No review tonight. My chosen topic was prompted by a video clip I saw, one of many floating around YouTube, which extract moments from conversations between the historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. (I can’t find that particular one at the moment.)

Anyway, one of the two men – I think it was Holland – mentioned, in a parenthetical way, that the English divine Alcuin of York (ca. 735 – 804 A.D.) was responsible for the innovation of putting spaces between words in documents. (You may be aware, if you’ve read about ancient manuscripts, that they wrote out their sentences without spaces, sometimes making interpretation hard.)

This intrigued me, as I’m something of an admirer of Alcuin’s. I thought I’d do some web searching on the subject.

My conclusion: Alcuin certainly did not invent the separation of written words. But he’s very likely responsible for its adoption as a standard.

When I deliver my little lectures on the book Viking Legacy (which I translated), I must perforce mention the contention of the author, Prof. Titlestad, that the Viking raids, starting at Lindisfarne in 793 AD., were a strategic response to Charlemagne’s massacre of the Saxons at Verden in 782. In discussing Lindisfarne, I always quote Alcuin, who famously wrote of the raid:

“Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.”

Alcuin would (to his eternal credit) pressure the emperor to stop using violence to try to convert the heathen. He joined Charlemagne’s court shortly after the Verden atrocity, and he brought with him the influence of the English church. The English tradition was inherited from Pope Gregory and St. Augustine of Canterbury, who urged missionaries to be kind and tolerant of heathen ways, so long as those ways were morally innocent. (It was this policy that led them to convert heathen festivals to Christian purposes – which means that when people complain that Christmas and Halloween were originally heathen festivals [a great oversimplification in itself] they are complaining about a tradition arising from the church’s rejection of conversion by the sword.)

As far as the spaces between letters goes, scholars tell us that the idea first arose in Ireland, where the monks adopted it to assist them in reading Latin, an unfamiliar language. Alcuin promoted this system during his time in France, helping to make it the standard throughout Europe.

So if you like reading, and appreciate those spaces – those blessed little bits of nothing – that help us recognize and identify separate words in a fraction of a second, you might pause a moment to remember and thank God’s servant, Alcuin of York.