Listen, there’s a poem, it speaks in the voice of England’s past like a flame beyond the language of the living. It’s more than a thousand years old and yet it still speaks to us. It’s called Beowulf.
–Michael Wood, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester
Tag: Anglo-Saxons
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5,903 words
We never manage to bury the dead completely. Their words still echo down to us from beyond life’s event horizon in direct contravention of physical law. Our stance towards death is a determining factor in how the dead return to us; in what form and with what significance they haunt the living. Although they are always there, the ways in which they interact with us vary and shift through time. And, at the present time, there is a strange blend of residual religious funerary rites and atheistic materialism. It feels very much as though we go through the motions of dispatching the dead to the next world without believing a word of it. (more…)
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Author’s Note:
The following short excerpt is from a forthcoming essay titled ‘How the Irish Became White’, which makes an ethnonationalist critique of the ‘whiteness historians’ (Ignatiev, Roedeger, Allen, etc.) and their treatment of Irish-America.