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11178 results in Anglo Saxon and medieval literature

Page 136 of 559

  • 14 - The Crucifixion (from the Old English Gospels: Mt 27.11–54)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 146-151

  • Summary

    The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John provide a narrative of the career of Christ, culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection. Our word ‘gospel’ derives from OE gōdspel, ‘good news’, a translation of Latin euangelium, which was itself a borrowing of the Greek euangelion; this meant originally a ‘reward for good news’ and then came to mean the ‘good news’ itself. The Old English Gospels (formerly known as the West Saxon Gospels) represent the earliest complete rendering of the gospels in English, made from the Latin Vulgate, probably in the second half of the tenth century. Six complete manuscript copies survive, along with fragments of two others. All were made in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. It is unlikely that the OE version was intended to give the common people access to scripture, as were the much later Middle English translations associated with the reformer Wyclif. The context of both its production and its use was probably the monastery. The addition of Latin annotations to some of the manuscripts may have been to allow cross-referencing with the Vulgate, which remained the official Bible of the church; and no doubt they would have been a help for monks learning Latin, too.

    The extract given here covers the last hours of Christ's life as a man: his arrest by the Roman authorities, his ‘trial’ before Pilate and his execution, followed by his resurrection from the tomb. One of the central aims of the gospel-writers was to show Jesus to be the Messiah of the Jews, whose coming had been prophesied in the OT, and this idea of fulfilment is repeatedly emphasised by quotations from OT books. In the extract, for example (lines 40–2, translating Mt 27.35), we are told that the sharing out of Christ's clothes by his executioners fulfils the words of a prophet (see 41–2n).

    The language of the preserved copies of the Old English Gospels is late WS. The eleventh-century manuscript used here (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 140) was written by four different scribes with their own idiosyncrasies; the one who wrote the latter part of Matthew preferred the ‘late’ form heom to him for the dative plural third-person pronoun (17, 18, etc) but also wrote hym (25), another late form, and he preferred hyne to hine for the third-person accusative singular masculine pronoun.

  • 10 - The Battle of Brunanburh

  • from II - Keeping a record
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 122-127

  • Summary

    Two of the seven extant versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see p. 97) have the following brief entry for the year 937: ‘In this year Athelstan and Edmund his brother led levies to Brunanburh and there fought with Olaf, and with the help of Christ they had the victory’. It was one episode out of many in an unceasing struggle between Wessex and its northern and western enemies during the tenth century and might have gone unremarked. But the other five versions of the Chronicle expand on the entry with an ardently nationalistic poem of seventy-three lines which celebrates the battle at Brunanburh as a decisive ‘English’ triumph. There King Athelstan and his brother Edmund, leading the armies of Wessex and Mercia, overcame a combined force of Norsemen from Dublin led by Olaf (Anlāf in the text), Scots under King Constantine III, and Britons from Strathclyde.

    Although the main events of the battle are corroborated in various other annals and histories, and in a much later Norse saga, the location of Brunanburh is not known for certain. However, it is likely to have been in the northwest of England, and identification with modern Bromborough, a village on the Wirral peninsula – which juts out into the North Sea – has long been popular. It has been shown that the form Bromborough could have evolved from an original Brunanburh and recent topographical research has reinforced the case for the connection, though confident claims for other locations (including one near Durham, in the northeast) continue to be made. The River Dee forms the boundary of the Wirral on its southwestern side and is a likely escape route for the defeated Norse forces heading back to Ireland.

    Some critics have suggested that the poet of Brunanburh was influenced by Latin or Norse panegyrics (laudatory verses about aristocrats or heroes), but the poem's emphasis is on English nationalism in an historical perspective, rather than on individual heroics, and nothing specific is said about Athelstan's feats (cf. the treatment of ealdorman Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon, Text 30). Brunanburh concludes with an historical allusion which links the present victors to the conquering ancestral Anglo-Saxons of the fifth century. From this continuity the poet builds a sense of national destiny, using the style, diction and imagery of heroic poetry.

