THE CROWNING OF ALFRED AND THE TOPOS OF SAPIENTIA ET FORTITUDO IN ASSER’S LIFE OF KING ALFRED
THOMAS D. HILL English Department, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Abstract At the crucial moment in Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi in which Asser narrates the crowning of Alfred, Asser praises Alfred in two balanced clauses celebrating respectively Alfred’s sapientia and his fortitudo. The use of this famous topos in this context is interesting and important, and it also relevant to the structure of the work as whole. It has long been recognized that the De Rebus Gestis Alfredi is a bi-partite work and that the two halves of the work are quite different in their concerns. I suggest that Asser was deliberately structuring the work as a whole in terms of this theme, first celebrating Alfred’s fortitudo in the Danish wars, and then celebrating his sapientia, his achievements as a philosopher king, in the final portion of the Vita. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
The heroic topos, sapientia et fortitudo, is an important figure in early medieval Latin and Old English literature. In the standard Latin reference work of the early middle ages, the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, Isidore etymologizes the Greek word heroes and associates the “hero” with sapientia et fortitudo: “Nam heroes appellantur viri quasi aerii et caelo digni propter sapientiam et fortitudinem,” a gloss which is repeated twice more in the Etymologiae.1 The opening words of the Aeneid, “arma virumque” were glossed as an example of the topos – thereby making sapientia et fortitudo rather more prominent in the poem than it otherwise would be2 – and praise of the wisdom and bravery of the ruler or prince is a prominent theme in late classical and early medieval Latin poetry. Ernst Robert Curtius provided a history of the motif and a number of examples,3 and his sense that the topos was important for understanding medieval vernacular heroic epic and praise poetry has been amply confirmed. In the context of Old English poetry in particular, R. E. Kaske wrote a series of papers on the Beowulf-poet’s use and development of the topos which made a very strong case for the thematic importance of sapientia et fortitudo in Beowulf.4 Not only is Beowulf characterized repeatedly as wise and brave, but just as Virgil (according to Curtius) contrasts Latinus “who is all sapientia” with Turnus “who is all fortitudo” so the Beowulf poet seems to contrast the wise (but aged and no longer strong) Hrothgar against the brave (but foolhardy)
Neophilologus 86: 471–476, 2002. 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Hygelac and the wise Danes with the brave Geats.5 In a later paper, Kaske showed that the Judith-poet uses the topos in a thematically significant way when the poet depicts God granting the divine gift of fortitudo to the wise woman Judith at the moment when she must kill the drunken and lecherous Holofernes.6 More recently Ann Astell has written a very interesting analysis of the theme of sapientia et fortitudo in the Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great; for Gregory, Job is an epic hero who lives according to the epic ideal of wisdom and fortitude – an interpretation of the book of Job which makes wisdom and fortitude a central theme in that text.7 Other Anglo-Saxon examples have been found since Kaske’s papers were published – according to the Latin text which accompanies The Bayeux Tapestry, for example, William tells his men “ut preparent se viriliter et sapienter ad prelium contra Anglorum exercitum (italics mine).”8 In these various texts the sapientia et fortitudo topos is characteristically evoked at a dramatic, even climactic moment in the narrative. Such a moment occurs in Asser’s De rebus gestis Alfredi when Asser describes how Alfred was crowned king after the death of his last surviving brother. Eodem anno Ælfred supra memoratus, qui usque ad id temporis, viventibus fratribus suis, secundarius fuerat, totius regni gubernacula, divino concedente nutu, cum summa omnium illius regni accolarum voluntate, confestim fratre defuncto suscepit. Quod etiam vivente praedicto fratre suo, si dignaretur accipere, facillime cum consensu omnium potuerat invenire, nempe quia et sapientia et cunctis moribus bonis cunctos fratres suos praecellabat, et insuper eo quod nimium bellicosus et victor prope in omnibus bellis erat.9 In the same year Alfred, who until that time (while his brothers were alive) had been ‘heir apparent’, took over the government of the whole kingdom as soon as his brother had died, with the approval of divine will and according to the unanimous wish of all the inhabitants of the kingdom. Indeed, he could easily have taken it over with the consent of all while his brother Æthelred was alive, had he considered himself worthy to do so, for he surpassed all his brothers both in wisdom and in all good habits; and in particular because he was a great warrior and victorious in vitually all battles.
