Simon Thomson

It is widely recognized that Cnut's reign in England saw a major increase in cultural, especially Church-centered, patronage, at the same time as it brought Scandinavian culture into the mainstream of southern English life. Winchester seems to have been one of the centres of such cultural activity: patronage and interest flowed into Winchester from multiple sources, if not often from Cnut himself, reflecting competing political and personal interests while simultaneously demonstrating the convergence of different cultural affiliations. Thanks to the archaeological excavations led by Martin Biddle, we can now see two focal points of this cultural activity in the great churches of Old and New Minsters, each of which managed and benefited from this interest in its own way. A large fragment of stone found in Winchester in 1965 epitomizes this flowering, this cultural convergence, and this focus: showing a key moment in the story of Sigmundr Vǫlsungsson, it must have been installed in the Old Minster during or after Cnut's reign, perhaps initiated with his patronage. The sheer unlikeliness of such an ideaa non-Christian warrior with a strange and savage story decorating the inside of one of England's oldest cathedralsmay have contributed to a dearth of discussion concerning this stone and its implications in eleventh-century English culture. But there is, this chapter argues, no reason to be afraid of this carving of a wolf and a man, for the relief merely lends a sharp focus to what we already know from other sources: Cnut's court had a lively interest in mythic and heroic narrative; that is, in what we might call Germanic storytelling at the same time as it invested heavily in the Church, in connections with Rome, and in the recent English past. Most people in early medieval England seem not to have seen the contradictions between the vaguely "pagan" and the broadly "Christian" that often preoccupy us, and it is usually best, I suggest below, to believe in the vibrant, productive, complicated mixture that the evidence shows, rather than to erect barriers against it in defiance of that evidence. The Sigmundr stone has much to tell us about how Cnut wanted to be perceived and indeed about the cultural tone of England in the eleventh century. It also has implications for our understanding of the stories of Sigmundr, of the Vǫlsungar, and of Beowulf. This chapter, then, aspires to wide horizons, some of which will no doubt remain hazy. But it begins with solid stone.

There are multiple early medieval English accounts of the Jewish heroine Judith. This essay seeks to bring them together, to identify some major differences in emphasis and interest. This discussion seeks to reveal that most writers working with the text felt uncomfortable with it and sought to control it in different ways; this in turn leads to the question of what made the story so appealing – why so many Englishmen felt the need to rewrite a story they might have preferred to ignore. The final third of the essay, then, reflects on what a "good story" is, and the aspects of Judith that seem to make it irresistibly attractive as a project to retell in new ways.

Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife explores different approaches to maintaining selfhood. This essay argues that the novel perceives selves – and artistic works – as simultaneously absolutely individual and profoundly composite, interwoven networks. In particular, the essay argues that this is presented through the twinned-but-opposed maternal figures of Dana and Willa, and by its use of plural voices for the mountain, the mothers, and the dogs.

Introduction to a volume on medieval stories and storytelling, exploring what is meant by "story", what takes place when a storyteller delivers one, and the shaping effects of media and context on encountering stories. The chapter also introduces and briefly describes the subsequent chapters in the volume.

Introduction to edited volume on strangers and their movement in medieval western Europe, discussing the concept of stranger / outsider in medieval texts and lived experience and some theoretical constructions of strangeness, with an introduction to the subsequent chapters of the volume.

Stemming from a culture with a long history of oral storytelling, Beowulf is intensely interested in how stories are told and how audiences make meaning from them. 1 Storytelling is a peculiar medium: its performers slip fluidly between narration and embodiment, and lack any of the tools of mimesis, making it look rather more like teaching than acting; I will argue here that its conscious use of make-believe and reliance on the collective imagination mean that it has most in common with children's fantasy play. Functioning primarily as entertainment, storytelling can shape moral and emotional responses, in effect constructing a community through shared experiences and principles. This chapter seeks to use Beowulf to explore how storytelling works, and to use storytelling as a lens through which to understand some of the sophistication of the poem. Doing so requires a number of relatively disparate threads to be brought together. First comes an overview of what is here meant by 'storytelling' and, in particular, how experiencing performative storytelling can be a communal, creative, and playful experience. This sets the ground for a discussion of the poem's well-documented interest in modes of storytelling, focusing in particular on how it presents the figure of Beowulf and what that presentation can tell us about how storytelling works. Bringing these threads together moves into a discussion of my experience of telling Beowulf and his story in Modern English; a written version of one way in which I tell the first third of the poem forms an Appendix, to which close reference is made.