  • Preface to the first edition

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp x-xi

  • Summary

    This book was planned nearly ten years ago to meet the need for a reader in Old English which would offer teachers and students two things: first, a range of texts far wider than the narrow canon available in the primers and readers in print; second, texts edited to modern standards of ‘userfriendliness’, in the way of presentation, glossing and annotation. The established canon is still properly represented in this volume but the addition of many new texts will I hope open up areas of Anglo-Saxon literary life which are usually ignored by all but the specialist, and will enable teachers at all levels to plan more adventurous courses. The innovations in presentation recognise the problems of today's readers, especially students in the many universities where modularisation has resulted in the compression of courses and the consequent demand that students do more in a shorter time (and with less supervision). They recognise also that few new readers of Old English today will have had the sort of rigorous linguistic training whose lack some of us spend so much time lamenting. The decision to supply every text with same-page glosses, in addition to explanatory notes that are fuller than in most previous works of this kind, was not taken lightly – not least because of the inevitable technical complications involved. The great Victorian scholar Henry Sweet averred grumpily (in the preface to his edition of Alfred's translation of Gregory's Regula pastoralis, p. ix) that a student tackling an Old English text ought simply to sit down with a grammar and a dictionary and get on with it; but that time has long gone, as though it had never been. The aim of this Reader is both to enable students to read Old English texts and positively to encourage them to do so. There is no virtue, as far as I can see, in withholding anything that might help them.

    At the start of this project, I was lucky to secure my then Cambridge colleague, Andy Orchard, as a collaborator, and the initial work was done by us in tandem. Eventually, however, it became clear that his many other commitments would delay indefinitely the completion of his portion of the work, and so I decided to go it alone. Nevertheless, his involvement at the planning stage was crucial.

  • 9 - Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People

  • from II - Keeping a record
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 105-121

  • Summary

    The Venerable Bede (c. 672–735) spent all his life from the age of seven at the monastery of Jarrow, part of the twinned institution of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria. This was at the time the most powerful of the independent Anglo- Saxon kingdoms, with kings willing and able to endow great centres of faith and learning. Wearmouth-Jarrow became one of the most important in the Christian West, largely owing to Bede. Ælfric of Eynsham, whose own works dominated a later period of Anglo-Saxon England (see p. 40), was to call Bede ‘the wise teacher of the English people’. The range of his writings was immense: biblical exegesis, history, hagiography (writings about saints), grammar, poetry, natural science and computus (astronomical and chronological calculation). His works, which define for us the first great period of cultural development in Anglo-Saxon England, were in demand on the Continent also, both in Bede's own lifetime and throughout the Middle Ages. The thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante afforded him the rare privilege of a place among the blessed souls inhabiting ‘the heaven of the sun’ in his Paradiso (part III of the Divina Commedia).

    The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’) was Bede's greatest achievement. In five books, it tells the story of his country from Julius Caesar's attempted invasion of Britain in 55 BC to the year in which Bede finished writing, AD 731. His aim was a fundamental Christian one: to record the growth of the English church and to reveal it, and England, as part of the divine scheme of history. To that end, the main narrative is filled out with letters, accounts of holy men and of miracles, and many anecdotes which became part of the literary heritage of England. Bede wrote in Latin, but when, at the end of the ninth century, King Alfred came to launch a revival of learning in Wessex (see p. 38), the Historia ecclesiastica was a natural choice for putting into OE, even though Alfred's direct involvement has not yet been proved.

    Like much early translation into OE, this one tends to stick close to the original Latin, sometimes at the expense of natural idiom, with awkward results; and in a few instances the translator's misunderstanding of the Latin has caused problems (as indicated in the notes below).

  • 16 - A Translator's Problems (Ælfric's preface to his translation of Genesis)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 158-165

  • Summary

    The Bible universally used in the West in the medieval period was the Latin Vulgate, a name which originally denoted the version accepted by the vulgus, or common people. It had been translated from Hebrew and Greek texts in the fourth and fifth centuries and had in effect been a ‘vernacular’ version for Christians among whom Latin was widely understood. But as the centuries went by and Christianity spread, that language became more and more inaccessible for most people – all but the educated minority of ‘professional’ religious, such as monks and priests and church writers. Whether it was proper to put the Bible into yet new vernacular languages then became an issue, which would persist right up until the Reformation.

    One problem was that Latin itself was now thought of as a sacred language of scripture (alongside Hebrew and Greek), expressing the inviolable divine word, and should not be tampered with. More important was the conviction among many in the church that this divine word ought in any case to be mediated for ordinary people by means of preaching and careful paraphrase. Allowing direct access to the text of the Bible to those who were untrained in the complexities of scriptural history and interpretative disciplines such as ‘typology’ (the method by which events in the Old Testament are interpreted as prefiguring those in the New) could lead to misunderstandings and heresy.

    It is such concerns that are expressed by Ælfric in the preface he wrote to a translation of the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis (see Text 13). We learn that Ælfric's translation had been made at the request of his patron Æthelweard (d. c. 998), ealdorman of the western provinces (presumably Devon, Somerset and Dorset; see also p. 40). However, Ælfric declares that he will do no more such translation (though in fact he did); he fears that ignorant men will not realise the symbolic significance of Old Testament events but will take them as offering standards of behaviour for all ages.

