Adaptation and anweald in the Old English Orosius

Kretzschmar, W.A. (1987) Adaptation and anweald in the Old English Orosius. Anglo-Saxon England, 16(1), pp. 127-145. (doi: 10.1017/S0263675100003872)

Abstract

After Janet Bately's several articles and her recent edition of the Old English Orosius there is little need to analyse further what the Anglo-Saxon translator did to his source. The translator made substantial cuts in the Latin text: he deleted much of Orosius's commentary on the events he narrated, made a number of minor, probably accidental, omissions, rather surprisingly left out some details which should have interested the Anglo-Saxon audience, and carried out a wholesale chopping of events and entire sections, reducing his translation to perhaps one-fifth the length of its source. He also made some additions, primarily explanations of institutions and details which would have been obscure to his audience, but also circumstances and rationalizations taken from secondary sources or from his own whimsy. Finally, he made some changes in the organization of his source and altered Orosius's polemical tone to that of a more objective but still Christian world history. Given the large number of changes, it is important now to ask why the translator might have made such a thorough redaction, and to consider how his translation could have been an appropriate vehicle for the transmission of this standard authority to an Anglo-Saxon readership. We are not unfamiliar today with historical revisionism and the motives for it, and the practice reveals the culture of its modern practitioners; the present study seeks similar information about the culture of Alfred's age.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Kretzschmar, Professor William
• Authors: Kretzschmar, W.A.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Language and Linguistics
• Journal Name: Anglo-Saxon England
• ISSN: 0263-6751
• ISSN (Online): 1474-0532