When Orpheus enters the underworld, the Old English Boethius pauses to clarify that
[n]e fo we no [on] ða bisna and on ða bispel for ðara leasena spella lufan, ac forðæm ðe we woldon mid gebecnan þa soðfæstnesse, and woldon ðæt hit wurde to nytte ðam geherendum. (C Text, prose 22, lines 156–58)Footnote 1
we do not seize on examples and parables for the love of false stories, but because we wished to signify truth with them, and wished that it would become useful to those hearing them.
In this moment, the Orpheus tale appears to become a moral instrument—the love of “false stories” figures as a real possibility, perhaps even necessity, but one that must remain insufficient as a motivating factor in the tale's reception and reproduction. Boethius, a Christian Roman consul imprisoned by Theodoric the Great at the start of the sixth century, needed to provide fewer background details for classical myths. His Consolatio philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy) deploys these myths throughout a narrative in which Philosophia guides the narrator to an understanding that will alleviate his terrestrial suffering. Yet roughly three centuries later, the ninth-century Old English translation of Boethius continually proffers new or extended explanations for the now-obscure classical narratives of its Latin source, largely unfamiliar to an English audience perhaps more at home with Weland than with Apollo.Footnote 2 The risks accompanying these passages are acknowledged by explanations referring to classical stories as eald or leas spell, old or false stories. But while these pious apologies do little to explain the stories they purportedly gloss, they do something new: they seek for the first time in English a terminology for something like fiction, and they reveal, if not a systematic theory, then a fledgling theorizing of what fiction is, and what it must do.
The Old English Boethius engages insistently, if not always easily, with classical and pre-Christian material, and it influences how later texts do so as well. The text survives in two versions, one entirely in prose (the B Text) and one that alternates prose and verse, mirroring the form of the Latin original (the C Text). We have evidence of further early manuscripts now lost, for example in eleventh-century Exeter and likely in Christ Church Canterbury (Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius 1: 42–43). The oldest surviving manuscript of the text, dating from the mid–tenth century, is likely to be the oldest manuscript containing a “substantial body” of Old English poetry (Jayatilaka 56). The famous Abbot Ælfric used passages of the Boethius in the tenth century, as did the translator of the Old English Distichs of Cato (Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius 1: 48–49; Papahagi 201–03). The text survives in a twelfth-century copy and is cited in Nicholas Trevet's commentary on Boethius from circa 1300 AD (Cornelius 279). We have lost much from this era, but the evidence suggests the translation was a text widely known both before and after the Norman Conquest and into the period of Early Middle English (Discenza, “Old English Boethius”). As Haruko Momma has argued, even when adhering fairly closely to its source, the Old English Boethius constructively elaborates on, embellishes, and extrapolates from its philosophical concepts (54–58). The Old English Boethius does much more than adapt its classical forebears’ approaches to fiction or anticipate those of its successors. The achievement of its translation offers something new in English literature: a vernacular vocabulary for fiction and a theorizing of fiction that locates its value not only in its ability to illustrate truth through falsehood but also in the ability of its audiences to dynamically experience that truth.
Yet our critical histories of fiction theory start much later, often with Henry James's essay “The Art of Fiction.”Footnote 3 Catherine Gallagher starts somewhat earlier, writing that “until the mid-eighteenth century, there was no widely employed means of distinguishing between a fiction and a lie” (163). Laura Ashe, however, has argued that fiction begins in English with the reinvention of the romance genre in the twelfth century (Fiction 23–26, 157–58 and Introduction xiv–xviii). In 2019 Julie Orlemanski confronted scholars who “delimit fiction” according to modern forms “in an act of definition that is also an act of periodization” (146). As an alternative to identifying the origin of a static category in a watershed moment in the past, Orlemanski advocated a more capacious approach to fictionality, locating understandings of fiction in the practice of different cultures and historical moments (153–56, 162). Her essay offers examples from later medieval narrative genres. Yet to date, scholars have only tentatively thought of fiction as an operative category in English before the twelfth century. Peter Dronke's influential Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism centers primarily on “the most brilliant of the twelfth-century Platonists, [who] attempted the defence and the use of the realm of imagination” (4). While his focus on “image, symbol and myth” does address questions about the efficacy of art, he makes no mention of such discourse in pre-Conquest medieval England (13–14). Elizabeth Tyler argues that eleventh-century historiographers wrote self-conscious fictions, understood to be untrue both by their authors and their audiences, although she clarifies that these texts are not interested in a theory of fiction per se (25, 53–59). Fiction is a term briefly introduced by Susan Irvine at the end of her discussion of how the term leas spell (“false story”) allows the ninth-century translator of the Boethius to emphasize the moral of each story while distancing himself from the leas men (“false men”) who would have originally told it, and how the “moralising conclusion is in fact rather different in emphasis from that of Boethius” himself (396–97). But the matter deserves closer attention, precisely because the one thing the moral explanations do not do is explain the stories they accompany. The codas offer not simply a moral for the story, nor merely a rhetorical flourish to conclude the story; together they offer a theory for the use of story itself, as the details of a particular story blithely exceed the text's explanation of how its hearers might use it. As we shall see, such explanation is a gloss not for the story but for reading stories.
