The Lives of the Two Offas: Vitae Offarum Duorum ed. by Michael Swanton (review)

Michael Swanton’s text and translation of the anonymous Vitae Offarum duorum is, like every other work of his over the years, an accomplished and highly useful book. That it fills a gap in Offa-studies is obvious. The Staffordshire hoard has reawakened curiosity in the eighth-century Midlands past, as the text on the rear cover points out. Much has already been written about King Offa of Mercia (757–796) on the basis of the fragmentary picture available through contemporary or relatively later sources, historical and archaeological, but no full narrative of his reign aside from this one exists. There has been no complete edition of the thirteenth-century bipartite work since the younger days of Milton, when Rev. William Watts published his text along with other St. Albans materials in 1639. R. W. Chambers reproduced some of the drawings in 1912 and edited an extract relating to the Mercian Offa (II) in his celebrated Beowulf monograph in 1921, while G. N. Garmonsway translated its text of the duel between this Offa’s alleged ancestor, the continental but here anglicized Offa (I), and some Saxon invaders, in his 1968 collection of Beowulf’s Germanic analogues. There again, the historians and archaeologists who have attempted to make a limited use of this text in the meantime must have been hampered by the lack of an accessible text. Literary scholars have had to make do with snippets of information here and there mostly in books and articles about Beowulf. Swanton’s edition comes to the rescue with the maturity of a scholar who is seasoned in each of these disciplines. This work represents most of a career, in that on the opening page he reveals that he had to put aside notes for his edition in the 1970s and resumed this work only on the point of formal retirement nearly forty years later. To judge by the book’s breadth of reading and elegance of overall design, Swanton’s intervening productivity has also played a role. The book gives an introduction in two parts: the first sketches out the text, presents the four surviving manuscripts of the Vitae Offarum duorum with clarity, and discusses the likeliest conditions of authorship, dismissing the notion that the author was Matthew Paris, who lived in the abbey from 1217 to 1259; the second delves into the narrative and its context, offering a readable commentary which adds in maps and figures wherever necessary and otherwise draws together most of the analogues and other relevant items of knowledge. Here the wide range of Swanton’s experience in most corners of Anglo-Saxon and continental literature and history comes into its own. His Latin and English texts follow on in parallel, with an idiomatic English rendering and with factual footnotes at every step. To supplement the monochrome plates of accomplished line-drawings of the main witness BL, MS Cotton D.I which appear throughout the text, Swanton reproduces folios 20v, 23v, and 25r in order to finish with Offa II’s foundation of St Alban’s abbey in the eponymous place. Thereafter, with the same straightforward clarity, Swanton lays out eight appendices with information on the Offas which once again give original and translated text in parallel form. These are extracts from the Peterborough manuscript (E) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, through the Old and Middle English poems Widsith, Beowulf and Layamon’s Brut, to one Welsh eighth-century vernacular and three Danish twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin chronicles, the last being Saxo’s florid story of Prince Uffo’s duel on the Eider in Gesta Danorum, Book 4. One of the twelfth-century saint’s life analogues for the 794 martyrdom of St. Æthelberht might have been added to this list: perhaps it is Swanton’s admiration for King Offa which keeps this out or indeed checks any enquiry into the extent of Offa’s guilt. A bibliography...