The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's "De Consolatione Philosophiae" (review)

The Old English Boethius exists in two versions: a prose version and a prosimetric version that is likely based on the prose version. Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine's masterly two-volume edition brings the two versions together in their entirety for the first time, with full modern English translations of both. The first volume comprises the bibliography, introductory material, and the Old English texts; the second volume includes the modern English translations, textual notes, commentary, and glossary. This addition is an enormous boon not only for Anglo-Saxonists but for medievalists in general. Previous modern English translations focused exclusively on the Old English meters of Boethius; for the first time, the Old English Boethius is available in its entirety, complete with a comprehensive Old English glossary, to the non-Anglo-Saxonist or beginning Old English student.

The first volume begins with a select but extensive bibliography and a chapter briefly and clearly explaining the history of and relationships between Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and the Old English (OE) versions. A detailed description of the manuscripts of the OE Boethius follows. The manuscripts are B, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180, which contains the prose translation of the Consolation of Philosophy, written by a single scribe probably in the late eleventh or early twelfth century; C, London, British Library, Cotton Otho A.vi, a composite manuscript, badly burnt in the Cotton fire of 1731, which includes a tenth-century copy of the prosimetric translation of the Consolation of Philosophy; and N, the Napier fragment, a now lost fragment of a single leaf. Godden and Irvine, after examining the existing hypotheses about the relationship between the two versions, conclude that the prosimetric version represented by C is likely a subsequent adaptation of the prose version represented by B, despite the older manuscript evidence of the prosimetric version.

The editors delve thoroughly into the Old English prose version, covering such topics as its relation to the Latin text, the use of Boethian commentary and other sources, the possible influence of Asser, the Old English Boethius's nature and purpose, and "Boethian Terminology and the OE Boethius." Godden and Irvine have mined the tradition of Boethian commentary from which the Old English translator drew without overstating his dependence on the commentary. As they importantly point out, the translator's version of the De Consolatione Philosophiae "seems to emerge from the context of the whole tradition of studying and commenting on the DCP, using the same sort of sources as commentators were using as well as their commentaries" (144). The section on terminology includes explorations of both important keywords in Boethius and their counterparts in the OE text. Their discussions of the overlapping semantic possibilities of fortuna and fatum in Latin and wyrd and gesælð in OE are especially illuminating.

In his section on the composition of the meters, Mark Griffiths focuses on the adaptation from prose into verse and also includes a lengthy and detailed section on the prosody of the meters. In their section on authorship and date, Godden and Irvine remain refreshingly agnostic on the question of authorship of the Old English Boethius, including a detailed comparison of the prose text with other Alfredian or pseudo-Alfredian works. A discussion of the language of the OE Boethius consists of the only detailed study of the orthography, phonology, and accidence of the OE Boethius. A particularly informative short chapter about later uses of the OE Boethius follows, with sections on its influence on Ælfric, the OE Distichs of Cato, and Nicholas Trevet. The general introduction concludes with a survey of previous editions of the OE Boethius, from Junius's seventeenth-century manuscript edition to Obst and Schleburg's 1998 German edition. This survey makes it clear that the...