This paper argues that the early medieval legend of Saint Christopher-in which a giant, dog-headed figure becomes a saint and converts a city-demonstrates the potential impact of being prepared to place the body, and in particular the face, in the center of our frame of vision. This paper suggests that Christopher's transfor-mative impact occurs not despite, but because of, his strangeness. Further, the audience is invited to identify with and emulate not Christopher himself, but those he encounters. In this story, which hovers between the monstrous and the hagio-graphic genres, we are not the strangers, but the ones who meet the stranger and must decide how to respond. Using some of Emmanuel Levinas's thinking about strangers and their faces enables the suggestion that the transformative impact of the passio has, just like the actions of its protagonist, potentially far-reaching social implications. That is, placing a strange face in the center of the frame-focusing on rather than ignoring its strangeness-can change the world.

The story of Christopher, the dog-headed saint, usually receives attention purely on the basis of his monstrous nature. Such analyses fail to notice the significance of two women who take a central position in “his” story, primarily because full versions of the text are only available in Latin. Having reviewed the narrative accounts of these characters in different versions of the passio, the discussion here moves on to consider when they may have first entered the legend and how early they were known in Anglo-Saxon England. It argues that recognizing the role played by the two women could make a significant difference to how the
best-known English version of the Christopher story is read. This partial translation, copied into the same manuscript as Beowulf in the early eleventh century, has always been assumed to have been of interest on the basis of its presentation of a monstrous saint. The argument here is that, when the activities of the two women are recognized, the passio resonates strongly with other depictions of powerful women in the texts of the manuscript, and that this provides an instance of the potentially highly productive nature of engaging closely with often-overlooked European Latin prose hagiography.

The Old English Saint Christopher has, like much anonymous vernacular hagiography, gone under-studied. This is partly because its manuscript context results in it being mentioned dismissively alongside more famous texts, and partly because no source has been identified or published. Based on a survey of the fifteen extant pre-thirteenth-century versions across about fifty of their manuscript forms, it is possible to show numerous and significant additions and alterations unique to this vernacular retelling. These changes ameliorate Christopher’s extreme passivity with some active attributes, make the king he opposes more deranged and cruel, and in particular tighten and clarify the story. The Old English Christopher is no masterpiece, but it is a skilful and creative reimagining of a very widespread text, developed by an authorial translator to meet the interests and needs of an Anglo-Saxon audience.

Between 1014 and 1017, England had four kings – two of whom were exiled beforelater resuming their reigns.  Little wonder, then, that when the dust had settled and Cnut Sveinnsson established himself as undisputed ruler of the English, stasis was attractive enough to be conjured into being.  Despite his origins as the son of a legendary warrior and raider called ‘England’s Devil’ in a saga account, his enmity to one of England’s great heroes in Edmund Ironside, and his close association with the greatest villain of the time in Eadric streona; and despite the proud celebration of his Danish origins through art and architecture, Cnut became regarded as ‘more English than the English’ and laid the foundations for a homogenous and stable North Sea empire which the early deaths of his sons ultimately undermined.
By reconstructing his own image and that of his regime as a static participant in English traditions, the Scandinavian raider became, in effect, part of the stable line of Wessex.  This paper discusses how Cnut’s regime used a range of media and approaches to project a sense of continuity and stability, including legal codes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, the production of currency, the administration of local government, ceremonial actions, and the reproduction of literary texts.

The version of Wonders of the East found alongside Beowulf in the Nowell Codex has long been disparaged for the low quality of its images. This article demonstrates that there were in fact at least two artists involved in the making of the images, one with considerably more skill than the other. Having established this principle of team work in the text and manuscript, a full reassessment of the process of producing the text, and the intentions behind it, is necessary. In the process, the article shows that - while it is far from first-rate work - there are a number of sophisticated ideas contained in the image scheme, that at least two exemplars were used, and that there is an element of experimentation and novelty in this production.

