Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library has probably done more than any other initiative over the last sixteen years to make Old English texts accessible. These handsome gold-brown volumes, comfortable in the hand and easy on both eye and wallet, present facing page editions and translations by the best scholars, compactly provided with efficient yet sufficient contextual information. Each volume hews to a formula, from crisply-written introduction, cleanly presented text on the verso with corresponding translation on the recto, pared down textual notes, and somewhat fuller explanatory material in “Notes on the Translation,” followed by basic bibliographical guidance. Early volumes devoted to The Beowulf Manuscript and Old English Shorter Poems brought classics of the field to a broad audience, while subsequent volumes, like Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints or the works of Ælfric and Wulfstan, are hugely valuable for reading or teaching the more neglected areas of the early medieval vernacular record. The present volume turns to the Chronicle, an obviously desirable addition to the series and yet one that is perhaps not so well served by the standard formula.
First a note about naming. The introduction spends some time historicizing the changing modern names for this accretion of annals, emphasizing the language of this written record, and concludes: “The text in this edition, covering the years up to 1001 and hitherto called ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Manuscript A,’ is accordingly given the new name that recognizes its language: ‘The Old English Chronicle, the A-Text to 1001’” (ix). The editors thereby tactfully move the work’s title away from a name element that has been widely seen as obnoxious. Less clear to this reviewer, though, is the rationale for the remainder of this act of fiat. Why end in 1001? This is implicitly addressed in the introduction: “The dozen scrappy entries from 1002 to 1066 are primarily in a twelfth-century hand. It is thus annal 1001 that brings to an end recordkeeping in the manuscript until after the Norman Conquest, when the A-text was taken over for the purpose of annotation in Latin by Canterbury scribes, thus bringing to a close its series of annals in Old English put together before the Conquest” (xvii), even as scrappy entries and annotations in Latin all sound potentially interesting. And why include just the A-text? Will there be separate volumes for each manuscript of the Chronicle? “Volume 1” in the title certainly flags more material to come, but if we are getting the other manuscripts, why include here two poems, on the Death of Alfred and the Death of Edward, that survive only in the C- and D-text? And why does The Battle of Maldon get included here? Those are questions left unanswered within the volume or the series’ website.
In any event, the Old English Chronicle is a hard work to read from beginning to end, which may suggest it calls for special treatment. Early annals are laconic in the extreme as they give basic details about the accession, battles, and death of kings and some ecclesiasts. Other major events also get mentioned, astronomical (the moon went red, the passing of a comet), meteorological (a great winter) or occasionally zoological (such as “great carnage of birds” in AN 671, “extraordinary snakes” in AN 773). The exception to the prevailing brevity of the early annals comes in the famous story of “Cynewulf and Cyneheard” (AN 755) with its extended, if still laconic, account of conflicting loyalties, here annotated fairly fully.
From 787 on annals become fuller as tracking Viking activity provides something of a through-line for the entries. As the introduction explains, the “Common Stock” of material shared by all the Chronicle manuscripts ends with the annal for 892, suggesting initial compilation in the orbit of King Alfred (reigned 871-899). Subsequent entries differ in style. The author of the “First Continuation,” for 893 to 896, provides a much fuller account of Alfred’s wars with the Viking armies. Remaining entries fall into four sections, the editors suggest, “entered in the manuscript during the early, middle, and second half of the tenth century and the early eleventh century” (xvi). These late entries include a series of poems, starting with “The Battle of Brunanburh” in annal 937, and continuing in annal 942 with shorter poems on “The Capture of the Five Boroughs,” which describes King Edmund’s reconquest of Danish-held territory in Mercia, and the Coronation of Edgar and the Death of Edgar as the annals for 973 and 975. Presumably it is the presence of these poems that provides a rationale for also including poems on the Death of Alfred (C-text annal for 1036) and the Death of Edward (C-text annal for 1065), which are included here with a markedly richer introduction and notes than the poems of the A-text (which, after “Brunanburh,” are characterized rather dismissively in the introduction as “generally regarded as lesser efforts” (xvii)). Fuller still is the treatment of The Battle of Maldon, which is given its own relatively extensive introduction and notes. A mistake in printing led to the omission of line 13 of the Old English text (at page 186), which is included in an online erratum notice, https://domedieval.org/books/the-old-english-chronicle-volume-i/.
As the editors observe in their introduction, the annals of the Chronicle “have rightly been described as providing a historical backbone for the period between the arrival of the first Germanic invaders in Britain in the fifth century and events in the early decades of the twelfth century” (viii), but it is a backbone that calls for significant additional explanation to make sense of the vertebrae. In addition to explaining key vocabulary items and identifying places, the notes here are most useful when they provide potted biographies of individuals named in the text, drawing details from Bede’s Ecclesiastica History and/or The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge, et al., and thereby filling in the annalistic compression with explanatory detail. For example, the rather bland entry for 657, “In this year Peada passed away, and Wulfhere, Penda’s son, succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians” (37) is unpacked through reference to Bede, “According to EH 3.24, pp. 294-95, Peada was ‘most foully murdered,’ apparently due to treachery on the part of his wife during the Easter festival” and “Wulfhere, a young son of Penda’s, had been kept concealed after his father’s death by three Mercian ealdormen in rebellion against Oswiu. They now set him up as their king. Ruling over the Mercians for seventeen years, Wulfhere gradually acquired power over most of the southern kingdoms” (230-31). In this way, the notes put flesh on the skeletal history, but they only do so some of the time. An intriguing detail in the annal for 962 that “King Sigeferth killed himself, his body lying at Wimborne” (159), for example, receives no explanation, for all its rare reference to the suicide of a king. The Chronicle covers history so cryptically that added explanation is a boon to a curious reader.
The translation mostly captures the laconic style of the original. A brief note on the method of translation observes that it “adheres closely to the Old English text, making only relatively minor changes to syntax when the structure of Modern English requires it—for example, in cases of extended syndetic parataxis” (xviii). Somewhat fuller notes explain the challenges in the naming of peoples and ranks and the technical language of warfare. On the latter, this reviewer finds one lexical choice that adds to the challenge for an unfamiliar reader. The OE term here from 837 onwards refers to the armies of heathen men or of the Danes who are fighting against the fyrd, the troops levied by the English kings. In this translation “here (whatever the actual size of the force in question) is normally translated ‘army,’ and fierd is translated ‘levy’” (xxiii). While this establishes consistency, it is consistently confusing in practice, since a reader has to recall “(Viking) army” for the manifold references to army activities in the later annals and “(English army)” for each mention of “levy.” Earlier translators used more distinctive terms—Garmonsway’s “the host” or Swanton’s “raiding-army” for se here—to help clarify for a reader whose army is being described.
The Chronicle is a hard text to present in a compact format. More concession to the reader (such as “Viking army” for here) could make the translation more user-friendly; more extensive notes could make the significance of the oh-so-cryptic entries easier to understand; while more introductory matter would make the rationale of this volume more comprehensible and make clear what we can look forward to next. All the same, the presentation here makes a fundamental text of early medieval England accessible to a broad audience and there is a clear hint of more to come. This is a series which still has much to offer.