Beowulf: A Text Which Continually Fascinates

Scholars do not know precisely when and where this fascinating story was written. Some suggest that it was composed as early as the late 600s and others propose dates as late as 1000. The location of the writing is often thought to be England, but there are reasonable arguments to be made for either Denmark or northern Germany. The location of the plot is most probably in or around Denmark.

This book is a story, a poem, and a song. It is narrative, its form has an importance of its own, and whether sung or read aloud, it was designed not only to communicate but also to sound. The book has no title in its surviving manuscript, so the name of the protagonist has become the title.

The text has attracted a steady stream of readers and researchers for over a thousand years, and this for multiple reasons.

Linguists consider it a valuable example of Old English, which was spoken and written from approximately 450 to 1050. Much of the Old English language is nearly indistinguishable from Old High German and Old Low German, which were spoken around the same time. These three languages are siblings, descending from a parent language, West Germanic.

Literary scholars consider it perhaps the only surviving example of a genre of which we otherwise have no remaining texts. Its poetic style and structure are landmarks.

Historians and cultural anthropologists mine the book for clues about the society in which it was composed, and the slightly different society which was its subject matter. The plot is fictional — or rather, contains fictional elements — but also refers accurately to historical events which took place in the late 400s or early 500s, more than a century before the story was written.

The book is also a book of contradictions. As indicated, reliable historical data pinpoints certain events, places, and people. But other elements in the book are not only fictional; they are fantasy. Fact and fiction are interwoven throughout. The characters are warriors, dragons, and monsters. The names will sound ancient to the twenty-first century American ear: Hrothgar, Grendel, Beowulf. The mother of the monster Grendel, herself a monster, plays a major role in the narrative.

A second tension lives in the text: the poetry, the plot, and presumably the author manifest traces of both sincere Christianity and Germanic paganism. The heathen belief systems native both to Europe north of the Alps and to Britain didn’t disappear in an instant when the Christian faith arrived. The two worldviews were interwoven in cultures for many years, and the characters in Beowulf demonstrate certain inconsistencies reflecting their society’s embrace of two incompatible conceptions of the world.

The poet knit Christian and pre-Christian motifs into a single fabric, as scholar Rosemary Jean Cramp writes:

Christianity has so deeply penetrated the language, metaphor, and thought of the poem that we must assume an audience with some tradition of Christianity and most probably Christian poetry behind it. The poet naturally presupposes also a wide knowledge of traditional heroic stories but he penetrates below the surface of such stories and their conventional situations, sympathetically considering the sufferings of innocent participants, the impermanence of success and happiness, and the courage of the heroes who had to live without the consolation of Christianity.

The pre-Christian pagan narratives remain on the surface of the characters. Christianity will introduce an exploration of the inner life. The text of Beowulf gives more occasional glimpses of the protagonist’s inner life than one generally finds in the purely pagan Germanic sagas.

In 1939, the archeological discovery of a burial site from the 700s provided confirmation that the “poet’s descriptions of the equipment and lavish burials of kings was neither exaggerated nor dependent on pre-English traditions.” The discovery, in Suffolk, revealed “a curious mix of heathen and Christian elements in the burial.” Rosemary Cramp adds that “there was no trace” in the burial area “of the human or animal sacrifices which were a feature of fully pagan burial rites.”

While traces of paganism are certainly present and clearly visible in the text, it is no longer the full-throated paganism of pre-Christian Scandinavia, because it lacks human sacrifice.

The dual nature of the text shows, on the one hand, a pagan warrior-code with ruthless familial feuds, a powerful concept of fate, immortal fame being earned by heroic deeds, and an honor culture which drives characters to self-aggrandizement and glory-seeking. On the other hand, with a touch of dissonance, the narrative contains Christian concepts like forgiveness, a framework of good versus evil, biblical allusions, prayer to a benevolent Savior, and a merry afterlife.

The times and places of the plot, and later of the writing, were “rather newly Christian,” writes Burton Raffel: “Layers of morality and tenderness and piety are intermixed,” with the pagan “glorification of war, death, and fame.” In the lingering paganism, on its way out and yet making itself felt in culture, “such humdrum occupations as farming, fishing,” and “the care and feeding of both adults and children are all denigrated, casually, when they are mentioned at all. Slavery is taken for granted.”

The introduction of Christianity into the culture brings about a more sympathetic eye, seeing the humanity of the slaves, servants, and craftsmen.

In this harsh heathenism, “battle is a way of life, a necessary function of the worthiest members of society,” Raffel notes. Among the leadership class of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes, “death being the supreme product of their occupation,” the warriors found honor in killing and in being killed. Christianity refuses to glorify killing.

“This morality, born of its time and its circumstances,” does not “sound particularly Christian. And yet the poem is full of Christian sentiments, joined with or superimposed onto this more or less pagan code of battle-heroism-kingship.” The reader might be tempted to think that the story is the result of a collaboration between two or more authors, so great is the tension between the pagan elements and the Christian elements. Yet Raffel states: “It seems fairly clear, however — and I myself have no doubt — that Beowulf is the work of one man and that its author was a Christian.”

