Descended from Woden: Why Anglo-Saxon Kings Claimed a Pagan God as Their Ancestor

By Calogero Nicosia

In the early eighth century, a Northumbrian monk sat down to write the history of the English Church. Bede was a careful scholar and a devout Christian, and his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) is the story of how the English turned from idols to Christ. Yet in the first book, when he introduces Hengist and Horsa, the two brothers said to have led the first Germanic settlers into Britain, he gives them a family tree. They were, he writes, the sons of Wihtgils, son of Witta, son of Wecta, son of Woden; and from Woden's stock, Bede adds, the royal families of many provinces took their origin (Ecclesiastical History I.15).

Woden was the chief god of the pagan English, the god whose name survives in our Wednesday (Old English Wōdnesdæg, "Woden's day"). A Christian monk was telling his readers, without apology, that the kings of England descended from him. He was not alone. For the next three centuries, English scribes went on copying royal pedigrees that ran back to Woden, and some of them went further still.

A god at the top of every tree

Bede's remark was not a passing curiosity. In Book II he gives the descent of the kings of Kent: Æthelberht, the first English king to accept Christianity, was the son of Irminric, son of Octa, son of Oeric, called Oisc, after whom the kings of Kent were known as Oiscings; and Oeric was the son of Hengist (Ecclesiastical History II.5). Put the two passages together, and the first Christian king in England stands eight generations below a pagan god.

The fullest evidence comes from a set of lists that historians call the Anglian Collection. It survives in four manuscripts, the oldest of which, now in the British Library (Cotton Vespasian B. vi), was written in Mercia in the first years of the ninth century. David Dumville, who edited the collection in 1976, traced its lost common source to Mercia around 796. It sets out the pedigrees of six royal houses: Deira and Bernicia (the two halves of Northumbria), Mercia, Lindsey, Kent and East Anglia. Every one of them ends in Woden.

The names below Woden differ from kingdom to kingdom. Kent descends through Wecta, as in Bede. Deira descends through Wægdæg, Bernicia through Bældæg, Lindsey through Winta. The Mercian line, which included the great Offa (d. 796), passes through an older Offa, a hero of Old English poetry who ruled the ancient kingdom of Angel, and his father Wermund, who reappears in medieval Danish histories. The East Anglian line, the dynasty of the Wuffings to which Rædwald belonged (the king usually linked to the Sutton Hoo ship burial), runs back through a figure called Caser, that is, Caesar, before reaching Woden.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Wessex in the reign of Alfred the Great, does the same for the West Saxon kings. Cerdic, the founder of the dynasty, is given a line of ancestors ending in Bældæg, son of Woden. Woden himself appears in the landscape the Chronicle describes: battles were fought in 592 and 715 at Wodnesbeorg, "Woden's barrow", usually identified with the long barrow in Wiltshire now called Adam's Grave. Not far away runs the great earthwork of Wansdyke, "Woden's dyke".

Of the surviving pedigrees, only one breaks the pattern. The kings of Essex traced themselves to Seaxnēat, not to Woden; it was a twelfth-century chronicle that finally made Seaxnēat a son of Woden.

Why keep a pagan god?

The obvious question is why Christian kings, and the monks who wrote for them, held on to such an ancestor.

Part of the answer is that a shared ancestor was useful. If every royal house descended from Woden, then every royal house was of one blood, and only those houses were truly royal. A king without Woden in his pedigree was a king with something to explain. Scholars such as Kenneth Sisam and David Dumville have shown how these lists were edited, extended and borrowed between kingdoms as political fortunes changed. They were not neutral records of memory; they were arguments about who had the right to rule.

The other part of the answer lies in how medieval Christians explained the old gods. A widespread idea, which goes back to the Greek writer Euhemerus, held that pagan gods had once been famous men, later worshipped by people who did not know better. On that view there was nothing shameful in descending from Woden. He had been a powerful king; the sin lay with those who had prayed to him.

Some English writers said so plainly. Æthelweard, an ealdorman who translated the Chronicle into Latin late in the tenth century, describes Woden as a king of a great host of barbarians, and complains that the unbelieving Danes, Northmen and Swedes still worship him as a god. Asser, Alfred's Welsh biographer, writing in 893, notes of Geat, one of the names above Woden in the West Saxon line, that the pagans had long venerated him as a god. Asser does not comment further, and Æthelweard's answer is clear enough: Woden had been a king whom pagans wrongly worshipped. Neither writer saw any reason to remove these men from the king's family tree.

