Although Hilaire Belloc and J.R.R. Tolkien had much in common, not least of which was their shared and impassioned Catholicism, it is intriguing that they should differ so profoundly on the importance of the Anglo-Saxons.
Picture the scene. An expectant audience, which includes the great Catholic writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, awaits the arrival of another great Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc, the latter of whom has been invited by the University chaplain, Monsignor Ronald Knox, to give a talk to the Catholic chaplaincy at Oxford University. Seated just behind Tolkien as Belloc gives his talk is the celebrated Jesuit Fr. Martin D’Arcy, who records what subsequently transpired in his memoirs:
In his talk Belloc came out with one of his pet themes: that the Anglo-Saxons were utterly unimportant in the history of England. Now, there was present on this occasion a man who was probably the greatest authority in the world on Anglo-Saxon subjects and was the professor of Anglo-Saxon history [sic] at the time. He is presently professor of English Literature at Oxford. The man’s name is Tolkien, and he was a very good Catholic …. Well, Tolkien disagreed profoundly with Belloc on the question of the Anglo-Saxons. He was sitting just in front of me, and I saw him writhing as Belloc came out with some of his more extreme remarks. So during the interval, I said to him, ‘Oh, Tolkien, now you’ve got your chance. You’d better tackle him.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Gracious me! Do you think I would tackle Belloc unless I had my whole case very carefully prepared?’ He knew Belloc would always pull some fact out of his sleeve which would disconcert you! Now, that was a tremendous tribute from probably the greatest authority in the world at the time on that particular subject.*
Although Belloc and Tolkien had much in common, not least of which was their shared and impassioned Catholicism, it is intriguing that they should differ so profoundly on the importance of the Anglo-Saxons. Belloc’s view of history, for the most part astute and penetrative, was always skewed by a less than balanced Francophilia and an almost shrill Germanophobia. This was evident in his dismissive disregard of the contribution to Christian culture of the Germanic tribes of England prior to the Norman Conquest and his lauding of the Conquest itself as having brought England into the fullness of Christendom which was always, for Belloc, synonymous with the influence of France. In contrast, Tolkien considered Anglo-Saxon England to have been idyllically Christian. Had he had his “whole case very carefully prepared” to counter Belloc’s attack on the Anglo-Saxons, he might have shown that Anglo-Saxon England was profoundly Catholic, to such a degree that the saintly Englishman, Boniface, had helped to evangelize Pagan Europe, while his contemporary, the truly venerable Bede, had exhibited the high culture that Saxon England enjoyed in abundance. Whilst the former converted the Germans to Christ, the latter excelled in Latin and Greek, and classical and patristic literature, as well as Hebrew, medicine and astronomy. Bede also wrote homilies, lives of saints, hymns, epigrams, works on chronology and grammar, commentaries on the Old and New Testament, and, most famously, his seminal Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum which was translated into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred the Great. At the time of his death in 735 Bede had just finished translating the Gospel of St John into Anglo-Saxon. Almost six hundred years later, Dante expressed his own admiration for Bede’s achievement by placing him in the Paradiso of his Divina Commedia. In addition, had Tolkien decided to accept the gauntlet that Belloc had thrown down, he might have added a host of other Anglo-Saxon saints, from St. Edmund to St. Edward the Confessor, the latter of whom was eulogized by Shakespeare in Macbeth.
And, of course, Tolkien could have pointed to the literary legacy of Anglo-Saxon England, of which he was possibly the world’s leading authority. From the epic sweep of Beowulf and the didactic piety of “The Dream of the Rood” to the somber contemplation of mortality and mutability in “The Ruin,” “The Wanderer,” or “The Seafarer,” Tolkien could have waxed lyrical as Belloc’s argument waned.
There’s no doubt that the historical question of whether the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 can be considered a good or a bad thing for England in particular or for Christendom in general is a question worth asking, perhaps even answering. What is not in question is the Christian character of Anglo-Saxon England, in terms of the saints and the literature she produced. Pace Belloc, Tolkien could have shown that England, prior to the Conquest, was a beacon of Christian enlightenment which was not in need of the baptism of blood which the Normans unleashed at the Battle of Hastings.