Early in the text, the description of the natural world is such that “whoever wrote it was plainly a Christian.” The reader might think that such a passage was inserted into the narrative by a later hand, but Raffel argues that

Most of the Christianity in Beowulf is not so easily dismissed as interpolation. “Let God be thanked!” (Alwealdan Þanc), cries Hrothgar, for example, when the Danes assemble to celebrate Beowulf’s victory over Grendel. These are his first words; he goes on, almost at once, to assert with great feeling that

... the Almighty makes miracles
When He pleases, wonder after wonder, and this world
Rests in His hands …

It is God, as I have already noted, who leads Beowulf to victory over Grendel’s vicious mother, once Beowulf has proved that he is willing and able to help himself. The examples could be multiplied many times over: the essential nature of this Christianity may not be quite the same as that practiced in twentieth-century London or in California, but it is an integral part of the poet’s thought and view of life.

Trying to imagine how a poet would compose a text in which the heathen worldview and the Christian worldview coexist, sometimes harmoniously, and sometimes dissonantly, Robert P. Creed notes that “Beowulf is the work of a Christian poet.” But this Christian poet set his narrative in times and places in which the Christian faith had not yet arrived. Britain and northern Europe were still solidly pagan in the 400s and 500s. The poet would have heard and read about names, places, and events; he integrated those into his own narrative.

What was this poet’s creative process? Robert Creed offers two options. In the first option, the poet sees latent Christian virtues in the stories of the heroes in a pre-Christian society:

At some point after the arrival in England of the Christianizing mission of St. Augustine in 597 a traditional singer who was also a Christian told again the story of the noble hero. To this Christian singer the notion that this magnanimous warrior was not a Christian was unthinkable. Beowulf’s conduct showed that he had been the willing servant of the true God.

Alternatively, the poet might have heard a song about a warrior, and detecting that both the song and the warrior lacked spirituality, added this dimension to the narrative, and created from scratch a new poem:

Or it might have happened in this fashion. The Anglo-Saxon singer heard a crude song of monster-wrestling and tribal warfare and decided to make a better man out of the hero of these savage doings. God, the singer had learned, was the fountain of all virtue, and the noblest adventure of all was the imitation of Christ. His noble hero would in his fashion have to imitate Christ.

That is, after all, what Beowulf does in this poem. Hearing that the Danes are at the mercy of that devilish son of Cain, Grendel, one of “a brood forever opposing the Lord’s Will,” the hero leaves his home in southwest Sweden and sails to the rescue. He wrestles with and defeats Grendel in the hall that becomes for that moment symbolic of the whole world.

The text names specifically Cain and Abel, and does so once at the beginning of the narrative and once toward the end. The monsters are in a “lake” that “burns like a torch.” These are clear biblical references. In the end, Hrothgar tells Beowulf, “our only help lies with you,” making Beowulf into a Christ figure. In Raffel’s words, Beowulf obliges by being “the man who died to save his people.”

Beowulf’s funeral retains the faintest hint of paganism, as his body is laid atop a funeral pyre. The Christian element is present in the funeral narrative, too: Bewulf’s soul drawn into eternal paradise, as “Heaven swallowed up the billowing smoke.”

The deceased goes up, not down.

Burton Raffel offers two slightly different hypotheses about how the pagan and Christian elements were mingled into the text. There may also be other possible scenarios. In any case, however, the two influences are braided intricately with each other, and organically, reflecting the two influences in the larger society: both present and detectable, but paganism on its way out, and Christianity on its way in.

These two belief systems moved past each other, one on the descent and the other on the ascent, in fits and starts, but generally at glacial speed. It took centuries to root out pagan practices like human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, and the payment of wergeld — a practice in which a human life was given a monetary value, and a killer need merely to pay this sum to the victim’s family in order for justice to be declared satisfied. Other pagan practices — the buying and selling of women, infanticide, and the kidnapping and enslaving of outsiders — extend and continue this general tone of devaluing human life.

So it is, then, that Allen Kent Hieatt writes: “The Christianity of the poet’s England was still strongly influenced by pagan habits of thought.” The narrative belongs to a “great body of partly heathen, partly Christian Germanic poetry and prose.”

The pagan and Christian strands have perhaps one common point: the clear sense of loyalty — to one’s family, friends, tribe, or king — as an ethical principle. Yet this shared ideal is soon split: in the pagan instance, the response is to kill without exception anyone who is disloyal; in the Christian instance, the response is to endure the disloyalty with patience and forgive the traitor.

“The transmutation of Germanic mores from personal vengeance to the fight against evil depends partly on the Christianity of the author,” writes Hieatt. This author’s “Christian milieu influenced his choice of supernaturally evil figures rather than men as Beowulf’s enemies (although of course these figures belonged originally to the realm of folklore).”

Hieatt continues:

There are a number of plainly Christian references in the body of the poem: to an Almighty who is just, to a shepherd who cares for souls and a malicious being who attacks them when they are not vigilant.

Additionally,

There are also definite biblical reminiscences. Grendel is said to be descended from Cain; the sword hilt which Beowulf brings back to Hrothgar from the underwater battle with Grendel’s mother has an inscription referring to an ancient race of giants, alien to God and flood-whelmed, reminiscent of the Nephilim of Genesis.

