Today I’ve been at the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory meeting at the Offa’s Dyke Centre in Knighton. It’s been a day-long research symposium, with a wide range of presentations given about Offa’s Dyke, its history and archaeology, as well as its conservation and preservation and the part it plays in local leisure and tourism.
I also gave a presentation – about the appearance of Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke in the Oswestry Heritage Comics, and the role comics can play more generally in public outreach about these (and other) earthwork monuments. The full text of my paper is here, if you’re interested, along with a .pdf of the accompanying slides. In that presentation, I showed some new comics about Offa’s Dyke – examples of how I thought comics could be used to help explain some of the research being done about earthwork monuments. I thought I’d take a little time here to talk about one of them in a bit more detail.
We often associate comics with the idea of “public” outreach – as a way to bring a particular kind of visibility to complex or unfamiliar information to a non-specialist audience. But comics can also be used as outreach when talking to highly-specialised audiences as well. Comics used to bring visibility to aspects of scholarship can do all the same things that we have seen comics do in public outreach: they can add visual context to explanation, introduce and de-complicate subjects, locate specific information within broader frameworks, make connections and links with other research – even invite participation. Narrative can be used to ground and humanise both research and interpretation – something which becomes important if one wishes to present models of past social practice as dynamic, and landscapes as inhabited. For example: within discussions about the past meaning of Offa’s Dyke authors often consider its implications as a social frontier, as a materialisation of a borderlands between cultures, of a space between Mercia and Powys, between ‘Englishness’ and ‘Welshness”, and as a meeting point shaped by the rivalries of power and kinship:
Recent re-appraisal of the nature of Mercian power under Penda has referred to it in terms of ‘hegemony’, although this can be a mercurial term. … he epitomised traits of kingship that both looked back to the heroic age of warbands held together by gift-giving and loosely organised polities bonded by kinship, and forward to the age of inter-kingdom relations managed through diplomacy, hostage exchange, and ever more strategic use of marriage-based alliances. This transition continued well into the era in which Offa’s Dyke was built.
Bapty, Ian & Ray, Keith, Offa’s Dyke: Landscape and Hegemony in Eighth Century Britain, p. 103.
Conflict between Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the various Welsh kingdoms could be inclined to break out at various intervals although they could also be allies. […] Then, as now, the actual border between Englishness and Welshness was doubtless somewhat blurred in the borderlands, and inter-marriage normal.
Hill, David & Worthington, Margaret, Offa’s Dyke, p. 108.
Larger boundary dykes, though unrecorded historically, are often assumed … to mark the territorial edges of different ethnic or national groups. … But the survival of the ethnic identity of villages divided by Offa’s Dyke proves that it was not the absolute ethnic boundary that early scholars believed.
Zaluckyj, Sarah, Mercia, p. 187.
But such interpretative discussions lose their impact in text alone. After all, when we talk about marriage or hostage-taking, even wealth or trade, we are talking about events and situations that impact individual lives at the level of emotion: of love, jealousy, ambition, greed and pride. Academic text is somewhat unsuited for this kind of discussion – it renders it dispassionate, objective and remote. If such interpretations are to have meaning in scholarship, if we want to understand how intermarriage or mercantile rivalry might drive Mercian foreign policy, early mediaeval economics or Anglo-Welsh culture, and thus how they might be reflected in historical and archaeological data – then we must try and render such interpretations passionate, subjective and intimate.
Marriage, violence, ethnicity and greed along C.8th Offa’s Dyke
The comic I created to help demonstrate this (left), shows how, in combining text and image, we can bring to such interpretations historical and cultural grounding, a narrative flow, and a sense of emotional depth – all things which are actually meaningful in the contexts of such discussion. Such works need be no more than a single page; they need not end up veering away from data towards drama. It is not necessary to go all “Game of Thrones” in order to make good use of comics in this context – what is needed, however, is that we recognise that leaving statements like these as academic text renders significant aspects of our interpretations invisible and thus un-examinable; comics, however, can contribute an important kind of visibility. Archaeologists and historians sometimes use terms such as “hostage exchange” or “inter-marriage” a little loosely, assuming that their audiences know and understand exactly what those phrases mean – or, perhaps more accurately, exactly what the authors mean by those phrases. But these are mercurial terms, and their meanings can easily shift. Granted, one might not want to try and provide an exhaustive definition of the possible Mercian social and cultural context of “hostage exchange” in a book primarily about the construction of an earthwork monument, but not attempting at least some kind of definition is somewhat disingenuous, as it effectively limits an audience’s ability to examine and critique the use of that term. This is where narrative visualisation could become important: as a way to suggest a context without necessarily pinning down an absolute definition. In the comic to the left, “inter-marriage” is framed (literally, in terms of the laying-out of the accompanying images) by notions of power, wealth and greed, ethnicity and ethnic rivalry, inter-generational conflict and even literacy and romantic love. It is also – again, literally – situated within the physical landscape of Offa’s Dyke, and a grounded, inhabited picture of the past. The result is something which uses the narrative and visual potential of comics to go beyond a strictly “literal” presentation of information to instead present a context for interpretation; a basis for which assumptions made in text alone (“inter-marriage”) can be interrogated and – if necessary – challenged. More, the scholarly exercise of constructing such a comic – even a single-page one like this – engages a different kind of critique than the one academia is used to, sparking of interesting examinations of one’s own research. Pr. Stephen Hodkinson, who worked as historical advisor on the graphic novel Three, about Sparta – makes similar points in his discussions with the graphic novel writer Kieron Gillen. Indeed, Stephen has found the process of thinking through research in comic-format so valuable that he has been actively looking at presenting his own research as a comic.
Such interpretative presentations can be rendered as easily for academic publication as for popular, and can usefully stimulate parallel discussions at various levels. Such works become windows into our data and the interpretative assumptions of scholarship – and access points for interdisciplinary collaboration, moments at which – for example – economic data, osteological data and survey data might come together with anthropology, ethnography and psychology. As I work more with comics in this way, I see increasing evidence of a new kind of visibility brought to such interdisciplinary discourse, allowing scholars to reach new kinds of audiences in new ways – both within and outside their particular area of speciality, both within and outside the otherwise sometimes narrow confines of the academy. I think that it is comics such as these – less so comics like the Oswestry Heritage ones – which offer the greatest potential to archaeological scholarship: unlocking not just a new way to visualise research – but to see research. I know from my experience of working with comics over the past ten years that once you start to see archaeological information in comic format, you begin to see archaeological information differently.
Thanks very much to Pr. Howard Williams, the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory, the Offa’s Dyke Association and the Offa’s Dyke Centre for organising today’s meeting. Very much looking forward to the next one!
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john g. swogger 