The Mother's Tongue and the Father's Prose

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Notes

¹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spred of Nationalism, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2006), p.41.

² Although the word ‘Saxon’ could also be used, Bede, writing of the birth of English poetry, describes the miracle of the cow-heard Caedmon suddenly beginning to sing in English, ‘id est Anglorum, lingua proferret’ (B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds., Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p.414); while King Alfred in the Preface to his translation of Gregory the Great's Regula Pastoralis, deplores the lack of texts available in Englisc throughout his kingdom, a point to which I will return below. For the text of the Preface see D. Whitelock, ed., Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp.4–7.

³ Laws and poetry survive in both languages, and they were commonly combined in texts such as charters, or on monuments such as the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross (Dumfries) or Franks Casket now in the British Museum.

⁴ There are many critiques of Anderson's work, but for a particularly cogent critique of his approach to medieval England see Kathleen Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century: a Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 (1998), pp.611–37.

⁵ On the importance of the image of the ruler as author and reader in Anglo-Saxon England see C. E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).

⁶ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.154.

⁷ A facsimile of the manuscript was published in 1722 shortly before the original was destroyed in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731.

⁸ ‘One day, therefore, when his mother was showing him and his brothers a book of English poetry which she held in her hand, she said: “I shall give this book to whichever one of you can learn it the fastest”. Spurred on by those words, or rather by divine inspiration, and attracted by the beauty of the initial letter in the book. Alfred spoke as follows in reply to his mother, forestalling his brothers (ahead in years though not in ability): “Will you really give this book to the one of us who can understand it the soonest and recite it to you?” Whereupon, smiling with pleasure she reassured him, saying, “Yes, I will”. He immediately took the book from her hand, went to his teacher and learnt it. When it was learnt he took it back to his mother and recited it.’ Asser's Life of King Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), p.20; trans. Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and other Contemporary Sources, ed. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p.75.

⁹ See further Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp.40–70.

¹⁰ W. H. Stevenson, ed. Asser's Life of King Alfred, p.59.

¹¹ W. H. Stevenson, ed., Asser's Life of King Alfred, p.94.

¹² Asser implies, but does not actually state, that all Alfred's children, male and female, were educated in both English and Latin. W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred, pp.57–9.

¹³ ‘ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne’. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

¹⁴ See Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England and British India’, in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.183–204.

¹⁵ W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred, p.73. ‘Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, through divine inspiration first began to read and translate simultaneously on one and the same day.’

¹⁶ W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of Alfred, pp.11, 73, 77, 12–14, 66.

¹⁷ On the question of audience see: S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp.56–7; Simon Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the Mercians’, in Kings, Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century, ed. M.A.S. Blackburn and D.N. Dumville (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), pp.1–45; Simon Keynes, ‘Asser’, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge, et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 49; D. P. Kirby, ‘Asser and his Life of King Alfred’, Studia Celtica 6 (1971), pp.12–35; Marie Schütt, ‘The Literary form of Asser's “Vita Alfredi”’, English Historical Review (1957), pp.209–20; James Campbell, ‘Asser's Life of Alfred’, in The Inheritance of Hagiography 350–900, ed. C. Holdsworth and T. P. Wiseman (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1986), pp.115–35; Anton Scharer, ‘The Writing of History at King Alfred's Court’, Early Medieval Europe, 5 (1996), pp.177–206.

¹⁸ S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp.40–41; Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the Mercians’, 41–3. It is even less likely that Asser included the glosses simply to show off his own linguistic abilities pace. See N. J. Higham, King Arthur: Mythmaking and History (London: Routledge, 2002), p.187.

¹⁹ The Welsh kings and their kingdoms are listed in book 80 of the Vita; W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of Alfred, pp.66–7; S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p.96.

²⁰ W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of Alfred, pp.2, 8, 24, 33, 37, 38, 40, 43, 45, 47.

²¹ In their translation of the Vita Keynes and Lapidge translate pagani as Viking throughout ‘in the belief that it identifies them more clearly’ (Alfred the Great, p. 231), which it does, but it also obscures the rhetoric and agenda of Asser's language.

