What if England does not exist – in fact, has never existed – and this is a good thing…?
Alex Niven cheekily explores the gaps that lead him to suspect the country is imaginary, and exploring other ways we could reconfigure the British Isles so that a more radical culture can flourish.
He approaches this theme from a few angles. Geo-politically, England was real between the 10th and 17th centuries only – and since then, it’s routinely been used as a metonym for other units of government that are much larger and more influential than itself (England-and-Scotland, Britain, the British Isles, the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Europe…).
Ethnically, the (white) “English” are not one group either – genetic studies show a number of different regional clusters, with the South being descended from a Franco-Germano culture pre-Norman-conquest, Cornwall and Devon continuing to be wholly distinct, and chunks of Northumbria being closely related to trading partners in Ireland and Scotland (he recognises that ethnicity-by-blood will always be a political dead-end, but it’s useful as evidence for the claim that “England” or the “English” is an imaginary structure imposed on the world, influencing how we think about reality; and especially given the continuing use of “”Anglo Saxon”” as a white nationalist founder-myth. Turns out, most Brits are not ethnically Anglo-Saxon – or ‘Viking’, for that matter – and attempts to make us so say more about the speaker and their desires, than historic or genetic reality.)
He discusses various strategies and trends in popular culture that attempt to paper over England’s absence; asking why self-identification as English has been on the political ascendance over the last decade (where before, “British” was in vogue); and skewering several strategies I’m familiar with in my work – from psychogeography, to connecting with England’s socialist ancestry. In the process, taking on the “conservative-pastoral myth of Englishness, and the modern liberal fantasy that England is a sophisticated multicultural democracy with just a couple of minor problems”.
He proposes that the concept of England is built of three things: an ancient curse, confinement, and the hidden or void. One can immediately see how the Landweird is a manifestation of his ‘ancient curse’ theme, and that seeking it is a response to the sense of that which has been ‘hidden’, and even that sense of confinement in the belief that something has been trapped under the hills.
Niven approaches these ideas both culturally and politically; the ‘ancient curse’ refers to the English sense the true land has somehow gone missing – as in, Arthur’s once-and-future-king, but also nationalist longings (a time before industry…before mass migration…before the end of the war…), psychogeography, the political repression which has prevented ordinary English folk living in a utopia, and even the text of “every Englishman’s second national anthem” Jerusalem which calls on the listener to build Jerusalem here – “a rather bizzare feeling that England somehow does not quite exist, and indeed not been allowed to exist since the arrival of a mysterious evil at the start of its history… the real nation will be revealed only when the curse is lifted). ‘Confinement‘ refers to the state of being on an island; the brutally restricted dreams of the populace under a capitalist system; the enclosures act that makes us trespassers on most of the physical landscape we can see; the character of the small-minded “Little Englander”; fears about loss of space; the intractable class system and poltical establishment; resentment of neighbours, fear of the outside. And ‘hidden/void’, finally, this idea that England is more imagined than real, and if we scratch at it we find nothing inside (but our own desires to discover it).
I love this kind of writing. Niven’s thesis reminds me of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which memorably asks “if feminism is all about women, then we should probably first consider ”what is a woman” – and that turns out is quite a complicated question”. There’s something very pleasing about stepping back from a concept that feels so solid you’ve never questioned it, and seeing it as an exploded diagram. It draws attention to how our ideas are formed and what their function is in society, and importantly – it lets us know we could arrange things differently.
Niven doesn’t quite land his argument; he advocates for a greater focus on regional identity, to re-imagine the Isles as a kind of ‘archipelago’. If Northumbrian identity has a greater closeness to Glasgow or Belfast, then why should we imagine Northumbria to be part of a political-cultural entity called England whose capital is London? This is influenced by his own (not wholly acknowledged) emotional draw to a Northumbrian identity; I identified strongly with being a Londoner, and I catch his drift that my attachment was more to London itself, not to an Englishness that granted any special insight or love for a place called Northumbria. Nonetheless, I think his argument leaves me cold because that sense of belonging to a place ultimately is so strong for him – its just not a place called England; and because I increasingly feel myself an outsider everywhere, I’m not sure I will belong to a piece of land again and the thought leaves me profoundly unmoored and afraid. Being forced to move away from London coincided with my growing attachment to a (problematic) Englishness, and this was certainly not a coincidence. What need does a desire for England serve? I suppose Niven and I would concur on this: to fill the void.
