The Old English Prose "Life of St Guthlac"

 St Guthlac (c. 673–714) was a hermit saint who lived on the island of Crowland in the East Anglian fens. A monk who calls himself Felix wrote an account of Guthlac’s life in Latin c. 730–40, and this work, the Vita sancti Guthlaci, was then translated into Old English prose — likely in late-ninth-century Mercia.

Guthlac led quite an exciting life, both before and after becoming a hermit. From the texts about his life we learn he was of noble birth and had a successful career as a soldier before turning away from the secular life. Guthlac first became a monk at Repton and then a hermit on Crowland, a lonely fenland island infested with demons. Accounts record his conflicts with the demons, who go so far as to carry him bodily to the gates of hell, from where he is rescued by his patron St Bartholomew. Guthlac is returned to his island hermitage site which, with the demons finally driven out, he successfully inhabits, performing nature and healing miracles, and offering advice to a succession of visitors. After his death in 714 Guthlac is buried on his island where the miracles continue, and Crowland ultimately becomes the site of a major Benedictine abbey. Guthlac’s cult was prominent in Early Medieval England and has a rich textual tradition. As well as Felix’s Latin vita and the Old English Prose Guthlac, there are two surviving Old English poems about Guthlac (Guthlac A and Guthlac B), and he appears in numerous calendars of saints and the Old English Martyrology.

Guthlac being carried to the gates of Hell by demons and rescued St Bartholomew, roundel 8 from the ‘Guthlac Roll’, British Library, Harley Roll Y 6 (late twelfth/early thirteenth century).

Two distinct versions of the Old English Prose Guthlac survive; these texts represent separate lines of transmission along which the original form of the translation has been edited and adapted for new purposes and audiences. A full account of Guthlac’s life is persevered in London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D.xxi, ff. 18-40, dating from the second half of the eleventh century. This MS was once part of the same volume as Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 509, which contains the Old English Heptateuch, a translation/paraphrase of the first seven books of the Bible by Ælfric of Eynsham (and others). This copy of the Old English Prose Guthlac appears to have been marked up for reading aloud. Presumably any such reading would have been split over a number of occasions as the text is rather too long to be tackled in a single sitting. A drastically abbreviated version of the Old English Prose Guthlac, much more suited to a single reading, is the last item in the Vercelli Book (c. 970), which contains numerous Old English homilies alongside verse. This version of the text is conventionally known as Vercelli Homily XXIII, although it is not really a homily. Each text of the Old English Prose Guthlac preserves passages close to Felix’s Latin that are missing in the other, showing that the prose of both versions has been edited down by later copyists. From the Vespasian text we get a more complete version of Guthlac’s story, following Felix’s text from Prologue to post-mortem miracles, but the fifty-three chapters of the Latin have become twenty-two sections in the Old English, and the narrative has been subject to increasingly aggressive editing as it progresses. The Vercelli text is based on just two sections, covering the period from Guthlac arriving in Crowland to his triumphant return from hell; it concludes with a new ending that depicts Guthlac being assumed directly to heaven. Although it is a relatively brief excerpt, Vercelli XXIII offers important insights into the Old English Prose Guthlac’s original form and origins. In contrast to the late West-Saxon dialect of the Vespasian text, the Vercelli version retains older, Anglian spellings, revealing the Old English Prose Guthlac’s origins likely lie in late ninth-century Mercia.

We know almost nothing about Felix, the author of Guthlac’s Latin vita, and even less about the anonymous translator who adopts Felix’s identity to adapted the Latin vita into Old English Prose. The Old English Prose Guthlac presents itself as the work of Felix and remains addressed to the eighth-century East Anglian king Ælfwold, long dead at the time of its composition. Its opening reads (to listen to a recording of this passage, click here):

Urum wealdende rihtgelyfendum a worulda woruld, minum þam leofestan hlaforde ofer ealle oðre men, eorðlice kyningas, Alfwold Eastengla kyning, mid rihte and mid gerisenum rice healdend, Felix þone rihtan geleafan gesette eallum geleafullum godes folcum, and ecere gesundfulnysse hælo and gretingce gesend. Þinum wordum and bebodum ic hyrsumode: ða boc ic gesette, þe þu ahtest be life þæs arwurðan gemynde Guðlaces, hluttrum wordum and tacnum. Ic forþan halsige and bidde þone gelæredan and þone geleafullan, gif he her hwylc hleahterlic word onfinde, þæt he þæt us ne wite.

