Anglo-Saxon Prose [antikvár]

Preface The act of translation needs no apology. The circumstances which made it desirable for Alfred and yElfric in the ninth and tenth centuries are no less pressing in the twentieth; and the attendant problems are no less great. The difficulties that confront the translator are innumerable; whole books have been written about them. Only those who have subjected their translations to the scrutiny of a number of others will readily appreciate how a dozen different readers will make a dozen different demands on a translation at any one time. It is simply not possible to satisfy every point at all times; of its nature, translation is unsatisfactory. The number of possible interpretations, not simply of substance, but of style and tone, is often large. And the decisions which must be taken are more often than not purely subjective. Ultimately translation cannot reproduce, or even adequately reflect, the style of an original without departing from its substance considerably. I have tried to supply as close a rendering as possible without being awkwardly over-literal. And I have thought it important not silently to 'improve' the original in those cases where I felt it to be at all clumsy, repetitive or obscure. To do so would be to present as unreal a picture as it would be to reduce all the varied styles of Old English prose to my own personal style, or to the 'colloquial Modern English' beloved of the university examiner. In the strictly limited space available, I have tried to furnish the general reader with a representative selection of some of the very different kinds of Old English prose. It would have been possible to include everyone's favourite passages only by an anthology of excerpts. But wherever possible I have chosen works which are complete in themselves, eschewing extracts in the belief that these are inherently misleading. What might at first seem a bold step in excluding passages from both Bede and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle •—both of which are in any case already available in inexpensive editions—allows space for less familiar material which would otherwise have had to be omitted. I have tried to include a body of vii