The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are Read Online Free PDF Page B

Christian
     conversion of all German lands was proof that Germany was a single nation,
     ‘clean and resolute, its inner unity and its unity to itself transferred by
     the poet … onto the persons with his holy story’. 35 The Saxon
     detail and thinking of
Heliand
became a pan-German myth: Jesus lining up
     with Bismarck. Vilmar was delighted by the rude remarks throughout the text about
     the ‘sluggish’ people of the South, who were mostly Jews, and the
     obvious superiority of the ‘Germanic’ disciples. His ideas persisted. At
     the time of the First World War the Gospels, told in Saxon verse, had somehow become
     ‘a pithy story of German manhood’. 36
    In the 1930s, the history of the
     Hanseatic League – trading towns working together so they could effectively subvert
     national powers – somehow turned into a claim for German national dominance. It was
     as though the fact that the Hansa had happened once could wipe away all those
     hundreds of years when it didn’t happen at all; and there are papers in the
     essential French journal
Annales
from the 1930s which are now unreadable
     because they claim all kinds of ‘powerful spiritual and intellectual
     forces’ behind a merchants’ union, make metaphysics out of the account
     books. 37 That is not the worst. In pursuit of a criminal idea of race,
     the SS was to become a perfect, almost mystical bunch of Nordic thugs, not only
     identified by type and shape of head but also bound into a carefully chosen past.
     With absolutely no irony at all there were posters in wartime Norway which showed a
     Viking standing most approvingly behind an SS man, freelance freebooters and a
     foreign state police oddly united against Nazism’s mirror, Bolshevism. 38
    History helps kill, if you’re not
     careful, so let me make one thingclear. I
     am celebrating the North’s contribution to the culture of Europe, but that
     does not mean forgetting the glories of the South; this is a story of connections. I
     want to isolate one part of the whole story only in order to get it clear, because
     it is the part that is so often missed.
    German nationalism went wrong, that is
     obvious, and in a particularly ugly way. By contrast an Englishman can read some of
     the English and British nineteenth-century versions of the past – just as determined
     to sing anthems and wave flags – and try to find them simply absurd.
    That would be a mistake. They still have
     extraordinary power.
    The English have a story every
     schoolchild knows, how Anglo-Saxons stormed the coast of Britain some time in the
     fifth century and pushed out or even exterminated the British and Celtic natives and
     changed the island for ever; we became Germanic, and we started to speak a kind of
     English. We became Christians in a world still pagan. We qualified to be a separate
     nation, six centuries before that meant much, and we had what every nation needs: a
     story about its origins.
    We’ve good authority for this.
     Bede’s
Church History of the English People
39 is the work of a
     great scholar who had access to a very decent library in his monastery at Jarrow. It
     was finished around 731 CE , which is as close as we can get to the
     invasion he describes, but not very close. Bede does say how he did his research,
     which was impressive: he had a Canterbury abbot to tell him what happened at
     Canterbury, who in turn drew on the memory of older men as well as what was written
     down. Meanwhile, a future Archbishop of Canterbury went to Rome to work through the
     Vatican book chests with the Pope’s permission and bring back letters of Pope
     Gregory for Bede. When he writes in his history about St Cuthbert and his island
     life on Lindisfarne, he says he wrote or talked to any credible witness he could
     find.
    But is Bede himself credible? He wrote
     about the times that mattered most to him: the times of Christian missions and their
     success. When he writes about earlier times, he