Holofernes's head:tacenand teaching in the Old EnglishJudith

Abstract

Ælfric'sOn the Old and New Testamentincludes a brief synopsis of the story of Judith, the Hebrew widow who decapitated the Assyrian general, Holofernes. In it, Ælfric refers his friend Sigeweard to an English version of theLiber Judithwhich has been written ‘eow mannum to bysne, þæt ge eowerne eard mid wæmnum bewerian wiþ onwinnendne here’. Ælfric thus defines the tropology or moral lesson of the Judith story as a timely call to men such as Sigeweard to resist the invading army of Danes. Most scholars agree that Ælfric is alluding to his own homily about Judith (‘on ure wisan gesett’), not the Old English poem celebrating the same heroine. Nevertheless many have held that Anglo-Saxon auditors of the poem derived the militaristic moral from it that Ælfric draws from the poem's biblical source.