James Hawes - Brilliant Isles

Unknown artist | ca. 420 ad | Norwich Castle Museum

Hes on a chair that is maybe a bit like a throne. He has a place in the world but he is confronting a place where none of that has meaning anymore.

antony gormley

T he moment we see this, we know its some ancestor of Rodins The Thinker. When we learn that it stopped up a cremation urn, its hard not to see some god of the dead, contemplating eternity. One Cambridge scholar has argued that he may be none other than Woden/Odin himself. For this is pagan Germanic art but not from Germany.

Spong Man, from Norfolk, is the first known three-dimensional, figurative art created here by the people who migrated from Germany into late Roman Britannia. They came as mercenaries, and the first tribe to come in numbers were the Saxons. By the time Spong Man was made, the fortified coast of south-eastern Britannia was officially called the litoris Saxonum the Saxon Shore and to this day every other culture here calls the English the Saxons (Saeson/Sassenach/Sasanach).

Germanic warriors were a common sight in the late Roman Empire: by 400 ad , Roman armies were largely made up of them. When the Western Empire fell in 476 ad , such warriors took over, from modern-day France to North Africa. It happened here too, but with a vital difference that would change the whole story of these islands, indeed of the world. That difference was the Channel not as a barrier, but as a great sea-road.

Elsewhere, the new rulers stayed a Germanic warrior elite. Their own tribes never joined them: infants, nursing mothers, and the elderly could not survive great land-treks across the ravaged former Empire. So the new elites married local women from the old elites. Since language and culture are transmitted by mothers, a sub-Roman world endured all over Western Europe. The pagan Germanic Franks, old allies of the Saxons, soon turned into the Christian, sort-of-Latin-speaking French.

Here, though, the pagan Germans, already manning the Channel forts, could easily invite their entire clans to cross by ship in a day or two, women, culture and all. The early sources speak clearly of messages home to Germania and successive waves of migrants. So, in lowland Britannia, and there alone, the new elite stayed pagan and kept their own language.

This is the real beginning of our story, the original parting of the ways from Western Europe. It is why Woden, god of the obscure tribes who made Spong Man, is still unthinkingly honoured around the world, every time someone says Wednesday. And it was the birth of a tension between the English and non-English on these islands that still haunts us all.

explore further | Silver amuletic pendant, poss. Woden (7th c. ad ; Brit. Mus; 2001,0902.1) The Thinker by Auguste Rodin (1904; Muse Rodin) Another Place by Antony Gormley (1997; Crosby Beach)

Aneirin (attrib.) | ca. 7th c.

The fact that a story like this, a poem that was probably spoken for the first time 1,400 years ago, is still here that I can stand here and say those words and be in that chain is a miracle. It was about their identity, about who they were, their very existence.

michael sheen

T he further the English (as in, German) newcomers advanced from their bridgeheads, the stiffer grew the resistance from the Romano-British, whom the English called (and still call) the Weahlas. At times deals were cut: one early Saxon king had at his command an elite cavalry unit, the cyninges horsweahl, which translates handily as The Kings Welsh Horse. Yet though modern nationalism was still centuries away, some of the Romano-British felt they were battling these illiterate pagans not just for local power or status, but for cultural survival. That feeling, then as now, is the most potent recruiter.

Y Gododdin, written around 600 ad and preserved in a 13th-century manuscript, where its ascribed to the poet Aneirin, lives on in a very different way from The Battle of Maldon, a similar Anglo-Saxon tale of warriors who die heroically resisting an invader. English speakers today would need months of training before attempting to decode