Born in Noah's ark

In Wessex, the pedigree kept growing. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in its entry on King Æthelwulf, Alfred's father, sets out his descent in full. It climbs past Woden through Frealaf (or Frithuwald, in some copies), Finn, Godwulf, Geat, Tætwa, Beaw, Sceldwea and others, to a figure named Sceaf, "that is, the son of Noah, who was born in Noah's ark" (in James Ingram's translation). From there it runs through the patriarchs of Genesis to Adam, "the first man, and our Father, that is, Christ".

This is the most revealing step of all. The scribes did not cut Woden out. They placed him in the middle of a much longer line that began with Adam and passed through Noah, so that the West Saxon kings were tied at once to the heroes of the north and to the history of salvation. Several of the names above Woden, Sceldwea and Beaw among them, belong to the same legendary world as the Old English poem Beowulf, which opens with the story of Scyld Scefing. The genealogy took the old northern legends and folded them into the Bible.

Snorri runs it in reverse

The idea travelled. Around 1220, the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, or whoever wrote the prologue to his Edda, faced the same problem from the other side. He loved the old poems about Odin, the Norse form of Woden, and he wanted to preserve them for Christian readers. His solution was to make Odin a man. In the Prologue, Odin is a ruler who leaves "Tyrkland", the land in which Troy stood, and travels north with his people, who are called the Æsir because they are men of Asia. He comes to "Saxland" and sets his sons up as kings: Vegdeg, Beldeg (whom the Prologue identifies with Baldr) and Sigi in Saxland and the land of the Franks, Skjöldr in Jutland, Yngvi in Sweden and Sæmingr in Norway.

The names give the source away. Vegdeg and Beldeg are the English Wægdæg and Bældæg. The Prologue's list of Odin's ancestors (Seskef, Bedvig, Athra, Ítermann, Heremód, Skjaldun, Bjáf, Ját, Guðólfr, Finn, Fríallaf) is recognisably the West Saxon line above Woden, run through Norse mouths. The debt to English tradition is clear, and Anthony Faulkes has argued that the author worked from genealogical notes derived from English sources.

So the same family tree served two purposes. In England, it turned a god into a royal ancestor. In Iceland, it turned a god into a migrating king, so that his myths could be read as history rather than as religion. In both cases a Christian writer kept Woden, or Odin, because he could not do without him.

What the pedigrees tell us

None of this proves that a man called Woden ever lived, or that Hengist was his great-great-grandson. The lists are literary and political creations, revised whenever a dynasty needed a new claim. What they do show is how slowly the old gods left English memory. Two centuries after the conversion, the kings of England still wanted Woden at the head of their line. They made room for him by calling him a man, and when that was not enough, they set him beneath Noah and Adam.

The pagan English left us almost nothing in their own words about Woden. Their Christian descendants, by refusing to let go of him, left us a great deal.

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Sources quoted: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People I.15 and II.5; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals for 592, 715 and the genealogy of Æthelwulf (entry for 855, numbered 854 in some editions); Asser, Life of King Alfred, ch. 1; Æthelweard, Chronicon; Snorri Sturluson, Edda, Prologue. Further reading: Kenneth Sisam, "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies", Proceedings of the British Academy 39 (1953); David Dumville, "The Anglian Collection of Royal Genealogies and Regnal Lists", Anglo-Saxon England 5 (1976); Anthony Faulkes (ed.), Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning (Oxford, 1982).

About the author: Calogero Nicosia writes Mythic Harmonies, an evidence-based Norse mythology blog that quotes the Eddas and sagas passage by passage and separates the sources from modern interpretation. His guide to Odin, the Norse counterpart of Woden, is at https://www.mythic-harmonies.com/norse-mythology/odin-allfather/ 

In Search of Northanger Abbey: Farleigh Hungerford Castle

By Nancy Bilyeau

Jane Austen is revered for the characters she created, for her wit, and for how she fuses an acerbic, unblinking view of human nature with deep stores of empathy.  I believe that, among her arsenal of gifts, also lies a talent for writing "place." Austen mixed descriptions of her most iconic creations—Pemberley, Mansfield Park, Kellynch Hall—with those of "real" places she visited and knew well, from London's West End to Lyme Regis to Bath.

When it comes to Northanger Abbey, that talent is on full display. As in Persuasion, Austen brings Bath vividly to life. She also creates an imposing country house in Northanger Abbey, the manor house of the Tilney family located in Gloucestershire.

