Teaching & Learning Guide for: Second‐Rate Stories? Changing Approaches to the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle
Authors: Stodnick Jacqueline A. 
Published: August 2010

Author's Introduction

The article provides an overview of the annals known collectively as The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, an extensive project of historical writing in English initiated in the late ninth century and continued for some two centuries and in eight manuscript versions. Because of the great complexity of its textual history, and the relative obscurity of its origins, much scholarship on the Chronicle has concentrated on its language – vocabulary and spelling – in an attempt to reconstruct both the relationships of the manuscripts to each other, as well as their putative originals and possible source materials. At the same time, the Chronicle has always been used as a source, in a raw sense, of historical data. This article considers the merits and limitations of both approaches, as well as advocating the value of more recent work that considers the Chronicle itself as a cultural product, which mediates and thereby shapes the perception of events by means of a deliberately restrictive and highly specific idiom. Summarizing the trends of past scholarship and attempting to predict the shape of future work, the article aims both to introduce students to the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle and to establish the centrality of this text to broader questions about the nature of historical writing.

Author Recommends

Michael Swanton's The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicles (London: Phoenix, 2000) is the best translation available for those who want to access the texts in Modern English. Following the practice of earlier Chronicle editors and translators such as Plummer and Garmonsway, Swanton provides concurrent annals from different manuscript versions, with A and E providing his main texts. He also includes black and white plates of various Anglo‐Saxon antiquities, as well as maps and genealogical tables.

For those who can read Old English, the volumes of the magisterial series The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition are essential, since they provide the texts of all the major Chronicle versions in a modern, scholarly format with full annotations and lengthy discussion of the manuscript background, textual relationships, and language: MS A, vol. 3, ed. Janet Bately (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986); MS B, vol. 4, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983); MS C, vol. 5, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); MS D, vol. 6, ed. G. P. Cubbin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996); MS E, vol. 7, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004); MS F, vol. 8, ed. Peter S. Baker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000).

Thomas Bredehoft's Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) was the first book‐length study devoted to this text, and is a thought‐provoking, well‐researched and enjoyable read for students and scholars alike, paying admirable attention to manuscript details such as pointing and layout.

Alice Sheppard's Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), another book‐length study, considers the Chronicle not just as a repository of historical detail, but as a nationalizing text containing shaped narratives of kin and lordship.

No scholar has done more to advance our understanding of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, and particularly the relationships among the manuscript versions and the use of source material, than Janet Bately. Essential reading in order to understand the complex textual history of the Chronicle includes: Janet Bately, ‘The Compilation of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, 60 BC to AD 890: Vocabulary as Evidence’, Proceedings of the British Academy 64 (1978): 93–129; ‘World History in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: Its Sources and its Separateness from the Old English Orosius’, Anglo‐Saxon England 8 (1979): 177–94; ‘Bede and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle’, in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones (Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, 1979), 233–54; ‘The Compilation of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle Once More’, Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985): 7–26; ‘Manuscript Layout and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle’, John Rylands University Library Bulletin 70 (1988): 21–43; The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: Texts and Textual Relationships (Reading: Reading Medieval Studies Monograph, 1991).

Online Materials

A manuscript image of annals 824–33 from the C‐text of the Chronicle may be viewed at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/histtexts/angsaxchron.html.

You can hear R. D. Fulk reading the poetic entry for annal 937 of the Chronicle at http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/audio.htm. This poem, known as The Battle of Brunanburh, which employs heroic diction and a traditional verse form, commemorates Æþelstan of Wessex's victory against a combined force of Picts, Irish, and Norsemen.

The Chronicle is not the only formulaic historical text in Anglo‐Saxon England, although it is arguably the most wide‐ranging in its focus, as well being the most self‐aware of its identity as a historical and national text. Charters are a related form, sharing with the Chronicle a highly formulaic diction (albeit generally in Latin), a focus on territorial tenure and exchange, and the function of recording details of persons and events. Translations of the charters are available at: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/kemble/pelteret/2%20Index.htm.