  • 5 - Beginning poetry

  • from Beginning Old English
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 29-34

  • Summary

    A Riddle

    Here is a riddle-poem, complete in one line. It is from a collection of nearly one hundred riddles copied out in the early eleventh century in an Anglo-Saxon anthology of verse known as the Exeter Book (see p. 258). It is usually identified as Riddle 69.

    Wundor wearð on weġe wæter wearð tō bāne.

    Some editors see this not as an independent riddle but as the last line of the previous riddle in the manuscript, but the scribe seems to have separated it and it works very well on its own. It is easy to learn by heart and, importantly for us, is a classic illustration of how OE poetry ‘works’.

    To start with the riddle's meaning, most of the vocabulary ought to be familiar or at least guessable by now. Wundor (‘wonder’ or ‘miracle’, pron. u as in ‘full’), wæter (pron. ‘watter’), on and tō are obvious. Weġ (here with the dative inflection -e after on) is ModE ‘way’ and sounds almost like the modern word; and bān (with the dative inflection -e after tō; pron. ‘bahn-eh’) has followed the pattern of long-vowel modification that we have met before (e.g. stān, ‘stone’) and has become ModE ‘bone’.

    That leaves the verb wearð, used twice and crucial in the riddle. The pronunciation is ‘weh-arth’, with ea said quickly and the r sounded. We met it first in 2b/7. It is the preterite of (ġe)weorþan (see p. 11), whose broad spectrum of meaning encompasses the verbs ‘become / come about / turn to / happen /occur’: some sort of process or a step in a sequence of events is always implied. The verb is also used as an alternative to wæs in sentences such as þæt scip wearþ ġefylled, ‘the ship was filled’. The verb's semantic flexibility allows it to be used very effectively in the riddle, but unfortunately we no longer have it in ModE, and so must use two different verbs from the spectrum: ‘happen’ and ‘turn to’ fit the bill. Thus we have:

    A wonder happened on the way – water turned to bone.

  • 6 - The Wagonwheel of Fate (from Alfred's translation of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae)

  • from I - Teaching and learning
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 73-78

  • Summary

    Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae (‘On the Consolation of Philosophy’) was one of the most widely read and influential books of the Middle Ages, as its survival in over four hundred manuscripts attests. Written in Latin, the work inspired many translations, including one by Chaucer. Boethius, born about AD 480, was a patrician Roman with a passion for philosophy and education. He was appointed to high political office in the Roman Empire under the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric (493–526), but during a period of political unrest was suspected by the king of plotting against him and was imprisoned, before being executed without trial c. 526. His De consolatione, written in prison, was Boethius's way of coming to terms with his unexpected fate. It purports to be a dialogue between himself and a figure called Philosophia (often rendered as ‘Lady Philosophy’), who visits him in his cell. As he rails against the injustice of fortune, she counters with careful comments and elucidations which point insistently to the existence of a divine scheme of things. From this Boethius obtains some peace of mind.

    It is not surprising that Alfred felt a special sympathy for the work. He, too, had experienced the lowest ebb of misfortune, in his case when the Danes had overrun Wessex and forced him into hiding. Even after the surprise victory at Edington in 878, which enabled him to come back and build the basis of a stable English kingdom, the Danish threat continued, and he was afflicted by illness. His name for the De consolatione was frōforbōc, ‘comfort book’, and he made many changes which reflect his personal identification with the subject. Although Boethius had been a Christian, this is not immediately apparent in the original work, and one of Alfred's aims in his reworking of it was to present explicit Christian teaching on Providence and the divine order. He eliminated the autobiographical references to Boethius and presented the dialogue as that between the inquirer's mind and the (male) personification of Wisdom, rather than Philosophia.

    The extract here is from the fourth book, Alfred's ch. 39. The inquirer has asked Wisdom to explain the fact that often good people suffer while evil people find happiness, according, it seems, to pure chance. Wisdom acknowledges that this is the trickiest of questions, involving as it does the issues of free will and predestination, and of Providence and fate.

  • 35 - Five Anglo-Saxon Riddles

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 358-364

  • Summary

    Riddling quickens the mind and lifts the spirit. It is an ancient and universal art which uses devices such as pun, double-entendre and metaphor to engage with the world in a sort of intellectual game-playing. Some ninety-five riddles in OE, all of them poems, are preserved in the Exeter Book, the exact number varying according to how editors divide them. They are copied in three groups, with other poems intervening, and some of the latter (such as Wulf and Eadwacer, Text 39) are themselves so enigmatic that critics have been tempted to include them in the riddling genre as well.

