Words of Technological Virtue: “The Battle of Brunanburh” and Anglo-Saxon Sword Manufacture

Abstract

Research Note WORDS OF TECHNOLOGICAL VIRTUE: “THE BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH” AND ANGLO-SAXON SWORD MANUFACTURE STEVEN WALTON Technology may be used for good or evil, but a belief in the intrin­ sic goodness of technology is a trait that Western culture seems to have inherited from the Middle Ages. Although there is some evi­ dence for medieval suspicions of technology, the surviving sources suggest that the positive view far outweighed the negative.1 Lynn White, jr., noticed evidence for a link between technological superior­ ity and virtuousness “in the Utrecht Psalter, illuminated near Rheims between 816 and 834. . . . On the right [of fol. 35v—see fig. 1] is the Psalmist being blessed by God. . . . On the left are the evil-doers. . . . The central interest of the picture lies in the sharpening of a sword in each camp, but by very different means. The iniquitous are content to employ an old-fashioned whetstone. The virtuous, in spectacular contrast, are using the first known example of the rotary grind­ stone.”2 White argued that “contemporaries seem never to have put Mr. Walton is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, writing on Tudor and Elizabethan artillery and pre-Galilean ballistics. He would like to thank Bert S. Hall and the two Technology and Culture referees for their help in evaluating earlier drafts of this article and Kelly DeVries for discussion of specific points herein. ‘For the genesis of this view, see Lynn White, jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962). For thorough recent interpretations of technology, including the classical disdain and the medieval embrace, see Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Artsfrom Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1990), and George Ovitt, The Restoration ofPerfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987), which place medieval technology in the wider theological and academic context of the Middle Ages. 2 From his essay “The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technol­ ogy,” reprinted in Lynn White, jr., Medieval Religion and Technology (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 181-204, quotes from pp. 185-86. He had first suggested this link as early as 1940 in his essay “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 15 (1940): 153.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/95/3604-0005$01.00 987 988 Steven Walton Fig. 1.—The Utrecht Psalter, fol. 35v, early 9th century, showing two methods of sword sharpening or manufacture. (Courtesy of the Utrecht University Library.) [this idea] into words,” and this compelled him to look at images to gain access to feelings that lay too deep for words.3 Contemporaries, however, did equate technology with virtue in words in the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Brunanburh . This poem recounts how, in the fall of 937, King Aethelstan, grandson of King Alfred, Aethelstan’s brother Eadmund, and the Saxon levy defeated a coalition of the Danes of Northumbria, the Danes of Dublin, the Scots, and the Strathclyde Britons.4 They de­ feated them, it is written, with “mill-sharpened” (mylenscearpum) swords: 3The Utrecht Psalter resided for a time at Christ Church, Canterbury, where three copies were made, so the Anglo-Saxons certainly had access to this image. Apparently the rotary grindstone image was not copied, but the band of the iniquitous sharpening with a whetstone were reproduced in an early-1 lth-century copy (British Library, Harley 603, fol. 21r). See Thomas H. Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration (Kalama­ zoo, Mich., 1992), p. 183, fig. 2.37. 4 Marjorie Anderson and Blanche C. Williams, Old English Handbook (Boston, 1955), p. 252; and F. C. Cassidy and R. N. Ringer, eds., Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader, 3d ed. (New York, 1971), pp. 162-63. “The Battle ofBrunanburh” and Anglo-Saxon Sword Manufacture 989 . . . / Wessaxe forS ondlonge daeg I eorodcistum on last legdun I laSum feodum heowan herefleman I hindan j?earle mecum mylenscearpum. . . . The West Saxons went forth, pursued the hostile troops all day, and hewed the fugitive soldiers severely from behind with swords mill-sharpened.3 * 5 The word mylenscearpum, here simply transliterated into mill-sharp...