'Awended on Engliscum Gereorde': Translation and the Old English Metrical Psalter

Abstract

The desire to render necessary texts into the vernacular, to have them 'turned to the English tongue', was a widespread one in Anglo-Saxon England. According to one source, Bede on his deathbed was engaged in a translation of the Gospel of St John.1 Two centuries later, ^Elfric was persuaded despite his reservations to translate part of the first seven books of the Bible, which are collected in the Heptateuch. All of ^Elfric's translation, and most of his other writing as well, was concerned with the arrangement and explication of important biblical texts and doctrines for the laity. The concern the Anglo-Saxons appear to have had with understanding these crucial texts in the vernacular must on occasion have been overwhelming: it led, for example, such monks as the Northumbrian priest Aldred to write an interlinear gloss of the text between the lines of one of the greatest display manuscripts produced in Western Europe, the Lindisfarne Gospels. Many other de luxe biblical manuscripts received similar treatment in England, including the Macregol or Rushworth Gospels and the Vespasian Psalter. Other Anglo-Saxon translators were less focused on the individual lexeme, being more concerned with explaining the meaning of the text than with reproducing its message word by word. Such, for example, was Alfred, who at the end of the ninth century implemented a programme of translation and paraphrase of a number of important works, both biblical and exegetical. This was the impetus for the so-called Alfredian group: the translation of Gregory's Dialogues by Bishop Waerferd, and the versions of Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (not strictly a Christian work but taken by the early church as an appropriate philosophical and ethical dialogue), St Augustine's Soliloquies, and the first fifty psalms. The Anglo-Saxons seem to have had few or no scruples about the possible difficulties of interpretation and understanding which the use of translations can precipitate. As Alfred says, in a much-quoted passage: