A comparison of ll. 247-342 of the editions of The Proverbs of Alfred – 
advice on choosing a wife and the medieval literary view of women 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 Suvi Salo 
 MA Thesis 
 English, Language Specialist Path 
 School of Languages and Translation Studies 
 Faculty of Humanities 
 University of Turku 
 January 2019 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The originality of this thesis has been checked in accordance with the University 
of Turku quality assurance system using the Turnitin OriginalityCheck service. 
 UNIVERSITY OF TURKU 
 
School of Languages and Translation Studies/Faculty of Humanities 
 
SALO, SUVI: A comparison of ll 247-342 of the editions of The Proverbs of 
Alfred – advice on choosing a wife and the medieval literary view of women 
 
MA Thesis, 63 pages. 
English, Language Specialist Degree Programme 
January 2019 
 ________________________________________________________ 
 
 
The Proverbs of Alfred is a twelfth century didactic poem that survives today in 
four different thirteenth century manuscripts. The poem is set in the time of King 
Alfred (ca. eighth century) and there is a frame story in the poem inside which 
King Alfred offers life advice to his male subjects. The lines 247-342 addressed 
in this thesis contain advice on choosing a wife and misogynistic warnings on 
how evil and deceitful women are. There is also advice on how to deal with 
wives.  
 
In this thesis I will try to shed light onto the social status of women in the Anglo-
Saxon England and offer viewpoints and explanations to the tradition of Middle 
English misogyny in literature. I shall also discuss the possible audience and 
the purpose of the text and compare the research findings and notes of Olof 
Arngart, Edvard Borgström and Walter Skeat who have re-edited the 
manuscripts in the twentieth century.  
 
Key words: The Proverbs of Alfred, proverbs, misogyny, Anglo-Saxon 
poetry, Anglo-Saxon women, women's social status in the Middle Ages. 
 Table of Contents  
 
1 Introduction ......................................................... 1 
2 On secondary sources and terms ....................... 3 
2.1 Secondary sources ............................. 4 
2.2 Misogyny ............................................. 5 
3 The Proverbs of Alfred ........................................ 7 
3.1 The Cotton Manuscript - MS Cotton Galba A. XIX ..................... 11 
3.2 The Maidstone Manuscript –  
MS Maidstone Museum A. 13 ...................  ...................................... 12 
3.3 The Trinity Manuscript –  
MS Trinity College, Cambridge, B. 14. 39 .  ...................................... 12 
3.4 The Jesus Manuscript – MS Jesus College, Oxford, 29 ............. 13 
4 Defining a proverb ............................................... 16 
4.1 Characteristics of a proverb ................ 17 
4.2 Attitudes in proverbs ........................... 18 
5 Defining a ‘Proverb of Alfred’ .............................. 20 
5.1 Wisdom literature ................................ 21 
5.2 Didactic poetry .................................... 23 
6 Analysis – Lines 247-342 of The Proverbs of Alfred  
(Skeat's edition of 1907) ........................................ 26 
6.1 Lines 247-257 (Choose No Evil Wife;  
as named by Skeat 1907) .........................  ............ 27 
6.2 Lines 258-267 (Choose No Evil Wife;  
as named by Skeat 1907...........................  ............ 31 
6.3 Lines 268-284 (Choose No Evil Wife;  
as named by Skeat 1907...........................  ............ 33 
6.4 Lines 285-295 (Keep Thy Wife Busy;  
as named by Skeat 1907) .........................  ............ 35 
6.5 Lines 296-305 (Keep Thy Wife Busy;  
as named by Skeat 1907) .........................  ............ 39 
6.6 Lines 306-316 (Woman Is Deceitful;  
named as a separate topic by myself) .......  ............ 41 
 
 6.7 Lines 317-328 (Avoid Women's Advice;  
as named by Skeat 1907) .........................  ............ 44 
6.8 Lines 329-342 (Women's Counsel Is Cold;  
as named by Skeat 1907) .........................  ............ 47 
7 Oral recital and audience .................................... 53 
8 Conclusion .......................................................... 55 
List of references ................................................... 61 
Appendix 1: Finnish summary 
1 
 
1 INTRODUCTION 
 
The topic of this thesis is a section in a thirteenth century Early Middle English 
poem called The Proverbs of Alfred. The poem is a collection of proverbial 
sayings and in this thesis, the focus of the study is a specific passage in the 
poem (ll. 247-342) that deal with women and wives, and more precisely, how 
men should deal with women and wives. The reason for a limited line range was 
that I wanted to study a passage in the text that was well defined and suitable in 
length (95 lines) for the purpose of this thesis. The passage, furthermore, 
stands relatively well out as a separate section beside the rest of the text as 
they are, as mentioned, the only lines in the poem written on women altogether.  
 There are two things behind the motivation for addressing the 
poem. Firstly, in the four existing manuscripts of The Proverbs of Alfred there 
occur textual differences – different word choices, spelling errors, 
misunderstandings of the scribe and intentional modification. The textual 
differences, however, not restricted only to the manuscripts or their editions but 
can also be found in its commenting literature. For example, Cannon (2010) 
discusses the poem in his paper Proverbs and the wisdom of literature: The 
Proverbs of Alfred and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee. He studies a certain stanza 
of the poem and uses a peculiar word choice which alters the meaning of 
sentence and the thus also the meaning of the passage in which it occurs 
(please refer to page 49 of this thesis). I wanted to compare the editions of The 
Proverbs of Alfred as there are also scholarly disagreement when it comes to 
textual factors, and offer also my views for discussion wherever possible. On 
the whole, I find textual commentary important because of the controversies I 
have found. Furthermore, when analysing the text, I wanted to be as precise as 
possible of the correct readings and word choices, as the textual practices of 
Early Middle English differ from those in Present Day English. 
 Secondly, a reason for choosing this section of the poem is my 
general interest in the message of the poem concerning the specific line range. 
I wanted to see what The Proverbs of Alfred said of women and what the 
arguments and reasoning considering wife-choice are. As mentioned, women 
are mentioned on 95 lines of the poem whereas the poem itself contains 456 
lines. In the section addressing women, there is a misogynous attitude seen 
2 
 
throughout the text. I wanted to see whether it was the way women were treated 
in texts at the time of writing and if there was something that could be said in 
favour of another kind of view. There are two research questions addressed in 
this thesis. Firstly: Does all literature contemporary to The Proverbs of Alfred 
treat female characters with a misogynous attitude only? Are there any texts 
that have a different approach? And secondly: How do textual features – most 
importantly word choices – reinforce the message of disdain? Are there any 
crucial differences in the manuscripts or any commentary literature to them (e. 
g. papers and editions) that might for example persuade the reader to take the 
advice in earnest, or something that would hint of the use of sarcasm? I set out 
with the assumption that there must have been something to contradict the 
misogyny, a literary approach that showed women in positive light.  
 In spite of the date of its composition, The Proverbs of Alfred is 
concerned with the time of Anglo-Saxon England with King Alfred as its wise 
ruler, that is, the latter half of the 9th century. The poem has a frame story in 
which King Alfred has organised a meeting for noblemen and churchmen to 
teach them his wisdom concerning good leadership and manners and life in 
general. The poem consists of many sections, almost all of which start with a 
phrase “Þus queÞ Alured”, in Present Day English “So says Alfred”. All the 
sections of The Proverbs of Alfred are named and some described more closely 
later in this thesis. 
 For the purpose of this thesis, I have defined shortly what it is 
meant with a ‘proverb’ both in the traditional sense, and in the sense the term is 
used in The Proverbs of Alfred. I shall discuss the term and the definition later 
on in more detail and, after that, I shall discuss how the traditional definition 
differs when talking about the ‘proverbs’ in The Proverbs of Alfred which are, as 
we will see, more precisely termed ‘advice’ or moral sayings. The thesis 
proceeds from the traditional definition of a proverb to describing a larger 
concept of proverbial sayings and to introducing a literary genre called wisdom 
literature. In the analysis section I offer my commentaries and discussion of the 
chosen text passage. I will also look at the tradition in which a woman is 
represented in Middle English texts. 
 
