Alfredian Temporalities: Time and Translation in the Old English Orosius

As one of the Alfredian translations, the Old English Orosius holds a place among the other books that the preface to the Pastoral Care deems are “nidbeðyrfesta … eallum monnum to witanne” (most needful for all men to know).¹ The text is an Anglo-Saxon “paraphrase” of the Historiarum adversum paganos libri septem, a Christian universal history written by fifth-century Roman historian Paulus Orosius. Meant to counter concerns that the sack of Rome in 410 C.E. was a result of the empire’s conversion to Christianity, the Historiae “presents a systematic catalogue of human misery from the Creation to the early fifth century, and repeatedly emphasizes the relative superficiality of contemporary suffering in comparison with the catastrophes of the past.”² This agenda in the Historiae—the promotion of Christianity through the comparison of times—makes the Old English translation of the text a particularly interesting case study for the function of time in translations.

In his study of time in Chaucerian texts, Paul Strohm rightly argues that “no text fails to bear within itself a range of alien temporalities, imported into its bounds as unavoidable part and parcel of the words and images of which it is made.”³ Therefore, each text “harbours different notions of time.”⁴ In this view of textual representation and production, the text becomes a collection not merely of words, stories, or characters but of times as well: the narrative present is always “held hostage to the past and future.”⁵ As a translation, the Old English Orosius contains two distinct times that cohabit the text: the fifth-century world of Paulus Orosius and the ninth-century Old English–speaking world for whom his work was “needful to know.”⁶ The text anticipates this audience and responds to it actively; moreover, there is a motion backwards in time that rewrites the identity and message of Paulus Orosius and the Historiae for the Anglo-Saxon future into which the Orosius narrator speaks.

The most striking textual feature of the Old English Orosius is the method by which it calls attention to itself as a translation: the recurrence of the phrase cwæð Orosius (Orosius said).⁷ The cwæð construction often introduces material that is significantly altered from the Latin. Additionally, it serves two further functions. First, the cwæð Orosius creates an author-figure that I will refer to as the “Orosius narrator.” The author-figure is an effect produced by the text and should be distinguished from the historical figure Paulus Orosius, however much the text wishes to fuse them together.⁸ Second, the cwæð Orosius constructs an audience for the text by assuming the historical and linguistic traits implicit in said audience. Both of these functions call a community into being through the text—the community to whom, in some senses, it is addressed—and this community is simultaneously located in Paulus Orosius’s fifth-century Rome and ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England. While this community resembles Brian Stock’s idea of a “textual community,” the key difference between the community established in the Orosius and the communities that Stock examines is historical reality. Whereas Stock refers to specific localizable communities who used the texts he examined, no such certainty exists for the Orosius.⁹ The textual communities formed in the Old English Orosius are “virtual”—that is, they are formed by an anticipated readership within the text rather than an existing one outside of it.¹⁰ My analysis of the Orosius thus offers a possible departure point for future studies of temporality, translation, and the Alfredian program as a whole by analyzing the way that translation can create a multilayered temporality within the text that changes the communities imagined within it.¹¹

I. Cwæđ Orosius

At the behest of Saint Augustine, Paulus Orosius wrote the Historiae in part to address—and rebuke—the discontents of some citizens of the Roman Empire. These citizens purportedly attributed the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in 410 C.E. to the empire’s recent conversion to Christianity. Written as a companion piece to Saint...