After offering a few examples of Christian influence, Hieatt points to the competing heathen ideology:

On the other hand, frequent references to an inscrutable, all-controlling fate; to being fated, i.e., doomed to die; and to a man’s fame as the only thing that will live after him are all in accord with what we know of Germanic pagan habits of thought, although there are no references to the ancient Germanic divinities.

Agreeing with Burton Raffel, Kent Hieatt argues that the two disparate worldviews in the text are not “later interpolations.” Instead, “what might seem to be discrete Christian elements and remnants of pagan thinking appear together” organically “and plainly come from the mind of a single author.”

Such elements are capable of residing in a text side-by-side, even if they are capable of generating a small amount of cognitive dissonance:

They are perhaps better described as elements of the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, which assimilated older views rather than completely discarding them.

In contrast, scholar Frederick Rebsamen allows for an outside chance that the author of Beowulf was not a Christian:

The Beowulf poet was either a Christian or very familiar with and influenced by Christianity. The very tone of the poem in places, especially in the final third, reflects the Christian patristic influence that pervades much of Old English poetry. But some of the principal characters are historically North Germanic pagans, and much of this tradition is retained by the poet, notably in some of the characteristics of Beowulf.

The author, argues Frederick Rebsamen, whether he was a Christian or not, addressed implicitly if not explicitly the fact that his audience lived in a culture and a society which was Christian, but only recently so, and which was well aware of its pagan past:

The way in which the poet solves the problem of religion in this heroic-elegiac poem composed for a Christian audience is one thing that leads me to believe that the poem was composed not long after 700. At that time, although the Anglo-Saxons were generally converted to Christianity, they were also strongly aware of their pagan past. Thus the poet, while introducing the idea of only one god, a kind of Old Testament god whose name is spelled exactly as today, does not push things further, makes no mention of Christ or anything else in the New Testament.

The author mentions “not one pagan god,” and the English/Germanic word wyrd is used in the text to refer to a concept of fate. The word had been used, prior to the writing of Beowulf, to refer to a Germanic god. The author thus reduces wyrd from a personal god to an impersonal concept. The demotion of wyrd goes even farther, when Beowulf’s “courage withstood wyrd.”

Frederick Rebsamen points out that God “is mentioned thirty-two times as God and at least sixty times” in the text “under several other names.” He concludes:

Though the pagan Germanic tradition is reflected in many ways, one god, named God and introduced through Christianity, is in charge.

As a man, Beowulf was, Rebsamen surmises, “a curious blend of pagan and Christian.”

Writing about the many scholars who’ve analyzed Beowulf over the years, Seamus Heaney suggests:

They devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world which operates in the poet’s designing mind displaces him from his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem — a pagan Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the living overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the afterlife.

Heaney proposes that such investigations are reasonable, but that they perhaps miss a greater investigation: the literary merit of the work. Beowulf is, after all, a poem, and as such, the structure, form, and sound are as important as — or more important than — its meaning and its analysis. He hopes that the reader can enter into a fantasy of monsters and dragons and the heroes who slay them, without having to be bogged down in critical apparatuses or interpretations.

What is the structure that houses the two worldviews which are at work in Beowulf? Heaney posits that the narrative contains an inner and an “outer” perspective, which allow to comment on the plot from two different viewpoints. The inner, internal, viewpoint is that of the pagan Germanic world.

But there is another, outer, rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at places and legends which his ancestors knew before they made their migration from continental Europe to their new home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and even censure the ways of those who lived in illo tempore:

As evidence, Heaney cites lines 175 to 180, in which the poet reports that the ancestors “vowed offerings to idols” and “swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people.” These things happened at “pagan shrines.” The poet distances himself from his ancestors: “that was their way.”

The poet’s own worldview appears in line 188, where he explains that the souls of the dead come to rest “in the Father’s embrace.”

Of course, Heaney offers this data from his own translation of the text; other translations confirm his presentation.

The poet offers a glimpse of the transition from the world of his ancient ancestors to his own world. He does this by showing how materialism receded. In the world of Beowulf, gold is a greatly valuable, perhaps the most valuable, possession. Over the course of the narrative, the status of gold changes:

By the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals riches in the medieval sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all value has been put in doubt.

The dragon, in Heaney’s estimation, is part and parcel of Beowulf’s world, and it is a sort of litmus test for the warrior: Can Beowulf slay the dragon? But the dragon has meaning beyond the mere physical test of skill:

Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival.

It has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with any transcendental promise.

The text of Beowulf offers many onramps for exploration: it can be read aloud for a purely auditory and musical experience; it poses fascinating questions about society’s metamorphosis from blood-thirsty Germanic paganism to a humane Christianity which values every human life; it highlights the tension between outer-directed and inner-directed psychologies, between the narrative of warriors who attend only to being shamed or praised and the narrative of characters who have an internalized sense of honor or guilt; the book blends solidly documented historical realities with fantasy creatures, like blending oil and water.

The many different aspects of this text, and the many different types of questions which it poses, explain the large amount of intellectual energy which scholars from different disciplines have expended in their investigations of it.

