Conclusion
The Old English Heptateuch presents a variety of approaches to biblical translation, adaptation and interpretation, ranging from the faithful, almost interlinear approach taken by Ælfric in the opening of his translation of Genesis to the free paraphrase of his homily on Judges. Uniting all these approaches, however, is a thoroughly domesticating sensibility, in which obscure or exotic elements are consistently downplayed or omitted whereas those parts of the biblical narrative which resonate with contemporary concerns are retained and sometimes even amplified. The various translation styles on display are all broadly speaking communicative, and only on rare occasions creative. As Ælfric explains in his
Preface to Genesis, any translation from Latin into English must rearrange the syntax of the source in order to be intelligible: the Heptateuch authors therefore adopt a functional equivalence approach to bring over the meaning of the source text rather than its form. In Steiner’s terminology, the first stage in the production of the Heptateuch is ‘affirmation’:
1 See above, p. xiii, for Steiner’s theory of translation. although Ælfric himself had strong reservations about the project, the team accepted the task of translating the first books of the Old Testament into prose for an audience who were otherwise unable to access its teaching. The next step is ‘aggression’ (or ‘plundering’), in which the translators analyse the vocabulary, syntax, grammar and meaning of the first seven books of the Bible, weighing up their options for rendering them into English. The third stage is ‘incorporation’, the process of adaptation into the target language: in bringing across the core elements of the first seven books of the Bible into English, the translators are relatively faithful to their source, though the tendency towards abbreviation increases dramatically from Exodus onwards, culminating in the heavily paraphrastic approach taken in the later books. As part of this process of ‘incorporation’, numerous biblical passages deemed too risqué or offensive, or too confusing or boring, are omitted, with the result that the Old English Heptateuch emerges as a much more accessible, coherent and readable text than its unwieldy and at times repetitious biblical source. Finally, we arrive at the stage of ‘compensation’:
in rendering the Heptateuch into the vernacular, the translators favour an idiomatic English prose style throughout, while Ælfric employs a rhythmical and alliterative prose style designed to appeal to the tastes of audiences familiar with vernacular preaching and poetry. Paratextual materials, including incipits, colophons and, in one manuscript, a scheme of lavish illustrations, further contribute to making the first seven books of the Old Testament more accessible and meaningful to a wide audience of lay and clerical readers.
Stripped of potentially confusing episodes, tediously long genealogies and irrelevant geographic details, the Heptateuch provided the English ruling elite with inspirational examples of heroic military leadership, inviting them to draw parallels between their own wars with the Vikings and the existential struggles of the Israelites. In this streamlined form, the core teaching of the Heptateuch that God’s laws must be obeyed if his people are to enjoy his favour and avoid his wrath is made all the more clear. Nevertheless, the project was not without its own difficulties. On occasion, the decision to abbreviate the biblical narrative in the manner outlined above led to inconsistencies, such as when Ælfric’s omission of the story of Moses’ disobedience at the rock in Numbers is flatly contradicted by the ending of Deuteronomy.
2 See above, pp. 192–3, 197–8. Ælfric’s subsequent turn from translation to paraphrase, in which the author can exert far more control over which parts of the source text are made available to the audience as well as determining how the selected material is framed, may be partially explained by his growing dissatisfaction with a project to which he seems never to have been entirely committed. Yet the Old English Heptateuch nonetheless stands as a remarkable literary achievement, widening access to the Old Testament to a broad audience comprising both lay and clerical elements. It would not be until the fourteenth century with the production of the Wycliffe Bible, that such a concerted effort to translate Scripture into English would be attempted again.
3 See below, Conclusion, pp. 249–50.