Cain’s Face, and Other Problems: The Legacy
of the Earliest English Bible Translations
Richard Marsden
Girton College, CambridgeEditor's Note: This article contains Greek and Hebrew, as well as Anglo-Saxon. If characters are not displayed correctly in your browser, consider downloading the Ezra and Gentium fonts from SIL, and consider using the Firefox browser.
Scripture was being put into English at least six hundred years before Tyndale’s
martyrdom and four hundred and fifty years before the making of the Wycliffite Bibles.
The roll-call of great Englishmen involved in promoting Scripture in the vernacular
must be expanded to include King Alfred, Ælfric, the self-effacing abbot of Eynsham,
and other, unnamed, Anglo-Saxons. The language of the earliest biblical translations, the
most important of which were made in the two centuries preceding the Norman Conquest
of 1066, was Old English. Although this form of our language is not easy to read for the
uninitiated, the languages of Wyclif and Tyndale (Middle and early Modern English,
respectively) were its direct descendants. The question I want to pose in this paper,
therefore, is an obvious one: to what extent, if at all, were the later translations influenced by
he earlier? Can a continuous biblical tradition be discovered, paralleling the linguistic
revolution of English and linking the work of the Anglo-Saxon translators with that of
their successors in the fourteenth century and beyond?
The general question of the continuity of English literature between the arrival of the
French-speaking Normans at the end of the eleventh century and the reassertion of the
English language in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries has proved difficult and
contentious. In his celebrated attempt to prove the existence of a continuous tradition of
English prose, R. W. Chambers used the evidence of both homiletic writings and Old
Testament translations from the Anglo-Saxon period, but his account contained much special pleading and was short on detail in crucial places. Charles Butterworth, as part
his classic study of the Bible in English. considered specifically (and uniquely, I
believe) the possibility of a continuity of scriptural tradition and suggested two possible
mechanisms: the building up of ‘an accepted standard or a traditional style for biblical
translation’, which would then have persisted from generation to generation; or the direct
influence of early manuscripts consulted by later scholars. He concluded, however, that
‘no positive indication’ exists that either process took place. I shall be displaying less
caution than Butterworth in my own re-examination of the subject. This does not mean
that I shall claim to have established the wholesale direct influence of the Old English on
the Middle English translations, but I do want to suggest that there are specific examples
apparent influence which justify further research. There are indications, too, that other
mechanisms of continuity may have been at work than those considered by Butterworth.
However, I can begin my exploration of possible connections uncontroversially, with
what I would call the ‘politics’ of continuity. These loomed large in the context of late
medieval and Reformation Bible translation, when the existence of Old English scriptural
translations was deliberately emphasized by scholars and ecclesiastics, even if the
texts had not actually been read in most cases. In 1539, only three years after Tyndale’s
death, Thomas Cranmer noted in his Preface to the Great Bible (the second of
Coverdale’s translations and the first ‘authorized’ version of Scripture in English) how
many hundreds of years before, Scripture had been ‘translated and read in the Saxon
tongue, which at that time was our mother tongue, whereof there remain yet diverse
copies, found lately in old abbeys, of such antique manner of writing and speaking that
few men now are able to read and understand them’. In 1571, Archbishop Matthew
Parker, a key figure in the transmission of Anglo-Saxon culture through his interest in
manuscripts, supervised publication of one such ‘antique’ manuscript, an edition of the
Gospels translated into Old English. It was printed by John Daye and entitled The
Gospel of the fower Euangelistes translated in the olde Saxons tyme out of Latin into the
vulgare toung of the Saxons, newly collected out of auncient Monumentes of the sayd
Saxons, and now published for testimonie of the same. The matryrologist John Foxe
contributed a preface, addressed to Queen Elizabeth, in which he implicitly associated the
Old English Gospels with what he called that ‘Pristine state of olde conformitie’ to which
the Church was now going to be returned, he clearly hoped, by the young queen:
Likewise haue we to vunderstand & conceaue, by the edition thereof, how the religion presently taught and professed in the Church at thys present, is no new reformation of thinges lately begonne, which were not before, but rather a reduction of the Church to the Pristine state of olde conformitie, which once it had, and almost lost by discontinaunce of a fewe later yeares.
Daye’s edition of the Old English was not set out as in the original manuscripts, in continuous prose with few divisions, but broken up into chapters and verses, with each verse
numbered and on a new line, following current conventions. This was an imposition
which reinforced visibly the reformers’ belief in the continuity of the tradition.
However, the sixteenth-century champions of vernacular translation were doing nothing
original in this harking back to venerable tradition, for the same justification by
precedent had been made by their forerunners of two hundred years previously, the
Wycliffite translators. It was they who had been the first at any period to provide English
readers with a complete Bible. In the Preface which John Purvey wrote to the second of
the Wycliffite versions in about 1390, he first ingeniously invoked Jerome’s Latin
Vulgate itself as a precedent for vernacular translation; after all, he argued, Latin was no
more nor less than the great doctor’s own mother tongue. He then went on to refer to
some of the earliest English translations:
Lord God! sithen [since] at the bigynnyng of feith so manie men translatiden into Latyn, and to greet profyt of Latyn men, lat oo [let a] symple creature of God translate into English, for profyt of English men; for if worldli clerkis loken [examine] wel here croniclis and bokis, thei shulden fynde that Bede translatide the bible, and expounide myche in Saxon, that was English, either [or] comoun langage of this lond, in his tyme; and not oneli Bede, but also king Alured [Alfred], that foundide Oxenford [!], translatide in his laste daies the bigynning of the Sauter into Saxon, and wolde more, if he hadde lyued lengere [lived longer].
