Colonial Desire or Political Disengagement?: The Contested Landscape of Guthlac A

Recent postcolonial criticism has understood Guthlac’s legend as reflecting a nascent sense of Anglo-Saxon colonial aspiration, with the Mercian saint a successful embodiment of Anglo-Saxon land conquest over native British resistance. This article argues that the Old English poem Guthlac A does not easily fit this pattern but rather depicts both the land and its possession in more ambivalent ways. While other texts of the Guthlac legend do contain relatively straightforward narratives of land reclamation and demon conquest, Guthlac A provides no clear political agenda or allegory but instead depicts a contested landscape whose ambiguity undermines the potential for latent reflections of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Guthlac A uniquely places conflicting conditions of ownership upon the contested beorg, complicating the process of its repossession, while this space is also depicted as simultaneously forbidding and congenial to both Guthlac and the demons throughout the poem, making the saint’s role as an agent of its manifest physical transformation far less clear. At every turn, the ambiguity of the landscape in this poem undermines the potential for colonial desires, as does the poem’s aversion to the violence of Guthlac’s past career as a warrior. I suggest that if this poem has any political context, it reflects Guthlac’s origins in Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that saw its spatial boundaries and political allegiances shifting the most rapidly and unpredictably.

Guthlac was a popular Anglo-Saxon saint whose life is recorded first in the early eighth-century Vita Sancti Guthlaci, written by a monk named Felix.¹ The saint was born into a noble Mercian family in 674 under the reign of Æthelred and in his early life was a successful warrior before a change of heart at age twenty-four prompted him to enter the monastery at Repton.² In 699, he left the monastery to live as a hermit in the fens of East Anglia, where he remained until his death in 715.³ Guthlac was venerated in Anglo-Saxon England even during his lifetime, as he was visited in his hermitage by the Mercian King Æthelbald before his accession in 716, and his Vita was written by Felix at the request of Ælfwald, king of the East Angles from 713–49.⁴

While Felix’s text is the earliest work to mention the saint, a significant body of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval material on Guthlac survives outside of the Latin Vita.⁵ However, Guthlac A is only one of two Old English poems on this saint, both extant in a single manuscript, the tenth-century poetic anthology known as the Exeter Book.⁶ While the two poems adjoin one another, Guthlac A and Guthlac B are very different works in content, tone, structure, and style.⁷ Guthlac B narrates the saint’s death, cleaving closely to its source, Chapter 50 of Felix’s Vita; Guthlac A,⁸ to the contrary, contains little in the way of linear narrative and has long suffered a poor critical reputation as a result. As Daniel G. Calder has noted, “[W]hile Guthlac B customarily garners praise for its clarity, humanity, and poetic power,” Guthlac A “usually receives blame for being abstract, repetitive, and didactic.”⁹ More recent scholarship has reclaimed Guthlac A’s artistry, productively focusing on the distinctiveness of this poem as juxtaposed against the more familiar narrative of Guthlac’s life from Felix’s Vita. While the question of whether or not the Guthlac A-poet was familiar with Felix’s text remains unanswered,¹⁰ it has been recognized that his poem departs, whether consciously or not, from the core elements of this saint’s legend,¹¹ becoming largely a description of an extended battle for the beorg.

Most recently, postcolonial critics have read Guthlac A as “suffused with colonial desires,”¹² interpreting its landscape as a site of “conquest and possession” in “the formation of cultural identity.”¹³ Yet in placing unsettled boundary spaces at the center of its narrative action, Guthlac A stands apart from a familiar legend of “a saintly figure whose actions are motivated...