Ælfric’s Lexical Alterations in his Adaptations from the Old English Boethius

Abstract

AElfric’s Lives of Saints contains two texts that he partly adapted from the Old English translation of Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae: Lives of Saints 1 (Nativitas Domini) and Lives of Saints 17 (De Auguriis). Although AElfric closely followed the language as well as the substance of his source material when writing these two adaptations, he made a number of linguistic changes including morphological, syntactical and lexical ones. In this paper, I focus on the lexical changes that he made in order to show how he reworked the diction of his source text so that his works have his regular vocabulary. The pattern of usage of some synonyms will also reinforce previous scholars’ view on the question of authorship of the AElfrician and non-AElfrician Lives of Saints.