King Alfred the Great

This morning I read something really remarkable in Eleanor Parker's blog. She's a medievalist at Oxford, and she writes about the legacy of King Alfred the Great, a man I much admire. Alfred protected his kingdom from Viking incursions and fought tirelessly for national unity. He was known for wise reforms in politics, military organization, law, and education. He supported and defended the church against cruel northern paganism. Even in the midst of uncertain and dangerous times, he both oversaw and personally labored to recover knowledge of the things "most necessary for all men to know." He had important books translated from Latin into English so that more people could read them, and he commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle so his people could know their own history.

In the words of the Beowulf poet: þæt wæs gōd cyning! ("That was a good king!")

Alfred died this day in 899 AD, so today is his feast day in many Christian traditions. Parker quotes a length a preface he wrote to his translation of St Gregory's Pastoral Care, about the importance of knowledge and therefore of translation:

And so I ask you to do what I believe you wish to do: that you disengage yourself from worldly matters as often as you can, so that wherever you can make use of that wisdom which God gave you, use it. Consider what punishments came upon us in this world when we neither loved wisdom in any way ourselves, nor passed it on to others. Then we loved only the name of being Christians, and very few loved the practices.

When I remembered all this, then I also remembered how I had seen, before it was all ravaged and burnt, how the churches throughout all England stood filled with treasures and books, and there were also a great many of God's servants; they got very little benefit from those books, for they did not understand anything in them, and could not, because they were not written in their own language. It was as if they said: 'Our elders, who once held these places, loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and left it to us. Here one may still see their footprints, but we cannot follow after them; and so we have now lost both the wealth and the wisdom, because we would not bend down our minds to study their tracks.'

...Therefore it seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we too translate certain books - those which are most necessary for all men to know - into the language we can all understand.

Parker closes with a beautiful observation of her own:

One of the things I would have liked to 'carry home' in translating the above Preface is the similarity between the two verbs in the phrase we hit nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufodon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lefdon, 'we neither loved [wisdom] in any way ourselves, nor passed it on to others'. And again: Ure ieldran, ða ðe ðas stowa ær hioldon, hie lufodon wisdom, ond ðurh ðone hie begeaton welan ond us læfdon, 'Our elders, who once held these places, loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and left it to us'. The likeness between those verbs lufodon and lefdon implies that there is an intimate connection between loving knowledge and leaving it to someone else ('leave' in the sense of 'pass on, bequeath'), and we have a duty to do both. Which is why Alfred translated St Gregory in the ninth century, and why we translate Alfred today.

You can read the whole piece here.