Judith makes two spectacular appearances in the Old English corpus: she is the brave heroine of a poem which is included in one of the most famous manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period, the Nowell Codex, which also contains the heroic epic, Beowulf.1 Judith is the subject also of a homily 1 The Nowell Codex, named for its mid-sixteenth-century owner Laurence Nowell, who wrote his name on the first page, is now preserved in the British Li-brary as London, British LiLi-brary, MS. Cotton Vitellius A. xv. In its current state it is a composite of at least two manuscripts, the first part being of the twelfth century and the second part, which contains Judith, most commonly dated to the turn of the mill-ennium. Neil Ripley Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1957), art.216, p. 281, dates the manuscript as s. x/xi. Roy Michael Liuzza, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 11, argues for a date of manuscript production in the decade after 1000.
The second codex contains five texts: a fragment of the Life of Saint Christopher, more complete texts of Letters of Aristotle and Wonders of the East, Beowulf, and Judith. The poem Judith did not, however, originally follow on from Beowulf, because worm-holes do not match up and there is great wear on the back of the last folio of Beowulf, which indicates that, at one time, it came at the end. The first four texts are insepa-rable, so Judith may have originally come before them or have been part of another manuscript. The latter part of Beowulf and Judith, however, appear to be the work of the same scribe. Currently, there is much debate about the theme of the “mon-strous” tying these works together, following Andy Orchard’s book Pride and Pro-digies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (Toronto: University of To-ronto Press, 2003). For the date of composition of the poem see n. 4. The most recent edition of the Old English poem is Mark Griffith (ed.), Judith. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). For a prose translation of the poem see S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1995). A translation that keeps much of the poetic style of the original (with the occasional loss of precision in the translation) is in Albert S. Cook (ed.), Judith, An Old English Epic Fragment (Boston: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1904), pp. 3–27, which can be found at http://www.elfinspell.com/JudithStyle.html. The translations used here are my own and preserve the sense and format of the poem, but not the poetic structure.
by Ælfric, the most prolific and highly-regarded homilist of the age, who rendered her as an appropriate subject for the contemplation of clænnysse (chastity) for the benefit of nuns.2 Thus, even at our first approach to the perception of Judith in late Anglo-Saxon England, we are presented with ambivalence; is she a courageous military heroine to be heralded at the
“mead-bench,” or is she a pious example of chastity to be meditated upon in the cloister? In actuality, the Anglo-Saxon interpretations of Judith are more complex than even this dichotomy between genres suggests. While the Judith poem is most certainly an heroic epic in the manner of Beowulf, particularly in the second half when the Israelite army takes on the Assyr-ians, Judith’s own martial role, though described in gory detail, is actually diminished as she is presented as an allegorical type in a contest between good and evil and she is portrayed very much as the instrument of God.
The Judith of Ælfric’s homily, on the other hand, is much more the mistress of her own will and actions.
Margarita Stocker referred to Judith as “the Good Bad woman,” encap-sulating her fundamental ambiguity.3 It is this very ambiguity that has made her fascinating to many writers throughout the ages. In the process of explicating Judith’s shocking act and addressing the ambiguity between her roles as both murdering seductress and virtuous instrument of God, individual authors can transmit their own messages to their audience. The Anglo-Saxons imbued Judith with both the qualities of military hero and chaste widow, and used her narrative both as tropological message and allegorical type. These seeming ambiguities begin to make sense when we understand that these divergent attitudes were produced from an amalgam 2 The base manuscript for Ælfric’s homily on Judith is preserved at Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 303, pp. 341–62. This is an early-twelfth-century collec-tion of a seleccollec-tion from both series of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and some other texts.
See Ker (1957) art. 57, pp. 99–105. Fragments from the homily are also contained in the badly damaged manuscript London, British Library, MS. Cotton Otho B.x., fols. 29 and 30. The homily’s first modern editor, Bruno Assman, “Abt. Ælfric‘s an-gelsächsische Homilie über das Buch Judith,” Anglia 10 (1888), pp. 76–104, sugge-sted a date of 997–1005; whereas Peter Clemoes dated Ælfric’s homily on Judith ca.
