Whichever fehnstrom (all anonymous Romney advisors may be regarded as one) told the Telegraph that Mitt understands the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" better than the President of the United States has already been derided for racism, and some people have even shown the hilarity of taking the statement at face value. In the U.K. itself, the statement seemed like something Enoch Powell would have said, because the U.K. is not "Anglo-Saxon" racially or culturally: it is as multi-racial as multicultural in fact. So, whichever fehnstrom it was, it did not know the U.K., did not think being racist would backfire, and felt that it was in the candidate's interest to play to the National Front for support. After all, Barclays executives and National Front have a lot in common in the UK, don't they? It's the same as the U.S., isn't it, where the TEA Party and Wall Street love one another?
In other words, the creature was a Doofus of the first water.
I should like to examine, though, the Anglo-Saxons and their values. Some of their values are Mitt's, after all, and not the President's. There are points of contact where Mitt is far, far more Anglo-Saxon than our President, especially on the subject of wergild.
The Anglo-Saxons were just another Germanic tribe, and, if we want to be clear, they were really Saxons. The Angles seem to be a minority. The Saxons were named after their unique weapon, a sort of elongated dagger. The Venerable Bede explains that the saxa played an important role in the takeover of Britain. According to his account, the Romanized Britons hired the Saxon mercenaries Hengist and Horsa (there was probably just one person, Hengist, because the two names both mean "horse") to kick Scottish hiney. After this West Jutland branch of Blackwater had dealt with the Picts and Scots, there was a celebratory dinner, according to Bede, where they were seated Briton/Saxon all the way around. The wine flowed, and all got drunk. Then Hengist stood up and said, "Nemet eora saxa" ("take out your saxa"). Each Saxon took out his saxa and plunged it into the chest of the British lord, and thus the whole of Britain's political leadership was decapitated.
True? Maybe. Something happened, and it happened pretty quickly. It does not pay to doubt Bede very much, either.
The Anglo-Saxons -- the Germanic tribes in general -- were the same people who would later be the "Norman" invaders from France. They were also the same people who would be the "Norse" who invaded from the north. In other words, all of these attackers were Germanic tribes. The Norman invaders had been Gallicized, and the Norse had not.
The "uncivilized" or "wild" version of the Germanic tribes had a religion centered on Woden/Odin, a belief in a sort of caste system of jarls and karls, and a cosmology that featured three tiers of worlds all centered on a "world tree." The fullest account of the cosmology appears late, in Snorri Sturlusson's Prose Edda, which is a lovely thing. They also had a tribal form of justice and social mobility. Mitt would have liked the one, not the other.
Wergild: The Value of a Life
You may remember that Kenneth Feinberg has had work setting the value of lives lost. He worked on the 9/11 compensation commission, and he was assigned to work on the BP compensation commission, too. He is a sort of Superman of underwriters. He looks at the dead and calculates how much money their future lives would have been worth. It is grim, and, to most of us, incomprehensible.
The Germanic tribes had that all worked out in advance. Each person had a value. A slave was worth a particular amount of money, and a freedman was worth more. A man with a family was worth more, and a foster son was worth less than a son but more than a freedman. A man of wealth was worth more. A noble was worth more money still. This monetary value absolved and established moral credit. If you wanted to shoot the person down the street, you could do so. Go ahead. Just go to the grieving family with an equivalent amount of money as the person was worth, and the family would be unable to take revenge.
What's more, if you did something bad, like violate a maiden, she would testify that you had done so. If she had a higher price than you, you were guilty. If you had a higher price, your word was worth more than hers. However, if she called witnesses, their value added to hers. You would then call witnesses to add to your value. The end result would be families against families or networks of friendship and debt testifying to achieve a balance of monetary value higher or lower than the opposition.
If you think this system couldn't work, you're wrong. It could work, and it did. In fact, it was moderately peaceful (moderately). To see the whole ballet of justice under the "man price" system, I cannot recommend anything more highly than Njals Saga, which is one of the greatest works of world literature, and probably the one Americans know least. [Note: the PG e-text is a creaky translation. I wish I didn't have to say this, but the new Penguin translation is far better. It really is worth the dollars.]
If we had wergild, Mitt Romney could not lie. He'd have enough money, and especially with Adelson's "testimony," that he would always be 'true.' Of course, if enough people came together, it wouldn't really matter.
Upward mobility for a Saxon
Ever wonder why those "vikings" showed up on the coast of England in the 900's? I know you may be humming "Immigrant Song" right now, but it wasn't because their only goal was the western shore.
"A-vikking" was "travelling." The men who showed up in the first wave were social climbers. You see, one improved one's status by giving gifts. If you were a young man of some brawn or skill, then you needed to be attached to a lord. This would be fine for a while, but to become a leader yourself, your lord needed to get booty and give it to you. You then needed enough of it to buy a ship and go get your own. It was a gift-based honor system.
Norway and Denmark had produced a great many fighting age young men and run out of social position for them. They began hanging about in the harbors looking for new sources of land to raid and fight. It was all about gaining enough wealth with the ship one finally got to give to followers to be a potent force to gain enough wealth to finally purchase farm land, which was in extremely short supply and high demand.
(You can imagine what happened when someone sailed back with a story of a place where there was gold and jewels in houses right by the water's edge, and even on islands, and the men there don't even have weapons or fight back! Monasteries were, for these social climbers, the answer to their pagan prayer.)
To be a successful leader in the "Anglo-Saxon culture" that Mitt's fehnstrom understands so well, one has to give and give and give. A leader was judged entirely on the nature of the gifts he gave.
The NPR story about Mitt Romney's Olympics includes an anecdote that Mitt's first meeting with his staff, he ordered a pizza. He paid $5 for it. It was cut into 8 slices, and he charged his staff $1 a slice and thus made a $3 profit on it. The person who told the anecdote did so with admiration. He admired the way Mitt had taken money from his employees, I suppose.
In an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, it would have led to someone saying, "Nemet eora saxa!"