The final two clauses of this passage reflect the praise topos of sapientia et fortitudo explicitly. First Asser praises Alfred’s sapientia: nempe quia et sapientia et cunctis moribus bonis cunctos fratres suos praecellabat. Then he mentions his fortitudo: et insuper eo quod nimium bellicosus et victor prope in omnibus bellis erat. That is, at the point at which Alfred is crowned, Asser offers an apology for the historical fact that Alfred came relatively late to the throne, and two balanced clauses of praise celebrating respectively his wisdom and his fortitude conclude the account of his coronation. In these qualities, according to Asser, he far surpassed the three brothers who reigned before him. Just as in Beowulf, Judith, or the “text” of the Bayeux Tapestry, the elabo-
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ration of the sapientia et fortitudo motif is reserved for an appropriately dramatic, climactic, moment. When Alfred is crowned, then Asser deploys the supreme heroic formula.10 The ideology of Old English kingship is an important historical topic and one of considerable literary critical and literary historical interest as well, and it is therefore appropriate to identify and “catalogue” those topoi which members of the court such as Asser used to praise a given king. Texts written to flatter a great man may be more or less suspect as sources for his life and actions, but they can reveal a great deal about the values of the court and aristocratic society as a whole. But if it is interesting that Asser should employ the great heroic topos of sapientia et fortitudo to praise Alfred at the moment when Alfred was crowned; his use of the motif is in itself neither particularly surprising or revealing. It is a very common topos, and is particularly prominent in ChristianLatin literature in which concern for wisdom defined as a specifically moral quality) of the ruler, figures prominently. It is, however, possible that the topos of sapientia et fortitudo might be relevant to the difficult problem of the structure of this text. A number of critics have observed that the De rebus gestis Alfredi exhibits a two-part structure – thus Grandsen remarks: “[Asser] arranged his work roughly like Einhard, devoting the first half to Alfred’s immediate predecessors on the throne and to his military victories, and the second part to Alfred’s character and family life and to the internal history of the reign.”11 Marie Schütt, in her article o the “The Literary Form of Asser’s Vita Alfredi,” had already noticed the two part structure of the work and spoke of the “annalistic” (cap. 1–72) and “biographical” (cap. 73–106) portions of Asser’s text.12 To the best of my knowledge no one has attempted to explain why these portions of the life of Alfred are as different in tone and content as they are. I would suggest that the first annalistic portion of Asser’s biography is essentially concerned with Alfred’s military successes and hence his fortitudo, and the second portion of the work, which is concerned with Alfred’s education and governance, illustrates Alfred’s sapientia. The wars against the Danes continued throughout Alfred’s life; there was no particular chronological reason to turn aside from the account of military success, which comprises the bulk of the material in the annalistic portion of this text. In the second portion of the text, however, Asser emphasizes very strongly Alfred’s inventions and innovations; the tradition of Alfred as a “reformist” king owes much to this part of Asser’s biography. The question is whether this pattern is deliberate or happenstance and I would cautiously argue that it is indeed deliberate. While Asser’s De rebus gestis Alfredi is, as Marie Schütt has shown, a more structured and coherent work than previous scholars had thought,
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it is still apparently unfinished, and the loss of the unique manuscript complicates what would be difficult textual problems in any case. The “annalistic” portion of this text is, however, very much concerned with Alfred’s military accomplishments. Asser seems to have been aware of the traditions of Welsh heroic poetry and even praises Alfred with a Welsh heroic epithet when he describes him as fighting “viriliter aprino more”13 at the battle of (Ashdon). Again the anecdote which Asser narrates concerning that battle – in which Alfred attacked while his brother was laudably delayed by worship – emphasizes Alfred’s fortitudo balanced by his brother’s sapientia. (For Asser as for the authors of the Biblical sapiential books sapientia and pietas are essentially synonymous.14) By contrast, in the biographical portion of the text Asser says very little about Alfred’s military exploits and emphasizes his zeal for learning, the arts, and good governance. A fruitful way of understanding this contrast is to assume that Asser organized his materials rhetorically, first celebrating Alfred’s fortitude and then his wisdom.15 An interpretation of the structure of what seems to be an unfinished work is obviously problematic, and in this case the difficulty is compounded by the complicated textual problems which this text presents. The sentences with which I am concerned, for example, are not confirmed by being reiterated by the chronicler John of Worcester, and so it is at least possible that these clauses were added to the text at some later point in its development. On the other hand, this is the kind of material which the chronicler tends to omit, and it is easy to imagine why he might have chosen not to include these particular sentences; Asser’s claim that Alfred could have preempted his brother’s claim to the throne is a potentially disturbing one. A later chronicler might well have chosen to omit a passage which implicitly associates Alfred with the possibility of subverting the normal order of succession. At a certain point the qualifications and reservations which one must acknowledge in constructing an argument of this kind might seem to vitiate the argument as a whole. Asser’s De rebus gestis Alfredi is, however, so problematic that some historians have questioned its authenticity. And one of the problems which has troubled scholars is the abrupt shift after chapter 73 from battles to education and governance. The hypothesis that Asser was structuring his work in terms of the sapientia et fortitudo topos would elucidate such problems. James Campbell has remarked that in his judgment “the nature of [Asser’s] book is by no means fully understood,”16 and any reasonable interpretion is at least worth careful consideration. There is also a sense in which this argument pertains to a larger literary historical issue. Any argument of this sort – which deals with topoi – depends in part upon the notion of shared literary expectations within a given corpus of literary texts. Without such expectations topoi would