3 
 
 I set out to read the text with the assumption that The Proverbs of 
Alfred would have given some humorous advice concerning marriage life but 
soon noticed that the attitudes towards women are far from neutral, and instead 
very misogynous. I will come back to this term as I find its use is not fully correct 
when talking about the eighth and ninth century (time of setting) or the 1200-
1300's (time of writing) as societal values were different back then. It is also, on 
the other hand, to keep in mind that this is a poetical text and as such, not a 
direct representation or record of the time of writing let alone the eighth and 
ninth century society and on the basis of this text, no real conclusions of 
attitudes towards women in the society can be drawn. 
 The different societal situation and the biased advice in The 
Proverbs of Alfred was to my belief in general not meant as a direct act of hate-
speech towards women. In this thesis I have discussed woman’s societal status 
and place in every section of the analysis and I try to offer explanations for the 
misogyny present in the Proverbs of Alfred and challenge it. Nevertheless, as I 
will explain later, it is not possible to find an exhaustive answer on how well the 
misogynous attitudes in the text really echoed the everyday of women of the 
Anglo-Saxon era as there is little information on their behalf. Literature of those 
times about women is very scarce and where it can be found, it is almost 
always written by or written of noblewomen, and there exists no encompassing 
registers on the life that laywomen led (Jewell 1996: 15-16, Mate 1999: 4).  
 I find The Proverbs of Alfred to be – however seriously the 'advice' 
in it was meant at the time of writing – quite a typical example of 1300's poetry 
as a specimen of a text in which women are treated in the way how the Bible 
treats Eve. The longer back one goes in time, the more there was the 
dichotomy of the woman character into sacred or sinful, good or evil (later in this 
thesis called the Eve/Mary type division) which was, nevertheless, above all a 
stylistic device and probably quite a popular one as well. 
 
2 ON SECONDARY SOURCES AND TERMS  
 
Before proceeding, I will briefly explain some of the choices I have made during 
the writing of this thesis. Firstly, I will have to comment on the secondary 
sources used when analysing The Proverbs of Alfred as some of them are 
4 
 
relatively dated. The explanation and justification for their use is found below 
(see section 2.1). Also the term ‘misogyny’ mentioned in the introduction 
necessitates some clarification. It is used throughout this thesis to refer to the 
attitudes prevalent in the poem. The term, nevertheless, carries some 
connotations that are not entirely applicable when studying a thirteenth-century 
text and for that reason I will offer some comments on the use of it in this thesis 
(section 2.2). 
 
2.1 Secondary Sources  
 
The Proverbs of Alfred is written in Early Middle English and survives in four 
manuscripts. It has been re-edited various times in the beginning of the 
twentieth century, for example by Skeat (1907) and Borgström (1908). Overall, 
it was studied rather widely in the early 1900’s and there is a comprehensive 
study of two volumes made of it in 1942 and 1955 by Olaf Arngart. The first 
volume (1942) is a study of the existing editions by various scholars of all the 
four manuscripts of The Proverbs of Alfred and the second (1955) contains new 
editions, made by Arngart, of all four manuscripts. Rouse (2005: 14) states that 
the abovementioned works “comprise the most substantial study of the text in 
the last sixty years”. Furthermore, he states that after Arngart’s works, relatively 
little has been written on The Proverbs of Alfred and summarises that “Arngart’s 
study of the Proverbs represents the culmination of the previous hundred years’ 
interest in the text” (ibid.). 
 In accordance with what Rouse states, it has been challenging to 
locate sources that are written about The Proverbs of Alfred later than the works 
of Arngart. At present there are no comparable studies to be found, the latest 
being Cannon's Proverbs and the wisdom of literature: The Proverbs of Alfred 
and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee (2010). When trying to find information on 
precisely this text, I have therefore had to resort into some rather old study 
material and references. The newer studies I have used are concentrated on 
the overall analysis of proverbs, their definition and structure, and for example 
proverbs in modern day use. Only the more dated reference books offer insight 
to the specific text I am interested in. Furthermore, I have found that the 
misogynistic attitudes present in the sayings in The Proverbs of Alfred are 
5 
 
relatively well commented in the old studies and articles that I have used (for 
example, Lucas (1965), who has discussed misogynous proverbs on a large 
scale. In the older sources I have also found specific commentary on proverbs 
that are written about women, wives and marriage life and good general 
references to Early Middle English poetry. 
 
2.2 Misogyny 
 
As mentioned, I will be using the terms ’misogynous’ and ’misogyny’ when 
referring to an attitude towards women that seemed to prevail in the time of 
writing The Proverbs of Alfred. 'Misogyny' is a term that in general means 
'woman-hating': “Hatred or dislike of, or prejudice against women” (OED, s.v. 
“misogyny”, n.). Misogynous is its adjective, describing for example an act that 
can be considered as derogatory, hostile or in any other a hurtful act that is 
specifically targeted towards women. In this thesis both terms are applied to 
written text and to discussion based on it. 
 The terms misogyny and misogynous are, when discussing The 
Proverbs of Alfred, used for example by Arngart (1955: 3). When referring back 
to the twelfth and thirteenth century however, they are not entirely appropriate 
for the following reasons: Firstly, the attitudes towards women seem not to have 
been 'woman-hating' but it was, rather, taken for granted that women are in 
some ways inferior to men. This followed largely from the teachings of the Bible, 
which were regarded very highly. “That women were by nature inferior to men”, 
states Clark (1997: 114), was a “most thoroughly commonplace idea” (ibid.), as 
well as the idea of woman as the easily seducible ‘weaker vessel’: There was, 
in the realm of church, a rather deeply engraved hatred towards women based 
on Eve, who, infamously, was the first one ever to be tempted by the Devil to 
commit sin (Clark 1997: 113-114). Quoting Mann (2002: 1), ”[t]he polarized 
nature of medieval attitudes to women is notorious. Eve is set against Mary, the 
sensual deceiver against maternal purity, rebelliousness against meekness [...] 
Yet this ambivalence is not a specifically medieval phenomenon; its roots can 
be traced back at least to Roman antiquity[,]” where there was literature that 
acted as catalyst in building the stereotyped images of woman (Mann 2002: 1). 
 
