Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia by Catherine E. Karkov (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia by Catherine E. Karkov Melissa X. Stevens Catherine E. Karkov, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), vii + 272 pp., 11 ills. Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia, by distinguished art historian Catherine E. Karkov, questions presumptions about “Anglo-Saxon” England and English claims to superiority that have resulted in centuries of violence. Karkov distinguishes between England, the literal location, and “Anglo-Saxon” England, a signifier onto which ideas about the place are projected. England has never had a single, monolithic ethnicity or culture; it has always been a heterogeneous place comprising multiple identities. Karkov argues that “Anglo-Saxon” England is a signpost onto which is mapped the identities, ideologies, “empty ideas and hierarchies that have emerged within Anglo-Saxonism” (26). This distinction enables her to separate the field of early [End Page 237] medieval studies from contemporary white supremacist groups that endorse racist, homophobic, and misogynist ideologies while misappropriating early medieval English and Viking myths, legends, objects, words, and symbols. The Angles and Saxons were two of the Germanic groups that migrated to England during and after the Roman occupation. Karkov frames the underlying argument by stipulating that people who populated early medieval England and came to be known collectively as the “Anglo-Saxons” viewed themselves—via a set of compelling origin myths—as a chosen people arriving in a promised land. These myths facilitated the denial and erasure of the violence they committed against the land’s original inhabitants, retelling these atrocities as supernaturally preordained. This cultural tendency repeated as the English colonized other parts of the world. Karkov’s critical theoretical analyses of several early medieval English texts utilize psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts of time and space, particularly utopia and its variants, dystopia, heterotopia, and retrotopia. She uses encryption to propose that the early English denied and erased the brutality of their origins while simultaneously perpetuating the illusion of superiority, enabling them to continue practicing invasion, usurpation, and settler colonialism. According to Karkov, they accomplished this via conceptions of utopia, a discontent with the present that leads to anticipating a different future. She examines the political and cultural implications of stories about “Anglo-Saxon” England that have hugely impacted early medieval English scholarship, creating the foundation for attitudes that endure, manifesting as gatekeeping in today’s politics, popular culture, and the academy. Karkov employs several theoretical concepts to address the idea of utopia underlying the construct of “Anglo-Saxon” England. She suggests that the idea of the uncanny can demonstrate how the English reinforced their identity in opposition to the peculiar “others” they created. The perceived disruption of the utopia—here framed by Karkov as the actual or imagined loss of empirical power—results in melancholia, defined within psychoanalytic terms as arising from the inability to mourn a loss, collectively or individually, and demonstrated in the time of Bede and Alfred and continuing in modern Anglophone societies like the United States and United Kingdom. Chapter 1 reads King Alfred’s Preface to his translation of the Regula pastoralis as a utopian text that fabricates a past to construct an imagined utopian future that must, by definition, remain forever on the horizon. His deep dissatisfaction with the present resulted in his ambition to build an England united by language and learning. According to Karkov, Alfred’s project helped lay the foundation for future imperialist expansion. Alfred sought to position English as a sacred language superior to all other languages, reinforcing a mindset that can still be observed among contemporary far-right extremists. Karkov argues that Alfred’s utopian ideal based on English exceptionalism was also dystopian, as its colonizing strategy laid the groundwork for later forms of imperialism and nationalism via “a weaponised idea of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (in the form of white and English-speaking) supremacy” (17). Chapter 2 analyzes the eighth-century Northumbrian Franks Casket as a metaphorical heterotopia containing an empty space representing “Anglo-Saxon” England. Michel Foucault defined heterotopia as a place that is both a part of and [End Page 238] separate from the social sphere. For Karkov, the Franks Casket “encrypts the violent origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England by projecting...