Defining fiction is an ongoing endeavor across the Old English Boethius. But the text's functional understanding of what I will call fiction corresponds with that of modern scholars: fiction is untrue narrative, and it must be understood as such by the author and the audience alike. The author knows the story will not be believed, and the audience would neither have believed the story nor have believed the author intended for them to do so; any truths found within the narrative are not those of narrative content. Yet as Carissa Harris has argued, even medieval fictions have the potential to destabilize distinctions between fact and fiction and to encourage troubling fantasies (240–41). In the modern era, Thomas Pavel has argued against the distinction between fictional worlds and real worlds (136–48). But for medieval texts and their readers, this distinction, and indeed the problem of making it, caused persistent anxiety. Medieval people could tell that a fantastic story was a lie, but it was hard for them to explain why it was all right that it was a lie—this is the problem the Old English Boethius addresses for the first time in the history of the English language.
Of course, the problem of art's dissembling was not new in the early Middle Ages either. Famously, Plato criticized poets’ use of false stories, admitting into the polis only poets who portrayed admirable traits exclusively (61–87). However, the Republic was unknown in England before the Norman Conquest (Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library 275–342). Other late antique and early medieval Latin authors would have been closer to hand. Macrobius, who acknowledges that fables may be used either “merely to gratify the ear” or to “encourage the reader to good works,” was well known (bk. 1, ch. 2). In the preface to his Fabulae, Avianus declares that in fables “urbane concepta falsitas deceat” (“courteously conceived, falsehood is proper”; 680). Isidore of Seville distinguishes between history, argument, and fable: “Nam historiae sunt res verae quae factae sunt; argumenta sunt quae etsi facta non sunt, fieri tamen possunt; fabulae vero sunt quae nec factae sunt nec fieri possunt, quia contra naturam sunt” (“For histories are true things that happened; arguments are things that, although they did not happen, nevertheless might have happened; fables truly are those that neither happened nor might have happened, because they are contrary to nature” [bk. 1, ch. 44, sec. 5]). When reconstructing hypothetical early medieval libraries, we should not assume that such texts would have been available in full to the translator of the Boethius, since classical authors may be quoted in part in florilegia, or in works like the Consolatio itself and its marginal glosses. Yet Augustine's Soliloquies offers a tantalizing discussion of how falsity depends on the similitude of the false to the true, as well as its ultimate dissimilitude (bk. 2, chs. 10–17). But the Old English translation of the Soliloquies does little with this argument, drastically reducing the length of this section and offering a much thinner treatment of how exempla may be used for teaching (Carnicelli 83–92). By contrast, the Boethius translator compensates for his modest familiarity with classical and late antique authors not by omission but by expansion of the material. Strikingly, the Old English Boethius argues that some falsity might in itself have value, and in doing so it introduces theorizing of fiction into English discourse for the first time.
Explanatory apologia for fictional tales appear throughout medieval English literature, especially in Boethian texts of the later Middle Ages. These explanations offer “moments at which literary works step outside of themselves, to do the work of theoretical commentary and to enact meditations on the nature of literary experience itself” (Johnson 11). These moments when the author becomes theorist reflect critical ideas about how literary experience is understood to work, and Boethian texts seem to invite such meditations especially. The Old English translation is the first translation of Boethius in a vernacular language, and it represents the cementing of Boethian foundations in medieval thought. As such, it works anxiously to bridge the gap between the culture of the Latin text and its own. In using Boethius's allusions to classical myth, the Old English Boethius introduced potentially heterodox ideas to a learned audience who largely would not have known them. To do so, it explains each reference and announces it to be untrue. In turn, that identification necessitated the further step of articulating why things untrue in themselves must be taught. Confronting the pagan and pre-Christian nature of its sources in ways the original does not leads to grappling with their fictionality in a way the original does not. And in the apologia devised for this purpose, we find old terms used for new concepts in new ways not otherwise found in the corpus of Old English writing.
In carefully introducing and expanding on the leas spell of Orpheus, and others like it, the Old English Boethius repurposes a negative moral term as a neutral critical one. In these explanations, the Boethius both enables a conception of something resembling fiction and offers a language and basic theory for how fiction works, even when its aesthetic reach exceeds its moral grasp. In the Old English Boethius, Wisdom (the vernacular rendering of Latin Philosophia) presents the verse and stories as serving the purpose of moral and spiritual development. But Mary Carruthers wisely cautions us against accepting that medieval people viewed literary art as merely functional, as the sugar on the bitter pill of some devotional lesson (8–13). Moral explanations are not “rational overlays detachable from the underlying human experience” (12); rather, medieval aesthetic experience involves an object's moral and devotional worth, but is not identical to it. This fact is hardly anywhere more apparent than in the handling of fictional narrative throughout the Old English translation of Boethius.
Whether cultivating or denying love for “false stories” at a given moment, the Old English Boethius insists even in its moralizing explanations on the enduring importance of the reader's experience of and response to fiction. Describing this experience requires a new terminology, one developed between the opposite poles of “false story” and “parable”—that is, between pernicious and sanctified discourse. This dichotomy encapsulates the inconsistency of the translation's attitude toward its own fictions—at one moment bringing them further into the realm of devotional teaching, at another quarantining them as potentially dangerous and indelibly alien. Incorporating and expanding on Latin glosses to the source text, the Old English does something radically different with its fiction than simply explain or elucidate its lessons. In both of its two versions, it embodies the aesthetic experience that its protagonists and readers alike are meant to progress through. Only in struggling through what a story and what fiction generally may do does the Old English Boethius realize both the aesthetic and intellectual good that Wisdom had promised all along. In what follows, then, I will first demonstrate how the Old English Boethius uses existing vocabulary in unparalleled ways to establish a terminology for fiction. Next, I will show how the text deploys this terminology to navigate the thorny moral issues of two classical, pre-Christian stories to direct how they—and story more broadly—ought to be experienced. This work will show that, even without a systematic theory of fictionality or definition of fiction, the problems of fictionality and of theorizing the experience of fiction have deeply concerned thinkers for as long as the English language has existed. Indeed, early medieval writers brought new language into being so that they might begin to describe their fictions.
