Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet, The

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

Why did he do this when apparently no one else in Europe was thinking of such a thing?32 There are at least four possible answers to that question, and each may contain an element of truth. "Why did the ripe peach fall to the ground?," we may as well ask. Well, there was gravity; there was the ripeness; there was a breath of wind; and there was the lack of a hand to pick it. Causae can be multiplied generously, and not necessarily wrongfully, for any event under the sun.

First of all, AEthelweard may have composed his Chronicon for the benefit of learned people from abroad. Clerics from Saxony, Gaul, Italy, or Ireland, for example, may have had little or no knowledge of the English language but may still have welcomed access to more recent insular history than was provided by Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History was completed in 731. The vernacular annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle did not respond to the needs or the curiosity of foreigners, but AEthelweard's Latin Chronicon could have done so. As Gransden has remarked, it was "the only serious attempt by an Anglo-Saxon, after Bede, at historical composition in Latin" (1974:42),33 and Bede's text was widely read. The book's dedication to AEthelweard's cousin Matilda, abbess of Essen (in Germany), is suggestive of the author's European ambitions.

A less disinterested reason for AEthelweard's project was English patriotism. AEthelweard lived and wrote at a time when the threat posed by the first Viking Age had subsided. Pride in the English people and nation was on the ascendant as the kings of the West Saxon royal line consolidated their status as rulers of a united England with quasi-imperial ambitions. A nationalistic tone is clearly struck in the poem known as "The Battle of Brunanburh," for example, the famous hymn of praise to the English royalty and nation that is inserted into some recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 937, although its composition may date from about two decades later.34 The other poems that are intermixed with the prose entries of the Chronicle under the years 942, 973, and 975 continue to sound this patriotic note.35 AEthelweard's Chronicon is written in the same encomiastic vein as these poems, and it employs language that is no less partisan. To cite one example of this bias, the Viking invaders who harried the land during the reign of King Alfred are not characterized simply as a here "raiding band, army," as they are often called in the anonymous annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that relate to those years. Rather, AEthelweard calls them a plebs spurcissima "a most foul people" and a plebs immunda "filthy people" who are no better than barbari 'barbarians' when compared to the English (Campbell 1962:42-43). Clearly the Danes were not on that author's list of peoples to be flattered, despite the active participation of numbers of anglicized Danes in English national life during this period. To cite another example, AEthelweard makes a personal offering to the cult of King Alfred when he praises that king in a eulogy that reads in part as follows: