Aelfric's Colloquy

by George Norman Garmonsway (Editor), Ælfric of Eynsham

Scholarly edition of Aelfric's Colloquy with supporting introduction and glossary.

Genres: Medieval

74 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 995

Reviews

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

I seldom read, much less review, children's books, but given that this one was written over a thousand years ago, I guess I can make an exception. The target audience would have been young boys, somewhere between seven and eleven, in a monastic school. The text was originally written in Latin at the end of the tenth century as a kind of dialogue for learning to speak that language (think of the A-L-M French or Spanish texts we tried to learn from in Junior High school). Sometime later (early eleventh century) one manuscript was supplied with a loose interlinear translation in Old English. The whole thing was published with a glossary of the Old English in an edition by George Norman Garmonsway in 1939; the Old English translation and the glossary from Garmonsway's book (but not the original Latin text) are available on various websites, and that is what I read. Today the Old English is far more interesting than the Latin anyway, since we have much less available in Old English than in Latin.

The content is in a way very similar to many children's books today. Any public library could probably fill a shelf with books about "people in your neighborhood" with a teacher, a doctor, a nurse, a firefighter, a letter carrier, a policeman, and perhaps some more exotic occupations. Aelfric's selection is a bit different. He begins, naturally, with a monk, since his students will mostly become monks; that's why they are learning Latin. Next is the ploughman, the yrthling, who provides us with food and drink. A modern book might have the farmer; but there were no farmers in Aelfric's England, just farmworkers who cultivated the land for the feudal nobility. Then we get the shepherd, the oxherd, the hunter (still a real occupation then, unlike today), the fisherman, the fowler (someone who hunts birds), the merchant trader, the shoemaker (and general leatherworker), the salter, the baker, and the cook, all treated with a bit of humor but giving us a glimpse of the daily functioning of the Anglo-Saxon economy a half-century before the Norman Conquest. We then get the "wise counselor" who starts a discussion about the importance of the crafts which becomes an argument introducing new characters such as the smith until the counselor gives us a short sermon on each person following their own craft. The children complain that the dialogue is becoming too deep for them, and it ends with the daily life of the students, mostly consisting in singing the liturgical offices.