6 
 
 Secondly, as the term 'misogynous' can also be used in the sense 
‘anti-feministic’, it has to be noted that there was of course no prevalent debate 
of women’s rights during those times in any similar sense that we understand 
the term today. And for that, it is therefore to be kept in mind that neither men 
nor women themselves even seemed to question the attitude too greatly but 
saw that as a normal way of organising the society. To quote Mate (1999: 99-
100),  
 
[i]n a hierarchical society in which children were subservient to their 
parents, and servants to their employers, it was not surprising that so many 
women accepted the authority of fathers or husbands. A woman who 
believed she was weaker than a man, not only physically, but morally and 
intellectually (less rational) did not question the right of her father to choose 
her husband and her husband to manage her property. 
 
 It was, in a sense, not the contemporary men’s (or women’s) ‘fault’ 
that the attitudes were as they were; they would not have been perceived as 
unfair or hostile. In the eyes of a modern reader, the ideas present in The 
Proverbs of Alfred seem different than they would have been in the eyes of the 
general folk of those days. Nevertheless, according to Clark (1997: 114), the 
kinds of “dismal misogynisms”, as they appear to us, found in old writings and 
documents, greatly stressing the lower understanding and sometimes the 
‘viciousness’ of women, have nowadays “often been reviewed and, in recent 
years, often regretted” as they have contributed in “promoting aggression 
against women on a European scale” (ibid.).  
 On literature contributing to misogyny, Mann (2002: 2) writes that 
even if many medieval works of literature tell us of the appreciation and demand 
of paradox and disputation, rather than of principled misogyny, the inevitable 
result still was the reinforcement of the 'Eve'-stereotype. As Clark, also Mann 
(2002: 2) and Mieder (1993: 65, 71) find the results saddening. To continue 
their views, individual works, such as The Proverbs of Alfred, probably would 
not alone have contributed to the phenomenon in major detail, but it is to be 
kept in mind that it was not the only text carrying those attitudes but one of 
many. Furthermore, it was a rather popular read in its time (Cannon 2010: 412) 
since even nowadays four MSS survive, and certainly has retained the 'popular' 
7 
 
attitude of good/bad woman, preferring the latter, thus again reinforcing the 
prevalent view.  
 Clark and Mann mention an idea of “conventional misogyny” (Clark 
1997: 117, Mann 2002: 26) and, although I stressed above that the ‘misogyny’ 
in the Anglo-Saxon society was not all intentional, it is to be noted that it was up 
to a point a natural way of social life. Following that, the kinds of attitudes 
present not only in The Proverbs of Alfred but also in a massive amount of older 
and newer other literature are nowadays regarded as anti-feministic and are to 
an extent also regarded to contribute to the persisting inequality between men 
and women. For these reasons, I have decided to apply the term ‘misogyny’ to 
The Proverbs of Alfred even though it does not represent exactly the same thing 
in the thirteenth-century literary context as it does today. Nevertheless, old 
narratives depicted women either as 'Eve' or 'Mary' type and the image is 
believed to affect attitudes even today. For both these reasons I have 
considered it important to look the attitudes and comment on them in the 
analysis section of this thesis.  
 
3 THE PROVERBS OF ALFRED 
 
In my thesis, the primary source is The Proverbs of Alfred, re-edited from the 
Trinity and Jesus MSS by Walter William Skeat in 1907. By the time he 
published his edited version, The Proverbs of Alfred edited from the Trinity MS 
had already been published three times (Skeat 1907: iii). He justified the new 
issue with stating that his objective was to give a correct text of the manuscript, 
which had until that far been reproduced all three times very incorrectly. 
Simultaneously, he wished to offer a full account on the spellings and spelling 
mistakes of the Trinity MS (ibid.). In the introduction of his edition, Skeat goes 
through the Trinity MS scribe’s choices in great detail. When discussing the 
miswritings in the Trinity MS, it should be noted that the Jesus MS is not free of 
mistakes either. Some findings that Skeat (1907) has listed in his edition are 
placing letters in wrong order and erring in letters (xii) and along with this 
statement, Skeat also notes (ibid.) that the scribe seemingly has been copying 
an older manuscript which he has occasionally misread and has thus miswritten 
words in his own work. This is in accordance with Arngart’s statement above 
8 
 
that none of the now extant MSS is the original but there exists at least one 
manuscript between the archetype of The Proverbs of Alfred and the present-
day MSS. The errors of the Jesus MS are few compared to the Trinity MS, of 
which Skeat has written several detailed pages. When giving notes on 
grammar, he again states the Jesus MS to be more trustworthy in grammatical 
details (1907: xxviii).  
 Skeat has included an explanatory notes section at the end of the 
edited texts along with a comprehensive glossary, of which both I have made 
great use of in studying the text and then reproducing a part of it in Present-Day 
English. Another work which I also have made great use of is The Proverbs of 
Alfred edited by Edvard Borgström, who similarly studied the Trinity and the 
Jesus MSS in 1908. Borgström’s edition contains similar kinds of glossarial 
index and explanatory notes to those of Skeat and I have also made use of and 
referred to Borgström’s commentaries of both the MS's editions for the purpose 
of getting a wider insight into the language used and a more encompassing 
understanding of the texts. I have applied the explanatory notes of Arngart 
(1955) wherever possible, but they could not be put in as much use as those of 
Skeat’s and Borgström’s owing to the fact that in his work, Arngart has 
compared all the four existing manuscripts of The Proverbs of Alfred and offers 
therefore mainly detailed comparative notes of them all.   
 The Proverbs of Alfred comprises 23 sections with an additional 
fourteen found in one manuscript of the four surviving MSS. The sections of the 
poem are numbered from section one onwards with A and a number, for 
example A.15., which is the start of my study material. One section holds a 
number of stanzas, and poetic impression is created most often with rhyme or 
alliteration (using a certain letter at the beginning of paired lines, such as 'Ne 
wurÞ Þu neuer so wod / ne so wyn-drunke). Alliteration seems to have been the 
originally applied stylistic device (Arngart 1942: 76), but there seems, however, 
to be a trend especially in one of th MSS for the scribe to switch it into self-
made rhyme. The topics of the sections handle with good and just reigning, 
proper way of life and managing family. Skeat (1907) names sections according 
to the topic on the top margin of his edition. As there may be two or more 
original sections per edition page, some sections are left without a name and in 
some the division is vague. Therefore, in the analysis section I provide an 
9 
 
additional topic (Woman is deceitful, lines 306-316) to better match the text and 
topic. The naming by Skeat after the Jesus MS is as seen below (approximate 
line range given in numbers after the topic, bold for the section covered in this 
thesis):  
 