1002–1005, “The Chronology of Ælfric‘s Works,” in Peter Clemoes (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins (London: Bowes, 1959), pp. 212–47. Most recently the homily has been edited, with extensive commentary, by S. D. Lee in an electronic book along with Ælfric’s homi-lies on Esther and Maccabees at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~stuart/kings/main.htm. The Old English text in this chapter is after his edition, but as yet no full translation is available, and the translations here are my own.
3 Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior. Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 24.
of the Anglo-Saxons’ past and their present. The patristic scholarship which the Anglo-Saxons inherited had many differing interpretations of Judith; to some she was a tropological model of chastity and faith, while to others she was an allegorical type for the Church, coming to represent all Christians in their struggles. The Judith narrative had also taken on a new urgency and poignancy in the late Anglo-Saxon period, as they confronted their very own “Assyrian” aggressors in the form of renewed Viking assaults begin-ning in the 990s. Judith, as she was imagined at the turn of the first millen-nium in Anglo-Saxon England, therefore, needs to be thought of within the context of both the patristic background and the contemporary calamity.
Ælfric’s homily was written ca. 1000 and the Nowell Codex was pro-duced at around the same time. There is some contention over the date of the composition of the poems in the Nowell Codex, including Judith. David Chamberlain suggests the date 990–1010, a date contemporaneous with the production of the manuscript.4 The Old English poem and homily were not written to commemorate a woman named Judith in the manner of Raba-nus Maurus of Fulda (780–856), a pupil of the great Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin, who wrote the first full commentary of the Book of Judith, which he dedicated to Queen Judith, wife of Louis the Pious. We can, therefore, look to the contemporary historical context of the composition of the hom-ily and poem to explain the urgency with which the Anglo-Saxons seem to have embraced the Judith narrative at around the turn of the millennium.
When the Viking raids on Britain began again in earnest in the 990s, just three generations after Alfred’s victory over them, it must have been a pro-found shock for a people who had been enjoying what art historians have called a “golden age.” Mistakes were made in encounters with the Vikings.
King Athelred the Unred (Bad Counsel) may have too rashly paid Viking extortions; meanwhile some earls, like Byrhtnoth, whose heroic defeat is celebrated in the poem The Battle of Maldon, may have too hastily engaged them in combat, even letting the raiders assume advantageous positions before entering into the fray. Many noble husbands were slaughtered at Maldon or were away fighting in similar battles, and we have to assume that there were many widows or married women who had to step in to 4 David Chamberlain, “Judith: A Fragmentary and Political Poem,” in Lewis E.
Nicholson and Delores W. Frese (eds.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 158.
This date is also endorsed by Ian Pringle, “’Judith’: The Homily and Poem,” Traditio, 31 (1975), p. 91. More recently Mark Griffith has proposed a date of ca. 900, Mark Griffith (ed.), Judith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), p. 47.
provide temporary “good lordship” on behalf of the dead or absent hus-bands. Good lordship meant many things – fairness, wisdom, constancy, leadership, but above all protection. These were qualities which lords were expected to embody at all times and which noble women had to adopt in difficult times. Thus, Judith is held as a shining example of good lordship for these tumultuous times, wise not rash, brave not foolhardy, faithful and pure of heart. If Judith, a weak woman, could prevail against the Assyrians, so too, contemporaries might extrapolate, could the Anglo-Saxons prevail against the Vikings.
