Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Language, Literature, History (review)

This volume of essays from a conference held at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, in 2004 is a worthy addition to Brepols’ ‘Studies in the Early Middle Ages’ series. As the informative introduction by editor Alice Jorgensen notes, this is the first multi-disciplinary essay collection focused on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a text characterized by its multiplicity, making this a worthwhile and long overdue work. The volume is divided into three parts which reflects its title: ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Literature’, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as History’, and ‘The Language of the Chronicle’. A sense of unity is provided by a focus on two key questions: what are we reading and how are we reading it?

The literature section begins with an essay by Thomas A. Bredehoft in which he argues that the annal for 1067 in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscript D includes a previously unrecognized thirty-five-line poem about the marriage of Margaret of Wessex to Malcolm III of Scotland in 1070. This surprising oversight (if Bredehoft’s position is accepted) is due to previous editors and readers not recognizing late Old English verse. The full poem, translation and notes are provided in an appendix to the essay. Susan Irvine then discusses ‘The Production of the Peterborough Chronicle’, also known as manuscript E, by focusing on the sources for the First Continuation annals of 1122 to 1131. The Peterborough Chronicle up to 1131 is also the focus of Malasree Home’s contribution, who convincingly argues that the interpolations were made to look contemporary. Then follows an excellent contribution by Jacqueline Stodnick, ‘Sentence to Story: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Formulary’ in which she demonstrates that later annalists continued to use the style established in the earlier entries. Her essay concentrates on the short annals, those which often appear the most factual, but which are shown to have repetitive language and style. Jorgensen closes the literature section with a contribution on the bilingual F manuscript and the portrayal of the English in its Æthelredian section.

Barbara Yorke’s ‘The Representation of Early West Saxon History in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ is the first of five history essays. In a stimulating and somewhat controversial essay she argues that a core of annals were kept in Wessex before the commencement of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the late ninth century, but these core annals were edited to compose the current work by those close to King Alfred. Yorke also suggests that the long entry for 755 – the Cynewulf and Sigebert episode – was composed by the author of the annal for 855 and was intended to reflect views on good and bad leadership.

This is followed by a short comparison by Anton Scharer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with the earlier Royal Frankish Annals. In ‘Marking Boundaries: Charters and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, Scott Thompson Smith contends that for the years 900–46 the text functioned as a charter for the expanding kingdom of Wessex through the mention of place-names and landscape markers, a suggestion that is likely to generate much debate.

Ryan Lavelle’s essay concentrates on kingship and the geographies of royal power. He argues that the battles listed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle point to the location of royal estates, and a useful list of battles and the preconquest holders of the estate recorded in Domesday Book is provided at the end of his essay. The history section concludes with a contribution by Alex Woolf on the reports of Scotland in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, who notes that the annal for 920 ‘is the first near contemporary use of the Scott-term for the northern kingdom’ (p. 227), a good example of the potential usefulness of the Chronicle for affairs outside of England.

The language section of the book is short, with only two essays. In the first of these, Jayne Carroll...