Mead-Hall

Stephen Pollington, The Mead-Hall: Feasting in Anglo-Saxon England. Norfolk: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2003. ISBN 1-898281-30-0. $85.00.

Stephen Pollington’s books are marked by a rare combination of engaging clarity and seriousness of purpose, and this volume is no exception. The task the author sets himself is the seemingly modest one of “bring[ing] together some of the material relating to Anglo-Saxon feasting – in its various senses – and the ‘mead-hall’ culture in which such feasting took place” (p. 15). The real challenge of this undertaking is to say something useful about the subject that has not been said before, while not pressing beyond what the documentary, linguistic, and archaeological evidence will bear.

Much of Pollington’s material on feasting and symbel, the role of oaths and flyting, and spatial indicators of relative power, were well covered ten years ago in Michael Enright’s Lady with a Mead Cup.[1] Similarly, Pollington’s coverage of the ritual function of the mead-hall in heathen life largely overlaps Frands Herschend’s The Idea of the Good in Late Iron Age Society.[2] To this prior scholarship, Pollington adds extensive detail on food and feasting equipment (an entire chapter, including typical male and female garb), period entertainment, and the physical layout of representative halls in various periods from the 5th to 11th centuries. These sections will undoubtedly make the book an important resource for historical reenactment groups with an interest in this period.

Still, as many previous writers on “pagan England” have discovered, most of the details of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon life lie tantalizingly beyond the historian’s grasp. There are only three ways of dealing with this reality: (1) ignore it, and pretend that the period can be described with certainty; (2) base one’s account on records of pre-Christian Scandinavia, and assert that things must have been the same in England; or (3) carefully qualify one’s statements to remind the reader that virtually all key elements of the narrative are speculative. It is to his credit that Pollington proceeds by the third route, which is the only intellectually honest one. But the necessary result is a book in which the most frequently used words seem to be “may,” “might,” “could have,” and “perhaps.”

In some cases, the bases for Pollington’s assumptions are not clear. He draws, for example, a recurring distinction between the presumed lifestyles of the “Aesir-worshiping aristocrats” and the “Vanir-worshiping agriculturists and artisans,” but offers no evidence that such divisions actually existed – or indeed, that the Vanir were even known in England at the time in question, an assumption that has been cast into doubt by, e.g., Lotte Motz.[3] Some readers may also wish that Pollington provided closer documentation of some of his translations of technical terms. It may seem counterintuitive, for example, to render healþegn as “steward,” while translating stiweard as “hall-keeper” (p. 181).

Like others before him, Pollington relies heavily on the evidence of Beowulf, without clearly acknowledging this work’s major defect as a resource on life in the Anglo-Saxon hall: the poem is not set in England at all, but rather in Denmark.[4] However, the author skillfully confirms the reliability of this evidence by appending additional, consistent examples of hall- and feasting-themes from a variety of Old English sources, including side-by-side translations of relevant passages from The Battle of Maldon, The Seafarer, Widsiþ, The Wanderer, and other works.

Overall, this book achieves its objectives with only minor reservations, and deserves a place on the shelf of any serious Anglo-Saxonist.
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1. Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophesy and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tene to the Viking Age (Dublin:1996).

2. The Idea of the Good in Late Iron Age Society (Uppsala: 1998).

3. See The King, the Champion, and the Sorcerer (Wien:1996), pp. 117-119.

4. I leave aside the other objection that could be raised here, concerning the possibility that Beowulf merely depicts a Christian poet’s imagination of what life in a heathen hall might have been like. Regardless of the religious background and intentions of the poet, a recent article by Lydia Klos in the journal Skandinavistik strongly suggests that the hall life depicted in Beowulf accurately reflects pre-Christian practices, at least in Scandinavia. See Klos, “A Courtly King: The Change of Hall Customs Under the Reign of King Olaf kyrri, Depending on European Influences.” Skandinavistik, vol. 34, pp. 12-30 (2004).