This description of paradise occurs in an anonymous prose text preserved in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198, and London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, and is placed in the second half of the eleventh century by its first editor, F. Kluge, who also pointed out, albeit rather non-committally, that the text focused on the phoenix. N. F. Blake called it the ‘Prose Phoenix’ and printed it as an appendix to his edition of The Phoenix, along with a similar text in Old Norse, but did not address adequately the question of the interrelationships of these texts. Indeed, not only this question but the text itself has been all but ignored by recent scholars, despite its potential interest for investigations into the transmission of Old English verse and prose.

Compelling as these issues are, they are raised here insofar as they shed light on the present investigation. Drawing on recent theories of the composition and transmission of Old English, I argue that the ‘Prose Phoenix’ represents the reabsorption of the Latinate poetic tradition into a late Anglo-Saxon, vernacular prose text.