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  • The Spelling of the Proper Names in the OE Orosius:The Case for Dictation by a Welshman Revisited
  • Janet Bately

The 2011 Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, “Colliding Worlds,” reopened important questions about the history of the rendering in Old English of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum adversum Paganos Libri Septem.1 One set of these relates to the presence of a large number of unusual features in the spelling of place names and people names in the manuscripts that have come down to us.2 Are these spellings the result of dictation, whether of a copy of the Latin original, or of the Old English text? And if so, what, if anything, can be learned about the nationality of the dictator?

I. THE QUESTION OF DICTATION

i.1. the background

It is now many years since attempts were first made to account for a number of irregularities in the spelling of the proper names in the Old English Orosius. Already in 1886 Hugo Schilling was putting forward dictation of the Old English text as the most likely explanation,3 while just two years later, Alois Pogatscher was to suggest that the particularly common use [End Page 45] of the symbols ð and þ for Greek δ and Latin d in the Orosius could be due to knowledge on the part of its supposed author, King Alfred, that in contemporary Greek d intervocalic represented a fricative, but was more likely “die Nachschrift eines Diktat,” reflecting the pronunciation of Latin intervocalic t and d as ð in neighboring Francia.4 Ann Kirkman, too, writing in 1930 and producing a detailed analysis of all the variant spellings of the proper names in the Orosius and their distribution, found nothing to invalidate a theory of dictation of the text involving the intervention of a foreigner, although in her paper she makes no attempt to determine that person’s nationality:

We have seen that the Latin text was probably explained to King Alfred by his scholars, and afterwards dictated by him to some amanuensis. This would give rise to two viva voce pronunciations: the scholar’s and the king’s. We do not know who the scholars were that helped in the interpretation of the Orosius, but if we could assume that they were foreigners it would make matters easier. When they had given their explanations, the king would understand their English in spite of a foreign pronunciation, but, in the case of names, the majority of which were quite new to him, he would imitate the scholar’s pronunciation as well as he could. This he would pass on to the scribe, probably with many minor variations; and the scribe in turn would represent it as well as he could, although he too would make further mistakes and might alter the sounds when he repeated to himself the names he had heard.5

My own involvement with the text began in the late 1950s, when, investigating the surprising claim that an Old French poem was based on the Orosius, I became aware that “in certain respects Alfred’s source bore a closer resemblance to some of the extant post-ninth-century MSS than to the older MSS recorded by Zangemeister.”6 I was subsequently able to [End Page 46] examine over two hundred copies of the Latin text in European libraries.7 Aided by a series of computer-generated word lists made for me from the OE version,8 I later extended my study to examine in detail all the irregular spellings in it that involve proper names, and concluded that a significant number were indeed best explained as the result of the dictation of a now lost copy of the Old English text lying behind the surviving manuscripts of the Orosius, suggesting, however, that the (hypothetical) dictator was not a Romance speaker but a “Welshman of Latin education,” reading to a scribe with an “Anglo-Saxon background.”9

King Alfred is of course now no longer generally accepted as the translator of the Libri Septem. However, given his plea for the rendering into English and circulation of “some books, those that are most necessary for all men to know,” and his support for “many...

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