Bede and Alfred were the names most frequently cited in connection with the earlier
translations in five tracts defending vernacular translation which were written between
Wyclif’s death in 1384 and the prohibition of the Wycliffite translation in 1408. As
Margaret Deanesly has shown, this claim was taken very seriously by the opponents of
‘lollardy’, who felt forced to counter-argue. The Franciscan, William Butler, for example
writing in 1401, admitted that there had been earlier translations but put forward the
rather curious argument that it was all right for the common people to read Scripture in
their own tongue at a time when few of them were converted to the faith (the situation
he assumed for the earlier English period), but not when all had become converts. In sup-
port, he cited Aristotle’s dictum: ‘The greater the people, the smaller its understanding.’
Thomas Palmer, a contemporary Dominican opponent of vernacular translation, justified
his opposition with two arguments. If Bede did indeed translate the whole Bible, the
Church had never accepted it; but in fact Bede had not really made one at all, or at least
had only rendered a small amount for practical purposes.
The facts known to Purvey and others about the earliest translations were essentially
correct, though one of the most important had been overlooked. There was never a complete
vernacular Bible in the Anglo-Saxon period. If all the scattered scriptural passages
cited in Old English translation in the numerous works of homily and sermon which survive from the Anglo-Saxon period were assembled and joined with the more substantial
translations that were made (and to which I shall return), we would end up, I estimate,
with something in excess of a quarter of a complete Bible.
The earliest translation of scriptural prose has often been attributed to the great Bede,
who passed his long life from the age of seven (c.680) at the monastery of Jarrow in
Northumbria, where he taught devotedly and wrote numerous works of exegesis,
commentary and history. An eye-witness reported that the indefatigable scholar was still
working on his deathbed, trying to finish, among other tasks, ‘the gospel of St John from
the beginning as far as the words, "But what are they among so many?", which he was
turning into our language to the profit of God’s Church’. Remarkably then, it seems that
we can pinpoint an English translation of the first six chapters of John (as far as 6:9) to
the year 735 and specifically (from other information available) to the weeks following
Easter. We must be cautious, however, about giving too much significance to Bede’s
‘translation of John’. Thomas Palmer, the Dominican whose opposition to vernacular
translation I noted above, was correct in this instance: there is no question of Bede’s having
produced a complete vernacular gospelbook, let alone a Bible. If he had, his deathbed
efforts would presumably have been unnecessary, and no such work is mentioned in
the long list of his achievements which he himself left us at the end of his Historia ecclesiastica; all of them are in Latin.
We do know, however, that Bede sanctioned the use of the vernacular in the teaching
of monks. In a letter he wrote to archbishop Egbert of York in 734, for instance, he
recommended that not only laymen but also clerics and monks who were ignorant of Latin
ought to be taught the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in English, as he himself had often
done. Almost certainly, Bede’s translation of the first six chapters of John (which does
not survive in any form) was for didactic purposes. It may have been an interlinear gloss
to the Latin text; such glosses were particularly prevalent in the later Anglo-Saxon period.
The eight-century Vespasian Psalter, whose Latin text was glossed during the mid-ninth century, has sometimes been cited as the earliest surviving translation of Scripture
into English, though, like all such word-for-word renderings, it would have made little
sense in its own right as continuous prose. In fifteen of some twenty-five Anglo-Saxon
psalters that survive, the Psalms are wholly or partly glossed. which indicates that hun-
dreds of glossed psalters must have circulated in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Famously, the Lindisfarne Gospels, a late seventh-century manuscript of the Vulgate
Gospels, was given a continuous Old English gloss by the priest Aldred at Chester-le-Street in the mid-tenth century; and not long afterwards the Rushworth Gospels, an Irish
manuscript of about 800, was provided with a gloss by two monks, one of whom seems
to have used the Lindisfarne gloss as a crib.
The sixteenth-century Bible translators were aware from hearsay sources of what has
more recently been confirmed by linguistic analysis, that King Alfred (871-99) translated
the first fifty Psalms into English. This is the earliest attempt that we know of to put
a substantial continuous portion of Scripture into Old English prose. After saving the
kingdom of Wessex from imminent Viking conquest, building up defences against further
attack and creating the conditions under which the first politically unified English
state would emerge, Alfred (deservedly called ‘the Great’) embarked on an ambitious
programme of educational reform. His aim was to restore throughout his kingdom the
standards of learning which had been reached in Bede’s day (150 years earlier) but had
since disastrously fallen away. According to his contemporary biographer, Asser, Alfred
did not master Latin until 887, when he was nearly forty, but he was to reach a sufficient level of competence to be able to undertake, albeit with helpers, major translations
of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae and
Augustine’s Soliloquia. His version of the first fifty psalms seems to have been made
towards the end of his life and survives in a manuscript of the mid-eleventh century
known as the ‘Paris Psalter’. The manuscript also has Psalms 51-150 in a metrical Old
English version, but this is not associated with Alfred. As we have seen, there was a long-standing Anglo-Saxon tradition of using the vernacular to gloss Latin texts of the Psalms,
probably as a help in teaching Latin to novice monks, but such glosses followed the Latin
literally, word by word, and could not be read independently of the Latin. Alfred’s continuous idiomatic translation was thus a new departure. Why was it made? Alfred seems
to have become increasingly pious as he grew older and his piety was closely tied up with
his conviction of his own regal destiny and of England’s rightful place in the great
scheme of divine history. He may even have seen a model of himself in King David, the
putative author of the Psalms - a king, like him, bedevilled by seemingly intractable
problems. Thus Alfred’s motives for the translation seem to have been a mixture of personal inclination and a sense of national destiny, but it is the personal dimension that
makes Alfred’s Psalms, for me, one of the most moving Old English texts. Although the
core translation is very accurate and follows the Latin closely, Alfred has no compunction about adding, altering and, most notably, amplifying the rather cryptic Latin. There
is the sense of a personal voyage of discovery in the king’s words and a consequent quality of spontaneity, which together endow the work overall with something approaching
lyricism. One of the arguments of the sixteenth-century opponents of vernacular translation of Scripture, derided by Tyndale in the address ‘to the reader’ which prefaced his
translation of the Pentateuch, was that direct knowledge of Scripture might make people
rise against their king. It is a telling comment on changing ideas of kingship that the earliest English translation of Psalms should not only have been made by an English king
but have been used, at least in part, to bolster his kingship.
