Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The Middle English poem Patience, it will be remembered, is in the main a paraphrase of the book of Jonah. In the main also, the medieval writer has followed the biblical narrative, as he has in Clannesse when narrating the fall of the angels, the flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the capture of Babylon. But just as in these latter stories the English poet has taken considerable freedom with the biblical account, both in vividness at the expense of a literal rendering and in the use of medieval scripture interpretation, so in recounting the life of Jonah there are passages which have no close connection with the book of the prophet. The most remarkable of these is the extension of two sentences in the book of Jonah into some thirty-nine lines, describing vividly and picturesquely the storm at sea which overtook Jonah and his companions. Of this striking extension, and of certain additions which also occur in it, no source has ever been pointed out so far as I am aware. Nor has attention been called to a close parallelism between this portion of Patience, and a similar extension of the same story in the poem De Jona et Nineve, formerly attributed to Tertullian.
page 242 note 1 The poem may be found in Collectio Pisaurensis Poetarum Latinorum, v, 15, and in Migne, Patrologiœ, ii, 1107-1114. A translation occurs in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, xviii, 278.
page 247 note 1 Anie-Nieene Christian Library, “ Tertullian,” Vol. I, p. 223.
page 247 note 2 Ibid., iii, p. 81; translation slightly revised.