The Cambridge Old English Reader

In a treatise on the books of the Old and New Testaments, written probably in the late 990s, at a time when Viking attacks on eastern and southern England were intensifying, abbot Ælfric exploited a reference to the Book of Judith to make a rare comment on events outside the monastery. He explained that he had put Judith's story into English (in a homiletic paraphrase) ‘as an example to you people, so that you may defend your country with weapons against the threatening host’. Judith was a pious widow who saved her people, the Israelites (called Hebrews in our poem) from destruction at the hands of the Assyrians by allowing herself to be taken into the bedroom of Holofernes, the enemy general laying siege to their city of Bethulia, and then chopping off his head.

The courage and fortitude which Ælfric so admired caught the imagination of many later medieval writers and painters also. However, the Book of Judith is one of several books which, though immensely popular and influential, and still part of the Roman Catholic Bible, were excluded after the Reformation from the official ‘canonical’ books of the Protestant Bible, though they will often be found there in a separate section of ‘apocryphal’ scripture.

There is no evidence that the version of Judith's story created by an anonymous OE poet was written with the specific purpose of encouraging the English in their own conflicts with invaders. It has come down to us in the early eleventh-century Beowulf-manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fols. 202r–209v), copied out by one of that poem's two scribes and bound into the volume immediately after it. Skilfully paring down the biblical narrative to its essentials (by ignoring the events of the first half of the book and omitting all the characters but Judith, Holofernes and Judith's maid), the poet has produced a moral tale for all times, but it is distinctly coloured by the conventional diction and imagery of Germanic heroism and structured by the sort of polarisation of good and evil well known in saints’ lives.