Spell and Bispell
The terms the Boethius translator uses to designate fiction are not used in quite the same way anywhere else in the Old English corpus.Footnote 4 But the concepts that the text thereby develops, of cultivating experience of truths through literary narrative, exert influence on later texts that draw on the Boethius. Scholars have argued that the Old English Boethius functions as a literary object in its own right, conveying not only the meaning of the Latin but also a deliberately literary experience of reading the Consolatio (Thornbury 235; Weaver 236–38). By the time the Old English translation was made in the ninth century, the Latin Consolatio frequently circulated with extensive commentary in the form of a varying set of marginal and interlinear Latin glosses that were often transmitted with the main text from one manuscript to another.Footnote 5 Many of the manuscripts of the Latin are laid out to leave ample space for these glosses. When the Old English translation of the Consolatio was made, numerous glosses were integrated into the translation itself. Because of the impossibility of knowing the precise glosses available to the translator, we know only that extended explanations of particular stories, theories of reading, or instructional comments may not be wholly original to the translator. Yet the translator's struggle to find vernacular terms for these concepts, and the formal integration of gloss and text, represents both formal and theoretical innovation. Moreover, in handling these explanations, the Old English Boethius negotiates concerns about the power and danger of literary artifice, integrating these concerns into the literary experience of the text in both the prose and prosimetric versions. Instead of simply condemning or qualifying its pagan stories, the text grasps for theoretical frameworks in which to envision how these narratives and others like them may be ideally experienced by readers.
To demonstrate how the Old English Boethius develops its discourse on fiction, it will first be necessary to look at the unique vernacular terminology the translation creates for it. When illustrations from the Latin Consolatio use narrative exempla, they frequently elicit explanatory digressions in the Old English translation, where such exempla are referred to as eald or leas spell—“old” or “false tales.” From the outset, the word spell—or words including the morpheme spell—is used to describe these stories. Spell is used alongside the term bispell, which, like spell, refers to a story or fable but can have the additional sense of “parable,” as we shall see. Spell on its own has a range of meanings in Old English, from simply “story” or “narrative” to “history,” “discourse,” or “homily” (“Spell”). In the Boethius, spell most commonly appears in the formulaic closing lines to prose passages: “Ða se wisdom þa ðis spel asæd hæfde” (“Then when Wisdom had spoken this story”; C prose 12, line 125). Here and elsewhere in the prose passages, spell on its own usually just means something spoken rather than sung, distinguishing the prose passages from the verse ones, which are often referred to with the terms gyd or leoð. This distinction seems clear at the beginning of meter 7: “Ða ongon se Wisdom his gewunan fylgan, / gliowordum gol gyd æfter spelle” (“Then Wisdom began to follow his custom, / sang with wise words a song after a story”; C meter 7, lines 1–2).Footnote 6 Throughout the rest of the meters and in many instances in the prose, however, spell acquires deeper layers of meaning. In the meters alone, the morpheme appears ten times, either as a noun or in the form of the verb spellian (C verse preface 4b).Footnote 7 Besides the instance in meter 7 and two instances in the verse preface, spell mostly appears in the meters only late in the game, where it appears seven times from meter 22 to meter 30. In all these seven instances, it consistently refers to pre-Christian sources. Those pre-Christian sources can be used with fairly positive connotations, as in meter 22, where Wisdom cites Plato for the doctrine that those unmindful of righteousness may retrieve it from their own memories (C meter 22, lines 53–58). Here Plato's dictum is called a riht spell (“true saying”; this is echoed subsequently as soð spell in the first line of prose 22). Spell is used similarly when referring to the writings of Homer, who “oft and gelome / þære sunnan wlite swiðe herede, / æðelo cræftas oft and gelome / leoðum and spellum leodum reahte” (“often greatly praised the countenance of the sun, often expressed noble virtues to the nations by songs and stories”; C meter 30, lines 5b–8). Spell also carries more ambiguous connotations, particularly when, as in the verse preface, it is paired with the adjectives eald or leas, or when it forms a compound with one of these—even the meter on Homer, for example, declares “be ðæm we magon singan swylc butan lease” (“about this we may sing thus without falsehood”; C meter 30, line 18). It seems important, and perhaps not a given, that the lesson from Homer contain nothing that is leas. Yet Wisdom will work with leas material throughout the text, adopting various strategies to thwart heterodox implications.