Extracts from two of Alfred’s versions of the Vulgate Psalms, which he knew in their
‘Roman’ text, will illustrate the ‘personal’ nature of his translation. In Psalm 3, the
Latin of verses 1-2 has: Multi dicunt animae meae non est salus ipsi in Deo eius. Tu
autem Domine susceptor meus es, gloria mea... (‘Many say to my spirit that there is no
salvation for it in its God. But you, Lord, are my protector and my glory...’). Alfred trans-
lates closely and accurately; but he seems to find the movement to the affirmative by
means only of autem too abrupt and so inserts a contradiction of the ‘many’ which serves
also to anticipate what follows: ‘but it is not as they say’; and then for good measure he
inserts a complementary amplification: ‘without any doubt’. His version thus reads:
‘Monige cweðað to minum mode þæt hit næbbe nane hæle æt his Gode. Ac hit nis na swa
hy cweðað, ac þu eart butan ælcum tweon min fultum and min wuldor’. In Psalm 22 (that
is, 23 in the usual Protestant division), Alfred decided to amplify his translation of virga tua et baculus tuus ipsa roe consolata sunt (‘thy rod and thy staff they comfort me’) in verse 5 with an explanation of what the two objects in question signify: ‘that is, your correction and comfort’ (þæt is þin þreaung and eft þin frefrung). Augustine may have provided the basis for this exegesis.
Alfred is associated also with two other smaller portions of scriptural translation, one
from the Old Testament and one from the New. They were most likely not made by the
king himself but were attached to the law code that was probably issued during the 880s
or early 890s. A long ideological prologue about law and law-giving, couched in specifically biblical terms, precedes the law code and opens with a translation of most of
Exodus 20-23, chapters that present the precepts of Mosaic law, and Acts 15:23-9.
which promulgates parts of it. These translations, which include some paraphrase and
amplification, have a transparent political purpose: to give biblical authority for the
English laws and by implication to suggest England as a successor to Israel in the scheme
of Christian history. Vernacular Scripture serves to demonstrate divine continuity.
The Old English versions of Latin works that were produced by Alfred and his
collaborators in the last decades of the ninth century mark the first great phase of vernacular
literary achievement in Anglo-Saxon England. The second was to begin in earnest
some two generations later, in the middle of the tenth century, in the wake of the powerful movement for monastic reform associated principally with the names of Dunstan,
Oswald, and Æthelwold. English monasticism was reorganized and expanded in accordance with principles propagated by the reforming continental Benedictines. New standards in devotional life were demanded and these in turn catalysed a new phase of intellectual endeavour, with the production by the reformers and their successors of an astonishing library of works in the vernacular. Among them were the most important and
influential of the Old English biblical translations: a complete gospelbook (the so-called
‘West Saxon Gospels’), and a compilation of Old Testament books in translation, of
which one extant copy is a Heptateuch and another an illustrated Hexateuch. Both the
New and the Old Testament translations were made, independently, towards the end of
the tenth century and sufficient copies or the remains of copies of both survive to prove
that they were widely used. Furthermore, they were being copied, emended and annotated through the twelfth century and on into the beginning of the thirteenth.
The Old Testament translations known collectively as the Old English Heptateuch. the
title under which they have been edited, survive in two main manuscripts: London,
British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv, a lavishly illustrated Hexateuch. and the Oxford,
Bodleian Library, Laud misc. 509, a Heptateuch containing the same text of Genesis to
Joshua as the Claudius manuscript with the addition of a portion of Judges. There are
seven other manuscripts containing parts of the work, all but two of them fragmentary.
The Old English Heptateuch is of especial interest because we know the identity of one
of the translators involved. This is Abbot Ælfric, who dominates the history of late Old
English prose to an extraordinary extent, mainly through his two great series of Catholic
Homilies and two volumes of Saints’ Lives. Some of these works. such as homilies or
sermons featuring 1-2 Kings, Job, Esther, Judith and Maccabees, contain further substantial portions of Scripture in translation. Ælfric set new standards in vernacular prose
and showed new possibilities for the English language; after him, for the first time in
English literature, we can talk confidently about prose style as a deliberately wielded
instrument of communication. Little is known about, Ælfric as a person. except that he
spent most of his life at the abbey of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, where he ran the monastic
school, and was then made Abbot of Eynsham, just south of Oxford, a house newly
founded by his patron, the ealdorman Æthelweard Most of his works were written
during the last decade of the tenth century and the first few years of the eleventh. His
contribution to the Heptateuch translation appears to have been Genesis chapters 1-24, the
second half of Numbers, and all that there is of Joshua and Judges. The compilation
does not in fact offer a complete translation and in the later books there is much omis-
sion and editing, and some paraphrasing; in the earlier books, however, close translation
of the Latin predominates.
We do not know when the Heptateuch compilation was made, nor for whom; but we
can be certain about the original purpose of at least part of it, for, Ælfric wrote an explanatory preface to his translation of the first half of Genesis and this has survived in two
of the manuscripts. He explains that the translation was made for the laity, though not for
the masses. Ælfric’s patron, Æthelweard, had asked him for it, and he and his son,
Æthelmer, may perhaps be seen as examples of a type of wealthy, literate, and above all
pious nobility who were keen to follow as best they could monastic devotions. The
Heptateuch was assigned to be read in the monastic night offices, in the pre-Lenten and
Lenten periods, so it may be that such an audience — a very specific class of the laity,
many of them important patrons and supporters of the monasteries — was the recipient of
the Heptateuch compilation as a whole, eager to follow for themselves something
approaching monastic devotions during an important period of the ecclesiastical year.
