One of King Alfred’s labours for the enlightenment of his countrymen was a translation of the “Universal History of Orosius, from the Creation to the year of our Lord 416.” This book had long been in high repute by the familiar name of “Orosius” among students and teachers in the monasteries; and it retained its credit so, that after the invention of printing it was one of the first works put into type, and appeared in numerous editions. The author was a Spanish Christian of the fifth century. Born at Tarragona and educated in Spain, he crossed over to Africa about the year 414, and received instruction from St. Augustine upon knotty questions of the origin of the soul and other matters. In Augustine’s works are contained the “Consultation of Orosius with Augustine on the Error of the Priscillianists and Origenists,” and a letter from Augustine to Orosius against them. Augustine sent Orosius to consult Jerome, who was in Palestine; and in his letter of introduction said, “Behold, there has come to me a religious young man, in catholic peace a brother, in age a son, in rank a co-presbyter, Orosius—of active talents, ready eloquence, ardent application, longing to be in God’s house a vessel useful for disproving false and destructive doctrines, which have killed the souls of Spaniards much more grievously than the barbarian sword their bodies.” In Palestine, towards the latter half of the year 415, Orosius attacked the Pelagians by writing against them a treatise on Free Will, and presenting a memorial against them to the Council of Diospolis. It was at the request of St Augustine that Orosius wrote his History. The sack of Rome by Alaric having caused the Christians of Rome to doubt the efficacy of their faith, Augustine, while he himself wrote his “De Civitate Dei” to show from the history of the Church that the preaching of the Gospel could not augment the world’s misery, incited Orosius to show the same thing in a compendium of profane history also. Orosius began his work in the year 410, when Augustine had got through ten books of his, and he finished it about the year 416. Like a good old-fashioned controversialist, he made very light of the argument of terror from the sack of Rome by Alaric, so representing the event that King Alfred, in his translation, thus abridged the detail:—
“Alaric, the most Christian and the mildest of kings, sacked Rome with so little violence, that he ordered no man should be slain, and that nothing should be taken away or injured that was in the churches. Soon after that, on the third day, they went out of the city of their own accord. There was not a single house burnt by their order.”
In translating and adapting this book to the uses of his time, King Alfred did not trouble himself at all with its old ecclesiastical character, as what Pope Gelasius I. had called a book written “with wonderful brevity against heathen perversions.” Looking to it exclusively as a digest of historical and geographical information, Alfred abridged, omitted, imitated, added, with a single regard to his purpose of producing a text-book of that class of knowledge. Omitting the end of the fifth book and the beginning of the sixth, and so running two books into one, he made the next and last book the sixth instead of the seventh, as it is in the original.
The “History of Orosius” itself is bald, confused; but it was enriched and improved by Alfred’s addition to the first book of much new matter, enlarging knowledge of the geography of Europe, which he calls Germania, north of the Rhine and Danube. Alfred adds also to the same book geographical narratives taken from the lips of two travellers. One was Ohthere, a Norwegian, who sailed from Halgoland, on the coast of Norway, round the North Cape into the Cwen-Sæ, or White Sea, and entered the mouth of the river Dwina, the voyage ending where there is now Archangel, the most northern of the Russian seaports. Ohthere afterwards made a second voyage from Halgoland along the west and south coast of Norway to the Bay of Christiania, and Sciringeshæl, the port of Skerin, or Skien, near the entrance of the Christiania fjord. He then sailed southward, and reached in five days the Danish port æt Hæđum, the capital town called Sleswic by the Saxons, but by the Danes Haithaby. The other traveller was Wulfstan, who sailed in the Baltic, from Slesvig in Denmark to Frische Haff within the Gulf of Danzig, reaching the Drausen Sea by Elbing. These voyages were taken from the travellers’ own lips. Of Wulfstan’s, the narrative passes at one time into the form of direct personal narration—“Wulfstan said that he went . . . that he had . . . And then we had on our left the land of the Burgundians [Bornholmians], who had their own king. After the land of the Burgundians we had on our left,” &c. The narrative of the other voyage opens with the sentence, “Ohthere told his lord, King Alfred.” These three additions to “Orosius”—the Description of Europe, the two voyages of Ohthere, and the voyage of Wulfstan—may be considered Alfred’s own works.
The Description is the king’s own account of Europe in his time, and the only authentic record of the Germanic nations, written by a contemporary, so early as the ninth century.
Ohthere was a man of great wealth and influence in Norway, as wealth was there reckoned; for he had 600 reindeer, including six decoy-deer; but though accounted one of the first men in the land, he had only twenty horned cattle, twenty sheep, and twenty swine. The little that he ploughed he ploughed with horses, and his chief revenue was in tribute of skin and bone from the Finns. The fame of his voyages attracted to him the attention of King Alfred. He said that he dwelt “Northmost of all northmen,” in Halgoland; and wishing to find out how far the land lay due north, and whether any man dwelt north of him—for the sake also of taking the walruses, “which have very good bone in their teeth; of these teeth they brought some to the king; and their hides are very good for ship-ropes”—he sailed northward. Ohthere may have obtained some of his wealth by whale-fishing. He says that “in his own country is the best whale-hunting; they are eight-and-forty ells long, and the largest fifty ells long;” of these he said “that he was one of six who killed sixty in two days;” meaning, no doubt, that his vessel was one of six. He relates only what he saw. “The Biarmians,” he says, “told him many stories both about their own land and about the countries which were around them, but he knew not what was true, because he did not see it himself.”
Wulfstan was perhaps a Jutlander, and his voyage was confined to the Baltic. Neither his account nor that of Ohthere contradicts the opinion then held, that Scandinavia was a large island, and the Gulf of Bothnia or Cwæner Sea flowed into the North Sea.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE
BY
KING ALFRED, ETC.
Translated in 1807 by the Rev. James Ingram, M.A., Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford.