Cross the Border

Did Alfred know Latin well enough to translate it? Asser says yes. Malcolm Godden now says no. This chapter begins with a close reading of how Asser blends hagiography and chronology in his account of the day Alfred began to translate at sight. It ends with a schematic analysis of how literacy and bilingualism intersect. This helps us chart how Asser played what de Lubac calls a ‘game of figures’ to create a typologie interne of Alfred’s adult biliteracy, in which what happened on St Martin’s Day 887, the day Alfred’s biliteracy campaign was born, simultaneously fulfills what the childhood fable of his contest for his mother’s book and the fable of his pilgrimage to Rome jointly prefigured.