The Cambridge Old English Reader

The psalms of the Old Testament, which had been a part of Jewish worship since the eighth century BC, came to play a crucial role in the practice of Christianity, too, for they were interpreted as presenting prophecies which were later fulfilled in the life of Christ. Their poetic qualities – a ‘psalm’ is a song, originally in verse in the Hebrew – and their association (however tenuous) with the great but troubled king of Israel, David (died c. 970 BC), made them a popular resource for personal devotion also. By the early Middle Ages, formal church worship (the ‘divine office’) was built around the psalms and they were circulated in self-contained books called psalters. In the monasteries, according to ch. 18 of the Rule of St Benedict, all 150 of the psalms in the psalter were to be sung every week, and the monks would be expected to know them by heart. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Latin psalter seems to have been the most widely copied book in Anglo-Saxon England. Eleven of the forty surviving examples have an OE translation (or ‘gloss’) written word by word between the lines of Latin, probably as a way to help monks to master that language.

Because it followed the Latin word-order slavishly, a gloss was not a coherent stand-alone version of the psalms, but such a translation does exist in a bilingual psalter made in the mid-eleventh century. Now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (lat. 8824), it is the most curiously shaped of Anglo-Saxon books, with pages three times as tall as wide (526 × 186 mm). All the psalms are there in Old English, the first fifty in prose and the rest (by a different translator) in verse. They are accompanied by a Latin text in adjacent columns, but this differs somewhat from the one that must have been used by the translators.

Scholars have established that the prose translations of the first fifty psalms are by King Alfred of Wessex (871–99) and were probably made near the end of his life. It is not known whether he ever intended to complete the whole psalter but the first group of fifty in itself is likely to have had a particular resonance for him, for it contains the lamentations of King David as he faces the hostility of his enemies.