ABSTRACT
Notorious for overpraising the accomplishments of King Alfred, Anglo-Saxonists may, in one area at least, have underestimated the literary achievement of his reign. As Alfred and his contemporaries translated works into the vernacular, they also created prefaces for works that did not have them. No prefaces accompany the Latin texts of the Historiarum adversus Paganos Libri VII of Orosius,1 the Soliloquia of Augustine,2 the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius,3 or the Dialogi of Gregory the Great.4 Although Gregory’s Liber Pastoralis came equipped with a prefatory letter, Alfred must have thought it was inadequate for his purposes, since he placed it after two prefaces of his own.5 For the preface to the law-code Alfred had a precedent in the preface to Ine’s laws. But the law-code is not a translation, and Ine’s preface (which survives only in the form transmitted by Alfred) can scarcely be compared to Alfred’s monumental introduction.6
