The Cambridge Old English Reader

The Durham Proverbs are so called because they are found in a manuscript now in the library of Durham Cathedral. In one of the curious juxtapositions which characterise the preservation of OE literature, they were copied, by a none too skilful scribe, onto five blank pages between a collection of hymns and a series of liturgical canticles. These hymns and canticles are in Latin, but with an OE gloss, and they seem to have been copied out in the second quarter of the eleventh century, with the proverbs being added a little later. The manuscript was made at Canterbury, and a second part contains a copy of Ælfric's grammatical work, his Excerptiones (see p. 400). Two of the proverbs (nos. 37 and 39) appear also as additions to a mid-eleventh-century Latin psalter (London, British Library, Royal 2. B. v) and two (nos. 14 and 42) are included in the thirteenth-century Middle English collection of the Proverbs of Hendyng.

There is one other major set of proverbs in OE (surviving in three manuscripts), a version of the Disticha Catonis (the ‘Dicts of Cato’), a third-century collection of wise sayings in Latin which enjoyed great popularity throughout the Middle Ages; it was widely used as a class-text in the monastic schools of Anglo-Saxon England. The only connection between these and the Durham Proverbs is the occurrence of the first of the latter as part of dict no. 23 (see 1n, below).

The forty-six OE proverbs in the Durham collection are all accompanied by Latin versions, but these derive from no known source. It is indeed not certain that the Latin versions came first and scholars have been tempted to see the collection as an original vernacular work, a native English collection of proverbs which someone then tried to put into Latin. The uneven and in places incomprehensible nature of the latter might suggest that it was supplied by a novice monk attempting the translation as a learning exercise. However, comprehension problems occur in the OE versions of the Durham Proverbs, too, and there are several cases (such as no. 16) where we have to turn to the Latin to make sense of the OE. The relationship between the English and Latin versions thus remains unclear.