The Prose Psalms

In the early eleventh century, probably in Canterbury, a scribe named Wulfwinus prepared an unusual psalter manuscript, very tall and thin, with two columns. (The manuscript is known to scholars in the field as the Paris Psalter, although there are several other manuscripts with this moniker.) The left-hand column had a slightly old-fashioned copy of the Latin book of psalms, and the right-hand column had a translation into Old English, in prose for the first fifty psalms, and in poetry for the next hundred. The prose text also had individual introductions to each psalm, an adaptation of Augustine’s famous fourfold exegesis which situated each psalm in a two-fold literal, a Christological or allegorical, and a moral interpretation for the text (with some variation in approach). These introductions are particularly interesting features, offering some of the context for each psalm as it was originally developed in Hebrew, before being translated into Greek and Latin, and generally offering at least a couple of possible levels of interpretation of the psalm. Those introductions also appear written in the margins (in a rather higgledy-piggledy way) in another early medieval English psalter manuscript, this one an interlinear translation of the psalms in Old English known as the Vitellius Psalter. In both manuscripts the introductions end when the prose psalter ends at psalm 50; from evidence in the prose psalter it is clear that the same person created the introductions as translated the Latin psalter. It thus seems very likely that the person translating the psalms and writing the corresponding introductions only got the first quinquagene, the first fifty psalms, completed. Whether that was intentional or not remains a mystery.

Famously, these first fifty psalms are often attributed to King Alfred.  We know from Asser’s biography of this ninth-century king that he was particularly attracted to the psalms and that he inaugurated in his ambit a translation program of important and needful texts into the Old English vernacular, and that he closely supervised the project. There are vocabulary parallels from the prose psalter to some of the other texts in this project, but these cannot be definitive proof that he prepared this text, and indeed, those vocabulary parallels might suggest involvement by others since presumably the king had other work to do each day. Collaboration must have been the hallmark of the whole translation project. That said, the prose psalms do demonstrate significant originality in their approach, rather like the adaptation that is the rendition of Augustine’s Soliloquies. In other words, the desire to see the prose psalter as the original and individual accomplishment of the most famous early medieval king of England is one shared by an impressive number of modern scholars for a variety of reasons (vocabulary parallels, his deep interest in the psalms, a more nebulous sense of his spirit at work). Failing other works that we know for certain to have been written by Alfred, we simply do not have enough evidence to prove this deeply pleasing possibility. 

What we can say for certain is that this project is a quirky and interesting one, and that the prose psalter materials that survive offer a fascinating window on the vernacular approach to the psalms in the two hundred or so years before the Norman Conquest (and perhaps a hundred or so years after that date). For example, Psalm 5 has this introduction, taken here from Patrick O’Neill’s edition in the Dumbarton Oaks series:

Ðe fifta sealm ys gecweden Dauides sealm, þone he sang be his sylfes frofre and be herenesse ealra ðæra rihtwisena ðe secað yrfeweardnesse on heofonrice mid Criste, se ys ende ealra ðinga; and ælc mann þe þisne sealm singð, he hine singð be his sylfres frofre; and swa dyde Ezechias, þa he alysed wæs of his mettrumnesse and swa dyde Crist, þa he alysed wæs fram Iudeum.

[The fifth psalm is called “David’s psalm,” which he sang about his own need for comfort and to praise all the just who seek an inheritance in the heavenly kingdom with Christ, who is the perfection of all things; and, everyone who sings this psalm sings it about his own need for comfort; and Hezekiah did likewise, when he had been freed from his illness; and so did Christ when he had been freed from the Jews.]

The introduction first points to David as the singer of the psalm in a literal interpretation, and continues with the moral interpretation to include its use by all Christians to comfort themselves (the first and fourth levels of exegesis in biblical commentary), then makes a second and rather unusual literal connection to King Hezekiah and his recovery from severe illness, all before the more usual Christological interpretation. That second literal interpretation was espoused by Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose work was decried as heresy at this time, which makes its appearance here the more intriguing. It arrived in the British Isles, possibly from Ireland, in what is now known as the pseudo-Bede Argumenta.  Emily Butler, advancing from a long scholarly tradition, points to the references to King Hezekiah here as evoking empathy in the reader, offering a sympathetic portrait of the Jews and their struggles in the Old Testament.

The translation itself is in elegant and clear Old English prose, with some moments of real rhetorical force. For example, the first verse of Psalm 5 is Drihten, onfoh min word mid þinum earum and ongyt mine stemne and min gehrop, and ðenc þara worda minra gebeda ('Lord, receive my words with your ears, and pay attention to my voice and my outcry, and think about the words of my prayers'). The line offers a doublet noun in mine stemne and min gehrop, and three parallel phrases of instructions from the psalmist to God, framed pretty firmly: onfoh ... ongyt ... ðenc ('receive ... pay attention to ... think about') in my version. The line might be an opening invocation or prayer, but it also has the force of a command. The Latin has a much simpler locution: Verba mea auribus percipe, Domine: considera clamorem meum ('Lord, receive my words with your ears, consider my outcry'). The Old English translator adapted and extemporized freely, with no thought to absolute precision in rendering a sacred text. Rather, the translation (or adaptation?) is the work of a thoughtful writer focused on the vernacular and its affordances.

Select Bibliography

Manuscripts

Paris Psalter. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS lat. 8824.

Vitellius Psalter. London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius E.xviii.

Criticism

Appleton, Helen, and Francis Leneghan, ed. The Psalms in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, Special Edition of English Studies 98.1 (2017).

[Asser, John]. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, ed. and trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).

Atkin, Tamara, and Francis Leneghan, ed. The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017).

Butler, Emily, '"And Thus Did Hezekiah": Perspectives on Judaism in the Old English Prose Psalms', Review of English Studies n.s. 67 (2016), 617–635.

Harris, Stephen J. Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (London: Routledge, 2003).

O’Neill, Patrick P., ed. King Alfred’s Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy, 2001).

--------, ed. and tr. Old English Psalms, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Toswell, M. J. The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (Leuven: Brepols, 2014).

--------. ''The Ninth-Century Psalter in England’, in The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan, Studies in Old English Literature 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 389–407.

Zacher, Samantha. Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Jane Toswell teaches Old English, medieval studies, and medievalism at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Her recent and forthcoming publications include a book on the foundation of Canadian medievalism in the United Empire Loyalists who left America in the late eighteenth century and provided the backbone of Canadian governance, structure, buildings, and culture; a book on Canadian universities; and articles on Ansaxnet and its contribution to the development of the field of early medieval studies, and on the lost women of Old English studies and their involvement in the Oxford English Dictionary.