We watched "The Last Kingdom" on Netflix. It's pretty entertaining and I think they did a pretty good job trying to imagine and depict the pinnacle of Saxon England. It's like an ode to Saxons and most of the main characters have an old anglo-saxon name like "Aelfflaed". The Saxon names prefixed with "Aelf", like "Aelfred" are concatenations of "Aelf = Elf" with some other word, which makes me think of the Lord of the Rings and circles back to a topic I sort of shelved a while back: frozen tribal conflict.
The idea of Saxon England is like Atlantis in a lot of ways. It's idealizable because it's lost. Are tribal societies any closer to "natural" for human life than Empires? Maybe not. A tribe is really an abstraction of family, but it's not a family. Tribal life could be arranged and maintained with every bit as much artifice, fraud, and parasitism as Empire life.
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