The Old English "Legend of the Seven Sleepers"

The anonymous Old English prose Legend of the Seven Sleepers is a lively and engaging version of a hagiographical wonder tale composed originally in late Antiquity and translated into many languages, from Coptic to Irish, a tale that fascinated readers in the Middle Ages and on into the modern period. For example, John Donne refers to the Seven Sleepers in his poem The Good Morrow, available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44104/the-good-morrow, and the story is humorously reworked by Mark Twain in Chapter 40 of The Innocents Abroad, available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm.

            The tale, as known in medieval Christendom (a version of the Seven Sleepers legend also occurs in Sura 18 of the Quran, with different details), is one with a message, namely that of the truth of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. But the story itself belongs to a type of folk tale of ‘magic sleep extended over many years’ widely found across the world, as described by Stith Thompson in his six-volume classic Motif Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1956), II. 349–350. The legend tells of seven young Christian men of noble families in Ephesus who are persecuted for their faith by the Roman emperor Decius (reigned 249–251). When Decius arrives at Ephesus, hunting down Christians, the seven flee to a cave outside the city but are discovered there and suffer the fate of being walled up alive with stones blocking the mouth of the cave. Before this, however, God has put them into a miraculous sleep and preserves them in this way until the cave is opened a later century in the time of the Christian emperor Theodosius II (reigned 408–450). The seven young men now awaken, thinking that they have been asleep for only one night, not realising that Decius is long dead and that Ephesus is now a Christian city.

Something of a black comedy of misapprehension ensues, particularly involving one of the seven called Malchus (in the most popular version of the story in the West). When they awake, Malchus is sent into the city to get supplies for them as usual, where he is bewildered by the changes to the city and by the suspicious attitude of its inhabitants towards him, especially when he tries to buy bread with old money. He is arrested and brought before the chief official of the city and the bishop. Eventually, God’s miracle is revealed and the saints pass away in glory to receive at last the eternal reward of their martyrdom. The miracle is presented as offering proof to the faithful emperor Theodosius of the truth of the orthodox doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

            The legend of the Sleepers is Greek in origin and may even go back to the time of Theodosius II, though the earliest extant Greek manuscripts are from the ninth century. A version of the Greek was translated into Latin in the form of the highly influential Passio Septem Dormientium, which survives in widely dispersed manuscripts from the ninth century on. It also formed the basis of a number of adaptations, abridgements and reworkings in Latin, as well as serving as the source for many vernacular treatments, the earliest of which are in Old English: a short version by the prolific hagiographer Ælfric of Eynsham in his Catholic Homilies (ed. Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series. Text, EETS, S.S. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 247–48; Ælfric also has a second brief reference to the story in an addition he made to his original text elsewhere in Catholic Homilies, ed. Peter Clemoes, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series. Text, EETS, S.S. 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), p. 534) (To read more about Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, click here) and the anonymous version that is the subject of the present essay. The Latin version was likely produced in the eighth or early ninth century, a period when Carolingian scholars are known to have been making Greek texts available in the West in Latin translation.

            The Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers can be convincingly dated to the end of the tenth century or the very beginning of the eleventh, making it contemporary with the work of Ælfric. It is preserved in the early eleventh-century British Library manuscript Cotton Julius E. vii, in which the text is complete (apart from a few sentences missing at the very end of the story). Fragments, amounting to just under a third of the text as preserved in Cotton Julius E. vii, are (mostly) legible in another British Library manuscript, the badly burnt Cotton Otho B. x (a victim of the Ashburnham fire of 1731), from the first half of the eleventh century. Cotton Otho B. x is a miscellaneous compilation of saints’ lives, predominantly by Ælfric, while Cotton Julius E. vii is the sole extant manuscript of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints as an organised collection. (To read more about Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, click here).

            The Legend, however, is one of four hagiographical items in Cotton Julius E. vii not by Ælfric, the others being the lives of Saint Euphrosyne, Saint Eustace and his family and Saint Mary of Egypt: it is written in a form of late West Saxon slightly different from that used by Ælfric (and different too from the language of the other non-Ælfrician pieces); it is not in Ælfric’s characteristic rhythmical-alliterative prose; it differs from Ælfric in its approach to translation and its style; and it represents a form of hagiographical writing evidently not to Ælfric’s taste. These circumstances compel the conclusion that it is a post-hoc addition to the Lives of Saints collection, included, in view of its content and treatment, without Ælfric’s authority or approval.

The Legend is unlike Ælfric’s hagiographical writing and is indeed notably distinctive among the corpus of Old English prose hagiography as a whole, which is typically highly idealising and stylised in its presentation of sanctity, with little human interest or concern for realism. Most saintly protagonists in the corpus are powerful and heroic, whereas the Sleepers are portrayed as distinctly unheroic.

Old English prose saints’ lives also tend to translate their originals closely or to abridge them, certainly not to expand on them. By contrast, at twice the word count of the Latin passio, the Old English version of the Seven Sleepers legend presents an imaginative augmentation of its source. And, following the lead of that source, it is clearly very interested indeed in the human experience of the people in the story, particularly that of Malchus, who thinks he has been asleep for one night when he makes his visit to a strangely changed Ephesus. The terror felt by persecuted Christians in Ephesus is emphasised, as is the sorrow and regret of the emperor Decius at the disobedience of the Seven (sorrow and regret being rare emotions for a persecutor, to say the least). With an unusual degree of realism, the Old English heightens the fear and bafflement of Malchus, the hostility of people against him and the impatience of the authorities towards him, as his progress becomes ever more nightmarish. The emotions of the characters are richly imagined and there is much direct discourse, in which characters express their thoughts rather than simply making speeches at each other, as in most saints’ lives. And the city of Ephesus is brought to life for the English audience of the Legend by being recast from the mediterranean city of the Latin to become a recognisable late Anglo-Saxon town, with its bustling marketplace, crowds, legal procedures and familiar local officials.

            Stylistically the Old English Legend is very much a tour de force. It is rhetorically ambitious, with cultivation of vivid imagery and patterned phrasing (including rhyme, alliteration and doublets), all contributing to a sense of heightened emotional engagement (to listen to a recording of this passage, click here):

La, hwæt mæg beon wop oððe sarignys, gyf þæt næs se mæsta ægðres, oþþe hwæt mæg beon geomrung and wanung, gyf þæt næs se fulla ægðres, þa siðþan man þus þa halgan hæfte and gebende, and hi man swang and bærnde and swilce ofstic­ode swin holdode, and to ealre yrmðe tucode? 

[Oh, what can weeping or sorrow be if that was not the greatest of either, or what can grief and lamentation be if that was not the height of either, when afterwards the saints were bound and fettered in this way, and beaten and burned and cut up like stuck pigs, tormented with every affliction?] (ed. and trans. Kramer, Magennis and Norris, pp. 596–597)

Here the ‘stuck pigs’ image is among the graphic additions in the Old English. Elsewhere the persecuted Christians are said to flee ‘like little grasshoppers’ (‘swilce lytle gærstapan’, pp. 590–591).

            The Legend is also notable for the complexity of many of its sentences, which are not modelled on Latin sentences in the source but are the anonymous writer’s own invention. For example, the opening sentence of the story reads (to listen to a recording of this passage, click here),

On ðam gefyrn gewitenan ðære mycelan ehtnysse timan, þa ða hæðenan menn Cristendomes leoman mid ealle adwæscan woldon and ælcne myne ofer eorðan adylgian, and þa ða eadigan mart­yras for his naman mænigfealde earfeðnyssa ðafedon, ða Decius se þweora heold rice ofer eall Romana rice and him for ðissere worulde wel on hand eode, þæt he Godes þa gecorenan witnode and hi on yrmðum getintregode and hi buton gewande getucude eall swa he wolde, ða gelamp hit æt sumum cyrre þæt he ferde into anre byrig þe man Constantinopolim nemneð, seo wæs heofodburh on Greclande, and of ðære he for into Cartag­ine and ðanon into Efese.

[In the long-ago time of the great persecution, when the heathen people wished to extinguish entirely the radiance of Christianity and to blot out every memory of it over the earth, and when the blessed martyrs endured numerous hardships in its name, while the depraved Decius held sway over all the empire of the Romans and was successful in worldly matters, so that he tortured the chosen ones of God and tormented them with miseries and without hesitation ill-treated them just as he wished, it happened then on a particular occasion that he traveled to a city called Constantinople, which was the capital city of Greece, and from there he went to Carthage and from there to Ephesus.] (pp. 588–589)

The Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers is an ambitious prose composition from someone writing in late West Saxon but uninfluenced by Ælfric. The identity of this writer is unknown but the existence of the Legend, with its creative approach to its material, reflects diversity in hagiographical practice in late Anglo-Saxon England.

