A Paradise Full of Monsters: India in the Old English Imagination · Wonders of the East describe...

LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Vol. 1Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History (2008)

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A Paradise Full of Monsters: India in the Old English Imagination Mark Bradshaw Busbee Florida Gulf Coast University Abstract Between the ninth and the twelfth centuries in England, the idea of India began to figure into Anglo-Saxon statecraft, religion, and literature. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that in 883, Alfred the Great promised to send emissaries to India; a sermon preached by the Anglo-Saxon priest Ælfric in the tenth century tells about the passion of Saint Thomas and his trials and eventual death in India; and Old English translations of Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East describe the amazing riches, unusual animals, and monstrous people found in India. Scholars applying post-colonial theory to these texts see them as essentially racist. This essay argues that such reductive readings miss the deep complexities in how Anglo-Saxons imagined India or what those fantastic ideas might reveal. The many notable ambivalences appearing in descriptions of India and its people show that Anglo-Saxons regarded India as an imaginative space where fears, hopes, and desires might be entertained freely. Rather than support the notion that the Anglo-Saxon mind was inherently racist, these texts, in their expressions of fear and fascination, reveal a willingness to engage and understand a mysterious Other. Keywords India, Old English, Anglo-Saxon, manuscripts, monsters, Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Cotton Tiberius, Cotton Vitellius, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ælfric, Alfred the Great Old English manuscripts dating from the late ninth through the early twelfth centuries contain what may be the most neglected

Mark Bradshaw Busbee A Paradise Full of Monsters: pp. 51-72 India in the Old English Imagination

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body of medieval Western texts regarding the nature of India and its inhabitants. These texts tell about the location, topography, and people of India; they offer stories about the martyrdom of Saints Bartholomew and Thomas in India; and some of them—like Latin and Old English renderings of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (A Book of Monsters of Various Kinds), and a text called The Wonders of the East—include vivid illustrations that act as imaginative renderings in these texts about India and its people.1 Read collectively, this body of stories and the illustrations accompanying them offer readers a window into Anglo-Saxon thinking about India. The Anglo-Saxons imagined India not only as a paradise with mountains of gold and vineyards yielding precious stones but also as the domain of frightening creatures, like dog-headed men, speaking trees, ants as big as dogs, and sheep the size of donkeys. As offensive as they might seem to modern readers, these imaginative details fit within a conceptual framework that allowed medieval people in England a multidimensional understanding of India and, as a consequence, their own fears and desires.

Versions of this paper were presented at the First International Conference “India in the World” at Universidad de Córdoba, Spain (March 9, 2007) and at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (May 12, 2007). I am thankful to Douglass Harrison and Rebecca Toronto, my colleagues at Florida Gulf Coast University, for their comments and suggestions on this paper. 1 The Latin text of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle appears in the British Library’s Royal 13.A.I, fols. 51v-78r; the Old English text appears in the so-called Beowulf ms, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. fols. 107r-131v (Brit. Lib.). The Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus exists in a singular extant ms: Royal 15.B.xix (Brit. Lib.). Normalized texts and translations of these mss and the ms of The Wonders of the East are available in Orchard’s Pride and Prodigies, whose texts and translations I rely on throughout this paper. The Wonders of the East exists in two Latin and two Old English texts. Bodleian Library 614, fols. 36r-48r (Oxford) contains one of the Latin versions, and Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fols. 98v-106v contains one Old English version. Cotton Tiberius B.v, fols. 78v-87r (Brit. Lib.) contains side-by-side Latin and Old English texts. The most useful compilation of these texts in facsimile was made by Rhodes in 1929. In my discussion, I will be focusing primarily on the images and texts in the Tiberius ms.


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While similar accounts of India can be found in continental medieval texts, students of post-colonial Anglo-Indian relations have become interested in these texts’ presentation and discussion in Old English literature, since the presence of these texts represents the earliest surviving textual efforts of Englishmen to comprehend India. This attention has naturally benefitted a traditionally neglected part of English literary history by opening it up to more careful scrutiny. An unfortunate side-effect, however, has been that these texts are often summarily dismissed as racist. For example, in “Wonders of the Beast: India in Classical and Medieval Literature,” Andrea Rossi-Reder asserts that these texts “presuppose the superiority of Western peoples over non-Western peoples” and that

scholars have generally examined the roots of Anglo-Indian colonial discourse only as far back as the Renaissance, but, in fact, classical and medieval literature, long before colonial expansion, contained the seeds of colonial thinking about natives of non-European countries such as India.

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Such an assertion relies upon the shaky assumption that the Anglo-Saxons dreamed of colonizing India, or more specifically that a king like Alfred the Great (871-899) thought Alexander the Great and his conquest of India an admirable model. Though anachronistic,2 this approach has become a common tool for explicating The Letter of Alexander and the Liber monstrorum, two texts that seem to embody “colonial thinking” and that seem to stress the horrific and distasteful aspects of the monstrous races the Anglo-Saxons expected to find in India. I argue that, if used exclusively, post-colonial theory oversimplifies what Anglo-Saxons thought and believed about an

2 Gretta Austin makes the point that the term race, as we understand it, was coined only in the 17th century, by François Bernier in “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les differentees espéces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent” (quoted in Austin 26, note 5); therefore, it could be argued (against Rossi-Reder) that any discussion of medieval racism is essentially anachronistic (Austin 26). I do not mean to engage this fine point here.


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unknown, almost mythical place. While post-colonial theory explores the situation of colonized people during and after colonization, the term postcolonial is sometimes used to refer to relations between two groups of people that seem similar to postcolonial conditions but do not involve a former colony. Old English writings about India remain outside this discussion because there is no evidence of any sort of an Anglo-India relationship during the Anglo-Saxon period. Instead, a text like the Old English The Wonders of the East, when read in combination with its illustrations, can offer a richer account of how the Anglo-Saxons imagined India before Anglo-Indian relations began (if we can risk using the term “relations”). The Tiberius manuscript of The Wonders of the East vividly imagines Indian peoples living in an earthy paradise or a sort of early medieval El Dorado. And though it shows them as monstrous or grotesque hybrid beings, I will demonstrate that this text and other Old English accounts ultimately depict India with a sort of romantic curiosity, one characterized by awe and wonder. This wonder is a far cry from racial or imperial designs. Before getting to the text and images featured in the Old English Wonders of the East, it would be useful to explore the nature and background of Anglo-Saxon belief about India’s location. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that first recorded instance of Anglo-Indian intercourse occurred in the year 883 (884 in the “C” manuscript). The entire entry for that year reads as follows:

In this year the [English] army went up the Scheldt to Condé, and stayed there for a year. And Pope Marinus sent some wood of the Cross to King Alfred. And that same year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome the alms, and also to India to [the shines of] St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, when the English were encamped against the enemy [Viking] army at London; and there, by the grace of God, their prayers were well answered after that promise.

(Whitelock 50)3

3 Whitelock contends that the whole incident of the vow is suspicious. MS A contains only the first sentence, but all others contain the account. Contemporary accounts by Asser (Alfred’s biographer) and Æthelweard


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Other historical records of this event mostly corroborate The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry. Written in Latin sometime between 1100 and 1125, the manuscripts of Florence of Worcester state that in 883 a churchman named Swithelm bore Alfred’s alms to the shrine of Saint Thomas in India (Thorpe 98-99). William of Malmsbury, an early thirteenth century English historian, also states that a journey to India was successfully carried out, writing that Sighelm

penetrated successfully into India, a matter of astonishment even in the present time. Returning thence, he brought back many brilliant exotic gems and aromatic juices in which that country abounds and a present more precious than the finest gold, part of our Saviour’s cross sent by Pope Marinus to the king.

(Giles 118)

A number of inconsistencies, both historical and grammatical, have caused scholars to question whether or not Alfred actually did send an emissary to India. The most blatant problem lies in the wording of the entry: all of the manuscripts give the word Iudea. Scholars get around this first problem by pointing to the well-known idea that Saints Thomas and Bartholomew were both martyred in India. Also problematic are the facts that there was not a Viking army in London between 883 and 884 and that the entry seems to imply that “Alfred promised to send alms to India than that he actually sent them” (Lees 191). It is also strange that the outcome of this mission—whether Sighlem and Athelstan ever made the trip, ever returned or, if they did, ever recorded what they saw—is mentioned nowhere in Old English. Such a journey would be “so great an achievement in the ninth century that some further record of it might be expected” (Lees 191). Inconsistencies also arise in the supporting accounts of Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury. The different names of the emissaries sent—Sigehelm and Athelstan in The Chronicle, only Sigehelm in William of Malmesbury, and only Swithelm in Florence—and the absence of this event in other important

do not mention the mission to Rome and to India or that the English were encamped against the enemy army at London in 883 (50).


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historical documents of the Anglo-Saxon period have caused many scholars to suspect the validity of the original entry in The Chronicle.4 Some scholars also contend that Anglo-Saxons used the term India to refer to the East in general. Mary Campbell writes that “‘the East’ is a concept separable from any purely geographical area. It is essentially ‘Elsewhere’” (48). However, while there is no way to know for sure if anyone from Anglo-Saxon England ever made such a journey, it is certain that a journey to India was believed possible, at least by the compilers of The Chronicle. It also makes sense that, if Alfred did promise to send an emissary to particular shrines in India, he must have had some general notion of its physical geography and location. We get a sense of what Alfred believed about the location of India not long after 883, when he commissioned a translation of Paulus Orosius’s Historiae adversus paganos (History against the pagans). Today, we know that India is bounded by the Himalayas to the north, the Indian Ocean to the south, the Arabian Sea to the west, and the Bay of Bengal to the east. Alfred’s translation reports that India is bounded to the north by the Caucuses, the river Indus to the west, the Red Sea to the south, and the Indian Ocean to the east (Malone 162-63).5 The confused geography of this report aside, where India is on Alfred’s map tells us a great deal about how the Anglo-Saxons might have imagined it. Alfred certainly believed it was a geographically definable place. On the other hand, it is important to remember that to early western Europeans a map was also an expression of cosmology and theology rather than simply an object of utility, as it is today. To give a sense of the practical and ideological uses of geography—and India’s placement in it—in Anglo-Saxon thinking, I have included the following map, which is a recreation of the theologically inspired geography of the known world as Alfred (and Orosius before him) understood it. To appreciate the ethnocentric method behind this particular map, we must realize that it is drawn as though the viewer is standing in the west, looking from bottom to top, up across a finite plane to the east, toward India. This perspective forces the east to appear at the top of the map, the

4 Asser’s biography of Alfred the Great and Aethelweard’s Chronicle do not mention the event. 5 For the text of King Alfred’s Orosius, see Henry Sweet’s EETS edition.


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west at the bottom. The map clearly demonstrates the Tripartite

Figure 1: World according to the Geographer Paulus Orosius in Historia adversus ad paganos, and as understood during King Alfred’s reign. Used with permission from the British Library. form of the world—with Asia to the east (the top of the map), Europe to the west (left) and Africa to the west (right). India is at the other end of the world; it is imaginable yet untouchable. Another conflicting perspective should be noted: like India, Britain lies on the margins of the world (on the bottom left of this map). Asa Mittman writes, “Throughout the early Middle Ages, British authors and artists depicted their own island as extremely marginal” (97). This sentiment can be traced as far back as Gildas, the sixth-century British writer, who claims that Britain “lies almost under the north pole of the world” (89-90). The Venerable Bede, in the


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eighth century, notes that Britain is an “island almost in the outermost band of the orbit of the earth’s circuit” (16). It is likely that Alfred and his countrymen considered their home to be “connected conceptually to other marginal regions, most particularly to the monstrous ‘East’” (Mittman 97). The second map, pictured below, appears in the Tiberius manuscript before The Wonders of the East. Unlike the previous map, which was inspired by Orosius, this one (see fig. 2) is the direct product of an English geographer. It is more stylized (and in many ways more confused), but it keeps the basic plan, with Jerusalem located in the middle of the world, the British archipelago enlarged in the bottom-left, and India at the top, far-most east. These positions are consistent with the remark in Alfred’s translation of Orosius that India lies the outermost of all countries (Sweet 136). Anne Knock McGurk believes that this map was placed intentionally before The Wonders of the East in the Tiberius manuscript to help clarify where the fabulous races live in relation to the British Isles (107). I want to stress two points about what these maps reveal about how the Anglo-Saxons imagined India. First, the Anglo-Saxons doubtless believed with other early medieval Europeans that India lay on the eastern borders of the world, which, according to Genesis 2:8—“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden”—is also the position of paradise. These maps also show, as I mentioned in the above paragraphs, that the Anglo-Saxons considered themselves as living on the margins of the known world, at once similar to India in its marginality and as far away as can be from India, and thus Paradise. Taken together, these points signal a notable ambivalence: while India was a “closed world of oneiric exoticism,” too far away to experience but still fascinating and provocative to contemplate, it was also “the hortus conclussus of an Eden in which raptures and nightmares were mixed” (Le Goff 190). Thus, India is both a place that can be located on a map and in the imagination, where fantasies and fears can be played out. Narrative examples of how Anglo-Saxons imagined India can be found in the stories of the Saints Thomas, Bartholomew and Andrew who were supposedly martyred there (there or in what the Anglo-Saxons believed to be bordering lands). The ninth-century Old English Martyrology ncludes relations of Sts Bartholomew’s


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Figure 2: The World. Cotton Tiberius B.v. folio 58v (Brit. Lib.). Used with permission from the British Library.

And Thomas’s passions as taking place in India, and homilies by the tenth-century English priest Ælfric feature accounts of the saints’ reluctance to travel there, their acts of healing and other miracles in India, and their eventual torture and deaths at the hands of cruel Indian kings.6 According to Ælfric, Bartholomew traveled 6 There was, however, some confusion as to where the bodies and relics of these saints lay. By the ninth century the relics of St. Bartholomew had been translated to Italy. And according to one Anglo-Saxon martyrologist, St. Thomas “suffered at Calamina, a ‘ceastre’ [city] in


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to the “third India” which “has on one side darkness, an on the other the grim ocean.”7 In another late 10th century manuscript, a Latin text known as the Durham Ritual, an interlinear Old English gloss describes the location of Thomas’s burial place as “india saracina” (Saracen India); it seems that Anglo-Saxons had begun to associate India with Islam (Beckett 172). In any case, India was indeed a specific location in each writer’s thinking. Its powerful imaginative associations as a place full of demons—in one homily an angel reveals to Bartholomew that the god of the Indians is a black-faced devil named Astaroth (Beckett 172)—or people hostile to Christianity remains consistent from the time of Alfred the Great. Ælfric’s sermon on the passion of Saint Thomas offers particular insights into Anglo-Saxon anxieties about India. Christ appears to Thomas to tell him that the king of the Indians is seeking a skilled carpenter and stone mason to build a palace in the Roman fashion. (It seems that the king’s interest in the West might allow a missionary into the confidence of a formidable, alien culture.) Anticipating Christ’s request Thomas replies, “Oh! Thou my Lord, / Send me wherever Thou will, except to the Indians!” Christ consoles Thomas, telling him that He will be with him and that “after you have gained for Me the Indians, / you shall come to Me” in martyrdom.8 Armed with knowledge of Roman architecture and the power to heal, Thomas has great initial success. He converts tens of thousands of Indians; he heals the blind and even raises the dead. It is when he travels further into India and begins to convert Indian women, particularly the sister-in-law of the king that his troubles begin. His increasing intimacy with the land and its people lead to his torture and eventual death. At the sermon’s abrupt end when we are told that Thomas’ body was moved to Syria from its resting place in India, there is a lingering sense of doubt that Thomas’s influence might endure. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Anglo-Saxon scriptoriums began to produce texts that testify to the enduring idea of India as

India, and his body was carried to the town called Edessa [Greece], where he is buried in a silver chest, suspended by silver chains” (qtd. in Hunter 290). 7 Translation by Thorpe. See Thorpe 454. 8 My translation. The text of this sermon is from Skeat 401.