When reading the novel closely — and writing my sequel, The Heiress of Northanger Abbey — I admired the evocative, if not precise, description of Northanger Abbey, a product of Austen's imagination. The novel tells us it was once an abbey for nuns. Based on the usual trajectory, we can assume that, after Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, the abbey was closed to religious life. Maybe the nuns received adequate pensions, or perhaps they starved. But as for the building itself, it's logical to think it was sold to a courtier friendly to King Henry or Thomas Cromwell.  

In Austen's novel, the Tilney family did not enter into it until much later, perhaps two centuries later. In the early18th century, a Tilney purchased the manor house and modernized it: Northanger Abbey was a massive quadrangle that retains its Gothic arches and heavy stone walls. But in the story, General Tilney, the family patriarch, is proud of the "modern" kitchen he installed. The house also features smooth parquet floors, modern sash windows, elegant carpets, and "Rumford" fireplaces, invented in the 1790s. The house has a modern "bell system," General Tilney's pride and joy.

So we know that Northanger Abbey has been made comfortable and stylish in line with Regency ideals.

What a disappointment for Catherine Morland, the novel's heroine! She was thrilled to receive an invitation to Northanger Abbey, not only because it's the home of Henry Tilney, whom she is falling in love with, but because abbeys are supposed to be spooky ruins, filled with dark, dusty corridors, secret passageways, and cobwebs. This belief supposedly stems from Catherine's passion for Gothic literature.

I'd like to pause here and say that Catherine Morland is not the only one who lets her Gothic imagination run away with her. Here are four different book covers of Northanger Abbey, two of which seem to be fairly accurate renditions of the house in the novel; one is more like Dracula's castle, hanging off a cliff; and one is such a fragile ruin that nobody could spend the night there, much less live there!

But to the point of this column, I was curious about why Catherine is so convinced that Northanger Abbey will be a shabby ruin and a place filled with frightening and dangerous possibilities. The other characters attribute it to her fixation on Gothic novels. When Jane Austen wrote this novel, Sir Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho were popular, along with many imitators. But in those books, the castles are in Europe, and the stories are from the past. Catherine is seventeen and naive, but would she really expect Northanger Abbey to resemble an Italian castle from centuries ago, as described in a clearly fictional tale?

I wondered whether this belief was more common in the 1790s, when Northanger Abbey was written, than we might assume. Did people in the Regency have ideas similar to Catherine Morland's about English castle ruins and former abbeys as repositories of fear and violence, independent of fashionable Gothic fiction? 

I believe the answer is yes, and one such place that may have inspired the darker possibilities of an old castle or abbey is Farleigh Hungerford Castle.

"A Place of Solemn and Romantic Solitude"

Farleigh Hungerford Castle is today a ruin on a hillside, overlooking the rolling Somerset countryside. Owned by English Heritage, it is a much-visited site. Parts of the complex remain roofed and structurally intact, though no one has lived there for centuries, apart from the Priest’s House in the Outer Court, which was repurposed into a tenant farmhouse and was continuously occupied by farm managers into the mid-20th century.

Eastern gatehouse of Farleigh Hungerford Castle. Source: Wikipedia.

The original property was a manor house built before the Norman Conquest, as William the Conqueror gave it to a Norman "companion," Roger de Courcelles, in the 11th century. It passed between various owners until the Hungerford family took over in the 14th century and built a massive quadrangle castle on the site.

I knew of the Hungerfords because, while writing my Joanna Stafford trilogy set in Tudor England, I stumbled upon the bizarre life of Sir Walter Hungerford in my research. It's little known that Cromwell did not die alone--he was executed on Tower Hill after Hungerford, convicted of "high treason, sorcery, and buggery." 

Sir Walter Hungerford seems to have gone insane while imprisoned in the Tower of London, much like Jane Boleyn did two years later. An observer said that on execution day Hungerford "seemed so unquiet that many judged him rather in a frenzy than otherwise." In fact, one report says that Cromwell tried to steady Hungerford, saying, "There is no cause for you to fear. If you repent and be heartily sorry for what you have done, there is for you mercy enough for the Lord, who for Christ's sake will forgive you. Therefore be not dismayed, and though the breakfast we are going to be sharp, yet, trusting in the mercy of the Lord, we shall have a joyous dinner."

