Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Language, Literature, History ed. by Alice Jorgensen (review)

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with its murky origins, multiple manuscript witnesses, baffling history of transmission, and perplexing relation to sources and contexts, has been a source of both frustration and delight for scholars. Derived from a 2004 conference on the Chronicle held at the University of York, the essays in Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle span a range of disciplines and offer a valuable and comprehensive treatment of this most intricate of texts. As the editor reflects in her Introduction, “the Chronicle breaks down into multiple chronicles and subchronicles. Historically, these materials were produced, used, and had meaning both as a whole and at lower levels of organization, and to recover their historical meanings we need to read in ways both comparative and linear, both holistic and atomistic. We need, in fact, to read them many times” (pp. 17–18). The Introduction offers an extremely useful overview of the Chronicle manuscripts and related texts, as well as its complicated critical history, along with salutary reminders to think about the plurality of texts, sources, and contexts. The goal of the volume is to understand ways of reading the Chronicle, both as modern readers and as scholars who want to know what it meant to its Anglo-Saxon audience. To that end, it is broken down into three sections: on literature, on history, and on language.

“Part I: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Literature” is made up of five essays on literary aspects of reading the Chronicle. Thomas Bredehoft identifies a thirty-five-line poem in the annal for 1067D, on the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret, offering a preliminary edition and translation as part of his contribution. While others have seen poetic “effusions” in this annal before, Bredehoft’s careful metrical analysis reveals a self-contained poem used, in this annal, “to invoke and to tie together two of the Chronicle’s central continuing themes: the political legitimacy and continuation of the West Saxon royal line, on the one hand, and the influence of that line on insular Christianity, on the other” (p. 39). This sort of careful attention to the literary form of the Chronicle is carried through in two essays on the Peterborough Chronicle, also known as MS E, by Susan Irvine and Malasree Home. Irvine examines the composition and compilation of E up to 1131. Through Peterborough interpolations into the source text (up to 1121) and the independent annals that continue it, Irvine discerns evidence that the scribe for this section of E might also have been the same person who compiled new material from Latin sources and translated them as well. Home agrees; while her study focuses on the exclamatory rhetoric of certain sections in this part of E, she reaches a conclusion similar to Irvine’s. Through the Peterborough Chronicle, in Home’s words, “we get a glimpse of the way a Chronicle version was painstakingly recrafted in order to make it a vehicle of provincial history and monastic interests, and the remarkable awareness of textual tradition and narrative structure that this process involved” (p. 88).

Two more stylistic analyses round out the section on Literature. In the first, Jacqueline Stodnick challenges the traditional view that the brevity and repetitive phraseology of the early Chronicle annals debases their literary value. Taking a page from the study of poetry, Stodnick shows that the repetition of formulaic phrases serves the same purpose in the Chronicle that it does in verse: to forge thematic links between events and figures at different points in a story. Formulaic language, far from being barren, functions as a conscious part of the chroniclers’ efforts at narrative shaping and represents “a deliberate attempt by annalists to minimize unevenness in their text caused by its multiple sources, compilers, and continuations” (p. 101). Aesthetic concerns likewise take center stage for Alice Jorgensen, who compares the emotionally charged narrative of the Æthelredian Chronicle (983–1016) with its redaction...