The precise nature of the relationship between the Old English Boethius and the early medieval tradition of glossing and commentary on the De consolatione Philosophiae (DCP) remains - and stands to remain, for the time being - an ongoing question. The Boethius Project, under the direction of Malcolm Godden, Rohini Jayatilaka, and Rosalind Love, promises to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the sources and methods that the Anglo-Saxon translator (or translators) used to produce a text uniquely suited to their needs and worldview. In its valuable and extensive commentary, the recent edition of the Boethius by Godden and Susan Irvine has proposed some probable points of intersection between the translation and the Latin glossarial and commentary traditions, but for now, the scholarly consensus holds the view reached by Kurt Otten in 1964, that 'die Bedeutung des Kommentarwissens fur Alfreds personlich Konzeption der Consolatio verhaltnismasig gering anzusetzen ist'.2 Further, as Godden and Irvine note, the absence of material clearly drawn from the commentaries should not necessarily be taken to imply ignorance of them: the translator may simply have opted for his own interpretation, or that of another source which we have not yet found.3Consequendy, instead of looking to the glosses and commentaries, scholars have investigated other sources that the translator could have brought to bear on the DCP. The forest from which he acquired his building timber (to borrow the metaphor from the Soliloquies) was quite varied: not only the probable and so far elusive interpretative texts, but Alcuin, Ambrose, Augustine, Bede, the Bible, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, Jerome, Orosius, and - saving the subject of discussion for last - Isidore of Seville make up a partial list of the thinkers whose work shaped the decidedly Christian lens through which the translator viewed the DCP. In the present article, I would like to take up the contributions of Isidore's writings to the framing of the Boethius, concentrating on the influence the Tiber differentiarum and Sententiae had on the Anglo-Saxon translator's doctrine of the immortality of angels and the souls of men. First I will present the Old English passage and its Isidorean correlates, then discuss the possible routes by which the translator acquired his Latin sources, and finally I will turn to a discussion of the interpretative strategies that may have made the material in the Tiber differentiarum and the Sententiae attractive to the translator.The passage at hand is Boethius 42, the chapter which concludes the text, and which corresponds to DCP j.pr.o. At this point in the Old English, Wisdom has already discussed the commensurability of divine providence and human free will, and has turned to the necessity of seeking to know God and understand the world 'be his andgites mae^e,' or according to his ability. What the individual does know, independendy of any enquiry, is that God is eternal, 'forbam naefre swa manega gesceafta and swa miela and swa faegra hi ne underbidden laessan gesceafta and laessan anwalde bonne hi ealle sindon, ne furoum emnmiclum' (42.7-io).4 Wisdom's assertion of God's eternality, and thus his infinite superiority, leads Boethius to enquire about the nature of eternity; Wisdom replies that eternity is a difficult concept to grasp ('mieles and earfooes to ongitanne'; 42.11), but attempts to explain it with reference to the conditions of transitory existence (one wholly bounded by time) and perpetual existence (with a beginning but with no end):Wast bu baet brio bing sindon on bis middangearde? An is hwilendlic, oaet haefo aegber ge fruman ge ende, and nat beah nanwuht baes oe hwilendlic is nauoer ne his fruman ne his ende. Oder bing is ece baet haefo fruman and naefo naenne ende, and wat hwonne hit ongino and wat baet hit naefre ne geendao, baet sint englas and monna sawla. Bridde bing is ece buton ende and buton anginne, baet is God. Betwuh bam brim is swioe micel toscead. …