine Service" all fall under the general term 'liturgy,' and the liturgy was central ...." [gives reader a clue as to what liturgy is]

3. The former is certainly more economical, and economy is important, because general readers will probably be less patient than academic scholars, but that impatience will be exercised first where the reader does not feel sufficiently informed.
   
4. Include original languages of everything quoted, but provide translations in every case. Follow "broken out" quotations with the translations in the same format as the original, with a white space between the original and the Modern English translation.
   
5. We shall use no footnotes as such. Instead, follow the citation style of The Anglo-Saxons edited by James Campbell, and key comments on bibliography to several pages at one time, and add a bibliography for the whole volume, and provide a comment on particularly pertinent sources at the beginning of the notes for each new chapter or section of the book.
   
6. Illustrate, illustrate, illustrate. Cf. Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory, for examples of what we mean.
   
7. Attempt to maintain a balance between then and now, never letting either end fall below 1/3 of the material presented.
   
8. Your style must convey that you can go beyond mere dilettantism. In order to write with authority in the style we need to use, writers will of course need to know more data than they can ever allude to on any point.
   
9. The use of U.S. or British spelling and other mechanical conventions will be dependent upon the needs of the publisher. Be prepared to submit your contribution in whichever form is finally required.
   
10. One approach might be to write a damned fine undergraduate lecture.

For further information, write to:

Patrick W. Conner

Stuart Lee