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*Martin C. D’Arcy, Laughter and the Love of Friends: Reminiscences of the Distinguished English Priest and Philosopher (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1991), pp. 112-113.
The featured image is part of scene 52 of the Bayeux Tapestry, depicting mounted Normans attacking the Anglo-Saxon infantry, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Thanks for an interesting historical fact. Tales of “If X had met Y” are always intriguing. such as how Churchill almost met Hitler in early 1930s Munich. In this case, a meeting between two prominent Catholic apologists did happen, at least in the sense of hearing Tolkien hearing Belloc speak.
Now if Lewis or Tolkien had only met Chesterton, that would have been marvelous.
One of the great cultural legacies of Anglo-Saxon England not addressed in this worthy essay is the political and legal legacy that set England apart from the rest of the continent and largely spared them from the political turmoils that engulfed Europe during the age of revolution. England, due to it’s Anglo-Saxon heritage had a strong tradition of individual rights or even family rights that served to balance the power of the central monarchy. The political and legal legacy of England, going back to the Anglo-Saxons is why England produced figures like Burke, Rutherford, and Locke, while France produced Rousseau and Voltaire.
I think that you have to consider Belloc’s point of view, well explained in Europe and the Faith: His historical work is more apologetics than proper history, and Belloc wanted the English to understand that before the Reformation they were fully part of Christendom even if that meant to underestimate the British and Anglo-Saxon past. He was reacting to the English history as exposed in the 19th century. Not only Tolkien did not understand this (he was of another generation that has not suffered the anti-Catholic bigotry of the universities), but also and most notably Christopher Dawson.
Norman’s, Anglo-Saxons–interlopers and Johnny-come-lately’s to both to Britain and to Christianity. Now, the Celts….
Mr. Pearce, I most certainly agree with Tolkien, that said (having read a fair bit of the history on the subject), perhaps the strongest argument for the conquest being good comes from Edward the Confessor. In the Vita Edwardi written in 1066 a prophecy is recounted by Edward on his death that (here I paraphrase) “because the lords and priests and bishops of England are not what they seem to be, but are in fact wolves in sheep’s clothing and the nation is full of greed and sin and envy God shall deliver them over to the foreigners and there shall be fire and wailing across the land, and no peace shall come until a stump that has been split in two and each half carried apart shall be joined back together and begin to grow once more.”
William of Malmesbury, who was pro-conquest, also records this vision and interprets the prophecy as the marriage of Henry and St. Edith (the heir of the House of Wessex) and the birth of their son.
Belloc would have needed no instruction on the glories of Christendom in the old Roman Province of Britain between 597 and 1066. In “Europe and the Faith” he maintains that the revival of Christendom was an achievement of the Catholic Church, i.e., of Europe (not precisely France, but Rome!), and it comes to the very decayed and fractured Roman Province via the Anglo-Saxon language of the converted chiefs located in the southern and eastern shores of Britain. But what they converted to was Catholicism and the old Roman civilization that bore it anew to the Island. As he says explicitly, referring to Britain from at least the 8th century onward, “it is again an established part of the European unity, with the same sacraments, the same morals, and all those same conceptions of human life as bound Europe together even more firmly than the old central government of Rome had bound it. And within this unity of civilized Christendom England was to remain for eight hundred years.” If memory serves, his main point regarding the Conquest is that it was not fundamentally an external thing.
I feel the Saxons were the creative cult that gave Britain Christianity. Always felt their reluctance to accept the Roman way of life helped developed their independence & colonisation of England. They, with resolution eventually tamed the Viking, Norsemen & unified England as one Country with convertion to Christianity. I’m an Anglo-Irish Catholic, probably with mixed emotions of my Home Country & England but to read this article is frank & refreshing.
“That Germany had a tribal and not a civilized origin and was outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire and of the Latin language were two of the factors that led Germany ultimately to 1945…. The shattering of the Germanic tribe in the period of the migrations, fifteen hundred years ago, and the exposure of its members to a higher, but equally total and and equally satisfying social structure–the Roman imperial system; and the subsequent, almost immediately subsequent, shattering of that Roman system caused a double trauma from which the Germans have not recovered even today” (Carol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 409). One can imagine Belloc responding to Tolkien along these lines.