    It is likely that the OE riddles had a variety of different authors. They drew on a strong Latin tradition associated especially with one Symphosius (himself an enigmatic, perhaps imaginary, figure), whose collection of three-line aenigmata (‘riddles’), compiled in the fourth century or the fifth, was enormously popular. In England, the early eighth-century bishop of Sherborne, Aldhelm, composed one hundred aenigmata in order to illustrate his study of Latin metre. (He composed OE verse as well, but none, as far as we can tell, survives.) In the eighth century, a collection of one hundred Latin riddles was put together by Tatwine, archbishop of Canterbury, and a writer calling himself ‘Eusebius’, who was possibly Bede's friend Hwætberht, abbot of Jarrow.

    Though strongly influenced by such Latin precedents, the OE riddles, with a few exceptions, are not simply translations. In general they are longer than the Latin riddles, and contain more detail, and they are far more playful in style. Their subjects are an odd mix of the secular and the religious, the cosmological and the mundane: shield, sword, cross, chalice; beaker, onion, dough; sun, storm, wind, iceberg; badger, hen, fish. Some reflect a knowledge of Graeco-Roman learning, others are overtly popular, with sexual double-meanings, and many offer us a window on to aspects of Anglo-Saxon life which are rarely revealed in the other literature. Several riddles incorporate the challenge, ‘say what I am’ or ‘ask what I am called’, and this may take a lot of ingenuity (a few riddles remain unsolved), but in other cases the ‘solution’ is in fact obvious long before the end; such riddles seem to be studied celebrations of the things they describe.

  • II - Keeping a record

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 79-80

  • Summary

    Writing about King Æthelberht of Kent, the first Anglo-Saxon king to convert to Christianity, Bede (d. 735) records that ‘among the many benefits that his wisdom conferred on the nation, he introduced … a code of law after the example of the Romans which was written in English and remains in force to this day’. This noteworthy event took place within a few years of the arrival in Kent of the Christian mission headed by Augustine in 597, and Æthelberht's lawcode – though it is preserved only in a copy made five hundred years later – is the earliest-known example of English used as a language of written record. This section begins with extracts from it (Text 7a). The writing of Germanic languages across Europe had previously been restricted to inscriptions made laboriously on wood or stone in versions of the ‘runic’ alphabet, but Christianity had brought Latin letters to the Anglo-Saxons and the opportunity for literacy. Bede's remark about ‘the example of the Romans’ seems to stress just that: the Anglo-Saxons, too, had now written their laws down, and no longer relied simply on oral tradition.

    The lawcodes of successive Anglo-Saxon kings, right up to the time of Cnut (1016–35), and including Alfred and Æthelred (Texts 7b–c), would now be cast in OE – centuries before vernaculars were used in such a way by England's continental neighbours – but the widespread use of the vernacular for general purposes took a little longer to become established. The language of the church and of learning remained Latin, and this is the language in which Bede naturally wrote his great Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’). It is a record of the history of the nation of ‘the English’, as Bede (echoing a description by Pope Gregory in the sixth century) was now calling them, set firmly in the context of Christian history. But the relative importance of the vernacular changed dramatically during the reign of Alfred (871–99) in Wessex (see Section I/headnote), when the king instigated the translation of essential books of Christian instruction from Latin.

  • 31 - Beowulf

  • from V - Telling tales
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 306-333

  • Summary

    Although Beowulf is the earliest long narrative poem in English, it is not about England or England's heroes. Its setting is what we now call Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and southern Sweden (the latter being known as Geatland in the poem), and its cast-list includes a selection of both historical and legendary figures from that period of the fourth to sixth centuries known as the ‘age of migrations’, when Germanic tribes spread across much of western Europe (some of them eventually reaching, and sacking, Rome). The settlement of Britain in the mid-fifth century by Angles, Saxons and other tribes – who would come to be known collectively as ‘the English’ – was itself part of this process. For them, therefore (and for the great number of later settlers, mainly Danes, who arrived during the ninth and tenth centuries), the world of Beowulf was, notionally at least, a familiar world, the world in which their ancestral identity had been created. It is within this world that the story of the young Geatish hero Beowulf unfolds: how he saved Denmark under King Hrothgar from the depredations of Grendel and Grendel's mother (in the first section of the poem), and how, in old age, he died defending his own kingdom from a dragon.

    Our only copy of the 3182-line poem – known universally by the name of its principal character since it was first edited in 1815 – is on fols. 153r–155v of what today we simply call ‘the Beowulf-manuscript’ (but formerly the ‘Nowell codex’, after its sixteenth-century owner); this constitutes the second half of a composite British Library volume, Cotton Vitellius A. xv. The manuscript was written out between about 1000 and 1010, by two scribes, but the poem's origins have long been a matter of great controversy. Historical references within it (such as the raid on the Swedes by Hygelac, lines 2922–98, which we know took place c. 510, and his death c. 520) show that it could not have been composed, in the form in which we know it, much before the middle of the sixth century; but the poet's knowledge of the Bible, and his obvious confidence that his audience is Christian, pushes the earliest possible date further forward to the mid-seventh century, a generation or more after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons.

  • 15 - King Alfred's Psalms

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 152-157

  • Summary

    The psalms of the Old Testament, which had been a part of Jewish worship since the eighth century BC, came to play a crucial role in the practice of Christianity, too, for they were interpreted as presenting prophecies which were later fulfilled in the life of Christ. Their poetic qualities – a ‘psalm’ is a song, originally in verse in the Hebrew – and their association (however tenuous) with the great but troubled king of Israel, David (died c. 970 BC), made them a popular resource for personal devotion also. By the early Middle Ages, formal church worship (the ‘divine office’) was built around the psalms and they were circulated in self-contained books called psalters. In the monasteries, according to ch. 18 of the Rule of St Benedict, all 150 of the psalms in the psalter were to be sung every week, and the monks would be expected to know them by heart. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Latin psalter seems to have been the most widely copied book in Anglo-Saxon England. Eleven of the forty surviving examples have an OE translation (or ‘gloss’) written word by word between the lines of Latin, probably as a way to help monks to master that language.

    Because it followed the Latin word-order slavishly, a gloss was not a coherent stand-alone version of the psalms, but such a translation does exist in a bilingual psalter made in the mid-eleventh century. Now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (lat. 8824), it is the most curiously shaped of Anglo-Saxon books, with pages three times as tall as wide (526 × 186 mm). All the psalms are there in Old English, the first fifty in prose and the rest (by a different translator) in verse. They are accompanied by a Latin text in adjacent columns, but this differs somewhat from the one that must have been used by the translators.

    Scholars have established that the prose translations of the first fifty psalms are by King Alfred of Wessex (871–99) and were probably made near the end of his life. It is not known whether he ever intended to complete the whole psalter but the first group of fifty in itself is likely to have had a particular resonance for him, for it contains the lamentations of King David as he faces the hostility of his enemies.

  • 17 - Satan's Challenge (Genesis B, lines 338–441)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 166-173

  • Summary

    The ‘Junius’ manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11), named after the Dutch scholar who studied it and published its contents in the seventeenth century, contains three OE poems on Old Testament themes, Genesis, Exodus and Daniel, along with a fourth called Christ and Satan, which develops some of these themes from the perspective of the New Testament (but which may not have been part of the volume's earliest design). Together, these poems explore some of the major themes of Christian history. The manuscript was compiled in the second half of the tenth or the early eleventh century and the text is interspersed with line drawings, some embellished with coloured inks.

    Genesis, the longest of the poems with its 2936 surviving lines, presents an imaginative paraphrase of the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis. In fact, however, it is a hybrid work, for interpolated in it are over six hundred lines of a different origin from the rest, though they slot well into the narrative (lines 235–851, or thereabouts). The interpolated lines are known as Genesis B (formerly the Later Genesis) to distinguish them from the larger poem, Genesis A, into which they fit. Genesis B describes the fall from heaven of Lucifer and his followers, the temptation of Eve, the fall of her and Adam, and finally the expulsion of the pair from Eden. The poem is unique in the surviving literature, as far as we can tell, in being a close OE translation of an original work in Old Saxon. This was the language, nearly related to OE, spoken by the inhabitants of Saxony (part of present-day Germany), to whom the Anglo-Saxons sent Christian missionaries during the seventh and eighth centuries. Twenty-five lines of an Old Saxon version of the poem are preserved in a manuscript in the Vatican Library.

    The story of the fall of the angels as a result of the subversive pride of Lucifer, God's brightest and most favoured angel (whose name means ‘light-bearing one’), is not told in the Bible. For many church writers, however, it provides an explanation of the origin of sin and, according to some interpretations, gives a rationale for God's decision to create humankind – namely, to replace the expelled rebel angels. It also sets up the causal framework within which the temptation and subsequent fall are played out.

  • Manuscripts and textual emendations

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 393-402

  • Summary

    In the Schoolroom

    British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii (mid-11th cent.), fols. 60v–61r and 63v–64r

    4 behese > behefe; 6 ge beon supplied, bewugen > beswungen; 8 swincgla us > us swingla; 11 sincge > singe; 12 and omitted; 15 yrþlincgas > yrþlingas; 18 weorc þin > þin weorc; 20 þa and þære supplied; 22 æþer > æcer; 25 þa supplied; 28 binnan oxan > þæra oxena binnan, hig > hige; 29 sceasn heora > heora scearn; 31 ge > gea; 33 sceap mine > mine sceap; 35 and > on, treowa > tweowa; 36 on þærto 7 cyse 7 buteran ic do > and cyse and buteran ic do þærto; 38 þu supplied; 39 þone supplied; 40 cycean > cyrcean, þam supplied; 41 pa > þam; 43 mæssa > mæssan, sungan > sungon; 44 drucon > druncon; 46 nihtsangc > nihtsang; 48 beswuncgen > beswungen; 51 þu supplied, deor > dear; 52 beswuncgen > beswungen; 58 paxgeorn > waxgeorn, synd supplied; 59 ne eom > neom; 62 hwilon supplied; 65 hit supplied, hæbbe > næbbe, eala > ealu; 66 drncst > drincst; 67 ne eom > neom; 69 þu supplied; 71 uhtsancge > uhtsange; 72 þone supplied, crise > arise, lareow min > min lareow.

    A Personal Miscellany

    London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvi–xxvii (1023–35), fols. 55v–56v.

  • (a) A Divinatory Alphabet

  • 20 blis seo > blisse; 22 bycna > bycnaþ; 24 soldan > foldan.

  • (b) The Moon and Tide,

  • (c) The Age of the Virgin

  • No emendations.

    • Medicinal Remedies

    London, British Library, Royal 12 D. xvii (mid-10th cent.), fols. 9v–10r, 70v–71r and 106r–v.

  • (a) For Dimness of the Eyes

  • (b) For Vomiting

  • No emendations.

  • 1 viþ > wiþ.

  • (c) For Dysentery

  • No emendations.

    • Learning Latin

    Oxford, St John's College 154, fols. 1–160 (early 11th cent.).

    Oxford, St John's College 154, fols. 1–160 (early 11th cent.). 47 of > on; 51 of > on; 57 se supplied before u; 59 þam supplied; 65 þr-winne > þrowigenne; 69 coniunctio > coniugatio; 85 ne > nu; 90 on supplied; 94 mann mm > nan mann.

  • 39 - Wulf and Eadwacer

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 383-386

  • Summary

    Along with The Wife's Lament (Text 40), Wulf and Eadwacer is a rarity in the OE poetic corpus: a secular lyric in a female voice. It is also one of the most enigmatic of poems and has generated intense but largely unresolved argument about its interpretation, for at the simple narrative level it is full of undeveloped allusions and unexplained ambiguities – not least the question of who ‘Wulf’ is and what his relationship with the speaker is, and who ‘Eadwacer’ is and whether he is a separate person at all. In the Exeter Book, the poem immediately precedes a long section of riddles, and some readers have found it useful to see it in the same light, as a deliberate enigma. Only at the more abstract level of theme and tone does the poem become more or less coherent, as a bitter personal reflection on separation and longing, an expression of intense feeling, apparently addressed by the female speaker (her gender confirmed by the feminine form of the adjective reotugu in line 10 [§C3c]) to an absent ‘Wulf’. This has led to a plausible, but not particularly helpful, association of Wulf and Eadwacer with the genre of poems in Germanic literature known as Frauenlieder (‘women's songs’).

    In the structure of the poem, there is a sense of both economy and completeness. What is striking, especially in view of the complexity (to us) of its literal meaning, is the comparative simplicity of its syntax. The obscurities do not arise from muddy grammatical relationships, syntactical dislocations or, as far as we can tell, from bad copying; they are in the semantics and the allusive terms of reference. Thus it is likely that the enigmas of the poem are deliberate. Simplicity is especially evident in the first eight lines, with the stark clarity of the discrete half-lines in 4 and 5 formally underlining the theme of separation. This section is given shape by the exact repetition of line 2 in line 7, followed in both cases by the cryptic statement, ungelīc(e) is ūs, meaning (apparently) either ‘it is different for us’ or ‘there is a difference between us’ (see 3n).

  • 38 - The Wanderer

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 375-382

  • Summary

    The Wanderer is a memorable example of meditation in a lyrical vein, in which universal rules are generated from intense personal experience. Though the context is unequivocally Christian, the poem is striking for the intimate allusions it makes to the conduct and ethos of the secular ‘heroic’ world. These occur notably in the retrospective brooding of the persona of the ‘wanderer’ himself (that being the widely accepted rendering of the word eardstapa in line 6 – literally ‘earth-stepper’ or ‘earth-hopper’), as he mourns separation from his treasure-giving lord, on whose knees he once ceremoniously laid hands and head, and from his boon companions of the mead-hall. It is (or was) a world of ritual, good companionship and human warmth, the memory of which is all the more compelling in contrast with a forlorn present of coldness and isolation.

