Fragments of Boethius: the reconstruction of the Cotton manuscript of the Alfredian text

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: T. S. Eliot’s metaphor in The Waste Land evokes the evanescent frailty of human existence and worldly endeavour with a poignancy that the Anglo-Saxons would surely have appreciated. Such a concept lies at the heart of Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae, and perhaps prompted King Alfred to include this work amongst those which he considered most necessary for all men to know.1 Written in the early sixth century, Boethius’s work was translated from Latin into Old English at the end of the ninth century, possibly by Alfred himself.2 It survives in two versions, one in prose (probably composed first) and the other in prose and verse, containing versifications of Boethius’s Latin metres which had originally been rendered as Old English prose. It is the latter of these versions which will be the focus of my discussion here. Damaged beyond repair by fire and water, the set of fragments which contains this copy will be seen to epitomize the ideas imparted by the work in ways that Alfred could never have envisaged. The only extant copy of the alternating verse and prose version of the Old English Boethius is in a mid-tenth-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Otho A. VI. The parlous condition of the manuscript can be directly attributed to the fire of 1731 that damaged or destroyed so many of the manuscripts and books collected by Sir Robert Cotton and later presented to the British people by his grandson in 1700.3 When the fire swept through Ashburnham House where the collection was being stored, enormous damage was inflicted not only by the flames themselves but also by the water used to douse them. The fragments of Otho A. VI which survived the inferno preserve a verse and prose version of the Old English Boethius not otherwise recorded. Fortunately, attempts to reconstruct the contents of this version are not reliant solely on the often tantalizingly obscure evidence offered by these