  Corresponding lines in Skeat's   
Name edition of the Jesus MS 
 
The Prologue ........................ 1-24 
King Alfred's Address, 
Excellence of Christ .............. 25-60 
Duties of a King ..................... 61-72 
Duties of Leaders .................. 73-85 
Duties of a Knight .................. 86-98 
The Value of Wisdom ............ 99-132 
Good May Follow Evil ........... 133-158 
Life is Short ........................... 159-179 
Be Not Proud of Wealth ........ 180-194 
Wisdom Excels All Things ..... 195-225 
Tell No Grief to Thy Foe ........ 226-246 
Choose No Evil Wife ........... 247-284 
Keep Thy Wife Busy ........... 285-316 
(of which ll. 306-316: Woman is deceitful; as named by myself) 
Avoid Women's Advice ...... 317-332 
Women's Counsel Is Cold .. 333-342 
Avoid Lying And Vice ............ 343-379 
Worldly Wealth Perishes ....... 381-409 
Let Thy Words Be Few ......... 410-426 
Teach Thy Son to Obey ........ 427-456  
(End of Jesus MS with the words Expliciunt dicta Regis Aluredi.) 
(In the Trinity MS also the sections called the 'Fatherly Advice': 
Avoid Drunkenness 
Tell Not All Thy Thoughts 
Be Not Niggardly 
Be Liberal in Old Age 
Thank God for His Gifts 
My Son, Be Kind to All 
Avoid A Drunken Man 
Avoid A Deceitful Man 
Avoid A False Friend 
Avoid A Little Man 
Avoid A Red Man) 
 
 Scholars have not been unanimous about the dating of The 
Proverbs of Alfred. Most scholars seem to agree, however, that the poem 
10 
 
should be dated somewhere around the thirteenth century. Moreover, there 
seems to have been an archetype to the text, an 'original' to all the MSS, 
composed in the twelfth century. The poem, according to Skeat (1907: xxxviii), 
should be placed somewhere between 1200 and 1250, whereas Borgström 
finds, with the help of other texts, that The Proverbs of Alfred cannot be as early 
dated as Skeat suggests and suggests the latter half of the thirteenth century. 
Arngart (1955: 55) argues that for the archetype of The Proverbs of Alfred, “[a] 
twelfth century date is to be assumed[.]” He (ibid.) refers to two scholars (Wells 
and Hall), who respectively place the time of composition at around 1150 and 
1180 and sums up that “a date not too late in the twelfth century seems to be 
required for the original composition of the Proverbs.” What makes the dating 
difficult is that there are no specific references in the text itself to the time of 
writing, and also because The Proverbs of Alfred is set in an earlier era than the 
time of its compilation, to the time of King Alfred's reign (9th Century). 
 Attributing a collection of wise sayings to a famous person has 
been a common practise throughout times. A Latin book used in many schools 
(and which was in use for centuries), the Distichs of Cato, was attributed “to the 
famously wise Roman statesman, Cato the Censor (234–149 BC), who almost 
certainly did not write them” (Cannon 2010: 416). Likewise, there are Biblical 
texts that are ascribed to someone perceived as 'wise', mainly to King Solomon 
(the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom and Ecclesiastes) and other old texts of the 
same type (for example Jesus Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)) (ibid.).  
 The Proverbs of Alfred refers repeatedly to words and actions as of 
equal value and the general tone in the whole collection of proverbs basically 
warns people (or rather, men, as it is quite overtly directed to the male gender) 
to govern their speech carefully (Rouse 2005: 27). Crépin, referring to the 
Anglo-Saxon social environment, comments that “[t]he general attitude is one of 
distrust, which is typical of a time of feuds [even] between close relatives” 
(1994: 49). According to the work, it is not advisable to tell all your thoughts to 
anyone - friend, foe or, for the purpose of this thesis, wife - because any 
(especially any excessive) information could be misused by others in the time of 
misfortune. One should also be wary and suspicious of the speech of others 
because people may for various reasons want to cheat or trick you (Rouse 
2005: 28). Rouse, referring to the strophes about women, also notes that not 
11 
 
only words but other things in life may deceive a man (ibid.). An example of 
women deceiving men provided by Rouse (ibid.) is a stanza (ll. 306-307) that 
describes women with a metaphor stating for example that ‘Many an apple is 
beautiful on the outside but rotten on the inside’ (orig. “Mony appel is bryht wiÞ-
vte, and bitter wiÞ-inne”). 
 The text, described by Arngart (1942: 7) as “one of the earliest and 
more important specimens of Early Middle English”, is known through four 
thirteenth-century manuscripts (Lutz 2002: 160), commonly known as the 
Trinity, Jesus, Cotton, and Maidstone manuscripts. All these MSS are written on 
vellum and are of different lengths. Some of the MSS contain different verses 
and sections and the same sections may occur in different order (Arngart 1942: 
111-118). There are also differences in writing and spelling - the texts do not 
always correspond to each other word by word. In what follows. I will go over all 
four MSS and point out their most important features, beginning with the Cotton 
MS and Maidstone MS. I shall then present the Trinity MS and Jesus MS more 
extensively as they are of greater importance for this thesis. The Jesus MS is 
the one I shall be using as the basis of my study so it will be discussed last and 
the discussion will include more detailed information than that of the other MSS. 
The headings (1-4) contain first the commonly used name of the MS and then 
the shelf mark. In this thesis, I will be referring to the MSS with their commonly 
used names, i. e. the Cotton MS, Maidstone MS, Trinity MS and Jesus MS. 
 
3.1 The Cotton Manuscript - MS Cotton Galba A. XIX  
 
The most defective one of the manuscripts of The Proverbs of Alfred is the 
Cotton MS which was badly burned in a fire of the Cotton library in 1731. Only 
three leaves of it survive today (Arngart 1955: 11). It was believed to be 
completely lost until the fragments were found and published in 1936 (Arngart 
1955:12). Fortunately, the manuscript had been also copied before the fire and 
it exists now in three transcriptions made by James, Spelman and Wanley 
(Arngart 1955: 11) and titled after them. The handwriting of the MS is the same 
in all the three surviving leaves (Arngart 1955: 12).  
 
 
12 
 
3.2 The Maidstone Manuscript – MS Maidstone Museum A. 13 
 
The Maidstone MS, now in the Maidstone Museum in Kent, was only found in 
1926 (Arngart 1955: 25). The manuscript contains many other texts besides 
The Proverbs of Alfred and is written by a “considerable number of hands” 
(ibid.). The other texts, Arngart (ibid.) continues, are “mainly in Latin but there 
are also a few short texts written in Anglo-Norman”. Apart from The Proverbs of 
Alfred there is only one text in Early Middle English called ‘Long Life’ and both 
these texts occur also in the Jesus MS (Arngart 1955: 26). The first three and 
the last six sections of The Proverbs of Alfred are left out in the Maidstone MS 
(Arngart 1955: 27). Furthermore (ibid.), the introductory phrase “So says Alfred” 
is always omitted. There are “deletions and alterations in the text, which indicate 
that the scribe was not quite familiar with the language of his original” (ibid.)  
 
3.3 The Trinity Manuscript - MS Trinity College, Cambridge, B. 14. 39 
 
The Trinity manuscript contains 43 texts in Early Middle English, Latin and 
Anglo-Norman and it is written by many hands, some of which reappear and 
some that do not (Arngart 1955: 31). The number of scribes may suggest that 
the manuscript was put together slowly during a long period of time (Arngart 
1955: 32). Arngart (ibid.) suggests it may have been made in a religious house 
“whose members entered in it from time to time material they wished to 
preserve for their common use.”  
 In the Trinity MS, The Proverbs of Alfred “lacks a heading, but is 
introduced by a large blue initial, decorated with a tracery in red. […] [and t]he 
text […] is divided into lines and couplets by the alternate use of a dot and an 
inverted semicolon.” (Arngart 1955: 31). The text contains a number of scribal 
errors (ibid.; Skeat 1907: viii). As with the Cotton MS, also the Trinity MS was 
believed to have been lost, as it disappeared in 1863 (Arngart 1955: 32). It was, 
nevertheless, found thirty years later, in 1893, in a package sent to a former 
Fellow of the Trinity College (Arngart 1955: 32-33). The package was never 
opened until after his death when the manuscript was found again (ibid.).  
 
