Selim 20.indb


Michelle P. Brown, SELIM 20 (2013–2014): 81–120ISSN: 1132–631X

BEOWULF AND THE ORIGINS OF THE 
WRITTEN OLD ENGLISH VERNACULAR

Abstract: This paper seeks to present an overview of the evidence for vernacular literacy 
in England prior to the Alfr edian revival and, in the light of this, to discuss whether, in 
principle, the Beowulf poem—like the Dream of the Rood—could have undergone several 
iterations before assuming its full literary form. Keywords: Old English, vernacular literacy, 
Beowulf, Dream of the Rood, History, Art History, Mercia, Kent, Northumbria, Wessex, 
King Alfr ed, Book of Cerne, Book History.

Resumen: Este artículo busca presentar una panorámica de las pruebas de una alfabetización 
vernácula en la Inglaterra anterior al renacimiento alfr ediano y, en consecuencia, discutir 
si, en principio, el poema Beowulf—como el Sueño de la Cruz—podría haber sufr ido varias 
revisiones antes de asumir su forma literaria completa. Palabras clave: Inglés antiguo, 
alfabetización vernácula, Beowulf, Sueño de la Cruz, Historia, Historia del arte, Mercia, Kent, 
Northumbria, Wessex, Rey Alfr edo, Libro de Cerne, Historia del libro.

I do not propose to engage here in a specific discussion of the dating or localisation of the sole surviving early 
manuscript witness to the Old English poem known as 

Beowulf, nor to participate in the complex and contentious debate 
concerning the generation of the fully-fl edged composition that is 
preserved therein, as there are those far better qualifi ed to do so.1 
Rather, I should like to consider whether the cultural contexts for 
the composition and transmission of vernacular material of this 
sort might allow, in principle, for something of a back-story to 
this epic work, prior to its appearance in the Nowell Codex around 
the year 1000. This will entail a consideration of the origins of 
the written English vernacular and of the nature of cumulative 
composition, as well as of audience reception by what might be 
termed a “community of reading,” by which I mean the widest 
participative group sharing access, of varying sorts and degrees, to 

1 I should like to thank Leonard Neidorf for his encouragement in writing this 
paper. For an overview of the debate on the dating of Beowulf as it currently stands, 
see Neidorf 2014.



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82SELIM 20 (2013–2014)

a common narrative. This may, or may not, take a written form or 
forms and may, or may not, entail the ability to read writing.

The majority of extant manuscripts containing Old English, 
including the four poetic codices, were written in the tenth to 
twelft h centuries. Transcription errors and archaic orthographical 
forms indicate that some of the texts in these manuscripts were 
composed at a signifi cant but uncertain remove. Nevertheless, 
scholars have fr equently assumed that the palaeographical dating of 
our extant manuscripts provides us with more than the terminus ante 
quem of their contents. There is a problematic tendency in recent 
Old English studies for scholars to equate the date of a particular 
manuscript’s production with the date of its content’s composition.2 
Thus, it is oft en assumed that if a prose text is found in a tenth- or 
eleventh-century manuscript, it must have been composed then.

However, R. D. Fulk has recently made a persuasive case 
against this assumption, demonstrating that a substantial number 
of vernacular prose texts contain archaic and dialectal features that 
render eighth-century composition far more probable (1992: 60–
65). Likewise, the Leiden Riddle, an eighth-century Northumbrian 
translation of Aldhelm’s Enigma 33 (Smith 1933: 18, 23–25; Van 
Kirk Dobbie 1942: cviii–cx, 109, 199–200),3 survives due to copying 
by a tenth-century hand (in Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Voss. 
Lat. Q. 106, f. 25v).4 A further intriguing case is the Collectanea 
Pseudo-Bedae, a miscellaneous assemblage of materials including 
riddling questions, formerly attributed to Bede and included in 
the edition of his complete works printed in Basel in 1563,5 of 

2 In the case of Beowulf studies this has escalated since the publication of Chase 
1981 and Kiernan 2011.
3 I am deeply indebted to Mercedes Salvador-Bello for this reference, and those 
in the following two footnotes.
4 For a full description of this manuscript and its contents, see Bremmer & 
Dekker 2006: 107–112 and Parkes 1972: 216–217.
5 Herwagen 1563: III.647–674. For discussion, see Bayless & Lapidge 1998.



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which no manuscript copy survives. Nonetheless, comparison with 
other literary works led Lapidge to conclude that the fl orilegium 
probably originated in the mid-eighth century, “either in Ireland 
or England, or in an Irish foundation on the Continent” (Bayless & 
Lapidge 1998: 12).6 Such admissions of the possibility of an earlier 
date of initial composition than that of the extant manuscript 
evidence is not new; Tolkien adopted a similar stance in his seminal 
paper “The Monsters and the Critics,” delivered in 1936, in which 
he suggested a date for Beowulf closer to that of Bede (Tolkien 
2006).

Leonard Neidorf has taken a similar stance in his recent study 
of the poem Widsið, of which he writes (2013a: 165):

Recent work on Widsið contends that there is little evidence 
supporting the presumed early date of composition. This 
essay argues, however, that four categories of evidence can 
be brought to bear on the dating of Widsið—orthographic, 
lexical, onomastic, and cultural—and that all four of these 
categories agree in support of an early date of composition.

Concerning Beowulf, Neidorf (2013b) has also shown that, between 
the seventh century and the time that the monk “Biuuulf ” was 
commemorated in the Durham Liber Vitae (written around 840), 
parents were naming their children aft er a legendary hero whose 
reputation was already well-known, and who was probably later 
placed at the heart of the famous poem. Neidorf (2013c), and 
earlier Michael Lapidge, has also cited the occurrence of multiple 
scribal errors in respect of the name in support of an earlier written 
circulation prior to the poem being inscribed in the Nowell Codex 
in the early eleventh century. Lapidge (2000) has related some 
of these errors, palaeographically, to misunderstandings of eighth-

6 This compilation shares numerous characteristics with other riddling dialogues, 
see Bayless & Lapidge 1998: 13. However, the inclusion of fi ve pieces fr om 
Symphosius’s Enigmata and fi ve fr om Aldhelm’s demonstrates that the author 
of the Collectanea was acquainted with major riddle collections, see Bayless & 
Lapidge 1998: 22.



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century Insular set minuscule letter-forms of a sort current before 
the mid eighth century.

An over-reliance upon the materiality of the evidential base 
under-estimates the likely low survival rate for the early medieval 
footprint of memory and identity. The fact that few artefacts and 
manuscripts bearing written Old English survive does not mean 
that it did not enj oy wider currency. In fact, the law of probability 
would suggest that, on the basis of those items that do survive, it 
would have done. Also, there are a series of references in historical 
texts of the period and a number of cultural contextual parallels 
that would likewise indicate that the written vernacular was 
more widespread during the pre-Alfr edian period than has been 
assumed.

A number of literary-historical assumptions support and 
inform the assumption that Old English texts are more likely to 
be late rather than early. One of these beliefs is that the vernacular 
was rarely used in writing before the reign of King Alfr ed. The 
cultural and political agendas of the king and his successors led 
them to portray him as an innovator in this practice, and modern 
scholars have generally credited his claims, partly in response to a 
reaction against an earlier scholarly tendency to assign the origins 
of major cultural trends to the age of Bede.7 Dorothy Whitelock 
(1951: 25) helped to shift  such assumptions when she suggested 
that a later date (before 835), perhaps the reign of Off a of Mercia, 
might be a more credible context for the origins of the Beowulf 
poem.8 Roberta Frank (1981, 2007), John D. Niles (1999, 2007), 
and Craig Davis (1996, 2006) are amongst those who have since 
argued eloquently that the Alfr edian program of translatio and 
renovatio would have created new conditions conducive to the 

7 For a summary of the debate on the dating of Beowulf as it stood at the end of 
the twentieth century, see Chase 1981, especially his Introduction (3–8).
8 An attribution of the poem to Off a’s reign was subsequently taken up by Wrenn 
and Sisam, see Chase 1981: 7.