There is no direct evidence for this, however. Although the combination of vernacular
text and illustrations in the Claudius Hexateuch suggests a lay audience, the workmanship of the copy that survives does not indicate that it was prepared for royalty or a particularly high-ranking nobleman.
In his Preface to Genesis, Ælfric reveals himself as the first Englishman (as far as we
know) to face those same doubts about the wisdom of vernacular translation that would
tax later translators. He expresses great anxiety about translating for the laity and he subscribes firmly, in principle at least, to the Augustinian view that Scripture should be
mediated, and that direct access by ignorant people might be a very dangerous thing.
What if, he asks in the preface, the unlearned were to confuse life under the old law with
life under the new and believe that they could behave with the same sexual licence displayed by the patriarchs in Genesis? The spiritual meaning of Scripture beyond the
‘naked narrative’, says (Ælfric, is very deep. But he is clearly aware of a further dimen-
sion to the problem. He writes of ignorant priests (ungelæredan preostas), who under-
stand a little Latin and think that this enables them to be teachers of Scripture. Bede, in
the early eighth century, as I have noted already, knew that he must cater in English for
clerics without adequate Latin, and Alfred, too, in the late ninth century, saw vernacular
translation as a necessary first step in overcoming the ignorance of those in holy orders.
Clerical ignorance was to be a recurring theme among later English translators. In
Tyndale’s Preface to his translation of the Pentateuch, he gives as one of the reasons why
he has suffered persecution in his England the fact that ‘the priests of the country be
unlearned, as God it knoweth there are a full ignorant sort which have seen no more Latin
than that they read in their portesses and missals which yet many of them can scarcely
read’.
The Old English Gospels survive in six more or less complete manuscripts (four
copied in the eleventh century, two in the twelfth) and two fragments. Each Gospel is
translated in its entirety, in a rendering that is close to the Latin and largely accurate. We
know nothing at all about the circumstances of the translation, though we may guess that
t was probably made during the last decade or two of the tenth century. There is no evidence that Ælfric was in any way involved, or that he even knew of the existence of the
translation. Rubrics in a copy associated with Exeter relate the Gospel texts to their liturgical use throughout the year, but this does not mean that the Old English Gospels were
.actually read during Mass as a substitute for the Latin. Roy Liuzza has noted the lack
it evidence that any of the Gospel manuscripts were ever in the hands of laymen; they
were part of monastic or cathedral libraries. What is more, examination of successive
copies suggests a process whereby the originally ‘freestanding’ translation was ‘drawn
sack into the orbit of the Latin text’ by means of added Latin headings and corrections
made to the Old English text, apparently with reference to a Latin, not another Old
English, text.
It is clear that we would be mistaken to regard our two Anglo-Saxon vernacular part-Bibles — a gospelbook and a Heptateuch — as the clear beginning of a movement to provide Scripture for the masses. It is true that pious noblemen or noblewomen may have
been involved, but whatever their initial audiences it is within the monasteries that all the
scriptural translations, of the New and Old Testaments, survived, and there that alterations and emendations were made. These continued into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In one Gospel manuscript, for instance, improvements were made to the Old
English text in the thirteenth century, but the manuscript was still being used in the
fourteenth century, when Latin glosses were added. In one Heptateuch manuscript there has
men updating of the English language, too, by means of Middle English glosses, and the
illustrated Hexateuch carries numerous notes partly in Latin and partly in English, made
in the twelfth century and deriving mostly from the writings of Josephus.
IIOf all freestanding English scriptural translations, the Old English Psalms, Gospels and
Heptateuch were the first into our language, and my fascination for them derives from
this very fact. The putting of Scripture into any vernacular language for the first time is
a coming of age for that language. In being brought face to face with the ineffable texts,
couched as they are in the imagery and syntax of alien cultures and transmitting profound
and often difficult concepts, the vernacular language is stretched to the omit. It may be
found wanting; at the very least it will have to accommodate, to adapt, to explore new
possibilities, and perhaps even to re-invent itself. It will never be quite the same again.
Literary languages have sometimes in effect been created specifically in order to propagate Scripture. Old English itself only began to be fully written with the coming of
Christianity and the adoption of the Roman alphabet. Even earlier another Germanic language, Gothic, had undergone a similar experience and, indeed, the only substantial written record we have of Gothic are fragments of the Gospels and some other biblical books
in a translation made by bishop Ulfilas in the second half of the fourth century. What
especially interests me about the first translations made in Anglo-Saxon England is the
linguistic challenge posed by some of those pivotal moments in the Old Testament narratives which are now such an intimate part of our linguistic, as well as spiritual, consciousness. In most cases the simplest of ideas or actions were involved, not great theological cruces, yet they had been described in the original Hebrew (and then in the
Vulgate translation) in obscure or idiosyncratic words or phrases. Among these pivotal
moments, as we shall see, are Adam’s and Eve’s discovery of their nakedness in Genesis
3 and God’s rejection of Cain’s sacrifice in Genesis 4.
