The Old English "Boethius"

The Old English Boethius is the scholarly shorthand for two of the most formally interesting and philosophically ambitious texts to survive from early medieval England. Attributed to King Alfred ‘the Great’ (r. 871–899), they are thought to transmit into English one of the works he considered niedbeðearfosta (‘most necessary’) for everyone to know.

The source text, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius’s Latin De consolatione Philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy) (written ca. 524) was by some metrics the most influential non-devotional text of the Middle Ages. Over some five hundred years, it would be copied and referenced so often that C.S. Lewis pronounced ‘[t]o acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised’ in the period (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 75). Written while awaiting his execution in prison, the Consolation presents a conversation between the despairing author and Lady Philosophy in alternating prose and verse sections. Both in its content and its prosimetrical form, the work invites a philosophical reorientation around inalienable, internal truths rather than unreliable fortunes or external markers of success. As the Old English translator puts it:

nauht nis betere on þis andweardum life þonne seo gesceadwisnes, forþam ðe heo þurh nan þing ne mæg þam men losian; forðy is betere þæt feoh þætte næfre losian ne mæg þonne þæt ðe mæg and sceal

[nothing is better in this present life than reason, because it can never stray from a person on account of any action; therefore, that wealth that can never go astray is better than that which can and must]

(Godden and Irvine, ed., vol. I, p. 262 hereafter cited by volume and page number; all translations are my own).

The Consolation now survives in roughly four hundred medieval manuscripts overall, including seventeen copies from pre-Conquest England. After its Alfredian associations, several notable translators would go on to engage with the text, including Geoffrey Chaucer in the later Middle Ages and Queen Elizabeth I, for whom the Elizabethan Age is named.

It was first translated into forty-two chapters of Old English prose sometime between 890–930. During this same period, an Old English versifier (perhaps the same scholar, perhaps another) then reworked Boethius’s poetic sections—often called ‘the meters’—into Old English alliterative poetry, likely in imitation of the prosimetrical format of Boethius’s Latin but using the prose translation as an intermediary. These two versions, known as the B and C texts, thus enable a close look at stylistic differences between prose and verse renderings of the same material and perhaps form something of an opus geminatum (‘twinned work’). Both now survive in single manuscripts. The earlier, all-prose translation (B), which I quote from throughout, is preserved in the twelfth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 180, and the subsequent prosimetrical version (C) is recorded in the mid-tenth-century, now badly burned London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho A.vi. Further complicating the record, Franciscus Junius’s seventeenth-century ‘transcription’ with emendations, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 12, now offers the only witness to some of the Cotton readings lost to fire damage.

Beginning with W. J. Sedgefield’s 1899 edition, King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, the poetic sections from the prosimetrical Boethius were artificially separated from the surrounding prose and became known across the twentieth century as The Meters of Boethius. There is no evidence that they ever circulated independently in early medieval England, however, and they are best read in context as they appear in the C text. Moreover, as the manuscript record attests, the B text continued to circulate long after the prosimetrical reworking was completed, even finding a reader in the prolific prose stylist Ælfric of Eynsham, who consulted the all-prose translation at the end of the tenth century, while the prosimetrical Boethius was likely the one consulted for the commentaries of Nicholas Trevet around 1300. In short, both versions were useful and long-lived.

Two prefaces and a reference in Æthelweard’s tenth-century Chronicon (along with a later comment along these lines by William of Malmesbury) ascribe the translation to King Alfred. The Boethius is also thought to have a close relationship to the Old English Soliloquies, a similar reworking of Augustine of Hippo’s Latin text, and the two may share a translator.

Imagining Alfred turning to the Consolation amid his worldly cares, the prose preface maintains that ‘[h]wilum he sette word be worse, hwilum andgit of andgite’ (sometimes he put it word by word and sometimes sense by sense) (I.239). The latter notion of translation for ‘sense’ offers the most accurate appraisal, because the Old English Boethius imaginatively reworks several aspects. Adapting references for an English rather than a Roman readership, the translator adds metaphors and asides, while leaving out large sections, including most of Boethius’s Book V. He or she drew from an extensive commentary tradition as well, so the Boethius is nearly twice the length of the Latin Consolation.

In the Old English Boethius, the author becomes the disembodied Mod (‘Mind’), while Lady Philosophy becomes ‘Wisdom’ and sometimes also Gesceadwisnes (‘Reason’). This emphasis on the mind makes the text a popular touchstone in studies of early medieval understandings of mental life. The Old English rendering of 3m9 (the conventional shorthand for Book 3, meter 9 of the Consolation) in Chapter 33 of B / Meter 20 of C and the description of a cartwheel in Chapter 39 are particularly beloved. Through the image of the wheel, the translator grapples with fate, free will, and belief. As he explains, creation revolving around a motionless God is like how:

on wænes eaxe hwearfað þa hweol and sio eax stent stille and byrð þeah ealne þone wæn and welt ealles þæs færeldes

[on the axle of the cart, the wheels turn, and the axle stands still but nevertheless bears all of the cart and directs all of the way] (I.363).

