Alfred the Great and Tradition: Reflections on G.K. Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse

[Originally written for a class.]

G.K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse is a beautiful and electrifying epic poem, steeped in English culture and proving its merit by how it captures the past to invigorate the present and the future. The poem was met with wide acclaim when it was first published, even being read by English soldiers during World War I.[1] Interestingly, J.R.R. Tolkien had quite a critical view of the poem, “[It] is not as good as I thought. The ending is absurd. […] G.K.C. knew nothing whatever about the ‘North’, heathen or Christian.”[2] Nevertheless, I very much like the poem, and my favorite character is certainly King Alfred, for he is the personification of the best of tradition. My interest in Alfred stems from my love of traditionalism and all of its societal implications. First, I will define tradition as it is relevant here and its relation to kingly character. Then I will discuss how Alfred personifies tradition by contrasting him with the barbarian and Christian chiefs, comparing him to two other notable symbols of tradition in the poem, namely, the White Horse and the playing child, and finally showing how his particular faults and virtues illustrate the development of tradition.

Chesterton was an eminent and excellent defender of tradition, memorably defining it as “the democracy of the dead” in his essay “The Ethics of Elfland.”[3] In the prefatory note to the Ballad, Chesterton points out the function of tradition: “It telescopes history.”[4] In a separate essay on King Alfred, Chesterton expands on this telescopic function, writing, “Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. […] We are in the presence of a thousand lies all pointing with their fantastic fingers to one undiscovered truth.”[5] Tradition presents us with the most noble, the best of human history. Living tradition is also necessarily popular. Chesterton chose to include certain episodes of Alfred’s life based simply on the fact that “it is a popular tale” as he says in the prefatory note. These tales reveal something of Alfred but, deeper than that, something valuable for English culture to preserve. Tradition connects us to the past in order to strengthen us in the present and prepare us for the future. We can call it “trans-historical” because while it derives from concrete history, it is not a mere restatement of dry facts but a distillation of the themes of human virtue and supernatural grace at war against selfishness and the forces of evil. Anthropologists even define tradition along the same lines:

Over the course of centuries, the actions of ancestral heroes, imitated directly and then represented in myth, become transformed, simplified, streamlined and quickened [….] Culture is therefore the “sum total” of surviving historically-determined, hierarchically-arranged behaviors […] into a single pattern of behavior—into a single system of morality [….][6]

Finally, in Western culture the figures of the father and the king have frequently embodied tradition: “‘Culture’ binds ‘nature.’ […] The protective capacity of benevolent tradition, embodied in the form of political order, constitutes a common mythological/narrative theme.”[7] We already see hinted here the profound link between Alfred and the continued existence of the White Horse, “cultivated” in the hillside of “nature” by human agency over time. Chesterton does not hesitate to paint Alfred in this archetypal manner; even the title of “the Great” brings into sharper relief the formative impact that the legends of Alfred brought to English society: “Every nation requires to have behind it some historic personality, the validity of which is proved, as the validity of a gun is proved, by its long range.”[8]

It is Alfred’s personification of tradition and the content of that tradition that make him worthy of the title “the Great.” However, in order to illuminate more clearly this relationship between Alfred and his greatness, it will be useful to contrast Alfred with the barbarian and Christian chiefs in the Ballad. The Danish chiefs represent vices antithetical to tradition. Harold represents lust and gluttony, in short, hedonism and materialism: “But we, but we shall enjoy the world, / The whole huge world a toy. / Great wine like blood from Burgundy / […] And the great smooth women like ivory / That the Turks sell in the street.”[9] Elf represents pride and curiosity[10] of the sort that end in disillusionment: “There is always a forgotten thing, / And love is not secure.”[11] I note disillusionment, for the poem relates how those who listen to Elf’s music grow sad. Later in the poem, the reader learns that Elf acquired a magical spear after encountering water-maids, further revealing Elf’s curiosity into the occult and demonic (note even Elf’s own name, which suggests the mythical and forbidden, the gnostic). Ogier, like an ogre, represents wrath: “Well if [a man] find in his soul at last / Fury, that does not fail. […] And hate alone is true.”[12] Finally, Guthrum represents despair and nihilism: “And a man may still lift up his head / But never more his heart.”[13] These virtues are antithetical to tradition. Lust and gluttony consume a person with himself, but tradition and culture draw a man out of himself to consider the common and higher good. Elf’s curiosity is the seeking of the novel and strange, the “forgotten thing,” but tradition cultivates and preserves the good proper to a community, establishing barriers to prevent possibly damaging foreign intrusion. Wrath and hatred prevent any sense of tradition from developing, for whereas today we often hear in the news of growing mob mentalities and the deepening divisions of identity politics, tradition on the other hand draws men together in common bonds of mutual concern and respect. Finally, despair and nihilism overturn the very foundation of tradition, which is the firm faith in the true, good, and beautiful.

