1. For an analysis of the treatment of prose in Old English textbooks
and a different consideration of the lack of attention to prose hagiographies, see Clare A. Lees,
"Whose Text Is It Anyway? Contexts for Editing Old English Prose," in Editing Old English
in the 90s, ed. Donald Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (Boydell, forthcoming). A fuller analysis
of the marginal state of Old English prose, with a suggested remedy, is provided by Clare A. Lees,
"Working with Patristic Sources: Language and Context in Old English Homilies," in
Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval
Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen
page 10
(Albany, 1991). For a major study which historicizes and
critiques the pedagogical and scholarly establishment of Old English studies, including pointing to
the relative neglect of Old English prose, see Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New
Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, 1990).
2. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H.
Abrams, et al., 6th edn., 2 Volumes (New York, 1993); Medieval English Literature, ed.
J.B. Trapp, Oxford Anthology of English Literature (New York, 1973). The Norton anthology
does, however, present Beowulf as if it were prose. For a critique of other confusion
which the presentation in the Norton anthology encourages, see Kevin S. Kiernan, "Reading
Cædmon's `Hymn' With Someone Else's Glosses," Representations 32 (1990),
157-74.
3. Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson (Toronto, 1980).
4. Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, New Critical
History of Old English Literature (New York, 1986). An honorable exception to the general
pattern of ignoring the prose in introductory surveys is the recent Cambridge Companion to
Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1991), which
integrates discussions of prose and verse in thematic chapters.
5. Old English Newsletter, 25.4 (1992), 12-18.
6. Namely, Michael Swanton's admirable (if brief) compilation,
Old English Prose (London, 1975). Numerous selections of Old English prose are
reprinted from earlier translations in The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, ed. Kevin
Crossley-Holland (Oxford, 1984; first published 1982). Historical prose has been better served by
such collections as English Historical Documents I: c. 500-1042, trans. Dorothy
Whitelock, 2nd edn. (New York, 1979) and Alfred the Great: Asser's "Life of King Alfred"
and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge
(Harmondsworth, 1983), which includes extracts from Alfred's writings. Lewis E. Nicholson, ed.,
The Vercelli Book Homilies: Translations from the Anglo-Saxon (Lanham, 1991) is an
exception to the prevailing trend but of limited distribution.
7. Allen J. Frantzen, "A Recent Survey of the Teaching of Old
English and its Implications for Anglo-Saxon Studies," Old English Newsletter 26.1
(1992), 34-45: question 10 (p. 37).
8. E.G. Stanley, "Studies in the Prosaic Vocabulary of Old English
Verse," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971), 385-418 at 385-6. Stanley continues,
"but the margin of error in my count may be great, and the problem is complicated by
interconnection, partial or whole, of some of the texts."
9. The statistics were provided in a personal communication by
Antonette diPaolo Healey, to whom I express thanks. The concordance is published by Antonette
diPaolo Healey and Richard L. Venezky, A Microfiche
page 11
Concordance to Old English
(Toronto, 1980) and Richard L. Venezky and Sharon Butler, AMicrofiche
Concordance to Old English: the High-Frequency Words (Toronto, 1985). The problem of
the multiple versions of some texts mentioned by Stanley is also implicit in the concordance.
10. The widest readership must be through the long-established
non-academic series of Penguin Classics and Everyman. Further translations have been made
available by more specialist presses, such as the New Saga Library of Canongate and Garland.
11. See the bibliographical essay by Carol Clover, "Icelandic
Family Sagas (íslendingasögur)," Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical
Guide, ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow, Islandica 45 (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 239-315.
12. For an instructive attempt to put Icelandic sagas into a context,
see Carol J. Clover, "The Long Prose Form," Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 101
(1986), 10-39. On the relation of the novel to the early romance tradition, see Michael McKeon,
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 1-4.
13. For an account of the ultimate sources of Ælfric's saints'
lives, see Max Förster,Über die Quellen von Ælfric's Homiliae Catholicae.
I. Legenden (Berlin, 1892); J.H. Ott, Über die Quellen der Heiligenleben in
Ælfrics Lives of Saints I (Halle, 1892); Grant Loomis, "Further Sources of
Ælfric's Saints' Lives," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 13
(1931), 1-8. For Ælfric's immediate source, see Patrick H. Zettel, "Saints' Lives in Old
English: Latin Manuscripts and Vernacular Accounts: Ælfric," Peritia 1 (1982),
17-37, which draws on his unpublished 1979 Oxford D.Phil. dissertation, and Peter Jackson and
Michael Lapidge, "The Contents of the Cotton-Corpus Legendary," Old English Prose Saints'
Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, forthcoming). For the latest
scholarship on sources, see the two large-scale collaborative projects: SASLaC, which has
published Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: A Trial Version, ed. Frederick M.
Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, 1990), and Fontes Anglo-Saxonici,
the latest progress report on which is in Old English Newsletter, 25.3 (1992), 12.
14. A handful of studies of individual lives against their sources
show aspects of the artistry of the Old English: see Cecily Clark, "Ælfric and Abbo,"
English Studies 49 (1968), 30-36 on Ælfric's "Life of St. Edmund;" Judith Gaites,
"Ælfric's Longer Life of St Martin and Its Latin Sources: A Study in Narrative
Technique," Leeds Studies in English 13 (1982), 23-41; Joyce Hill, "Ælfric,
Gelasius, and St. George," Mediaevalia 11 (1989 for 1985), 1-17.
15. For a study of this compositional element in Latin saints' lives
from Belgium, see Michel Lauwers, "La mort et le corps des saints: La scène de
page 12
la mort
dans les Vitae du haut Moyen Age," Moyen Age 94 (1988), 21-50. The death scene in
early Latin saints' lives is surveyed in Pierre Boglioni, "La scène de la mort dans les
premières hagiographies latines," in Le sentiment de la mort au Moyen Age, ed.
Claude Sutto (Montreal, 1979), pp. 185-210.
16. For an introduction to the works of Ælfric with a stress
on Ælfric's self-consciousness as a writer, see my Ælfric's Prefaces, Durham
Medieval Texts (forthcoming). Many of Ælfric's saints' lives were written in a form of
rhythmical prose which has sometimes been viewed as verse. The relative popularity of Old
English poetry which I describe above applies only to those poems which appear in the
Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Whether Ælfric's writing is called verse or prose, it is still
widely ignored.
17. See Michael Lapidge, "The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon
England," in The Cambridge Companion, ed. Godden and Lapidge, pp. 243-263, which
provides a good introduction to the subject.
18. For an entertaining and informative study of the cultural
phenomenon, see Karl S. Guthke, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Western
Culture (Princeton, 1992), from which the examples in this paragraph are taken. On the
significance of the moment of death in English literature of the 17th to 20th centuries, see Garrett
Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
19. For examples in Old Norse literature and Old English poetry,
see Joseph Harris, "Beowulf's Last Words," Speculum 67 (1992), 1-32. Harris is
interested in defining the structural elements of a literary subgenre: he cites some, but by no
means all, of the examples from Icelandic sagas given here.
20. Grettir's Saga, trans. Denton Fox and Hermann Palsson
(Toronto, 1974), ch. 45, p. 95.
21. The Saga of Gisli, trans. George Johnston, Everyman
(London, 1963), ch. 13, p. 17 and ch. 36, p. 58.
22. Njal's Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann
Palsson, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, 1960), ch. 77, p. 169.
23. The Saga of the Jomsvikings, trans. N.F. Blake
(London, 1962), chs. 36-37, pp. 40-41.
24. Laxdæla Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and
Hermann Palsson, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, 1969), ch. 49, p. 175.
25. Njal's Saga, ch. 129, p. 267.
26. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans.
Helen Weaver (Oxford, 1981).
27. Guthke, Last Words, pp. 56-57.
28. References to Ælfric's works are embedded in the text.
Lives of Saints (abbreviated LS) are edited by Walter W. Skeat, Ælfric's Lives
of Saints, EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881-1900; repr. in two vols., 1966), with
facing translations largely by Gunning and Wilkinson (see "Prelimi-
page 13
nary Notice," p. vii); reference
is by the number of the life followed by the line number. Catholic Homilies circulated in
two series (abbreviated CH I and CH II), edited with a facing translation by Benjamin Thorpe,
The Sermones Catholici or Homilies of Ælfric, vol. 1 (London, 1844) and by
Malcolm Godden, Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: the Second Series; Text, EETS s.s. 5
(London, 1979); references to CH I are by homily and page number in Thorpe's edition,
references to CH II are by homily and line number in Godden's edition. All translations from Old
English are my own.
29. Natale is the term for the festival celebrating a saint's
death to this world. For a theoretical statement of the joyousness of the occasion, see Jean
Leclerq, "La joie de mourir selon Saint Bernard de Clairvaux," in Dies illa: Death in the
Middle Ages, ed Jane H.M. Taylor (Liverpool, 1984), pp. 195-207.
30. On Ælfric's careful use of direct speech for dramatic
effect, see Ruth Waterhouse, "Ælfric's Use of Discourse in Some Saints' Lives,"
Anglo-Saxon England 5 (1976), 83-103.
31. The Battle of Maldon, ed. D.G. Scragg (Manchester,
1981), lines 312-13.