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composition of Beowulf. N. F. Blake (1977) has argued that the bulk 
of Old English poetry, including Beowulf, was composed during or 
aft er Alfr ed’s educational program, which “provides us with a good 
reason for the rise and development of the poetry.” The biggest 
support for the myth that the vernacular was born during Alfr ed’s 
reign, however, is the assumption that manuscript dates provide 
special insight into composition dates. E. G. Stanley (1981) has 
expressed this questionable idea in the context of the dating of 
Beowulf: “The greater the distance between the date of the Beowulf 
manuscript—“s. X/XI” by paleographical dating—and the posited 
date of the poem as we now have it, the heavier the element of 
hypothesis.”

The present essay will not make a specifi c argument about 
the date of Beowulf. Rather it will reconsider evidence bearing 
on some of the literary-critical and text-historical assumptions 
that have informed discussion of the issue. In particular, it will 
posit powerful cumulative evidence indicating that the vernacular 
was used in writing during the earlier Anglo-Saxon period. This 
evidence off ers some important methodological reminders: that 
the extant manuscripts present a skewed and partial image of 
the vibrant cultural production of Anglo-Saxon England; that 
the assertions of King Alfr ed, his heirs and publicists should not 
always be taken at face value; and that we must take adequate 
account of probable lacunae in the evidence as well as its extant 
material manifestations. Glosses, texts, inscriptions, and several 
crucial passages fr om Bede indicate that there must have been 
fr equent use of the vernacular in writing before Alfr ed’s reign. 
This paper is thus intended to encourage us to reconsider how 
we discuss Old English literary history. We may achieve a more 
nuanced understanding of the literary culture of Angl o-Saxon 
England by focusing less on homogenizing manuscript dates and 
more on evidence indicating probable composition dates and 
cultural trends.



Michelle P. Brown

86SELIM 20 (2013–2014)

Discussions of this Beowulf poem’s origins have entailed 
a consideration of the text, palaeography and codicology of the 
Nowell Codex, its dating and localisation (this actual sole surviving 
manuscript dating to c.1000–1025, place of origin uncertain), and 
whether it is: (a) a copy of an earlier work; (b) a representative of 
authorial input and therefore close to the date of actual composition; 
or (c) part of an ongoing iterative process of textual transmission in 
which an earlier core text is being amplifi ed or reworked in some 
way. Amongst the many valuable contributions to this debate has 
been the invaluable work undertaken by Kevin Kiernan, especially 
in pursuit of the goal of making Beowulf the fi rst cybernaut, with 
the appearance of the electronic Beowulf in which the manuscript 
was digitised and given a digital raft  of scholarly apparatus and 
accompanying commentary (Kiernan 2011). Then there has been 
the ongoing process of examining the cultural context in which 
the action of the poem is set and the equation of this with material 
culture as attested by archaeology and art and attempts to match 
this to historical context—i.e. to render it period specifi c by locating 
parallels to features such as the hall in Heorot, ship burial (which 
has been compared to that excavated at Sutton Hoo), treasure 
hoards concealed in barrows and the like. Most recently, in this 
vein, has been the fascinating work by John D. Niles (1999, 2007) 
on correspondences between the material culture described in the 
poem and the excavations at the Danish site of Lejre, where halls 
similar to Heorot have been discovered, and also on the context 
of oral literature. The question then arises of whether such well-
observed evocations of social setting are period specifi c or whether 
they represent a literary topos, designed to evoke a past age and, 
if the latter, to identify  a historical context for composition that 
would make such an evocation of an earlier age desirable. In the case 
of Beowulf and the ideal it presents of Germanic warrior lifestyle, 
these might include a wish to summon up such heroic associations 



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for reasons of geneaological and political legitimisation,9 or a 
desire to heighten the sense of a shared cultural memory between 
diff erent peoples of common pagan Germanic root-stock, namely 
the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians who had followed them 
in settling in Britain fr om the ninth century onwards.

Such debates are not exclusive to Beowulf, of course. The study of 
the transmission of Homeric epic and its transition fr om an oral to 
a written mode of dissemination and preservation springs to mind 
as, closer to hand in both time and space, does that of the great 
Celtic epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (“The Cattle Raid of Cooley;” 
Kinsella 1969). This is thought, on linguistic grounds, fi rst to have 
been committed to writing in approximately the seventh century, 
although, like its Anglo-Saxon counterpart Beowulf, the detail of 
the world in which it is set relates to the pre-Christian Iron Age, 
whereas its earliest extant manuscript version dates to a later period, 
in this case to around 1100. A sixteenth-century copy is preserved 
in British Library, Egerton MS 93, and this exhibits a remarkable 
conservatism, as if highly trained druidic oral mnemonic discipline 
had been imported into the written environment, safeguarding the 
smallest details of the material culture and practices of an earlier 
age across perhaps as much as a millennium and a half by means 
of careful, disciplined recitation and periodic attempts to capture 
this orality in written form. As research by Robin Flower, a curator 
at the British Museum Library, demonstrated, as late as the mid-
twentieth century Peig Sayers, an elderly woman living on the 
Blasket Islands in western Ireland and who was “illiterate” in the 
conventional sense, was still able to recite much of the tale verbatim 

9 These include the work by Craig Davis in identify ing an Alfr edian dynastic 
genealogical interest in asserting a link with the Germanic dynasties of the Beowulf 
poem, tracing his father’s line back to Scyld and his mother’s to the Geats and 
Goths (see Davis 1996, 2006). Helen Damico has recently delivered lectures on 
her work to demonstrate a link between the poem and Queen Emma’s dynastic 
interests.



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as it occurred in its medieval written form, purely fr om memory 
(Flower 1978; Sayers 1974).

Like Beowulf, the Táin contains references to things and 
practices that may have passed out of currency by the time that 
they were recorded on the manuscript page. For example, the use 
of the Celtic proto-writing system, ogham/ogam, attributed to the 
god Ogmios, although it is essentially an exploded version of the 
Roman alphabet which takes the form of carved lines grouped in 
families of fi ve. Bede’s explication of the decimal system and the use 
of fi nger-counting may owe something, ultimately, to druidic use 
of the digits as a mnemonic aid, which also led them to group the 
graphic characters of ogam into fi ves, exhibiting the infl uence of 
Pythagorean number symbolism. The practice was still employed, 
much later, in printing by typesetters. A similar treatment of 
exploded letter-forms may also be encountered in some of the 
grafi tti at Pompeii. Ogam was used for short inscriptions fr om the 
fi rst to the seventh centuries, in Ireland and by Irish emigrants to 
Scotland and Wales, whose inscriptions reveal that they retained 
their native tongue. These oft en commemorate individuals but the 
talismanic potential of ogam is also indicated by a passage in the 
Táin, in which an army is stopped in its tracks by a stick carved with 
an ogam taboo (Kinsella 1969: 68, 263). Even if Christian scribes of 
a later age were familiar with the ogam alphabet in an antiquarian 
fashion, as probationes pennae and other annotations suggest, their 
earlier signifi cance and use had long since disappeared.10

Many manuscripts written in the early Celtic vernacular 
languages are, like their Old English counterparts, of later date 
than that of the textual composition—notably the twelft h century 
in the case of Ireland when the Normans were making their 
presence felt—perhaps refl ecting a perceived need on the part 

10 Interestingly, some 550 medieval rune-sticks have been excavated at Bergen, 
Norway and, as Kelly has suggested, it is also possible that they were also used 
for practical communication in Anglo-Saxon England. See Liestøl 1968, 1971 and 
Kelly 1990: 37.



