T.O.P. Podcast: Season 2 - Episode 2

Between Two Worlds: How Medieval Writers Saved the Pagan Past While Preaching Christianity

In early medieval England and Ireland, Christian writers faced a dilemma that feels uncomfortably familiar today. They were charged with spreading the Christian faith, yet they inherited a world saturated with pagan stories—gods, heroes, monster-slaying warriors, and funeral pyres. Church doctrine labeled these traditions false or even demonic. The question was unavoidable: do you erase the past, or do you preserve it—knowing it contradicts your beliefs?

This tension shaped some of the most important texts of the early Middle Ages. Three distinct strategies emerged, each revealing not only how medieval writers navigated faith and history, but how we still do the same—often less honestly.

Bede: Preserve the Framework, Reverse the Judgment

The Venerable Bede (673–735) wrote the first comprehensive history of the English people. His solution was subtle. Paganism is preserved in full—genealogies, warrior values, even month names honoring old gods—but its meaning is reinterpreted. In Bede’s account of King Edwin’s conversion, the pagan high priest Coifi publicly declares his own religion worthless and destroys his temple without consequence. Pagan belief is shown not as evil, but as empty and foolish.

The structure remains intact; the moral verdict changes. Bede never pretends neutrality. He openly writes Christian history, even while relying on a pagan cultural skeleton to do it.

The Beowulf Poet: Moral Ambiguity Without Resolution

The anonymous Christian poet who composed Beowulf took a different approach. He celebrates a pagan hero in lavish detail, opening with a ship burial explicitly forbidden by Christian teaching. Yet the monsters Beowulf fights are interpreted through Christian theology—Grendel is descended from Cain. When Beowulf dies on a funeral pyre, the poet refuses to explain his fate. “Heaven swallowed the smoke.” Salvation or damnation is left unresolved.

This strategy preserves the nobility of pagan heroes without declaring them saved or damned. The tension is visible and unresolved, deliberately leaving space for moral complexity.

The Irish Monks: Radical Preservation with Honest Doubt

Ireland’s conversion occurred without Roman imperial enforcement, allowing its monasteries to become unparalleled centers of preservation. Irish monks copied everything: Christian texts, pagan myth, genealogies, heroic epics, and supernatural legends. They did not reconcile contradictions—they annotated them. In the margins they wrote things like, “I do not believe this,” or “The Church does not accept this.” Then they copied the text anyway.

Their solution was radical honesty. Preserve all of it. Admit your doubts. Let future generations decide.

The Modern Failure

We still use all three medieval strategies today—strategic reinterpretation, moral ambiguity, and selective preservation. But we largely abandon the Irish monks’ honesty. Instead of stating our biases openly, we claim objectivity. We revise textbooks, remove uncomfortable material, and pretend we are simply showing history “as it actually was.”

We aren’t. Every generation reshapes the past to serve the present. That’s inevitable. The real failure is pretending we don’t.

Five hundred years from now, readers will see our blind spots as clearly as we see those of medieval monks. The question is not whether we shape history—but whether we are honest about the shaping.

Perhaps the best model remains the Irish monks: write it all down, state your doubts in the margins, and let the future judge.