A little while back, somebody quoted a line from T. S. Eliot’s
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to me. I was thinking what a
marvelously prissy name “J. Alfred Prufrock” is, and then it struck
me — how the heck did a name like “Alfred” slide to a place where
it evokes images of skinny gentlemen (“But how his arms and legs
are thin!”) with weak chins and pince nez?
To a guy like me, who spends a lot of weekends as a hobby
reenactor, dressing up as a Viking and whacking (and being whacked)
with blunt swords, the name Alfred has very different associations.
Alfred (c. 849-899) is the only Anglo-Saxon king to whom we apply
the descriptive “the Great.” A mighty and shrewd warrior, he
prevented the subjugation of his country by the Danes (known to us
reenactors as “our guys”), forcing them to accept Christian baptism
and the partition of the country after whomping them at the Battle
of Edington.
This was not a man who measured out his life in coffee
spoons.
It’s odd, when you think about it, that names considered
effeminate today are almost uniformly ones originally made famous
by big, pugnacious men who as often as not had human blood caked
under their fingernails.
Take “Bruce.”
Robert the Bruce (1274-1329) was a much tougher character than
his portrayal in Braveheart would suggest. He changed
sides more than once in the wars of Scottish independence, but
always with the consistent purpose of furthering his own claim to
the throne by any means necessary. Educated as a knight, he became
a master guerrilla fighter, achieving the humiliation of England’s
Edward II, and everlasting fame, at the Battle of Bannockburn.
His name is a Norman one, passed down from a fighting, mail-clad
ancestor who sailed over the Channel in a longship with William the
Conqueror.
But you have to purse your lips to say the name, so it’s
considered sissy today.
Or (while we’re on the subject of pursing) take “Percy.”
The Percys also came over with the Conqueror, and they weren’t
typists or dishwashers in the army. From the 14th century they were
earls (later dukes) of Northumberland, and they kept the servants
busy washing blood out of their surcoats as a result of their
involvements in the Welsh wars and the Wars of the Roses.
Shakespeare’s Harry Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1, was a
Percy.
But the name includes the syllable, “purse,” and we all know
what that means. (This is a sore spot with us Vikings, by the way.
Our tunics have no pockets, so we wear purses [we prefer to call
them pouches, thank you] on our belts, just as everybody did up to
the late 18th century, when somebody had the bright idea of sewing
his purse [all a pocket really is, after all, is a built-in purse]
inside his pants.)
But this doesn’t help the Percys of this world. Their name says
“purse,” so they’re branded as sissies. And since our degenerate
laws discourage lopping the heads off people who insult you,
there’s little they can do about it.
It’s the price of fame, I suppose. When you’re famous, people
name their kids after you, and those kids don’t always live up to
the appellations they’ve squatted on. Then the names go out of
style, and the young folks associate them with funny-looking old
people, and suddenly a name that once frightened strong men is a
joke, or a Modernist poem.
And when the name requires you to make a kissing motion with
your lips, or to think of ladies’ handbags, hope is pretty much
lost.
I think there’s another reason as well, though.
Ever since around the end of World War I, our culture has been
leery of heroes. We crave them and we need them, but once we’ve got
them we obsessively dissect them, like biology students with frogs,
or the English with William Wallace, and the heroes don’t come out
much better than the frogs or Wallace once the operation is done.
(Come to think of it, “Wallace” is a pretty respect-free name today
too.)
C. S. Lewis, in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” quotes an unnamed
English politician who said, “A democracy does not want great men.”
It wasn’t always that way. The original dream of the American
founders — and of all classical liberals — was the vision of a
world where every man would be a philosopher and an artist and a
warrior. But people are lazy. We’ve discovered — to our immense
relief — that equality is much easier to achieve through just
cutting the big men off at the knees.
From Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court to “Spamalot,” we’ve taken a lot of pleasure in reducing
our heroes to the level of their faults. “We’re just exposing
hypocrisy,” we say. “If these so-called ‘heroes’ were really all
they’d been advertised to be, we wouldn’t be able to find flaws in
them.”
Strangely enough, though, we rarely subject ourselves to that
kind of scrutiny. The wonderful thing about having no ideals is
that you can never fall short.
Legend says that Alfred came in for a little of this kind of
treatment in his own lifetime. He’s supposed to have hidden in a
peasant cottage while on the run from the Danes, and the peasant’s
wife is supposed to have scolded him after he agreed to watch some
cakes baking, and absentmindedly let them burn. With the
magnanimity that goes with greatness, he did not murder the old
lady. He had Danes to fight.
And fight them he did. He successfully resisted having his
kingdom overrun by a foreign people, thereby preserving English
culture, religion and language.
Come to think of it, I’m not surprised he gets no respect
today.
