Christianity and writing
We know little about the Anglo-Saxons until after their conversion to Christianity, which introduced them to writing. As elsewhere in medieval Europe, writing was in the hands of clerics, who often had strong views about what it was proper to record, so that we learn little about the ways of the Heathen English form their writings. Some pagan lore has remains fossilized in the language:
e.g. the Heathen gods have given their names to the days of the week:
- Tīw “Tuesday”;
- Wōden “Wednesday”;
- thunor “thunder” “Thursady”;
- Woden’s consort Frīg “love” has given her name to Friday;
- the goddess of the rising sun or of spring, Ēastre, has probably given her name to the Christian festival of Easter.
The conversion of the English to Christianity began in 597 when Pope Gregory the Great sent the missionary St Augustine to England, and took a century to complete. Augustine was able to convert King Ethelberht of Kent and soon set up a Roman Catholic see in Canterbury. England underwent a remarkably bloodless conversion over the next 70 years. There are no records of priests being martyred or pagans being killed, possibly because Pope Gregory had thought to tell Augustine not to destroy the pagan temples, but to enter into them and replace the idols with the Christian cross, therefore allowing people to maintain many of their traditional customs in their traditional places.
It was carried out from 2 directions, the Celtic church penetrating from the North-west (Christianity had survived among the Celts of Ireland and missionaries also came to convert the Anglo-Saxons from there, they began their work in Northumbria) and the Roman church from the South-East (Augustine landed in Kent and started his work in the south). The Celtic and the Roman churches differed in some of their practices, though it was the Roman church which was to come out victorious in the 7th c. With Christianity came writing [Baber].
Writing
A writing system used by Germanic tribes from maybe the second century AD was the runic futhork, a system, originally of twenty-four letters. Runes were used only for short inscriptions, not for texts of any lenth. Runes had been used by the Germanic peoples from at least the 3d c. AD, for carving or scratching inscriptions on stone, metal-work, or wood: the word book (OE bōc) originally meant “beech”. The word rune also meant “mystery, secret”, and the inscriptions were evidently thought to have magical power. Runes go back ultimately to some form of the Greek alphabet. A form of the runic alphabet is known as the “futhorc”, from its first six letters.
When the clerics introduced writing to England, they used a Celtic version of the Latin alphabet, but added some runic symbols from the futhork [Baber].