From “Judith, An Old English Epic Fragment, Edited, with Introduction, Facsimile, Translation, Complete Glossary, and Various Indexes, with English Translation, Introduction by Albert S. Cook; D. C. Heath & Co., Boston; 1904; pp. iii-xxxiv.
JUDITH.
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I HAVE endeavored to edit the Old English poem of Judith in a manner which, while not unacceptable to the scholar, should enable the general reader to form an intelligent opinion concerning its merits, and furnish the academic student with a helpful introduction to the study of the poem. Fortunately for my purpose, the existing fragment is so short that the labor of examining it under different aspects as seemed within the possibilities of a rather scanty leisure. That my conclusions upon matters of mere opinion will be generally accepted I can hardly bring myself to expect; but I would fain believe that I have classified and tabulated some of the materials upon which sounder conclusions may eventually be based.
The nucleus from which this volume has grown is the translation, made by five University students of Old English: George D. Boyd, Fanny Cooper, Alice K. Grover, Adolph C. Miller, and Catharine E. Wilson. This translation I have retouched, and in some portions refashioned, so that I am bound to assume the responsibility for its present form, while gratefully acknowledging the assistance derived from the earlier draft.
ALBERT S. COOK.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
Berkeley, Cal., 3 December, 1887.
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IN this second edition a number of minor errors have been corrected, and the translation has been freed from some of its more palpable defects and inelegancies. For corrections under the latter head I am indebted to a review in Modern Language Notes by Dr. James W. Bright, of the John Hopkins University, but especially to friendly criticism from F. York Powell, of Christ Church, Oxford, on whom the mantle of the lamented Vigfusson would appear to have fallen.
The most important addition will be found on pages 75 to 85, under the heading Judith in the Dialect of the Northumbrian Gospels. This, as a first attempt to test practically the theory of transcription from Northumbrian originals, commonly held with respect to most of the Old English poems, will, I hope, be looked upon with indulgence. For a consideration of the slight metrical changes involved in this approximate restoration, if such indeed it be, the reader is referred to a paper in the Transaction of the American Philological Association for the current year.
The bearing of Old English literature upon the history of civilization, and of letters especially, in England and throughout Western Europe, has scarcely yet been appreciated by any save the most advanced students of that period, though all that makes English civilization distinctive may already be descried there, as the living panorama of the street may be viewed in miniature, remote from its noises and whirling dust, through x the camera obscura of some lofty watch-tower. The author of Judith anticipates Spenser, as Spenser anticipates Tennyson. Everywhere and always a conflict is in progress between sorely tried virtue and arrogant evil, and more often than otherwise the issue of the struggle is decided by the strength and insight of a woman’s soul. The conception, so familiar in European literature, of the woman in arms, magnanimous in the council-chamber and the field, is always, I believe, primarily and essentially Germanic, whether found in Virgil or Spenser, in Ariosto or Tennyson. But this conception, native to the Germanic race amid European peoples, was no doubt powerfully re-enforced and elevated by the influence of Hebrew poetry and history. At the meeting-point of the two our poem stands. It is Hebraic in incident and outline, Germanic in execution, sentiment, coloring, and all that constitutes the life of a poem. It adds psychical depth and the loftiest purposes to the courage and vatic inspiration already celebrated by Tacitus. While it epitomizes the situation of woman, ideally considered, in two confluent civilizations, it may at the same time be regarded as a prophecy of her moral leadership — a leadership which, individual and fortuitous for many centuries, was to become generic and constant through the worship of the Virgin Mary as the supreme womanly type, at once the embodiment of her specifically feminine qualities as maiden and mother, and the instrument of universal human progress towards its goal in the Divine. The Beatrice of Dante has the purity and loveliness of the virginal Madonna, but also something of the strenuousness of militant or masculine womanhood, the strenuousness of a Judith or Britomart. The moral sovereignty of this androgynous type once recognized and confessed, as in Beatrice, it continues to sway the conscience and affections of xi all modern men. Laura derives from Beatrice, and the Elizabethan lyric ideal, in turn, from Laura, so that Spenser, in lineal descent from Petrarch and Dante, is but the mouthpiece of what is best and most enduring in his age, when he thus exalts the mistress of his Amoretti:
And if the Elizabethan lyric ideal of womanhood derives from Laura, its epic ideal is sufficiently discernible in its glorification of the not merely androgynous, but decidedly militant, Virgin Queen. The Elizabethans bequeathed these types to us, and through them dominate our whole recent literature.