Teaching Marcus Aurelius in Introductory Humanities Courses — Find an Approachable Translation

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has long been a staple in interdisciplinary Western Civilization courses at the secondary and post-secondary levels. The text offers connections to both history and philosophy, reflects the influence of Greek thought on Roman thought, and when compared and contrasted with Epictetus, can be used to explore the late Roman version of Stoicism.

In whole or in part, it is included in many anthologies, reading lists, and syllabi.

Many students, however, encounter a significant but unnecessary obstacle to this text: its translation.

In the early twenty-first century, many anthologies, being reprints or slightly revised editions of textbooks published in the twentieth century, offer the Meditations, or excerpts of it, in translations which were done in the nineteenth century — and many of those translations deliberately affected an English prose style which was even older. Imagine an eighteen-year-old in the year 2025 pausing his video game long enough to look at this:

This also thou must consider, that many things there be, which oftentimes unsensibly trouble and vex thee, as not armed against them with patience, because they go not ordinarily under the name of pains, which in very deed are of the same nature as pain; as to slumber unquietly, to suffer heat, to want appetite: when therefore any of these things make thee discontented, check thyself with these words: Now hath pain given thee the foil; thy courage hath failed thee.

This passage was translated into English by Meric Casaubon in the 1600s, and it is still occasionally inflicted on students today.

If the topic of study were English prose style in the seventeenth century, such an assignment might be justified. But if the object of study is Roman Stoicism, then the translation poses an obstacle without any benefit to the student.

A specialist who is studying the history of ancient philosophy may have the patience and ability to untangle Casaubon’s prose, but an introductory course should not burden the student with this reading.

Why are these texts still assigned? Often the reason is, directly or indirectly, money. Older texts are no longer copyright protected, and can be printed and reprinted for free.

More accessible translations are available.

In 2002, brothers and Montana natives C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks offered The Emperor’s Handbook, published by Scribner.

In that same year, Random House published the Meditations as translated by Gregory Hays.

Both of these recent translations make Marcus more comprehensible to twenty-first century teenagers than renderings in Elizabethan or Victorian pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Classical scholars can explore and debate the philological merits and weaknesses of these translations, but the classroom instructor can vouch for their practical value. These twenty-first century translations make Marcus Aurelius intelligible and user-friendly.

This example is one of many. Students are introduced to Aristotle and Plato, to Sophocles and Vergil. A student’s first exposure should be in an enjoyable text.

There are many obstacles which hinder the scholar’s goal of helping young people find the humanities engaging. Difficult-to-read translations of assigned texts needn’t be one of them.

Or, as the Hicks brothers phrase it, “Whether speaking to the Senate or to the humblest person, use language that is respectful, but not affected. Let your speech be plain and honest.”

They Elected Their Kings, They Elected Their Emperors: Democracy Is Older Than You Think

Students hear of ‘democracy’ often for the first time in connection with ancient Athens. Those who have the opportunity to study closely, however, are often disappointed to find out that the Athenian version of democracy was exclusive: only a small number of people were voting citizens, and every effort was made to keep than number small.

The exclusive nature of Athenian democracy is significantly different from the inclusive democracy which has guided American political thought for more than two centuries.

Next, the Romans experimented with partially democratic systems. During the Roman Monarchy, from 753 BC to 509 BC, the Senate elected the kings, who were installed for life onto the throne. During the Roman Republic, from 509 BC to 27 BC, there were a few faint elements of democracy in the elections of consuls and tribunes; censors sometimes elevated elected magistrates to the Senate.

But a full-throated systematic democracy, with the free elections of representatives, was still in the future.

The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) would be one of the first — perhaps the first? — political institutions to have a truly elected leader. The reader will remember Voltaire’s old joke: The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Instead it was a secular middle European defensive confederation.

Charlemagne was crowned emperor of most of Europe in 800 AD, and after his death, his dominions were ruled by several generations of his descendents on a hereditary pattern. This Carolingian dynasty eventually dissolved into chaos. The dominions were regrouped and reorganized into what would become the HRE.

The HRE followed an ancient pattern from middle and eastern Europe in which kings were elected, often by a council of feudal lords. The feudal system was localized, with many lords each having his own small territory. The lords were obligated to the peasants who lived on their land; legal documents detailed the responsibilities of the lords to the peasants. The lords functioned as representatives of the peasants in electing a king.

Thus Conrad of Franconia was elected in 911 AD, and his successor, Henry the Fowler, in 919 AD. Here is a clear and early case of an elected leader.

England introduced the notion of limited government in several documents. In 1100 AD, Henry I issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ (also known as The Coronation Charter or The Statutes of the Realm). In 1215, King John consented to the Magna Charta. In 1689, Parliament issued a Bill of Rights which limited the powers of the monarchs. While the English enactment of limited government is a profound precedent, it happened in the absence of elected executive leadership.

In the HRE, and in areas bordering on the HRE in eastern Europe, elected leadership brought about a de facto limited government, if not de dicto or de jure. The emperors of the HRE were not absolute rulers in the style of the Roman Empire. They needed to seek a consensus of those who elected them before taking actions.