Moreover, the smoothness of the ride depends on whether believers find themselves at the hub next to the axle, along the spokes, or at the rim of the wheel.

The handling of “old false stories” or Classical allusions, such as to Hercules, Orpheus, and Ulysses, has also drawn considerable attention, most recently in the text’s theorizing of fictionality. Scholars have also mined additions related to kingship for insights into Alfred’s life and thought, especially in the speech in Chapter 17 on the need for the three estates, or, ‘gebedmen and fyrdmen and weorcmen’ (prayermen and soldiers and workmen) (I.277).

Manuscripts

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 180 (all-prose B text)

London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho A.vi (prosimetrical C text)

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 12 (Junius’s ‘transcription’)

Edition

Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine, eds. The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Criticism

Anlezark, Daniel. ‘Three Notes on the Old English Meters of Boethius’, Notes & Queries 51 (2004), 10–15.

Bolton, Whitney R. ‘How Boethian Is Alfred’s Boethius?’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 153–70.

Brooks, Britton. ‘Intimacy, Interdependence, and Interiority in the Old English Prose Boethius’, Neophilologus 102 (2018), 525–42.

Discenza, Nicole Guenther. ‘Alfred the Great and the Anonymous Prose Proem to the Boethius’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107.1 (2008), 57–76.

——. The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

——. ‘Knowledge and Rebellion in the Old English Boethius’, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. A Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018), pp. 19–34.

——. ‘The Old English Boethius’, in A Companion to Alfred the Great, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Nicole Guenther Discenza (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 200–26.

Faulkner, Amy. ‘Seeking within the Self in The Metres of Boethius’, Anglo-Saxon England 48 (2019), 43–62.

Fox, Hilary. ‘An Ethical History for the Self: The Liberius Exemplum in the Old English Boethius’, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. A Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018), pp. 71–88.

Godden, Malcolm. ‘Editing Old English and the Problem of Alfred’s Boethius’, in The Editing of Old English: Papers from the 1990 Manchester Conference, ed. Donald G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 163–76.

——. ‘King Alfred and the Boethius Industry’, in Making Sense: Constructing Meaning in Early English, ed. Antonette diPaolo Healey and Kevin Kiernan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007), pp. 116–38.

Irvine, Susan. ‘Ulysses and Circe in King Alfred’s Boethius: A Classical Myth Transformed’, in ‘Doubt Wisely’: Papers in Honour of E.G. Stanley, ed. M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 387–40.

——. ‘Wrestling with Hercules: King Alfred and the Classical Past’, in Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages: The Proceedings of the First Alcuin Conference, ed. Catherine Cubitt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 171–88.

——. ‘The Protean Form of the Old English Boethius’, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. A Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018), pp. 1–18.

Jorgensen, Alice. ‘Controlling and Converting Emotion: The Old English Boethius', in her Emotional Practice in Old English Literature (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2024), pp. 104–39.

Kiernan, Kevin S. ‘Alfred the Great’s Burnt Boethius’, in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 7–32.

Lenz, Karmen. Ræd and Frofer: Christian Poetics in the Old English Froferboc Meters (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012).

Lockett, Leslie. ‘The Alfredian Soliloquies: One Man’s Conversion to the Doctrine of the Unitary sawol’, in her Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 313–73.

Lorden, Jennifer A. ‘Tale and Parable: Theorizing Fictions in the Old English Boethius’, PMLA 136.3 (2021), 340–55.

Momma, Haruko. ‘Purgatoria clementia: Philosophy and Principles of Pain in the Old English Boethius’, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. A Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018), pp. 53–70.

Papahagi, Adrian. ‘The Singularity of the Old English Boethius’, in The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 283–305.

Payne, F. Ann. King Alfred & Boethius: An Analysis of the Old English Version of the Consolation of Philosophy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).

Pavlinich, Elan Justice. ‘Into the Embodied inneweard mod of the Old English Boethius’, Neophilologus 100 (2016), 649–62.

Szarmach, Paul E. ‘An Apologia for the Meters of Boethius’, in Naked Wordes in Englissh, ed. Marcin Krygier and Liliana Sikorska (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 107–36.

——. ‘Alfred’s Nero’, in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. by Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 147–67.

——. ‘The Old English Boethius and Speculative Thought’, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. A Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018), pp. 35–52.

Weaver, Erica. ‘Bending Minds in the Old English Boethius’, in The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 341–61.

——. ‘Hybrid Forms: Translating Boethius in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 45 (2016), 213–38.

Weaver, Erica and A. Joseph McMullen. ‘Reading Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation of Philosophy from Alfred to Ashby’, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. A Joseph McMullen and Erica Weaver (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2018), pp. ix–xxxii.

Erica Weaver is Associate Professor of English at UCLA. She is the author of The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2025), and co-editor (with Daniel C. Remein) of Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy (Manchester University Press, 2020) and (with A. Joseph McMullen) of The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives (ACMRS, 2018).