Ælfric himself was well aware of language problems in general and the problems of
scriptural language in particular. This was another of the issues which he tackled in his
Preface to the translation of Genesis. For Ælfric, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were three
sacred languages of equal status, and he was familiar with Jerome’s insistence that in
holy Scripture the very order of the words is a mystery. But Ælfric was also an educator and, like all educators, a pragmatist. He explains in his Preface that Scripture is ‘very
dense with meaning’ and is set out syntactically exactly as God delivered it to Moses
(Ælfric is talking here specifically of the Pentateuch). So, he says, ‘I dare not write in
English anything that is not in the Latin — except in one case, namely, that English and
Latin do not do things in the same way. Always, he who translates from Latin to English
must order things such that the English keeps its own manner, or it will be confusing to
understand for those without knowledge of Latin.’ I am not going to accuse Ælfric of
being disingenuous here, and certainly he is a long long way from the Wycliffite idea that
language is simply the clothing of the law of God, to be changed according to the style
of clothing familiar to a particular people, but the freedom he gives himself to translate
as he sees fit is fairly comprehensive, for the ‘one case’ when the two languages differ
in their way of saying things (that is, in their syntax) is in fact most of the time. The
churchman, heavily influenced by Augustine and others, never loses sight of the almost
numinous character of the sacred text, and of his awesome responsibility to remain faithful to its profound spirit (deopan digelnysse); but the experienced teacher and expert
grammarian knows that a translator who does not truly translate, but who simply, in
effect, glosses, is abrogating the further responsibility of enlightening rather than con-
fusing his flock. This approach is in fact that of Jerome, who, in producing his Latin
Vulgate against great opposition in some quarters, had paid lip-service repeatedly to the
sanctity of the words of Scripture (in Greek and Hebrew) but in practice had exercised
the same sanction implicit in Ælfric’s ‘except in the one case’." The evidence of Ælfric’s
approach is there throughout his translation: in general, he uses Old English idiom when
the Latin is awkward or obscure, but he is prepared to go further in those cases where
there is a chance, not that the words may be misunderstood, but their meaning. In his version of Genesis 6:2, for instance, which contains the notoriously difficult passage about
the sons of God marrying the daughters of men (‘the sons of God, seeing the daughters
of men, that they were fair, took to themselves wives’), Ælfric adds to ‘the sons of God’
an explanation: ðæt wæron gode men ‘who were good men’. He could have found his
authority in an extensive range of patristic works, including Augustine’s City of God.
Another example is found in Genesis 2:13, where Ælfric qualifies the name of the second river of Paradise, Geon, with the statement, seo ys gehaten Nylus ‘it is called the
Nile’ — a sound piece of information, available in Isidore and other sources. We have
seen that Alfred made similar amplifications in his translation of the psalms, though the
approach of the abbot is certainly more scholarly.
Critics have taken at best a rather condescending attitude to the Old English translations of the Gospels and the Heptateuch, laying the blame for shortcomings on the inadequacies of the language itself as much as on the translators. Geoffrey Shepherd suggests
that an educated person would have found the vernacular, during the period before
Wyclif and probably at any time before the sixteenth century, ‘simply and totally inadequate’. A vernacular, he writes, must have ‘relevance and resources’ and especially
‘cultural prestige’ before it can make an acceptable translation, and this must coincide
with an ‘available theology’ for interpretation. Shepherd seriously underestimates the
achievements of late Old English prose, especially in the hands of Ælfric. I would argue
strongly that the Old English language did have the resources and that the abbot of
Eynsham himself, if none other, gave it cultural prestige. The artfully controlled rhetoric
of Ælfric, which in his later homilies involves the use of some of the tools of the alliterative poet to unite the logic of his argument to the form of its expression, has been widely studied and admired." As for an ‘available theology’, my example of, Ælfrician amplification in Genesis 6:2 is enough to suggest that there was one, rooted firmly (as other
examples would confirm) in the core ‘canonical’ works of Augustine, Jerome and the
other fathers, and that it could be used effectively and uncontroversially in the Anglo-Saxon period to add definition to Bible translation in crucial places. The suggestion of
Roy Liuzza that such translations in the Anglo-Saxon period are ‘concessions, not
accomplishments’, undervalues the actual results of their work, I believe. The translations were indeed concessions, in the sense that their aim was probably limited to giving
vernacular access to only parts of Scripture, and for a restricted audience of monks without adequate Latin and perhaps pious laymen or laywomen, and that their making presupposed the softening of a traditional reluctance to vernacularize Scripture.
Nevertheless, they were accomplishments also in respect of the way in which they transmitted lucidly and literately the biblical narratives. Indeed, the stark success of the translation exercise may have contributed to Ælfric’s doubts about the wisdom and propriety
of thus spreading abroad the ‘naked narrative’
There is a particular trap which lies in wait for the analyst of scriptural translation: the
bogey of ‘literalism’. Ælfric himself has been accused of being so concerned to keep to
the letter of the sacred language that he was prepared to write ‘nonsense’ Old English on
occasions. My indignation at such a preposterous idea is already in print, and I need do
no more than summarize my views here. I am convinced that ÆIfric always translated
with calculation, as well as with skill. The instances of apparent over-literal translation
are not always what they seem and sometimes they simply illuminate that crucial
moment (in fact a whole series of crucial moments) to which I alluded above, when a vernacular comes face to face with Scripture for the first time: what does the original mean,
and how is it to be tackled? It is a moment when all the resources of the language are
tapped and when it may have to be shaped anew. Perhaps the greatest skill of the translator in these circumstances lies in knowing the limits of the possible in his language and
then pushing as far as he dare beyond them in a shaping, creating process. Thus when
Ælfric, who as a rule shows no inclination to translate with slavish fidelity the Latin, renders Jerome’s odd ‘cessauerat ab omni opere suo quod creauit Deus ut faceret ’ in Genesis
2:3 as ‘he on ðone dæg geswac his weorces ðæt he gesceop to wyrcenne ’ (‘he rested on that day from all the work which he had created to make’), we may perhaps posit two
reasons. Either the verb ‘gescieppan’ was already in use in Old English in the sense of
‘to intend to’, followed by an infinitive (although there is no other record of it), or that
Ælfric deliberately pushed the verb a very short step from its established use to another,
hardly obscure or revolutionary, one. On occasions he may simply have wanted to retain
something of the numinous quality of a momentous divine statement. Thus in Genesis
17:4 Ælfric apparently chose to translate the Vulgate ‘dixitque Deus ego sum et pactum meum tecum’ literally, with omission of a second copulative verb and thus a spartan and
memorable syntax: ‘ic eom and min wed mid ðe’ (‘I am, and my covenant with you’); but
he was not compelled to do this.