When leas is not modifying some form of spell, its connotations seem unequivocally negative. The word is defined in Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller's standard dictionary as “falsehood” or “that which is untrue” (“Leás.”). In the Boethius, it is used in lease lot (“false cunning”; C meter 4, line 46), leasan sælða (“false fortunes”; C prose 5, line 29; prose 6, lines 11, 14), and leas wela (“false wealth”; C prose 5, line 91). It is used in leas gilp (“false pride”) in a passage on arrogance, unjust power, and excessive fame (C prose 9, line 33). However, this adjective also frequently accompanies the stories that the translator takes pains to defend and justify at length. In fact, the only instances in which leas seems to be used with remotely positive connotation are when it appears in conjunction with spell, and even then, this is not always the case. Early on in the text, just after Wisdom has diagnosed the protagonist (referred to in the translation less often as Boetius [sic] than þæt mod [“that mind”])Footnote 8 with a lack of self-knowledge, he explains how the mod has come to be in such a sorry state:
Ac hit nis giet se tima þæt ic þe healicor mæge onbryrdan, forðæm hit is ælces modes wise þætte sona swa hit forlæt soðcwidas swa folgaþ hit leasspellunga. Of ðæm ðonne onginnað weaxan þa mistas ðe þæt mod gedrefað, and mid ealle fordwilmað ða soðan gesihðe swelce mistas swelce nu on þinum mode sindon. Ac ic hi sceal æræst geþinnian þæt ic siððan ðy eð mæge þæt soþe leoht on þe gebringan. (C prose 4, lines 90–96)
But it is not yet the time that I may fully inspire you, because it is the manner of every mind that as soon as it abandons true sayings it follows false speaking. From this the mists that trouble the mind begin to increase, and completely confound the true sight—such mists as are now upon your own mind. But I shall first dispel them that I may thereby easily bring the true light to you.
Here, Wisdom directly contrasts leasspellunga (“false speaking”) with soðcwidas (“true sayings”) and explains them as symptoms of aberration and as causes of further trouble, in the form of mists that darken the mind. This condition prevents the mind from being more readily corrected by Wisdom, who promises to free the mind from such false speech. Possibly the compound leasspellung has a different shade of meaning than the combination of adjective and noun in leasspell. This is the only appearance of the compound in the Old English Boethius, although similar terms appear elsewhere in the corpus of extant Old English works. There are two appearances of the compound in the Orosius: in the first, the leasungspell is clearly a negative force that leads monige unwise menn (“many unwise men”) astray (Bately, Old English Orosius 26), while in the second it refers to the words of poets, although still in a negative light, in their capacity to pervert judgment: “his feond mæge swa eaþe his mid wordum gestieran” (“his enemy may thus easily direct him with his words” [53]). In the Old English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, such false speech is paired with drunkenness (Miller 354), and in both the Old English translation of the Benedictine Rule and in the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, false speech is paired with idel (“vain”) speech (Schröer 135; Orchard 226).
From this brief sketch, it would appear that the common understanding of the juxtaposition of leas and spell was negative, consistent with its earlier use in the Old English Boethius. Yet in further uses in the Boethius, the juxtaposition of these terms bears ambiguous or even positive connotations: Wisdom is, in fact, portrayed as dispelling false tales by means of false tales:
Ic wat þæt þu geherdest oft reccan on ealdum leasum spellum þætte Iob Saturnes sunu sceolde bion se hehsta god. . . . Ðyllica leasunga hi worhton, and meahton eaðe seggan soðspell gif him þa leasunga næren swetran, and þeah swiðe gelic ðisum. (C prose 22, lines 86–88, 96–97)
I know that you have heard it said often in old false tales that Jupiter, Saturn's son, was supposedly the highest god. . . . They made such false stories, and might easily have said the true stories if the lies had not been sweeter to them, and yet very like these.
This is only the second association of eald with spell in the prose texts, and at first it seems to retain the largely negative view of false stories common to the rest of the corpus. Yet it marks the beginning of a series of discussions of false tales, and as such first acknowledges what is so simultaneously appealing and dangerous about them—the element of sweetness, the affective power that makes one tale more attractive than another one like it. This observation leads to an extended warning later in the same section that explicitly acknowledges the falseness of the tale but advocates its value for expressing truth:
Ðeah we nu scylen manega and mislica bisna and bispell reccan, ðeah hangað ure mod ealne weg on þæm þe we æfterspyriað. Ne fo we no [on] ða bisna and on ða bispel for ðara leasena spella lufan, ac forðæm ðe we woldon mid gebecnan þa soðfæstnesse, and woldon ðæt hit wurde to nytte ðam geherendum. Ic gemunde nu ryhte þæs wisan Platones lara suma, hu he cwæð ðætte se mon se ðe bispell secgan wolde, ne sceolde fon on to ungelic bispell ðære spræce þe he ðonne sprecan wolde. Ac geher nu geðyldelice hwæt ic nu sprecan wille, ðeah hit þe gefyrn ær unnet þuhte, hwæðer ðe se ende a bet lician wille. (C prose 22, lines 154–64)
Though we must now relate many and various examples and parables, yet our mind always depends on that which we strive after. Nor do we seize on these examples and parables for the love of false tales, but because we wished to signify truth with them, and wished that it would become useful to those hearing them. I remembered now rightly certain teachings of the wise Plato, how he said that the one who wished to tell a parable should not seize on a parable too unlike the speech that he wished to relate. But hear now patiently what I will now speak, although it seemed useless to you before, whether the end may better please you.
Ðeah (“Though”) here implies that the soðfæstnesse (“truth” or “righteousness”) may be conveyed in spite of the falseness. Prose 22 invokes Plato to explain that intended lessons should be expressed through an appropriate tale, and that they can only be properly received by a mind prepared and suitably disposed to receive their truths—the mind may only now hear patiently what would previously have seemed useless to it. Nevertheless, a single tale will not suffice, nor will manega (“many”)—the tales must also be mislica (“various”) and offer variety to the senses of their hearers. The discussion of the spell of Plato here still does not resolve the problems surrounding the uses of stories, but it opens the floodgates for further discussion of types of spell. As part of the framing of the Orpheus episode, prose 22 reflects on the ways that such stories might be received. Yet rather than continue previous explanations, elements of this section depart from the justifications for false stories operative elsewhere in the Old English Boethius: in this passage the bisna (“examples”) and bispell (“analogies” or “parables”) are identified with the false tales, the love of which must be denied as sufficient excuse for them.
