§ 5. Alfred’s Method of Translation.

Such was the man who wrote the famous book which King Alfred set himself to make known to his people. That it was a task after the English monarch’s own heart we may well believe. The splendid career and the wretched end of the last great Roman must have Edition: current; Page: [xxi]deeply impressed Alfred, who had himself known adversity, and was far from sure that his present heyday would last.

But the task of translation, though congenial, was difficult. In the first place, Alfred’s knowledge of Latin can hardly have sufficed to give him an exact idea of the contents of a book whose style was modelled on the old classical writers of Rome, and differed widely from the crude Latin written by the learned monks in the ninth century. This difficulty the King surmounted, as we have already noticed, by having Asser read out the Latin text and explain it to him; and this is confirmed by an examination of Alfred’s version, which in many parts bears the marks of having been written from a recent recollection of the Latin rather than directly from it. The King’s version makes no attempt to imitate the artificial and involved periods of Boethius; he was content to write so as to be ‘understanded of the people,’ and in this he succeeded, for his English, though devoid of art and often inelegant and rambling, is clear enough as to the sense. It is probable that Alfred wrote as he spoke, for he could have found but little prose literature in English fit to form his style upon. Certain parts of the Vulgate and the Book of Psalms and a number of prayers had been Englished, as the Life informs us; but beyond these it is likely that no prose of a literary character existed in West-Saxon. All previous literary effort in English had taken the form of verse, which chiefly flourished north of the Humber; and we have the curious, but not isolated, spectacle of a noble and expressive poetry co-existing with a rude, faltering, barely Edition: current; Page: [xxii]articulate prose, as we can see it in the old charters which have come down to us. In the process of transferring the ideas of Boethius into English of the ninth century a certain loss was inevitable. This Alfred doubtless realized, and from the first resolved to attempt no more than to give the general sense of his original, now keeping fairly close to the Latin, now being content to find a simple expression for ‘dark words’; here omitting what he judged of less moment for the end he had in view, there making additions of his own. And it is just these additions that are the most interesting part of the King’s version. In them we see him in the capacity of author, and can make a comparison between the ideals he himself here puts before us and his success in realizing them as recorded in the pages of history. In this connexion we may note that the annals of the West Saxons, perhaps previously written in Latin, were in the latter years of Alfred’s rule recorded in English, probably by the King’s orders, and the events of his reign were described in language of considerable vigour, with which it is instructive to compare the prose of the royal writer himself. These annals form the first instalment of the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued in various monasteries, till the last version, the Peterborough Book, ends with the joyful accession of Henry II.

Thus King Alfred may be regarded as the first known writer of English literary prose. Abbot Ælfric, about a century after, recognized his debt to the King, saying that in his day ‘there were no other godly books in the English tongue save the books that King Edition: current; Page: [xxiii]Alfred skilfully translated from Latin into English.’ Ælfric formed himself consciously on the style of the King, and in his hands English prose became smoother and clearer, more elegant, and more suited to the expression of shades of thought.

It is now time to see how the English King went to work in turning the Consolations of Philosophy into his own tongue. A glance over his version will at once show that it is very far from being even a free translation of the original work. Alfred evidently realized that a literal rendering, such as we find in his version of the Pastoral Care, would be a difficult task for himself, and would be largely unintelligible to the people for whom it was intended. So he resolved to omit what seemed to him unessential, or too hard to translate, or too stiff for plain men’s comprehension, and he did not hesitate to amplify where he thought a fuller treatment needed. Thus at the very beginning of the work he supplies a historical Introduction, and boldly transposes and condenses the first few sections of the Latin; a treatment to which he occasionally resorts throughout the book, particularly at the end. One is soon struck in reading Alfred’s version by the large number of explanatory notes inserted in the text. The King watches his chance, and explains allusions, mythological, historical, and geographical, with evident pleasure, and sometimes at great length.

This plan was also followed by Alfred in his Orosius, and here we see his anxiety that obscurities should be removed, so that his book might be truly a popular one, and read by persons who had no knowledge of the ages that lay behind them, and to whom a literal Edition: current; Page: [xxiv]translation of the De Consolatione would often have seemed mere nonsense. It has been proved that Alfred made considerable use of Latin commentaries which had already appeared before his day, just as they had appeared in the case of the old classical writers, and many of the additions that distinguish Alfred’s version, and till quite recently were unhesitatingly credited to him, are now seen to correspond, often word for word, with commentaries still extant in MSS. dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries. This, however, only shows that Alfred procured the best MSS. of the Consolation that he could, and used the commentaries written in the margin, just as modern scholars make use of the scholia in preparing their editions of the classical texts.

From a modern reader’s point of view these constant digressions seem to encumber the text and impede the free course of the argument, but we should remember that in Alfred’s day such things as footnotes were unknown, so that he was obliged to put everything into the text, unless he had chosen to imitate the scholia or explanatory notes written on the broad margins of the Latin manuscripts. Alfred’s arrangement, however, was exactly adapted to the purpose he had in view, for as books were in those days generally read aloud by one man in the presence of others, it was convenient that his reading should flow on without interruption from distracting notes. Another point in which Alfred’s version differs from the original is its distinctly Christian colouring. As we have said before, Boethius Edition: current; Page: [xxv]gives no sign in his Consolations of Philosophy that he was acquainted with or influenced by the Christian faith. Alfred, on the contrary, mentions Christ by name, speaks of ‘Christian men,’ ‘angels,’ ‘the devil’; and the name of God, which the Roman seldom directly mentions, occurs nearly two hundred times in the English version. Alfred’s allusions to Old Testament history form an entirely new feature, while as a Western Churchman he shows his disapproval of the Arian Theodoric as markedly as he shows his sympathy with the Catholic Boethius.

Frequently Alfred forgets his rôle of translator, and prompted by a word or phrase of his original, writes freely as his own feelings taught him. One of these spontaneous outpourings has a keen and enduring interest for Englishmen; revealing as it does the noble aims of him whom the late Professor Freeman called ‘the most perfect character in history.’ This is the passage on the duties of a king forming chapter xvii, where Alfred sets forth his aims in stirring words that deserve a place on every monument that Englishmen may raise to their national hero. ‘It has ever been my desire,’ he says, ‘to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.’