Anglo Saxon Chronicle

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry sub anno '1016', one of the longest, is reviewed in regard to the accretion of later interpretations of it. Consideration of the earliest history of Southwark and its status and relationship at that period with London is given and the exact nature of the events in the entry and how they related to London within the larger Canute -  Edmund war scenario.  A strict forensic analysis is undertaken using  a table of  textual variants comparing the ASC entry's discreet  statements alongside those of John Stow and Sir Frank Stenton as most other commentators have accepted their interpretation. An alternative explanation of the events in the ASC entry is then offered with a revised chronological sequence.

A draft version of the published paper  „The Early Kings of Norway, the Issue of Agnatic Succession and the Settlement of Iceland“, Viator. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 47:3 (Autumn 2016), 171-88.

The early Norwegian kings are scarcely attested in sources earlier than the twelfth century, in contrast to the rich and varied descriptions of them from twelfth-and thirteenth-century sources. It will be argued that the historical narrative of their reign had direct relevance for at least two contemporary issues during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One was the precedence of sons of kings in the order of succession to the Norwegian throne. This claim was strengthened by the genealogical lines of the Norwegian kings which existed from the 1120s or 1130s onwards and demonstrated that the Norwegian monarchy had always passed to heirs in the direct male line. Another important issue was the aspiration of the Norwegian kings to extend their rule to Iceland in the thirteenth century. Paradoxically, at this very time the view gained ground in saga narratives that Icelandic settlers had been opponents of the earliest Norwegian kings.

La tesi verte sullo studio dell’evoluzione nel tempo delle desinenze verbali e la relativa scomparsa di vocali posteriori dall’Anglosassone (Old English) all’Inglese Medio (Middle English). In particolare essa si focalizza sulla cosiddetta “Cronaca di Peterborough”, documento molto importante ai fini della ricerca diacronica.
Dopo aver spiegato nell’introduzione alcune nozioni chiave, il lavoro si sviluppa per tappe, fra le quali l’analisi e l’enumerazione in ordine alfabetico delle forme verbali contenute nella “Cronaca di Peterborough”.
Tramite l’osservazione delle forme verbali posteriori all’anno 1100 viene dimostrato ciò che la dissertazione si propone di evidenziare, ossia la scomparsa delle vocali posteriori.
Alle conclusioni di tipo morfologico si accompagnano considerazioni sintattiche sul modo in cui il livellamento desinenziale finisca per influire sulla struttura della frase.

"Old Norse sagas that deal with the stories of medieval Scandinavian royalty, the so-called Konungasögur, were written in the crucial phase of Norwegian history when kings were changing, to paraphrase the title of Sverre Bagge's well-known work, from "Gang leaders" into "God's anointed".
The period their authors describe in their works seems to have seen very important changes and to have been full of clashing ideas and attitudes, from the heroic ethics of the eddic and skaldic poems and the Íslendinga sögur to the aggressive pragmatism found during the Age of the Sturlungs. Most of all, this is the period that immediately follows the Christianisation of Norway and Iceland, a period in which the Church was trying to introduce new rites, new ceremonies, a new eschatology, and new symbols.
Literature could not be indifferent to the new meanings that inevitably became attached to the concept of kingship as a result of this change, and the authors of the Konungasögur were certainly aware of the ideas connected with the ideological legitimization of kings. Their different models of kingship come actually to the fore through a comparison between them: they all display different processes of selection, arrangement and rationalisation of source material, different narrative strategies that clearly convey their political judgements on kings.
The story of Magnús góði is, in this respect, exemplary, all the more because it is dealt with in the five Old Norse synoptic histories of Norway, namely Ágrip af Noregskonungasögum, Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna, Heimskringla and Historia de Antiquitate Regum Norwagiensium."

In 1899, a widely shared desire to fix Alfred’s birth-date without consulting Asser led Plummer to conjure up a mirage: “It seems to have been overlooked that the date is fixed by the genealogical Preface to MS. A of the Chron., a strictly contemporary authority, which says that he was ‘turned’ twenty-three at his accession in 871.” Plummer’s mirage may be traced back to Archbishop Parker’s original interest in his manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which Parker erroneously characterised as written when Alfred was twenty-three years old. The clause recording Alfred’s twenty-three-year regnal length in the last sentence of the Alfredian West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List can be reversed to yield a birth date of 848 only by imposing on the text a feebler standard of style and syntax, numeracy and logic, rhythm and coherence than the text deserves, ignoring its arithmetic, semantics, and genre. Letting go of Alfred’s hitherto canonical birthdate is not a trivial matter. Alfred's 848 birthdate is based on a mirage. This is in part a case history of Elizabethan, Victorian, and current OE philology. "Much will change if we come to imagine the historical Alfred in 855 as more or less the same age as Judith, the thirteen-year-old Carolingian princess old enough to marry his father on their way back from Rome."