Early in the Anglo-Saxon period, a scribe's role was conceived of as being source-centred.  Their primary responsibility was to the author of a work, and the key indicator of their success was the faithful reproduction of an exemplar.  However, over time scribes became more reader-focused in their activity: their role became to interpret a text for a reader, rendering it more accessible.  This in turn means that many scribal interactions with a text relate directly both to that text's meaning and how readers accessed or created meaning; or, at least, individual scribe's conceptions of meaning and its production.  In manuscript studies, there is often a disciplinary distinction in approaching scribal products.  On the one hand stands formal analysis of production through palaeography, codicology, and the like; on the other, interpretative engagement with literary or artistic meaning.  But this is patently not how Anglo-Saxon scribes understood their work, and is extremely unlikely to be the way Anglo-Saxon readers approached texts: production was aligned to, and intended to clarify, meaning.

The five texts of the Beowulf manuscript have long been recognised as being an unusual combination, bringing together texts that are religious and secular, prose and poetry, Germanic and Latinate, with adventures in Scandinavia, India, and North Africa.  However, the peculiarity of the production has been largely set to one side rather than used to develop understanding of how scribal production might deepen understanding of the production of textual meaning.  They have, in fact, been so unappealing as a group that they were not published together between the production of the codex in the eleventh century and Robert Fulk's 2010 edition for the Dumbarton Oaks series.  Fulk's edition follows work by Kiernan, McGowan, Klegraf and others on describing scribal activity in the codex and seeking to understand what it tells us about their understanding of the texts; it stands alongside digital facsimiles of the codex produced by Kevin Kiernan and the British Library.

In this piece, I demonstrate the suitability of this codex in considering how scribal activity and the process of production may have related to meaning.  In doing so, I make detailed use of the digital editions and the clarity of images they offer.  I argue that digital editions enable examination of theories about engagement with and the meanings of 'Beowulf' and the other four texts of the codex in relation to both source copies and readers; that we now have the opportunity to 'see through the eyes of scribes and readers' and engage with their understanding of their texts.

In July 2012, representative stratified samples of public primary schools, head teachers, teachers and pupils were surveyed in the six Nigerian states where the DFID/UKaid-funded 'Education Sector Support Programme in Nigeria' (ESSPIN) works.

This report presents the findings with respect to ESSPIN outputs, outcomes and impact, in pilot schools, roll-out schools and control schools. Early indications are that ESSPIN- supported schools are associated with significantly more competent teachers, more effective school development planning, better functioning School Based Management Committees which reflect women and children’s concerns, and (to a degree, in accordance with the ESSPIN theory of change) pupil learning outcomes. The origin of these differences requires analysis of a follow-up Composite Survey in 2014. Head teacher effectiveness and school inclusiveness may require more intensive or adjusted interventions, going forwards.

This Technical Report describes the intended and achieved samples, the statistical tests and instruments used, the key data and findings, and next steps for the ESSPIN programme in view of the results and lessons learnt.

Since the earliest period of Old English study, strict divisions have been maintained between poetry and prose; and between those works perceived to be drably derivative and those with higher literary merit.  This does not seem to have been the Anglo-Saxon attitude to writing.  The Nowell codex, which contains our only copy of Beowulf, places it fourth in a sequence of texts after The Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, and Alexander's Letter to Aristotle.  The eleventh century, then, saw Beowulf not in splendid isolation, but as part of a collage of Indian monsters, Greek warriors, a dog-headed saint, and a pagan Scandinavian hero.

In this paper, I will consider what happens to this canonised poem when it is considered as a part of this collage.  That is, I will seek to trace some of the ways in which the four texts speak to one another and are transformed when read as part of a unified composition.  In turn, that will suggest some of the aspects of Beowulf which were important or significant to its Anglo-Saxon readers.  Approaching the codex as a collage rather than as a flawed record of an ancient masterpiece enables an exploration of the interactions it invites from its readers, and of the ways in which readers a thousand years ago sought to make an old text very new by placing it in a different literary context.

The Nowell codex, bound into BL MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, now contains five Old English texts: The Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and Judith.  Damaged by fire in 1731, and distorted by subsequent treatment, many readings in all of the texts are corrupted or lost; significant efforts have been made to restore readings by, for instance, the use of UV photography by Kevin Kiernan and Joseph McGowan.  Despite the work of Kiernan in particular, relatively little attention has been paid to the manuscript's presentation its texts, and still less to how the scribes expected their work to be read.  Recently, the texts have been published together for the first time since the eleventh century by Robert Fulk in the Dumbarton Oaks series, and the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts project has made extremely detailed examination of the manuscript possible. 

