Historians have been baffled by the way Asser interlaces allusions to Einhard, echoes of his own words, and hagiographic clichés. Reading the Vita Alfredi as literature advances the current paradigm shift in our attitudes towards Asser, allowing us to appreciate the rhetoric and imagination that inform his imitatio of Einhard’s Vita Karoli. Thomas Greene on literary imitation, Walter Berschin on Carolingian life-writing, Christopher Ricks on the poetics of allusion, Erich Auerbach on prefiguration and fulfilment, David Howlett on chiasmus, and John Hollander on self-echoing illuminate what Asser was doing with words and help us interpret and evaluate his achievement.

The evidence that Asser thought Alfred was born in 849 is too slender to bear the weight that has been hung from it. The systematic dating of events from AD 849, the birthdate of Alfred preserved in the Cotton MS. version of Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, was probably absent from the source of both ‘The Annals of St Neots’ and John of Worcester, and may therefore have been unknown to Asser himself. Asser may have written his Vita soon after 887. The implications for Asser’s contribution to the Alfredian canon, and especially for his account of Alfred’s trip to Rome, are not trivial. 'In trying to settle where Asser belongs in the Alfredian canon it might prove prudent to accept the gambit proposed by Stubbs over a hundred years ago: to see what sense the Life makes if instead of trying to rectify what was dislocated in the margin, we simply sacrifice the Anno Ælfredi series altogether, take it off the board, and remove it from play. There will be losses and gains. We shall have to let go of our desire to know the exact year of Alfred’s birth. In return we shall gain a coherent representation of Alfred’s inner and outer life as constellated by three childhood virtutes: the story of the book, the trip to Rome in his eleventh year, and his conversion to Latin literacy in his twelfth — a ‘quintessentially hagiographic’ interpretation of Alfred’s modus vitae which deserves, and rewards, serious hagiographical readings and re-readings.'

Imitating redaction criticism as practiced by Biblical scholars I offer here a close reading of ‘the anecdote of Alfred’s learning to read for Judith’s gift’ as a pericope, with particular attention to how Asser’s Latin prose condenses the curve of Alfred’s destiny into a figura too good to be false. This is the penultimate draft of a companion piece to ‘Asser’s imitatio of Einhard: clichés, echoes and allusions,’ EOLAS 7 (2014) 65-91 (#4 above) which concluded that “Asser ... invites us to watch him do what Einhard did not: contain the modus of Alfred’s life in a figura, a rhetorical gem, with its tight dramatic exchanges of short speech acts, simple gestures, and the book.”

In 1899, a widely shared desire to fix Alfred’s birth-date without consulting Asser led Plummer to conjure up a mirage: “It seems to have been overlooked that the date is fixed by the genealogical Preface to MS. A of the Chron., a strictly contemporary authority, which says that he was ‘turned’ twenty-three at his accession in 871.” Plummer’s mirage may be traced back to Archbishop Parker’s original interest in his manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which Parker erroneously characterised as written when Alfred was twenty-three years old. The clause recording Alfred’s twenty-three-year regnal length in the last sentence of the Alfredian West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List can be reversed to yield a birth date of 848 only by imposing on the text a feebler standard of style and syntax, numeracy and logic, rhythm and coherence than the text deserves, ignoring its arithmetic, semantics, and genre. Letting go of Alfred’s hitherto canonical birthdate is not a trivial matter. Alfred's 848 birthdate is based on a mirage. This is in part a case history of Elizabethan, Victorian, and current OE philology. "Much will change if we come to imagine the historical Alfred in 855 as more or less the same age as Judith, the thirteen-year-old Carolingian princess old enough to marry his father on their way back from Rome."

"I’m going to tell an 8th C story about what happened when bilingualism met literacy, when Boniface met Gregory. And then I’m going to chart the plot of the story in the form of an abstract diagram. This schematic approach may help clarify Asser’s typological account of Alfredian biliteracy." This working paper is the script of a twenty minute paper I read in a Session on “Toward a Theory of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England” organized by the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at the Biennial Conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, Honolulu, July 31 2017. Based on a lively exchange of collegial comments in the subsequent academia.edu "session" on this draft, I am now expanding it, first to 4,000 words, and then after further feedback from colleagues, to a 12,000 wd chapter. Your continued feedback and advice much appreciated.

