4 - Write the Life

Summary

Vitae serve as reliquaries for the relics (saints) which they display textually.

— Alicia Spencer-Hall

In analytic terms, we are not skilled at discussing imitative works as imitations. Once we have noted a so-called model or source, we are only beginning to understand the model as a constitutive element of the literary structure, an element whose dynamic presence has to be accounted for. We have not been adept as literary critics at accounting for imitative successes as against the many failures, or at recognizing the variety of strategies imitative writers pursued.

— Thomas Greene

Abstract

Historians have been baffled by the way Asser interlaces allusions to Einhard, echoes of his own words, and hagiographic clichés. Reading the Vita Alfredi as literature advances the current paradigm shift in our attitudes towards Asser, allowing us to appreciate the rhetoric and imagination that inform his imitatio of Einhard’s Vita Karoli. Thomas Greene on literary imitation, Walter Berschin on Carolingian life-writing, Christopher Ricks on the poetics of allusion, Erich Auerbach on prefiguration and fulfillment, David Howlett on chiasmus, and John Hollander on self-echoing illuminate the literary game Asser plays with clichés, echoes, and allusions. By condensing the modus of Alfred’s life into a childhood fable, a hagiographic figura, he invites us to see him succeed where Einhard failed.

Keywords: V. H. Galbraith, Hiberno-latin hagiography, Asser, Vita Alfredi, Einhard, Vita Karoli

Respect

After 1983 it became possible to read Asser’s Life as a work of literature. The turning point in scholarly respect paid to Asser not as a mere redactor in the pejorative sense but as the author of an interesting work of art can be dated with such precision because it was in 1983 that Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge promoted Asser’s Life of King Alfred to the status of a contribution to world literature worthy of being published in English translation as a Penguin Classic. E. V. Rieu launched the Penguin Classics series in 1946. His Penguin edition of the Odyssey proclaimed ‘that this was a book that anyone — everyone — could, and should, read.’ The classics were no longer ‘the exclusive province of the privileged few.’