²² ‘Quia in eadem arce multi ministri regis cum suis se concluserant confugii causa. Sed cum pagani arcem imparatam atque omnino immunitam, nisi quod moenia nostro more erecta solummodo haberet, cernerent, – non enim effringere moliebantur’ (Stevenson, Asser's Life of King Alfred, p. 43). ‘For many of the kings’ thegns with their followers, had shut themselves up for safety inside this stronghold; and when the Vikings saw that the stronghold was unprepared and altogether unfortified (except for ramparts thrown up in our fashion) they made no attempt to storm it’ (S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p. 84).

²³ Ashdown is glossed only with the Latin mons fraxini [hill of ash]; W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of Alfred, p. 28.

²⁴ On the use of Alfred as national symbol and imperial figurehead in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see Barbara Yorke, ‘Alfredism: the Use and Abuse of King Alfred's Reputation in later Centuries’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp.361–80; Barbara Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Anglo-Saxons and the North: Essays Reflecting the Theme of the 10 ^th Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Helsinki, August 2001, ed. Matti Kilpio et al. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), pp.31–49.

²⁵ D. Whitelock, ed. Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, pp.4–7 (6–7). ‘When I remembered all this, then I wondered very much why those good wise men who once were found amongst the English, and had thoroughly learned all those books, had not desired to translate any portion of them into their own language. But I immediately answered myself and said: “They did not think that ever men should become so reckless and learning so declined as this; for this reason they refrained from doing it, that they would have it that the more wisdom would be in this land the more languages we knew.” Then I remembered how the law was first written in the Hebrew language, and then, when the Greeks learned it, they translated it all into their own language, and also all other books. And then the Romans the same, after they had learned them they translated them all through wise translators into their own language. And also all other Christian peoples translated some part of them into their own language. Therefore, I think it better, if you also think it so, that we too certain books, those books that it is most necessary for all men to know, that we should turn them into the language that we can all understand, and that we do this, as we may easily do with God's help, if we have peace, so that all free-born young men now in England, those who have the means to apply themselves to it, may be set to learning, as long as they are not useful for any other employment, until the time that they know how to read English writings properly. Later one may instruct in Latin those whom one wishes to teach further and to promote to holy orders.’

²⁶ Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.416–17; Kathleen Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’, pp. 615–16.

²⁷ D. Whitelock, Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader, p. 5. ‘So completely was [learning] decayed amongst the English that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine offices in English, or even translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe that there were not many on the other side of the Humber either. So few of them were there that I cannot think of a single one south of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom.’

²⁸ Points noted by Kathleen Davis, ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century’, pp.620–621.

²⁹ See further Uppinder Mehan and David Townsend, ‘“Nation” and the Gaze of the Other in Eighth-Century Northumbria’, Comparative Literature 53.1 (2001), pp.4–61.

³⁰ W. H. Stevenson, Asser's Life of Alfred, p. 4. ‘She was the daughter of Oslac […] Oslac was a Goth by race, he descended from the Goths and Jutes, specifically from the line of Stuf and Wihtgar […] who […] killed the few Britons on the island [the Isle of Wight], those they could find on it, in that place called Wihtgarabyrig. The other inhabitants of the island had been killed earlier or had fled as exiles.’ On the differences in Asser's version of events and the account of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle see S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 229–30.

³¹ As argued by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents, p.49; Janet T. Nelson, ‘Reconstructing a Royal Family: Reflections on Alfred, from Asser, Chapter 2’, in People and Places in Northern Europe, 500–1100: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. Ian Wood and Neils Lund (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), pp. 47–66 (50).

³² ‘Cum diutius resistere non possent, muliebriter fugam arripunt’ [when they could resist no longer they fled like women]. W. H. Stevenson Asser's Life of King Alfred, pp.17–18.

³³ A cultural phenomenon that has clear links with the processes and hierarchies of language outlined in Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). See especially pp.23, 39–40.

³⁴ See e.g. Armes Prydein: The Prophecy of Britain from the Book of Taliesin, ed. I. Williams and R. Bromwich (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1972); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 85–104. On the troubled relationship between Alfred and the Welsh in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism see Barbara Yorke, ‘The “Old North” from the Saxon South in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, pp.133, 144–5.

³⁵ For the life of Emma see Alistair Campbell and Simon Keynes, eds., Encomium Emmae Reginae (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 1998). For Margaret's life see Richard Gameson, ‘The Gospel's of Margaret of Scotland and the Literacy of an Eleventh-Century Queen’, in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. J. H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 149–171, a study which unfortunately serves only to reinscribe Margaret within a patriarchal clerical culture.