DID KING ALFRED ACTUALLY TRANSLATE ANYTHING? THE INTEGRITY OF THE ALFREDIAN CANON REVISITED

Abstract

Then I began, among other various and manifold troubles of this kingdom, to translate into English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis, and in English Shepherd's Book, sometimes word by word and sometimes according to the sense, as I had learnt it from Plegmund my archbishop, and Asser my bishop, and Grimbold my mass-priest, and John my mass-priest. And when I had learnt it as I could best understand it, and as I could most clearly interpret it, I translated it into English. (King Alfred: prefatory letter to the Pastoral Care)1In his Gesta regum Anglorum, the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury referred to Alfred, late ninth-century King of Wessex, as the translator not just of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralis, but also of three other major works: Paulus Orosius' Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, Bede 's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, and Boethius' prose and verse De consolatione Philosophiae, with a translation of the Psalms still in progress at the time of the king's death.2 The Old English versions of Bede and Orosius have, on linguistic grounds, been removed from the Alfredian canon', but Alfred's 'unfinished' psalm translation has been identified by a succession of scholars with the fifty prose psalms of the Paris Psalter, and his literary achievements extended to include a work drawing on a range of sources including Augustine's Soliloquiae, and now known as the Soliloquies, the surviving manuscript of which contains an explicit attributing it to the king.3 Recendy, however, Alfred's authorship of the Old English Psalms has been disputed, while doubts have been expressed, both about the reliability of written evidence for Alfred's involvement in any of the translations and about his competence to undertake them. So, for instance, what are we to make of the fact that of the two surviving manuscripts of the Old English version of Boethius (the Consolation), one renders the verse metres of the De consolatione into prose, the other into verse, but the preface which names the king as author,4 and refers to translation first into prose and then into verse, is in MS Bodley 180, and accompanies the version of the text which is all in prose, when it is clearly more suited to the Cotton manuscript,5 with its mixture of prose and verse? Might not the Bodley manuscript, it is asked, then represent a post-Alfredian creation of an all-prose version?6 In view of Alfred's (supposed) lack of learning before the Welsh bishop, Asser, took him in hand, and the obvious distractions caused by those 'various and manifold troubles of the kingdom' that he himself refers to, should we not have reservations as to whether the king could have had 'the time or the linguistic and intellectual skills required for such ambitious tasks of translation, adaptation, and expansion'?7 Again, how do we account for the 'remarkable sympathy' which both Consolation and Soliloquies show with 'the position of the thegn or adviser cast out of his king's favour'?8 Could Alfred the translator' be no more than a construct, with the attachment of his name to Consolation and Soliloquies, maybe even to the Pastoral Care,9 a mere topos, one or more people associated with the king being responsible, in fact if not in name, for the finished works?10 Might agreements between additions in the Consolation and surviving Latin commentary material even point to Alfred's Boethius' not necessarily being composed in the late ninth century, but possibly dating from the tenth and the time of St Dunstan?11 To rephrase the question which Malcolm Godden has asked, in the provocative paper whose title has inspired the first part of mine: did King Alfred actually translate anything?'Whatever the weight we may place on the information provided about the king in the Vita ?Elfredi, with its attribution to Alfred's contemporary, Asser, it could very well be argued that a number of the assertions contained in the text as we have it are the result of spin. …