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an awe-inspiring, mysterious, and wonderful place. All of these texts—The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Liber monstrorum, and The Wonders of the East—were essentially translations of texts from an ancient tradition of foreign exotica that started with the Greeks in the early fifth-century B.C.9 Rudolf Wittkower writes that these source texts about the East “determined the western idea of India for almost 2000 years, and made their way into natural science and geography, encyclopedias and cosmographies, romances and history, into maps, miniatures and sculpture” (159). At the risk of gross oversimplification, I will add that by the ninth century in England, these tales about India were given interpretive value and brought in line with theology and traditional views concerning what was known about the physical world. By the tenth century, the long history of the development and diffusion of this common body of knowledge resulted in common medieval European catalogues or lists of the monsters of the East. In most cases, this tradition is characterized by “spaceless arrangement and [. . .] loose assemblages of figures and groups” which appear in “simple rectangular frames” (Wittkower 172). What is unique in the Old English tradition is the high degree of attention given to the beauty of the landscapes and the humanity ascribed to the monstrous inhabitants that inhabit those landscapes. In most European manuscript traditions, exotic regions like India were depicted simply as hostile and frightening, their inhabitants in menacing poses. In the Old English manuscripts, attention is given to wonderful plants, awe-inspiring mountains, and strange creatures that seem to be in constant motion, even at times about to step out of the frames they are in (see fig. 3). The creators of these images commonly stress the “close and constant connection between incivility and mountainous and rocky sites” (Friedman 149) so that “desert, forest, jungle, or mountains” serve as the “physical stages” upon which western consciousness could act out fantasies of wildness and savagery (White 6).10

9 The best overviews of the literary history of the monstrous races can be found in Friedman’s Monstrous Races and Wittkower’s “Marvels.” 10 As the images below convey, the monsters of the Tiberius ms are often still presented in rocky or mountainous landscapes. But they are


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The Old English manuscripts also depart from traditional landscape treatments to follow two ideas behind Anglo-Saxon maps, the ideas that India is paradise on earth and that Englishmen might have felt some sort of kinship with the denizens of another land on the edge of the world. A passage taken from The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle relates Alexander’s praise for the abundance of India. It “concern[s] the situation of the great nation of India” (Orchard 225), presenting India as a bucolic paradise. Alexander writes,

It was a place spacious and pleasant, and balsam and incense were there in abundance, and welled out from the boughs of the trees and the people of that land ate them and lived thereby. Then we took a closer look at that place, and went through the groves, and I was amazed at the loveliness and beauty of the land.

(Orchard 247)

Elsewhere Alexander describes a palace in India in language reminiscent of Christian descriptions of heaven, or, to borrow from modern European tradition, descriptions of El Dorado. He tells how the palaces have golden and ivory walls and columns and how the leaves in the vineyard are gold, their tendrils and fruits crystal and emerald. In The Wonders of the East, the traveler describes similar marvels: golden vineyards, where berries are produced like pears or jewels, and trees, upon which precious stones grow. The illustrator provides complementary images, as though he is attempting to freeze his subject matter in time, in the habitual present. The first image below suggests that in India golden vines produce precious stones. And the second image below (see fig. 4) depicts a vine extending over a long bed frame (or couch) made of ivory. In her discussion of the Tiberius manuscript, Mary Campbell writes that the images literalize and hold still “the fleeting coherence of dreams, permitting us to entertain, while awake, the figure of the impossible” (72).

surrounded by other images of the wonders of India and are therefore given the sense of inhabiting those landscapes.


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Figure 3: Golden vines bearing precious stones. Tiberius folio 84v. Used with permission from the British Library. Alexander and the anonymous reporter in The Wonders of the East show similar fascination for the human monsters they encounter. Alexander often tries to collect the living creatures that he finds beautiful, and the Wonders reporter reveals deep curiosity for the people who live on raw meat, who go without clothing, and who share their wives with visitors. The reporter’s tone and illustrator’s depiction of these taboos “produce an impression of liberation and freedom” (LeGoff 197). In fact, the illustrations


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seem to reveal a fascination with human diversity in their attention on the personal character of the monster as well as its physical nature. Most of the human monsters obviously possess human

Figure 4: Vines draped over an ivory couch 360 feet long, Tiberius folio 86v. Used with permission from the British Library.

intelligence and the power of speech, and some are even omnilingual and more clever than their visitors. Unlike the landscapes they inhabit and the manuscript pages and frames in which they are positioned, the monsters seem to be in perpetual motion. They address the reader directly as they seem to move in engaging patterns. In short, they indicate an interest on the part of the illustrator in the monster’s interiority and vitality. To demonstrate these points, I have selected four more images out of the thirty-eight framed drawings appearing in the Tiberius


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manuscript of The Wonders of the East.11 They are of the most common types of Indian monsters—the Blemmyae, who are men with their heads in their chests; the Cynocephali, or dog-headed men; Hostes, or giant cannibals, and the Donestre, or cannibals with an alleged divine ancestry.12 The way each of these images is depicted implies deep interest in the depicted creature’s potential humanity. The first image features a Blemmya (see fig. 5). Firmly grasping the frame within which he stands the Blemmya stares directly at the viewer. His direct gaze suggests social intelligence and demands respect. His grasp suggests that he is using the frame to his own physical advantage or that he is attempting to step out of the register that contains him. The Blemmya is, after all, called a man in the text; the Anglo-Saxon illustrator seems to suggest the monster’s irrepressible human nature by allowing him to leave “the borders confining him to the static page” (Friedman 154).13 The next image (see fig. 6) is of a Cynocephalus (Dog-head) taking nourishment from one of the many fruit-laden trees in India and living near cities that are filled with the wealth of the entire world. This creature is one of the few that does not violate his frame—though the left horn on his head does slightly, possibly indicating that he poses no physical threat to the viewer / reader. He is not referred to as “man,” nor does he speak or gesture. The Old English Life of St. Christopher, which appears just before the Vitellus manuscript of The Wonders of the East and which ultimately derives from accounts of the adventures of the apostles Andrew and Bartholomew, claims that this creature can only growl or bark and therefore cannot communicate with humans (Orchard 15).14

11 The images appear two to a page and are drawn in sepia and red inks on backgrounds painted in pale ochre, orange, greenish-grey, brown, and blue, with white in the highlights (Temple 104). See Orchard 8-22 for a list of the monsters. 12 With the exception of the Hostes, the name Hostes apparently being invented by the Anglo-Saxons and meaning “enemy,” these creatures are common place in the Mirabilia in most early European cultures. The images reproduced here are taken from McGurk 13-20. 13 For a discussion of the use of frames in the medieval manuscripts, see Pächt 22. 14 It is also interesting to note that in this Old English account, St. Christopher himself is a cynocephalus.


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But his humanity is in some ways greater than that of the Blemmya, in that he is fully formed.

Figure 5: Blemmya. Cotton Tiberious, folio 82r. Used with permission from the British Library.

Figure 6: Cynocephalus (Latin, “Dog-head”)/ Healfhund (Old English, “Half-dog”). Cotton Tiberius fol. 80r. Used with permission from the British Library.


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The next image (see fig. 7) also stresses that the monsters are considered in some sort of relationship to the reader. In the left, the Host, or Enemy, seems to be stepping out of his frame while gesturing to the reader, seemingly inviting him in. The right shows the results of the accepted invitation: another Host is in the process of eating the newly-arrived visitor, who is dressed in traditional Anglo-Saxon clothing of the period. This process of greeting the viewer and luring him into the frame before devouring him is not described in the text accompanying the image. We are told only that Hostes catch and eat men. The illustration is therefore largely the product of the illustrator’s imagination; it pulls the viewer into the frame, the creature’s world, and it lets the viewer imagine the consequences of traveling there in body and encountering this creature, which, like the Blemmya, is referred to as a man. In some ways, though, the viewer discerns that Hostes are more nearly human than the Blemmyae, for they have more fully formed bodies, and they gesture as if they know human language. In other ways, however, they are less human: they eat human flesh, and they do not engage the reader directly.

