Texts in Context:
The Real Dark Ages
By Gabriel Blanchard
We turn now to the pathless north, to see if there is any light we can shed upon an age famed most for its slain dragons, extinct giants, and other elusive natives of Faërie.
The Twilit Lands
The imperial purple has withdrawn from western Europe; as we are staying there, we must now leave its veil. Before us lie the plains north of the Alps, the frigid Baltic Sea, and the numberless fjords and skelligs of Britain, the Faroe Islands, the Hebrides, Iceland, Ireland, the Orkneys, and Scandinavia. They have lain till now under the shroud of an immemorial dark age. But half a minute. When we started on this Medieval stuff, we said in no uncertain terms that “the Dark Ages” aren’t a thing. There was a THE CHART about it and everything! Admittedly, the title here somewhat gave the game away that there is some dark age, somewhen or other; but are we really about to backtrack what we fussed so much about establishing?
Obviously, yes—though, to be clear, all that stuff we’re backtracking is perfectly true. Historiography, or the study of the study of history, is rather like chess: every move has ramifications so numerous as to be incalculable; the lines that define the game’s boundaries and allowable moves are immune to our objections, yet are at the same time entirely man-made; and some of the rules seem to have been thought up specifically to annoy. But there is a rationale for this back-and-forth, yes-and-no, one-fish-two-fish stuff about the term “Dark Ages.”
The first step in that rationale is that “the Dark Ages” is not a synonym for the Middle Ages. At the absolute most, the term can be stretched to cover the whole of the Early Middle Ages, and many scholars would reject even this usage. Realistically, it describes the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries best,1 i.e. the period roughly from the year 500 to the year 800; and from here we must continue narrowing it down.
The Nature of the Twilight
Long-time readers of the Texts in Context series may have noticed that we have spoken a great deal about original sources in Greek or Latin, but only a little about texts composed in other languages. The key trait the Mediterranean languages share is, they were written down, and in scripts we can still (or again) read. For the most part, this is not true of the proto-Germanic languages of northern Europe, nor even of the Celtic languages once spoken in the West Roman Empire.
Another wrinkle is that, when hitherto illiterate cultures acquire the art of writing from a literate civilization, they sometimes borrow not only the script, but the language it was devised for. This was not uncommon in the period we’re dealing with: An Anglo-Saxon scribe doubtless could write his own language in Roman letters (indeed, this became customary within a few centuries), but most of his work would assuredly be in Latin regardless.
This was more sensible than it may sound. Most people couldn’t read in any language; there was no popular audience to disappoint. Those who could were in demand for official functions of state and Church alike, both of which had international ties; moreover, despite the difficulties of travel, important courts and sees2 (especially the latter) frequently played host to foreign dignitaries or were staffed by foreigners: the Holy Roman Empress might be from England, or England’s own archbishop of Canterbury a native of Burgundy. It only made sense to write nearly everything in Latin, which was taught to all educated people in the known world anyway.3 This naturally meant there was less motivation to record local vernaculars, which in turn meant that their pre-Latin and non-Latin learning (whatever it may have been, and of whatever quality) was allowed to decay. On the whole, such stuff was preserved only in scraps; yet here and there it survives at greater length, copied out by some canny scribe with a taste for local epics and fairy tales. A good example from our Author Bank is Beowulf, which may have been composed (or at least written down for the first time) in the ninth century.
... Logres4 lay
without the form of a Republic, without letters or law,
a storm of violent kings at war—smoke
poured from a burning village in the mid-east;
transport had ceased, and all exchange stilled.
On the other hand was the wood of Broceliande.5
Dangerous to men is the wood of Broceliande.
Hardly the Druid, hardly a Christian priest,
pierced it ever ...
Location, Location, Location
The Latin-versus-Greek division also highlights something else: up to this point, we have spoken mostly about contrasts that fall into a west-versus-east pattern, in which the west is Latinate civilization and the east is Hellenic. We have now to consider instead a south-versus-north setup, where south and north symbolize civilization in general and barbarism of a few differing types. As the realm of Classical Antiquity was defined largely by the Mediterranean Sea, so northern Europe primarily means those areas that border on the Baltic and North Seas, reaching inland about as far as the Alps and the Carpathian Mountains.
The upshot of all this is, some specific regions of Europe—mainly its north—remain “dark” to us because, from the sixth to tenth centuries, we know relatively little about them. Too many documents have been lost or destroyed, thanks not least to the climate of northern Europe, which is a great deal wetter than anything we have thus far been obliged to deal with—and, as anyone who has ever spilt something on a book can attest, water is almost as merciless a foe of books as fire. In other words, the Dark Ages are as much a geographical term as a chronological one: Italy does not really go through the Dark Ages, for the same reason that Italy doesn’t exactly have a Victorian period. It does not follow from our ignorance that these societies were any more superstitious or ignorant or savage than most societies are. They may have been, but that’s another question. (It doesn’t even mean they didn’t possess records of their own; it’s just that either those records did not survive, or we cannot read them—perhaps, in some cases, because we simply have not found them yet.)