This excursus, long for a preface, and especially for the preface to a second edition, may serve to indicate, what is constantly overlooked, the intimate relation which, along many lines, exists between our oldest literature and our customary modes of thought, and it is to the more general recognition of this relation that I could wish these editorial labors might contribute.
YALE UNIVERSITY,
September, 1889.
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[Pending until the Anglo-Saxon language text and glossary is complete The English Translation is online, see below.]
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THE manuscript is the well-known Cotton Vitellius A XV of the British Museum, which likewise contain (fol. 129a-198b) the poem of Beowulf. The whole manuscript was first described by Wanley, Catalogus, pp. 218-9. Beowulf ends on fol. 198b, and Judith begins on fol. 199a, continuing through fol. 206b (a more recent numbering increases each of these numbers by three). The accompanying autotype page (fol. 200b), of the same size as the original, may answer the purpose of a general description, and enable experienced palæographers to assign a date to the handwriting. The mixture of dialectic forms seems to indicate that a Northern original passed through one or more hands, and that the last scribe, at all events, belonged to the Late West Saxon period. Forms like héhsta and néhsta for example, point to the North, while such as hýsta are clearly LWS.
The most discrepant dates have been assigned to our poem. On the one hand, Stephens and Hammerich would attribute it xvi to Cædmon, which would fix the inferior limit of the composition at A.D. 680. Ebert (Allg. Gesch. der Literatur des Mittelalters im Abendlande, III 24 ff.), without naming an author, refers its origin to the closing decades of the seventh century, and expressly declines to accept Kluge’s view, as stated below. Ten Brink says (Early Engl. Lit. p. 50): “The majority of the works mentioned arose probably during the eighth, or in the beginning of the next century; including also the Exodus, the Daniel, and the Judith.” E. Groth (Composition and Alter der Altenglischen Exodus, Berlin, 1883), basing his conclusion upon the comparative frequency in different poems of the definite article, and of the weak adjective when no article precedes, associates Judith with Byrhtnoth. Kluge, writing later in the same year (Beiträge, IX 448-9), approves of the methods originated by Lichtenheld and adopted by Groth, and adds other tests according to which Judith would belong to the tenth century. These are, passing over the verbal correspondences between Judith and Byrhtnoth, which are discussed below, the sporadic use of rime, and certain transgressions of the metrical rules observed in earlier poems. Luick, who investigates the metre of Judith in Paul and Braune’s Beiträge, Vol. XI, is of the same opinion. The treatment of middle vowels, together with the frequency of expanded lines, leads him to the conclusion (pp. 490-1) that Judith is a comparatively late poem. Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, I lv-lvi, seem also to regard it as late, and would apparently assign it to the tenth century. Their words are: “The Brunanburh Lay is book poetry of the same type as the later bits in the English Chronicle. It has several lines almost identical with lines in Judith. . . . Judith is a Christian epic, also of the long modified style, composed by a bookman, who, however, knew and used snatches of good old verse.”
Which of these views shall we accept? Before deciding, it will be necessary to examine them somewhat more critically. Stephens argues from the occurrence of expanded lines in Judith: “Now, as far as I know, this rhythmical peculiarity is xvii unknown in Old-English verse except here, in Cædmon’s Paraphrase, and in that noble epical fragment ‘Judith.’ And I venture to assert that all these three are by the same Scop. Cædmon wrote them all. They have all the same color, all the same Miltonic sublimity, the same ‘steeling’ of phrase, the same sinking back not only to the two-accented line but sometimes to an almost prosaic simplicity in the intervals of his flights of genius” (Runic Monuments, II 420). To this argument Hammerich and Ebert add nothing. Let us see what it is worth. As far as Stephens knew, expanded lines occur only in the Dream of the Rood, in Cædmon’s Paraphrase, and in Judith. But Sievers has shown (Beiträge, XII 454-5), that many other poems, including Andreas, Elene, Christ, and even Alfred’s Metres, exhibit the same peculiarity, and that in no stinted measure. Evidently Stephens’ argument from metre proves nothing. May we affirm the same of his argument from more purely æsthetic considerations? What of the color, the Miltonic sublimity, the ‘steeling’ of phrase? To my mind there is — if I understand the word ‘steeling’ aright — a steeling of phrase in the Battle of Brunanburh, perceptible even through the translation by Tennyson, and certainly perceptible to him:
As regards similarity of color, it may be possible to decide after comparing different versions of what may be termed a commonplace of epical adornment in Old English.
