Abstract
Scholars have long recognized that the Old English Judges has aims extending well beyond translation. However, to classify the entire work as a homily would be to disregard the fact that not all of its parts answer to the same aim or genre. This article argues that the text’s inclusion of Samson’s biography is of no relevance to the moral lesson that seems to speak from both the biblical material that precedes it and the extrabiblical material that follows. The text may nevertheless be understood as a single work, crafted to relay the contents of the biblical Book of Judges to a lay audience while emphasizing that its implications for personal conduct remained valid in Anglo-Saxon times.
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Notes
“Ðis gewrit wæs to anum men gediht ac hit mæg swa ðeah manegum fremian” (Marsden 201). We cannot, of course, be certain who prepended this message.
I am grateful to Winfried Rudolf and Christine Voth for lighting the way to this conclusion (personal communication, December 2014–January 2015).
I am grateful to Stephen Pelle for extracting these data.
It should be borne in mind, of course, that some of Pope’s more general observations may lean on Judges among other texts as evidence of Ælfric’s later works. Since he does not, as a rule, cull his examples from this text, however, the danger of circular reasoning is limited.
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Langeslag, P.S. Reverse-Engineering the Old English Book of Judges . Neophilologus 100, 303–314 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9456-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9456-2