Aldhelm's prose style and its origins

Abstract

Eduard Norden's great bookDie antike Kunstprosais grounded on first-hand acquaintance with an astonishingly wide range of literature, both from classical antiquity and from the Middle Ages. But at the authors of Anglo-Saxon England Norden does seem to have drawn the line. ‘The two great writers, Aldhelm and Bede’, he says, ‘write, like all Anglo-Saxons, a stylistically uncultivated (verwildertes) though grammatically correct Latin.’ There is no need to labour the point that Aldhelm and Bede are not to be mentioned thus cavalierly in the same stylistic breath: we are all familiar today with the distinction between the ‘hermeneutic’ Latin of the one and the ‘classical’ Latin of the other. But at least Norden could not fall victim to another widely accepted doctrine that purports to explain the origin of that distinction: the doctrine that Aldhelm's style was influenced by Ireland, Bede's by the continent of Europe. I doubt if this is true even of Bede. But my present business is with Aldhelm; I shall try to show that his literary origins are not to be found in Ireland. At the same time I shall be challenging Norden's claim that his Latin was uncultivated. I shall suggest, indeed, that its cultivation was of a kind that Norden himself would have been uniquely qualified to analyse.