Stars in the Night
Moreover, we know for a fact that even in those areas where they did throw a Dark Age, the dark was never total. Take metallurgy. This post’s image is a photo of the Hunterston Brooch, now displayed in the National Museum of Scotland. Its exquisite Celtic knot-work design features perfectly interlaced “threads,” mere millimeters wide; and this was (in all probability) made in Ireland, a land which had never known Roman rule, in the eighth century. Nor is this a unique find; on the contrary, one of the reasons it is adjudged to be of Irish make is that Ireland at that time was known for making beautiful objects of this type.
Indeed, despite its peripheral location, Ireland was an important center of civilization and scholarship between the death of Justinian and the crowning of Charlemagne. The title, and contents, of Thomas Cahill’s popular book How the Irish Saved Civilization (first published in 1995) are a little overblown—but only a little! Beginning in the mid-sixth century, Irish monks traveled hundreds of miles east and south, evangelizing and civilizing pagans in much of Western Europe. This included peoples in many areas we think of as having been Christian already, like Gaul; monastic houses as far afield as Sankt Gallen in eastern Switzerland and Bobbio in the north of Italy were founded by Irish missionaries. And these monks did not only bring knowledge with them. Like the Hunterston Brooch, the breathtaking illuminations of volumes like the Book of Kells, the Book of Durrow, and the Lindisfarne Gospels all exhibit the famed, singular beauty of Hiberno-Saxon art.6 Once Christianized (which took place mainly over the seventh century), the English proved almost as zealous in their love of learning as the Irish, producing such luminaries as the Venerable Bede and, later, Alcuin of York, one of the chief figures in the Carolingian Renaissance, which—not coincidentally!—marked the end of the Dark Ages.
Combining the Irish love of books with their handsome smithcraft were the cumhdaigh, singular cumhdach (roughly pronounced kûv-dā and kûv-däḥ respectively).7 The Irish word literally means “cover,” though they are sometimes called “book shrines” in English. Less than a dozen examples survive, but they would have had to number in the hundreds at least; books, or sometimes relics, would be housed in them for transport and safekeeping—a necessity when books of any kind were as time-consuming to make, and as expensive to buy, as a house might be today. But besides being practical, cumhdaigh were beautiful: surviving examples feature intricate Celtic crosses and sculpted reliefs, and are made of materials like oak wood, silver, copper, bronze, and gold, with surfaces inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones.
All this talk of monks, however, not to mention the evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons, brings us to two writers from the Author Bank whom we would do well to revisit at greater length next week. They are not exactly from the Dark Ages, as both men were native to Italy; but St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great were both powerful figures within it, and major reasons why the light that eventually came, when the sun rose in the north, was a Roman as well as a Catholic light.
1There’s a small irony in this: the Latin phrase sæculum obscurum, “dark age,” was originally coined to name a period in the tenth and eleventh centuries that (by some, hostile, accounts) was plagued with exceptional papal corruption. However, when “the Dark Ages” is used at all in modern scholarship, this is not what it refers to.
2In this context, a see is the place of residence for a bishop (descended from the Lat. sēdēs “seat”). The equivalent in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is called an eparchy.
3Incidentally, the surname “Latymer” or “Latimer” is a slightly garbled form of Latiner, a Middle English word for someone who speaks Latin, and, thus, for an educated person in general.
4Logres is a traditional name for the realm of King Arthur. It is related to the modern Welsh name for England, Lloegr, which is pronounced a little like ḥlo͡i-gŕ. (The YouTube channel The Cambrian Chronicles, a native speaker of Welsh, discusses the Welsh pronunciation of ll in this short video).
5Broceliande is a perilous enchanted wood in Medieval legend, closely associated with the Arthurian cycle, and often linked with Merlin, Morgan le Fay, and other magical figures. It is sometimes placed in Brittany. The forest and its name (with alternative forms such as Brécilien and Brécheliant) served as part of the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien‘s realm of Beleriand.
6The present author thinks “Hiberno-Saxon” a better name than its main alternative, “Insular.” The latter, from the Latin insula, technically denotes anything from an island: which, in Europe, is really not very informative! “Hiberno-Saxon,” on the other hand, denotes two of the most important ethnic groups of the British Isles (Hibernia is the Latin name of Ireland), and even hints at the right time period, since England is not generally described as “Saxon” before the fifth century (when the Saxons showed up) or after the eleventh (when the Normans did).
7Most sources would have us believe that “cumhdachs” is the plural of cumhdach, in English anyway. To the present author, this not only looks perfectly ridiculous, but is actually harder to say than the Irish plural—and being more difficult to say than something in Irish is a shocking low, even for English.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the CLT Journal. If you enjoyed this piece, you can learn more about the authors whose texts we are putting in their original contexts by consulting our “Great Works & Authors” series, which features men and women (and anonymous books) from as far back as the eighteenth century before Christ, and from as recently as 2019.
Published on 12th November, 2024. Page image of the Hunterston Brooch (not to be confused with the Tara Brooch, of similar design and provenance), discovered in the early nineteenth century in the southwest of Scotland. Brooches were used by both sexes as cloak fasteners; made from silver, gold, and amber (though most of the amber has been lost), the circle of this brooch is a little under five inches across. The brooch is now housed in the National Museum of Scotland (photograph made available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license—source).
.jpg){kind=link}