What gives Hungerford even more fame than his death — and provides fodder for stories told centuries later — is his treatment of his wives. James Tunstall, in a 19th-century guidebook, identified Hungerford as “something of a Bluebeard.” Three wives in succession complained of his cruel treatment. He imprisoned his third wife, Elizabeth, in the castle for nearly four years and frequently attempted to poison her. She is said to have survived only by drinking her own urine and eating food secretly supplied by local women.

After Cromwell's arrest, among all the letters found was one by Elizabeth accusing Lord Hungerford:

"Here I have been for three or four years past, without comfort of any creature, and under custody of my lord's chaplain, which hath once or twice poisoned me, as he will not deny under examination. He hath promised my lord that he 'would soon rid him of me,' and I am sure he intendeth to keep his promise."

(In case you're wondering, Elizabeth Hungerford survived her husband and remarried.)

The Hungerfords held Farleigh Hungerford Castle for another century, though the family remained problematic. According to the English Heritage site for the castle, Sir Edward Hungerford was known as "the Spendthrift," legendary both for his extravagance – allegedly paying 500 guineas for a wig – and for his debts. He sold the castle in 1686 to the Baynton family, who lived there until about 1702.

A watercolor sketch of the castle from the early 18th century

The once-proud medieval stronghold was sold for salvage in 1705. Over the following decades, the castle was systematically plundered for its materials and fittings.

In the 18th century, as it continued to fall apart, Farleigh Hungerford Castle became a popular place to visit. It was seen as noteworthy for “its antiquity, its importance, and the beautiful romantic scenery with which it is encompassed."

John Collinson, in The History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset, published in 1791, wrote:

"The remains of this castle stand in one of the most rural and picturesque spots within a wide radius of Bath... [The site] displays a scene of fallen grandeur, where overgrown towers and ivy-bound walls awaken the mingled sentiments of pleasure and melancholy."

Did Jane Austen Visit the Castle?

The key to this question is Collinson's writing that Farleigh Hungerford stood "within a wide radius of Bath." It was seven miles away. Jane Austen lived in Bath during two periods of her life. According to Professor Janine Barchas,  "Farleigh (or Farley) Hungerford Castle features prominently in a Bath guidebook owned by the Austen family."

So we have no proof of an Austen visit, but it seems very possible, even likely. If she and her family had gone day-tripping, they would have heard the story of the "Lady Tower," where Lady Elizabeth was said to have been confined by her husband.

The Lady Tower, where Elizabeth Hungerford was allegedly kept prisoner

In the plot of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland becomes fixated on stories about the dead mother of Henry Tilney. Her rooms in the abbey are kept separate, and Eleanor, Henry's sister, is very upset that her mother died while she was away. Catherine begins to wonder if there is something cruel about General Tilney, the dominating father of the family, and whether his wife was confined to her room or even if she died of natural causes.

Catherine cannot resist exploring the dead mother's room. While snooping, she is caught by a surprised Henry Tilney. She eventually explains that she feared his father "had not been very fond of" the late Mrs. Tilney.

Henry scolds her for her suspicions. The death was of a "malady," and the General's "value of her was sincere."

Embarrassed, Catherine flees the room in tears.

However, and Austen scholars find this interesting, Henry does tell Catherine that his mother "had much to bear" from General Tilney. And Catherine herself is mistreated when the General, who mistakenly thinks she is an heiress, orders her put out of the house when he discovers she is not.

Is General Tilney a "Bluebeard" guilty of imprisoning wives in his crumbling castle and trying to poison at least one? No. But he is not an admirable man either. 

These complexities are part of what makes Northanger Abbey, and Jane Austen's other novels, so cherished.

This is the first part in a series of articles I am writing about the inspiration for Northanger Abbey, the place.

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Learn more:

The Real Bluebeard of Bath:A Historical Model for Northanger Abbey, written by Professor Janine Barchas

The Thing About Austen podcast: General Tilney's bell system and other Northanger episodes

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The Heiress of Northanger Abbey will be published on September 1st in paperback, hardcover, and ebook. Real Simple magazine put the novel on its list of "Perfect Fall Reads," saying, “You’ll get a touch of that Austen spirit, with a Gothic mystery mixed in.”

"A thrilling mystery for everyone who wishes the Abbey really did have deep Gothic secrets--including some more dangerous than Catherine Morland ever dreamed!" -- Claudia Gray, NYT bestselling author of the Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney series

To learn more, go to Nancy Bilyeau's website.