King Alfred the Great, his Hagiographers, and his Cult: A Childhood Remembered [Full text] (2025)

King Alfred the Great, his Hagiographers and his Cult: A Childhood Remembered [Sample chapter]

King Alfred the Great, his Hagiographers and his Cult: A Childhood Remembered [Sample chapter], 2023

In the 19th C Protestant historians expunged hagiography. But for Aelred of Rievaulx history was contained by hagiography. His Cistercian version of the popular fable that the infant Alfred was anointed king by the Pope in Rome embedded Alfred in hagiographic time liberated from chronology: Biblical typology bound what the Pope foresaw in Alfred’s destiny to what Samuel foresaw in David’s. And in 1901 Plummer believed the 853 papal anointing was not, in fact, royal, and that Alfred psychologically misinterpreted it as typologically prefiguring his royal adulthood. By substituting psychological for spiritual understanding, Plummer canonised the Chronicle as prime reliquary for the Protestant cult of the historical Alfred, since its annal for 853 contains this authentic Anglo-Saxon relic of Alfred’s psychology.

No Mere Arthur: The Victorian Quest for the Historical Alfred, ISAS 1999

"Now that we are learning to hear Asser’s voice not through the ears of the Victorians, but with our own ears, with no reason at all to fear the voice of an intelligent and sophisticated hagiographer, we will at last be hearing a voice which Alfred himself heard. And we may gain a richer and historically more accurate understanding of the function of hagiographic discourse in Alfred’s circle of scholars. The primary function of hagiography at Alfred’s court may have been to help inaugurate the incipient cult of Alfred himself. If so, it launched something that has lasted eleven hundred years: a cult that is alive and still kicking. No mean achievement. Well worth celebrating!" At its Biennial Conference at Notre Dame University in 1999, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists set aside the evening of August 10 to commemorate the 1100th anniversary of the death of Alfred the Great. Patrick Geary was Master of Ceremonies. The main event was Simon Keynes’ now famous paper on ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great.’ This was preceded by my 20 minute paper on ‘Mythical Millenaries: The Victorian Quest for the Historical Alfred,’ my maiden speech to that body, presented here verbatim, including the handout on ‘Some key dates: 1849-1904.’

“"King Alfred the Great and his Biographers: Images and Imagination." Pp. 61-75 in Writing Medieval Biography, 750-1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow. Ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton. Boydell and Brewer. 2006.

Too good to be true: the fable of Alfred's childhood

Imitating redaction criticism as practiced by Biblical scholars I offer here a close reading of ‘the anecdote of Alfred’s learning to read for Judith’s gift’ as a pericope, with particular attention to how Asser’s Latin prose condenses the curve of Alfred’s destiny into a figura too good to be false. This is the penultimate draft of a companion piece to ‘Asser’s imitatio of Einhard: clichés, echoes and allusions,’ EOLAS 7 (2014) 65-91 (#4 above) which concluded that “Asser ... invites us to watch him do what Einhard did not: contain the modus of Alfred’s life in a figura, a rhetorical gem, with its tight dramatic exchanges of short speech acts, simple gestures, and the book.”

The Long Ninth Century and the Prose of King Alfred’s Reign

The Long Ninth Century and the Prose of King Alfred's Reign, 2015

This article examines the history of the scholarship of the Old English prose of the ninth century and the reign of King Alfred the Great. Looking at the manuscripts, language, Latin sources, and the transmission of the texts, it argues that Old English prose existed before Alfred, then changed and developed during Alfred’s reign. Analyzing passages from key Old English prose texts, including the Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Wærferth’s translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, and Alfred’s translations of Gregory’s Pastoral Care and the first fifty Psalms, this essay argues that early Old English prose was highly learned and in dialogue with many of the primary texts of the medieval Western world. Keywords: King Alfred, Old English prose, Gregory the Great, Mercian, West Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, the OE Bede, The Pastoral Care, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, CCCC 173 Published in Oxford Handbooks Online Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - Early and Medieval Online Publication Date: Nov 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.53 Published in Oxford Handbooks Online Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - Early and Medieval Online Publication Date: Nov 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.53

Born in the Margin: The Chronological Scaffolding of Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, Peritia 27 (2016), 79-98.

Peritia, 2016

The evidence that Asser thought Alfred was born in 849 is too slender to bear the weight that has been hung from it. The systematic dating of events from AD 849, the birthdate of Alfred preserved in the Cotton MS. version of Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, was probably absent from the source of both ‘The Annals of St Neots’ and John of Worcester, and may therefore have been unknown to Asser himself. Asser may have written his Vita soon after 887. The implications for Asser’s contribution to the Alfredian canon, and especially for his account of Alfred’s trip to Rome, are not trivial. 'In trying to settle where Asser belongs in the Alfredian canon it might prove prudent to accept the gambit proposed by Stubbs over a hundred years ago: to see what sense the Life makes if instead of trying to rectify what was dislocated in the margin, we simply sacrifice the Anno Ælfredi series altogether, take it off the board, and remove it from play. There will be losses and gains. We shall have to let go of our desire to know the exact year of Alfred’s birth. In return we shall gain a coherent representation of Alfred’s inner and outer life as constellated by three childhood virtutes: the story of the book, the trip to Rome in his eleventh year, and his conversion to Latin literacy in his twelfth — a ‘quintessentially hagiographic’ interpretation of Alfred’s modus vitae which deserves, and rewards, serious hagiographical readings and re-readings.'

The Orosius in King Alfred’s Court: A Ninth-Century Historical Renaissance

UBC Okanagan Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies/UBC Okanagan Library, 2012

This paper compares Paulus Orosius’ original Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (hereafter Historiarum) with its anonymous ninth century Old English vernacular translation (hereafter Orosius), in order to examine how the Anglo-Saxon author’s inclusion of additional narrative elements, such as the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, overshadows the original’s moralistic imperative. Deborah VanderBilt argues that in addition to composing new narrative dialogue delivered by Orosius ‘the author’, the Anglo-Saxon translator cuts “nearly all of the sections in which [the Historiarum] engages in rhetorical argument or polemic” (379). In her own edition of the Old English text, Janet Bately further contends that Orosius’ original Historiarum, though still geographically and historically significant, is, in the end, a polemical argument that Christianity is not to blame for the downfall of Rome (xciii). While the original's Christian moral is still present in the Old English Orosius, it is generally engulfed by new and/or ratified narrative components, which the translator uses as vessels in which to explore the nature of hardship, history, war and the northern Germanic homeland, rather than the socio-cultural impact of Roman Christianity in late antiquity. Ultimately, I will show how the author of the Old English Orosius is more interested in periphrastically bringing the history and geography of the original text into concurrence with his own age than explicating the veracity and superiority of the Christian faith, as per the mandate of the Latin original.

CHAPTER 3 King Alfred and Weland: Tradition and Transformation at the Court of King Alfred

Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture. Toller lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text, 2017

The author's 2011 Toller lecture looks at the treatment of traditional heroes - both Germanic and non-Germanic heroes in sources associated with the court of King Alfred. It argues that the robust presentation of heroic and mythological characters runs counter to views promoted in contemporary clerical culture and may provide insights into the elusive court culture and attitudes of Alfred himself (which may be at odds with the idealising presentation of the king by Asser). From Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture. toller lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text, ed. Charles Insley and Gale Owen-Crocker(Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2017)

Barbara Yorke considers the reputation of King Alfred the Great, and the enduring cult around his life and legend

The Art of Alfred and his Times