Yet as we see, it is precisely the love of false stories that has prepared the hearer's mind for Wisdom's teaching. We learn as much from the commentary at the end of prose 29, a lengthy, rambling discussion of the problem of evil ending, almost apologetically, with the promise of another verse: “Ac ic ongite ðæt ic þe hæbbe aðretne mid þy langan spelle, forðæm þe lyst nu leoða; ac onfoh hiora nu, forðæm hit is se læcedom and se drenc þe þu lange wilnodest, þæt ðu þy eð mæge lare onfon” (“But I perceive that I have made you weary with this long tale, therefore now you desire songs; but take them now, because it is the medicine and the drink that you have long wished for, that you may thereby receive instruction easily” [250–53]). Even near the end of the text, the joy of songs appears pleasant and necessary, and Wisdom does not seem to condemn the mind's desire for them. While the hard teaching may have made the listener weary, the songs help the medicine go down, so to speak. At the same time, denying the love of false stories and requiring such stories to adhere closely to their intended morals sits uneasily with the repeated assertion that the mind must not only accept Wisdom's teachings but also find them pleasing if it is to overcome its present despair.
Prose 22 brings new terms into the equation: bysen (“example”) and bispell, which feature as potentially neutral terms. Aside from many instances in the treatments of Orpheus and Ulysses, there are three further uses of bispell later in the text. The next two appearances are in prose 29, a long prose section ending with an offer of song as both a relief from and a reassurance following what has been taught. Neither instance involves any kind of classical myth; the bispell in this illustration function more as metaphors than as narrative parables.Footnote 9 Here, as before, the term bispell signals a particular kind of literary device that demands a particular kind of interpretive response, but it does not make the sort of demarcations that set apart stories of classical myth. The final instance of the word bispell in the Boethius appears in prose 31. The illustration contains a reference to Aristotle and the assertion that nothing is brought forth by chance. Since there is no mythological allusion included in the illustration of the discovery of hidden gold, the translator introduces the story without any great fanfare: “Ic þe wille læran bispellum swa ic þe ealne weg dyde” (“I will teach you with parables as I have all the way” [C prose 31, lines 15–16]). When used in conjunction with classical myth, bispell seems to have a Christianizing effect, painting benign illustrations and pagan fables with the same brush. The term appears grouped in two sections of the text, around prose 22–23, and again at prose 29 and 31. In the earlier grouping, the tales are always identified as false, leas, while in the latter they are not: in the earlier section the tales are mythological, while in the second they are only metaphors that are entirely consistent with Christian reference. We see that while these leas mythological stories offer a means to both illustrate abstract arguments and persuade readers to accept them, they sometimes threaten the more explicitly Christian vocabulary and ethos of the Old English translation. As a result, they occasion careful, extensive reflection in which the Old English Boethius allows leas to modify spell without morally negative connotation. In doing so, the Boethius must explain how they function as more than neutral metaphor, but as narrative that must be experienced by a reader who understands how story works.
The Old English offers other categorical terms for the illustrations that drive Wisdom's teaching. One of the simplest, the bysen, simply presents an analogy so that a principle may more easily be perceived:
Ac ic sceal be sumere bisene sume anlicnesse þære wisan ðe getæcan oð ðe þæt ðing cuðre sie to þam þæt ðu þa bisne sweotole gesceawige. And þonne be þære anlicnesse þara soðena gesælþa ðu mæge ongitan þa soðan gesælða and forlætan þætte him wiðerweard bið, þæt sint þa leasan gesælða, and þonne mid ealles modes geornfullan ingeðance higie þæt ðu mæge becuman to þam gesælðum þe ece þurhwuniað. (B Text, ch. 22, lines 38–44)
But I shall, by a certain example, signify to you some likeness of its manner, until the thing may be more familiar to you that you may then clearly understand the example. And then by that likeness of the true benefits you may perceive the true benefits and forsake that which is opposed to them—that is, the false benefits—and then you may pursue with the eager inner thought of your whole mind that you may come to those benefits that eternally endure.
Nevertheless, the bysen here operates provisionally—oð ðe (“until”) the difficult matter becomes familiar. This suggests that the bysen functions instrumentally—not primarily as an aesthetic experience in itself but as a figure of something else. Even this procedure is not merely intellectual exercise, but must incite the inward thought of the mod (“mind” or “spirit”) not only to understanding but also to an affective desire to act. Unlike other narrative examples, the bysen skips fantastic stories for something that will render a hard lesson cuðre (“more familiar”), and thus must work through mundane imagery—the taste of honey, the turning of a wheel, the term of mortal life. Yet at the later stages of the text, the concept of bysen comes to apply not only to metaphor but also to thought experiments that help the mod to grasp abstract concepts. For example, in book 4 of the Consolatio, where Philosophia promises, “[C]rebras coaceruabo rationes” (“I will heap up numerous rationales” [Bieler, bk. 4, prose 2, line 66]), Wisdom offers, “[I]c þe wolde gegæderigan manige spell and manega bisna” (“I would gather for you many stories and many examples”; B Text, ch. 36, line 126). It seems not to be simply the case that bysen translates ratio, because the Old English actually adds several illustrations absent from the Latin original, including an example of wooden dishes being valued above gold and silver to show the absurdity of evil's being rewarded more highly than good (B Text, ch. 36, lines 22–24). At the very stages that the Latin text moves away from concrete illustration into abstract philosophical debate, the Old English translation displays a desire for more material illustration, introducing new examples just as its source encourages leaving such devices behind.
