Judgement and Doom: Apocalyptic Anxiety and Rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England

Comparable to the “Y2K” phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century, many historians posit that there was a similar concern a thousand years prior at the turn of the first millennium. This rested on the belief that Christ would return and initiate the world’s end—the apocalypse. In ninth and tenth-century England, Vikings raids were instilling terror into the hearts and minds of those who experienced them, and the clergy often observed these calamities in an apocalyptic light. This thesis will examine the rhetorical and theological expressions of apocalyptic concern in Anglo-Saxon writing from the ninth century into the tenth and eleventh.