Judith is anOld English narrative poem describing the beheading of Assyrian generalHolofernes by Israelite Judith ofBethulia. Found in the same manuscript as the heroic poemBeowulf, it is one of many retellings of the Holofernes–Judith tale as it was found in theBook of Judith, a story still present in theCatholic andOrthodox Christian bibles but considered apocryphal by Protestants. There is one other extant version in Old English;Ælfric of Eynsham, the late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer, wrote ahomily (in prose) of the tale.
Judith is found in theNowell Codex, dated ca. 975–1025. The poem is incomplete. How much is lost is a matter of contention.[1] The poem is at the end of the codex, followingBeowulf, and was written by Scribe B, one of two scribes responsible forBeowulf.Leonard Boyle proposes that Scribe B was working onJudith while Scribe A was working onBeowulf, and that B finishedBeowulf afterward.[2]
Some earlier scholars (such asAlbert Spaulding Cook[3]) proposedCynewulf as the poem's author, but the absence of Cynewulf's typicalrunic signature has led many not to attribute authorship to him.[4] Stylistically, the poem so strongly reflects the Cynewulfian school that Cook surmised it may just as likely been written by one of Cynewulf’s successors.[5]
It is unknown whenJudith became fragmented, butRobert D. Fulk (and others) argueJudith, and indeed the Nowell Codex, was already fragmented whenLaurence Nowell signed the manuscript in the 1500s.[6]
It is evident that the story ofJudith has been modified and set within the framework of the Old English present. Much of the geographic and political structures relevant to a Hebrew culture have been removed or adapted, relevant to an Old English audience.[7]
LikeBeowulf,Judith conveys a moral tale of heroic triumph over monstrous beings, if we follow the supposition of Andy Orchard’sPride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript. Both moral and political, the poem tells of a brave woman’s efforts to save and protect her people. Judith is depicted as an exemplary woman, grounded in faith and chastity--so the biblical text and Ælfric's homily tell us, because the extant Old English text startsin medias res. Her bravery and wisdom are mentioned: she is ahalige meowle (line 56), "holy woman", and asnoteran idese (line 55), "wise woman", and her beauty is praised in line 13 when she is calledaelfscinu (line 13), "elf-shining", sometimes rendered as "woman of elfin beauty".[8] Although Judith kills a man, she appears to be doing God's will; Holofernes, while described to some extent as a standard military leader in the Beowulfian vein, is also cast as a salacious drunk and becomes monstrous in his excess.
Portraying the epitome of Germanic heroism,Judith was likely composed during a time of war as a model for the Anglo-Saxon people. The Abbot Ælfric similarly created his own homiletic interpretation of the Book of Judith. At the time of his creation, Vikings were ransacking England. Ælfric professed that Judith was to serve as an example to the people. In a letter, Ælfric wrote:þeo is eac on English on ure wisan iset eow mannum to bisne, þet ge eower eard mid wæpnum beweriæn wið onwinnende here, meaning "It is also set as an example for you in English according to our style, so that you will defend your land with weapons against an attacking force".[9]
Ælfric’s Judith is quite like that of the poem; furthermore, the characters seem to have served the same purpose—to stand as an example to the people in a time of war. Judith's city of Bethulia was being plundered by Assyrians. Holofernes was an Assyrian general and king, often drunk and constantly monstrous.
The Vulgate Liber Iudith, the posited source text of these works, has been mutilated in order to contain the Anglo-Saxon heroic mode:
“Perhaps the most striking difference between the Old English Judith and the Vulgate version isthe setting of the story. In the Vulgate version of the story, Judith’s people, the citizens of Bethulia in particular and the Israelites in general, are shown as more religious than martial, led by priests and elders, rather than kings and generals. The Old English poet deliberately chose to place Judith in a more military setting. Thus, the seeming paradox of a woman as the military leader of her people is not just the result of a difficulty in adapting a biblical story to a Germanic heroic idiom.”[10]
There are also key narrative details: the Old English Judith, after severing the head of Holofernes, proudly displayed his head to her Hebrew army and led them into a victorious battle against the Assyrians. In contrast, in the Book of Judith, the Assyrians simply fled Bethulia after discovering the deceased body of Holofernes.[11]
Judith contains many of the poetic techniques common toOld English poetry, including alliteration. The poem used the same kind of variation as do other Old English poems.[citation needed]
The only existing copy of the poem is in theBeowulf manuscript, immediately followingBeowulf. Damage to the manuscript was caused by theCotton fire of 1731 and readings have been lost. In order to account for these lost words, modern editions of the poem are supplemented by references toEdward Thwaites' 1698 edition.[12]
In the Nowell Codex, the lack of scribal regularization is of note. The absence of-io spellings inJudith is of interest, in contrast to the ‘126’ <io> spellings in Beowulf, (totalling the pages transcribed by both A and B.)
As Peter Lucas has demonstrated, Scribe A, who copied the first 87 MS pages ofBeowulf, made sure to use regularised <eo> spellings in ‘The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle’, (66 instances,) and 'The Marvels of the East,’ (2 instances).
Conversely, The Life of St Christopher does not contain any <io> spellings, which leads to Lucas’ claim, that it is “extremely probable that Quire 14, containing Judith, is the nearest surviving part of the manuscript to its lost beginning, and that the quire was linked to the present Quire by just one quire, designated *0, at least part of which was discarded only as relatively recently as c. 1600.”[13]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