The Christian chiefs represent foils of the barbarians, each chief focusing on some quality necessary for the promotion and preservation of tradition. Colan contrasts with Harold by representing purity and asceticism, which shift a man’s focus away from himself and refuse to see others merely in terms of his own gain or pleasure: “For Colan was hung with raiment / Tattered like autumn leaves, / And his men were all as thin as saints, / And all as poor as thieves.”[14] Mark represents humility, orderliness, and studiousness: “But Mark was come […] / Where men can number and expound, And his faith grew in a hard ground / Of doubt and reason and falsehood found, / Where no faith else could grow.”[15] As the narrator tells us, Mark’s environment so valued the truth that falsehood could not take root there, for example, the falsehood of heresy and pagan mysticism. Hence Mark later defeats Elf in battle: “But the shield [of Mark] shifted never,” that is, Mark’s humble commitment to the true was not swayed by Elf’s curious knowledge of the “forgotten things.” Eldred symbolizes humility and meekness. He is “down to earth” and focused on the concrete realities of life: “I will watch the certain things.”[16] In the midst of battle, Eldred’s heart is focused on his crops as he thanks God “for good eating / And corn and quiet times,”[17] and this focus and gratitude are the foundation of culture, the cultivation of the earth leading to the worship of God, offering Him the first-fruits. However, this simplicity, left on its own, is susceptible to manipulation, which is how Elf with his cleverness, symbolized by the enchanted spear, kills Eldred. Finally, Alfred represents hope. Although defeated, he keeps his conviction in the triumph of good over evil: “But our king Alfred, lost from fame, / […] Has still some song to sing.”[18] When combined these virtues form the bedrock of a healthy culture: mortification, consideration for others, a commitment to the truth that never becomes arrogant, and finally, to hope in the good and the true “against hope” as Saint Paul says.[19]

Only when the Christian chiefs are united can they defeat the barbarians; as individuals they fall. Alfred unites the Christian chiefs precisely for their different strengths. Similarly, tradition binds men across their individual differences and skills, tempering and directing them for the sake of the good beyond each individual. Tradition orients a man by placing him between the past and the future, and Alfred does exactly the same by seeking out his allies and organizing them to defeat the threat of the Danes, to keep the White Horse, and to preserve Christendom.

In order to draw out further how Alfred personifies tradition, I would like to focus also on two other symbols of tradition in the Ballad, namely, the White Horse itself and the child at play during the battle. The White Horse is the artifact of tradition where Alfred represents the agent who preserves tradition. The White Horse exists only because of the intention and dedication of men across time to preserve its existence. In other words, tradition is maintained to the precise degree that those who possess tradition choose to hand it on for future generations. The processes of degeneration, decay, and forgetfulness are constantly repeated throughout the Ballad: “The great White Horse was grey [sic], / […] Since the foes of settled house and creed / Had swept old works away.”[20] Alfred states frankly, “I know that weeds shall grow in it / Faster than men can burn.”[21] Hence the determination and commitment to preserve tradition must be equally insistent, patient, and renewed. The hope of Alfred is represented in the continued scouring of the White Horse; thus the Horse is an abiding sign of hope even to the extent that it is called “a live thing, / The scoured chalk.”[22] This is the hope that Our Lady speaks of to Alfred, the hope that God will triumph in the end despite every external indication to the contrary while journeying in the world. This hope of heaven is even called “a doubtful star / On the waste wind whirled and driven,”[23] reinforcing its seemingly elusive, intangible quality. The manner in which Colan defeats Harold illustrates the paradox of this hope: “Man shall not taste of victory / Till he throws his sword away,”[24] that is, precisely when one is in the condition of complete helplessness and humility can one be redeemed, modeled by Christ’s death on the cross. This hope is so efficaciously transformative that by it “men signed of the cross of Christ / Go gaily in the dark.”[25] Here we see a striking collision or coordination between circumstances that seem utterly beyond one’s control and the Christian’s free abandonment to Providence, which is sometimes so obscure to human vision that to persevere requires “joy without a cause, / Yea, faith without a hope.”[26]