Judith could be used as a call to all in Anglo-Saxon society to do their part in the battle against the Vikings. Ælfric wrote a book entitled On the Old and New Testament for his friend Sigeweard in which he includes a brief synopsis of the tale of Judith.5 In this book Ælfric refers Sigeweard to an English version of the Liber Judith, which he says has been written “to be an example to you men, that you defend your country against the attack-ing army.”6 Ann Astel argues, along with many other scholars, that in this, Ælfric is referring to his own Old English homily on Judith, which she de-fines here as a moral lesson which is a “timely call to men such as Sigeweard to resist the invading army of Danes.” 7
Ælfric, however, was not advocating that women actually pick up the sword against the Vikings in direct emulation of Judith; indeed Anglo- Saxon culture valued women as peace-weavers not as warriors, and there are very few examples of women warriors in chronicles or in literature compared to the Viking culture.8 The last part of the extant Ælfrician hom-ily makes its intended audience apparent; this constitutes a didactic call to clænysse, “chastity,” and it is addressed specifically to myn swustor, “my sister,” and it is an exhortation to nuns to protect their chastity. Judith is an admirable exemplar because “she lived in chastity after her husband [died]
on her upper floor” (Judith ll. 172–73).9 There may have been more than one version of Ælfric’s homily on Judith circulating. If the ending (the lines 5 Ælfric, “Letter to Sigeweard,” The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, ed. S. J.
Crawford, Early English Texts Society, old series 160 (1922), p. 48.
6 “... eow mannum to bysne, þæt ge eowerne eard mid wæpnum bewerian wið on winnende here.” Crawford (1922), p. 48.
7 Ann Astell, “‘Holofernes’ head’: Tacen and Teaching in the Old English Judith,”
Anglo-Saxon England 18 (1989), pp. 117–133, at 117.
8 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, records that in 722, Queen Æthelburg of Wessex led an army to destroy Taunton, which had formerly belonged to her hus-band, but this is a solitary incidence in a chronicle that records centuries of Anglo-Saxon history. See entry for a.d. 722 at http://omacl.org/Anglo accessed on 8/29/08.
9 “hi wunode on clænnysse æfter hire were on hyre upflore.”
after l. 356) was changed and addressed to a secular male audience and not a female cloistered one, and the final contemplation was concerned with courage and fortitude, rather than with faith and chastity, then the rest of the homily could stand unchanged and not seem out of keeping with a new audience and new message.
In the beginning of the homily, Ælfric has included a brief “scene- setting” section that is not in the Vulgate. The Vulgate opens by placing the incident within its true historical setting, explaining who the protagonists in the conflict are and how it had come about in terms of chronological history; Ælfric, however, takes a much broader approach in his introduc-tion. His opening is deceptively instructive: he appears to be sorting out any confusion between the two Nebuchadnezzars mentioned in the Bible, although what he is really doing is introducing one of the key messages of the homily – steadfast faith will be rewarded and wavering faith will be punished. The first Nebuchadnezzar, Ælfric says, was able to invade Judaea, destroy the Temple and put the Jewish people to the sword because they had insulted their God through idolatry and devil worship. Ælfric then reports how the Jews were held captive in Babylon until they were released by King Cyrus and returned to Judaea where they rebuilt the Temple. The other Nebuchadnezzar, Ælfric informs his audience, was King Cyrus’s son, and he is the one who is relevant to our story; he once more threatened the Jews, through his general, Holofernes. Ælfric does not bother with the minutiae of the chronology found in the Vulgate, but instead, by including the Babylonian captivity, sets the stage for Achior’s speech in which he tells of the Jews escaping from the Egyptians across the parted Red Sea and liv-ing in the desert by God’s munificence. Achior warns:
… no-one was able to own this people as long as they held their God rightly.
But as soon as they bow down away from worshiping Him to the heathen gods, they become ravished and insulted through heathen people. As soon as they with true repentance cried afterwards to their God, he made them mighty and strong to withstand their enemies. Their God truly hates un-righteousness.10
Thus, Ælfric, by including the Babylonian captivity, has enhanced the notion from the Vulgate that bad things happen to unfaithful people and 10 “ne mihte nan mann naht þisum folce, swa lange swa hi heoldon heora God on riht. Swa oft swa hi bugon fram his biggengum to þam hæðenum godum, hi wur-don gehergode & to hospe gewordene þurh hæðene leoda. Swa oft swa hi gecyrwur-don mid soðre dædbote eft to heora Gode, he gedyde hi sona mihtige & strange to wið-standenne heora feondum. Heora God soþlice hatað unrihtwisnysse!”
good things happen to the righteous, by providing a counterexample to balance the story of God’s facilitation of the escape from Egypt. In Ælfric’s milieu, with the renewed Viking assaults, he is presenting a poignant ar-gument: that it is the lack of righteousness that has brought the current calamities down on the Anglo-Saxons and that things will not improve un-til they mend their ways and are once more pleasing to God.