The feudal lords who began electing kings, and later emperors, slowly redesignated themselves over the years as ‘princes’ and, to distinguish themselves from other princes, as ‘electoral princes.’ These princes often held the upper hand, and it was the emperor who had to answer to them, and not they to him. The emperor of the HRE was then an elected representative whose task was to do the will of the people.

Note the vocabulary in historian Martyn Rady’s account of political events on the geographical margins of the HRE:

The Transylvanian principality was the creation of the Hungarian king, John Szapolyai, elected in 1526 as a rival to Ferdinand. Unable to make good his claim to the whole of the kingdom, Szapolyai had retreated to the highlands of Transylvania, which was internationally recognized in 1570 as an independent principality under its own prince, who was elected by the Transylvanian diet.

The word ‘elected’ appears twice in a short paragraph.

John Zapolya, an alternate spelling of Szapolyai, was elected King of Hungary in 1526, and remained king until his death in 1540. During his reign, a counter-claim was made by Ferdinand I, who was already archduke of Austria, and who was elected king of Hungary in 1526. That’s right. Two different guys were elected to the same office in the same year. How did that happen?

The monarchs were elected by “diets” which were congresses or conventions or some kind of legislative assembly. It turns out that there were two diets in Hungary. One was the parliament of the untitled lesser nobility or gentry; this diet elected John. The other was the higher aristocracy, magnates, or barons; this diet elected Ferdinand. John and Ferdinand were supported by different factions of the nobility in the Hungarian kingdom. Each thought himself to be rightfully king of Hungary.

It’s a complicated and confusing story, but it points to the importance of elections in that time and place. Democracy can be messy.

For present purposes, what’s important is not the complicated and intricate details of Transylvanian and Hungarian politics, but rather the fact this was all done by electoral politics.

While ancient Greece and ancient Rome may have had a system with a few democratic elements, their leaders were not purely the result of voting. On the other hand, the HRE and some of the late feudal systems of central and eastern Europe had leaders who were placed into office purely by voting. The supremacy of the vote can be seen in elections in which the voters (at that time called ‘the electors’) did not function as a mere “rubber stamp” approval of some previously anticipated outcome, but rather were defiantly independent of expectations.

In 1292, the electors chose Adolf of Nassau to be the emperor of the HRE. In 1312, the electors chose Henry of Luxembourg to be the emperor of the HRE (upon taking the throne, he became known as Henry VII).

Both the election of 1292 and the election of 1312 demonstrated the independence of the electors. In both cases, many observers expected the election to go to a member of the Habsburg dynasty, but the electors exercised their freedom to vote otherwise.

The same is true of Conrad of Teck, formally known as Conrad II of Teck, who was probably elected to be emperor — the documents surrounding his election are ambiguous — but was assassinated “within forty-eight hours of his election,” as Martyn Rady phrases it, if indeed he was actually elected at all.

So the electors had real power — the power of the ballot. That’s democracy.

To be sure, suffrage was far from universal. In the years up until 1257, the number of electors was relatively large, but also undocumented, unknown, and varying. In the pre-Merovingian and Merovingian times, quite large numbers of electors took part in the process; but the exact number is not known.

Gradually the number of electors sank. Between 1257 and 1648 — i.e., until the end of the Thirty Years’ War — the number of electors was seven. Between 1648 and 1806 — i.e., until the end of the HRE — the number grew gradually to ten.

Despite the often relatively small number of electors, the process was truly democratic. This was a pivotal moment in history: major leaders — perhaps the leaders of the most powerful political entities on earth — were chosen democratically.

Like freely-elected leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these elected leaders of earlier centuries could not do whatever they wanted — they could not act arbitrarily or capriciously. They answered to the constituency who elected them.

So it was that these early instances of true democracy were directly linked to early instances of limited government. The emperors of the HRE did not act with the unquestioned absolute limitless authority and power of the ancient Roman emperors. After being elected emperor, they continually had to negotiate and compromise with those who elected them, as is clear in the following narrative reported by Martyn Rady:

Rudolf was forced to back down, agreeing in 1606, in the Treaty of Vienna, to full religious freedom in Hungary. Sensing his weakness, the Bohemian diet obliged Rudolf to make similar concessions, including the right to hold Protestant services on crown and church lands. In the Letter of Majesty of 1609, Rudolf agreed that a permanent sub-committee of the diet, known as the Defenders, should police the religious settlement. He promised that, ‘Henceforth no free noblemen or inhabitants of towns or villages, including peasants, should be forced by a higher authority or indeed anyone, be they churchmen or laymen, to give up their religion or be compelled to change religion in any way whatsoever.’ Rudolf gave similar rights to the townsfolk and nobilities of Upper and Lower Austria.

Officially known as Rudolf II, he became emperor of the HRE in 1576. But as the text above shows, he was continually compromising with his subjects. An unavoidable result of truly free elections in increased liberty for the electors.

In sum, it can be argued that the antecedents of modern political democracy, as it is known in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is found not in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but rather in the central and eastern European elected monarchs, and subsequently in the HRE.