It may be of interest briefly to compare the anonymous Legend’s treatment of the story of the Seven Sleepers with that of Ælfric in his short account in Catholic Homilies, mentioned above, an account based on the same Latin Passio as that used by the writer of the Legend but adapted very differently. Ælfric’s version is a quintessential example of his hagiographical writing. It is spare, brief and lucid in style, written in short paratactic sentences with only two direct speeches in total, which are like blessings rather than being dramatic exchanges.

Ælfric is not drawn to the human-interest aspect of the story or the feelings of the Seven. Most strikingly, he disregards entirely the feature that is most compelling in the Latin and the anonymous Legend, the concerned focus on the bewildered Malchus. Ælfric omits any mention Malchus’s adventures, simply stating that after 372 years the saints awoke and were revealed to the citizens of Ephesus and then to the emperor.

Ælfric concentrates particularly on the meaning of the legend as glorifying the doctrine of the resurrection and on the spiritual enlightenment that the miracle brings to the emperor Theodosius, who becomes the most important character in the narrative. The saints themselves are transfigured at the end of the narrative and their faces shine like the sun, but in a sense they are also transfigured from ordinary life in the rest of the narrative as well. They exist on a rarified level rather than being portrayed, as they are in the anonymous Legend, as striving human beings at a time of trial.

Select Bibliography

Manuscripts

London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius E. vii.

London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho B. x.

Editions

Kramer, Johanna, Hugh Magennis and Robin Norris, ed. and trans. Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 63 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 588–651.

Magennis, Hugh, ed. The Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers, Durham Medieval Texts 7 (Durham: Durham Medieval Texts, 1994) [this also contains an edition and translation of the Latin source text in a version similar to that used by the Old English writer, pp. 74–91].

Skeat, Walter W., ed. and trans. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS O.S. 76, 82, 94, 114 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1881–1900; reprinted as 2 vols, 1966), I, 488–541.

Secondary Literature

Atherton, Mark. ‘Coins, Merchants and Fear of the King: The Old English Seven Sleepers Story’, in Royal Authority in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, BAR British Series, 584 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2013), pp. 63–74.

——. ‘“Sudden Wonder”: Urban Perspectives in Late Anglo-Saxon Literature’, in Towns and Topography: Essays in Memory of David Hill, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Susan D. Thompson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), pp. 74–82.

Cubitt, Catherine. ‘“As the Lawbook Teaches”: Reeves, Lawbooks and Urban Life in the Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1021–1049.

Joy, Eileen A. ‘The Old English Seven Sleepers, Eros, and the Unincorporable Infinite of the Human Person’, in Anonymous Interpolations in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Robin Norris, Old English Newsletter Subsidia 35 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2011), pp. 71–96.

Magennis, Hugh. ‘On the Sources of the non-Ælfrician Lives in the Old English Lives of Saints, with Reference to the Cotton-Corpus Legendary’, Notes and Queries, ns 32 (1985), 292–99.

——. ‘Style and Method in the Old English Version of the Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, English Studies 66 (1985), 285–95.

——. ‘Contrasting Features in the non-Ælfrician Lives in the Old English Lives of Saints’, Anglia 104 (1986), 316–48.

——. ‘The Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers and its Latin Source’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 22 (1991), 43–56.

——. ‘Ælfric and the Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). pp. 317–31.

——. ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saints’ Lives’, in Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 137–57.

——. ‘Crowd Control: Depictions of the Many in Anglo-Saxon Literature, with Particular Reference to the Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, English Studies 93 (2012), 119–37.

——. ‘Domesticating Translation in the Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, in Sermons, Saints, and Sources: Studies in the Homiletic and Hagiographic Literature of Early Medieval England, ed. Thomas N. Hall and Winfried Rudolf, Studies in Old English Literature 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 329–46.

Whitelock, Dorothy, ‘The Numismatic Interest of the Old English Version of the Legend of the Seven Sleepers’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 188–94.

Wilcox, Jonathan. Humour in Old English Literature: Communities of Laughter in Early Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023, pp. 269–86. 

Hugh Magennis (h.magennis@qub.ac.uk) is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published widely on Old English and related literature, specialising particularly in saints’ lives, translation and poetic tradition. He is currently co-editing a series of volumes for Brill on the four elements in the Middle Ages (with Marilina Cesario and Elisa Ramazzina).