xviiiIn the Judith, the preparations for an attack upon the Assyrians are described, and the poet continues (vv. 205-12):
As a parallel to this may be adduced the following passages from Genesis and Exodus:
Ex. 161-8:
While raven and wolf are both introduced with the same general effect in Judith and Exodus, yet the verbal correspondences are but insignificant. The adjective wann(a) is employed in all three extracts, and ætes in two, but no identical phrase is common to all, though se wǫnna hrefn is found in Beowulf (l. 3024), and Byrhtnoth has a strikingly similar phrase to the earn ætes georn of Judith in earn æses georn (l. 107)
If we turn, however, to the Battle of Brunanburh, we shall find the ‘color,’ so far as color is associated with particular phrases, much more exactly reproduced (ll. 60-5):
xixNor is the likeness less unmistakable in Elene (ll. 27-30, 110-2):
This very poem of Elene contains much that reminds us of Judith, apart from the verbal correspondences noted on page 60, or the general likeness between longer passages. Thus, for example, notwithstanding the different words which fill the spaces here left blank, the general sequences is of the same nature, and employs in part the same expressions:
If for ‘sublimity’ we substitute ‘energy,’ is there not much resemblance between the color and energy with which these two battle-pieces are painted?
The resemblances here pointed out, together with those collected in the list of Verbal Correspondences (pp. 57-65), persuade me that the poem is Cynewulfian rather than Cædmonian, though I have no doubt that the author was conversant with Genesis A and Exodus. The almost total lack of correspondences with Genesis B might indicate that the latter was of subsequent composition, though this hypothesis is not absolutely necessary. If the list above referred to is carefully scanned and the comparative length of the poems taken into account, it must be conceded, I think, that Judith, if not by Cynewulf’s own hand, emanated from what, in the larger sense, might be termed the Cynewulfian school. Judith is not, at all events, earlier than Cynewulf; for this the peculiarities common to it and the undoubted Cynewulfian poems are too numerous, not to mention those which connect it with other poems that are sometimes referred to Cynewulf. To assume that these peculiarities were all derived from the one short fragment of 350 lines, and incorporated into the several longer poems from the hand of Cynewulf and his disciples, would be to attribute to Judith an extraordinary popularity, such as but few poems have ever enjoyed, none, in fact, save the great epics which have educated nations and contributed powerfully to civilization. This has been the prerogative of the Iliad, the Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, and perhaps Beowulf, but nothing would warrant us in advancing such a claim for Judith.
If numerous peculiarities were common to merely two poems, Judith and one other, it might be possible to determine, from this evidence alone, which poem was the earlier, though xxi the fact of relationship would undoubtedly be recognized; but when similarities are detected between the language of Judith and that of a whole group of poems, all of which are known to be by a single author, it is almost impossible to escape the conclusion, either that Judith is by the same hand, or that it is a production of some later poet saturated with the diction of this group.
Judith, then, as we may conclude, is either by Cynewulf or by some one of his disciples or successors. If by one of his successors, is it as late ass Groth, Kluge, Luick, and the editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale would have us believe?
Luick’s language is so vague that it would be futile to base an argument upon it. With reference to Groth’s proofs, based upon Lichtenheld’s tests, it may be sufficient to remark that the cogency of the latter is disputed. Sarrazin, for example, thus impugns their validity (Anglia, IX, 531-2) in words which translate: “Though Lichtenheld has attempted, in the Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum, XVI 327 ff., to establish the omission of the article, and the frequent occurrence of the strong (?) adjective with the noun, and without the article, as marks of peculiar antiquity, it is to be objected that the validity of the criterion has not been demonstrated, and that the earliest prose employs the definite article quite as freely as the later, and more freely than is done by contemporaneous poetry. It may therefore be surmised that what Lichtenheld regards as a mark of great age is rather a peculiarity of the poetical style. . . . Moreover, Kynewulf makes very frequent use of the noun without the article, and of the strong adjective in the attributive relation with nouns, as will appear from the following examples.” In the poem on the death of Edward (Sax. Chr. A.D. 1065) there are five occurrences of the definite article, or about half as many in relation to the number of lines as in Judith. In Brunanburh there are seven instances of the definite article, or about one-third of the relative number in Judith. These two poems are dated, and both are late; yet they do not conform xxii to the tests proposed. Shall we determine the date of Judith, then, on the assumption that these tests are valid?