An Early Arabian Cathedral: Reconstructing the Design of a Lost Architectural Style

Yemen is the southwestern coast of the Arabian peninsula, a strip of land measuring a little over 100 miles from north to south, and a little over 500 miles from east to west. For reference, the area of Yemen is about 200,000 square miles, a little larger than Montana and a little smaller than Texas. The city of San‘a’ is located in Yemen.

Because the name of this city is originally written in Arabic script, it is also sometimes transliterated into English as Sanaa, as San’a, or as Sana.

In this city, a ruler named Abraha built a grand church. Likewise, for reasons of transliteration, his name is sometimes also spelled Abreha, Abrahah, or Abrahah al-Ashram. In the middle of the sixth century, probably around 567, he caused a structure to be built in an architectural style, “the equal of which neither Persians nor Arabians have ever built,” in his own words. This church has been the object of intense study by historians.

William Hugh Clifford Frend proposed the date of 567 as likely for the building of the church, but this must be regarded as an approximation.

Two historians, Barbara Finster and Jürgen Schmidt, wrote a detailed investigation of the church, including an analysis of, e.g., the building materials used in its construction:

Als Abraha seine Kirche plante, schrieb er an den Qaisar, d.h. an Justinian, und bat ihn um Unterstützung für sein Bauvorhaben. Dieser sandte ihm daraufhin Handwerker, Marmor und Mosaiken. Da auch der Yemen über Marmorvorkommen verfügt, muß Justinian einen speziellen Marmor geschickt haben, vielleicht den schön geäderten prokonnesischen Marmor oder bereits vorgefertigten Säulen.

This structure must have been impressive, because of the high quality of the materials used to build it, and because of the direct involvement of Justinian.

The church no longer exists. It, along with all the other churches in the area, as well as Christian schools and seminaries, was destroyed when Islamic armies invaded the area from the north.

The church as San‘a’ is a reminder of an era, prior to the rise of Islam, when the Arabian peninsula was inhabited by large numbers of Christians, who lived peacefully alongside Jews, animists, and Zoroastrians.

Given the surviving written descriptions of the church’s architectural details, the two historians were able to produce diagrams of the building. The building was surrounded by a plaza or courtyard:

Die Kirche selbst umgab im Abstand von 200 Ellen ein Peribolos mit einem mit Marmorplatten ausgelegten Hof, der möglicherweise Nebengebäude einschloß. Weiträumige Höfe, die vor allem Prozessionen dienten, sind für äthiopische Kirchen überliefert, und es ist anzunehmen, daß auch in San‘a’ Raum für den tawaf geschaffen werden mußte.

The church was an impressive structure, and the indoor and outdoor processions and ceremonies were grand events. The destruction of the church was a tremendous loss to the history of art and architecture.

Luther Fuels the Resistance Movement: Jumping a 400-Year Gap

Martin Luther died in 1546. How did he play a role in energizing an underground network inside Germany working to undermine and disable Hitler’s vicious plans?

The secret organizations which undermined the National Socialist war effort and saved the lives of thousands of Jews were composed of a diverse array of individuals. Lutherans worked with Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Eastern Orthodox believers. Some members of the resistance were not primarily motivated by spirituality, but rather came from aristocratic families or from the military.

Many underground operatives, including famous leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl, were motivated by their Lutheran faith. Others weren’t explicitly Lutheran, but encountered Luther’s thought as they worked with their fellow anti-Nazi conspirators.

How did Luther contribute to this resistance? As historian Uwe Siemon-Netto write, it was Luther’s “ceaseless admonition to speak up in the face of governmental evil,” and “his unequivocal opposition to all wars of aggression — and his advice to soldiers to disobey orders that violate God’s commandments.”

In the early 1930s, when Hitler began to seize power, the demographics of Germany resembled those of many other countries at that time, and throughout both the preceding and subsequent decades: The population could be grouped into those who seriously engaged in their spirituality, and those who were content to be nominal members of some church.

Those who understood, internalized, and acted on their spiritual principles, found themselves obliged to oppose Hitler both with their words and with their deeds.

Those who made no effort to shape their lives and actions according to the Christian faith, and who made no effort to understand the ethical commitments which this faith entailed, were content to sit idly by as the National Socialists started wars and murdered Jews.

The resistance movement was explicit in citing its spiritual motives as it opposed Naziism. Uwe Siemon-Netto explains that “uniformly Lutheran countries, such as Norway, based their resistance to tyranny on Luther’s theology.”

John Steinbeck’s novel about the Norwegian resistance movement captures this in a passage describing the home of an underground member. In the house hangs a painting of Christ as bringing hope.

Luther was certainly not the only source of thought for the movement. Augustine was often cited, and contemporary German clergy from a diverse range of theologies — Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran — formulated argumentation which revealed why significant and concrete actions had to be taken against Hitler. From these sources and others, the resistance assembled an intellectual framework justifying their actions: sabotage which slowed the manufacturing of weapons, vandalism which slowed military supply lines, misinformation which confused military intelligence assessments, printing forbidden texts to alert the public to the evils of National Socialism, and the organized escapes which took Jews out of Germany and into safe countries.