Based on the use of this facsimile, this paper will suggest that the most profound corruption is in the loss in understanding of the subtleties of manuscript presentation.  I will share some of the previously unrecorded scribal indications of how the texts in the manuscript could be read that can be seen when using extreme close-up images.  These include a possibly runic sign; crosses and letter-shaped signs in text and margin; and a complex heirarchy of capitals which varies across the texts.  Some of these evidences of scribal practice provide clear evidence of expected reading processes others are not so easily decoded and point instead to the corruption in readers' understanding despite the preservation - indeed, the digital clarification - of the literary object.

Between 1014 and 1017, England had four kings – two of whom were exiled beforelater resuming their reigns.  Little wonder, then, that when the dust had settled and Cnut Sveinnsson established himself as undisputed ruler of the English, stasis was attractive enough to be conjured into being.  Despite his origins as the son of a legendary warrior and raider called ‘England’s Devil’ in a saga account, his enmity to one of England’s great heroes in Edmund Ironside, and his close association with the greatest villain of the time in Eadric streona; and despite the proud celebration of his Danish origins through art and architecture, Cnut became regarded as ‘more English than the English’ and laid the foundations for a homogenous and stable North Sea empire which the early deaths of his sons ultimately undermined.
By reconstructing his own image and that of his regime as a static participant in English traditions, the Scandinavian raider became, in effect, part of the stable line of Wessex.  In this paper, I will discuss how Cnut’s regime used legal codes, the production of currency, the administration of local government, ceremonial actions, and the reproduction of literary texts in order to project a sense of continuity and stability.

Almost a thousand years ago, in 1016, the landless son of a pirate became a king of England.  By 1030, Cnut Sveinsson had formed an empire of at least three kingdoms – England, Denmark, and Norway – established himelf as a European monarch fit to rub shoulders with the Holy Roman Emperor, and developed the idea of a Danish dynasty that would last long after his death.
The remarkable achievement of Cnut’s court was at least partly thanks to a capacity to recognise the power of local identities and the potential for the construction of a wider, national sense of belonging.  Taking his lead from the success of the Wessex dynasty which he had conquered, Cnut used literary production and performance, retrospective construction of a dynasty, the production of coinage, and aggressive construction of national others to design himself and his sons as the site of Danish identity and enable a complex empire of competing kingdoms to retain a high degree of integrity.
In this paper, I aim to set out the model which Cnut seems to have seized upon and the sophistication with which his court used literary performance to construct a lasting communal identity through the idea of the king.

Scribe A has always been assumed to be the sole illustrator at work in the Beowulf manuscript's copy of 'The Wonders of the East'.  On this basis, the illustrations have been alternately dismissed as 'crude' and inadequate and admired as subversive, dynamic, and sophisticated.

In fact, close examination of the images makes it indisputably clear that there are two distinct hands working on the the images, one of whom is much more skilled than the other.  Significantly, it also seems probable that a third and later hand is at work on one of the most dramatic illustrations of the text.

As well as demonstrating the importance of close engagement with a manuscript, facilitated by digitalised editions, this finding also stands in an interesting relationship to the two scribes who worked on the Beowulf manuscript, and may point towards the codex as a whole as the result of a collaboration between two men with different levels of skill and experience.

Views of Anglo-Saxon scribes range widely.  While monastic engagement with religious and Latinate texts seems indisputable, the extent to which scribes engaged wtih the Old English poetry they copied is unclear.  In some scholars' views, they were inveterate dunces, obstructing our access to earlier and purer versions of texts through their clumsy errors and lack of comprehension.  Other readings see them as creative active participants in the creation of texts, sometimes even rechristened as scribe-editors and scribe-poets.
Attempts to consider the sensory experience of early medieval scribing have produced interesting results, and has brought us closer to understanding the physical conditions in which manuscripts were written.  But the extent to which scribes actively thought about the Old English texts they were copying as poetry – the extent to which they were scribe-readers – has not been part of the same discussion.
In this paper, I intend to briefly discuss perceptions of Anglo-Saxon scribes, particularly those who worked on Old English poetic manuscripts.  I will suggest that there are indications, in the shaping of verse to pages, that some Old English poetry was copied by scribes who engaged with the poetic rhythms of their texts as they wrote.