The author's 2011 Toller lecture looks at the treatment of traditional heroes - both Germanic and non-Germanic heroes in sources associated with the court of King Alfred. It argues that the robust presentation of heroic and mythological characters runs counter to views promoted in contemporary clerical culture and may provide insights into the elusive court culture and attitudes of Alfred himself (which may be at odds with the idealising presentation of the king by Asser). From Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture. toller lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text, ed. Charles Insley and Gale Owen-Crocker(Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2017)

Often regarded as one of the very last works in Old English, the homily on Saint Neot has received little critical attention in the last fifty years, falling outside the bounds of Anglo-Saxon studies yet failing to attract the interest of students of early Middle English. Recent recognition of the homily’s accomplished style has culminated in its reattribution to the early eleventh century, where it stands as a virtually unparalleled example of vernacular hagiography from the period after the circulation of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. This article revives the case for a post-Conquest dating of the Old English homily on Saint Neot, questioning scholars who interpret the text as the cry of an English underclass hostile to foreign occupation. Rather than viewing the homily’s unique features as evidence of its dependence on a lost version of the Latin Life of Saint Neot, I argue that these changes reflect the distinctive agenda of the translator, who uses the Anglo-Saxon past as a platform from which to comment on Anglo-Norman society.

With this study we hope to serve the needs of those students and teachers who feel particularly committed to the changes that have characterized our field in recent years. The renewed emphasis on historicism and the decline of formalist aestheticism in medieval studies have rendered it desirable to have a literary history that attends more singularly to the material and social contexts and uses of Old English texts. Although the need is greater than this volume can really satisfy, we hope that the present study will nonetheless prove useful to those who, like us, see literature’s relation to history and culture as our field’s area of chief pedagogical interest, and the respect in which it has most to offer literary studies at large.

The aim of this paper is to investigate discourse strategies of outgroup construction in the Alfredian period (late ninth century), by using critical discourse analysis and testing its relevance for the Anglo-Saxon data. The study focuses on the Viking outgroup and its presentation in the texts of the period. The analysis also tackles earlier and later sources containing the episodes of the first encounter with the unwelcome “Other” to trace typological features of outgroup construction in medieval political discourse. The genres that are taken into account are historical writings and legislation in Anglo-Latin and Old English. It is postulated that the Alfredian texts are commissioned by the political elite—the West Saxon kingship—and produced by the symbolic elite—writers, chroniclers, copyists, the clergy more generally, with the Alfredian circle being reconstructed as a “Community of Practice” with a distinct political, cultural, and discourse agenda. The Viking raids of the period provide a “bid for counter-power,” to which the elites have to react both militarily and ideologically. The ideologies of the Anglo-Saxon elites are analyzed at the discourse level, concentrating on the strategies of outgroup derogation, e.g., criminalization of the Vikings in the chronicles. It is concluded that the chronicles can be analyzed as analogous to modern press, that they were produced and circulated to shape “public opinion” of politically and economically prominent social groups.

Dissertation

The Old English Bede (OEB), a vernacular version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica (HE), was written sometime before c.900, possibly at King Alfred's behest. It adds little to Bede's text but makes substantial excisions and abbreviations, removing much historical narrative, many quoted documents and most references to theological controversy. It is often argued that Bede provided an ideological blueprint for the creation of a single English kingdom in the tenth century, but the parts of the HE upon which this interpretation depends are among those omitted from the OEB. This is significant, since there are indications that the OEB was more widely known that the HE in the tenth century. It seems that the translator was not concerned with promoting an English ideology. Rather, he appears to have aimed to produce a text focussed on the inculcation of virtue through examples. This interpretation of the OEB has significant implications for our understanding of the significance of ‘Englishness’ and of whether it was believed that the English were a ‘chosen people’ who enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ with God. In turn, this demands reconsideration of the factors underlying the emergence and endurance of the English kingdom.

This volume draws together a series of papers that present some of the most up-to-date thinking on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England more broadly. In honour of one of early medieval European scholarship’s most illustrious doyennes, no less than twenty-nine contributions demonstrate the indelible impression Barbara Yorke’s work has made on her peers and a generation of new scholars, some of whom have benefitted directly from her tutorage. From the identities that emerged in the immediate post-Roman period, through to the development of kingdoms, the role of the church, and impacts felt beyond the eleventh century, the rich and diverse character of the studies presented here are testimony to the versatility and extensive range of the honorand’s contribution to the academic field.

