6 - Cross the Border

Summary

The two stories reflect light upon each other, — and ‘tis a pity they should be parted.

— Lawrence Sterne

I am concerned here with typology as a mode of thought and as a figure of speech. I say ‘and’ because a mode of thought does not exist until it has developed its own particular way of arranging words.

— Northrop Frye

The author of the Vita Alfredi deserves the last laugh, both on those who have impugned his veracity and on those who have defended it by appealing to the shortcomings of his native culture. He knew exactly what he was saying when using the words ‘legere’, ‘recitare’ and ‘interpretari’ over the course of the king’s pursuit of learning, and he meant exactly what he said. He made that the major Leitmotif of his hero’s life, its critical turning point the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year in which the Carolingian empire succumbed. Insofar as it was his manifested learning that marked out King Alfred from any other ruler of his time or anywhere near it, he was entirely right to do so.

—Patrick Wormald

Abstract

Did Alfred know Latin well enough to translate it? Asser says yes. Malcolm Godden now says no. This chapter begins with a close reading of how Asser blends hagiography and chronology in his account of the day Alfred began to translate at sight. It ends with a schematic analysis of how literacy and bilingualism intersect. This helps us chart how Asser played what de Lubac calls a ‘game of figures’ to create a typologie interne of Alfred’s adult biliteracy, in which what happened on St Martin’s Day 887, the day Alfred’s biliteracy campaign was born, simultaneously fulfills what the childhood fable of his contest for his mother’s book and the fable of his pilgrimage to Rome jointly prefigured.

Keywords: medieval biliteracy, Alfredian translations, language border, Asser, Vita Alfredi

The Pope and the Book

The time has come to take stock of where, after its twists and turns, my line of inquiry has landed us. We have come a long way since the Dean of Ely’s thrill of emotion in 1901.