The landscape of the epic poem Beowulf is a fantasy construct in which incompatible features coexist, but while it is an unprofitable exercise to attempt a reconstruction of a coherent topography in which Beowulf's exploits took place, the poet's choice of individual landscape terms is not likely to be random. Where this choice is not influenced by alliteration, each term may have been intended to convey a specific image appropriate to its immediate context. Several of the landscape terms used in the poem are otherwise unrecorded or only found rarely in other literary sources. This applies to hlið, hop and gelad; but by contrast with their rarity in literature these words are well evidenced in place-names, and an understanding of the place-name usage may have some relevance to the interpretation of their occurrences in the poem.

The Anglo-Saxons' awareness of their cultural and racial affiliation with their continental cousins is well attested, as is their interest in the earliest migrations of their ancestors to the British Isles from the homelands of northern Europe. The founding figures who led the migrations from Europe across the North Sea had names which were preserved by oral tradition well into the Christian period, and the names of these founders of Anglo-Saxon dynasties entered the historical record when Christian missionaries introduced the technology of writing among the Anglo-Saxons.

On 24 August 410 the Goths under their king Alaric entered the city of Rome and spent three days pillaging it. They then moved south towards Sicily, possibly in the hope of escaping to Africa, but Alaric died and the Goths retreated back through Italy to Gaul, from where they were driven into Spain by Roman forces in 414. The sack of Rome was by all accounts of little material significance in the long and complex history of Roman engagement with barbarians; it was in fact the Goths' third visit to the city in three years, and on the previous occasion the senate had allowed them into Rome and collaborated with them in setting up the prefect of the city as emperor in opposition to Honorius, whose administration was based in Ravenna. Contemporary historians emphasized that the forces of the western empire had recovered their dominance within just three or four years at most, and recent historians have seen the attack on Rome as representing a failure on the part of the Goths, who had hoped to use the threat to Rome as a bargaining tool with the emperor in their pursuit of land and supplies. Honorius and his government seem to have been relatively untroubled. On the day after Alaric's seizure of Rome Honorius had time, from his palace in Ravenna, to issue an edict ordering that religious dissension among Christians in North Africa should cease and summoning a conference of all the Catholic and Donatist bishops to examine their dierences. The Liber pontificalis manages to give a quite detailed account of the time of Pope Innocent I (402–17) and his good works without once mentioning the Goths or the attack on Rome (Orosius explains that he happened to be away in Ravenna at the time). But the event acquired remarkable prominence, and a distinctive significance, in the Anglo-Saxon perception of their past, especially in the Alfredian period: it is mentioned prominently in two of Bede's historical works, in four of the Old English prose works associated with King Alfred, and in Æthelweard's Chronicle; it is the context and end-point of the Old English version of Orosius's History of the World; and it is the starting-point of King Alfred's account of Boethius. I want here to explore its developing significance for the Anglo-Saxons, and particularly for the Alfredian world.

The translator of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica faced a daunting task. His source text had behind it the authority of a well-known, learned English saint, and a translation of the work would inevitably be a step removed from that saint. How could the translator convince the audience that his translation possessed authority? Alfred's prefaces to his translations and Wærferth's preface to the Dialogues gain the confidence of the readers or hearers through their explicit discussion of motives and methods of translation. By contrast, the Old English Bede authorizes itself not through any overt claims in an original preface but through strategic translations of the Latin preface and of the text itself. The Alfredian prefaces thus provide valuable points of comparison and contrast for the Old English Bede. All the translations assert continuity between source text and translation while replacing the source text in different ways. Alfred and Wærferth reveal their identities as translators and make claims for their own authority while the translator of the Old English Bede relies on the authority of Bede himself; Alfred and Wærferth argue for the ability of Old English to render Latin, while the translator of the Old English Bede simply provides a text in Old English.

The theories of oral-formulaic composition advanced by Albert B. Lord, his mentor and collaborator Milman Parry, and their later twentieth-century followers have been adduced frequently in studies of Old English verse, elements of whose language must go back ultimately to an oral tradition. After decades of research, however, scholars have yet to find conclusive answers to some basic questions: did literate Anglo-Saxons continue to practise techniques of extemporaneous versification? If so, did they continue to develop the mnemonic skills attributed to oral poets? It is clear that the monuments of Old English verse reveal many examples of formulaic language (for example, se mæra maga Healfdenes, se mæra mago Healfdenes and se mæra maga Ecgðeowes); but should we regard this language as a reliable witness to oral-formulaic versification or, perhaps, as a hybrid, ‘literary-formulaic’ idiom? Finally, if we accept the synchronic (or achronic) models of the formulaic ‘word-hoard’ that inform many Old English studies, is it pointless even to speculate about poetic influence, direction of borrowing and similar concerns? If so, how should we regard, say, two parallel uses of the unusual phrase enge anpaðas, occurring verbatim in Beowulf and the poetic Exodus but nowhere else among the surviving monuments? Must we view these parallels as isolated outcroppings in the trackless expanse of the Old English poetic corpus? Largely as a result of the scarcity of verse preserved in multiple copies, such questions have remained debatable into the present century.