Chesterton opens Book VII with a surprising divergence from the battle scene by focusing on a child playing in the grass and building a tower out of stones. In the poem, the child clearly represents Christ: “The child played on, alone, divine [….] The child whom Time can never tire.”[27] The child’s building of the tower represents both the plan of redemption and God’s invitation of salvation to men, repeatedly offered throughout history, as well as the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth, which is a necessary corollary of the spreading of the Church as individuals cooperate with that divine plan. The child has infinite patience, infinite determination, infinite hope. The child also represents Alfred as the poem explicitly states: “And this was the might of Alfred, / At the ending of the way [….] Alfred fought as gravely / As a good child at play.”[28] Because of Alfred’s complete surrender to this hope beyond hope, the poem notes that whereas the other chiefs will be forgotten, Alfred will not and hence “rules England till the doom”[29] in the figures of the White Horse and English culture. The act of building the tower is another representation of the scouring of the White Horse and therefore of the act of handing on tradition, the cultivation and raising of civilization from the chaos of untamed nature. Time can never tire the child or Alfred because of his hope; the White Horse is preserved “though skies alter and empires melt.”[30]

Lastly, an examination of Alfred’s other faults and virtues will reveal how Alfred signifies tradition. Before the battle against the Danes begins, Alfred confesses grievous sins he committed in the past, an act of humiliation reminiscent of the “nobis quoque” in the Canon at Mass. This act has a twofold significance: 1) it is a remembrance of the past in its mistakes and failures; and 2) it is a resolution to amend one’s life. By growing in self-knowledge and humility, man equips himself in the struggle to grow in virtue, and on the societal level the knowledge of one’s own history helps prevent repeating the mistakes of the past. By immortalizing Alfred’s contrition, Chesterton conveys the important notion of tradition as a light to know our fallen nature (remembrance of past sins) and to guide our future behavior (amendment of life).[31]

Alfred’s idealism is both a virtue and a fault. Originally, his idealism lacked humility: after his initial defeat by the Danes, Alfred despaired: “And naught was left King Alfred / But shameful tears of rage, / [….] He was broken to his knee.”[32] Later when Alfred is tending the fire in the peasant woman’s hut, his arrogant idealism causes him to pity the woman’s poverty and wax eloquently in his mind on lofty theological ideas of Providence. His failure to do a simple task, and the humility that follows, temper his idealism by rooting him in the concrete present: “Pride flings frail palaces at the sky, / […] But the firm feet of humility / They grip the ground like trees.”[33] All of Alfred’s daydreaming not only brought about no good but led to waste. This episode illustrates that hope must not make us ignore the realities of the present and fail in our daily responsibilities. Near the end of the poem, when asked why he does not expand his kingdom, Alfred reveals how deeply this humility has sunk in: “That a sage feels too small for life, / And a fool too large for it. […] I am not wise enough / To rule so small a thing [i.e. Athelney].”[34] Tradition is the embodiment of hope in the future, but it exists only in the present and is preserved only in the present. Alfred’s humbled idealism reflects the balance necessary for tradition to be effective.

Alfred’s self-knowledge is another important virtue. Not only is Alfred’s contentment in ruling the small isle of Athelney a reflection of this humility, but the fact that he rides a gray horse into battle further demonstrates his self-knowledge, specifically that he must die. Chesterton uses the color gray to represent old age and the apparent ends of things, from Colan’s solitary gray cave, to the old woman in the forest, to the graying White Horse that has been neglected, and the “grey [sic] twilight” when Alfred’s army despairs of victory and begins to flee from the Danes. Alfred has the humility to recognize that his time for preserving tradition will shortly pass. Additionally, although Alfred predicts that the heathens will return in the distant future in more subtle, insidious ways, he cannot see “in what wise men shall smite him [the neo-pagan].”[35] Alfred existed for his own time, for the struggles of his day; although he symbolically models how tradition and the defenders of tradition must act, he himself remains a person rooted in a particular moment in history and thus cannot give the precise solutions that we who live in the present must discern and utilize as we scour the White Horse anew. 

