LATCH: A Journal for the Study of the Literary
Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History
Vol. 1
(2008)
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 postcolonial 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 AngloSaxons 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
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A Paradise Full of Monsters:
India in the Old English Imagination
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 AngloIndian 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.
(53)
Such an assertion relies upon the shaky assumption that the AngloSaxons 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 AngloIndian 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 AngloSaxon 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 wellknown 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 sixthcentury 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, farmost 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
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 AngloSaxon martyrologist, St. Thomas “suffered at Calamina, a ‘ceastre’ [city] in
6
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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
Armed with knowledge of Roman
Me” in martyrdom. 8
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 sisterin-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
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
9
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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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pp. 51-72
A Paradise Full of Monsters:
India in the Old English Imagination
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 postcolonial 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 eleventhcentury 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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pp. 51-72
A Paradise Full of Monsters:
India in the Old English Imagination
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.
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