My MA dissertation compared the themes and clauses of all four Anglo-Saxon treaties that have survived into the modern period, and that common scholarly consensus agrees are legitimate treaties. These include: The Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum; the Ordinance of Dunsate; the Anglo-Norman Treaty and the Treaty between Æthelred and Olaf. The project focuses on identifying common means by which Anglo-Saxon rulers and communities approached peacemaking, and highlighting some of the goals by which they were pursued.

This paper compares Paulus Orosius’ original Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (hereafter Historiarum) with its anonymous ninth century Old English vernacular translation (hereafter Orosius), in order to examine how the Anglo-Saxon author’s inclusion of additional narrative elements, such as the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, overshadows the original’s moralistic imperative. Deborah VanderBilt argues that in addition to composing new narrative dialogue delivered by Orosius ‘the author’, the Anglo-Saxon translator cuts “nearly all of the sections in which [the Historiarum] engages in rhetorical argument or polemic” (379). In her own edition of the Old English text, Janet Bately further contends that Orosius’ original Historiarum, though still geographically and historically significant, is, in the end, a polemical argument that Christianity is not to blame for the downfall of Rome (xciii). While the original's Christian moral is still present in the Old English Orosius, it is generally engulfed by new and/or ratified narrative components, which the translator uses as vessels in which to explore the nature of hardship, history, war and the northern Germanic homeland, rather than the socio-cultural impact of Roman Christianity in late antiquity. Ultimately, I will show how the author of the Old English Orosius is more interested in periphrastically bringing the history and geography of the original text into concurrence with his own age than explicating the veracity and superiority of the Christian faith, as per the mandate of the Latin original.

The often-anthologized story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard is typically regarded as the earliest example of heroic English prose, perhaps a summary of an earlier oral tale. Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to its context within the A MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Given this text’s association with King Alfred, this article locates the tale within the broader context of Alfredian writing on the morality of rule and, in particular, royal wisdom. Rather than simply endorsing the loyalty of fighting men to their lord, the tale also warns of the dangers of royal folly and the consequences of unrighteous rule.

This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing to political changes of the period and to communities of practice that produce these histories and chronicles. It examines the labels and stereotypes applied to the Vikings and establishes their sources and evolution by applying a fourfold chronological division of historical sources from around 800 to 1200 (based on the political developments within Anglo-Saxon history and on the manuscript history of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The data for the study come from both Old English and Anglo-Latin chronicles. The results are interpreted in terms of critical discourse analysis. It is demonstrated that the chroniclers employ strategies of dissimilation exploiting the notion of illegitimacy and criminality of the Viking outgroup. These strategies change over time, depending on the political situation (raiding vs. settlement vs. reconquest period) and communities of practice involved in the maintenance and dissemination of a particular political discourse.

An overview of the development of the cult of St Edmund from the ninth century up the present day. Published in the Spring Issue of the Suffolk Review 2017, (New Series no. 68).

Feeding the micel here in England c. 865-87 by Shane McLeod "With the question of the probable size of ninth-century Viking armies remaining unresolved, this paper examines one of the primary impediments to fielding a large army: the availability of food. Perhaps the best documented Viking army of the century, the great army during its campaign in England, is the focus of this investigation. It is argued that historians have often ignored probable sources of food for the army, particularly the likelihood that food was regularly provided as part of peace treaties, and have consequently overstated the difficulty of maintaining a large army in hostile territory. Furthermore, the role that the kingdoms conquered by the great army and subsequently held on its behalf by puppet administrations may have played has also not been considered.

Considers the evidence for framing a narrative of the containment of the Viking threat to Wessex in the late 870s by the building of a system of burhs or strongholds over all of Wessex (the extent of Alfred's kingdom at the time), arguing that this time (879-880) provides the most suitable histtorical window for what can be recognised as a dramatic reorganisation of the political and military landscape. This was made possible through King Alfred's decisive victory against the Vikings at Edington at the time.

The Kingdom of Mercians is generally assumed to have come to an end, largely as a result of Viking incursions, in the late ninth century; from the 880s its rulers seem to have been under the authority of Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons. This essay argues that we should not see the end of the Mercian kingdom simply in terms of collapse, but also in terms of renegotiation, as the Mercian political elite sought, in the first few decades of the tenth century, to place themselves at the heart of a new political entity, the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, later the kingdom of the English.