    The Wanderer is a frame poem, which begins and ends with lines of explicit Christian statement – first about the availability of God's mercy, even to the abject exile (1–5), and last about the rewards of faith (112–15). Within this outer frame is another one (6–7 and 111), in which brief ‘stage directions’ are given, introduced by the formula swā cwæþ, ‘thus spoke’ – first, ‘thus spoke the wanderer’, and then, ‘thus spoke the wise man’ (snottor). Enclosed by this double frame is the long central section of the poem (8–110), which, in the simplest interpretation, may be seen as the monologue of the wanderer, in whose reflective voice the poet develops his theme. The monologue itself is structured, moving from personal despair to detached observation. Its integrity is not affected by its closing lines (92–110), in which the wanderer rounds off his own ruminations by invoking the voice of a world-weary ‘everyman’, who has perceived the transience of all people and all things and asks where they have gone, using a literary topos known by the Latin words for ‘where are they?’, ubi sunt, and frequently exploited in homiletic literature.

    The main structural problem in the poem involves the question of whether those stage directions of the inner frame (6–7 and 111), which are clearly in the voice of the scene-setting poet, refer backwards or forwards – i.e. to the voice which speaks the outer, Christian, frame or to the voice of the central monologue.

  • 29 - Cynewulf and Cyneheard (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: annal for 755)

  • from V - Telling tales
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 281-286

  • Summary

    The entry for 755 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see 8/headnote) is remarkable for its length. Breaking from the pattern of terse entries restricted to the major events of successive years, it expands into an account of a power struggle lasting almost thirty years between two royal kinsmen for the kingdom of Wessex. The entry is a carefully crafted narrative with a purpose beyond mere record. It has been argued that the piece, the ‘Cynewulf and Cyneheard’ episode, must have derived from a preexisting source outside the Chronicle, perhaps a poem or an oral tradition; it has been claimed also that the style has something in common with that of the Icelandic sagas, though there is little to support this. Lexical evidence in fact associates the writer of this annal with the one who put together the entries for the 870s. After the episode, the Chronicle returns to 756 and resumes with a more typical assortment of short annals.

    The style of the episode, with its paratactic syntax (mostly short sentences joined by ‘and’), is breathless. It can be confusing, too, as the result of the swift alternation of subjects, which often leaves the reader doubtful about the referents of ‘he’ and ‘they’. The copyist of the ‘Parker Chronicle’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 173), the version used for the text below, seems to have become confused himself at one point, writing plural cȳðdon instead of the correct singular cȳðde (24). Below, the subjects of pronouns are indicated by glosses where confusion is likely.

    After allusion to the events which saw Cynewulf take the throne of Wessex from Sigebyrht, thus fomenting future trouble from the latter's brother, Cyneheard, the narrative is largely taken up with events towards the end of the thirty-year period covered. Two armed encounters are presented, with clearly parallel features. First, a small group of King Cynewulf's men, caught off-guard in an attack on their stronghold by Prince Cyneheard, are offered safety and reward if they will desert their king; they choose not to do so and die fighting.

  • 11 - The Will of Ælfgifu

  • from II - Keeping a record
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 128-131

  • Summary

    There are some sixty vernacular documents of varying length which may loosely be described as Anglo-Saxon ‘wills’. They were made by kings and ecclesiastics as well as laymen and laywomen. The beneficiaries may be family and friends when personal effects are involved, but in the case of land, it is the church or monastery which usually benefits. Because such institutions needed to maintain a record of dispositions, to guard against possible litigation over their property, many wills survive only as copies in ‘cartularies’ – volumes of charters kept by the churches. The ‘Codex Wintoniensis’ (now London, British Library, Additional 15350) is the cartulary of St Swithun's, Winchester, written in the first half of the twelfth century. Among the items there is the will of Ælfgifu.

    This woman has not been positively identified, but she was probably of royal descent and it has been conjectured that she was married to (but then divorced from) King Eadwig (957–9). Her will can be dated between 966 and 975 for two main reasons. First, she makes a bequest to Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, and this is likely to have been after the old foundation was re-established by King Edgar in 967. Second, the Liber Eliensis – ‘Book of Ely’, a twelfth-century compilation treating the history of Ely Abbey in Cambridgeshire – tells us that Edgar gave to Ely the estate at Meassewyrthe, which Ælfgifu, as she says (lines 13–15), left to him at her death; in other words, she must have died before Edgar.

