An “Authorized Fiction”: Towards a Biography of Anonymous 756

Abstract

This article offers a theoretical biography of Anonymous 756, the wife of King Eardwulf of Northumbria. Historians working on women in the pre-Conquest period have noted their relative absence in sources, and evidence for queens can be scant or spurious. By carefully interrogating the political and ideological biases of the sources, as well as focusing on female relationships, this article looks to advance our understanding of the life of Anonymous 756. First, it situates her marriage to Eardwulf within an overview of pre-Conquest royal marriages to foreground a discussion of peaceweaving marriages, which is proposed as one plausible scenario to understand the match. Beowulf serves as a cultural illustration of some of the key ideas of aristocratic matches; another cultural icon, Charlemagne, has been associated with Eardwulf, but a further investigation of this connection rejects identifying Anonymous 756 as the emperor’s daughter. Using the principles of contemporary naming practices, it then excavates patterns of relationships both simultaneously documented and obscured in the Northumbrian Liber Vitae to offer some possible “identities.” The argument offered here must remain theoretical—an “authorized fiction” rather than a traditional biography. However, detailed consideration of her likely relationships serves as a fruitful line of inquiry to understand more about the life of Anonymous 756, as well as other women with similarly scantily documented backgrounds.

Keywords

• queenship
• old english
• biography
• feminist history
• alcuin
• bede