[To our right-believing ruler, for ever and ever, my most beloved lord over all other men, earthly kings, Ælfwold king of East Anglia, holding the kingdom with right and with seemliness, Felix sets the right faith for all God’s faithful folk, and sends the eternal prosperity of salvation and greetings. I obeyed your words and commands: I set the book, which you should have about the life of Guthlac of worthy memory, in clear words and signs. I entreat and bid the learned and the faithful, if he find any ridiculous word here, that he not blame us for that.]

The ‘us’ here, where Felix’s Latin uses the singular, is perhaps a hint of the joint enterprise, but it is also rhetorical convention from a translator who has skilfully rewritten and reshaped Felix’s material for a new vernacular audience

 The translator clearly had excellent Latin: Felix’s ornate style is notoriously difficult (it has been attracting complaints since at least the twelfth-century), yet they handle it with confidence, deftly employing a rich vocabulary. For example, Chapter 31 of Felix’s vita offers this vision of hell:

Non solum enim fluctuantium flammarum ignivomos gurgites illic turgescere cerneres, immo etiam sulphurei glaciali grandine mixti vortices, globosis sparginibus sidera paene tangentes videbantur

[For not only could one see there the fiery abyss swelling with surging flames, but even the sulphurous eddies of flame mixed with icy hail seemed almost to touch the stars with drops of spray.] [ed. and trans Colgrave, p. 104, 105]

This rich image is rendered thus in the Vercelli text:

And nalas þæt an þæt he þær þa leglican hyðe ðæs fyres upþyddan geseah, ac eac þa fulan hrecetunge swefles þær geseah upgeotan

[And he not only saw the flaming wave of the fire thrusting up there, but he also saw the foul belching of sulphur pouring up there].

The translator’s prose here embraces the complexity of Felix’s Latin; the vocabulary used is unusual (both up- compounds are unique), and the sense of ascent is captured by upþyddan geseah […] geseah upgeotan. Passages such as this suggest that the original translator imagined a comparatively sophisticated audience for their work, able to engage with complex imagery, but subsequent copyists show far less faith in their readers’ capabilities — this image is not included in the Vespasian text.  Where elaborate sections echoing Felix’s prose survive in the Vercelli text they are generally simplified in Vespasian, and vice versa, showing how copyists abridged the translation’s original form to produce a streamlined text closer to the typical style of later Old English prose hagiography.

This bit of hell imagery also illustrates Felix’s habit of quotation; he uses verbal echoes of scripture and authors such as Vergil at key moments. Here he reworks Aeneid iii.574 ‘attollitque globos flammarum et sidera lambit’ (and raises up globes of flame and licks the stars). These highlighting resonances would be lost if turned directly into Old English, but the translator instead offers something different – but equally fancy. Another example is the translator’s handling of the Vergil quotation Felix uses in his description of the origins of Penwalh, Guthlac’s father:

Huius etiam viri progenies per nobilissima inlustrium regum nomina antiqua ab origine Icles digesto ordine cucurrit

[Moreover the descent of this man was traced in set order through the most noble names of famous kings, back to Icel in whom it began in days of old.] (ed. Colgrave, pp. 74, 75).

Felix has lifted the phrase ‘antiqua ab origine’ from Aeneid i.642, where it describes the ancestry of Dido. The OEPG translation reads:

          He wæs þæs yldestan and þæs æþelstan cynnes, þe Iclingas wæron genemnede

          [He was of the oldest and noblest kin, who were named the Iclings].

Here the translator replaces the Vergil quotation with an additional superlative, creating a pair which highlights the greatness of the descendants of Icel. Much of the original translator’s carefully ornamented style has no doubt been lost to later editing, yet enough traces of the Old English Prose Guthlac’s original form remain to reveal an individual well enough educated to recognise what Felix was doing and invested in finding ways to write Old English prose with some flair.

