Anglo-Saxon Attitudes Read Online Free

expression. A deep pink had spread over Rose's rather grubby cheeks, giving them a curious likeness to the soiled flowers in her hat.
    'I'm afraid, dear,' she said, 'if you want to talk about witches, you've come to the wrong person. I'm a very plain scholar. An historian, you know, is not the same thing as an anthropologist.' Her little-girl voice took on quite a hard timbre. Frazer, Margaret Murray indeed! She was always being confronted with this awful confusion. Her theory, her knowledge of the nature of the early medieval Church, was not based on folk-lore and fancy and that sort of thing. She was a factual historian, trained by Tout and Stokesay. And then - what she saw so clearly sometimes nowadays - the conspiracy, the strange age-old conspiracy which she alone had guessed at, was something beside which Dr Murray's Dianic cult and Divine Victims paled into childish insignificance. Clarissa, realizing the magnitude of her blunder, began to extricate herself, but Dr Lorimer was listening now to voices quite other than Clarissa's cultured tones.
    Really! thought Clarissa, if collecting historical material is going to be as tiresome as this, I wish I had accepted the offer of writing a travel book on Angola. Seeing Dr Lorimer's blank expression, she raised her voice. Heaven knew how deaf the old thing was!
    'Of course, the Melpham excavation seems to me so fascinating,' she shouted, averting her eyes from a nearby party of goggling schoolchildren.
    'Yes,' said Dr Lorimer distantly, 'it is very fascinating.' She decided not to tell this stupid woman just how fascinating. She would return the conventional judgement, 'But you must remember that Bishop Eorpwald was a very unusual person. So much we know from Bede alone. We can't judge everything by Melpham.'
    'Did you take part in the "dig"?'  asked Clarissa in a sporty voice that she somehow felt necessary for the colloquialism.
    'Bishop Eorpwald's tomb was excavated in 1912, dear,' said Dr Lorimer sharply. 'I was only a girl.'
    Clarissa poured herself out a cup of cold tea and drank it in her confusion. 'I've always been awful about dates,' she explained.
    'Well, you must try to get them right in your book, mustn't you?'  said Dr Lorimer; then, noticing her guest's embarrassment, she relented, and said, 'There was no reason why you shouldn't think I helped at Melpham. Fifty-five must seem as old as the hills to a girl like you.'
    Clarissa reflected that the simple, too, had their charms. She almost regretted her Woman's Hour talks in the 'Middle Age Looks Back' series.
    'And anyway,' Rose added, 'I look as old as the hills. As a matter of fact, it was a great compliment to pay to a pupil of Professor Stokesay's. Melpham was the crown of his work, in my opinion. No. Everything he did was wonderful. He taught me all I know. And so vigorous right up to the end, though he rather left his old colleagues behind them. He became a man of affairs, dear,' she ended, as though this was some sort of physical metamorphosis.
    'Yes, I remember,' said Clarissa. 'He was one of the men of Munich, wasn't he?'  and instantly regretted the contribution. But she need not have been anxious, for Rose smiled vaguely. 'Yes, bless his heart,' she said, 'he'd gone quite beyond my little world.'
    'And you really think that the wooden figure ...?'  Clarissa tailed away in query.
    'Oh, a fertility god, dear,' said Rose. 'No doubt of it at all. Of course, the carving's very crude. Much cruder than the few finds they've made on the Baltic Coast. Due to native workmanship, no doubt with the Continental tradition almost lost. That accounts for the large size of the member, you know.' Clarissa felt that she need not have feared to finish her sentence. 'But it's an Anglo-Saxon deity all right. A true wig. One of the idola Bede was so shocked about. Or pretended to be, shall we say?'  she added mysteriously.
    The significance of the mystery, however, was lost on Clarissa. 'And is there nobody alive now who