This kept popping into my mind when I was putting together my anthology, and in the end I just gave in to whatever it was my subconscious was trying to tell me.
It’s a hagiography of a King who’s martyred by invading Vikings for refusing to give up Christianity. It’s not a short story but I think it feels like one to read it today. What’s stuck with me is the way that it depicts (or rather, doesn’t depict) pain. The weirdness of it! The odd, affectless way that physical agony is described! There’s a line about him being pricked all over with spears ‘like a hedgehog’ that I think about weirdly often – it’s so impassive, disconnected – like his body is nothing but surface.
I read this at university and I remember not really knowing what to do with it academically. Now I’ve forgotten everything I learnt about hagiography and Abbo of Fleury, but the feeling of reading the text hasn’t budged – its bright, solid images, its refusal to go inside of things.
Perhaps this is what I like about reading it: that it reminds me of the uncanny fact of other lives and other times. Often stories give us the illusion of true empathy – of feeling with. But reading this, with all its meanings distant and its contexts inaccessible, I become aware of how many things have been, are, and will forever be alien to me.
Collected in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, Oxford University Press, 1882. Read online here
A Personal Anthology 