The authors catalogue all the chronological indications of three mauscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A, D, and E, and analyze them as the central element of the inner organization of the annalistic text. The authors study such wordings as the annal-numbers, the words which follow the annal-numbers (such as 'Her' etc.), the formula with which new items start inside an annal (such as 'On thys ilcan geare'), precise dates (Kalends, church festivals, etc.), wordings which are used to organize long narrations (like 'Tha sona aefter thaem'), references outside the particular annal (indications of the duration of reigns, references to earlier and later events, etc.).

"This paper looks at the scribal practices of MS ‘A’ of the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', and at some of the confusions resulting therefrom.

It attempts to show that the sequences of dates which precede the Mercian Register in MSS ‘B’ (816-817-818-819-900-901) and ‘C’ (896-897-898-899-900-801) are derived from a set of annal-numbers (916-917-918-919-920-921) which once formed a postscript to the annals of the (shared) source-text of B and C (or '/BC'). It also suggests that the annals of A from *912 to *914 were derived from a source like the (shared) source of B and C, which continued only to 914 or 915; and that the annals of A from *915 to *920 were taken from this same source, after that text had been continued by the same author for a further six years.

Addendum: The implications are that there was either a programme in which continuations were sent to associated religious centres, or there was a close connection between MSS A and /BC, with one copyist perhaps working on two chronicles and then sending one of them elsewhere. As it happens, the divisions of the available texts show some level of coincidence with the times at which new religious centres in Wessex were set up. And the fact that the copyist of B and the first compiler of C take the run of annal-numbers in question to be an Introduction to the 'Mercian Register' would suggest that the 'Register' was physically attached to (or copied into)  /BC. Moreover, if /BC contained a copy of the 'Register', which relates to King Alfred's daughter,  who was known as the 'Lady of the Mercians', then we might ask how a Mercian text came to be available to the compiler/s of /BC. Perhaps /BC was located at Ramsbury, one of the new religious centres set up in Wessex in the early tenth century. Alfred's daughter had her centre of power at nearby Gloucester. The Ramsbury-theory might allow a system of borrowing and/or provision of information -- specifically between the different houses of Mercia and Wessex, as a continuation of the blueprint for English chronicling (arguably) established by Alfred. Manuscript A, which does not contain the 'Register', might theoretically have remained at Winchester."

Textual sources of the early Middle Ages (fifth to tenth centuries AD) contain more astronomical observations than is popularly assumed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lists some 40 observations of astronomical and atmospheric events for the just over 600 years it covers. But the contexts in which these are set show that eclipses, comets, meteor showers and aurorae were seen as portents of evil events, not as objects of early scientific curiosity. The case of Bede in the early eighth century shows that this was true, to an extent, even for the educated ecclesiastical elite. Bede’s eclipse records also appear to show that astronomical events could be used to explain unusual phenomena such as the postulated volcanic ‘dust-veil’ event of AD 536.

Resumo: O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar a participação do Outro no contexto formativo dos povos Ingleses (731 – 899). Esta investigação tem como base três documentos: a Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum, obra do monge Beda datada de 731, a sua tradução ao Inglês Antigo feita no século IX e o estoque comum da Crônica Anglo-Saxônica, obra que começa a ser escrita em 890-2 na corte do rei Alfredo de Wessex (871 – 899) e termina em 1154. Nossa problemática central é: como interpretar os efeitos do Outro no discurso de formação identitária dos povos Ingleses? Para responder a esta questão trabalhamos com o termo ‘situações de outridade’. Estas situações servem para englobar a situacionalidade da etnia – sendo a etnicidade um dos elementos-chave de análise – que se move no espectro entre a identidade e a alteridade. Através de uma interpretação tropológica do discurso ao redor dos termos gens Anglorum e da Angelcynn, as referências das fontes para a ideia de ‘povos Ingleses’, obtemos nossa hipótese central de que este processo formativo se pautou pela pluralidade étnica. No capítulo I, instrumentalizamos as situações de outridade enquanto ferramenta teórica na formação dos povos Ingleses. No capítulo II, analisamos a outridade no discurso da gens Anglorum bedaniana. No capítulo III, interpretamos o discurso da Angelcynn alfrediana.

Palavras-chave: Beda; Crônica Anglo-Saxônica; Povos Ingleses; Situações de outridade; Etnicidade.