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of scholars, librarians, or other preservers of group memory, to 
preserve indigenous culture in the wake of conquest and renewed 
ecclesiastical rapprochement with mainstream Europe. Such a 
phenomenon is probably also to be observed in the tendency to 
anthologise knowledge in English around the turn of the fi rst 
millennium, evinced by works such as the Anglo-Saxon Herbal, 
the so-called Anglo-Saxon Scientifi c Miscellany, the Vercelli 
Codex, the Exeter Book and perhaps the Nowell Codex itself 
(Brown 2011 & forthcoming ⒝  ). In the case of Ireland, however, 
rapid changes in linguistic development permit the excavation of 
underlying composition dates for vernacular texts preserved in later 
compilations.

A thumbnail sketch of this process in Ireland may serve 
as a useful comparative case study in linguistic and cultural 
transmission. To quote Michael Richter, “[a]ft er Latin, Irish is the 
language in western Europe with the longest and best-documented 
development” (Richter 1988: 11). Its earliest vehicles were the ogam 
inscriptions (indeed, the term “ogam” was retained in medieval 
Ireland as a cognomen for the written vernacular), an elegy of c. 
600 (the Amra Coluim Chille), an early “mirror for princes” (the 
Audacht Morainn of c. 700) and legal texts. This Archaic Old 
Irish accompanies the period of the introduction and spread of 
Christianity and its literate learning throughout Irish territory and 
travelled with the peregrini to Britain and the Continent. Texts 
are more plentiful fr om the mid-eighth century onwards and 
contemporary manuscript witnesses survive, mostly preserved in 
continental Irish foundations, such as Bobbio and St Gall, such as 
the St Gallen Priscian. Other extant early vernacular texts include 
a treatise on the mass in the early ninth-century Stowe Missal and 
texts included in the Patriciana of the Book of Armagh, of 807.11 
There was a permeable interaction between Latin and the vernacular 

11 Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 52 (Alexander 1978: no. 53), Dublin, 
Trinity College Library, MS 52 (Alexander 1978: no. 53).



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and patterns of such interaction could vary according to genre. 
Some texts, such as annals and penitentials, were written initially 
in Latin but moved into Old Irish fr om around 800, whilst others, 
such as the vernacular secular law tracts, seem to have received a 
stimulus fr om Latin ecclesiastical collections. For example, Senchas 
Már (“The Great Old Knowledge”) was compiled during the eighth 
century, probably in response to the Latin ecclesiastical Collectio 
Canonum Hibernensis (Richter 1988: 88).

In view of the early nature of the origins of the Irish written 
vernacular, its interaction with latinate literacy, preserved oral 
tradition and observed patterns of preservation and migration 
over time and within the extant manuscript corpus, it is generally 
considered that the Táin, as represented in its late medieval 
manuscript form, preserves at its core an orally composed and 
transmitted Iron Age epic, which refl ects the social and material 
contexts of the pre-Christian period but which has grown and 
incorporated textual and linguistic interventions over succeeding 
centuries, especially during the process of being committed to 
writing by Christian (probably monastic) scribes.

The alacrity of the English in adopting a written vernacular 
was probably infl uenced, at least initially, by the precocity of their 
Irish neighbours. Like the Celtic peoples and their ogam, the 
Germanic exposure to romanisation seems to have fostered the 
adoption of a proto-writing system: runes. Their origins also lie 
within the pre-Christian, “pre-literate” prehistoric past. “Rune” 
means “secret,” perhaps implying early elitist or cult use. The poet 
Cynewulf, perhaps writing as early as the late eighth century, would 
append them to his works as a cryptic signature and the solutions 
to certain Latin riddles depends upon a knowledge of runes (Page 
1973; Sisam 1953: 1–28). The Old German runic futhark / futhorc, 
of twenty-four characters grouped in families of eight, is thought 
to have been current fr om AD 200–750. Localised demand led to 
expansion to thirty-three in England, for phonetic purposes. Some 
runic characters are clearly indebted to the Roman or Etruscan 



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alphabet, their angular forms betraying epigraphic origins. This 
is in eff ect a proto-literate writing system, born of lengthy liminal 
contact with the Mediterranean and of limited application. Runes 
generally occur in short inscriptions (Page 1995; Forsyth, Higgitt 
& Parsons 2001) on artefacts such as jewellery, weapons and 
monuments, sometimes occurring alongside Latin, which aided 
in their initial decipherment, although they are also discussed in 
a scholarly context in later Christian manuscripts and continue 
to occur in Christian inscriptions, petering out only aft er the 
thirteenth century.

As far as we can tell, the role of the scop was not as formalised 
within early Germanic society as that of the Celtic bard, whose 
role as a member of the aes dana—the professional classes—was 
protected and celebrated in Irish law and whose training as a 
preserver of group memory and identity fell within the orbit of 
the specialised druidic caste, with its schooled tradition (McGrath 
1979). Yet, even if we were to accept the premise that Germanic 
bards were capable of composing, preserving and transmitting a 
complex epic poem of the nature of Beowulf across several centuries 
before it was written down in the Nowell Codex or any earlier lost 
manuscript intermediaries, then the scholarly trend to place the 
origins of written Old English in the Alfr edian era has still tended 
to preclude this hypothesis. But is it really the case that there could 
have been no substantial literary compositions in Old English prior 
to the Alfr edian revival? Or, as in the case of the Táin, might there 
indeed be the possibility of a back-story to the process of textual 
development and transmission of Beowulf prior to its appearance in 
the Nowell Codex?

In a recent monograph, The Book and the Transformation 
of Britain c.550–1050 (Brown 2011), I have attempted to assess 
something of the nature of the complex interplay between written 
and visual literacy and orality in Anglo-Saxon England. In the 
course of this study I examined some of the evidence for the early 
use of the written vernacular and suggested that there may be some 



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value in reappraising the conventional scholarly view, as a cultural 
model even given the limited nature of the surviving evidence. It 
may be helpful to summarise here some of the context that I have 
proposed.

Literacy is more complex than simply the ability to read and to 
write. One needs to take full account of the reader as viewer and 
the reader as listener. The ability to “read” has as much to do with 
the ability to comprehend meaning as with the technical ability to 
decipher graphic symbols and form them into words. Oral and visual 
literacy play as essential a part in communicating text as writing 
has—and oft en an even greater role for a wider audience. During 
the early Middle Ages, when the act of writing was essentially the 
preserve of professional scribes and highly educated scholars and 
the sustained act of reading generally one of public performance 
or private meditation and study, we should not judge a people’s 
literacy by the deployment of these skills alone, but also by its 
response to the book and to the impact of text conveyed across time 
and space. Oral and written forms of transmission might interact 
over time, transforming a text in the process.

The rise of the written vernaculars was intimately interwoven 
with the introduction and transmission of Scripture (Brown 
2005). Centralised authorities tend to promote the use of a single 
unify ing language, whilst those affi  rming local or group identity 
oft en use language as a means of signalling independent traditions 
and histories. “Vernacular” languages are distinguished by their 
particularised use, in contrast to “universal” languages. With the 
growth in the acceptance of Christianity these notional universals 
became the linguae sacrae: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. In the 
Near East, although Greek became the principal language of the 
Byzantine Empire, independent local Churches emerged in areas 
such as Armenia, Syria and Coptic Egypt, each with their own 
languages and traditions which found graphic expression in their 
books (Buchtal & Kurz 1942; Déroche & Richard 1997). The same 
would occur in the British Isles and Ireland.



