scholarly journals The Mind in the Old English Prose Psalms

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (296) ◽  
pp. 597-617
Author(s):  
Amy Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Text ◽  
The West ◽  
Alfred The Great ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Consolation Of Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

Abstract The Prose Psalms, an Old English translation of the first 50 psalms into prose, have often been overshadowed by the other translations attributed to Alfred the Great: the Old English Pastoral Care, with its famous preface, and the intellectually daring Old English translations of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Augustine’s Soliloquies. However, this article proposes that, regardless of who wrote them, the Prose Psalms should be read alongside the Old English Consolation and the Soliloquies: like the two more well-studied translations, the Prose Psalms are concerned with the mind and its search for true understanding. This psychological interest is indicated by the prevalence of the word mod (‘mind’) in the Old English text, which far exceeds references to the faculty of the intellect in the Romanum source. Through comparison with the Consolation and the Soliloquies, this article demonstrates that all three texts participate in a shared tradition of psychological imagery. The three translations may well, therefore, be the result of a single scholarly environment, perhaps enduring for several decades, in which multiple scholars read the same Latin, patristic writings on psychology, discussed these ideas among themselves, and thereby developed the vernacular discourse observable in these three translations. Whether this environment was identical with the scholarly circle which Alfred gathered at the West Saxon court remains a matter for debate.

A Tale of Two Kings: Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready

1986 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 195-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Keynes
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
The Other ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
Apparent Contrast ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Alfred The Great ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Personal Qualities

IN the gallery of Anglo-Saxon kings, there are two whose characters are fixed in the popular imagination by their familiar epithets: Alfred the Great and ÆEthelred the Unready. Of course both epithets are products of the posthumous development of the kings' reputations (in opposite directions), not expressions of genuinely contemporary attitudes to the kings themselves: respective personalities. In the case of Alfred, it was the king’s own resourcefulness, courage and determination that brought the West Saxons through the Viking invasions, for it was these qualities, complemented by his concern for the well–being of his subjects, that inspired and maintained the people’s loyalty towards the king and generated their support for his cause. Whereas in the case of jEthelred, it was the king’s incompetence, weakness and vacillation that brought the kingdom to ruin, for it was these failings, exacerbated by his displays of cruelty and spite, that alienated the people and made them abandon his cause. Few historians, perhaps, would subscribe to such a view expressed as bluntly as that, and more, I suspect, would consider such comparisons to be futile and probably misconceived in the first place. I would maintain, however, that something is to be gained from the exercise of comparing the two kings in fairly broad terms: by juxtaposing discussions of the status of the main narrative accounts of each king’s reign we can more easily appreciate how their utterly different reputations arose, and see, moreover, that in certain respects the apparent contrast between them might actually be deceptive; by comparing the predicament in which each king was placed we can better understand how one managed to extricate himself from trouble while the other succumbed; and overall we can more readily judge how much, or how little, can be attributed to personal qualities or failings on the part of the kings themselves.

scholarly journals Some Boethian Themes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Andrzej Wicher
Keyword(s):  
Medieval Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Lord Of The Rings ◽  
The Road ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Consolation Of Philosophy ◽  
Good And Evil

There appear to be quite a few parallels between Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy (Consolatio Philosophiae), and they seem to concern particularly, though not only, the character drawing in Tolkien’s book. Those parallels are preeminently connected with the fact that both Boethius and Tolkien like to think of the most extreme situations that can befall a human. And both are attached to the idea of not giving in to despair, and of finding a source of hope in seemingly desperate straits. The idea that there is some link between Boethius and Tolkien is naturally not new. T.A. Shippey talks about it in his The Road to Middle Earth, but he concentrates on the Boethian conception of good and evil, which is also of course an important matter, but surely not the only one that links Tolkien and Boethius. On the other hand, it is not my intention to claim that there is something in Tolkien’s book of which it can be said that it would have been absolutely impossible without Boethius. Still, I think it may be supposed that just like Boethian motifs are natural in the medieval literature of the West, so they can be thought of as natural in the work of such dedicated a medievalist as J.R.R. Tolkien.