To show the untrustworthiness of such criteria of age, Groth’s instrumental-test (p. 38) may be adduced. According to this, the instrumental case denoting agency will be found more frequently without the preposition mid in the oldest poems, while the later ones prefer to employ mid. The pure instrumental is never found, for example, in Byrhtnoth, remarks Groth. Exodus, on the contrary has 29 instrumentals without, and 12, or more strictly speaking 10, with mid. Hence Exodus is an early poem. Judith, being late according to Groth’s other test, should have few pure instrumentals, if any. Nevertheless, the pure instrumental is found in ll. 8, 10, 35, 36, 37, 62, 67, 70, 0, 99, 101, 101, 114, 115 (2), 118, 129, 171, 194, 213, 214, 229, 241, 263, 264, 289, 294, 295, 299, 300, 302, 322, 329, 332, 339, in all 35 times; mid is used with the instrumental in ll. 29, 59 (2), 88, 89, 95, 97 (2), 184, 272, 287, in all 11 times. Hence Judith is an early poem. Since Groth’s article-test and his instrumental-test lead to directly contrary results in this case, which is to have the preference?
Kluge’s rime-test is scarcely sufficient of itself to fix the date of a poem, especially when other signs point in an opposite direction, or neutralize each other. As for the transgressions of metrical law, Kluge’s reference is but incidental, and would need elaboration and verification, particularly in view of such recent investigations as those of Sievers (Beiträge, X. 209-314).
Vigfusson and Powell appear to regard Judith as a production of the tenth century, though the express statement is nowhere made. To this opinion they seem to be led by the expanded lines, and by the partial identity of lines in the Battle of Brunanburh with certain ones in Judith.
But these expanded lines occur already in the Cædomonian poetry, and this criterion cannot therefore be relied on for establishing the age of the poem. Such partial identity of lines as exists between Judith and the Battle of Brunanburh also exists between the former and more than one poem beside. xxiii As we have seen, this fact would only imply relationship of some sore, either that both poems were composed by the same author, or that one served as a model to the other. No one, I suppose, would contend that Judith and the Battle of Brunanburh are by the same hand. The difference in tone would alone forbid this supposition. Judith is deeply religious in spirit, Brunanburh is distinctly warlike. The heroine of the former is represented as invoking Divine assistance on her undertaking, and returning thanks for the success vouchsafed her. She regards herself as a mere instrument of Divine vengeance and deliverance, and remains humble notwithstanding the honors and riches which are heaped upon her by the gratitude of her countrymen. Quite otherwise is victory conceived by the panegyrist of Athelstan. His glorification of the prowess which freed the land from treacherous invaders, however agreeable to the feelings of the victors and of all good patriots, savors not a little of boasting. No one can read the closing words of the two poems without perceiving how different are the tempers from which they emanated, though both are designed to commemorate triumph over a foreign foe:
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‘Glory to the Lord’ and ‘exulting in war’; in these two expressions lie the keynotes of the two poems.
If, then, they cannot be by the same author, which is the earlier, the poem which breathes humility, reliance upon God’s help in extremity, awe at his judgments, and a tempered joy when deliverance has been effected, or that which is characterized by great rapidity, vehement martial ardor, and a tendency to unrestrained exultation in the hour of victory?
To answer this question, we must first inquire whether the religious age of Early England preceded or followed the year xxiv 937, the date of the Battle of Brunanburh. No one at all familiar with Old English history can hesitate to reply that the distinctively religious age antedated that period. If, therefore, these two poems reflect the spirit of the epochs in which they were respectively produced, Judith must be the earlier of the two.
Not earlier than Cynewulf, and not later than the year 937 — to this point our reasonings have conducted us. What follows is more conjectural, but perhaps not wholly extravagant or fantastic. Neither extravagant nor fantastic, but simple, literal fact, is the recapitulation of a fragment of Old English history which shall serve to preface the theory.