Students of late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are fortunate to have recourse to a number of fundamental studies which chronicle changes in the various arts of manuscript production during the tenth and early eleventh centuries. These studies provide a background against which to assess the work of individual craftsmen (scribes, initiallers, illustrators) who produced English manuscripts of this period. In the attempt to date a manuscript, each of these studies provides a spectrum of changing practices against which one can measure the most probable date of execution for any aspect of the manuscript. Additionally, if we use these studies as a group rather than one by one, they have much to tell us about the chronological circumstances of the creation of an entire codex as a composite work of art produced by a team of craftsmen.

Ælfric, in the Preface to Genesis, comments about what we do not find in the first book of the Old Testament: ‘Seo boc ys gehaten Genesis, Þæt ys “Gecyndboc”, for Þam Þe heo ys firmest boca and spricÞ be ælcum gecinde (ac heo ne spricð na be Þæra engla gesceapenisse).’ Although he proceeds to explain what is contained in the opening verse, noting that creation ‘on annginne’ refers at once to the literal act of creation and, ‘æfter gastlicum andgite’, to Christ through whom all creation was formed, he makes no further comment here upon the angels. In other works, however, where the topic could be more appropriately introduced, Ælfric enthusiastically engages with the problem of angelic history. The sermon De initio creaturae, the Interrogationes Sigewulfi, the Exameron, the Letter to Sigeweard and the Letter to Wulfgeat all contain accounts of the angelic creation and fall. Because Ælfric is a writer actively concerned with orthodoxy and sound doctrine, we would do well to ask why he has such an interest in the angels–about whom such an authority as Bede would say almost nothing–and to investigate precisely how, and from what sources, he presents their extra-scriptural history.

‘Eaduuius surnamed Basan’ is one of the small number of late Anglo-Saxon scribes to be known by name, and he is unquestionably the most important. Eadwig Ü the Old English name represented by the Latin ‘Eaduuius’–identified himself in a colophon to the small but exquisite gospelbook, Hanover, Kestner-Museum, WM XXIa, 36 (see pl. V); and his distinctive hand has been recognized in a further three gospelbooks or lectionaries, three psalters, and three or four charters. It is on this corpus of material that our knowledge of him rests. The colophon does not, unfortunately, contain much information and it is highly formulaic; it is all the more important, therefore, to interpret its words judiciously. Before we turn to the text, however, it will be helpful to rehearse the salient points of Eadwig's career, in so far as they are known.

In a sermon for Ash Wednesday, after general exhortations to prayer, church-going, and almsgiving during Lent, Wulfstan discusses what is to be done with those guilty of ‘high’ sins:

And sume men syndon eac Þe nyde sculan of cyricgemanan Þas halgan tid ascadene mid rihte weorðan for healican synnan, ealswa adam wearð of engla gemanan Þa ða he forworðe Þa myclan myrhðe Þe he on wunode ær ðam Þe he syngode … Leofan men, on Wodnesdæg, Þe byð caput ieiunii, bisceopas ascadað on manegum stowan ut of cyrican for heora agenan Þearfe Þa ðe healice on openlican synnan hy sylfe forgyltan. And eft on Ðunresdæg ær Eastran hy geinniað into cyrican Þa ðe geornlice Þæt Lencten heora synna betað, swa swa hym man wissað; Þonne absolutionem bisceopas ofer hy rædað [agus] for hi Þingiað [agus] mid Þam heora synna Þurh Godes mildheortnesse myclum gelyhtað. And Þæt is Þearflic gewuna, ac we his ne gymað swa wel swa we scoldan on ðisse Þeode, [agus] hit wære mycel Þearf Þæt hit man georne on gewunan hæfde.

The embroidered hanging known as the Bayeux ‘Tapestry’ was an obvious candidate for inclusion in an Anglo-Saxonists' conference titled ‘Imagined Endings, Borders, Reigns, Millennia’. Almost certainly constructed in English workshops for a Norman master, the ‘Tapestry’ illustrates a chronological period that begins with the final years of Edward the Confessor's reign and ends with the closing of the Anglo-Saxon era. The physical termination of the ‘Tapestry’ is missing, but this does not preclude the imagining of it, usually as a scene showing the accession of William the Conqueror to the English throne, a new reign and a new, Norman, era.