This follow-up to Hana Videen’s 2021 book The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, itself the product of the author’s highly popular and long-established blog, presents an authoritative and accessible account of how non-human animal life was understood and represented in early medieval England. Videen manages an effective balance between the medieval, the contemporary, and the personal throughout The Deorhord, sounding a chord between the academic and the conversational that will appeal to a broad range of readerships. The book already has its share of enthusiastic reviews that will be read more widely in popular publications, and its target audience is appropriately wide for such an involving subject.
A sensible review written by and for academic audiences recognises decisions likely made with this broader readership in mind, and reflects on how the book represents both contemporary scholarship and Videen’s own interventions. Happily for Old English scholars, and especially those interested in animal studies, ecocriticism, and so on, this book will be a helpful primer for friends lost to early modern studies, for family members with a thin grasp of what it is you do, and for teenagers who might be converted to medieval studies. Equally, however, it may also offer fresh insights to readers who overestimate the extent of their own knowledge, this reviewer included.
The Deorhord is effectively structured around concepts and individual creatures or groups of creatures (using Julian of Norwich’s shorthand to save on words). Twenty such beings are divided between categories including “The Ordinary” (eagles; spiders; cattle; doves); “The Extraordinary” (animals unheard of; ants; elephants); “The Good” (lions; deer; the phoenix; the panther); “The Bad” (whales; snakes; dragons; wolves); and “The Baffling” (you will need to read the book), concluding with the epilogue “Human or Beast?”. The effect, cleverly, is not to present a comprehensive account of the animalia known to, or imagined by, people in early medieval England, but to show the various ways in which they thought about them.
This approach is successful and sensitive; it pushes boundaries in ways that reflect a sea-change in studies of early medieval England, while showing how simply this can be accomplished and demonstrated with thought and care. While a 2023 trade bestseller on Roman roads skips over the recent discussion of the “Anglo-Saxon” in a line or two, and even finds enthusiasm for the “Dark Ages,” Videen’s book is a masterclass in understatement, and the better and more effective for it. Some academic readers, this reviewer included, will make their way through earlier chapters wondering when the book will address the question of who, and what, was considered human, and non-human, being mindful of the relationship between the Middle Ages and colonial histories. Rather than hectoring in ways more likely to rile a general (or fragile) readership, this is craftily brought into the closing stages of the argument--craft, here, in the Old English sense, referring to skill, balance, and precision.
Videen’s expertise is as a literary-linguistic scholar, and in this regard the Deorhord is as strong as one might expect. The book presents a thorough and accurate appraisal of the material that does the important job of making the language accessible to a broader readership. Views on how best to accomplish this always differ, and Videen’s approach is what UK institutions would call best practice. Reviews are supposed to find room to pick holes, and there might have been scope in a longer version of this book, miraculously granted additional images and wordcount by the publisher, to give further consideration to material culture and archaeology. An issue the book has to deal with, because of this balance, is frequent recourse to later bestiaries and other sources. Many of the illustrations, for this reasonable reason, are post-Conquest. This approach works effectively (for continuity) as far as the non-specialist reader is concerned, though it may leave those who are fussier wondering why there are no comments about the fallow deer in Richmond Park being a post-Conquest import (120-21). Similarly, the survival of bears in Britain as late as the post-Roman period is thought unlikely by most (205), and more recent scholarship on wolves would have helped some of the arguments in chapter 15. A more general consideration concerns the representation of the non-human world through what was written, rather than what is known from other (mainly material) sources. When we are introduced to medieval people’s knowledge of non-human beings through written sources (vernacular and Latin), this necessarily excludes the knowledge of most medieval people, and especially those people more often responsible for managing animals and landscapes. This is not Videen’s problem to solve, of course, but could usefully be foregrounded.
In summary, this book is a successful exercise in demonstrating how early medieval England understood its connectedness with the rest of the world through its understanding of other terrestrials. Videen manages to enliven some trenchant arguments about riddles with her own interpretations in ways that are both convincing, but, more importantly,engaging, showing in a practical fashion how interpretation of these texts is an ongoing project, and not purely the province of academics. Given that academic criticism of successful public-facing writing by other academics is often riddled with personal gripes, this book works hard to acknowledge the contribution of scholars. This reviewer did wonder whether there might be scope to trouble the modern reader’s conception of animalia, real and imagined, by including reference to a tree or plant like the peridexion in the Physiologus. But perhaps this would be treading on the borders of an arboreal word-hord as yet unwritten.