Francis Junius (1591–1677): copyist or editor?

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Dekker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
British Library ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Scholarly Edition ◽  
The University ◽  
Made In

In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory'sPastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.

Language and Literacy: what writing does to Language and Mind

1996 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 3-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Olson
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Effects ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
The West ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Different Cultures

With the ascendance of new information technologies, the significance of writing has, it seems, slipped from view, in spite of the fact that the conceptual and cognitive implications of the newer technologies is a matter of enthusiastic speculation rather that serious research. On the other hand, it is now reasonably well established that the invention of the first “information” technology, namely writing, has had a profound effect on the ways in which we think about language, the mind, and the world, effects which have taken millenia to unfold. “Effects” is perhaps too strong a term as it is less a matter of how technology affects people than a matter of the ways in which people in different cultures have used and applied the technology and the ways they have altered the technology to suit their purposes. In the West, some of these uses have involved institutional change; thus, to make use of a technology such as writing requires the development of monasteries, schools, and other institutions. Indeed, some of the cognitive effects we usually attribute to schooling are better thought of as consequences or implications of literacy.

scholarly journals From "Sisters" to "Comadres": Translating and Transculturating Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pilar Somacarrera
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sexual Content ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
Spoken Text ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Tomson Highway ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
The Mind

Since theNative Canadian playwright Tomson Highway imagines his plays in Cree beforetranslating them into English, his dramatic texts  are, in the words of  Gayatri Spivak, “a history of the languagein-and-as-translation. “ As he acknowledges, Highway’s English is permeatedwith the rhythm of the Cree language: “I am actually using English filteredthrough the mind, the tongue and the body of a person who is speaking inCree”  Highway’s text introduces Cree orOjibway words and phrases, providing English translations for them infootnotes. The other characteristic which makes Highway’s plays distinct istheir sexual content, as transmitted both in the spoken text and in the stagedirections. Highway explains in an article titled “Why Cree is the Sexiest ofAll Languages,” that talking about sex in English is a terrifying experience, whereasin Cree it is the funniest, most hysterical and most spectacular thing in theworld.” In addition, visceral and sexual language is an essential component ofthe play, This paper will explore the process of translation andtransculturation involved in the translation of Highway’s play The Rez Sisters, in the light of translationstudies theories and the notion of transculturation as coined by Fernándo Ortizand expanded by Norman Cheadle in his book CanadianCultural Exchanges.

Old Latin Intervention in the Old English Heptateuch

1994 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 229-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
English Translation ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Patristic Literature ◽  
History Of

The Old Testament translations in the compilation known as the Old English Hexateuch or Heptateuch are based on good Vulgate exemplars. That is to say, where variation can be demonstrated between the version associated with Jerome's late fourth-century revision and the pre-Hieronymian ‘Old Latin’ versions, the Old English translations can be shown to derive from exemplars carrying the former. The opening of Genesis–‘On angynne gesceop God heofonan 7 eorðan. seo eorðe soðlice was idel 7 æmti’–illustrates this general rule. Behind it is the Vulgate ‘in principio creauit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et uacua”, not a version with the characteristic ‘old’ readings, such as fecit for creauit and inuisibilis et inconpositas for inani et vacua. Indeed, much of the Old English translation, especially in Genesis, is sufficiently full and faithful for the identification of specific Vulgate variants in the exemplar text to be made with some confidence and for the influence on it of the important Carolingian revisions asssociated with Orléans and Tours to be demonstrated. There is, however, a small number of Old English readings throughout the Heptateuch for which Latin parallels in the thirty or so collated Vulgate manuscripts are unknown or hardly known. Instead, they appear to derive from models available in pre-Hieronymian texts. Uncertainty often surrounds their identification, owing to the complexities both of the translation process and the history of the Latin Bible. Understanding their origins involves consideration of the influence of patristic literature and the liturgy, as well as the availability of ‘contaminated’ exemplar texts.