Sample Syllabus

The Textuality of Medieval Culture

Course Description

This course will explore, in a broad and interdisciplinary manner, the various influences and aspects of textuality in medieval English culture both early and late. We will investigate the question of what constitutes a ‘text’ in a manuscript culture in which scribes customarily and substantively altered the texts they copied; in which the beginnings and ends of individual works were not graphically marked; in which every copy of a work was unique; and in which works were regularly copied into larger manuscript collections. We will also consider the ways in which medieval thinkers employed textual or linguistic models to represent and understand their world. Thus we will treat ‘textuality’ as both a material and a conceptual phenomenon.

Week 1

Introduction to course and administrative matters: history of the book and writing; medieval manuscript production and scripts; editing theory; transcription skills.

Section I: Authority, Interpretation, and Exegesis

Week 2

Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Upple Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958).

Brian Stock, ‘Introduction’ and section on ‘Christian Doctrine’, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self‐Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1–19, 190–206.

Week 3

Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin, 1990).

Nicholas Howe, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Making of the Migration Myth’, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo‐Saxon England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989; Reprint, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 1–7, 33–71.

Week 4

Chaucer, ‘The Book of the Duchess’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 329–49.

Martin Irvine, ‘ “Bothe Text and Glosse”: Manuscript Form, the Textuality of Commentary, and Chaucer's Dream Poems’, The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen, eds. Charlotte Cook Morse, Penelope Reed Doob, and Marjorie Curry Woods (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 81–109.

Section II: Orality, Literacy, and the Materiality of Textual Culture

Week 5

Two versions of Bede on Caedmon – one from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed (New York, NY: Norton, 1993), 16–19; the other from Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 404–21.

Allen Frantzen, ‘Preface’, and section on ‘The Norton Anthology Caedmon’, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), ix–xvi, 137–44.

Martin Irvine, ‘Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture’, Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1991), 181–210.

Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Preface’, ‘Introduction’, and ‘Orality and the Developing Text of “Caedmon's Hymn” ’, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ix–xiv, 1–46.

Brian Stock, ‘Orality Literacy and the Sense of the Past’, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 1–15.

Week 6

Trip to Special Collections

Section III: Writing Culture: Inter‐ and Intra‐Textuality

Week 7

Extracts from The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicles, trans. and ed. Michael Swanton (London: Phoenix Press, 2000).

Jacqueline Stodnick, ‘Second‐rate Stories? Changing Approaches to the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle’, Literature Compass 3.6 (2006), 1253–65, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00380.x, <http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/literature/section_home?section=lico‐medieval>.

Week 8

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, trans. R. M. Liuzza (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000).

Gillian R. Overing and Marijane Osborn, ‘Mapping Beowulf’, Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1–37.

Week 9

Selections of Old English poetry and riddles from Anglo‐Saxon Poetry, ed. and trans S. A. J. Bradley (London: Everyman, 1982).

Pauline E. Head, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Locating the Reader: Perspectives in Old English Poetry and Anglo‐Saxon Art’, Representation and Design: Tracing a Hermeneutics of Old English Poetry (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 1–53.

Week 10

Chaucer, ‘The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23–36.

Selections from The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth Century Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992).

Stephen A. Barney, ‘Chaucer's Lists’, The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, eds. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 189–223.

Week 11

Selections from Canterbury Tales (continued)

Seth Lerer, ‘Introduction: The Subject of Chaucerian Reception’, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–21.

Section IV: Fiction and Referentiality

Week 12

Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966).

Michelle R. Warren, ‘Historia in marchia: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Colonial Itinerary’, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25–59.

Patricia Clare Ingham, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Arthurian Imagination and the ‘Makyng’ of History’, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1–50.

Week 13

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. James Winny (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1992).

Christine Chisholm, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Heady Diversions: Court and Province in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1–110.

Week 14

Alliterative Morte Arthure in King Arthur's Death: the Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994).

Lee Patterson, ‘The Romance of History and the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 197–230; reprint in Medieval English Poetry, ed. Stephanie Trigg (London: Longman, 1993), 217–49.

Week 15

Presentations and roundtable discussion of major course themes.