Cognitive Imperialism: Let’s Hear It for POV
Here’s what appears to have happened:
On June the eighth of 793 CE, ships appeared off the coast of Northumberland in the northeast of England headed for an island called Lindisfarne. This island was home to one of the largest and richest monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The ships landed and raiders came ashore. Raiders nowadays called Vikings. Those raiders killed an unknown number of monks; other monks ran into the sea and drowned; some were taken as slaves. The raiders made off with a large amount of treasure, mostly in the form of sacred Christian objects.
That is what happened, as clearly as historians can make out.
Concerning this event, Alcuin, a Brit at the court of Emperor Charlemagne, wrote:
Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race . . . . The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets.
Alcuin also wrote,
Behold the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.
I first read of the Lindisfarne attack when I was studying for my PhD in medieval British literature. I was studying Old English texts, and so I read the story from the point of view of the wronged Christians — the Anglo-Saxon British Christians who felt threatened by this attack, which they saw as barbaric, wanton, and unprovoked.
The story that I read was the story as it came down through the years, taught as fact: violent, merciless pagans swept into Christendom, acted violently toward peaceful priests, and desecrated Christian relics.
What I did not read was another part of the story:
When those Vikings (most likely Norwegians) landed at Lindisfarne, they saw in the monks the representatives of Charlemagne, the powerful Christian ruler of Europe at that time. The Vikings knew that Charlemagne was at that moment offering them and their families a simple choice: baptism or death.
They could surrender their traditional religious practices and accept Christianity, or they could die.
A stark choice.
Again, the year of the Lindisfarne attack was 793. A mere eleven years before that, Charlemagne had ordered the massacre of 4500 Saxons in what is now northern Germany. Charlemagne also ordered the destruction of a huge, ancient tree that the people called Irminsul, which in Old German means “great pillar.”
Some Saxons saw in this ancient tree the horse of their chief god, Odin. Others saw the great serpent of the middle earth. The tree had been a holy site for generations.
Charlemagne knew what he was doing when he ordered the destruction of the tree. And 4500 people.
When they got off their ships at Lindisfarne, those marauders saw the monks there as representatives of the oppressive power of Christianity, and they saw the symbols of the religion not as symbols of culture and peace but as the symbols of violence and oppression.
Were the Christian monks at Lindisfarne innocent worshipers of the Prince of Peace or agents of a violent imperial religion?
Every story has at least two points of view.
And this is just a little tidbit showing how Christianity has colonized minds. Cognitive imperialism. It’s a thing.
