Reading The Life of St Margaret is a trip. Throughout the story Margaret is tortured, kills a dragon, bludgeons a devil, causes an earthquake, and converses with holy doves before she is executed, and her severed head is carried to heaven as a reward for maintaining her virginity in the face of a prefect’s aggressive efforts to take it. However, the most implausible thing to me when reading this was…
The story of Cain killing Abel is found three books earlier in the Vulgate Genesis: the Latin version, given on the right above, is significantly more succinct than the Old English, a fragment from which is given on the left.
The personified Earth drinking the blood of the first murder is only found in the Old English telling of the story, which leans into and elaborates on the act itself and the fallout experienced even before God arrives and calls Cain to account for his brother. Once we arrive at the interrogation point in the story, the words track more directly: in every iteration, Cain’s retort that he is not his brother’s keeper is preserved.
This two-part post set will pull out moments in the Old English Genesis where I found translation questions particularly pertinent. First, I will compare some residual effects the most proximate language of translation left on the Modern English versions of the Old English and Vulgate descriptions of the Flood, respectively, how the two poems look at the horror of the destruction. In this moment, the two versions are mostly similar,…
God’s presence is seemingly imperceptible to the human mind in Genesis. Both Adam and Cain commit their respective sins in God’s absence, though He is innately aware of their wrongdoing before they even confess it. God arrives at the Garden of Eden after Eve and Adam have consumed the fruit from the Tree of Death, “to find out what his children might be doing;” (Genesis A 852). Upon his arrival,…
Though the fall of Adam and Eve is the most well known story of descent in Genesis, both biblical Genesis and the Old English interpretation are full of backend stories about the biblical forefathers making a couple mistakes and seeming much less likable or heroic than who they were when they were first introduced. Lot turns from a favored nephew to a confused old man manipulated by his daughters, and…
In Genesis in the Old Testament Narratives, Eve, deceived by the messenger of Satan, ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of death. The “Fall” of the sinned Adam and Eve carried out by the furious God is, on the appearance, due to the disloyalty of his chosen servants. However, a close reading of the “Fall” entails an inherent contradiction in the nature of Eve’s sacrilege. Note that the story…
The human life is a mediated experience: we do not encounter an unfiltered world, but rather we process every input through our senses. Among our five senses, sight often reigns supreme; this article is not one of Professor Saltzmann’s podcasts, and I assume you aren’t understanding it via tactile telepathy. However, in the Old English poem Daniel, visuality is typically portrayed as an incomplete phenomenon through which one cannot fully…
Daniel Anlezark’s Old Testament Narratives explores the tale of Adam and Eve, but it allows for an inspection between the relationship of God and humans through the interesting dynamic of the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge. At the beginning of Genesis B, God commands Adam and Eve to “renounce that tree, guard yourselves against the fruit. For you two there will be no unsatisfied desire” (19). And Adam and Eve continued…
One of the most fascinating aspects of Genesis B is its numerous departures from the Vulgate Bible, most notably in the depiction of Eve. The poem’s recounting of the first Biblical story, the fall of humanity from Eden, calls into question notions of culpability and agency in the Bible. Did Adam and Eve have agency, and by extension, do their descendants, humans, have agency in the Judeo-Christian universe? When…
On a chaotic battlefield in some unknown place, good and evil are fighting to the death in an ecstatic battle for the soul. Chastity slices through lust causing fountains of blood to erupt into the air. Good works has greed held in a chokehold watching her face turn blue and then purple as the last vestiges of air slip away. Faith strikes the head of worship of the Old Gods…
