LECTURE VI
LITERARY WORKS (continued); SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Authorship of the Orosius translation undisputed. Recent doubts as to the Bede translation. Ælfric distinctly attributes it to Alfred, which he does not do in the case of the Dialogues.
§ 104. We have seen[779] that in the case of the Orosius, the only direct hint of authorship contained in the book itself is the address of Ohthere to ‘his lord King Alfred’; and the earliest external testimony on the subject is to be found in William of Malmesbury in the early part of the twelfth century. But no one has ever doubted King Alfred’s authorship. Till recently the same might have been said of the Bede; in 1877 Professor Wülker spoke of Alfred’s authorship of the Bede as ‘a fact which no one hitherto has doubted or could doubt[780].’ Since then, however, Mr. Sweet, in his Anglo-Saxon Reader[781], and Dr. Thomas Miller in his edition of the Bede translation, published by the Early English Text Society[782], have tried to overthrow the traditional view; the former, mainly on the ground of that occasional over-literalness of the version already alluded to[783]; the latter, because he thinks that it shows Mercian characteristics incompatible with a West Saxon origin. Now we must admit at once that the book itself contains no direct evidence of authorship, not even such a hint as is dropped in the Orosius. On the other hand the external evidence is very much earlier. Ælfric, the homilist, distinctly quotes the book as Alfred’s. In his homily on St. Gregory he says: ‘Many books tell of his conversation and holy life, as does Historia Anglorum, which King Alfred translated out of English into Latin.… We will however tell you something about him because the fore-said book is not known to all of you, although it is translated into English[784].’ This was written within a hundred years of Alfred’s death. For many books of which the authorship has never been doubted we cannot produce evidence anything like as early. I may note in passing that in speaking of the translation of Gregory’s Dialogues Ælfric makes no assertion as to the Alfredian authorship, merely saying ‘the book has been translated into English, and in it any one who will read it may learn profitably of these matters[785].’ In another place he gives interesting evidence that, till he himself took pen in hand, Alfred’s translations were the only books accessible to those who did not know Latin[786].
Evidence of MSS.
Moreover the Cambridge University MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Bede, which is said to be of the middle of the eleventh century, has at the beginning and end the following distich:—
‘Historicus quondam fecit me Beda Latinum,
Alfred, rex Saxo, transtulit ille pius.’
The same MS. contains, between Bede’s Preface and the History proper, a copy of the West Saxon genealogy in the exact form in which it appears in MS.