    Although Anglo-Saxon wills are the predecessors of the modern ‘last will and testament’, they are not documents which formally effect the transfer of bequests; they are more like written memoranda of the declared intention to make such transfer. Their oral character (attested by the use of cwydes in line 2) reflects their origin in Germanic legal practice.

    The extant copy of Ælfgifu's will is full of unusual spellings, though it is not clear how many are original and how many due to the idiosyncrasies of its late copyist. The most prevalent is æ for e, whether medial or terminal, long or short (Ælfgyfæ, 1, Godæs, 2, þǣ, 3 and 26, pæniga, 28, and so on), and in fact, if this is ignored, the language is fairly conventional late WS.

  • 34 - The Durham Proverbs

  • from VI - Reflection and lament
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 350-357

  • Summary

    The Durham Proverbs are so called because they are found in a manuscript now in the library of Durham Cathedral. In one of the curious juxtapositions which characterise the preservation of OE literature, they were copied, by a none too skilful scribe, onto five blank pages between a collection of hymns and a series of liturgical canticles. These hymns and canticles are in Latin, but with an OE gloss, and they seem to have been copied out in the second quarter of the eleventh century, with the proverbs being added a little later. The manuscript was made at Canterbury, and a second part contains a copy of Ælfric's grammatical work, his Excerptiones (see p. 400). Two of the proverbs (nos. 37 and 39) appear also as additions to a mid-eleventh-century Latin psalter (London, British Library, Royal 2. B. v) and two (nos. 14 and 42) are included in the thirteenth-century Middle English collection of the Proverbs of Hendyng.

    There is one other major set of proverbs in OE (surviving in three manuscripts), a version of the Disticha Catonis (the ‘Dicts of Cato’), a third-century collection of wise sayings in Latin which enjoyed great popularity throughout the Middle Ages; it was widely used as a class-text in the monastic schools of Anglo-Saxon England. The only connection between these and the Durham Proverbs is the occurrence of the first of the latter as part of dict no. 23 (see 1n, below).

    The forty-six OE proverbs in the Durham collection are all accompanied by Latin versions, but these derive from no known source. It is indeed not certain that the Latin versions came first and scholars have been tempted to see the collection as an original vernacular work, a native English collection of proverbs which someone then tried to put into Latin. The uneven and in places incomprehensible nature of the latter might suggest that it was supplied by a novice monk attempting the translation as a learning exercise. However, comprehension problems occur in the OE versions of the Durham Proverbs, too, and there are several cases (such as no. 16) where we have to turn to the Latin to make sense of the OE. The relationship between the English and Latin versions thus remains unclear.

  • 4 - Learning Latin (from Ælfric's Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice)

  • from I - Teaching and learning
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 58-65

  • Summary

    One of the works which Ælfric probably composed in the first instance to meet his own needs as a teacher in the monastic school at Cerne Abbas (see p. 40) is the Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice (‘Extracts on Grammar in English’). It is a schoolboys’ Latin grammar-book, written at a fairly elementary level and intended, as Ælfric explains in the preface (given below), to make Latin accessible to boys at an early stage in their monastic careers. These boys, known as ‘oblates’ or ‘novices’ (who in many cases, like Ælfric himself, would have been placed in a monastery at the age of about seven), had to learn not only to read and write but also to speak Latin. From the start, they had to participate in the Divine Office, the series of services performed daily in Latin in the monastic church according to a strict timetable set out in the Rule of St Benedict (see 1/headnote). They were expected to learn by heart the psalter (with its one hundred and fifty psalms) and hymnal (dozens of hymns and chants regularly used in the liturgy), and in the classroom they would have to progress eventually to the texts which constituted the standard medieval curriculum, covering subjects such as rhetoric and dialectic, and grammar itself.

    Well-known grammars such as the Ars minor of Donatus had long been adapted for the use of English-speaking learners, but they were still written in Latin. Ælfric's Excerptiones – based primarily on an abridgement of the work of another sixth-century Latin grammarian, Priscian – was the first to be written in English (or indeed in any other European vernacular). The widespread and continuing use of the work is confirmed by the preservation of copies of it in thirteen manuscripts, the last made as late as the thirteenth century. Appended to seven copies is a Glossary, a list of Latin words with OE equivalents which we assume was also compiled by Ælfric; it contains several hundred words, arranged not alphabetically but according to topic.

    For his Excerptiones, Ælfric needed a set of English grammatical terms to represent the latinate ones. Most were created (by Ælfric himself or predecessors) by literal translation. Thus, infinitiuus (Latin for the ‘infinitive’ form of the verb) became ungeendigendlic (‘unending’) and accusatiuus (the accusative or object case) was wregendlic (from wregan ‘to accuse’ or ‘impeach’).

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