ABSTRACT
The Alfred Jewel can be viewed as a symbol of his achievement, the image reflecting to the meditative viewer at once the wisdom of the Logos and that of the king as his earthly vicar, inheritor of the Christian empire, who modeled himself on the divine exemplar. On the Alfred Jewel, the divine power of the Word as the spiritual basis of political victory and stability is presented to Anglo-Saxon viewers for serious consideration. The prominent role of the Church in this new creation is indicated by the superstructure of the ark, which looks very like a splendid Anglo-Saxon church with its stone construction, round and triangular. When another set of invaders came to England a couple of decades after the death of Cnut in 1035, they brought a language that had become differentiated from that of their own Viking ancestors, and the culture supported by the new ruling aristocracy, while Christian, was no longer Anglo-Saxon.
