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Bede's creation of a nation in his Ecclesiastical History Bede completed the Ecclesiastical History of the English People at some time between 731, the year of his last entry, and 735, the year of his death.1 So powerful is the Anglo-Saxon present he evokes, so influential on subsequent chroniclers and historians, from later Anglo-Saxon times through the medieval period to our own present, that it can sometimes be necessary to remind ourselves how much more Anglo-Saxon history still lay ahead. Bede's picture of contemporary Anglo-Saxonracialand political groupings united by Christian purpose and practice, an ordered society of 'winners' with a firm collective sense of its destiny, is presented by a 'reliable nanator',2 who offers the comfort of closure by depicting the establishment in Anglo-Saxon affairs of guidelines which have merely to be followed through by any future generations. Beyond the actual lifetime of the writer, however, lay another two hundred years of separate, sometimes mutually hostile, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; shifts southward in the centre of cultural and political power from his native Northumbria to Mercia, then Wessex; and Scandinavian incursions of long-term occunence and effect. Virtually all the literature we think of as the (extant) Old English corpus, in which both primitive and Christian elements of Germanic culturefindexpression, had yet to be written: it would be some two centuries, for instance, as Audrey Meaney has shown, before the Beowulf prologue would articulate its ancient dynastic concerns, and almost another century before the manuscript in which that text survives would be produced.3 But Bede's understanding of the world would probably have enabled him to take such events 1 All references to the text in this essay are to Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People', ed. (and trans.) Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1969; for Bede's death see pp. 572-73, 'Continuations from the Moore MS.', under 735. That Bede did not necessarily complete this work in 731, as often assumed, has been observed by J. M . Wallace-Hadrill, in the companion volume to this edition, Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People': A Historical Commentary, Oxford, 1988, p. 203. 2 The expression is that of Donald K. Fry, in "The Art of Bede U: The Reliable Narrator as Persona', in 77M: Early Middle Ages, The Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of N e w York at Binghamton, Acta 6, Binghamton, NY, 1979, pp. 63-82. 3 See Audrey L. Meaney, 'Scyld Scefing and the dating of Beowulf—Again', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 71 (1989), 7-40 (the T. Northcote Toller Memorial Lecture delivered in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 14 March 1988: passim). The standard text of the poem is that in 'Beowulf and 'The Fight at Finnsburg', ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3rd edn with supps., Boston, 1950. For the approximate date of the manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv in the British Library, see Meaney's article, p. 7, and Klaeber's edition, p. cvii. P A R E R G O N ns 10.2, December 1992 140 D. Speed on board without difficulty: although the History obviously records events of linear time, as it is itself an event in linear time, it simultaneously locates itself and other events in non-dimensional eternity, all equally present to the eye of the Creator. This textual simultaneity, I suggest, imitates, or mimes, the actual simultaneity which is the very essence of eternity. The classical concept of 'imitation'—Latin imitatio, Greek mimesis—has been discussed as an explanation of Bede's procedure in the History in an important essay of 1979 by Calvin B. Kendall.4 The History, Kendall argues, both portrays exemplary lives for the reader to imitate and itself imitates exemplary literature. As the ultimate exemplary life in Christian history is that of Christ, so the ultimate exemplary literature is the Bible, both life and literature being revelations of God himself, Word, in human and written form respectively. Kendall's article is specifically concerned to show the 'centrality of the concept' in the History,5 and concludes by discussing some ways in...
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