helped by such legends as the 11th-century tale of how
he allowed a peasant woman’s cakes to burn as he mused
on the fate of Wessex and the apocryphal 13th-century
Proverbs of Alfred. It reached an apogee in his Victorian
representation as father of the navy and founder of liber-
ties and national unity. At least in proclaiming Alfred’s
greatness these myths have a grain of truth.Alfred’s Infl uence on Learning
In spite of what he described as the “various and mani-
fold preoccupations” of his kingdom, King Alfred not
only achieved considerable political success but also
instigated and made a major contribution toward the
revival of learning in Anglo-Saxon England. In a letter
prefaced to his Pastoral Care he relates, not without
some rhetorical exaggeration, how greatly education
had declined by the time that he came to the throne,
with few people able to understand Latin, the language
of learning. For Alfred learning and the wisdom that
could be acquired as a result of it were essential to
the spiritual as well as to the economic health of his
kingdom: loss of wisdom, he believed, brought with it
calamity. Aware that many who did not know Latin could
yet read English, he resolved to provide essential texts
in the vernacular and called on his scholars to join him
in translating those books that were “most necessary
for all men to know.”
Alfred himself produced three major works—the
Pastoral Care, the Consolation of Philosophy, and the
Soliloquies—writing mainly in prose but partly in verse;
he was apparently also the translator of the fi rst 50 prose
psalms of the Paris Psalter. In addition he incorporated
translation from the Bible into an important preface to
his collection of laws, which set out his concepts of law
and lawgiving. How far his colleagues responded to his
request for translation is not known. Only one other
attributable vernacular work has survived from the late
9th century, Wærferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dia-
logues, and Alfred’s preface to this work tells us that it
was commissioned for his personal use, that he “might
occasionally refl ect in his mind on heavenly things amid
these earthly tribulations.” However, he acknowledges
the help of four people in his Pastoral Care, while the
anonymous translations of Orosius’s Seven Books of
History against the Pagans and Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History, both of which were once wrongly attributed to
him, probably date from this period and may also have
been undertaken as part of his plan.
Alfred is sometimes described as father of English
prose. His patronage and personal involvement in trans-
lation must have contributed to the acceptance of the ver-
nacular as an appropriate medium for serious subjects.
His works were still being copied in the 12th century. At
the same time there seems to have been a fl owering ofprose literature in the last part of the 9th century. Works
apparently composed in this period include not only the
OE Orosius, the OE Bede, Wærferth’s translation of the
Dialogues, and Alfred’s own compositions but also the
fi rst sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the OE
Martyrology. The Bede and the Dialogues follow their
sources faithfully. Alfred’s translations and the OE Oro-
sius, in contrast, are rarely word-for-word. The Pastoral
Care is essentially a paraphrase of Gregory’s Regula
pastoralis with explanations and expansions, including
a metrical epilogue, based on John 7:38. Gregory was
writing for those in authority in spiritual matters, advis-
ing “rulers” both how to order their own lives and how
to advise the different types of people in their charge,
but many of his injunctions applied to the exercise of
authority in general and had come to be seen as ap-
plicable to secular rulers. In Alfred’s hands it becomes
virtually a treatise about power and authority.
Liberties are also taken with the text in the prose
psalms: Alfred demonstrates a surprising willingness
to modify scripture here and elsewhere, with explana-
tion and comment freely inserted. So, for instance, the
scribe’s quill of Psalm 44:2 is “Christ, the word and
tongue of God the Father”; the king’s daughters of verse
10 are the souls of righteous men, while the queen is the
Christian church. To all the psalms except the fi rst are
prefi xed brief introductions, giving their meaning at sev-
eral levels, including their signifi cance for every human
being. Indeed, what makes Alfred’s writings of peculiar
interest and importance is the way the king has modi-
fi ed and added to the substance of his (often learned)
Latin originals, in order to render them intelligible to
Anglo-Saxons, familiar only with a limited amount of
writing in the vernacular, and, where appropriate, even
to change the arguments, to bring them into line with
his own thinking.
The texts in which Alfred demonstrates the most
independence are the renderings of Boethius and Au-
gustine. In the Consolation of Philosophy Boethius,
writing in the Platonic tradition, sought to demonstrate
the divine ordering of the universe without appeal to
Christian revelation. Alfred, reading the work in the light
of the Christian perspective of his day and as a ruler,
accepting the doctrine of merit and the forgiveness of
sins, rejects a number of Boethius’s ideas and recasts
his source. He makes substantial changes to passages
involving the Platonic doctrine of Forms, the concep-
tion of a World-Soul, and a belief in the preexistence
of the soul. The personifi cations Natura and Fortuna
are removed; Lady Philosophy becomes se heofoncund
wisdom (masc. “divine Wisdom”) or gesceadwisnes
(fern. “Discrimination, Reason”), while her interlocutor
“Boethius” is frequently replaced by Mod (“Mind”),
with the effect of making the speaker appear less of an
individual and more of a representative of humanity.ALFRED THE GREAT