Abstract: The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the participation of the Other in the formative context of the English peoples (731 – 899). This investigation has its basis in three documents: the Ecclesiastica Historia Gentis Anglorum, a work of the monk Bede, dated for 731, its translation to Old English made in the 9th century and the common stock of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a work that begins to be written in 890-2 in the court of the king Alfred of Wessex (871 – 899) and finishes in 1154. Our central problematic is: how to interpret the effects of the Other in the discourse of identity formation of the English peoples? For answering this question, we work with the term ‘situations of otherness’. These situations serves for encompassing the situationality of ethnicity – one of our key elements of analysis – that moves in the spectrum between identity and alterity. Through a tropological interpretation of the discourse around of the terms gens Anglorum and Angelcynn, the references of the sources for the idea of ‘English peoples’, we obtain our central hypothesis that this formative process was guided by ethnic plurality. In the first chapter, we mean to instrumentalize the situations of otherness as a theoretical tool in the formation of English peoples. In the second chapter, we analyze otherness in the Bedan discourse of gens Anglorum. In the third chapter, we interpret the discourse of Alfredian Angelcynn.

Keywords: Bede, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; English peoples; Situations of otherness; Ethnicity.

This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing to political changes of the period and to communities of practice that produce these histories and chronicles. It examines the labels and stereotypes applied to the Vikings and establishes their sources and evolution by applying a fourfold chronological division of historical sources from around 800 to 1200 (based on the political developments within Anglo-Saxon history and on the manuscript history of the

Il presente studio nasce dalla necessità di fornire un'edizione completa delle sezioni poetiche della 'Cronaca anglosassone', nonché di analizzarle - sia comparativamente, sia singolarmente - da vari punti di vista: codicologico, tipologico-strutturale, lessicale, stilistico, semantico-pragmatico, tenendo conto anche dello specifico contesto prosastico in cui tali testi sono inseriti. Muovendo da un'analisi paleografica e linguistica dei singoli componimenti poetici con le loro varianti significative, la ricerca mira a individuare: - il motivo per cui nelle varie redazioni della 'Cronaca' i versi sono registrati a partire dal X secolo e non prima; - specifici parametri tematici, strutturali, stilistici e/o semantico-pragmatici in base ai quali attribuire alle sezioni poetiche della 'Cronaca' una o più etichette di genere; - le differenti funzioni progressivamente assunte dalla poesia nell'ambito di un'opera storiografica di tipo annalistico.

co-edited with Paul E. Szarmach Eleven major scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period consider Alfred the Great, his cultural milieu, and his achievements. With revised or revived views of the Alfredian revival, the contributors help set the agenda for future work on a most challenging period. The collection features the methods of history, art history, and literature in a newer key and with an interdisciplinary view on a period that offers less evidence than inference. Major themes linking the essays include authorship, translation practice and theory, patristic influence, Continental connections, and advances in textual criticism. The Alfredian moment has always surprised scholars because of its intellectual reach and its ambition. The contributors to this collection describe how we must now understand that ambition. While I cannot upload the book, I have uploaded my own chapter, "The Old English Boethius," to https://ndiscenza.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/the-old-english-boethius-from-a-companion-to-alfred-the-great/.

This paper explores the various narratives concerning the events of the 'adventus Saxonum' ('the coming of the Saxons') in the fifth century AD. Gildas' 'De Excidio Britanniae', Bede's 'Historia Ecclesiastica', the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', and the 'Historia Brittonum' all recount the event - in rather different ways.

This paper traces the development of the narrative of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers, and their leaders Hengest and Horsa. It argues that Æthelberht’s overlordship of southern England, and the monastery of Canterbury's claims of primacy and authority were two contexts in which the historical events gained new relevance and could be put to new ends.

co-edited with Paul E. Szarmach Eleven major scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period consider Alfred the Great, his cultural milieu, and his achievements. With revised or revived views of the Alfredian revival, the contributors help set the agenda for future work on a most challenging period. The collection features the methods of history, art history, and literature in a newer key and with an interdisciplinary view on a period that offers less evidence than inference. Major themes linking the essays include authorship, translation practice and theory, patristic influence, Continental connections, and advances in textual criticism. The Alfredian moment has always surprised scholars because of its intellectual reach and its ambition. The contributors to this collection describe how we must now understand that ambition. While I cannot upload the book, I have uploaded my own chapter, "The Old English Boethius," to https://ndiscenza.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/the-old-english-boethius-from-a-companion-to-alfred-the-great/.