With The Ballad of the White Horse Chesterton is at his literary best. He dresses deep paradoxes in stunning poetry by focusing the telescope of our attention on a great man of the past who yet remains ever relevant: “To study humanity in the present is like studying a mountain with a magnifying glass; to study it in the past is like studying it through a telescope.”[36] The dead speak to us and are necessary for us, for “the only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since by the sublime religious story a dead man only could reconcile heaven and earth.”[37] Chesterton shows us why Alfred is great: he possessed the kind of heroism that remains in popular imagination precisely because his actions led to the preservation of present-day English society from the invading paganism of the past. The “thousand years” blazed by Guthrum’s baptism marks the 1,000 years of Christendom, in which “Christian men / Guard even heathen things.”[38] Through the inspiration and intercession of Our Lady, Alfred was fortified to become a pillar that Providence used to build up the tower of Christian society, symbolized by the keeping of the White Horse and the child at play. Tradition marks our identity, forges us in virtue, and impels us into the future. It reveals our potential while simultaneously setting our prudent limits. It requires constant vigilance, defense, and maintenance yet endures beyond any individual and even empires, from the “end of the world long ago” to the “children of some second birth.”[39] I agree with Chesterton that Alfred deserves to be called “the Great”; his poem articulates more movingly than a plain logical argument why Alfred is great. The Ballad addresses exactly my concern for tradition and my desire to care for it, to take up the duty of scouring the White Horse, and like Alfred be counted among “the kind of Christ,” who “are ignorant and brave” with “wars you hardly win / And souls you hardly save.”[40]

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Footnotes:

1. Robert Wiesner, “The Ballad of the White Horse: An Introduction and Analysis,” Seton Magazine, Oct. 11, 2013.

2. “Letter 80: From an airgraph to Christopher Tolkien,” in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, eds. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 92.

3. This essay is found in Orthodoxy.

4. G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse, Prefatory Note. The noted anthropologist Mircea Eliade describes the function of tradition in exactly the same way: “[…] to telescope all events in the same atemporal horizon of the mythical beginning.” Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. W.R. Trask (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1965), xi.

5. G.K. Chesterton, “Alfred the Great,” in Varied Types (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903), 201–202.

6. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 156.

7. Ibid., 161.

8. Chesterton, “Alfred the Great,” 202.

9. Chesterton, Ballad, Book III. The Harp of Alfred.

10. Father Walter Farrell, O.P., notes that curiosity is “merely a tool of pride.” Walter Farrell, A Companion to the Summa, vol. 3, “Chapter XIX—Modesty and Miracles.”

11. Chesterton, Ballad, Book III. The Harp of Alfred.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., Book V. Ethandune: The First Stroke.

15. Ibid., Book VI. Ethandune: The Slaying of the Chiefs.

16. Ibid., Book II. The Gathering of the Chiefs.

17. Ibid., Book VI. Ethandune: The Slaying of the Chiefs.

18. Ibid., Book III. The Harp of Alfred.

19. Rom. 4:17.

20. Chesterton, Ballad, Book III. The Harp of Alfred.

21. Ibid., Book VIII. The Scouring of the Horse.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., Book IV. The Woman in the Forest.

24. Ibid., Book V. Ethandune: The First Stroke.

25. Ibid., Book I. The Vision of the King.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., Book VII. Ethandune: The Last Charge.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., Book VIII. The Scouring of the Horse.

31. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives an example of tradition acting as a warning and corrective when it states that ignorance of man’s wounded nature “gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action, and morals” (CCC §407), in a word, culture itself.

32. Chesterton, Ballad, Book I. The Vision of the King.

33. Ibid., Book IV. The Woman in the Forest.

34. Ibid., Book VIII. The Scouring of the Horse.

35. Ibid.

36. Chesterton, “Alfred the Great,” 199–200.

37. Ibid., 199.

38. Ballad, Book III. The Harp of Alfred.

39. Ibid., Book I. The Vision of the King.

40. Ibid.