The second half of BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv, often known as the Nowell codex, has been much studied for the poetic works it contains: Beowulf and Judith.  The three preceding prose texts – usually called ‘The Passion of St. Christopher’, ‘The Wonders of the East’, and ‘Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle’ – have received less critical attention, save for the light they can shed on Beowulf itself.  The most recent edition of the texts is the first since the manuscript itself to produce all five together, but does not even use the scribe’s version of ‘The Wonders of the East’.  This in itself builds on the processes of making and unmaking that the manuscript has experienced throughout its error-strewn history, including translation, copy errors, failed planning, loss, and repeated reordering of text by successive collectors and librarians. 

Since Kenneth Sisam identified the hand of the prose texts with that of the first half of Beowulf, similarly little attention has been paid to their manuscript presentation.  Even Kevin Kiernan’s ground breaking work on the codex does not provide anything approaching the same level of analysis of the folios containing the prose texts as for those containing Beowulf, the central subject of his interest.  This is unfortunate, because the prose texts can tell us a great deal about late Anglo-Saxon scribal practice.  In particular, the mistakes that have been made, and the different ways in which they have been ignored, amended, or corrected, have the potential to tell us about the purposes and processes of production.

In this paper, I will share some examples of mistakes visible in the Nowell codex, with a particular focus on the illustrated ‘Wonders of the East’.  I will go on to use the remarkable close-up facsimile images now available through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts scheme to consider what went wrong during both the production process and the multiple subsequent phases of controlling the prose texts.  Close examination of mistakes (un)made by both the team that I will argue worked to produce the manuscript, and by those who have sought to preserve and present their work are revealing.  They demonstrate the challenges experienced when combining and controlling visual and textual media in the way attempted in this manuscript.  They suggest the challenges of both innovation and control.  Finally, they point to textual production and interpretation as fundamentally contexts of mistake making, and to the engagement with error as a crucial aspect of medieval scholarship.

Very little is known about how much authority scribes had over the texts they produced.  Scribes have generally been cast in the role of transmitter: the best performance achievable is that which does not mar or mangle an exemplar.  By contrast, A. N. Doane has argued that manuscript copies of texts are virtually individual performances, with scribes freely producing personal interpretations of their text; he has not generally been followed.  At the same time, scribal capacity to create visual impact has been almost taken as read: capitals and marginal annotations can be formal, playful, and individual. 

Based on a close reading of the Nowell codex, supplemented by data from Junius 11, the Exeter Book, and the Vercelli Book, this paper will consider some visual indications of scribal interpretation of Old English poetry.  In particular, I will share some examples of apparent scribal decision making in the forms they select for unadorned capitals, in placement of capitals, in the quantity of verse to a page, and in the shaping of numbers of verses to manuscript leaves.  This will lead to some suggestions about what the scribes regarded as of particular importance or interest in the texts they copied.

It remains unclear, and a matter of ongoing scholarly contention, to what extent Anglo-Saxon scribes understood and engaged with the texts they copied.  The continuum of opinion ranges from active, thoughtful editors to indifferent, harmful drudges.  Much of the attention paid to scribal activity is, in fact, primarily a means to the end of reconstructing an originary text: of clarifying just how close extant copies bring us to the undefiled fount of literary production.

There has, though, been some exploration what scribes expected people to make of what they copied.  That is, rather than trying to look behind manuscripts to find out where their texts came from, it is possible to consider the futures anticipated for a text by those who produced it in manuscript form.  The most sigificant work in this field - O'Brien O'Keeffee's Visible Song - identifies the accents and pointing used in the four Old English codices, seeking to identify patterns within and between them in order to understand what scribes thought their non-verbal marks were for.

In this paper, I will consider another non-verbal indication of expected reading: the use of differentiated capitalisation.  I will consider the variation and consistencies in one scribe's use of capitals across the four texts he copied in the Nowell codex: The Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and the first two thirds of Beowulf.  This will lead to some suggestions on the likelihood of scribal control over placement of capitals and - more significantly - how capitals may have shaped meaning for the readers of manuscript texts in the eleventh century.