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The imperium of Rome and the pattern of post-Roman 
devolution of power to the urban episcopacy led to Latin retaining 
a prominence in the West. In the Preface to his Institutiones 
Cassiodorus wrote (Mynors 1937: 5–6):

And so it appears that the Divine Scriptures of the Old and 
New Testament fr om the very beginning to the end have been 
expanded in the Greek language…But with the Lord’s aid we 
follow rather aft er Latin writers, that, since we are writing 
for Italians, we may most fi tly seem to have pointed out 
Roman interpreters as well. For more gladly is that narration 
undertaken by every man which is told in the language of his 
fathers.

His portrayal of Latin as the early Italian may be disingenuous, but 
it does serve as a timely reminder that the primacy of Latin was 
by no means assured. The shift  in perception of its status owed a 
great deal to Jerome, Popes Damasus and Gregory the Great in 
their promotion in the West of Latin Scripture and commentary, 
raising “vulgar’ (vulgata) Latin to literary heights. Latin and the 
Roman alphabet thus rose to prominence largely in response to 
the bureaucratic needs of the amorphous Roman Empire and its 
heir—the Church. The question was perhaps whether the Church 
would embrace the idea of a lingua fr anca or would accommodate 
its multi-lingual, diverse local parts within a latter-day Tower of 
Babel (Brown 2005). The account of Pentecost (Acts 2.4–6) was of 
particular relevance in this respect:

All of them were fi lled with the Holy Spirit and began to 
speak in other tongues, as the Spirit enabled them. Now 
there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews fr om every 
nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd 
came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them 
speaking in his own language.12

Bede was particularly interested in this episode. In his Commentary 
on Acts (Acts 2.6) he said that it could be taken as meaning that 

12 Biblical quotations fr om Palmer et al. 1978.



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the Apostles went to many diff erent peoples and preached in their 
many tongues, or that they spoke only once and the Holy Spirit 
simultaneously translated for their hearers’ benefi t (Hudson 1983: 
3–99; Martin 1989). He was much criticised for this assumed 
heresy of innovatio and in his Retractatio justifi ed his statement 
by emphasizing that he was quoting fr om Gregory Nazianzen. 
Yet Bede was not alone in his perception of the value of sharing 
Scripture in the vernacular, in both oral and written forms. Indeed, 
some of the earliest examples of written vernaculars come fr om 
precisely this evangelising context.

The conversion process for a religion of the Word entails not 
only the translation problems of preaching in the fi eld, for which 
interpreters are oft en required, but also the need to teach the 
necessary literacy skills for reading and copying texts. Missionaries 
accordingly oft en resorted to the use of a written version of the 
spoken language of the area they were evangelising, as a step on 
the path to achieving full (Latin) literacy. Phonetics played an 
important part, for diff erent sounds encountered in local languages 
oft en necessitated the creation of entire scripts or modifi cations of 
existing systems to suit spoken languages, such as the Miao script 
developed by Pollard of the Christian Bible Society and Cherokee 
script invented by the native American Sequoya and his family 
(Brown 1998).13

Gothic was the earliest written vernacular in the late Roman 
“West,” invented by Ulfi la (c. 311–383) “Apostle to the Goths,” 
who drew upon the Greek and Roman alphabets to produce the 
written Gothic language in order to translate the Bible. The great 
monument to the Gothic language is the Codex Uppsalensis 
(or Codex Argenteus: Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket, MS 
DG I), a splendid volume written in sixth-century Ravenna for 
the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric (Brown 1998: 43; Webster & 

13 For an outline of biblical transmission in the early Middle Ages see Brown 
2006b.



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Brown 1997: 242–243).14 The adaptation of the Greek alphabet to 
Armenian and Georgian is likewise attributed to the fi ft h-century 
missionary St Mesrop and the Greek-based Glagolitic alphabet 
is ascribed to St Cyril, missionary to the Slavs. Bede’s claims in 
respect of Augustine’s mission having likewise begun the process 
of writing Old English (rather than merely inscribing short runic 
inscriptions) are not, therefore, without context in the conversion 
orbit. He tells us that King Ethelberht of Kent “introduced with 
the consent of his counsellors a code of law inspired by the example 
of the Romans, which was written in English, and remains in force 
to this day” (HE, II.5).

Infl uenced by a growing perception of the iconic nature of the 
book in a religious context, Insular secular rulers were quick to 
perceive the value of this powerful medium, and of a literate clerical 
administration, and enlisted the support of church personnel in 
penning law-codes, charters and genealogies to help establish 
secure, legitimate states (Cubitt 1995, 2009; Kelly 1990; Wormald 
1999). The Roman missionaries may not have translated the Bible 
into English (although the English Church, along with those of the 
Irish, would soon display an open mind in translating Scripture), 
but they were apparently quick to commit Kent’s Germanic law-
code to the “safe-keeping” of writing, thereby beginning the 
processes of transliterating Old English into the Roman script 
and integrating the Church into the social structure.15 Augustine’s 
role in inventing written Old English is perhaps best viewed in 
the context of the mission’s instructions fr om Pope Gregory the 
Great to site Christianity within existing local tradition. The 
books that accompanied his mission helped shape perceptions of 
the authority of writing in such a society, revolutionizing its oral 
literary, learning and administration. Augustine and his followers 

14 Facsimile in Svedberg et al. 1927.
15 For an overview of the conversion period in England, see Mayr-Harting 1977 
and Brown 2006a.



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had some foundations upon which to build. They supplemented 
the Roman alphabet with characters representing alien phonetic 
elements based upon pre-existing Germanic runes. Even though 
the only extant copy of Ethelberht’s code is in the twelft h-century 
copy (the Textus Roff ensis, now in Kent Record Offi  ce), the script of 
which preserves earlier palaeographical features, it therefore seems 
reasonable to accept that Augustine and his circle intervened at an 
early stage in devising a written form of the language of the people 
they had come to convert (see Webster & Backhouse 1991: 39–46).

Those areas which appear to have most consciously preserved 
their own script systems, decoration and the vernacular were 
those which escaped absorption within the Carolingian Empire 
and its successors, namely: Britain, Ireland, Visigothic Spain 
and Benevento. This raises the interesting issue of imperialism 
and regional identity in book production. The corresponding 
reluctance of the East and West Franks and the rest of Italy to 
promote the vernacular has been ascribed to the gradual evolution 
of the Romance languages fr om the Latinity of the late Roman 
Empire and to a conscious Carolingian policy of promoting 
Latin, and Caroline minuscule, as a means of cultural cohesion 
and control throughout the Carolingian Empire. Thus German 
identity would not be unduly distinguished fr om that of Gaul, with 
its marked Roman legacy and mixed population (Nelson 1996: 10), 
and the written culture of the Carolingian Empire did not refl ect 
its daily speech. Meanwhile, fr ee fr om centralised rule, the newly 
Christianised Anglo-Saxon and Celtic peoples used everything at 
their disposal, including language, to share the “Good News” (Old 
English gōd spell), as did some of their counterparts in the former 
eastern Roman Empire.

