Alice Roberts' Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain' is technically brilliant. Her story of unrelenting attachment to solving ancient burial mysteries is a superb, coherent narrative. The tomb site chapter-style storytelling is worth the time.
Roberts repetitive weakness (IMHO) is extrapolating a Roman/Dark Age/Medieval cultural interpretation from burial and anatomical evidence by applying a 21st-century Humanist worldview. The problematic histories of Bede and others seldom reflect the mind's eye of the temporal inhabitants. However, Beowulf in its OE context influences Dark Age and Medieval OE/ME context, as did Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, and the far more extant fragments of village-oriented poetry/storytelling. A modern, self-described Humanist, Roberts is out of context, attempting to impute humanism to an age before the invention.
In an early example, she questions the interpretation regarding why 1/3 of the heads of the dead are cut off. Sounds shocking. But, it isn't. In the context of the period, the headless corpse is an Occam's Razor from the era's worldview. Ghosts and spirits were not a matter of opinion. Ghosts and haunting spirits were expert facts. The Bible tells of the supernatural. The authorities of kings and religion agreed. To not agree, was heresy.
The dead likely agreed in life and likely participated in the village decapitation burial ritual. Removing dead heads, as frequently as it is observed, is easily understood as a community service to the departed to ensure they don't return, as they surely were seen to do, to haunt family and village. Did disemboweled Egyptian mummies represent anything different? Headless burial meant no ghosts. Gutless mummies represent a trip to Duat sans haunting spirits. Is it a wonder that the buried might later be dug up, staked, bricked, or cremated years later as the period literature describes?
Medieval literature in all surviving texts presents a belief in an extracorporeal human spirit and afterlife within both the Christian and Pagan traditions. There is no evidence from the period of a humanist worldview. Roberts suggests a Hellenistic philosophical tradition using Epicureans to deduce a classical knowledge transference into North Sea paganism, Britonic paganism allowed by Romans (not so much the Druids themselves), and later Roman Xtianity. Several of the graveyards she investigates began as a cult of dead saints. People wanted to draw near the saints in death and were buried in proximity for medieval-minded reasons.
The first historical evidence suggesting a non-haunted British world is expressed in the mid-16th century as Enlightenment began to question the supernatural and evil spirits.
The study of language, runes to Old English, and the body of poetic literature from the era reflect a human thought paradigm utterly foreign to 19-20th century. These are the graves of people holding a worldview we might likely never comprehend.
I was reminded in several passages of 'reading list' supplement. My list would include the academic work of CS Lewis in 'The Discarded Image'. Hana Videen's "The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English" for a sense of word images and 'The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe' by Michael Pye to consider a 10,000-year trading lingua franca.
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Adelmo
Niente di che. Mi aspettavo di più. Banale, sciatto, inutile.
Reviewed in Italy on January 11, 2023Ken Meeson
Dry subject - but very readable.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2024arty granny
Interesting new things to learn
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