The great blessing of London identity is that so many people flood in and out of it, that its easily claimed: anyone who is here, now. Unlike other identities, I don’t think one can be a Londoner living somewhere else – casually granted, immediately lost. That leaves me as a nothing, and as magnet to magnet, void draws void, to be English is suddenly very important (albeit, a fantasy landscape of corn rigs and thatch cottages that I know mostly from television). Will there be a point when I start feeling Welsh? I feel fiercely that the refugee who competed on Welsh-language walking competition show Am Dro is as Welsh as anyone else who lives here; but that anti-blood-and-soil energy does not, it seems, extend to me. What would feeling Welsh be like; how would I identify that experience within me? It’s a bit like encountering a transphobic feminist, who deliberately demands to argue on the illogical territory of “how can you ‘feel’ like a woman?”. Niven doesn’t really explore the emotional dimension of nationalism, I suppose taking it as a given that though deep feeling exists, it cannot be a good basis for politics. Nonetheless, I think there is a certain relevance: if we are to claim that England does not exist and the country should be rearranged along more logical political and emotional lines, then how people feel about who they are is a factor. How would I sort myself, if we re-drew the maps?
Niven’s argument could, I think, be strengthened by looking at how Germany, Switzerland or America, at how regional units within a nation actually function – whether it lead to the kinds of socialist outcomes he desires. But I think the lack of answers in the final chapter is OK. This is a short book on an impossible topic, and there’s value in asking more questions than you can solve.
It’s planted a seed in me: “when I think about England, what do I mean by that?”
England has always loomed large in my psyche. I didn’t grow up there, but I always dreamed of going; because in my homeland, we did not have the big European deciduous forests that I fell in love with as the settings of stories. Visiting Sherwood Forest at the age of 5 or 6 had the quality of a pilgrimage. Magic was real, but it was in England – where the oak trees were. I moved there as soon as I could; and my spiritual longings were to connect with the spirit I had met as a child. Fencraft then developed in the crucible of discovering England had forgotten its gods, that what was here was nameless (and that other Pagan traditions, in seeking to “solve” this irritating gap, plastered over it as if to consider the gap itself would lessen the magic rather than be its most vital feature).
“What is England” is, therefore, a question of no small importance, and I recognise many of the strategies in Niven’s book as ones I have used (for example, he is opposed to hauntology and sees it as a political dead end). One cannot seek for a spirit of a place without conceding the existence of a place, and encountering others whose experience of it fills disparate needs. “The ancient gods of my people/the place I live” can never be politically neutral; whether the seeker is aware of it or not, this asks
well, who are “my people”? These questions are so politically charged that there are perhaps no unproblematic strategies.
The contemporary trend in paganism to oppose cultural appropriation is excellent and much needed – but I do feel a certain discomfort too, with where it leaves white pagans. The “acceptable” traditions one can draw from without being challenged reifies the existence of a Western Culture, seeing anything (white) pan-European as part of “our” culture, stretching back to the ancient Greeks. But this “West” is a white-nationalist meme; nothing unifies Mozart, Plato, blonde Bulgarian girls in traditional dress, Italian cathedrals and Viking carvings except the concept of whiteness.
If one rejects that, one is left with a more national-nationalism – focusing only on the gods of Britain, or England, or the Kingdom of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, or ~Albion~. But that’s not a solution either; because one is inevitably implying that the history of the isles is exclusively one of white culture and tradition (when there has always been migration and cultural exchange), implying that the ancient gods of “my people” are ‘Anglo Saxon’ (when one may very well ‘be’ a Frisian or a Jute or all manner of things, and terms such as that have been retroactively applied for nefarious reasons), and playing into a different strand of right wing nationalism which opposes European identity in favour of English isolationism. (A key factor is the English-language internet is dominated by American users, who are often ill-equipped to understand how nationalism operates in a European context).
But this doesn’t make right the 1920s fascination for pan-cultural universal myths and archetypes which underpinned early neo-Pagan thought; nor does it validate a modern magpie approach to a buffet of eclectic cultures, or the comforting liberal myth that we are all one nation now and so anything here is neutral and entirely fair game under a free-market of ideas in which all individuals have equal social power.
That there can be no answer to this does not, I think, suggest we should stop asking the question. On the contrary, it requires us to resist the urge to solve and instead be constantly self-aware of the implications of what we say and do. And for that, books like New Model Island are vital reading. I didn’t expect to love this as much as I did; but having read it twice, I have a sincere and deep appreciation for the little Alex Niven voice now lodging in my skull, drawing my attention to Worzel Gummidge calling up the ‘Scarecrows of Albion’ and saying “psttt what memes is that choice of word drawing on; what strategies is it using; what ideas is it implying; why Albion, why not anything else; that’s not a neutral image, is it, Albion and the corn and the soil; why not the Pretanic Scarecrows, eh?”.
Ah, the delights of a new way of seeing! If Albion is dreaming, I am perhaps now uncomfortably awake.
Available from Repeater Books / Alex Niven can be found on Twitter
Fencraft: Seekers of the Landweird 