After this altered introduction Ælfric then provides a paraphrase of the Vulgate in the middle (and largest) part of the homily. There are occasional additions for emphasis; for example, in l. 242 he adds for nanre galnysse, emphasizing Judith’s complete lack of immorality. Ælfric also omits or foreshortens some parts of the Vulgate version; most significantly Judith’s speeches have been cropped. This is not unusual, however, in the writing of homilies, where it is important to get on with the narrative and drive home the message. The indignant speech in which Judith challenges the decision by Ozias and the elders to wait five days for God to intervene and, if He does not, then surrender to Holofernes, has been reduced in Ælfric’s version to a plea for faith in God; this simplification once again empha-sizes Ælfric’s main message in the homily – right faith will be rewarded.
The prayer Judith offers up to God as she adorns herself before setting off for the Assyrian camp is completely omitted; this may be because in this prayer she reveals her plan to use her beauty to overcome Holofernes, and Ælfric as a good storyteller did not want to give too much away too soon in his tale. The initial conversations between Holofernes and Judith are also reduced in Ælfric’s version, but again this may simply be the product of his desire to tell the story well and to get to the main action in Holofernes’s tent.
Compared to some older patristic versions and commentary on the Judith narrative, Ælfric nevertheless stays somewhat truer to the Vulgate version. Ælfric does not participate in the extreme polarizing of good and evil that we see in Jerome’s idea that “chastity beheads lust” or that which was taken up in Prudentius’s highly allegorical poem Psychomachia; neither does Ælfric’s Judith conform to Jerome’s notion that she was “a type for the Church which cuts off the head of the devil.”11 Jerome skewed temporality in aligning Judith with Christianity:
In the Book of Judith – if any one is of opinion that it should be received as canonical – we read of a widow wasted with fasting and wearing the sombre garb of a mourner, whose outward squalor indicated not so much the re-gret which she felt for her dead husband as the temper in which she looked 11 Jerome, Letter to Salvina, no. 79. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001079.
htm accessed on 3/13/08.
forward to the coming of the Bridegroom. I see her hand armed with the sword and stained with blood. I recognize the head of Holofernes which she has carried away from the camp of the enemy. Here a woman vanquishes men, and chastity beheads lust. Quickly changing her garb, she puts on once more, in the hour of victory, her own mean dress finer than all the splen-dours of the world. (Judith xiii)12
Jerome replaces the Jewish cultural practices of Judith’s mourning with the notion that she is an archetype for the “bride of Christ” – that is, a nun, waiting in chaste hope and expectation to be united with her “bridegroom”
– Christ. Jerome has, however, broken the constraints of temporality, and in the same way that he can reflect himself back into Holofernes’s tent, Judith can emanate forward into the Christian milieu, and thus spiritual symbol-ism can be given free rein. It is interesting, given Ælfric’s intended clois-tered audience, that he does not make any attempt in the manner of Jerome to make his Judith into a “bride of Christ,” but he is content to allow her to remain within her historical context. Indeed, Ælfric leaves a lot of the complexity of Judith’s character intact; she is still praised for her clænnysse (chastity), but she is by no means the innocent agent of God, who performs his will almost as an automaton.
Ælfric’s Judith is an “Eve-like temptress,”13 who deliberately sets out to seduce and deceive, because “she cast aside her sackcloth and her widow’s clothes and adorned herself with gold and with purple garments and with a splendid girdle.”14 Moreover, the explanation she gives in the homily to
Ælfric’s Judith is an “Eve-like temptress,”13 who deliberately sets out to seduce and deceive, because “she cast aside her sackcloth and her widow’s clothes and adorned herself with gold and with purple garments and with a splendid girdle.”14 Moreover, the explanation she gives in the homily to