Thoreau's Saxon Letters

Thoreau's Saxon Letters Annie Abrams (bio) The Saxon King was told that man's life was like the swallow that flew in at one window, fluttered around, and flew out at another. So is this population of the spot of God's earth called Concord. —Emerson, Journal, 29 June 1835 Henry David Thoreau's skepticism of settled convention seems to have secured his place in the American canon. In Old Style, Claudia Stokes includes him as an example of a writer to whom "our field confers special distinction . . . whom we commend for their noncompliance with nineteenth-century aesthetics and seemingly prescient anticipation of modern tastes for innovation."1 After Thoreau's death in 1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated how his friend had "scoffed at conventional elegance," which many subsequent readers have appreciated.2 But Thoreau's college commonplace book and a related manuscript, held at the Morgan Library and undiscussed in scholarship, record his engagement with voguish nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and his imitation and interpretation of medieval English poetry. As Stokes notes, dominant models of nineteenth-century authorship emphasize the publication of original work. Thoreau's insistence on secondary and citational writing practices—commonplacing, commenting, translating—are key to his idea of writing as a vocation. This engagement is an oft-remarked element of his first published book ("A Week"), [End Page 463] but we see evidence of it already in his earlier commonplace book entries on medieval writings. This article demonstrates how an entry in Thoreau's college commonplace book, an archival finding of his collegiate inauguration into a tradition of English-language authorship, reveals both the contingency of Thoreau's writerly identity and the precariousness of the myth of racialized Anglo-Saxon kinship. This essay proceeds as follows: Following a brief explanation of the American Anglo-Saxonism to which Thoreau responded, I describe in detail one section of his collegiate commonplace book and a related manuscript poem. After tracing several later instances of Thoreau's circumspect thinking about the Saxonist myth, I reflect on how the archive has shaped our perceptions of Thoreau's role in American letters. I argue that, as a college student, Thoreau's study of Old English might have stoked glorification of an exclusionary literary heritage, but instead it became an occasion for shaping both authorial and national narratives rooted in transformation. american anglo-saxonism Understanding the context for Thoreau's fascination with early medieval literature heightens its stakes: his study holds the potential to implicate him in an odious practice of inventing a racial genealogy to legitimize unjust, rigid parameters for American identity. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nationalistic German and British academic investigations of their countries' histories spread across the Atlantic.3 After traveling abroad, American scholars infused stateside intellectual life with the European vogue for romanticizing the early Middle Ages—what they called the Anglo-Saxon period. Simultaneously, the American Enlightenment debate about the origins and significance of races heightened as tensions over slavery [End Page 464] rose. Jefferson hoped to make study of Anglo-Saxon culture central to the University of Virginia's mission because of his belief in its pure ideals. He wrote to John Cartwright, "They doubtless had a constitution; and altho' they have not left it in a written formula, to the precise text of which you may always appeal, yet they have left fragments of their history and laws from which it may be inferred with considerable certainty."4 When, in this crucible, white Americans beyond the academy started to use the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" selfreferentially, they often capitalized on its ambiguity to serve their political ends. From the start, the term was a fiction.5 Identifying with the label had less to do with Americans' actual backgrounds, and more to do with the project of establishing a usable past. For some, "Anglo-Saxon" became a racialized term to describe a culture destined for world domination because of what Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Traits (1856) would call the "uncoiling of that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces . . . carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law . . . to the conquest of the globe."6 Painting with...