In his letter to Archbishop Ecgberht of York, dated 734, Bede—
who presumably also incorporated runic characters into the Latin 
alphabet in his writing of the vernacular—wrote that he had found 
it useful to translate the Pater Noster and Creed into Old English 
for use by priests lacking suffi  cient Latinity to conduct services 



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(Plummer 1892–1896: II. 405–423; Farmer, Latham & Sherley-
Price 1990: 337–351). This passage is oft en cited as evidence of the 
“illiterate” nature of much of the priesthood in England at this 
period, but upon closer scrutiny it can be interpreted diff erently:

In preaching to the people, this message more than any other 
should be proclaimed: that the Catholic faith, as contained 
in the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, which the 
reading of the Gospel teaches us, should be deeply memorized 
by all who are under your rule. All who have already learnt 
the Latin tongue by constant reading have quite certainly 
learnt these texts as well; but as for the unlearned, that is, 
those who know their own language only, make these learn 
the texts in their own tongue and accurately sing them. This 
should be done not only by the laity still settled in secular 
life but also by clerics and monks who are already expert 
in the Latin language. For thus it will come about that the 
whole congregation of believers learns how to be full of faith 
and how it must protect and arm itself against the attacks of 
unclean spirits by fi rm belief: thus it comes about that the 
whole chorus of those who are praying to God learns what 
should be specially sought fr om God’s mercy. That is why I 
have fr equently off ered translations of both the Creed and the 
Lord’s Prayer into English to many unlearned priests. For St 
Ambrose the Bishop, speaking of faith, admonishes believers 
to sing the words of the Creed each morning: thus they fortify  
themselves with a spiritual antidote against the devil’s poison, 
which he can wickedly instill by day and by night. Moreover 
the custom of repeated prayer and genufl exions has taught us 
to sing the Lord’s Prayer more oft en.

Bede’s primary intention here was to foster the creation of a 
community of prayer—the embodiment of the Church militant, 
the present manifestation of the Communion of Saints, which is 
fused with the Church triumphant (those in paradise) and expectant 
(those in purgatory) through collective prayer. This is to be sung, 
in the tradition of both the Temple and of the Germanic and Celtic 
cultures, and in the vernacular, based upon written translations. 
The assumption is that there are those who will be able to read text 



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in this form—priests and perhaps some laity—who will instruct 
others in its recitation. Those clerics who are already fully latinate 
and therefore “literate,” are also expected to participate in collective 
vernacular performative prayer. Thus the oft  misinterpreted passage 
presents us with a picture not of lamentable illiteracy amongst the 
priesthood, but a more nuanced situation of clergy who were expert 
in reading both written Latin and the vernacular, some clergy who 
could only read the vernacular—indicating that there was already a 
measure of vernacular literacy in the pre-Alfr edian era—and laity 
who participated in the enactment of written text, by committing 
what intermediaries taught them to heart and singing it verbatim, 
or perhaps in some cases by fi rst reading the words written in their 
own tongue (Farmer, Latham & Sherley-Price 1990: 340).

In a similar vein Bede also relates that Cædmon, using the 
divine gift  of song, turned Scripture into English verse to make it 
more accessible:

There was in the Monastery of this Abbess a certain brother 
particularly remarkable for the Grace of God, who was wont 
to make religious verses, so that whatever was interpreted to 
him out of scripture, he soon aft er put the same into poetical 
expressions of much sweetness and humility in English, which 
was his native language. By his verse the minds of many were 
oft en excited to despise the world, and to aspire to heaven. 
(HE IV.24)

Only the short piece known as Caedmon’s Hymn is actually quoted 
by Bede, but his account reveals that Caedmon was responsible for 
many other vernacular poems. To test his new-found gift , Abbess 
Hild asked him to compose verse based upon “a passage of sacred 
history or doctrine”—the fi rst of the many which followed aft er he 
took the cowl.

Bede’s interest in the vernacular relates to his recognition of 
the generosity of the Jews in sharing their faith with the gentiles, 
pointing to passages in his commentary on Tobit (3.12 and 2.6) 
and their sharing the Word with the gentiles through the Greek 



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Septuagint, an impulse shared by the gentile races of Britain and 
Ireland who sought to share their faith with others (Connolly 
1997: 24–25). On his deathbed Bede was still sharing—translating 
extracts fr om Isidore’s On the Nature of Things and the Gospel of 
St John—fusing the revelations of science and mystic vision in the 
quest to know God. As the letter of his pupil Cuthbert to Cuthwin 
relates concerning Bede’s fi nal illness in 735 (Farmer, Latham & 
Sherley-Price 1990: 358–359):

In these days, besides our lessons and the chanting of psalms, 
he was much busied with two short works which are specially 
worthy of memory: the translation into our own language 
for the Church’s benefi t of the Gospel of St John fr om the 
beginning until the passage where it says: “But what are these 
among so many?” [John 6.9], and also certain excerpts fr om 
the Book of Cycles by Bishop Isidore, about which he said: “I 
do not wish my students to read lies, or to work at this task in 
vain aft er my death.”

Bede’s translations have not survived, but some of his work may 
be recollected in the interlinear gloss added c. 950–960 to the 
Lindisfarne Gospels by the monk Aldred—the oldest surviving 
translation of the Gospels into English, wherein the gloss to John’s 
Gospel is executed in two inks; might that honoured by the use 
of red ink preserve something of Bede’s translation? (Brown 2003, 
2006b). Aldred opened his accompanying colophon with a synopsis 
of the Monarchian prologues outlining the process of transmission 
(Brown forthcoming ⒜  ). He associated himself in the colophon 
with those to whom original production was ascribed (the scribe, 
Bishop Eadfr ith of Lindisfarne; the binder, his successor, Bishop 
Æthilwald; and the metalworker who adorned it, Billfr ith the 
Anchorite); in so doing, Aldred presented himself by analogy as 
the fourth evangelist (Brown 2003: 96), John, beloved of Christ, 
placing himself, and the English language, in direct line of 
transmission fr om the divine to humankind.



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Of similar date is the interlinear gloss supplied by the priests 
Owun and Farmon to the early ninth-century Irish MacRegol 
(or Rushworth) Gospels (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. 
D. 2. 19). The West-Saxon Gospels (London, British Library, 
Royal MS 1.A.xiv), preserved in a manuscript of twelft h-century 
date, are written in single columns of continuous prose text with 
simple coloured initials. However, the earliest English translation 
of a biblical text to survive physically is the interlinear gloss to 
the Vespasian Psalter added during the mid-ninth century in 
Canterbury to a Kentish volume made a century earlier. Both 
these and Aldred’s glosses are inserted with care and sensitivity to 
the original layout of two extremely formal tomes. The signs are 
that, left  to its own devices, Anglo-Saxon England would not have 
had to await Wycliff e and Tyndale to have produced an English 
vernacular Bible.

