Many references to Boethius that are of a personal nature
are removed, and attitudes refl ecting the circumstances
in which the original was written are softened. Boethius,
the philosopher-politician, imprisoned and about to be
executed by the king he had served, attacks the pursuit
of wealth, position, power, and fame, all of which come
under Fortune’s jurisdiction and fall in abundance on the
most wicked people. Alfred, the ruler, sees power and
wealth as both necessary and potentially good, having
been bestowed on men by God so that they may do his
will. Honor and fame are not to be rejected, and it is right
that a man’s reputation should live after him as an en-
couragement and example to others. In transforming his
Latin original in this way Alfred resembles the translator
of Orosius, who also takes great liberties with his text
and moves from an exercise in polemic, showing how
evils have ever occurred in cycles, to a demonstration
of God’s mercy as manifested through and after Christ’s
birth. However, both Alfred and the Orosius translator
preserve the structural divisions of their sources.
A different kind of freedom is exercised in the work
known as the Soliloquies. A lengthy allegorical preface
is followed by an adaptation of Augustine’s Soliloquies
refl ecting the king’s major concerns; subsequently Al-
fred draws on Augustine’s De videndo Deo, the Bible,
and works by Gregory the Great. The text, organized in
three books, for much of its length follows Augustine
in using dialogue form: the speakers are Mod (“Mind”)
and Gesceadwisnes (“Discrimination” or “Reason,”
Augustine’s Ratio), and the subjects explored include
the nature of God and of the soul, the eternal qualities
of knowing, what constitutes Truth, and the many roads
to Wisdom, that is, to God. Much space is devoted to
the subject of the immortality of the soul, in an attempt
to reply to a question asked by Augustine at the end of
his Soliloquies but not answered there.
The interest of Alfred’s works for the modern reader
does not, however, lie solely in the modifi cations of
substance that he makes to his primary sources. The
perceived need for clarifi cation has resulted in many
minor additions and modifi cations, a need met also in
the Orosius, where the Latin author’s assumption of
classical and historical knowledge in his audience has
led the OE translator to make an extraordinary number of
expansions—telling the story of Regulus, for instance,
or the Rape of the Sabines, or Cato’s suicide. Alfred
similarly fi lls in a number of details, such as the fate
of Busiris, and relates at some length the stories of Or-
pheus and Eurydice and of Ulysses and Circe. Like the
translator of the Orosius he has drawn his material from
an impressive range of classical and patristic sources,
though whether directly or via an intermediary cannot be
determined. In the case of the Pastoral Care we know,
from Alfred’s own preface, that the king had the work
explained to him by the group of English, Welsh, and
continental scholars he had gathered round him. The
introductions to the Psalms and some of the explanations
within them appear to be derived from written commen-
taries. Boethius’s Consolation, according to William of
Malmesbury, was explained to Alfred by Asser, though
whether orally or in writing is not stated. Attempts to
identify a written form of Asser’s explanation have so
far failed. The use of a commentary or glossed manu-
scripts might account for a number of the additions in
Alfredian texts (as, for instance, the many identifi cations
of biblical quotations in the Pastoral Care) but cannot
be proven for these or indeed for the new information
in the OE Orosius.
Another important and interesting group of changes
refl ects attempts by the king to modify the severity of
some of the harsher pronouncements of his sources.
So, for instance, when Gregory’s Regula pastoralis
states that all sins will be punished on Doomsday, the
Pastoral Care refers to all sins that are unatoned for;
when Gregory condemns those who abandon a good
work unfi nished, Alfred inserts the words “willingly
and deliberately”; when Gregory quotes the statement
from James 4:4 that one must not become a friend of
the world, Alfred supplies the important qualifi cation,
“too immoderately.” Gregory’s list of sins for which God
will make exception is extended to include not only sins
committed out of ignorance or folly but also those com-
mitted from the instincts of the fl esh or from weakness
of character or from infi rmity of mind or body. Similarly,
in the Boethius translation, Alfred regularly reminds his
reader that punishment can be avoided by repentance
and constantly stresses God’s mercy: God judges by the
good will and not by the performance. In the Psalms
the statement that God hates all who work iniquity is
modifi ed to apply only to those who do not abandon it
or repent of it, and a similar qualifi cation is added to the
claim that “those who do evil shall be exterminated.”
In the Soliloquies as in the Boethius, the king refuses
to agree that wealth is necessarily bad and that honor
should be abandoned unless it is excessive. Perhaps the
most interesting “minor” changes, however, are those
that involve making potentially diffi cult points more
accessible through simple and familiar analogues.
Alfred’s love of expanded metaphor and simile mani-
fests itself in his preface to the Soliloquies as well as in
the body of his works. Favorite themes include fl owing
water and ships; others refl ect the preoccupations of
a ruler and the everyday concerns of his people: the
ways to a king’s court, for instance, or the relation-
ship between a man and his lord, or the building of a
dwelling. A Boethian simile comparing the universe to
a number of spheres turning on a center, is replaced by
an elaborate and carefully sustained image, explaining
the relationship between various sorts and conditions of
men and God in terms of a wheel set on an axle.ALFRED THE GREAT