§ 6. Manuscripts of the Old English Boethius.

King Alfred’s Boethius has reached us in two manuscripts, one of the tenth century written about fifty or sixty years after his death, and the other dating from the beginning of the twelfth century. The older Edition: current; Page: [xxvi]manuscript is now in the British Museum, having once formed part of the collection made by Sir Henry Cotton in the seventeenth century. It was injured by the fire which ravaged this valuable collection in the year 1740, and for a century afterwards lay neglected in a box. Some sixty years ago two scholars arranged the scattered and charred leaves, and with great skill mounted them separately in an album, like photographs, so that now the greater part of the writing on the damaged vellum can be made out in a favourable light. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, when this manuscript was still perfect, Franciscus Junius, a German scholar settled in England, the first serious and critical student of the oldest English, took from it many readings and wrote them in the margin of the copy he had made of the later manuscript, copy and manuscript being now in the Bodleian Library. This manuscript is in perfect preservation. Junius also copied from the Cotton or older manuscript the whole of the alliterating version of the metres of Boethius which in the later manuscript are rendered in Old English prose.

Besides these two manuscripts, a small fragment of a third was discovered at the Bodleian Library at Oxford by Professor Napier some years ago. It is extremely probable that such a popular book as King Alfred’s Boethius would have been frequently copied, so that it is somewhat strange that more manuscripts of it have not come down to us. We are told that among the books presented by Bishop Leofric to the chapter of Exeter Cathedral in the eleventh century there was an old English version of the De Consolatione, referred to as Boeties boc on englisc, ‘The Book of Edition: current; Page: [xxvii]Boethius in English.’ The two manuscripts above mentioned differ in the following respects as to their contents. The older one has, as we have before said, a metrical alliterating version of the carmina of Boethius, which in the later one are rendered into prose. Again, while the text of the later manuscript is broken up into forty-two chapters that do not always correspond to the divisions in the Latin original, the older manuscript has no formal divisions, except that the end of each book and the beginning of the next are indicated. Both manuscripts had the same prose preface, but the older manuscript contains in addition a metrical proem which is wanting in the later one. Finally, the latter has a table of contents prefixed.