In the year 856 there came to England the ancestress of the whole line of English sovereigns from William Rufus down, the stepmother of Alfred, the great granddaughter of Charlemagne. Her grandfather was the sole successor of the Emperor of the West, and her father, not yet emperor, was king of the Western Franks. To maintain the glory of this royal house through three generations, the fame of its great progenitor would alone have sufficed; but its renown is derived from better titles. It cherished learning, and was cherished by religion. The Palace School, established by Charlemagne, continued to exist during the reign of Louis the Pious, and sprang into new life under the patronage of Charles the Bald. The latter, following the example of his mother Judith, attracted to his court, the most learned men of his time. So flourishing had the School of the Palace become, that Charles’ royal seat was known, by a significant inversion, as the Palace of the School.
The sceptre of Charlemagne, which only his powerful hands could wield, had become a reed in those of his feeble and vacillating son. No longer adequate to the sway and protection of the people, it was virtually abased before the crozier during those years when Louis was a fugitive or prisoner in his own realm. While the ambitious Charles was struggling for a nominal supremacy, it was Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, who exercised sovereignty in his name. The clerk had taken the xxv place of the warrior in the council, and sometimes on the battlefield. The ecclesiastic had supplanted the duke, and was fast supplanting the king, whom yet, in order the more freely and safely to govern, he permitted to exist and war the semblance of royalty. Learning and religion, which had been transplanted to the shores of England, were now, after having been borne from that country to Germany, enjoying their first Continental Renaissance north of the Alps. Otfrid was writing, in Old High German, his Poetical Harmony of the Gospels. The year which probably witnessed the birth of Charles’ daughter also witnessed, according to the usual reckoning, the birth of the French language, in the famous Strassburg Oath.
This daughter, who was now voyaging across the narrow seas to Britain, must have been fascinating to an unusual degree. Her grandmother, who bore the same name, Judith, was undeniably the most beautiful woman of her generation; her grace and accomplishments won the hearts of all who came within the sphere of her personal influence, and were acknowledged even by those antagonists who most bitterly condemned her intrigues, and deplored the calamitous effects of her maternal ambition. In an age when music was but little cultivated, she was an admirable performer on the organ. Walafrid Strabo, a poet of the day, describes her in the following eulogistic terms:
Everything indicates that the younger Judith inherited, with her grandmother’s amatory disposition and somewhat of her fondness for intrigue and power, the same lovable traits. Though now in her earliest teens, and perhaps not more than twelve years of age, she had gained the affections of Æthelwulf, a mature man, one of the best-loved of English kings. She was yet to disarm by her attractions the animosity of this king’s eldest son and heir, and to share the throne with him after his father’s death. Finally, after the decease of her second English husband, she was to return to her father’s court, and, not xxvi yet twenty years old, was to win the hand of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, a man of whom it was said in the eleventh century: “Flanders never had a man his superior in talent and warlike ability” — a man powerful enough to incur the sentence of excommunication at the instance of his father-in-law, but afterward to obtain its revocation from the Pope himself.
The marriage of the youthful bride with the elderly husband was solemnized by Archbishop Hincmar, the first ecclesiastic and chief power of the realm. Judith went forth richly dressed, with her father’s blessing, the approbation of the whole clergy, and the love of a devoted husband.
The wedded pair were received in England with the acclamations of the people, and Judith took her seat beside her husband, as his equal in rank and dignity, by the consent of the whole body of the nobles, — a thing contrary to the prejudices of the West Saxon nation, and unknown for many years previous. Only Æthelbald, the disaffected son of King Æthelwulf, emboldened by the support of a few conspirators, grudged that his father should return with a young wife, and attempted to exclude him from the kingdom; but this insurrection was quickly allayed by the good sense of the father and the counsel of the nobility.
The warmth of this reception cannot be ascribed, however, solely to the good qualities or pleasing manners of Judith; a large share of the credit is certainly due to King Æthelwulf himself. He was not only easy-tempered, but devout; he had just completed a pilgrimage to Rome, and in the same year had made a donation which so far wore the character of a tithe as to furnish the basis of the whole system of English tithes until the present day. It was no doubt his piety and munificence which led Charles the Bald to provide him with a royal escort to the frontiers of his kingdom on his setting out for Rome, which conciliated the stern and zealous Hincmar, and which won him golden opinions from the nobles and commonalty of his own land.
xxviiYet, however warm the welcome that awaited Æthelwulf, had he returned alone, there can be little doubt that his reception was all the more cordial because of the bride who accompanied him. Not only was she of royal descent, and charming in person and manner; she was likewise descended from that Charlemagne at whose court Egbert had resided during his exile from his native country, and whence he had derived many of his notions concerning the duties and prerogatives of kingship. She came of a house which loved their people, their traditions, their songs, and their language.
