ABSTRACT
King Alfred's version of St. Augustine's Soliloquia is the most problematical of the works associated with the great West Saxon king. The only complete manuscript is the twelfth-century London, BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fols. 4-59, in which the very great conceptual and source difficulties inherent in the Old English text are linguistically compounded by late orthography and morphology. One may pleads not only the limitation of space but also the present state of the Latin and Old English texts, in view of which one offers an hypothesis as to a possible rationale of the Old English version. The most important observation in the light of the difference of opinion about the nature of Alfred's radical changes in his sources, whether Boethius or Augustine, is that Alfred seems be engaged exclusively with the aim of appropriating at least in spirit the wisdom of his authorities.
