Endings, Emplacement and Mutability in History

The final words of T break off mid-sentence at the bottom of folio 139v, as Bede's translator invokes ‘þæt sume men wuniað cweðan’ (‘what some men are wont to say’) to warn his audience about the price of refusing to lead a good Christian life. This episode, the story of a drunken brother in Bede's community, is both intensely personal – beginning with ‘Ic seolfa cuðe sumne broðar’ (‘I myself knew a brother’) – and eschatologically universal. It is the third of three chapters in a row in Book V that recount otherworldly visions. The first is that of Dryhthelm, a Northumbrian thane who dies for a night, tours the Otherworld, then returns to his body to live out his life in strict penance; the second is the vision of a despairing Mercian thane, who is visited on his deathbed by angels and demons bearing books containing all his good and bad deeds; and the third is that of the drunken brother, who sees his place in hell before he dies in despair. These visions are anticipated, in the Historia Ecclesiastica and two of the surviving manuscripts of the OEHE (T and B), by the visions of Fursey, an Irish missionary who founds a monastery in East Anglia.