13 
 
 The Trinity MS includes, addedly to the other MSS, a full second 
section ('Fatherly Advice', see page 9) of The Proverbs of Alfred. There has 
been critical debate over whether they occurred in the common original to all 
the manuscripts (Arngart 1942: 112) but on the basis of different metre 
(constant and regular rhyme) and a different vocabulary (much loan-words of 
Scandinavian and French origin against the “almost purely native” vocabulary of 
the authentic parts of the Proverbs), the second section seems to be a later 
addition (Arngart 1942: 114) and therefore unauthentic. The Trinity MS also 
includes sections in the first part of the Proverbs which the other MSS do not 
have (Arngart 1955: 49). According to Arngart (ibid.), despite the corrupt and 
poor state of the manuscript it is “of particular value, first as being the sole 
authority for a large proportion of the Proverbs, and secondly because despite 
much corruption it sometimes contains readings superior [to all the other MSS.]” 
 
3.4 The Jesus Manuscript – MS Jesus College, Oxford, 29 
 
The Jesus manuscript consists of two volumes, of which the second part 
contains 26 texts in Early Middle English, among them The Proverbs of Alfred 
(Arngart 1955: 25). The text precisely in this MS is “the latest of the extant 
versions” (Arngart 1942: 89). Following Arngart (1955: 35), “[t]he copy is 
carefully executed in a clear and legible hand, and there are few errors and 
practically no correction [in the text].” According to Arngart, the text of the Jesus 
MS is written in prose. All the line-ends are marked with a dot or a semicolon. 
The phrase “Þus queÞ Alvred” is not always in the beginning of a section but 
may have been placed at the end of the previous section Arngart 1955: 36). 
 The Jesus MS differs from the other MSS in several details. It has, 
in the words of Arngart (1955: 135) “been considerably revised, and the 
changes undertaken affect (1) metrical form, (2) vocabulary, (3) contents, and 
(4) length and arrangement.” On metrics, Arngart (ibid.) thinks that The 
Proverbs of Alfred has originally been written in a “late type of alliterative line 
characteristic of some early M[iddle] E[nglish] pieces” that was based on the 
rules of Old English alliterative poetry. Although the rules were still applied, The 
Proverbs of Alfred show “alliterative verse in an advanced state of decay as 
compared with classical Old English patterns.” (Arngart 1942: 75). Arngart 
14 
 
(ibid.) states that “[a]ll the OE types of alliterating lines may be found in the 
Proverbs, but the number of irregular lines is great.” This holds true also for the 
other three manuscripts (ibid.). Arngart states, however, that the archetype of 
The Proverbs of Alfred has contained much more regular alliteration than the 
existing manuscripts. 
 The loss of alliteration holds true especially for the Jesus MS. 
According to Arngart (1942: 74), the scribe of the manuscript seems to be 
extremely “fond of rhyme”. Rhyme has also to some extent been used in the 
original, but the scribe of the Jesus MS has put it into much greater use, 
“frequently substituting rhymes for original alliteration, that is in replacing old 
metrical form by one more up to date” (1955: 135). In other words, the scribe, or 
‘reviser’, as Arngart (1942: 76) calls him for making the various changes, has 
put in “a conscious effort […] to replace the archaic alliterative line with a more 
up to date poetical form.” The scribe has also at various places altered the 
word-order, but Arngart concludes that this is due to achieving rhyme instead of 
the original alliteration and that the word-order of the whole text, apart from this 
objective in various lines, has been generally well retained (1955: 136). 
 The scribe of the Jesus MS has substituted obsolete or native 
words with current (often French-based) synonyms (ibid.) and “expands and 
paraphrases passages of the text, adding lines of pious and moral contents” 
(ibid.). Moreover, the scribe seems to have deleted sections from the Jesus MS 
that nevertheless occur in the other MSS. For example, as he, according to 
Arngart (1942: 114), seems to have been a religious man, “we might assume 
that he left out [a] section […] which deals with the perils of intoxication, 
because he was shocked by its cynical realism.” However, Arngart thinks that 
similar motives for other deletions are hard to find and some of them may be 
accidental (Arngart 1942: 114; Arngart 1955: 54). On the whole, the omissions 
do nevertheless seem intentional (ibid.). Because of these reasons, Arngart 
(1955: 135) chooses to refer to the scribe as ‘reviser’. He, furthermore, briefly 
discusses the possible effect of oral recital on the Jesus MS stating that “[b]oth 
the omissions and the re-arrangement of material may to some extent be 
accounted for through the texts having been transmitted orally for some period 
of their history.” (Arngart 1955: 54). In a widely illiterate population, who 
nevertheless seems to have welcomed the poem with delight (Arngart 1955: 11, 
15 
 
Borgström 1908: xvii, Cannon 2010: 412), oral recital probably was the means 
for passing it on although no visible sign or record of that is given in the poem. 
 Despite the high extent of revision in the Jesus MS, Arngart (1955: 
39) concludes it to be superior in many ways in comparison with the other MSS. 
He offers many examples on lines that are correctly preserved in the Jesus MS 
against all the other manuscripts on the basis of alliteration and spelling 
(Arngart 1955: 40-43). Furthermore, he demonstrates (1955: 43-49) how the 
Jesus MS agrees or disagrees with the other MSS in order to show that the 
other manuscripts seem more corrupt in terms of the contents than the Jesus 
MS, despite its revised state. Arngart (1955: 44). According to Arngart (ibid.) the 
Jesus MS “retains a considerable number of genuine readings” which in the 
other MSS have been corrupted or lost altogether. In addition (Arngart 1955: 
44), the Jesus MS does not share even one corrupt variant with the other texts. 
This to Arngart (ibid.) suggests that the Jesus MS must have branched off the 
others at some point of descendancy to the archetype. In other words, the 
Jesus MS represents another descent line to the Cotton, Maidstone and Trinity 
MS. Arngart (1942: 124, 1955: 47) presents the family tree of the MSS as 
follows (Diagram 1.): 
Archetype
Jesus MS Original 2
Trinity MS
Original
Cotton MS
Original 3
Maidstone MS
 
Diagram 1. The table of descent of The Proverbs of Alfred according to Arngart 
(1942: 124). 
 
 Considering that the Jesus MS represents a separate line of 
descent than the other MSS, Arngart (1955: 44) thinks that this is “the reason 
why the version of ‘A father’s advice to his son’ that was added to the Proverbs 
proper at some date subsequent to their original composition […] is missing 
from J[esus MS]” and why the organisation of individual sections is different 
from that of the other MSS. In his words (1955: 49), “[i]t often stands alone in 
16 
 
preserving original readings lost from all the other texts, and its variants should 
be carefully weighed against those of [the other MSS].” 
 The fact that it, according to scholars, seems to be the most error-
free manuscript of the four existing ones, I have chosen it as the sample text for 
my analysis and all excerpts in the analysis section (from page 27 onwards in 
this thesis) follow the text and markings of Skeat's 1907 edition of the text. 
Another edition by Borgstöm dates almost the same (1908) being only very 
slightly newer. Unlike Borgstöm's, however, Skeat's edition of 1907 can in its 
entirety be found scanned online (full web address provided in the list of 
references; see Figure 1 below for an example of the text) and thus the reader 
may, if desired, follow the poem from the original edition. 
 