The origins of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of glossing may 
be observed in the Latin  / Old English glossaries used in the 
schoolroom fr om the reforms of learning implemented by 
Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury during the seventh century 
(Lindsay 1921). In such handbooks the glosses provide explanations 
and perhaps a translation of terms, oft en drawn fr om specifi c texts 
or subject-based. Such teaching aids were probably indebted to late 
Antique and Merovingian Graeco-Latin glossaries. The eighth-
century Irish use of such glosses is also likely to have been of 
relevance here. The impact of the missionary conversion experience 
and of the “new learning” promoted by Theodore reverbertated 
throughout secular society, as well as the Church. Early English 
kings soon came to take pride in tracing their newly Christianised, 
integrated ancestry back through historical fi gures to pagan deities 
such as Woden and thence back to the biblical Adam and tracing 
their antecedents not only through the songs of bards and scops, but 
through the columns of a book, just as Christ’s genealogy opened 
the holy Gospelbook. As the deeds of the heroes of generations 
past were lauded in song, so the biblical forefathers were celebrated 



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in the feasting hall. The account of Bede’s death, written by his 
pupil Cuthbert, bears witness to his love of song, “for he knew our 
poems well,” and indeed the earliest recorded Old English verses 
(even if only of 9 lines in length) are Caedmon’s hymn (HE IV.24) 
and Bede’s death song recounted by Cuthbert (Farmer, Latham 
& Sherley-Price 1990: 248–249 and 358, respectively). Yet before 
the eighth century was done such cross-cultural synthesis was 
becoming unacceptable, at least in cultivated circles, and another 
of Northumbria’s scholar sons, Alcuin, would demand aff rontedly 
of an Anglian religious community, which permitted such songs / 
poems  / lays to be sung at table, “what has Ingeld to do with 
Christ?”16

Another English verse of this era was carved in Roman capitals 
and runes on the Ruthwell Cross in the ancient British kingdom 
of Rheged in Southwest Scotland during the eighth century. 
This monument, a visual meditation in stone on the Passion of 
Christ and the religious life, refl ects Northumbrian infl uence in a 
recently annexed region, emphasised by its display of runic script 
(Ó Carragáin 1994, 2005). In the late tenth-century this verse was 
copied in a fuller form in the Vercelli book as The Dream of the 
Rood, in which the cross laments its role in the crucifi xion of the 
young warrior, Christ, but is subsequently honoured by being 
covered in precious metals and jewels, becoming the honoured crux 
gemmata—symbol of Resurrection. Processional crosses, such as 
the early eleventh-century Brussels Cross, which carries passages 
similar to the Dream of the Rood poem inscribed upon it, recalled 
such eloquent splendour, as would the stone and wooden crosses 
that sprouted across the land. Such crosses also oft en bore scenes 
fr om Scripture, serving as teaching aids and being imbued with 
subtle exegetical meaning and typological analogies which would 
be apparent to the initiated and which might be expounded to the 

16 Alcuin raised this question in a letter dated 797 which has traditionally been 
thought to be addressed to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne; see Bullough 1993.



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faithful. Bede’s aspirations for refr aming heroic northern culture in 
Christian guise were being fulfi lled.

The Bewcastle Cross, of similar date to Ruthwell, likewise bears 
an eroded inscription in runes, proclaiming in Old English the 
fame of Northumbria’s royal house—in the heart of British Rheged 
which they had annexed (Karkov & Orton 2003). The use of 
particular scripts could be a powerful statement of both harmonious 
integration and unity, as in the Lindisfarne Gospels where Roman 
capitals, Greek letters and stylised forms recalling runes and ogam 
are carefully synthesised in its display script, or of cultural and 
political supremacy (Alexander 1978: nos. 35, 20; Brown 2003: 55–
56, fi g. 25; Lowe 1934–1971: ii.215, ii.213; Webster and Brown 1997: 
245–246). It is therefore most unlikely that the Chad Gospels, 
whose artist copied the incipit pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, was 
Welsh (as its ninth-century provenance might suggest), for it goes 
a step further and features actual runic letter forms in some of its 
display script—a thing that no self-respecting Welsh person would 
do at a time of resistance to English expansionism (Brown 2003, 
2007, 2008). R. I. Page has suggested that the epigraphic runes on 
the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses and the Cuthbert coffi  n are 
indebted to the approach of manuscript scribes, and the context 
of public display of these monuments is such that we are likely 
to be witnessing positive cultural statements of “Englishness” and 
its relationships to Graeco-Roman past and international Christian 
present—with runes already serving as a signifi er of Anglo-Saxon 
identity. Such semiotics remained important, for most people’s 
knowledge of Scripture, as of other texts, would continue to be oral 
and visual.

Runes and Roman script also rubricate the Northumbrian 
eighth-century whalebone box known as the Franks Casket, which 
has been proposed as a book reliquary, Leslie Webster (2010) 
suggesting that it contained a Northumbrian royal genealogy. Such 
books were penned by clerics and helped to legitimise the rule 
of their owners as Christian princes whose ancestors, traditions 



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and beliefs were presented as world history within the context of a 
Christian eternity, just as their descent fr om historical and semi-
mythical fi gures was traced to Germanic gods and Old Testament 
patriarchs. Thus the iconography of the casket related scenes 
fr om Jewish, perhaps Greek, Roman, Germanic and Christian 
traditions, captioned in runes and roman capitals, juxtaposing 
and synthesising them to provide a visual genealogy of power and 
redemption for a contemporary English audience. Thus the bird 
whose feathers enabled the vengeful Weland the Smith to escape 
his enemy, Nithhad, becomes the Holy Spirit, guiding the Magi 
to salvation in the form of the Christ-child, on one face of the 
Franks Casket. Not only letter forms and iconographies and myths, 
but whole mindsets and socio-ethical codes are juxtaposed and 
mutually accommodated. Similarly, at another point during the 
eighth century an English reader would gloss the word thalaria, the 
winged sandals of Mercury, as “fether homa,” Weland’s garment of 
feathers, in a copy of Servius’s commentary on Vergil’s Aeneid, Book 
IV, attesting to the level of assimilation and association attained by 
Insular readers.17

Stressing a shared, participative world history with their biblical 
and Roman counterparts was a preoccupation of Insular ecclesiastical 
and secular authorities. The hagiography of native saints, such as 
Cuthbert and Guthlac, would soon rival the tales of the heroes of 
Germanic and Celtic mythology and those of the Christian martyrs 
of Rome—although as Bede laments, in his letter to Ecgberht, 
some teachers preferred to fi ll their minds with secular tales than 
the word of God and Alcuin, in his Epistle 124, urged that a reader 
rather than a harpist, patristic discourse, not pagan song, be heard 
at table (Bullough 1993).

These worthies would therefore doubtless approve that the 
earliest extant manuscript of a primary prose text in Old English 

17 Spangenberg, Pfarrbibliothek, s.n. (Lowe 1934–1971: xii, no. 1806); see Parkes 
1997: 11.



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should occur in a devotional context—in the Book of Cerne, a 
western Mercian prayerbook which was probably made for Bishop 
Æthelwald of Lichfi eld (818–830). My identifi cation of the hand of 
its Old English prefatory Exhortation to prayer as that of the main 
artist/scribe and my discussion of it as guide for the performative use 
of this devotional manual, make it the earliest extant example of an 
English vernacular text written as part of an original project, rather 
than added to an existing work (Brown 1996). One of the prayers 
in Cerne, the Lorica of Laidcenn—considered so effi  cacious that 
it was recited thrice daily—also carries a planned interlinear Old 
English gloss. It is telling that the Exhortation, an early example 
of a vernacular text planned as part of a Latin book compiled fr om 
numerous earlier sources, should be essentially an explicatio and 
instructio for its use, which also provides for the possibility of 
performance—before God and the communion of saints—with its 
exhortations to the user to prostrate himself and engage in other 
ritual acts during the text’s use.