Charlemagne, says his biographer and personal friend, used to “write down and commit to memory the very ancient German poems, which related the deeds and wars of the early kings. He likewise began a grammar of his native language.” It was chiefly at the instance of the elder Judith that Otfrid, according to his own statement, undertook to versify the Gospel narrative in German. His words are: “a quibusdam memoriæ dignis fratribus rogatus, maximeque cuiusdam venerandæ matronæ verbis nimium flagitantis, nomine Judith, partem evangeliorum eis Theotisce scriberem . . .” Finally, it was for the ears of the people that Charles and Louis exchanged their pledges in French and German, while their armies stood by to echo and applaud the fraternal engagements.
Judith can hardly have lived at the Frankish court through the susceptible years of childhood without imbibing somewhat of these traditions and this spirit. The Saxons, to whom she was coming, had been the missionaries by whom the evangelization of Germany had been effected. They had sent Alcuin, one of their ablest teachers, to the court of Charlemagne, and thus had been instrumental in founding that School of the Palace which she knew so well. Had she not herself, perchance, been taught the rudiments of learning by John Erigena, the present head of the school, who had emigrated to France about the time of her birth? Had he not instilled into her his own doctrines concerning the freedom of the will, thus making her somewhat more thoughtful and less volatile, at the risk xxviii of strengthening in her an imperious and even headstrong disposition?
Strong in purpose she must already have been, notwithstanding a liability to be enslaved by a love of art and splendor, or by her own wilder passions. Strong, for she had fallen heir to the energy of Charlemagne, and the resistless will of the elder Judith. Strong, for she had been born into all the troubles of a stormy reign, had heard the savage Norsemen at their work of rapine and slaughter, and nevertheless retained enough self-possession to win half the throne of England’s rightful overlord, and to take her seat in the face of precedent, at the risk of insult and civil war, overthrowing all opposition with the authority of her husband and her own girlish smile.
The Danes were still harrying France; but now for eight years, after repeated invasions and alternate successes and defeats, they cease to harry England. This very year is the year of their withdrawal, though they go on to capture Orleans, and, a few months afterward, to burn the churches of Paris. Might it not seem, to the excited national imagination, to a people wild with delight at the departure of their cruel foe, wild with admiration of this graceful, queenly presence and courtly speech, that the very coming of their youthful but keen-witted ally had banished the spoiler, and enabled the defenders of England, in the strength of their enthusiasm, to complete the final expulsion of the heathen? Would the clergy have been unapt to flatter Æthelwulf, by attributing such powers to this idolized creature, the very whimsicality of whose caprice must have seemed to him superhuman wisdom? May they not themselves have believed that her coming at this time was opportune and providential, cementing, as she did, an alliance between the two civilized kingdoms, and bringing the terror of France to unite, against the barbarian, with the terror of England? After her marriage with Æthelbald, the clergy may have stigmatized her, and conspired to blacken her memory from that day to this, even as was afterwards done by the servile Frankish bishops at the command of her father; but at this xxix moment they are more likely to have overwhelmed her with adulation, to have ascribed to her the salvation of the realm, and even to have paid court to her with poems, in which delicate flattery should play upon the name which had suddenly grown dear, and, in glorifying the national heroine of the ancient people of God, should indicate the position accorded to herself by the loyalty and gratitude of those whom he had chosen to be emissaries and soldiers of the faith in their later age.
Poems, or a poem — the poem a fragment of which we still possess.
This, then, is the theory I would propound: the poem of Judith was composed, in or about the year 856, in gratitude for the deliverance of Wessex from the fury of the heathen Northmen, and dedicated, at once as epinikion and epithalamion, to the adopted daughter of England, the pride, the hope, the darling of the nation.
It may be objected that there is no proof of such popular enthusiasm and fervent piety as would be implied by this hypothesis. But the fact is attested by contemporary historians: Asser is authority for the second, and both Asser and the English Chronicle for the first. It is Asser who records the institution of what have since been called tithes and Peter’s pence as occurring within the year s855-858; and it is Asser who says: “When Æthelwulf, therefore, was coming from Rome, all that nation, as was fitting, so delighted in the arrival of the old man, that, if he had permitted them, they would have expelled his rebellious son Æthelbald, with all his counsellors, out of the kingdom. But he, as we have said, acting with great clemency and prudent counsel, so wished things to be done, that the kingdom might not come into danger; and he placed Judith, daughter of King Charles, whom he had received from her father, by his own side on the regal throne, without any controversy or enmity from his nobles, even to the end of his life, contrary to the perverse custom of that nation.” With the statement concerning the rejoicing, the English Chronicle substantially agrees.