What is instructive is that the critics of Ælfric’s alleged ‘literalism’ have not been outraged, it appears, by other of his ‘literal’ translations. Particularly prominent among these
are the hebraisms which are such a characteristic feature of the Old Testament in translation, not least in Genesis. Rendered nearly always literally by Jerome in the Latin
Vulgate, they were in turn translated more or less literally by Ælfric. And here, at last,
we reach the problem of Cain’s face. In Genesis 4:5, it will be remembered, God refuses Cain’s sacrifice, and Cain’s disappointment is shown by a change in his facial expression. The Vulgate, translating fairly accurately the Hebrew, has iratusque est Cain
uehementer et concidit uultus eius ‘and Cain became mightily angry and his face fell’ or
‘fell down’. The phrase is repeated in the following verse, 4:6, where God asks Cain.
‘Why did your face fall?’ (quare concidit uultus tuus?). Ælfric translated 4:5 quite literally: þa hirsode Caim þearle and his nebwlite ætfeol ‘then Cain became greatly angry
and his face fell, or fell down’. The reason why critics of Ælfric’s translation style have
not protested at this peculiar idiom, ‘his face fell’ (or, as the Authorized Version has it,
‘his countenance fell’), is obvious: it is current in modern English and causes us no problems (though this is not the case, it may be noted, in many other modern languages,
which invariably paraphrase). But what did the Anglo-Saxons make of the idiom? Was
it known in Old English before the fateful day (almost exactly a thousand years ago)
when Ælfric translated Genesis 4:5?
The Hebrew idiom (ויּפּלוּ פּניו ‘his faces fell down’) had been paraphrased in some
Greek versions but in others rendered literally, except that the noun was made singular
(for example, καὶ συνέπεσε τᾳῡ προςώπῳ αὐτοὑ). Both the earlier Latin translators
(working from the Greek) and Jerome (with access to the Hebrew) chose to be literal
also, yet there is reason to think that the ‘falling face’ idiom was never accepted easily
in the Latin. Isidore, in a glossary of scriptural passages, felt that an explanation was
necessary: mutauit colorem uultus sui ‘he changed the colour of his face’. An Old Latin (i.e.
pre-Vulgate) version of the passage from the late first century was even more helpful in
Genesis 4:5: et tristus factus est Cain ualde confusa est facies illius ‘and Cain was very
sad and his face became upset’; but, curiously, it gave a literal rendering of 4:6: et dixit
Deus ad Cain, quare tristis factus es et quare corruit uultus tuus? ‘...why did your face
tall down? The evidence is that the Anglo-Saxons in their turn were in no hurry to
accept the idiom, for when King Alfred came to put Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis into English and had to deal with Gregory’s citation of Genesis 4:5, given in the
usual Vulgate version, he paraphrased: ‘ ða wearð Cain swiðe ierre ond hnipode ofdune ’
(‘Cain became very angry and bowed down ’). The fact that Alfred used this paraphrase
strongly suggests that the literal idiom was not known to him and therefore not yet available in English. More interestingly still, Ælfric’s literal translation of the passage is in
only one version of the Old English text, that in the mid-twelfth-century Cambridge
University Library manuscript which carries a translation of Genesis 1-24:22 which is
believed to be nearest to Ælfric’s original translation. The main Hexateuch and
Heptateuch manuscripts transmit a text which has undergone some revision, and they
omit the clause ‘and his face fell’ altogether, having simply ‘ða wearð Cain ungemetlice
yrre’ (‘Cain became angry without measure’). Perhaps the revisers were unhappy with
the idiom of the falling face; perhaps, indeed, they were the first to accuse Ælfric of ‘literalism’. Whatever the case, I believe that in (Ælfric’s version of Genesis 4:5 we may be
able to see our language being created — and created in the image of Scripture.
IIIIn considering finally the subsequent history of the ‘falling face’ idiom in Genesis, after
Ælfric’s fateful decision to present it literally, I return to my theme of continuity. We
have seen that the fourteenth- and then the sixteenth-century translators were right in
their self-justifying claims to be not innovators but continuators, when it came to the idea
of vernacular translation. But can any more solid connections be drawn, whether linguistic or stylistic, between Ælfic and Wyclif, or even Tyndale? On this question I offer
optimistically a few pointers to future study. The territory has hardly been touched, and
yet it is a rich one, with intriguing problem, and some oddities awaiting investigation;
and one of the most fruitful areas of enquiry will be hebraisms, such as that used in the
Cain narrative.
The next known continuous prose version of Genesis after the one made by Ælfric and other Anglo-Saxons is that of the first Wycliffite translation (1380), which was based also on the Lain Vulgate. Its literal rendering of Genesis 4:5 is: ‘And Caym was greetli wroth, and therwith felde his chere’. The second, more idiomatic, Wycliffite version (1395) modifies slightly, filling out the action of faIling with a preposition and thereby, arguably, coming closer to the Latin (concidit): ‘And Cayn was wrooth greetli, and his cheer felde doun’. From its use in the second version, if not the first, it is tempting to assume that the ‘falling face’ idiom was acceptable in Middle English, perhaps as a result of its introduction to our language in the Anglo-Saxon period and subsequent continuity of use through the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is therefore disappointing to find in one of the six surviving manuscripts of the second Wycliffite version a gloss to this passage, which explains ‘felde doun’ as ‘he was hevy’, that is, sad. This
seems to suggest that the idiom was not considered to be immediately comprehensible,
or at least not universally, and so it may be argued that we witness in the Wycliffite version a new and parallel act of language creation. Yet it remains possible that there were
dialectical differences, in respect of the phrase in question, between various areas of
England. The Oxford English Dictionary cites poetical use of the idiom some fifty years
later so perhaps we may assume that by then, at least it had become ‘naturalized’.
