The King's Family: Securing the Kingdom in Asser's Vita Alfredi (2001)

Recent work on Asser's Vita Alfredi has pursued two separate but complementary directions. While one set of scholars has returned to the question of authenticity, asking whether the work is a genuine ninth-century text or a forgery, the other has focused on the problem of audience. (1) Because it is written in Latin, the Vita Alfredi stands out from other Alfredian texts like the Old English Bede and Old English Orosius, histories that, together with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, suggest the importance of vernacular historical writing at Alfred's court. Nonetheless, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Asser's text is genuinely from the ninth century. (2) With regard to the question of audience, most scholars agree that Asser's life of Alfred was probably not intended to circulate at court, and many offer Asser's associates in Wales as likely readers. (3) That these questions have dominated Asser scholarship points to one of the central difficulties of reading the Vita Alfredi. Asser's combination of annals from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle with scenes from Alfred's life is an appealing story, but the ways in which the text diverges from Carolingian models of history and royal biography--models upon which we know Asser drew--have made it difficult for scholars to appreciate the cultural importance of the Vita Alfredi. (4) I begin with the Alfred annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Asser's treatment of the annalist's lordship ideology is crucial to understanding what I see as the significance of his text. Blending Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon theories of ideal leadership, the Vita Alfredi interprets, supplements, and then authorizes the discourse of collective identity articulated in the Chronicle. In the Chronicle annals for 871-891, the king's defense of his realm and creation of a unified kingdom are presented as an issue of his lordship relations. Though Alfred wins and defends his kingdom on the battlefield, the annalist exploits the doubled language and rituals of lordship and peace-making to suggest that the king wins his kingdom with his performance of lordship. Thus in the foundation narrative for Alfred's realm, images of the king's lordship are so powerful that nation of origin seems not to matter. (5) Be they Dane or Anglo-Saxon, the noble men who unite themselves under Alfred become members of what the Alfred annalist calls the Angelcynn. (6) By the end of these annals, Alfred's lordship is both a defining ethos for the king's people and an expression of their cultural and political identity. (7) In that Asser retains the annalist's particular formulation of Alfred's royal power, I suggest that he accepts the cultural function performed by the Alfred annals. In that he translates the annalist's work into Latin and into the form and ideology of ninth-century Carolingian historical biography, borrowing explicitly from well-known examples of Carolingian mirrors for princes, I suggest that Asser uses his Vita Alfredi to proclaim to the Latinate Christian world the Alfred annalist's articulation of royal power. (8) Asser's careful translation and supplementation of the Alfred annals legitimizes the annalist's work by distinguishing it from and then reintegrating it into Carolingian traditions of kingship theory. Thus performing a linguistic and cultural translation of the Alfred annalist's text, Asser shifts the reader's focus from the king's defense of his kingdom to the political and cultural life of the court and the personal life of the king. Though the Danish invaders continue to assault the land, the emphasis on Alfred's childhood, struggle for literacy, and domestic life suggests first that Asser's interests extend beyond Alfred's fight for military security and second that it is not enough to read the Vita Alfredi as a translation of the Chronicle. To explain Asser's interpretation of the annals, the Vita Alfredi is most frequently compared to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne. But as James Campbell has pointed out, Asser's text in its combination of annals and biography also stands alongside the lives of Louis the Pious by Thegan and the Astronomer (anonymous); it can even be compared to Notker of St. …