This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.

The author examines the consensus position regarding the documents scholars now call the Burghal Hidage as adumbrated in The Defence of Wessex eds Hill and Rumble - Manchester University Press 1996 (the keystone essays on this text) and the discrete sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle known by scholars as the Mercian Register (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition eds Bately, Brewer, Dumville et al Cambridge 1986 - 2013). The First Part: The Defence of Wessex Revisited, reviews the classic and now standard interpretation of Hill and Rumble (and subsequent papers by the contributors) which arguments are tested against the original texts and also in relation to the evidence of two other documents of near contemporary standing:- the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Alfred and Guthrum Treaty (English Historical Documents c.500-1042 D. Whitelock 1955). The paper does not seek to be polemical or contrary but nevertheless offers a major revision of the position set out by the contributors and editors of ‘The Defence ...’ in regard to both the dating of the production of the Burghal Hidage and the system it represents. The paper is cast in sections discussing: i) the Great Army’s destruction of the existing insular kingdoms; the nature of the conquest of Mercia in particular; ii) the issues relating to the ‘survival’ of Alfred and Wessex; iii) a discourse on the relationship of Kent and London to these events and to the silence of the Burghal Hidage regarding them; iv) the analysis of the variants of the Burghal Hidage and their alternative appendices; v) the nature of the agreements and arrangements between Alfred and Guthrum; vi) the circumstances of Guthrum’s removal to ‘East Anglia’ as well as a review of the reasons for and the route of that removal; vii) offers an alternative hypothesis regarding the Alfred and Guthrum Treaty viii) and a sequel chapter on the use of the burhs in the the so called ‘Last War of King Alfred’. The paper then proposes a reconciliation of what appears as contradictory evidence from the three sources. An Appendix treats in extenso with the status of Essex, in response to Dumville’s suggestions. The Second Part : The Mercian Re-conquest, is an analysis of the discrete ASC interpolation the Mercian Register to contrast this in relation to the principal texts discussed in the first part of the essay and to review the current scholarship in regard to: i) the identification and possible location of the obscure burhs in these annals; ii) queries the foundation of three of the principal known burhs in the documents – Chester, Shrewsbury and Warwick; iii) the general dating of the Statements in the annals; iv) the course of the campaigns of the re-conquest in western Mercia as undertaken by Æthelred, Æthelflaed and Edward; v) and the parties and the intent of the treaties referenced in regard to these campaigns. This is a completely revisionist exercise which gives a more coherent account of the course of the Re-conquest. The author has prepared digital maps ad novo for the essays and offers his own translations of the relevant annals and documents to assist in a simplified analysis of their Statements.

Abstract: A great part of King Alfred's renown comes from his translations of Latin writings into Old English. The group of translations that he gets credit for, however, has changed over the years. Presently four translations are attributed to him: the Pastoral Care, the Boethius, ...

Published in the 'Saga-Book' 40 of the VSNR 2016.

