Bodies as Borders: Cannibalism and Conversion in the Old English Andreas

The Vercelli Book poem known as Andreas¹ recounts the adventures of St. Matthew and St. Andrew in the land of the heathen, man-eating Mermedonians. The popularity of various versions of the legend and the widespread importance of St. Andrew’s cult² attest to the power that this miles Christi held in the medieval Christian imagination, a power that I would suggest stems from the nature of his encounter with and conversion of a threatening and exotic people on the margins of the known world.³ The story of the apostolic mission to central Asia resonates with medieval Christians on many levels that go beyond its reenactment of Christ’s own mission in the world. These tales represent originary moments in Christian history: the encounters of Matthew and Andrew with the strange and heathen Other, the monstrous Mermedonian, serve at once to define what it means to be Christian and to question the very foundations of that definition.

Contemporary theories of the body and incorporation can help us to understand the cannibalism of the Mermedonians and its relationship to their conversion. As critics have often pointed out, Andreas is a poem about conversion,⁴ but conversion of whom, the Mermedonians or the Jews? The poem’s collapse of these two categories of the non-Christian Other—one abominable, the other originary—plays upon the archetypal fear of that which exists outside. The subsequent conversion of the heathen Mermedonians, who are arguably identifiable with Jews in the poem, seeks to resolve the tension between that which is “inside” and that which is “outside” by imagining the Mermedonians’ incorporation into a transcendental “single body that [can] contain all meaning”⁵—the body of the Christian Church. The poem accomplishes this through its use of shifting metaphors of incorporation, that is, by focusing on images of the physical and spiritual assimilation of human beings, first into the bodies of other humans and subsequently into the communal body of the Church. It is the project of this article to trace these shifts in Andreas, to observe these patterns of alienation and internalization, expulsion and forceful reincorporation, with an eye to their significance for the poem’s Anglo-Saxon audience.⁶

The poem’s interest in the creation and maintenance of the boundaries of Christian community seems especially relevant to an Anglo-Saxon audience when we consider that Andreas was probably composed in the ninth century, squarely in the midst of the Viking incursions.⁷ Viewed in this historical context, the assimilation and neutralization of a bloodthirsty heathen people might take on a special significance, encoding the religious and cultural anxieties of Christians living in Anglo-Saxon England in the ninth century. On one hand, the poem’s typological emphasis on Christ’s eventual conquering of all unbelieving peoples may serve as a source of comfort for the Anglo-Saxon audience insofar as they identify themselves as part of the body of the Christian faithful. Alternatively, however, the Old English legend’s heightening of the violence and animalistic terror of the Mermedonians may also record an anxiety that the heathen Vikings could displace the Anglo-Saxons in England, turning their island into a “mearcland morðre bewundan.”⁸

In From Communion to Cannibalism, Maggie Kilgour describes the paradoxical nature of incorporation:

the relation between an inside and an outside involves a delicate balance of simultaneous identification and separation that is typified by the act of incorporation, in which an external object is taken inside another. The idea of incorporation . . . depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears, dissolving the structure it appears to produce.⁹

From the beginning of Andreas we see this pattern at work in complex ways in the poet’s description of the Mermedonian cannibals and their encounters with Matthew and Andrew. On one level, the poet’s depiction of the Mermedonians works to alienate them from their Christian counterparts through a grotesque and horrifying description of their bloodthirsty, even demonic, custom. Yet the expectation of...