My work on this and other Mercian manuscripts of the fi rst 
half of the ninth century, and my appraisal of the nature of 
the palaeographical and stylistic relationships of the regional 
components of what I have termed the “Mercian Schrift provinz” 
(Greater Mercia, including the Fens, Kent and Wessex), coupled 
with the arguments adduced by Jennifer Morrish, point to West-
Saxon attempts to downplay the cultural achievements of Mercia 
as their prominent political forebear. As part of the construction 
of a unifi ed England, the rules of Wessex fostered forgetfulness of 
the extent of earlier learning and suppressed the Mercian historical 
record represented by annals and other documents (Brown 2001: 
279–291, 2006: 164–172; Morrish 1982, 1986, 1988; for a more 
pro-Wessex view, see Gneuss 1986). Greater Mercia was actively 
promoting texts in the vernacular during this period, as the 
prose “Exhortation” and glossed lorica in the Book of Cerne, the 
interlinear translation / gloss of the Psalms in the Vespasian Psalter 
(the earliest extant example of a biblical text in English, following in 



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Bede’s footsteps) and perhaps the Old English Martyrology and the 
poetry of Cynewulf (who may have been a Mercian writing around 
800) suggest.18 Nicholas Brooks’s picture of the decline of standards 
of handwriting and Latinity in the Christ Church Canterbury 
scriptorium during the second half of the ninth century, which 
is based upon the extant output of one ageing monastic charter 
scribe, needs to be balanced against the evidence I have rehearsed 
of the continuing presence and infl uence of Mercian manuscript 
exemplars and scholars, such as Wærferth, Plegmund, Æthelstan 
and Werwulf, in unoccupied western Mercia and Wessex in the late 
ninth century (Brooks 1984; Brown 1996: 16–18, 162–164, 173–177). 
Couple this with a wish to recall (or better) Charlemagne’s imperial 
achievement in establishing a court-focused scholarly equipe, a 
publishing programme in the form of the Tours Bibles,19 and a 
cultural renovatio,20 and we have receptive soil for the legend of 
Alfr ed’s literary prowess. This grew over the course of the tenth 
century fr om the seeds of renewal sewn in his own circle—and 
probably with his own imprimatur—which were cultivated by his 
immediate heirs and eulogised by later authors.

When the preface to the Pastoral Care states that there was 
nobody in Alfr ed’s kingdom who could read Latin by Alfr ed’s 
day, and few elsewhere in England, it may accurately refl ect the 
situation in Wessex and Kent, but there were evidently those who 
could in Mercia, at least. There are indeed indications that the 

18 See Bjork 1998; Brown 2006, 2001; Pulsiano 1996; Zacher 2002. We know 
Cynewulf ’s name fr om his runic signatures, woven into the four poems which 
comprise his acknowledged corpus: The Fates of the Apostles, Juliana, Elene, and 
Christ II (also referred to as The Ascension), which survive in later collections in 
the Vercelli and Exeter Books.
19 Alcuin’s programme was probably infl uenced by Wearmouth / Jarrow’s earlier 
“publication” of the works of Bede and of reliable editions of Scripture, in turn 
indebted to Cassiodorus’s example.
20 The Carolingian court culture was one that Alfr ed had visited as a child and 
which his Carolingian princess / stepmother had inhabited.



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decline in Latinity had begun prior to the Viking incursions, in the 
early ninth century, but that this was patchy and occasioned not so 
much by cultural degeneration as by the growth of an active written 
vernacular literacy—English was coming of age in its own right and 
fr eeing itself fr om its Mediterranean masters. It would be ironic 
indeed if the edifi ce of West-Saxon renovatio had its foundations 
laid by a largely Mercian team, drawing also upon Continental 
precedents and expertise and with a large dash of Welsh hyperbole, 
courtesy of “Asser.”

Notwithstanding ongoing scholarly debate concerning the 
extent of his personal scholarly role, Alfr ed’s contribution should 
not be devalued, for even if many of the Old English translations 
associated with his reforms were penned in the subsequent 
generation, he initiated such enterprise by his distribution—by 
means of a Wearmouth / Jarrow and Touronian style publishing 
drive—to key centres of the Pastoral Care, a work designed to 
foster social cohesion—and by choosing the vernacular as its voice. 
He also ensured a measure of continuity in traditions of script and 
other aspects of book production and consolidated what remained 
of local scholarship. He also ensured a growing rapprochement 
with the cultural ideals and strategies of the Carolingian Empire, 
probably reintroduced schooling, extending it beyond the orbit of 
earlier monastic schoolrooms, for a substantial sector of the male 
population and began the process of reviving the ecclesiastical 
publishing houses and beacons of faith.

These were considerable achievements indeed, but nonetheless 
Alfr ed did not pioneer the use of written Old English. He and his 
heirs transplanted and strengthened a vigorous root stock that had 
already sprung fr om the seeds of conversion and the accompanying 
reception of full literacy, as was also the case with so many other 
of the European and Middle Eastern vernaculars. What Alfr ed 
did do was to escalate a trend to reverse the polarity. Whereas 
Insular authors such as Aldhelm and Bede composed in Latin—
even if Bede for one recognised the pragmatic effi  cacy of vernacular 



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translation—post-Alfr edian writers, such as Ælfr ic, Wulfstan and 
Byrthferth, would write predominantly in their native tongue. 
Ælfr ic’s homilies were designed for circulation to a literate English-
reading clergy, whilst Bede lamented the lack of Latinate priests 
and began the process of equipping them with written vernacular 
tools which they could share orally with their wider communities. 
Whereas the churchman Bede translated into English in order to 
inform his people of an international Christian literary tradition, 
250 years later the layman Ealdorman Æthelweard translated into 
Latin in order to integrate his nation’s historical experience back 
into that tradition.

The English and Irish escalation in the use of their written 
vernaculars during the ninth century can perhaps best be viewed, 
in some respects, as an ethnic response to Viking invasion, 
settlement and the establishment of a “state within a state.” Ninth-
century Wales (and to a lesser extent Cornwall) witnessed a similar 
phenomenon in reaction to English expansionism. For such threats 
spurred a desire to preserve national cultural identity. In England, 
they also stimulated the translation of appropriate classics, such as 
Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, and the production of custom-
written vernacular texts, including rousing sermons by Ælfr ic and 
Wulfstan—the Wolf, designed to hearten and to mobilize English 
resistance to Scandinavian incursion, penned largely in his own 
hand.

The anthologising trends apparent in British and English 
literature, fr om the work of the Welsh cleric Nennius in the ninth 
century (Dumville 1985), who tells of his collecting of historical 
sources and oral anecdotes to form the Historia Brittonum, to that 
of the compilers of the Vercelli book (whom Ó Carragáin (2005) 
suggests may have been a canon; see also Scragg 1992) and of the 
Anglo-Saxon Scientifi c Miscellany (BL. Cotton MS Tiberius B.v, 
pt 1; McGurk et al. 1983), speak of a desire to capture existing 
knowledge—both written and, as Nennius puts it, the “tales of old 
men”—within binding boards for posterity, perhaps in response to 



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the threat of loss of identity and to the challenge of establishing 
a perceived shared identity amongst established and incoming 
populations. There are also signs of attempts to assert traditional 
ties to ancient and imperial worlds, and to a northern Scandinavian 
trading empire with shared Germanic folk roots and vernacular 
orality. Such was the climate that cultivated the production of the 
Beowulf manuscript, the Old English compendia of poetry, and 
sculptural monuments such as the Nunburnholme Cross and the 
Gosforth Cross with their juxtaposed images of Crucifi xion and 
Scandinavian saga.