By contrast, the Nazi leadership was uniform in its opposition to Christianity. The Nazis occasionally co-opted Christian words or ideas to hide their true intentions, but this was a cynical exploitation of Christianity, not in any way an embrace of it. Some National Socialist leaders had be raised in the Christian tradition, but they explicitly rejected Christianity when they joined the Nazi hierarchy, as Uwe Siemon-Netto writes:

The ex-Catholics in the top Nazi leadership rejected the Catholic faith of their childhood in favor of forms of religiosity that would not pass doctrinal review by theologians of any serious Christian denomination, with many, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler, embracing a rabidly anti-Christian variety of neo-paganism.

While individual narratives are complex, the big picture is clear: dedication to the Christian faith was a major component of the intellectual foundation of the anti-Nazi resistance movement.

The Mayerling Incident: Facts vs. Speculations

The deaths of Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf can be explained simply: On Wednesday morning, January 30, 1889, they were found dead inside a locked room in the Crown Prince’s hunting lodge in Mayerling, a small village southwest of Vienna. The circumstances have driven investigators, on that day and for the last 135 years, to conclude that the event was a murder-suicide pact, in which Mary Vetera asked Rudolf to shoot her before he shot himself.

While the basic report is clear, the further details are muddy and complicated. What was the motive — what were the motives — for this horrifying act? Who may have had knowledge or suspicions about it beforehand? One of the factors for the lack of clarity about these further questions was an organized coverup orchestrated by the Habsburg dynasty.

A number of individuals are involved in the events: Rudolf’s wife, Crown Princess Stephanie, who was wounded by the illicit affair between Rudolf and Mary, and who yet needed her marriage to Rudolf to maintain her status near the very top of the dynasty; Rudolf’s mother, Empress Elisabeth, who had been habitually disengaged in her son’s life and thereby perhaps by means of this neglect created a psychological neediness in him; Rudolf’s father, Emperor Franz-Josef, who relationship to Rudolf was distant and disparaging; and Mary’s mother, Helene von Vetsera, who raised her daughter to be an ambitious social climber. To these main figures is added a long list of other family members, a number of various government officials, and a handful of friends.

“Even after more than a century, the subject of Mayerling remains controversial,” note co-authors Greg King and Penny Wilson. The case presents “few known facts” but many “divergent ideas offering alternative explanations.” King and Wilson venture some hypotheses:

Despite the rather obvious hurdles involved in tackling an historical affair and two mysterious deaths clouded by decades of controversy, we believe that we’ve been able to reach some new conclusions offering a starkly different take on the liaison between Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera.

The complexities of investigating the Mayerling case are amplified by the secretive reaction of the Habsburg dynasty. Documents relating to the deaths of Rudolf and Mary have disappeared in some cases, or remained state secrets for many years in other cases.

The royal family had motives to suppress information which might fuel narratives unfavorable to the dynasty, and had motives to promote accounts of the incident which cast the family in a more favorable light. To which extent did the dynasty act on those motives?

Given Rudolf’s geopolitical importance, diplomats and governments around the world produced fevered speculation in large quantities, further muddying the investigative waters. While the case was a personal tragedy, it was also a matter of state.

The starting point for all hypothesizing was the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera on January 30, 1889 in the family’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. The event seemed prima facie to be a murder-suicide by gunshot wound. Letters written by Rudolf and Mary were found, seemingly confirming the murder-suicide hypothesis.

Soon, however, alternative narratives appeared. One version supposed that Rudolf had secret connections to a Hungarian nationalist group, and that when it seemed that these connections might come to light, Rudolf chose suicide rather than have his political entanglements exposed. Another version posited that a member of the royal family murdered both Rudolf and Mary, and that the dynasty was engaged in a coverup to protect the murderer.

The passage of decades has been a double-edged sword: one the one hand, the motives of defending the dynasty’s honor and of geopolitical relevance of Rudolf and his death have faded, lessening the tendency to manipulate the narrative in order to serve either, or both, of those purposes. On the other hand, some of the physical evidence, living witnesses, and relevant texts have gradually ceased to be.

Historians Greg King and Penny Wilson write:

More than 125 years have passed since the tragedy at Mayerling. Shifting stories, deliberate lies, wild theories, and the disappearance of evidence have shrouded the story in seemingly impenetrable layers of mystery. Absent documentation, history can only speculate about what happened between Rudolf and Mary at that isolated lodge. But enough remains, when coupled with modern forensic evidence and psychological analysis, to weave together a plausible version of events, one that not only fits within the framework of known facts but also offers a believable and ultimately devastating reconstruction of those final, fateful hours.

King and Wilson go on to offer scholarly support for the most sober interpretation: that they only two people in the room were Rudolf and Mary, that there was no third-party murderer, and that it was a combination of political and personal stressors, with the added factor of Rudolf’s personal dissipation, that pushed him to, and beyond, the idea of suicide — and Mary with him.

Rudolf’s life, as King and Wilson write, was falling apart, both personally and politically. Mary had become fixated on Rudolf and could imagine no future without him. Rumors add the possibilities that Mary was pregnant with Rudolf’s child, that Mary was actually Rudolf’s half-sister by means of a youthful indiscretion on the part of Emperor Franz-Josef, or that Mary had been infected by Rudolf with a sexually transmitted disease. It is not possible to prove or disprove any of these possibilities.