The explanations evince anxiety over mythical tales: as Susan Irvine observes, their “fabulous content clearly alarmed” the translator.Footnote 10 While she rightly concludes that these “false classical stories were justifiable because truths could be expressed through them,” the interpretive contortions the text performs to make that so tell us about the concerns of the translation, contrasted with those of the original text or its accompanying glosses (389–90). The qualifications and justifications added to the Old English version allow us to see how literary artifice commandeered to serve devotional ends simultaneously supports but exceeds, affectively enforces but also threatens to undermine, the orderly aims of the text. This helps to explain just why fictional narrative remains so important in spite of its dangers and excesses. In the context of theological discourse, the stakes are of ultimate spiritual significance: Wisdom must appeal to the affective state of his charge through narrative exempla, but the most important aspects of aesthetic experience in this regard are also the most difficult for the translator to control. Rather than omit the exempla, or simply attempt an allegorical explanation, however, the translation does something else. It offers an account of how readers ideally experience such fictions, locating the virtue of the tale not only in its lesson but also in the mind of the reader who experiences it properly.
Orpheus Breaks Out of the Underworld: Eald and Leas Fictions
To see how the Old English Boethius uses its vocabulary to theorize mythical fictions and envisions the experience of reading them, we must examine some of the most difficult stories it contains. Meter 23, which extends the introduction to the story of Orpheus, affirms the value of such fictional stories as these:
We shall now nevertheless, with God's help, improve your inward thought with old and false parables, that you may better direct yourself rightly to the heavens, into that eternal homeland of our souls.
The invocation of Christian rhetoric effectively baptizes the classical, pagan story, assuring that the hearer's ingeðonc (“inward thought”) will be improved by such fabulous tales. The particular spell-word used here is also notable: this is the second use of the word bispell in the C Text, and while bispell appears several times later in the prose texts, this is the only time it will appear in one of the meters. Particularly unusual is the application of the adjectives eald and leas not to spell but to bispell, or bigspell, a term that is most frequently invoked in the Old English corpus in homiletic and scriptural contexts (“Bigspell”).Footnote 11 Here, it likely renders a phrase found in the Latin glosses: carmen fabulosum (“narrative song”) or figmento poetico (“poetic fiction” [Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius 2: 416]). These glosses help to guide what the Old English translation strives to convey in a vernacular without a vocabulary for it. It would seem that the word leas has come clearly by this point to suggest something other than “false”—something indeed closer to “fictional” (or fabulosus, related to our term fable)—to signify an artifice used not to deceive but to instruct. In other words, leas as a modifier for spell or bispell connotes in the Old English Boethius an idea of literary artifice rather than of deception. Here, premodern belief, far from being antithetical to the idea of fiction, prompts a discourse on fiction in dealing with classical texts. The translator need not fear that the reader might embrace Hellenistic paganism, nor require that each element of the Orpheus story bear clear allegorical significance. What the text has been suggesting about leas spell all along is rather that the reader's ingeðonc may with God's help discern the truth wrapped in fiction. The reader's progress thus ideally tracks that of the Boethian protagonist, even if the telling of the Orpheus myth will proceed less neatly than this theory promises.
In invoking the category of parable, the phrase eald and leas . . . bispell brings the tales thereby described closer to the early English sphere of experience even as it holds them at a distance. Although the stories are false, leas, they can function as parables—both as moral exempla and as aids to understanding—and are thus asserted as an instrumental good that may direct the hearer not just to better understanding but to heaven itself. Yet eald and leas also echoes the description of stories about Jupiter, revealing that these stories belong to another time and place and that they are not true stories even if they are like true stories (C prose 22, lines 86–88, 96–97). This exoticizing move sanctions the affective potential of these stories while carefully circumscribing their interpretation within the bounds of Christian discourse. The word bispell next appears in a similar context, in the prose leading up to meter 26, the story of Ulysses: “gehere get sum bispell and geheald þa wel þe ic ðe ær sæde” (“consider yet a certain parable, and observe well those things that I said to you previously”; C prose 26, line 50). For the text's protagonist, as well as its imagined audience, prior experience must guide present experience. While this latter passage offers a less developed apology for the mythical story that follows, the similarities in the treatment of the stories and the repeated use of a word not found earlier in the text suggest a parallel approach to the material. That the word bispell in particular has Christian connotations makes it all the more suggestive when invoked in explanations of pre-Christian material involving pagan gods—it translates mythical material into Christian parlance. Yet the equation or equivocation of classical and Christian is nevertheless a fraught enterprise, as a closer look at the treatment of the Orpheus story itself, and the reading experience envisioned by its translator, will demonstrate.