Again, it may be urged that such marks of honor were not xxx customary at that period, that to praise a Teutonic princess, and especially such a Teutonic princess, by likening her to a Jewish heroine, was not only unheard-of, but would have been impossible and inconceivable.
The rejoinder is not far to seek; it is a matter of record that a poet of whom mention has already been made, Walafrid Strabo, addressed a poem to the Frankish royal family just twenty-seven years before this time, in which he compares the elder Judith to her Biblical namesake. It is likewise matter of record that in 836, just twenty years before, the learned Rabanus Maurus, one of the first theologians and scholars of that epoch, dedicated to the same Judith, wife of Louis the Pious and mother of Charles the Bald, his commentary upon the Book of Judith, accompanying it with a prayer for his empress, couched in heroic verse, and with an Epistle Dedicatory, in which he averred that he had inscribed his work to her because she bore the name of Judith, and that he also dedicated to her his commentary on Esther, because she occupied a similar station to that illustrious queen. These are his words: “De cætero, qui vos compari laudabili excellere ingenio, et sanctarum mulierum quas sacra Scriptura commemorat, vitrutes ac studium in bono opere imitari, non frustra arbitratus sum quarumdam illarum historiam, allegorico sensu ad sanctæ Ecclesi7aelig; mysterim a nobis translatam, vestro nomini dicare atque transmittere, Judith videlicet, atque Esther: quarum unam coæquatis nomine, alteram dignitate. . . . Accipite ergo Judith Homonymam vestram, castitatis exemplar, et triumphali laude perpetuis eam præconiis declarate . . . Esther quoque similiter reginam regina, in omni pietatis et sanctitatis actione imitabilem, vobis ante oculos cordis semper ponite.” (Migne, Patrologia CIX 539 ff.) If this be regarded as puerility, it is still of a higher order than the acrostic written on the name of Charles the Bald, or at all events than the poem of three hundred lines in his honor, every word of which began with C.
That the subject of Judith was a popular one among the poets of that reign, most probably because the Danes, who xxxi exulted in their heathenism, and lost no opportunity of manifesting their contempt and hatred of Christianity, were supposed to be prefigured by the Assyrians, is indicated by the existence of a fragmentary Latin version of the Biblical narrative, which one of its editors assigns to the close of the eight century or the beginning of the ninth, while the latest historian of that literature declares that it cannot possibly be later then the year 871, and may belong to the preceding period (Du Méril, Poésies Populaires Latines, p. 184; Dümmler, in Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altherthum, XI 261 ff.; Ebert, Geschichte der Literatur des Abendlande im Mittelalter, II 316-7).
Assuming for an instant the truth of our conjecture — that the poem was composed in honor of Judith, Queen of England, and that it was written in or about the year 856, who can have been its author? Shall we go far astray in supposing it to have been Swithhun, Bishop of Winchester, who is known to have been Æthelwulf’s teacher, his bosom friend and confidant, and to have survived him by four years? Who would look with more complacency upon Æthelwulf’s deeds, or rejoice more sincerely in the welfare of the land, secured by the king’s benefactions, the repulse of the Danes, the foreign alliance, and the exultant satisfaction of the people? That we have nothing else from his pen can hardly be urged against this supposition. He was a man of varied activities, and, if not a poet by profession, might well have been seized by the divine afflatus at such a moment, when affection for his king, the pride of a patriot, and the gratified longings of a Churchman, were all blended in a single feeling, and perhaps warmed into still livelier sensibility by the sight of youthful buoyancy and loveliness, creating happiness, and revelling in the happiness it created.
A collateral circumstance, insufficient of itself to form the basis of a theory, but not to be disregarded as a corollary or confirmation of our hypothesis, is to be found in the well-known story of Alfred’s introduction to the lore contained in books. According to Asser, King Alfred remained illiterate xxxii till he was twelve years old or more, that is, we may infer, till the year 860 or 861. Asser goes on to state: “On a certain day, therefore, his mother who was showing him and his brothers a Saxon book of poetry, which she held in her hand, and said, ‘Whichever of you shall the soonest learn this volume shall have it for his own.’ Stimulated by these words, or rather by the Divine inspiration, and allured by the beautifully illuminated letter at the beginning of the volume, he spoke before all his brothers, who, though his seniors in age, were not so in grace, and answered, ‘Will you really give that book to one of us, that is to say, to him who can first understand and repeat it to you?’ At this his mother smiled with satisfaction, and confirmed what she had before said. Upon which the boy took the book out of her hand, and went to his master to read it, and in due time brought it to his mother and recited it.”
