![]() William lists among Alfred’s translations works by Gregory the Great, Orosius, Boethius and Bede, and says that he was working on an English rendering of the Book of Psalms when he died. According to the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury, Alfred ‘translated into English the greater part of the Roman authors, bringing off the noblest spoil of foreign intercourse for the use of his subjects’. These men brought with them Latin books that could be discussed at court and translated into English. In order to meet his desire for wisdom, Alfred sought out the best scholars from across Europe. In the words of his Welsh biographer, Bishop Asser, Alfred was a pious youth who loved ‘reading aloud from books in English and above all learning English poems by heart’. ![]() Without Alfred, however, the English language itself might not have survived the Viking age. We also have this period to thank for the only surviving copies of Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Dream of the Rood. Many more books were produced in Old English during the post-Alfredian period, including the writings of contemporary churchmen such as Ælfric, who developed his own distinctive alliterative prose style. It was under Alfred’s successors in the tenth and eleventh centuries that the kingdom of Engla-lond took shape, as West Saxon rulers extended their power further North and East. Although it may not look much like English to us, the closer we look the more we start to see how the Englisc spoken in the late ninth century is a direct ancestor of the language we speak now. We now call the language of King Alfred’s day Old English, to distinguish it from Middle English, the language of Chaucer, and Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare. In the midst of these turbulent political events, Alfred still found time to devote himself to learning Latin and producing books in Englisc (‘English’), the language of his subjects the Angel-cynn (‘race of the English’). By the time of his death in 899, Alfred had defeated the Vikings in the south and forged a new kingdom by uniting the West Saxons with the Anglian-speaking Mercians to the north. When he came to the throne of Wessex in 871, almost all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were under Viking rule. 849–899) is one of the most important figures in English history and one of the first named English writers.
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