There is no direct evidence that the Wycliffite translators had read any Anglo-Saxon
versions of Scripture, but they knew about them, as I noted above. The language would
certainly have posed a problem. As John Purvey put it in a treatise on the question of
Bible translation, Bede’s version of John and other Gospels, which he claimed still survived ‘in many placis’, were ‘of so oolde Englische that vnnethe can any man rede
hem’. But the statement that ‘hardly anyone’ could read the Old English Gospels leaves
open the probability that some people, at least, could read them and it certainly does not
preclude their study by scholars. It is not impossible that the Old English Gospels, and
perhaps other scriptural translations from the Anglo-Saxon period, were on occasions
consulted by the later translators.
What does Tyndale do in his version of Genesis 4:5? Rather surprisingly, for one
whose translation is based in general on the Hebrew and noted for the vigour of its idiom,
he uses a paraphrase: ‘And Cain was wroth exceadingly, and loured’. The latter verb
(first used in Middle English but of unknown origin) is graphic, but why did Tyndale not
use the dramatic, and above all faithful, ‘falling face’ idiom? The first Coverdale Bible
of 1535 is stiffly reticent: ‘Then was Cain exceadingly wroth, and his countenaunce
chaunged’. The Geneva Bible (1560), however, fulfills the claim f the translators in
their preface to have kept the Hebrew expression wherever possible: ’wherefore Kain
was exceding wrath, and his countenance fel downe’. This is very close to the Wycliffite
version. Curiously, though, when the phrase is repeated in the following verse, Genesis
4:6, Geneva varies with a paraphrase: ‘Then the Lord said unto Kain, Why art thou
wroth‘? and why is thy countenance cast down?’ All the other English Bibles from which
I have cited repeat in 4:6 whatever idiom they have used in the previous verse. The
Bishops’ Bible of 1568, on the other hand, eschews the verb ‘to fall’ and opts to use
‘abate’ (with the primary meaning ‘beat down’) intransitively: ‘Cain was exceedyng
wroth, and his countenaunce abated’. Finally, however, the Authorized Version of 1611
opts once more for the Hebrew idiom, and thus makes one of its comparatively rare
departures from Tyndale: ‘Cain was very wrath, and his countenance fell’. Did the King
James translators, in this instance, recreate the language anew? Or were they drawing on
well-established vernacular resources, deliberately taking over an idiom which was
already available, although perhaps restricted to regional or dialectical use and therefore
considered unsuitable by most other Reformation translators? And if so, had the idiom
become established through the Wycliffite translators’ use of it, or had the original Old
English version, Ælfric’s creation, been current in the vernacular all the time?
The ‘falling face’ idiom is just one of a whole nexus of hebraic expressions which
occur in modern, or at least medieval, English and which may have become ‘naturalized’
in the Anglo-Saxon period. Several others are connected with the face, including ‘before
the face of’, ‘to set one’s face against’, ‘to set one’s face towards’. Still in the facial
region, the resonant phrase ‘lift up your eyes’, of Old Testament origin, seems first to
enter our language when the anonymous translator of the Old English gospels writes ‘þa
hig heora eagan up ahfon’ (’then they lifted up their eyes’) in Matthew 17:18. Ælfric
uses it in his translation of Genesis 13:14 — ‘aheve up þine eagan’ (‘lift up your eyes’) —
but does not seem to have been happy with it in 13:10, in a slightly different context, and
paraphrases: ‘Lot ða beheold geond all’ (‘then Lot looked all about’), as does the anonymous translator of Genesis 24:63: ‘þa he hyne beseah’ (‘when he looked around him’).
Among other characteristically hebraic expressions is ‘to die by death’, with the variation ‘to die the death’. This barely survives in today’s language but was current (in various forms) throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and until the Renaissance
period. The expression made its first prose appearance in the scriptural translation which
reads King Alfred’s law code and was used also in the poem Genesis A, a long Old
English paraphrase of Genesis (line 1,205). It thus had already a long pedigree when the
second Wycliffite version used it, for example, in Judges 13:22, ‘Bi deeth die we’.
Coverdale, in the same passage, used ‘We must dye the death’.
I shall finish with one more intriguing example of possible continuity between the
anglo-Saxon and later periods, again from Genesis but this time involving Adam’s and
Eve’s sartorial emergency. The Geneva Bible earned its famous nickname, ‘the breeches
Bible’, because it used that word in Genesis 3:7 to describe the garments Adam and Eve
hurriedly made out of fig leaves in order to clothe themselves, once they had eaten of the
forbidden tree and thereby discovered their nakedness: ‘Then the eyes of them bothe
were opened, and they knewe that they were naked, and the sewed fig tre leaues together, and made them selues breeches’. A footnote in the Geneva Bible interprets the
Hebrew חגרת (chagoroth), as ‘things to girdle about them to hide their privities’. Other
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions, including those of Tyndale and Coverdale,
and the Bishops’ Bible, the Great Bible and of course the King James Bible, prefer
‘aprons’. Tyndale’s version of Genesis 3:7, for example, is: ‘they understode how that
they were naked. Then they sowed fygge leves togedder and made them apurns’. The
Hebrew word for the garments worn by Adam and Eve was put into the Greek as
περίζωματα (περίζωμα,
‘an apron’, from a verb meaning ‘to gird round’). Jerome then took
this over directly, as perizomata, for his Vulgate version.
Geneva’s ‘breeches’ is well-chosen but it was not original, for a precedent for the use
of the word had already been set by the Wycliffite versions two hundred years previously:
‘and whanne thei knewen that thei weren nakid, thei sewiden the leeves of a fige tre,
and madden brechis to hem silf’. I do not know whether this had influenced the Geneva
translators, but my more immediate interest is in the source f the Wycliffite version. It
seems to have gone unnoticed by historians of the English Bible that there was a precedent for this, too, and that it had been set by abbot Ælfric in the Old English translation
which he made at the end of the tenth century. The Old English form of ‘breeches’ is brec
(which can be plural as well as singular) and it is compounded with wæd (cf. modern
English ‘[widow’s] weeds’): ‘and hi worhton him wædbrec’; that is, ‘and they worked
for themselves clothes in the form breeches’. Old English brec is itself of Latin origin
and occurs fairly frequently in its simple form. Is this a genuine example of semantic
continuity between Ælfric and the Wycliffites (and then perhaps the Geneva translators)?
