Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England

Nicholas Howe

In this original and revisionist interpretation of Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe proposes that the Anglo-Saxons fashioned a myth out of the fifth-century migration of their Germanic ancestors to Britain. Through the retelling of this story, the Anglo-Saxons ordered their complex history and identified their destiny as a people. Howe traces the migration myth throughout the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, in poems, sermons, letters, and histories from the sixth to the eleventh centuries.

“Howe’s book is of value not only to scholars of medieval English literature but highly suitable for mythographers, cultural historians, anthropologists, and theologians. Documentation is thorough, and most footnotes are annotated; the bibliography is exhaustive. This study complements Howe’s previous scholarship and assumes, by its authority and integrity of presentation, the status of a standard in contemporary scholarship relevant to Anglo-Saxon England.”— Renaissance and Reformation

Nicholas Howe is professor of English at the Ohio State University and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In addition to many published articles and essays, Howe is the author of The Old English Catalogue Poems (1985), editor of Irving Howe’s Critic’s Notebook (1995), and co-editor of Words and Works (1998).