This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham

for foreign translators to pick from English-language texts than ones in, say, Norwegian, Portuguese or Uzbek. UNESCO certainly appears to believe just that. On its website, it commented: ‘This is perhaps one way of controlling the market and maintaining the cultural dominance of English and the market is controlled through what is on offer, through the availability of products sold by the industry of culture—whether it is music, or films or books.’ (The atrociously mangled syntax of this sentence suggests that the ‘industry of culture’ would be in mortal danger if left to writers such as this.)

      UNESCO, however, is just plain wrong. Just who exactly is thought to be ‘controlling the market’? A conspiracy of top executives at News International and Walt Disney? An undercover alliance between the CIA and MI6? A secret society headed by Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, his trusty lieutenant? The point about the book market is that it’s a market. Readers buy whatever they want to read. Publishers publish anything that looks like selling. It’s true that English acts as a convenient international clearing house. Japanese publishers wanting to translate a Danish text will most likely translate from the English version, not the Danish. In that sense, though, the universality of English makes works in minor tongues more available than they were before, not less. When great books come along in those minor tongues, they sell. The Danish language Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow was a big hit. So was the Norwegian book Sophie’s World. Contrary to what UNESCO might think, these books sold not because of a slip-up in the CIA’s operating procedure, but because they were good to read. That, funnily enough, is what readers care about.

In the end, why should it seem so odd to argue that British writers do so well because they’re good at what they do? Nobody has a problem accepting that the German musical tradition is (vastly) richer than the British one, that the Italians have done (infinitely) more for opera, that the French have done very much more for painting, and so on. We Brits aren’t awful at these other art forms, but we don’t excel. In literature, however, whether popular or highbrow, we do excel. It is our art form, the one that, for whatever reason, speaks more deeply to our national consciousness than any other.^* It has done so since the time of Alfred the Great, when English vernacular literature was the most developed in Europe. It does so now.

* Also its most famous secretary, Miss Moneypenny.

* I’m using the word ‘national’ in a very broad sense here, since Ireland has made a quite disproportionate contribution to ‘English’ literature. Since the death of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatists of the British Isles have arguably been Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Synge, Shaw and Beckett—every one of them Irish.

       OF COWS AND BEEF

      The word Welsh derives from an Anglo-Saxon root, Wealas, which means slave or foreigner. There, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the politics of sixth-century Britain. The incoming Angles, Jutes and Saxons had turned the native British Celts into foreigners in their own land; not quite slaves perhaps, but humiliatingly subject all the same.

      Anglo-Saxon rule didn’t extend merely to land and territory; it covered language too. Although a certain amount of intermarriage must have taken place between invaders and ‘slaves’, that intermarriage was reflected hardly at all in the spoken word. Virtually no Celtic words survived the onslaught, and those that did are telling. Modern English words such as tor, crag, combe, cairn, cromlech, dolmen and loch are all Celtic, and they all describe features of the landscape which simply hadn’t existed in the flatlands from which the invaders had come. The newcomers took the words they absolutely needed and ditched the rest. Only a few dozen Celtic words survive in English today.

While the Celts always referred to their invaders as Saxons,^* the newcomers themselves began to call themselves Anglii, their new country Anglia, and (in due course) their language Englisc. It’s that language which we speak today. Of the hundred most commonly used words in modern English, almost all are Old English in origin, including all but one of the top twenty-five. (In order: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from. The Old Norse intruder in this list is they. The word the appears in this book some 5,850 times.) These twenty-five words make up about one third of all printed material in English. The top hundred words make up about a half. The first French-derived word doesn’t appear until number at seventy-six.

      You can tell a lot about a society from the language it speaks. The language of the Anglii was domestic, rural, warlike, concrete. Words such as man, daughter, friend and son are Old English. So are dog, mouse, wood, swine, horse. So are plough, earth, shepherd, ox, sheep. So are love, lust, sing, night, day, sun. So are words such as so, are, words, such, as. The one linguistic invasion of real significance in those years was Christianity. As the pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to the new religion, new words (mostly Greek or Roman in origin) crept in to handle the new concepts: bishop, monk, nun, altar, angel, pope, apostle, psalm, school. The number of new words was small, less than 1 per cent of the existing vocabulary, but they extended the language by giving it ways of expressing new thoughts, new concepts.

      With the language to do it, the Anglii began to produce a literature of their own, probably a great one. If people wanted to preserve their work, they wrote not in English but in Latin. As a consequence, most work that was written in English has been lost for ever. Fortunately, though, enough of the old literature has survived for us to get a feel of what was lost. Beowulf is the first great surviving work of literature written in English, a story of strange monsters and Dark Age realpolitik. Here, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, is the arrival of the monster Grendel at the feasting hall:

      In off the moors, down through the mist-bands

      God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping. The bane of the race of men roamed forth, hunting for a prey in the high hall. Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it until it shone above him, a sheer keep of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling —although never in his life, before or since, did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders.

      This extract gives us the true feel of Anglo-Saxon: gritty, alliterative, forceful, direct. In Heaney’s words: ‘What I had always loved was a kind of four-squareness about the utterance…an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world.’

      Warrior-like it may have been, but Anglo-Saxon almost died nevertheless—not just once, but twice. The first major threat came with the Viking invasions when, but for Alfred the Great, we might well have ended up speaking Norse, not English. The second near-death experience came with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Because the new king, William, had been hard up for cash, he’d paid for much of his help with pledges of English land. When victory came, those pledges were redeemed. All of a sudden, every position of power in England was filled by French speakers. The new noblemen spoke French. Bishops and abbots spoke French. The court spoke French. The king made a short-lived effort to learn English, then gave up and stuck to French. As an official language, English completely vanished. In its written form, its disappearance was almost total.

      For centuries, a kind of linguistic apartheid reigned. English peasants continued to speak English. The court continued to speak French. But in between the top and bottom layers of society, mixing was inevitable, as Normans married English, as French babies were cared for by local women. At the level where the two societies met, the English language underwent the most rapid—and