Holy Heights in the Anglo-Saxon Imagination: Guthlac’s beorg and Sacred Death

In his eighth-century Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede quotes Gregory the Great saying “Non enim pro locis res, sed pro bonis rebus loca amanda sunt” (Truly, things are not to be loved on account of place, but places are to be loved on account of good things).¹ There is no better illustration of this idea than one of the opening scenes of Bede’s work, when Alban, Britain’s first martyr, leads his executioners to a hill five hundred paces from the arena where he was to be killed. Alban ostensibly chooses the location of his martyrdom, a hill uestitus (vested) with verdure whose beauty “dignum uidelicet eum pro insita sibi specie uenustatis iam olim reddens, qui beati martyris cruore dicaretur” (rendered it worthy that it should one day be consecrated with the blood of a blessed martyr).² This line suggests that the hill has stood waiting for its true realization in Alban’s death, a place seemingly determined by Nature and by God as an altar upon which a holy sacrifice might be made. Just as Alban receives the crown of martyrdom, the hill is a crowned part of the landscape waiting for Alban’s death as the moment in which its natural beauty is fused with sacred significance. Consecrated by his death, this hill symbolically becomes a natural martyr’s shrine at a period in British history when martyrs’ shrines could not be publically constructed.³ The hill is a conspicuous place, elevated and visible to all—a physical testament to Christianity’s precedence over the surrounding pagan landscape. This is a place to be loved not merely for its location but also because a saint died there.

This hill of martyrdom in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica may shed light on one of the most famous and contested literary topographies in Old English literature: the beorg of Guthlac A. In this Old English poem, the location of the saint’s struggle with demons is described as a beorg, a term often used in the Old English corpus to mean “mountain” or “hill,” but which can also indicate an artificial mound, “barrow,” or even “refuge” or “protection.”⁴ Paul Reichardt, David F. Johnson, and Manish Sharma have all observed spiritual and Biblical resonances in Guthlac A, Reichardt observing that the beorg represents a spiritual “mount of saintliness” to be ascended symbolically through ascesis, and Sharma arguing that Guthlac’s physical motion (including his ascent up the beorg) parallels that of his spiritual development.⁵ None of these interpretations, however, have incorporated the powerful theme of violent martyrdom into their analyses of the poem, nor regarded Guthlac’s battle for his beorg as a symbolic death. In this essay, I argue that the poet of Guthlac A crafts Guthlac’s beorg as a holy height on which a figurative hill-death in imitatio Christi took place and depicts his saintly hero as a martyre (l. 514a). While Bede constructs his account based on existing material about a historical martyr dying on an actual mons, the poet of Guthlac A imagines his saint’s struggle with demons as a symbolic death suffered on an elevated space, his beorg. Further, I highlight moments in the Old English corpus that suggest that the mountain topos was known and utilized by authors and poets to weave sacred landscape into their narratives. Though the saintly Guthlac does not die on his beorg in Guthlac A, the poet not only depicts his hero as a martyr entering spiritual combat for Christ but also places him at a locus proper for martyrdom, conjuring up his beorg in the unlikeliest of locations: the lowlands of the British fens.

HOLY HEIGHTS IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

The typological significance of Alban’s hill and of Guthlac’s beorg begins with the Hebrew scriptures, where mountains are places of distinct holiness. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, Mount Zion refers to both a literal mountain near Jerusalem and the eschatological Holy City, fully realized only at the end of time.⁶ The book of Isaiah states: “et erit in novissimis...