Saint Aldhelm was an Anglo-Saxon monk, abbot, and bishop who was born before the middle of the seventh century and died in 709. Likely, according to Michael Lapidge and James Rosier, the son of English converts to Christianity, his connections with the Anglo-Saxon nobility, his association with the late sixth-century Canterbury school of Hadrian and Theodore, and his service as both the abbot of Malmesbury and the bishop of Sherborne mark him as an active and influential leader of the early English church. Beyond that, he was a well-respected and influential writer of both Latin and Old English poetry and prose, although none of his English-language compositions were recorded or have survived.
In Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles, poet A.M. Juster (the pen name of Michael James Astrue, a Yale and Harvard-trained lawyer and former Commissioner of the Social Security Administration) follows earlier translations of Petrarch and the Satires of Horace with one of Aldhelm’s Aenigmata (“Mysteries”), one hundred Latin verse riddles on subjects as transcendent as “Fate” and “Creation” and as down-to-earth as “The Rooster” and “The Leech.” These riddles initially formed part of the Epistula ad Acircium, a collection of works on symbols, metaphor, and poetics addressed by Aldhelm to King Aldfrith of Northumbria, but they likely were written earlier and circulated separately. Juster’s translation of the Aenigmata is headed by a sketch of Aldhelm’s life and work and followed by an extensive commentary that presents what amounts to an interpretive essay on Aldhelm’s sources and intentions, and discusses, often line-by-line, each riddle’s imagery, vocabulary, and formal elements while commenting on the challenges they present to the translator.
Juster asserts that Aldhelm’s expert, evocative, and assertively medieval verse deserves to be read in a fully poetical translation, not only for its artistry but also for its pastoral intention as the creation of an educated and high-status cleric attempting “to explain the wonders and mysteries of God to a lay audience.” In the translator’s hands, these riddles are elegant, flowing, and engaging. Here is the fifteenth aenigma, the answer of which is “salamander”:
Ignibus in mediis vivens non sentio flammas,
Sed detrimenta rogi penitus ludibria faxo.
Nec crepitante foco nec scintillante favilla,
Aredo, sed flammae flagranti torre tepescunt.
Juster renders this verse as:
I feel no flame while living in the fire,
But mock the pains while deep within the pyre.
As the hearth crackles and the embers glimmer,
I do not burn, though wood’s fierce flames grow dimmer.
Meanwhile, Lapidge and Rosier, in what Juster cites as one of the “more literal” scholarly translations, give the first two lines as:
Although I live in the midst of fires, I do not feel the flames,
But rather I will treat the damages (inflicted by) the fire completely as a joke.
Here and throughout, Juster is particularly alive to Aldhelm’s language and imagery. His version, while not “a trot” as he says (and while employing end rhymes not present in the original), betters the more literal one by setting the poem’s subject firmly “deep within” the fire. In his hands, the heat is palpable. Within Juster’s stated aim of providing non-scholars interested in riddles, poetry, and Anglo-Saxon England with a full display of Aldhelm’s “warmth, wit, and wonder,” his translation succeeds admirably.
Juster’s commentary on these poems is rich and worthwhile as well, demonstrating considerable knowledge of and research into both the Classical and the medieval Insular poetic and literary traditions. I certainly agree with him that Aldhelm, as a poet, scholar, and pastoral leader in seventh-century England, wrote to illuminate the divine underpinnings of the natural world. I hesitate, however, at the suggestion that these particular riddles were meant to teach Anglo-Saxons about the Christian God even if their Irish-educated dedicatee Aldfrith may have been literate (i.e., Latinate) enough to appreciate them. According to William of Malmesbury’s eleventh-century biography of his famous predecessor, Aldhelm sang or recited to his secular audiences in English, not Latin. Moreover, Andy Orchard says that Aldhelm’s use of alliteration likely derives more from the Hiberno-Latin than Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, something that better fits the Rome-oriented Bede’s assessment of Aldhelm’s written style as “polished” (nitidus). Given that likely only men and women who were already part of the Church could read Latin, few in Aldhelm’s audience would have learned much new about their God from reading his riddles even though subsequent imitation shows that many of them eagerly learned from him about riddles and poetic style.
Nevertheless, I think that Juster is right to identify the Aenigmata as a didactic work—maybe even as a work designed to teach cosmology, like the Irish Liber de ordine creaturarum or Treatise on the Order of Creation that was written at roughly the same time and survives in copies produced in Northumbria not long before Aldhelm’s death. The Christianization of England involved clerics like Aldhelm trying to inculcate in their English followers a Christian image of the whole of creation from top to bottom. Given that the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus shows that the English practiced and valued the oral composition of complex poetry, a poet of Aldhelm’s skill and breadth of learning certainly may have joined an Anglo-Saxon and Latin love of the riddle with a commitment to teach a Christian worldview when composing lines like these, from the final riddle whose answer is “Creation”:
Behold! I see God’s secrets down through sky,
Yet under land found Hell attracts my eye …
Behold! I’m wider than the limits of Earth’s lands,
Yet can be held within a person’s hands.
Aldhelm’s Aenigmata not only influenced Anglo-Saxon poets in Latin and English over subsequent centuries but also may have served as a treasury of mysteries from which educated clerics with pastoral commitments might draw ideas, inspiration, and even examples of how they could present Christian ideas in new forms. Juster’s translation and commentary encourages us to appreciate the poet’s craftsmanship and consider its implications.
Works Cited
Aldhelm, 1985. Aldhelm: The Poetic Works. Translated by Michael Lapidge and James L. Rosier. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer.
Orchard, Andy, 1994. The Poetic Art of Aldhelm. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bede, 1969. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
William of Malmesbury, 1887-1889. De gestis regum Anglorum libri quinque; Historiae novellae libri tres. Two volumes. Edited by William Stubbs. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.
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[Review length: 1063 words • Review posted on December 8, 2016]