I believe that it is, though in a specialized way. The only other occurrence of the Old
English compound wæd-brec in the Anglo-Saxon period is in a glossary, where it defines
‘perizomata’ or ‘campestria’ (the word used in some older Latin versions, and meaning
a leather apron worn about the loins). But this Old English glossary is by Ælfric himself
and it circulated with the vernacular grammar of Latin which he wrote. In other words,
in the glossary he may have been simply legitimizing his own choice of a translation, and
my assumption is that Ælfric himself was indeed its originator. Interestingly, the uncompounded word is given in the entry immediately before perizomata in Ælfric’s glossary
as a translation of Latin femorale ‘covering for the thighs’, which is a rare word but
occurs in the Vulgate Sirach 45:10. It is possible that the Wycliffite translators re-created the translation ‘breeches’ spontaneously, but it seems to me more likely, in view of
the difficulty of the word requiring translation (perizomata), that they turned to a glossary for help. Glossaries were a staple of early medieval intellectual life, and collections
of glosses survive which originated in Anglo-Saxon England as early as the seventh centtury. We know that copies of Ælfric’s glossary (with its collocation femorale/brec and
perizomata/wædbrec) were being made as late as the thirteenth century; the use of one
of these by later translators s a possibility. What I am suggesting, then, is yet anther
sort of continuity in the history of English scriptural translation — a continuity of biblical
scholarship.
IVI have used this paper to promote an idea of continuity between the earliest English translations of Scripture and those of the later English periods beyond the level merely of a
shared conviction of the need for such translations. My thesis is that scriptural translation changes for ever the receiving language and that this will have been the case with
the English language during the Anglo-Saxon period. The case has not yet been proved
beyond doubt, and how ‘provable’ it will be is unclear, but at the very least I believe that
the language available to the Wycliffite translators, and then in turn to those of the
Renaissance and Reformation periods, will in some measure have been prepared for the
task by what had been done some centuries before by those early Englishmen whose
activities had enriched the literary and spiritual history of the English language.
I conclude with the words of Bishop Æthelwold, a tireless monastic reformer of the
tenth century who espoused vigorously the cause of vernacular translation. It was he why
first put into English the Benedicti Regula, the monastic Rule established by St Benedict
of Nursia in the sixth century and followed in the later Anglo-Saxon monasteries.
Æthelwold is specifically talking about the Rule, not Scripture, in the passage which I
cite here, but the principle he propagates is a general one and is in perfect harmony with
the spirit of the age of reform to which he belonged, an age when English translators
were already hard at work and had not yet faced the threat of capital punishment for their
efforts:
Ic þ[onne] geþeode to micclan gesceade telede. Wel mæg dug[an hit naht] mid hwylcan gereorde mon sy gestryned and to þan soþan geleafan gewæmed, butan þæt an sy þæt he Gode gegange.
I therefore considered this translation a very sensible thing. It matters not at all by what language a man is acquired, and drawn, to the true faith, as long only as he came to God.
The original form of expression is Old English and the context is Anglo-Saxon, but I am
confident that later translators, including William Tyndale, would have united to endorse
the sentiment.
Appendix
Genesis 3:7
Hebrew ויּדעוּ כּי עירמּם הם ויּתפּרוּ עלה תאנה ויּעשׂוּ להם חגרת
LXX καὶ ἔγωσανὅτιγυμνωὶ ἡσαν καὶ ἔρραψαν φύλλα συκῆ καὶ ἐποίησαν ἐαυτοῖς περιζώματα
Vulgate cumque cognouissent se esse nudos consuerunt folia ficus et fecerunt sibi perizomata
Ælfric (c.990) hic oncneowon ða ðæt hi nacode wæron and sywodon him ficleaf and worhton him wæd-brec
Wyclif 1 (1380) and whanne thei knewen hem silf to be nakid, thei soweden to
gidre leeues of a fige tree, and maden hem brechis
Wyclif 2 (1395) and whanne thei knewen that thei weren nakid, thei sewiden the
leeues of a fige tre, and maden brechis to hem silf
Tyndale (1530) they understode how that they were naked. Then they sowed fygge
leues togedder and made them apurns
Coverdale (1535) and they perceaued that they were naked, and sowed fygge leaues
together, and made them apurns
Geneva (1560) and they knewe that they were naked, and the sewed fig tre leaues
together, and made them selues breeches
Bishops’ (1568) and they knewe that they were naked, and they sowed fygge leaues
together; & made them selues apernes
KJV (1611) and they knew that they were naked; and they sowed fig leaves
together and made themselves aprons
Genesis 4:5
Hebrew ויּחר לקין מאד ויּפּלוּ פּניו
LXX Καὶ ἑλυπηθη Κύιν λία&nu, καὶ συνέπεσε τῷ προςώπῳ (var. τό προσώπον αὐτου)
Vulgate iratusque est Cain uehementer et concidit uultus eius
Alfred (c.880) ða wearð Cain swiðe ierre ond hnipode ofdune
Ælfric (c.990) þa hirsode Caim þearle and his nebwlite ðtfeol
Wyclif 1 (1380) And Caym was greetli wroth, and therwith felle his chere
Wyclif 2 (1395) Aid Cayn was wrooth greetli, and his cheer felde doun
Tyndale (1530) And Cain was wroth exceadingly, and loured
Coverdale (1535) Then was Cain exceadingly wroth, and his countenaunce chaunged
Geneva (1560) wherefore Kain was exceding wroth, and his countenance fel downe
Bishops’ (1568) Cain was exceedyng wroth, and his countenaunce abated
KJV (1611) Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell
References