2 - Æthelstan

Summary

Alfred had been concerned to establish an English voice, self-image and history that could serve to unite the people he ruled with each other and with a ‘common’ past; his grandson Æthelstan (king 924/5–939) used methods very similar to those of his grandfather both to unite England geographically and to create an image of England as a power within Europe. Born in Wessex but raised in Mercia, Æthelstan, more acutely than Alfred, seems to have been aware of the value of boundary space and the ways in which it could be worked and manipulated to either break down or maintain difference. Like Alfred too, Æthelstan was keenly aware of the power of the book and of writing as tools in the expansion of his regnum, but where Alfred had used translation as his chosen medium, Æthelstan used inscription. Rather than portraying himself as an author of texts, Æthelstan added personal inscriptions and portraits to older manuscripts, or manuscripts made up of older texts, imprinting visual and verbal reminders of his presence, authority, generosity and faith on books donated to churches throughout his kingdom. Interestingly, Æthelstan's inscriptions are themselves boundary texts in the sense that they are not integral to the books in which they appear, but are added, often in the margins or blank spaces, to pre-existing texts. They also serve to mark, indeed often to map, the space between the original owner or place of production of the book and the king's court; or in the case of the one surviving portrait (fig. 4), the space between the present in which the manuscript was produced and the past in which St Cuthbert, its ultimate recipient, lived.

Inscription can, however, also be a form of translation, and if we consider translation in its material sense, as in the translation of saints and relics, it is possible to understand Æthelstan's inscriptions as enacting a different type of translation from that practised by Alfred. The inscriptions document the process by which Æthelstan's books were elevated from the secular world of the court to the sacred world of church and monastery in which they were to remain enclosed – just like the vast numbers of relics that he is also known to have collected and given away.