The Orpheus passage recounts the hero's mythical journey to the underworld, his ability to captivate his hearers through song, and his failed effort to free his wife from death. The Old English offers a long passage describing the responses of those who fall under the musician's spell: Cerberus is said to wag his tail at the sound of the harp, and the denizens of hell accompany Orpheus to their king, arguing his case because of their love of his song. While Orpheus wins both his case and his wife, he ultimately loses her again when he looks back at her before their journey out of the underworld is complete, thus breaking the lone capricious stipulation the ruler of the underworld has placed on his prize. For all the moral priming that the Old English translation has offered in the preceding sections, the conclusion extrapolates this moral from the story's details:
Ðas leasan spell lærað gehwylcne mon ðara ðe wilnað helle ðiostro to flionne and to ðæs soðan godes liohte to cumanne, þæt he hine ne besio to his ealdan yflum swa ðæt he hi eft swa fullice fullfremme swa he hi ær dyde. Forðæm swa hwa swa mid fulle willan his mod went to ðæm yflum ðe he ær forlet and hi ðonne fullfremeð and hi him þonne fullice liciað, and he hi næfre forlætan ne þenceð, ðonne forlyst he eall his ærran good buton he hit eft gebete. (C prose 23, 49–56)
These false stories teach every man who wishes to flee the darkness of hell and to come to the true light of God that he must not look back to his old sins so that he commit them again as fully he did formerly. Because whosoever with full will turns his mind to the sins that he formerly gave up and then fully performs them and they then fully please him, and he never seems to abandon them, then he has lost all his former good unless he again improves.
While this passage reads like a good Christian justification for the story, warding off morally dubious interpretation, it departs from the story's basic details—what evil has Orpheus turned back to if his wife is herself the former good he has attained and lost? Did Orpheus perhaps fail to flee the darkness of hell by seeking his wife there in the first place? Is his wife not his former good at all, but the yfel ðe he ær forlet (“sin he had previously abandoned”)? While the answers may not be found in the Old English, we can construe how the translation develops from the passage in the Latin:
This tale reflects on you, who seek to lead the mind into the higher daylight; for whoever being overcome should turn his gaze back into the Tartarean chasm loses whatever excellence he bears, when he sees those ones below.
This passage precisely identifies the elements of its analogy: Orpheus's wife is not his sin; she is the excellence he might have brought with him had he not looked back on the underworld, while the things of the underworld, the inferi, represent that which overcomes the mind on its way to higher things. The greater ambiguity in the Old English rendering may have been introduced by the translator's sources: while most read the inferi as the evil looked back on and Eurydice as the good thereby lost, a gloss in the tenth- or eleventh-century text found in Cambridge University Library manuscript Kk. 3.21 states, “[I]ubetur ne suam respiciat uxorem id est terrenam dignitatem et carnales concupiscentias quae in hoc saeculo pro tempore delectantur” (“[H]e is ordered not to look back at his wife, that is worldly honor and carnal desires, which delight for the time being in this age”; qtd. in Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius 2: 423).Footnote 12 The id est (“that is”) seems here to link Orpheus's wife with worldly goods and transient desires, whereas other glosses on the next page (folio 61v) speak of the cupiditas (“desire”) of his glance.
The dilemma evinced here is central to the concerns of the Boethius at this point: Orpheus wins because he masters his listeners’ perceptions through art, producing a profound affective response and influencing their actions, yet Orpheus's own need for sensory perception of his wife overcomes his ability to defer that desire when he knows it will cause him to lose her. The Old English translation may reflect difficulties with the source material, moral discomfort with its details, or awkwardly integrated commentary from a gloss or exegetical tradition. But from what the translation has told us about “false stories” thus far, the specificity of the analogy is not entirely the point. The Orpheus story does not work analogically, as in the Latin, but associatively: it presents its fiction not as a model for truth but as a mode through which one may arrive at truth. Thus, the Old English eschews the Latin's abstract “higher daylight”; instead, it envisions a reader led by fictional narrative to contemplate sin and worldly endeavor more broadly. It articulates not an explication for this story so much as the experience of story that its reader might have.Footnote 13
What we should therefore look for in this passage is not an explanation of the story but an explanation of how fiction itself is meant to work: the translation offers a reflection on the tale that is not simply analogical, even if there are analogous elements between the tale and the explanation. Proper reflection on even salacious classical stories will lead a mind to truth with proper training and experience. And in its departures from the Latin, the Old English translation offers not a failed gloss but an instance of the very associative practice whereby the mind may, in such reflections, find truth.
In the Latin, the lesson of the Orpheus story (which closes book 3 of the Consolatio) signals a shift from lower to higher things, to more abstract teachings rather than the likenesses foreshadowing them. Yet the Old English seems, like Orpheus, unable to direct its gaze forward—its treatment of book 5 is drastically abbreviated compared to its treatments of the previous books. Thus, we find an aesthetically rich parable whose details appeal to the same appetites and desires it warns against, and a rational explanation for the story that explains few of those details before moving beyond them. The need to render pagan myth digestible leads to a moralizing conclusion that redirects attention from what it concludes, both overwriting and offering a way into the affective power and ambiguity of myth.
Meter 26, much like the Orpheus story, uses fiction as a springboard for associative reflections, even more so than the corresponding section in the B Text, and its treatment of Ulysses and Circe takes further liberties in commenting on its fictions. The translator opens by reflecting that a valid moral lesson can be more easily expressed by such false stories: “Ic þe mæg eaðe ealdum and leasum / spellum reccan spræce gelice / efne ðisse ilcan þe wit ymb sprecað” (“I may easily express with old and false stories a speech similar to that of which we speak”; C meter 26, 1–3). The value of the story lies not in the story itself but in the broader discourse in which narrator and audience take part. The corresponding meter in the Latin Consolatio provides no such self-justification, launching with the ships of Ulysses (Bieler, bk. 4, meter 3), although glosses here mark the story as fabula.Footnote 14 Three short lines describing Ulysses's fleet in the Latin and four lines of prose on the same in the B Text are vastly expanded in the metrical rendering in the C Text, including some rousing if conventional poetry about maritime journeys and stormy seas. In all, we are offered roughly fifty lines of Old English verse on Ulysses's genealogy and the backstory of the Trojan War, including information on Jupiter, Saturn, and Apollo, none of whom are mentioned in the Latin, and on Circe, who is never mentioned by name.Footnote 15 Early English unfamiliarity with the pantheon invites explanatory digressions; early English fondness for seafaring poetry perhaps invites a familiar flourish.
