Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet, The

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

AE THELWEARD AND HIS CHRONICON

The story of Csedmon's divine inspiration, as I have said, is the first of two moments in Anglo-Saxon literary history that I wish to juxtapose. In order to reach the second, we must pass over in silence some two and a half centuries of English history and literary development. In addition, we must turn our attention geographically from the north of England to the south, in keeping with the law of gravity whereby all things of weight were shifting from Northumbria toward Wessex, often via the midlands though sometimes by a direct leap, during the period when King Alfred and his successors in the West Saxon royal line were asserting their authority over not only Wessex and Kent but almost the whole of Britain.

Around the year 980, shortly before the onset of the second Viking Age and about two years into the reign of King ^Lthelraed "the Unready" (978-1013), a prominent Englishman named yEthelweard wrote a chronicle that is one of the curiosities of the historiographical literature of the Middle Ages. In large measure what it consisted of was a translation into Latin of the set of vernacular annals we call the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. AEthelweard was an historian, but he was not a monk. There is no need to imagine him trying to warm his fingers in an unheated monastic scriptorium like his pattern the Venerable Bede, whose austere labors at the writing desk would have been punctuated every few hours by the liturgical hours of prayer, in a rhythm of labor that Bede must have found as soothing as the rising and setting of the sun./Ethelweard was not even a member of the clergy. he was what the Anglo-Saxons called a weorold-mann "world-man" or "secular person," or what later writers were to call a lewed mann 'layman." It is that fact that makes him so interesting, particularly since he obviously was making a strong effort, through his sponsorship of other writers as well as his own literary efforts, to influence the marriage of church and state that was the great aim of the Benedictine reformers.

As he spares no pains to tell us, AEthelweard was the great-grandson of King JLthelred I, who ruled over Wessex during the early 86Os shortly before his younger brother King Alfred came to the throne. By office as well as lineage, jEthelweard was a man of rank, for he held the position of ealdorman (or chief magnate) over the southwestern shires of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. Indeed, from 993 until his death in c. 998 he was the leading ealdorman of the realm, with a status not far below that of King AEthelred II, whose persistence in ineptitude was eventually to win him the punning surname Un-rd "Ill-counsel" (popularly rendered as "The Unready").23 If today AEthelweard is not famed either for his deeds of state or as the author of his Chronicon, at least he has achieved minor renown for another reason, for he was the patron of a far greater stylist than he would ever be. This was the monk AElfric of Eynsham (c. 950-c. 1010), the distinguished homilist and defender of Christian orthodoxy. AElfric dedicated his Lives of the Saints to AEthelweard (Skeat 1999:4), and he also wrote an English translation of parts of the Old Testament under AEthelweard's direction (Crawfordl997:76) even while chafing at that task, for AElfric knew how sharply the dangers of misunderstanding Scripture increased in proportion to a person's ignorance of the system of Christian exegesis. AEthelweard is also known to have been an important owner and donor of books, and it has been thought that both the Lambeth Bede (London, Lambeth Palace MS 149) and the Old English Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, fols. 8-130), two expensive books that were written in the same region and in the same period, if not at the same scriptorium, may once have been in his possession.24 Ealdorman AEthelweard is therefore one of the chief persons to be taken into account in any assessment of the state of literacy in both Latin and the vernacular in England as the first millennium neared its end.25