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be unrecognizable, and generic form incomprehensible. To some degree the disorientation that modern readers often feel when they first begin to read early medieval literature – whether in Latin, Old English, or one of the other early medieval vernacular languages – reflects a failure of understanding based on such shared expectations. Obviously there is a sense in which the argument for the importance of the theme of sapientia et fortitudo in Beowulf, Judith, or Asser’s De rebus gestis Alfredi must stand alone in each case. But it is also true that the more current and commonplace the topos can be shown to be, the more plausible the argument is in each individual case. There is a kind of cumulative force which the enumeration of instances entails, and if it does seem plausible that Asser’s De rebus gestis Alfredi was indeed structured as I have suggested, this argument bears on some broader literary historical issues as well as on the De rebus gestis Alfredi itself.17
Notes 01. Isidore Etymologiae, I, xxxix, 9; for similar comments see VIII, xi, 98; X, 2. A convenient edition is that of W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911). 02. Fulgentius, Fabii Placiadis Fulgentii V. C. opera, ed. Rudolf Helm, rev. Jean Préux, Bibliotheca Teubneriana (1898; rpt. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1970), p. 87. For discussion see Leslie George Whitbread, Fulgentius the Mythographer (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp. 139–140. 03. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, The Bollingen Library (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 172–179. 04. R. E. Kaske, “Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf,” SP 55 (1958), pp. 423–456 rpt. In An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, Ed. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1963), pp. 269–310; “The Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac Passages in Beowulf,” PMLA 74 (1959), pp. 489–494. 05. Curtius p. 173; Kaske (1963), pp. 279–296. 06. R. E. Kaske, “Sapientia et Fortitudo in the Old English Judith,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, Eds. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), pp. 13–29 and 264–268. 07. Ann W. Astell, Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 70–96. 08. David M. Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry (New York: Knopf, 1985), plates 57 61; p. 173. 09. Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Ed. William H. Stevenson, with an article by Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 32. Those portions of the text that are paralleled in the Latin Chronicle of John of Worcester (whom Stevenson following older usage identifies as Florence of Worcester) are printed in conventional script. Those portions of the text that are not so paralleled are printed in italics. I quote the translation from Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. and annotated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (London; Penguin, 1983), pp. 80–81. 10. Note Gaimar’s employment of the sapientia et fortitudo topos at the death of
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Alfred: Des icel jur que Deus fu nez,/ Ot nof cenz anz e un avoc/ Trescique Elfred murrut iloc./ II regnat bien vint e oit anz,/ Poi sunt humes tels vivanz/ Kar sages fud e bon guerier,/ Bien sot ses enimis pleisier,/ Nul mieldre clerc de lui ni esteit/ Kar en s’enfance apris l’aveit. “Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, Ed. Alexander Bell, AngloNorman Texts 14–16 (Oxford: The Anglo-Norman Text Society [Basil Blackwell], 1960), p. 109, lines 3436–44. Cf. Also the OE poetic The Descent into Hell in which the resurrected Christ is characterized as “sigefæst ond snottor”/ “fixed in victory and wise” (line 23) on his first appearance after the Resurrection. 11. Antonia Grandsen, Historical Writing in England c. 550–1307 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 51–52. On the historiographical Context of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi see Anton Scharer, “The Writing of History at King Alfred’s Court.” Early Medieval History 5 (1997), pp. 177–206. 12. Marie Schütt, “The Literary Form of Asser’s Vita Alfredi,” The English Historical Review 72 (1957) pp. 209–220. 13. Asser, p. 29. 14. Job 28:28 (Septuagint) “Ecce pietas est sapientia.” This phrase is something of a leitmotif in Augustine’s writing (Confessiones VIII,I,I,45,CCSL 27,114; Enarrationes in Psalmos, Psalm 135,8, CCSL 40, 1962; Enchiridion 1,2, CCSL 46,49, etc.). 15. Curtius commented on Asser’s portrayal of Alfred as a man of culture as well as a warrior (p. 177). 16. James Campbell. “Asser’s Life of Alfred” in The Inheritance of Historiography, Exeter Studies in History 12, Eds. Christopher Holdsworth and T. P. Wiseman (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986), p. 115. 17. For a recent and controversial claim that “Asser” is a late 10th century forgery see Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). The claim is not a new one of course – see Janet Nelson, “Waiting for Alfred,” Early Medieval History 7 (1998), pp. 115–124, for a good summary of the majority view of the question. See also Richard Abels. Alfred the Great (London: Longmans, 1998), pp. 318–326. Although the issue of the authenticity of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi does not directly affect my discussion of the theme of sapientia et fortitudo in that work, I would note that I accept the traditional view that Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi is a textually problematic but authentic work.