Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere As Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building

Abstract

“Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building.” Scholars have long noted differences in treatments of nature between Anglo-Saxon and other early Insular literatures. But such real (though not monolithic) differences in emphasis have never been adequately explained relative to cultural views of natural landscape that were fostered by the construction of Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity in the seventh and eighth centuries. An ecocritical approach to the most extensive surviving Anglo-Saxon landscape narratives, Beowulf and the Lives of St. Guthlac, enables us to understand how the formation of Anglo-Saxon cultural identity, in an Augustinian theological context, led to an allegorizing of landscape in literature and culture with political implications. In a seeming paradox, Augustinian emphases on the fallen nature of the world helped to shape a new ideology for dominating the natural landscape, thus meeting political needs of emerging Anglo-Saxon national elites.

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