Poor Hengist and Horsa
Feb. 13th, 2005 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusI'm reading The Roman de Brut, and having a Starship-Troopers moment. Even though it's intended as 12th-century pro-Christian propaganda, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the villains.
A pair of gorgeous Saxons guys come to the king to request space to live. There is lots of land in Britain at this time (plenty of wars have depopulated the fields), and the Saxons need a place to live.
The problem? They're Woden-worshippers -- Germanic pagans. The king takes them in anyway, since his own people hate him, and the Saxons get caught in the middle. For the Christians, it's the last straw. They rise up against their king, and start exterminating the Saxons.
The Christians play dirty, so the Pagans play dirty back. Only the Pagans get judged for their behaviour. In the end, a defenceless Hengist gets chopped up by a bishop, citing the Bible as precedent for this behaviour.
It's probably not history, but people believed it was history until very recently. Along with the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim literature I've read from the Middle Ages, it frightens me just how dehumanized people are in these things.
A pair of gorgeous Saxons guys come to the king to request space to live. There is lots of land in Britain at this time (plenty of wars have depopulated the fields), and the Saxons need a place to live.
The problem? They're Woden-worshippers -- Germanic pagans. The king takes them in anyway, since his own people hate him, and the Saxons get caught in the middle. For the Christians, it's the last straw. They rise up against their king, and start exterminating the Saxons.
The Christians play dirty, so the Pagans play dirty back. Only the Pagans get judged for their behaviour. In the end, a defenceless Hengist gets chopped up by a bishop, citing the Bible as precedent for this behaviour.
It's probably not history, but people believed it was history until very recently. Along with the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim literature I've read from the Middle Ages, it frightens me just how dehumanized people are in these things.