 
Figure 1. Lines 17-24 of The Proverbs of Alfred in the edition of Skeat (1907: 
4). 
 
4 DEFINING A PROVERB 
 
For the introduction of a proverb, let us start with the Oxford English Dictionary's 
general definition: A proverb is “[a] short, traditional, and pithy saying; a concise 
sentence, typically metaphorical or alliterative in form, stating a general truth or 
piece of advice; an adage or maxim” (OED s.v. “proverb”, n.). To quote the 
etymological definition of the OED (ibid.), a “short well-known saying, moral 
maxim [...]”. In the plural, ‘proverbs’ refer to “Book of Proverbs in the Old 
Testament and Hebrew Scriptures[.]”. The etymology of the Latin-derived 
(‘proverbium’) word is (ibid.) as follows: ‘pro’ - prefix + ‘verbum’ (=word) + ‘ium’ - 
suffix. […] In other words, the sense of the word ‘proverb’ is ‘on behalf of (other) 
17 
 
words’; usually, explains Mieder, (1993: 25), something concise and pithy on 
behalf of more words and lengthier commentary.”  
 Proverbs are an old phenomenon. Traditionally, proverbs have 
been used as advice and instruction as well as for moralising, that is to say, for 
didactic purposes. Proverbs carry wisdom that has been found adequate in 
certain situations, has come in handy at certain points in life, or seems to fit in 
the way the world works. Furthermore, proverbs affect discourse in various 
ways - they add colour to arguments, organise speech and sometimes also tell 
something about the speaker’s intelligence and learned status. In the following, 
I shall briefly look at the characteristics of a proverb – a wider definition and 
their place in a language. After that I shall look at attitudes in proverbs. The 
topic refers back to the 'misogyny' defined above. 
 
4.1 Characteristics of a Proverb 
 
Offering a good comprehensive definition of the concept of a proverb is not 
easy. There seems to be, according to various scholars, no absolutely all-
covering definition to be found. As the OED definition above lacks concrete 
limits as to how long it can be as well as examples, I offer another one to 
complement the OED. Mieder cites Whiting's definition (Whiting in Mieder 
1993), which gives a wider perspective in understanding the term that covers 
such a wide range of sayings, whose boundaries are, nevertheless, quite 
vague.  
 
A proverb is an expression which, owing its birth to the people, testifies to 
its origin in form and phrase. It expresses what is apparently a fundamental 
truth […] in homely language, often adorned, however, with alliteration 
and rhyme. It is usually short, but need not be; it is usually true, but 
need not be. Some proverbs have both literal and a figurative meaning […] 
but more often they have but one of the two.” (Whiting in Mieder 1993: 4, 
emphasis added) 
 
 Mieder (1993: 6) suggests that although we have a ‘gut feeling’ 
about the matter, there is a great difficulty of definition shows us as proverbs 
are somehow intangible and an abstract matter. Mieder (1993: 6) suggests that 
one of the problems in defining a proverb lies on the fact that proverbs should, 
18 
 
in peoples’ mind, be somehow ‘traditional’. Traditionality, he continues, is tricky 
to prove and it cannot be determined by a text itself.  
 Along with traditionality, there are many other factors to consider, 
for example lexicality and currency. Lexicality means the way and amount in 
which proverbs are stored to peoples' lexical knowledge, i.e. their language. As 
a part of the lexis, proverbs are mainly remembered as frozen entities and 
therefore always produced in the same words and word-order in a discourse 
(Fiedler 2007: 21). Fixed form allows the proverb to maintain memorability and 
recognisability in the actual use (Mieder 1993: 8). As we will see later, the 
sayings such as in The Proverbs of Alfred do feature more or less similar in 
other works of literature from the same era as well (Arngart 1955: 7-8). The 
amount of any (secular or religious) literature from its time was a small fraction 
compared to the amount of literature of today. Therefore, I suggest, the 
occurrence of these proverbs in many poems and works of the time testifies in 
favour of them being known in the language of Middle Ages. 
 Closely related to lexicality, we also have to be able to judge the 
currency (Fiedler (2007: 21) and Mieder (1993: 6), the 'current popularity' that a 
proverb should enjoy in order to be classified a proverb. What makes defining 
difficult, however, is that there are no precise limits as to what size of a group 
has to use a proverb and how much it should be used for it to be current (ibid.). 
Mieder (1993: 6) suggests that we should rather talk about relative currency and 
that we normally have an insight telling us if the proverb is 'current' in the 
language we speak. It is important to keep in mind, nevertheless, that not all 
members of society speak a language the same way – old and young people, 
for example, use different words and sometimes different sayings, and the style 
of business language is normally different to the one people use at home. 
Basically, common general knowledge allows us to judge the currency of 
proverbs in our own language and in our personal ‘culture’ (Mieder 1993: 136). 
 
4.2 Attitudes in proverbs 
 
There are proverbs for all aspects of life, and also for example about friends, 
men, women, choosing a life partner, marriage and raising children. But the 
great majority of proverbs about women is appalling. Lucas (1965: 45-46) is 
19 
 
astonished by the unfairness and hostility of proverbs concerning women, that 
is, misogynous proverbs. The attitude is something that seems to come up 
especially in old proverbial sayings. One of the reasons for proverbs like these 
is, in Lucas’s opinion, the fact that proverbs seldom - if almost ever - were 
composed by women (Lucas 1965: 45). Lucas’s examples (1965: 46) of 
misogynous proverbs include: “To educate a woman is putting a knife in the 
hand of a monkey.” (Hindi), “Would you have tough shoes, sole them with a 
woman’s tongue.” (Alsatian), “Never trust a woman, not though she has borne 
you seven children.” (Japan) and “Lord, there are so many nasty things in the 
world and Thou hast created wives!” (Russian). Lucas describes the inventors 
of many proverbs to be old grumpy men, “frequently cynical, […] largely 
misogynists” (Lucas 1965: 49). The same opinions are shared by Mieder (1993: 
65), who further discredits men who have invented such proverbs by stating that 
the fact that the women in their own lives have probably been very good to them 
adds even an extra insult to the offence. Similar examples to those of Lucas’s 
(above) that Mieder (1993: 65) provides from past centuries include “A woman’s 
tongue wags like a lamb’s tail”, “A woman’s answer is never to seek”, “Women 
naturally deceive, weep and spin” and “Women are necessarily evils”.  
 Mieder (1993: 65) proposes that “proverbs contain the value 
system of the time of their origin”. As stated above in the examples from Lucas, 
many proverbs were coined before the time of feminism (and indeed, most of 
them by men) and at the time when the social status of women was relatively 
low. The most antifeministic examples of woman and her place are from the 
sixteenth century (Mieder 1993: 66), such as “A good woman must be beaten” 
(ibid.) and “A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree, the more they’re beaten, the 
better they be”. In the aforementioned proverb a woman and a tree do seem, in 
the speaker’s opinion, to need the same kind of handling as if they could in 
some ways be compared (in terms of ‘productivity’, perhaps). Incidentally, 
according to some scholars (Borgström 1908: 58-59, 95; Skeat 1907: 61), there 
is a similar idea even in one of The Proverbs of Alfred (ll. 290-5; see page 35-39 
of this thesis) suggesting that as fruit-tree branches should be bent for 
achieving a strong trunk and easier harvest, so should a woman be kept busy 
(in a way ‘bent’ as a tree) in household chores in order to keep her obedient and 
well-behaved. I shall return to this aspect later in the text. 
20 
 