During the early eleventh century, such intersections of 
identities also reached new levels of visual narrative expression 
in the Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library, MS 
Cotton Claudius B.iv) and the Old English Genesis (Oxford, 
Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11) manuscripts. These confl ated 
vernacular paraphrases of Old Testament texts with picture cycles 
of largely Early Christian origin, adapted to refl ect the interests 
of contemporary “communities of reading,” including women, 
and emphasizing the Anglo-Saxon people’s own sense of exile and 
journey fr om their original Germanic homelands to England as 
the new “children of Israel.” The English thereby asserted their 
own cultural and linguistic identity and set themselves within the 
biblical landscape.21

Such works stressed the shared inheritance of Anglo-Saxon and 
Scandinavian parallel cultures, sprung fr om a common Germanic, 
and ultimately biblical, stock. Such a trend can be detected as early 
as the Alfr edian revival, with the inclusion of Othere’s Voyage 
alongside the Old English Orosius, which survives in an early 
tenth-century copy (the Helmingham  / Tollemache Orosius). It 
culminated in the Anglo-Saxon world map, the fi rst of the medieval 
mappae mundi. This forms part of the Anglo-Saxon Scientifi c 

21 See Barnhouse & Withers 2000; Dodwell & Clemoes 1974 ; Karkov 2006; 
Muir 2004; Withers 2007.



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Miscellany (McGurk et al. 1983), which links material such as 
Priscian’s Periegesis, Archbishop Sigebert of Canterbury’s pilgrimage 
route, Cicero’s Aratea, the Marvels of the East and computistic 
materials, also features a remarkable, precocious world map. Based 
upon Roman cartography supplemented by the experience gained 
on Scandinavian voyages, this is the fi rst surviving attempt to depict 
a world view in diagrammatic form, other than the simple Isidoran 
“T maps” in which a globe is divided into three continents. It 
depicts Britain and Ireland, with their outlying archipelagos, as part 
of a Scandinavian empire linked via trading and pilgrimage routes 
to the Holy Land, with Jerusalem as the umbilical centre-point of 
the world, and with the outlying lands of legend, as recounted by 
the Marvels of the East. The monstrous races that it describes are 
not confl ated onto the map here, but they are depicted elsewhere in 
the volume, and in the Beowulf manuscript where they complement 
the theme of Grendel and his Mother in a poem that retains a 
recollection of the culture of Germanic prehistory. By the time 
of the more famous thirteenth-century Hereford mappa mundi, 
which may once have functioned as an altarpiece, the monstrous 
races and other aspects of the information in the Miscellany had 
been mapped onto the surface of a world which English scholars 
such as Bede and Byrthferth had played signifi cant roles in seeking 
to understand at a scientifi c level of revelation. Such was the 
sophistication of the rapprochement of learning, text and image 
that had been achieved towards the conclusion of our period.

The orality interface remained highly signifi cant. Patrick 
Conner’s recent work on Anglo-Saxon guilds has shown that the 
song of the Germanic warriors’ mead-hall was giving way, by the 
eleventh century, to other sorts of secular fellowship of like-minded 
folk, linked by trading interests in a developing urban environment. 
Books fi gured in guild feasts, and in the development of dramatic 
performances—forerunners of medieval mystery plays—and 
Conner suggests such a context for the performance of at least 
some of the poetry and riddles in the Exeter Book (Exeter, Dean 



Michelle P. Brown

110SELIM 20 (2013–2014)

and Chapter, MS 3501).22 The inappropriate participation in such 
social rituals by monkish ale-poets caused Wulfstan to lament, 
recalling Alcuin’s demand “what has Ingeld to do with Christ?” 
(Cherniss 1972).

We might ask, in return, “what has Beowulf to do with monks?” 
Yet retention of a Germanic way of life, or poetic and visual 
allusions to it, did not equate to the perpetuation of paganism, for 
as Patrick Wormald observed, the Church was not separate fr om 
the world, and Beowulf was not exclusively secular or antipathetic 
to a monastic audience (Wormald 1978).

The interplay between the oral and visual imagination and 
their commital to long-term graphic retention by means of 
the written word and images, which occurred in Anglo-Saxon 
England, was a complex one. This, coupled with the models of 
transmission provided by works such as the Táin, the works of 
Cynewulf (which are preserved in the anthologies in the Vercelli 
and Exeter Books) and the Dream of the Rood, would suggest that 
it is possible that there was a back-story to the transmission of 
the Beowulf poem before it was copied, reworked or expanded, in 
the form that it assumes in the Nowell Codex. It is conceivable 
that, like the Dream of the Rood, Beowulf fi rst took the form of 
a written poem in the Insular age (probably the eighth century). 
This would accord with the arcane archaeological, palaeographical 
and linguistic features of the poem, the mixed West Saxon and 
Anglian dialect of which suggests that an East Anglian, Mercian or 
Northumbrian intermediary dwells at the heart of its West-Saxon 
body. It may, previously and/or subsequently, have been recited in 
the mead hall and extracts fr om it may also have been inscribed 

22 Conner (2009) proposes “to examine the proposition that four poems preceding 
the Riddles 1 to 59 in Booklet III of that manuscript beg, by their sequencing as 
well as thematic content, to be read together in a performance context, perhaps 
appropriate to a banquet with both men and women in attendance, such as those 
we know were held by the parish guilds which are documented in southern Anglo-
Saxon England.” See also Conner 2008.



Beowulf and the origins of the written Old English vernacular

111 SELIM 20 (2013–2014)

onto stone, bone and wooden monuments and de luxe metalwork 
before its full literary form was incorporated by a monastic scribe 
into a manuscript anthology, with a focus upon the relationship 
between mankind and the monstrous races, sometime around the 
year 1000, perhaps stimulated by a rapprochement between English 
and Scandinavian society and celebrating their shared roots in the 
Germanic past.

Further support for the contention that the Beowulf poem 
was an early composition comes fr om the arguments based upon 
linguistic similarities between Beowulf and Genesis A advanced by 
Dennis Cronan, who favoured an eighth-century date for both 
(Cronan 2004: 49):

The words examined here confi rm the presence of the 
chronological connection between Beowulf and Genesis A 
seen in this list, and to a lesser extent they also confi rm the 
connection between these poems and Exodus, and perhaps 
Daniel, although in this latter case the evidence is not as 
reliable. The distribution of suhtriga, heoru, eodor, engel and 
missere indicate that these poems are probably early; the 
restriction of suhtriga to Genesis A and Beowulf (as well as 
Widsith) and to glossaries derived fr om a seventh- or eighth-
century collection indicates an eighth-century date for Genesis 
A, and, by implication, for Beowulf, Maxims I, Exodus and 
perhaps Widsith. In the case of Maxims I it is uncertain 
whether the evidence points toward an eighth-century date 
for some of the materials in the poem, for the editorial work 
of an anthologist, or for the poem itself.

This supported the chronology of Old English poetry proposed by 
R. D. Fulk (1992: 60–65), which in turn confi rmed that advanced 
by T. Cable (1981: 80). This in turn lends support to Lapidge’s 
contention that errors in the Beowulf poem, as it appears in the 
Nowell Codex, were the result of scribal misunderstanding 
of certain letters such as would suggest that he was copying an 
exemplar in “Anglo-Saxon set minuscule script, written before c. 
750” (Lapidge 2000: 34).



Michelle P. Brown

112SELIM 20 (2013–2014)

The vernacular, it is clear, moved fr om the purely oral and 
inscriptional to a fully written form during the seventh, and eighth 
centuries. The fact that the four compendia of Old English poetry 
were penned during the tenth and eleventh centuries should not 
lead us to imagine that poetry was not written down in previous 
centuries. These compendia contain transcription errors and 
archaic orthographical forms, moreover, which would suggest that 
they contain poems fi rst committed to writing during the earliest 
periods of Anglo-Saxon literacy. A variety of lexical and metrical 
evidence supports the possibility that Beowulf was composed in the 
earlier Anglo-Saxon period; this essay has simply contributed a 
context, in light of which there is no literary-historical reason why 
it should not have been.

Michelle P. Brown
School of Advanced Studies, University of London

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•

Received 9 Apr 2014; accepted 03 May 2014