Reviewing the sophistication increasingly recognised in Anglo-Saxon timber buildings, Mark Gardiner regrets museums’ and illustrators’ persistent ‘mud-and-wood’ reconstructions, so ‘sharply [in contrast] with the skill implied by … elaborate metalwork, carved stone, and illuminated manuscripts’ (pp 47–8). Builders were capable in fact of advanced techniques, for example the trompe-l’œil of curved walls for clients who wanted their halls to appear larger than they actually were.
The point of departure for these dozen essays, fruit of a conference in 2009, is that the ‘transience of trees and timber in comparison to metal and stone’ has obscured the quality evident in the structures and artefacts around which much of public and private life was played out. Not only materiality has escaped scrutiny, the editors assert, but also ‘complex relationships between practical application and religious belief, architectural utility and literary conceit, functionality and symbolism’. ‘To think of wood only as the material of low-status objects is at best negligent and at worst intellectually unsound’ (pp v, 2, 14).
Ten scholars mount a stimulating attempt to show how the balance can be redressed, and achieve their aim admirably around three themes: timber in building practice, perceptions of wood and wooden objects, and trees and woodland in belief. The range of issues is necessarily wide, but cemented by frequent cross-referencing. Why, for example, did the Anglo-Saxons build stone churches and timber houses? Michael Shapland suggests that stone stood for eternity, while wood represented the life cycle and domestic realms. Life (and its loss) is woven through these essays. Michael Bintley, tracing common threads in Exeter Book Riddle 21, The Dream of the Rood and the Æcerbot Charm, emphasises trees’ regenerative agency. Pirkko Koppinen, applying semiotics to Riddle 12, observes that trees invade and kill.
Jennifer Neville warns of the paradoxes and subtleties of Anglo-Saxon perceptions and the precariousness of our insights. Nevertheless, the material and social sophistication that Martin Comey demonstrates in the drinking vessels from Sutton Hoo is palpable. Gradation of woods and finishes, even size, appears to fit the feasting ritual described in Beowulf, speaks of patronage and largesse and marks objects ‘fit for use in the afterlife’ (pp 118–20). Mortal and cosmic worlds also come together as Clive Tolley seeks an Anglo-Saxon ‘world tree’. The (sacred) tree merges with the grove; Norse lundr can mean either. However, Tolley too has a caveat, against over-ready presumptions of ‘paganism’. Christian imagery should be our ‘first port of call’ (p 184), a banner taken up in Bintley’s insightful exploration of trees in Anglo-Saxon spiritual history, from the ‘Ancestors of Christ’ panel on the South Sandbach Cross to sacred standards, staffs and pillars in Bede. He proposes that the form and decoration of wooden and later stone preaching crosses helped bridge the transition from ‘superstition to doctrine’ (pp 225–6), a transition further illuminated in John Blair’s latest revelations about Bampton, Oxfordshire. The clues just keep coming from this fine-grained, multi-period ritual landscape – including critical finds by ‘Sophie’, an anonymised metal-detectorist. Extrapolating from Bampton’s chapel of St Andrew at Beam (‘arguably our most convincing Anglo-Saxon case of … the conversion of pagan shrines to churches’) and detailed study of other places with the name-element bēam, ‘tree’, ‘post’, ‘baulk of timber’, Blair proposes ‘a type of [complex] ritual arena … focused on one or more holy trees or their substitutes … and linking cult sites [within] holy zones’ (pp 206–7).
Many of these ideas are echoed in Della Hooke’s tour d’horizon, ‘Christianity and the “Sacred Tree”’, richly ranging from ‘holy’ oaks in charter bounds to the garlanding of churches. It is a fitting conclusion to a cornucopia of words decidedly not final. Some areas still await the first word; thus Comey regrets there is no Old English equivalent to Fergus Kelly’s ‘Old Irish Tree List’ in Celtica (Kelly Reference Kelly1976). John Baker’s review of place-name timber references, with imaginative use of overseas cultural data to consider bridge building, highlights the need for working models and synthesis. Relevant work in progress includes Sarah Semple’s, whose ‘Gardens of the Gods: plants, trees and groves in the pre-Christian landscape’ is sadly among the conference papers not included.
This volume succeeds on many levels, not least because even its lacunae will stimulate the reader to question, squirrel and discuss. £65 will put off many from buying this book. We must hope librarians are not among them.