Figure 7: Hostes (Enemies). Cotton Tiberius folio 81v. Used with permission from the British Library.


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The last image features the Donestre (Divine One) (see fig. 8). It is the most active illustration in the Tiberius manuscript in that it provides three stages of interaction between the monstrous Indian and his Anglo-Saxon visitor. The image follows the text closely. Donestre are half-human, but they know all human speech and, by referring to the Anglo-Saxon visitor’s family by name, gain his confidence. Then they eat him (except for the head) and weep over him afterwards. The melancholy of the Donestre after eating the visitor seems to lessen his monstrosity and emphasize his humanity.

Figure 8: Dionestre (Divine One). Cotton Tiberious, folio 83v. Used with permission from the British Library.


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It is easy to forget that these illustrations belong to texts that themselves belong to the corpus of literature that was held to be factual about distant places. As moderns, we maintain that art is conceptual and cannot be true or false, that it “can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions” (Gombrich 89). A consequence of this idea is that the more a work makes its viewers becomes emotionally engaged, the more modern viewers are likely to treat it as fiction because they often value fact or data over meaning. To the Anglo-Saxon translator, scribe, and illustrator, the meaning of a text took priority over the formation of that text’s images; thus, the affective descriptions of India and its inhabitants created many dimensions of meaning and ways of understanding that were held by the Old English audience to be objective and factual, not a sort of aesthetic propaganda. Therefore, if post-colonial critics, or literary critics in general, limit the possible readings of Old English texts regarding India to how these texts create templates for racism, rich complexities might be neglected. One can certainly try to connect these texts and images with modern Anglo-Indian cultural discourse, especially as post-colonial critics have described it. The prominent post-colonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha writes about notions of Hybridity in Anglo-Indian relations, applying his ideas to how in the post-colonial era modern Englishmen unconsciously characterize the peoples of India as half-human or hybrid humans (112). Bhabha’s analysis might seem appropriate at first glance. The problem with attaching his ideas with Anglo-Saxon texts is that he is concerned with cultural colonialism in so far as Britain, as the so-called mother culture, discriminates against its bastard offspring. Such a relationship had yet to exist in the eleventh-century between Anglo-Saxons and Indians.15 If anything, the images in The Old English Wonders of the East might suggest an entirely different scenario, one in which the Anglo-Saxons expressed fascination for the people and resources of India.

15 There are other problems with reading these Old English texts from the standpoint of post-colonialism. David Spurr, another post-colonial scholar, contends that “non-western peoples are essentially denied the power of language and are represented as mute or incoherent” (104). This is partially true, in the case of the Dog-head, who can only bark, but it does not work in the case of the Donestre.


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In fact, these texts reveal a dual fear and desire that resided completely in the realm of the imagination and that operated at a time before the crusades and the later Age of Exploration had a chance to taint the Anglo-Saxon consciousness with the sort of racism that began to develop in the sixteenth century and after, when England assumed in earnest its imperialist role in India. One point that these texts and images clearly make is that India, in its contradictions to the known world and the natural laws that govern it, in its dangers and attractions, promised Anglo-Saxons much more than a dream of conquest or superiority. Works Cited Austin, Greta. “Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races? Race and

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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981.

Gildas. The Ruin of Britain and Other Works. Ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom. London: Fillimore, 1978.

Giles, J.A., trans. William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England from the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen with Notes and Illustrations. London: George Bell and Sons, 1904.

Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. 2nd ed. Bollingen Series, 35.5. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.

Herzfeld, George, ed. An Old English Martyology. EETS 116. London: n.p., 1900. Rpt. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 1981.

Hunter, W. W. The Indian Empire: Its History, People and Places. London: Trubner, 1882.


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Jones, Timothy S., and David A. Sprunger, eds. Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations. Studies in Medieval Culture 42. Kalamazoo, MI:. Medieval Institute Publications, 2002.

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