It is frequently assumed that Alfred’s own mother, Osburgha, was alive at the time of this event, and that it was she who thus incited him to learning. But Æthelwulf married Judith in 856, on his return from a pilgrimage to Rome, the solemn ceremonial, which is still extant, being conducted by the highest clerical potentate in France. Is this fact consistent with the belief that Osburgha was still living? She was “noble by birth and by nature,” and the exemplary king could have had no cause for putting her away. And even had he been so minded, and had gone so far as to perpetrate this inconceivable folly and iniquity, could he have done so with the tacit connivance and approval of the Pope, whom Hincmar would have been elated to detect in such a fault, and of Hincmar himself, who was closely watched by his brother prelates and by emissaries from Rome? But, supposing Æthelwulf had escaped this double scrutiny, would his nobles and the great body of his subjects have extended to him so hearty a welcome upon his return, if his true and lawful wife, “noble by birth and by nature,” had still been living, repudiated and disgraced, to witness the triumph of her successor? Only two years after, on the occasion of Æthelbald’s marriage, xxxiii the nation proved very sensitive with respect to wickedness of a similar king. Would they have closed their eyes to it in one whose years should have conspired with his honor to fortify him against such a temptation, and whose reputation for saintliness of life must have been coextensive with the knowledge of his name?
Osburgha, then, mush have been dead before Æthelwulf wedded Judith. When Alfred learned to read, Judith was either the wife of Æthelbald, or only recently widowed for the second time. Her inherited love for learning (of which we know nothing in Osburgha’s case) would naturally lead her to devote much of her leisure to reading. In purely theological books she would scarcely have taken a deep interest. The granddaughter of the most highly cultivated woman in France, who excelled in the dance as well as in her knowledge of polite letters, is much more likely to have been attracted to poetry than to profound disquisitions on subtle points of controversy. It is not to be wondered at if, in conformity with the example of her great grandfather, she spent much time over the songs of her adopted people, akin in blood and sentiment to her own race, and still nearer to her heart because they had accepted her so frankly and cordially on her first coming among them. Nor is it surprising that, with her artistic instincts, she should have preferred illuminated manuscripts to those which were merely legible. Winsome in herself, would she not appear still more winsome to the adolescent Alfred when bending over the poems he loved, and which, through his whole life, he was never weary of persuading others to learn by heart? Would she not be peculiarly attractive when scanning the pages written in her own praise, and blending the sensation of gratified vanity with passionate admiration of the heroic ideal presented? The volume composed as a tribute to herself, written and embellished for her own use, would have a peculiar value in her eyes. May it not have been this volume, the Judith, that Alfred learned to read, and that inspired him with deeper abhorrence of paganism, and a more resolute xxxiv determination to defend his own people against its foreign adherents, while he confirmed them in their attachment to Christianity by his teachings and his life?
Whatever may be thought of this latter hypothesis, its acceptance or rejection in no way affects the considerations advanced in favor of the principal theory. This theory appears, better than any hitherto propounded, to harmonize with all the relevant facts; and may perhaps be allowed to stand until superseded by a better.
The sources of our poem are contained in the Apocryphal Book of Judith, particularly in the portion included between VIII 33 and XVI 1 inclusive. The order of events is not that of the original narrative. Many transpositions have been made in the interest of condensation and for the purpose of enhancing the dramatic liveliness of the story. Besides, the poet has not scrupled to add embellishments of his own invention, as will be more fully pointed out under the next head. The passages which seem to have been directly interwoven into the substance of the narrative are here subjoined, in the order adopted by the old English poet.
[The remainder of the Introduction is either spoilers or highly technical discussions of Anglo-Saxon grammar. Should anyone care to know this, and requests it, it will then be forthcoming.]
[Passing over this for now, the English text of Judith follows. The Anglo-Saxon version and the glossary are also not up, but available on request.]
Begin the text of Judith by clicking HERE.