Early in the Anglo-Saxon period, a scribe's role was conceived of as being source-centred.  Their primary responsibility was to the author of a work, and the key indicator of their success was the faithful reproduction of an exemplar.  However, over time scribes became more reader-focused in their activity: their role became to interpret a text for a reader, rendering it more accessible.  This in turn means that many scribal interactions with a text relate directly both to that text's meaning and how readers accessed or created meaning; or, at least, individual scribe's conceptions of meaning and its production.  In manuscript studies, there is often a disciplinary distinction in approaching scribal products.  On the one hand stands formal analysis of production through palaeography, codicology, and the like; on the other, interpretative engagement with literary or artistic meaning.  But this is patently not how Anglo-Saxon scribes understood their work, and is extremely unlikely to be the way Anglo-Saxon readers approached texts: production was aligned to, and intended to clarify, meaning.

The five texts of the Beowulf manuscript have long been recognised as being an unusual combination, bringing together texts that are religious and secular, prose and poetry, Germanic and Latinate, with adventures in Scandinavia, India, and North Africa.  However, the peculiarity of the production has been largely set to one side rather than used to develop understanding of how scribal production might deepen understanding of the production of textual meaning.  They have, in fact, been so unappealing as a group that they were not published together between the production of the codex in the eleventh century and Robert Fulk's 2010 edition for the Dumbarton Oaks series.  Fulk's edition follows work by Kiernan, McGowan, Klegraf and others on describing scribal activity in the codex and seeking to understand what it tells us about their understanding of the texts; it stands alongside digital facsimiles of the codex produced by Kevin Kiernan and the British Library.

In this piece, I intend to demonstrate the suitability of this codex in considering how scribal activity and the process of production may have related to meaning.  In doing so, I make detailed use of the digital editions and the clarity of images they offer.  I argue that digital editions enable examination of theories about engagement with and the meanings of Beowulf and the other four texts of the codex in relation to both source copies and readers; that we now have the opportunity to 'see through the eyes of scribes and readers' and engage with their understanding of their texts.

ESSPIN, the Education Sector Support Programme in Nigeria, has been working since 2010 in six States since 2010: Enugu, Lagos, Kwara, Kaduna, Kano, and Jigawa.  As with all education programmes, a major challenge has been ensuring that all of the activity taking place at Federal, State, and Local Government level is sustainable and has an impact at school level.  An associated, and even more significant challenge in the Nigerian context, has been and continues to be accurately measuring quality and changes in quality at classroom level.

The ESSPIN programme is complex and wide-ranging and this paper does not aim to represent all of it.  I will share the broad model used for planning and measuring quality at school level, some of the results from different methods of measuring quality across each of the six States, and some of the changes made to planning in response to these results.  In doing so, I hope to suggest that a programmatic focus on quality, and effective gathering and use of data can result in genuine and significant change in pupils' experience of and achievement in school.

In Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that preserved Beowulf as one of a collective, if error-strewn, endeavour and arguing for a date in Cnut’s reign. He presents evidence for the use of more than three exemplars and at least two artists as well as two scribes, making this an intentional and creative re-presentation uniting literature religious and heroic, in poetry and in prose.

He goes on to set it in the broader context of manuscript production in late Anglo-Saxon England as one example among many of communities using old literature in new ways, and of scribes working together, making mistakes, and learning.

Alun Ford's monograph contains a skilful and engaging set of investigations. His project is vast: to analyse three quite different manuscripts as material artefacts, considering their social contexts, textual presentation, production processes, and intertextual readings – and by so doing to construct a history of the medieval Marvels tradition. The stimulus, and unifying element, is the presence of an illustrated insular version of The Wonders of the East in London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv (part 2); London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.

The Old English Saint Christopher has, like much anonymous vernacular hagiography, gone under-studied. Aside from a general lack of interest in such texts, this is partly because its manuscript context results in it being mentioned dismissively alongside more famous texts, and partly because no source has been identified or published. Based on a survey of the extant versions in their manuscripts, it is possible to show some additions and alterations made uniquely in this vernacular retelling. The changes made are numerous and significant. They work towards ameliorating Christopher's extreme passivity with some active attributes, making the king he opposes more deranged and cruel, and particularly to making the story clearer and tighter. The Old English Christopher is no masterpiece, but it is a skilful and creative reimagining of a very widespread text, developed by an authorial translator to meet the interests and needs of an Anglo-Saxon audience.