The term leas, again apparently deployed in the more neutral sense of fictional rather than false or deceptive, applies in the Old English both to the present story and, later on in the same meter in the C Text, to the stories that have led foolish men into the false belief that a person's mind can be transformed by sorcery:
Oh those foolish men that long believed in these magical arts, false tales, knew nevertheless that the intellect, the mind of anyone, may not change with magical arts, though she might accomplish that their bodies would be changed for a long time.
The false stories here are of a different kind—if foolish men believe them, they err. But deployed as fiction, the translation may put them to use. The implications get muddled—how can there be a correct understanding of magical arts if only foolish men believe in them at all? The problems the meter works to solve are problems it has introduced. The condemnation of belief in magical arts and false stories is absent from the source text and extant Latin glosses. In the prose version and in the Latin, there is no link between Ulysses's sailors’ animal forms and their mental attributes, and no discussion of foolish men who believe in magical arts. Instead we are assured only that power to influence the body entails no power to influence the heart:
Oh hands too weak, herbs without power, it is allowed that they may have strength over the limbs, yet they do not have strength to turn hearts.
The Latin seems to be saying only that power to control the body is not power to control the mind—a fitting lesson for the imprisoned Boethius. But the Old English riff in meter 26 reverses the terms of that in the preceding prose, which stated that the wicked have the outward form of men only, but in their minds become like animals and should thus be considered as animals rather than human beings. The story of Ulysses in the Latin never casts any aspersions on the moral character of the sailors, reiterating only that the mind is unchangeable by external factors and that the outward form of the sailors turned animals did not affect their essential character as men. The prose Old English Boethius adds additional details but seems to hold to the reversal as presented in the Latin: “Næfdon hi nane anlicnesse manna, ne on lichoman ne on stemne, and ælc wisste þeah his gewit swa swa he ær wisste” (“They did not have any likeness of men, neither in body nor in voice, and each nevertheless knew his understanding just as he previously knew it”; B Text, ch. 38, lines 38–40). The C Text's metrical rendering, however, adds new layers to the fantasy, explaining that each sailor was changed “to sumum diore swelcum he æror / on his lifdagum gelicost wæs” (“to such an animal as he was most like previously in the days of his life”; C meter 26, lines 87–88).Footnote 17 Although Circe's sorcery does not transform the mind, it reveals each mind's enduring character. This meter's lesson muses associatively on the reflection that Ulysses's followers did have animalistic mental qualities revealed by Circe's skill, going on to warn that modes unðeaw (“the mind's sin”) presents greater danger than infirmity (mettrymnes) that affects merely the body (C meter 26, 111–13). The translations eschew simple analogy, concerning themselves instead with the state of its protagonists’ minds and, implicitly, with those of its audience.
This final moral denies sorcery's power over the mind, leaving behind Ulysses, the Trojan War, and the various adventures narrated in the poem. As a concluding reflection, the “moral of the story” reorients readers’ attention from salacious details toward a model of how readers might reflect on them. Its concerns about the mind return to the improvement and protection of the ingeðonc that had justified such stories, putting into practice the translation's theory of what readers might do with them. Hence, the explanation freely introduces familiar Boethian themes such as abuses of power, concupiscence, and servants falling from their master's favor. The bonus fifty lines of Old English battle poetry, how any of this might relate to the assertions about the mind-body relation that finish out the verse, need not be explained. We know, unlike the dysegan men (“foolish men”) of the meter, that these tales are untrue. We also have learned to be wary of their influence on our minds; we know what things they might do.
Truth and Old Lies
As Wisdom would counsel, the true lesson comes not from the false details of false tales. In the Old English Boethius, the affective experience of reading fiction for the reader who has been prepared for it sharpens understanding of philosophical truth. In this formulation, the pagan stories of the Consolatio need not be true if their lessons are. The Old English Boethius explicitly names these stories as lies, as leasspell. While this term exists elsewhere throughout the Old English corpus, nowhere else does it acquire contextualizing explanations in the way it does here, and nowhere else is this term used without starkly negative moral connotations.
In repurposing the term leasspell, sometimes, but not always, to adapt the Latin term fabula, this earliest vernacular translation of Boethius develops for the first time in English a vocabulary for fiction, including terms more commonly used for biblical parables, to explain Wisdom's strategy. The desire for fiction and the desire to explain what fiction does are thus at least as old as the English language—but the Boethius may be the first time that English has a language for doing so. What it develops with this language is not a systematic theory of fiction, nor is it meant to be. Rather, the process of translating, of integrating interpretive traditions, and of associatively adapting unfamiliar narrative catalyzes a novel theorizing of fiction where scholars have not expected to find one. This early medieval text knows that its fictions are lies and not truth and cares very much about the distinction, but it must explain why it is all right that fictions are lies: that these lies can tell truth. Only thereby can the Boethius guide its audience with Orpheus into the underworld, and only in its theorizations of the experience of reading fiction can readers emerge with the highest good they had sought to find.
