Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet, The

Western Folklore, Winter 2003/Spring 2003 by Niles, John D

Denique in eodem anno magnanimus transiit de mundo AElfredus, rex Saxonum, immobilis occidentalium postis, uir iustitia plenus, acer in armis, sermone doctus, diuinis quippe super omnia documentis ambitious.

(Then in the same year, there passed from the world AElfred, king of the Saxons, unshakable pillar of the people of the west, a man full of justice, active in war, learned in speech, steeped in sacred literature above all things.) (Campbell 1962:51)

Such glittering praise of King Alfred stands out like a jewel against a drab background when compared with the prose of the D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which reports the king's death in 899 A.D. in two sentences that may strike modern readers as laconic to a fault:

Her gefor AElfred cyning .vu. k Nouembri. 7 heold pone rice .xxviii. wintra 7 healf gear.

(In this year King Alfred died on the seventh calends of November. And he had ruled the kingdom for twenty-eight and a half years.) (Plummer 1892:91-93)

To speak of English patriotism as a motive for AEthelweard's act of composition, however, could lead to misunderstanding of the exact nature of that author's partisanship. As has been noted, his book is respectfully dedicated to his cousin Matilda, abbess of Essen. In a prefatory epistle, AEthelweard makes clear how Matilda was related to him by birth. She was the granddaughter of Emperor Otho I and Otho's queen Eadgyth. Eadgyth in turn was the daughter of King Edward the Elder (r. 899-924), and hence she was a granddaughter of King Alfred. As for his own lineage, AEthelweard specifies that too, making clear that he stands in a direct line of descent from King Alfred's older brother King AEthelred I. The point of these displays of genealogical lore is not hard to discern, AEthelweard wished his readers to know that he and Matilda shared as their common ancestor Alfred's father AEthelwulf, King of the West Saxons (839-858), whose royal genealogy going back no fewer than forty-four generations makes up a spectacularly bulky insertion into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 855.36 Nor does Matilda appear only as the dedicatee of AEthelweard's Chronicon. In the prologue to Book II, that author addresses Matilda for a second time and states that now that he has finished summarizing the history of Britain up to the time of St. Gregory the Great's mission to Kent, he will begin to write ad nostri . . . generis proprietatem "about the qualities of our own race "(Campbell 1962:15). What he means by this somewhat oblique phrase is that he now intends to write in particular about the West Saxon royal line, his own gens. As he then turns to Books III and IV of his history, AEthelweard increasingly writes about the deeds and achievements of the West Saxon kings seen as the founders generis nostri "of our race" or, more precisely, "of our family" (Campbell 1962:34). For this author, patriotism goes hand in hand with family pride. Taken together, these two cogs are the driving machine of his history.

Finally, there is a fourth and more speculative answer to the question of why AEthelweard wrote his Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is that no one else had done it. AEthelweard may even have wished to demonstrate that an intelligent layman like himself, trained in a manner consistent with King Alfred's program of educational reform, was capable of participating fully in the world of Latin learning. Once his book was in circulation, it would have served as a precedent giving evidence that any member of the English royal gens, or perhaps even any person of rank, was potentially eligible for the respect that pertained to participation in the world of Latin letters. At the same time, the book could have served as encouragement to the other lay members of his family to follow in his footsteps as regards the making of Latin books. This line of thought is speculative, as I have said, but it is not wild guess-work. In any event, AEthelweard's Chronicon serves as evidence that by the late tenth century, some lay members of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class had advanced farther in the literary arts than their counterparts in other lands had done. They had also advanced farther, it seems, than has been granted by a posterity that has been so dazzled by Bede's Latinity as to be unappreciative of less elegant efforts in that direction. At the same time, as a lay writer, AEthelweard may well have been influenced by the vernacular poetic tradition and seems to have gleaned historical or geographical information from oral sources, as well.37