Politically, Rudolf encountered perpetual frustration: The Emperor failed to take seriously any of Rudolf’s policy views or suggestions. Rudolf was on track to become Emperor, but it would be another twenty-five years before that could happen: twenty-five years of waiting and of being unable to shape policy. Rudolf feared that, when he finally might become Emperor, it would be too late: that, by such a time, the European situation would have deteriorated so far that meaningful reforms could not succeed. Rudolf was correct: the dynasty would fall in 1918. Rudolf believed that he could have saved the dynasty by reforming it.

Beyond the speculations about the nature of the two deaths are the speculations about the ripple effects those deaths had on world history. Had Rudolf lived, he would have had a hand in imperial politics for the next twenty-five years, and then he would have become emperor. Could Rudolf have exerted enough influence in his father’s government to avert WW1? Even if he had been unable to prevent the war, would he have been able to find a better end to it if he’d taken the throne upon his father’s death in November 1916 — two full years before the war’s end?

Franz-Josef had planned for Rudolf to succeed him on the throne. After Rudolf’s death, the next person in the line of succession was Archduke Karl Ludwig, who would have been emperor had he not died in 1896. Karl Ludwig’s son Franz-Ferdinand then became the heir to the throne until his death in 1914. When Franz-Josef died in 1916, the throne was passed to Karl, who was a nephew of Franz-Ferdinand and a grandson of Karl-Ludwig. So it was that Emperor Franz-Ferdinand outlived three different men, each of whom was slated to be his heir.

The sad deaths of Rudolf and Mary leave many questions which will probably never be conclusively answered. The case continues to attract attention both because of its human interest and because of its location in history as a point of contact between a variety of geopolitical and sociopolitical trends.

Linguistics: A Safe Haven for Academics During the Soviet Era

Teachers, professors, researchers, and authors found that life could be difficult and dangerous during the Soviet Socialist era, from 1917 to 1991. Harassment, imprisonment, and even death were inflicted upon those whose writings or lectures were deemed to be contrary to communist orthodoxy.

Even those who desired to conform to the Marxist-Leninist dogma could run afoul of the government agents who monitored the print media, because the standards changed constantly and without warning, and such standards were not always made clear. In some cases, this ambiguity was deliberate, giving the government a method to persecute any academician arbitrarily, because a case could be made against anyone, no matter what she or he had, or had not, written. In other cases, this shifting and invisible sand of standards was the result of competition between various branches of the Soviet government and the result of opportunistic adjustment in the government’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist as applied in concrete situations.

Teachers and professors, then, lived in constant fear. On the one hand, they were expected to give lectures and publish writings. On the other hand, at any moment, with no warning, these writings and lectures could be investigated because they were suspected of promoting Marxist too weakly. These attacks were not limited to political content. A professor might write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and find himself being arrested, because the essay was perceived as not being Leninist enough in tone. A teacher might present to students about the change from paleolithic society to neolithic society, and find himself in jail because his teaching was alleged to depart from communist orthodoxy.

The system was rigged: the government could simply declare that a publication failed to be enthusiastic enough in its promotion of Marxism. No evidence was required, and if evidence was given, it was subjective allegations, and no counter-argument was permitted. The system could be exploited by competing colleagues who could accuse each other of not energetically proclaiming Marxist doctrine. The process could be manipulated to serve the purposes of personal grudges.

Seeking some measure of protection from these arbitrary allegations and investigations, some academics discovered that there were safe zones within academia: disciplines like mathematics and linguistics. Soviet Socialist authorities figured that these fields were so abstract that they would have no political relevance.

This general situation, and the specific instance of Vitaly Shevoroshkin, are explained by author Robert Wright:

Linguistics has long been a haven for Soviet intellectuals of a contrary sort. In the pre-Gorbachev era, when the study of history and economics and nearly everything else involving human beings was tailored to exacting Marxist specifications, the study of language was exempt. It had been deemed in 1950 to have no connection with ideology (and had been so deemed by no less an authority than Joseph Stalin, who considered himself something of an expert on language). So linguists were free to say whatever they wanted — about language, at least — without fear of rebuke. Naturally, the discipline attracted a number of people with a disdain for authority, and developed a culture that tended to reinforce this disdain. Maybe, then, it isn’t surprising that Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a linguist at the University of Michigan who immigrated to America from the Soviet Union in 1974, has spent much of the time since then waging a guerrilla war against the orthodoxies of Western thought.

An academic who escaped from the Soviet Union knew what serious persecution was: it could mean years in a labor camp. By contrast, if his linguistic hypotheses were unpopular in America, as a tenured faculty member, the worst it would mean was encountering some disdain from a few colleagues: a laughably minor consequence.

Shevoroshkin went on to champion some radical propositions in linguistics, encountering the skepticism of his colleagues. The skepticism didn’t bother him; they weren’t, after all, going to throw him into the Gulag. Decades later, some of Shevoroshkin’s views have gained general acceptance; others are still hotly debated. But making controversial statements about historical philology probably saved his life: had he made equally controversial statements about economics or political theory, he probably would have frozen to death in Siberia.