The Text and The Composition of The Seafarer

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 332-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Stevick
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Text ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
The One ◽  
Oral Composition ◽  
The Mansion

Textual cruces in The Seafarer, especially those near the end of the poem, have been not so much resolved as relegated to the lumber room in the mansion of poetry. On the one hand, oral-formulaic analysts regard The Seafarer as a verse text of 124 lines, predominantly formulaic, probably composed by a learned poet. The major problem, under this view, is that of deciding to what extent it is formulaic and then inferring the manner of composition: does the unique text represent a slightly defective record of oral composition? does it represent a poem composed entirely in writing, with deliberation foreign to oral composition, though employing traditional formulas of oral poetry? or does the text perhaps preserve orally composed sections that have been remembered by a deliberate, lettered poet who has built these sections into a poem he composed pen in hand? On the other hand, the historical-thematic analysts, also regarding the poem as a 124-line composition, employing inherited poetic language, continue to adduce evidence converging on the conclusion that a homiletic writer has shaped traditional verse materials to his own pious ends. One can no longer question the pervasiveness of doctrinal and homiletic devices in the conception and diction of the poem. Both oral-formulaic analysis and historical-thematic analysis, by their very nature, tend to assume the integrity of an Old English text—allowing, of course, for copyists' lapses of attention and errors in understanding. Neither approach, however, has been particularly concerned to resolve some persistent question of the integrity of the text or to suggest ways of regarding the textual cruces in the final section of the poem.

scholarly journals „Þæt is mid Estum þeaw þæt þærsceal ælces geðeodes man beon forbærned”. What exactly Wulfstan said about the burning of the dead by Ester in the fragment of his report on the trip to Truso? .

2015 ◽  
Vol 290 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-578
Author(s):  
Rafał Panfil
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
English Text ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Funeral Rites ◽  
Grammatical Analysis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead

In 1961 a part of Old English Orosius, the description of northernmost and central Europe, was translated into Polish and edited by Gerard Labuda. The source contains two short travel accounts by Othere and Wulfstan in the end of ninth century. The Polish editor did not avoid a number of linguistic mistakes made during the translation. Moreover, this was issued without any syntactic and grammatical analysis of the original Old English text. The Labuda’s edition only provides the Polish translation of the modern English translation by the mid-nineteenth century English scholar Joseph Bosworth. This resulted in the wrong inter�pretation of some important information contained in it. The subject of this paper is a one of the sentences included in the final fragment of the description of the funeral rites among the Ests/the Old Prussians – „Þæt is mid Estum þeaw þæt þær sceal ælces geðeodes man beon forbærned”. My aim is to understand this passage of the OE text correctly by providing it’s linguistic and grammati�cal examination to see how it corresponds with the known or presumed historical circumstances of the time and place. The interpretation of the old written source cannot be separated from its context, it this particular case especially from the local archaeological context. This will be arguing in my paper. At last,the above mentioned passage should be translated as:„And that is a custom among the Ests that people of every nationality must be cremated there”. According to this custom, the dead body of every man, that has passed away in the Witland, must be burned on the funeral pile. This Wulfstan’s description seems to be strongly supported by the number of rich equipped graves of the foreigners discovered and archaeologi�cally investigated at the number of early medieval cemeteries located in modern day city of Elbląg area and dated to the VIII/IX/X/XI century.

An Alfredian Reading Project

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-136
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
English Hegemony ◽  
Cultural Project ◽  
Rhetorical Tropes ◽  
King Alfred ◽  
Christian History

Chapter 2 compares the rhetorical tropes employed in the ‘Preface’ to The Anathemata (often overlooked in the scholarship) with those of the preface to King Alfred’s Old English translation of the Pastoral Care. This comparison establishes the idea of Jones’s artful construction of his ‘Preface’ as a manifesto for the cultural project of The Anathemata. Reflecting on the Alfredian rhetorical ideal of an English nation (and more specifically an English nation of Catholics) as both a medieval and a post-medieval construct, this chapter illuminates the direct challenge of Jones’s ‘Preface’ to Alfredian assertions of English hegemony. Key to this effort to disrupt the hegemony of British Christian history, this chapter argues, is Jones’s use of Latin and how this implicates the work of two other ninth-century writers—Asser and Nennius—in Jones’s dialogue with King Alfred.

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