The Origin of the English Nation

by Hector Munro Chadwick

A highly detailed account of the origin of the Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Jutes and Danes with four maps showing the ancient homelands in Scandinavia, Germany and Britain early in the present era. It has often been said that the English nation had sprung from diverse racial origns, but while it indeed represents an amalgam of Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Jutes and Danes, with related Celtic elements, these peoples were all closely related. Even the Celts are now believed to have separated from the Germanic speakers only a thousand years or so B.C., when they spread out in all directions from the common Germanic-Celtic homeland north of the European Alps. Contents The Saxons, Angles and Jutes in Britain; The Angles and Saxons in Germany; The Danish Settlers; The Classification of the Ancient Germanii.

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1983

About the author

Hector Munro Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, married to Nora Chadwick, worked during his career to integrate history and archaeology into the study of the philology of Old English.

Reviews

[Simon Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

H.M. Chadwick is the scholar's scholar. Of all the innovative oddballs knocking around the Edwardian intellectual scene - including the likes of Jane Harrison and the so-called 'Cambridge Ritualists' - it is Chadwick alone who is still read today by those in his field. Where his 1912 The Heroic Age provided a stunningly original catastrophic social explanation of the origins of modern individualism in the social encounter between two distinct kinds of ancient civilization, his early Origin of the English Nation broke new ground by tracing the origins of the English back before the migrations. This Chadwick achieved by tracing the outlines of the ancient mythology that the English shared with other Northern tribes. This account of ancient English mythology provided J.R.R. Tolkien with the starting-point for his stories of Middle-earth, which he intended as the conjectural stories that became the mythological traditions surveyed by Chadwick.