The Old English Prose Guthlac shows the enduring prominence of Guthlac’s cult in Early Medieval England and even in its much-altered surviving versions offers further compelling evidence for a sophisticated Mercian translation programme and the cultural importance of Mercian prose.

Select Bibliography

Manuscripts

London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D.xxi

Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXVII

Editions

Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Johanna Kramer, Hugh Magennis and Robin Norris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University                 Press, 2020).

Crawford (now Roberts), Jane, ‘Guthlac: An Edition of the Old English Prose Life Together with the Poems in the Exeter Book’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1967).

Das angelsächsiche Prosa-Leben des hl. Guthlac, ed. Paul Gonser, Anglistische Forschungen 27 (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1909).

Felix, Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956).

The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Life of St Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland, ed. and trans. Charles Wycliffe Goodwin (London: John Russell Smith, 1848).

Criticism

Appleton, Helen, ‘The Psalter in the Prose Lives of Guthlac’, in Germano-Celtica, ed. Anders Ahlqvist and Pamela O’Neill (Sydney University Celtic Studies Foundation, 2017), pp. 61–86.

——— and Matthew Robinson, ‘Further Echoes of Vergil’s Aeneid in Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci’, Notes and Queries 64 (2017), 353–55.

———, ‘Water, Wisdom, and Worldliness in the Anglo-Saxon prose lives of Guthlac’, in Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England, ed. Carolyn Twomey and Daniel Anlezark, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 47 (Leiden: Brepols, 2021), pp. 211–39.

Bolton, W. F., ‘The Manuscript Source of the Old English Prose Life of St. Guthlac’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 197 (1961), 301–03.

Brooks, Britton, ‘Biophonic soundscapes in the vitae of St Guthlac’, English Studies 102 (2021) 155–79.

———, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2019).

———, ‘Felix’s Construction of the English Fenlands: Literal Landscape, Authorizing Allusion, and Lexical Echo’, in Guthlac: Crowland’s Saint, ed. Jane Roberts and Alan Thacker (Donington: Shaun Tyas Publisher, 2020), pp. 55–71.

Giliberto, Concetta, ‘The Descensus ad inferos in the Old English prose life of St Guthlac and Vercelli Homily XXIII’, in Hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England: Adopting and Adapting Saints' Lives into Old English Prose (c. 950-1150), ed. Loredana Lazzari, Patrizia Lendinara and Claudia Di Sciacca, Textes et études du Moyen Age, 73 (Barcelona-Madrid: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d'Etudes Médiévales, 2014), pp. 229–53.

Roberts, J., ‘An Inventory of Early Guthlac Materials’, Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970), 193–233.

———, ‘Traces of Unhistorical Gender Congruence in a Late Old English Manuscript’, English Studies 51 (1970), 30–37.

———, ‘The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita Sancti Guthlaci’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York, 1986), pp. 363–80.

———, ‘Two Readings in the Guthlac Homily’, in Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg, ed. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe: Arizona University Press, 2002), pp. 201–10.

———, ‘Guthlac of Crowland and the Seals of the Cross’, in The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Catherine E. Karkov, Sarah Larratt Keefer and Karen Louise Jolly (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 113–28.

———, ‘Hagiography and Literature: the case of Guthlac of Crowland.’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr, Studies in the Early History of Europe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001), pp. 69–86.

Scragg, Donald, ‘The Corpus of Anonymous Lives’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 209–30.

Waugh, Robin, ‘The Blindness Curse and Nonmiracles in the Old English Prose Life of Saint Guthlac’, Modern Philology 106 (2009), 399–426.

Weston, Lisa M. C., ‘Guthlac Betwixt and Between: Literacy, Cross-Temporal Affiliation, and an Anglo-Saxon Anchorite’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 42 (2016), 1–27.

Whatley, Gordon E., ‘Lost in Translation: Omission of Episodes in Some Old English Prose Saints’ Legends’, Anglo-Saxon England 26 (1997), 187–208.

Helen Appleton is currently Departmental Lecturer in Old English at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on Old English literature, including on homilies and hagiography, and has also worked on cartography in Early Medieval England.