In ninth-and tenth-century England, the ethnonyms Goths and Geatas and the patronymic Gaut became more important than they had ever been to Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. The sudden popularity of these words has been remarked upon by scholars, and has usually been explained as cultural tools for nation-building in the time of Alfred the Great and his heirs. 1 Meanwhile, the shift in mentalities that allowed for the concept embodied in these words (namely, that the Goths are somehow related to the Anglo-Saxons) to emerge has largely gone unexplored. This is, then, the purpose of the present paper: to go beyond the textual sources of this idea by exploring the evolutions in how ethnicity was conceptualized which allowed for an Anglo-Saxon 'Gothicism' to become thinkable and by looking at the socio-cultural and political needs that this concept fulfilled. As I will show, the introduction of Geat to the royal genealogies in all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the increased importance afforded to the Goths in the Old English translation of Orosius, the fascination with the Geatas in Beowulf and other poetic sources, are all particular embodiments of the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had Gothic origins. This idea has, of course, little historical basis, but it was significant enough for many Anglo-Saxon intellectuals to shape accounts of their past according to it. The significant array of Anglo-Saxon sources that I will be exploring can be dated to the late ninth and tenth century, a time of nation-building, when the concept of Angelcynn came to label a new community that would include all Christian Anglo-Saxons and Danes under the leadership of the West-Saxon royal dynasty. 2 It was therefore crucial to develop new ways of thinking about ethnic identity, as well as finding a narrative that would encapsulate these new conceptualizations. The legendary Goths (including their incarnation as Getae, shadowy inhabitants of the mythical North) thus provided a handy answer to burning socio-political and cultural questions in post-Alfredian England such as 'how can Danes and Anglo-Saxons both be integrated in the new English national identity, the Angelcynn?' or the older 'how do Anglo-Saxons relate to Roman and Christian history?'. 3 Yet these legendary Goths (to be distinguished from the historical Ostrogoths and Visigoths) did not spring out of the fertile ground of Anglo-Saxon poetic imagination fully armed and ready for battle. Rather, the Anglo-Saxons weaving them into their history had at their disposal a long mytho-geographical pedigree, and on the other hand, more recent examples responding to similar socio-political needs. For the Anglo-Saxons were not the first to succumb to the appeal of the Goths. The Carolingian intellectuals did it first throughout the ninth century. I will therefore first explore the construction of Carolingian 'Gothicism' – a phenomenon we can localize very well in time and space, unlike some of its Anglo-Saxon embodiments. This phenomenon consisted in a wave of accounts of Frankish origins that clearly show that at least some ninth-century Franks believed that the Goths were of Scandinavian origins and that they were the ancestors of the Franks (but also of other Germanic peoples such as the Danes and Saxons, who were thus seen to be related). As we shall see, the connection between the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian conceptualization of ethnicity and interest in the Goths is rarely made. Roberta Frank is an obvious exception, and the present paper owes much to her study of ninth-century 1 Stephen

Reassesses the role of King Alfred in the development of London in the ninth century. It explores the historical and landscape context of the political and strategic developments of which it was the centre, at a crucial juncture in the development of the West Saxon kingdom in relation to the Viking presence in Mercia and East Anglia

This article argues that the Old English Orosius, a work traditionally viewed as a product of the educational reforms of King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871–899), can be constructively read in relation to developments in Anglo-Saxon political thought in the early tenth as well as in the late ninth centuries. The earliest extant manuscript of the Orosius was probably copied at Winchester in the early tenth century by the same scribe responsible for the entries for the late ninth and early tenth century in MS A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This section of the Chronicle charts both the break-up of the Carolingian Empire and the conquests of Alfred and his successors, Edward the Elder and Æthelstan, over various kings and peoples of Britain. Treating the reports of Ohthere and Wulfstan contained in the geographical preface to the Orosius as an integral part of the text as it was read in the early tenth century, rather than as an extraneous interpolation, I suggest that this passage invites readers to consider the rapidly expanding West Saxon kingdom in relation to the great empires which preceded it. I then outline how the translator refashioned Orosius’s ‘universal history’ into a work of imperial history which is more directly concerned with Rome’s long and difficult rise than with its fall to the Goths in 410. I conclude that the Orosius might have encouraged early tenth-century Anglo-Saxon readers to interpret the recent rise of Wessex to overlordship in Britain as part of an ongoing process of translatio imperii, the transference or succession of empires, contingent on the Christian virtue of its rulers.

The purpose of the article is to elucidate the Old English Boethius, Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the translation of which is attributed to King Alfred the Great (849-899 A.D). The article provides a special focus on the versified proem to the prosometric version of Boethius. The proem, arguably, represents a view of Ostrogothic Kingdom of Theodoric that counters the notion of Germanic myth of origin pervading Anglo-Saxon textual culture and the memory of Theodoric as Germanic ruler of Rome that is evident in Old English poetic tradition. The Old English Boethius, arguably, contests the established tradition to promote a Christian grooming of the Anglo-Saxon notion kingship in keeping with the Alfredian programme of cultural reform.

The author reviews the events surrounding and following the attack by Guthrum's Army on Chippenham and the flight of Alfred. The discussion then moves to analyse the remarkable revival of Alfred's fortunes in the military events which resulted from the victory described as at Ethandun. Detailed study is given of the arrangements of the truce between Alfred and Guthrum's Army in the Somerset Levels and consideration given to the details of what had been agreed at a putative 'Treaty of Wedmore'. The proposal made from the evidence is that Guthrum could relocate after a furlough at Chippenham to Mercian territory at Cirencester. The remarkable revival of Alfredian Wessex is analysed, in a Note, against possible other examples of 'Anglo-Saxon Polities' survivals elsewhere in the island, the author suggests these where largely compromised, clientised or extinguished.