 Although nowadays clearly inappropriate, the abovementioned 
proverbs, or at least the misogynous attitudes they carry, are nevertheless still 
known to the modern public. Mieder (1993: 65) states that “[a]lmost every 
proverb that touches on women contains a severe negation of the value of 
women in society.” Fortunately, one could add, a share of antifeministic 
proverbs nowadays has contradictory sayings to oppose them. Examples 
provided by Mieder (1993: 70-71) are “A woman’s place is in the House… and 
in the Senate!” (a counter to “A woman’s place is in the home”) and “The best 
man for the job … may be a woman” (emphasising the fact that the phrasing 
“best man for the job” is normally used without thinking the gender bias). The 
amount is nevertheless very scarce and it will take most probably a very long 
time to repair the damage misogynous proverbs have done to the social value 
of and the attitudes towards a woman and their alleged low morale and lack of 
sophisticated behaviour (Mieder 1993: 71). Moreover, the counters do not offer 
a 'wisdom' themselves but, I feel, often seem to carry some kind of 'marketing 
value', be that advertising or a sign of benevolence. I find that they are a way for 
the utterer to show respect and honour, or perhaps compassion, towards the 
discriminated group and furthermore, they can be used as an appeal for social, 
commercial or political business. They are, as such, not a direct turn-around in 
proverbial 'mindset'. 
 
5 DEFINING A ‘PROVERB OF ALFRED’ 
 
Above I have given a short description of how proverbs can be defined and 
discussed their attitudes to women. Next, I will shift the focus from traditional 
proverbs into the kinds of proverbial sayings I am studying in this thesis. This 
section will be divided into two subsections – wisdom literature and didactic 
poetry – that deal with the literary genre that The Proverbs of Alfred represents, 
as a collection of proverbial maxims and recommendations on various subjects. 
Let us start with the term maxim, as rather than proverbs in the traditional 
sense, The Proverbs of Alfred fall into the category of maxims and are what one 
could call ‘ideas similar to proverbs’. Mieder and Holmes (2000: 9) offer a 
definition for the term: “A maxim is a concise formulation of some fundamental 
21 
 
principle or rule of conduct.” They serve as a moral guideline and are often 
compact and easy to memorise (ibid.) 
 The Proverbs of Alfred contain much more words than is traditional 
for proverbs and the sections are far too long to be classified only proverbial. In 
essence, The Proverbs of Alfred, containing maxims and recommendations, 
belongs to a part of a traditional Old English genre called didactic and 
instructive poetry, falling into the category of a ‘gnomic verse’. In the words of 
Arngart (1955: 1), “The Proverbs of Alfred is a piece of didactic writing 
containing precepts of morality and rules of conduct rather than a collection of 
proverbs in the ordinary sense of the word.” All the mentioned genres, maxim, 
didactic poetry and gnomic verse, can be placed under an umbrella term, a 
genre called wisdom literature. In the following, shall be discussing the term 
'wisdom literature' in more detail, describing what it is and with what means it is 
composed. After that, I shall be looking at didactic poetry more closely. 
 
5.1 Wisdom Literature 
 
Wisdom literature is a genre label most often applied to Biblical texts, especially 
in reference to the Book of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes (Weeks 2010: 1), 
but the term is extended to secular literature as well. Also for example in Old 
English, following Hill (2005: 166), ”[t]here […] existed […] a native Germanic 
tradition of sapiential literature”. The Book of Proverbs, following Weeks (2010: 
1), is an “anthology of various materials, mostly offering advice either through 
long collections of short sayings, or through more elaborate units of teaching”. 
According to him, all three – The Book of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes – 
“focus on issues that are relevant to all humans, ranging from good manners 
through to the purpose of living”. They are, moreover, interested in the 
individual more than in any certain group of people, and give advice that is 
focused on the present rather than the future (ibid.). Even if The Proverbs of 
Alfred cannot be regarded as an Old English text, given the date of composition 
(the twelfth century, whereas the period of Old English was around the fifth to 
the eleventh century), it follows the same style and poetical pattern. According 
to Hill (2005: 179), Old English wisdom poetry “directly addresses the problems 
of moral values and human choice”. The subjects The Proverbs of Alfred deal 
22 
 
with vary from good manners to more specific decisions that one has to make in 
life, and in this case, the weight is much more on the long “elaborate units of 
teaching” that Weeks (2010: 1) mentions than it is on traditional proverbs.  
 Weeks suggests that, for practical purposes, ‘wisdom literature’ 
should be understood in the first place as literature about wisdom and not as an 
”origin or [a] standpoint, just as, say, ‘crime fiction’ is literature about crime, not 
a literature composed to promote crime, or written by criminals.” (2010: 1). Also 
‘The Proverbs of Alfred is essentially poetry about wisdom more than it is poetry 
composed to directly ‘push for’ wisdom. In reference to wisdom literature, 
Weeks (2010: 2) also discusses different types of skill and ability. He concludes 
that what normally is understood as specifically ‘wisdom’ in the sense of wisdom 
literature refers to people’s “‘know-how’ of living their life” and continues that 
“[t]o achieve it, of course, is to live better, which is to say, longer and more 
successfully” (2010: 2). Wisdom, furthermore, often seems to be connected to 
righteousness (ibid.) thus giving it a religious nuance; if, following Weeks (2010: 
2-3), “one believes that long life and prosperity are a reward from God, then 
wisdom becomes associated with pleasing God - that is, the skill lies not so 
much in understanding life itself as in discerning the divine will.”  
 In wisdom literature, there is rather inevitably a need for someone 
who is accepted to be ‘wise’ and thus qualified to teach wisdom to others. In 
Weeks’s opinion, this suggests that the world does not consist of people with 
various degrees of wisdom but it is filled “with those who are wise and those 
who are not” (2010: 3). If it is taken for granted that wisdom is not shared by all 
but that it can be learnt, Weeks finds it naturally follows that there comes up the 
question of who is able to teach it (ibid.). Teaching others wisdom calls for a 
reputation of being a wise person. Weeks (2010: 3) writes:  
 
If somebody claims that they can provide the key, or part of the key, to a 
long and successful life, it is reasonable to examine their credentials. 
Where the offer of teaching is made [only] through written literature, 
moreover, which can present no author directly for interrogation and 
evaluation, then this literature has to find a way of accrediting itself in the 
eyes of its audience. (Weeks 2010: 3) 
 
 The point of 'wisdomhood' or 'wiseness', so to speak, is frequently 
emphasised in writings about King Alfred, including The Proverbs of Alfred, 
23 
 
where already in the first strophe he is stated to be the wisest man in England 
(for example Skeat 1907: 4; lines 19-24; my translation). Also, King Alfred was 
very religious (in the words of The Proverbs of Alfred, he was ‘a king and a 
cleric’ and respected God) and there is a religious nuance to be found in many 
of the 'proverbs'. In the last lines of the first strophe of The Proverbs of Alfred 
there is a straightforward portrayal of Alfred himself. There he is stated to be a 
king and a cleric, most probably suggesting that he was gifted and able to guide 
and advice people in both worldly and spiritual matters (Rouse 2005: 20). In 
Skeat’s edition (1907: 4; lines 19-24) Alfred “loved God’s work, was wise on his 
word and wary (meaning here ‘prudent or ‘considerate’) in his actions” and 
finally “he was the wisest man that there was in England” [my translations]. 
Rouse (2005: 20-21) sums up that all these personal properties establish King 
Alfred as a good instructor, someone, who is worth listening to and whose 
words are worth adhering to.  
 The religious message of the sayings in the poem and, for 
instance, the occasional references to the Book of Proverbs, provide The 
Proverbs of Alfred with even more authority when not only King Alfred as a wise 
speaker, but through his citing also divine authorities seem to recommend the 
manners and behaviour presented in the text. In other words, his name carried 
a great authority that seemed to be a suitable means for offering people advice 
and recommendations that were hoped to be followed. In addition, the poem 
accredits itself by referring to what is defined appropriate behaviour not only by 
King Alfred but also by the Bible. 
 
5.2 Didactic Poetry 
 
As we have now established that for dispensing wisdom there has to be 
someone wise and how 'wiseness' can be defined, let us now consider the 
overall dispensing method, the concept of didactic poetry. According to Morey 
(2005: 183), “didactic verse is the largest single body of Middle English poetry”.  
Depending on the broadness of definition of 'didacticism’, he continues, one 
could even claim that almost all Middle English literature had teaching and 
instruction as its aim, or at the least state, that didacticism was an underlying 
feature of various of the writings of that time (ibid.). Also, Morey states, even 
24 
 
illiterate laymen would have recognised the didactic aim at least through oral 
citing (2005: 183; see page 14-15 as well as section 7 of this thesis). Didactic 
poetry, says Morey (ibid.) “offers wisdom and comfort: the wisdom to lead a 
Christian life, and the comfort of knowing that salvation accrues from so living”. 
This aspect, as already mentioned, is clearly present in The Proverbs of Alfred 
with its maxims on how to live a good life and how to behave in a proper, 
acceptable and friendly manner. Furthermore, there is always a teaching in all 
Alfred’s proverbs, involving consequences should the recommendation not be 
observed. Instruction, reasoning, conclusion and consequences are present in 
the section to be analysed (ll. 247-342) but they occur in all other sections of the 
work as well. 
 Now, to add to what didactic poetry tries to achieve, let us discuss 
how it may try to achieve something. Dalzell (1996: 7), marks that there is 
always an interaction between the reader and author, pupil and teacher, and 
speaker and audience. Didactic poetry involves a teacher who directs his or her 
speech to an audience (ibid.), be that for example pupils or readers. The 
Proverbs of Alfred not only creates a link between the text and the reader, but 
even inside the text there is a frame story about a speaker and his audience 
and thus another link in which the reader can relate. If (referring to the 
discussion in the above section 4.1) it is accepted that wisdom can be taught, 
the overall concept of didactic poetry also seems legitimate and justified (Dalzell 
1996: 11). In essence, didactic poetry both teaches and advices the reader in a 
certain matter and warns against the consequences should the reader not 
comply with the advice (Matsuda 1997: 34). The Proverbs of Alfred is a good 
example of this. It contains, as mentioned, different sections which together 
create a whole but also all individual sections create an entity of their own. 
Cannon (2010: 417) specifies this kind of 'proverb' to comprise “proof, contrast, 
comparison and judgement” [my summary]. He continues that as the sections of 
The Proverbs of Alfred seem to fulfil the requirements, each of them can be 
classified as a 'progymnasma proverb' (ibid.). The 'progymnasma proverb' 
equals to “a set of basic exercises used for teaching reading and writing from 
ancient times, the so-called progymnasmata ('elementary exercises')” (Cannon 
2010: 416). Cannon finds, overall, that there is a 'proverbial kernel' (2010: 414) 
in each section of The Proverbs of Alfred.  
25 
 
 Within some individual 'proverbs' of Alfred, there is a real proverb 
(such as “cold red is quene red” [cold advice is a woman's advice], (page 48 in 
this thesis). The real proverbs that function somewhat like a topic kernel may be 
situated anywhere in a stanza – beginning, middle or end – inside an ample and 
ornate account (Cannon 2010: 414). The account “proceeds without any 
obvious system [...], but, through a variety of illustrations, comparisons, and 
exemplifications, each stanza tries to demonstrate the generality of the cited 
proverb’s wisdom” (Cannon 2010: 414). This all functions persuasively towards 
the reader. Significantly, the ‘proverbs’ (or perhaps, rather, recommendations) 
of Alfred are not direct orders or commands to the reader from a high authority 
but, rather, recommendations with arguments and explanations of various kinds 
on why they should be followed. King Alfred was already known for this kind of 
style of writing when The Proverbs of Alfred was first written, for example 
through his translation of Pastoral Care. According to Discenza (2005: 129), 
Alfred “refrains from outright commands, instead simultaneously urging and 
praising his readers.” This feature makes the proverbs more ‘agreeable’ and 
persuades the reader to follow them. In short, following the suggested ways of 
behaviour presented in the Proverbs, basically, the Christian way of life, leads 
towards happiness and respectability, and from that it follows in turn that life will 
eventually end in salvation. 
 According to Sternbach (1974: 44), “gnomic and didactic poems are 
collections of verses composed by one author only”. He suggests, nevertheless, 
that in practise there are works that are considered to be written by one author, 
but which may in fact be collections of verse by many different authors and also 
drawing from oral tradition. The reason they were ascribed to a single author is, 
in Sternbach’s words, “in majorem gloriam”, i. e. ‘for greater glory’ (Sternbach 
1974: 44). According to his statement, I find it possible that also The Proverbs 
of Alfred may be a collection of didactic sayings and recited folk poetry from 
many people, which ostensibly is uttered by one person. The effect is made 
easier with the help of one scribe only, which to the reader would indicate that 
the original was composed by one writer (who apparently has followed a speech 
of King Alfred). All the 'proverbs' in the sections are attributed directly to the king 
although the warnings etc. can be citations of another wisdom (e.g. (line 317) 
“So says Alfred:” → (line 329) “Even Solomon has said...”) It is very probable, 
26 
 
though, that rather than completely new proverbs and utterances by King Alfred, 
the poem contains many proverbial sayings that were common among people 
during the time of writing, and possibly also borrows proverbial sayings from 
other contemporary works. There is for example a connection to similar sayings 
in the abovementioned The Owl and the Nightingale and in a poem called the 
Proverbs of Hendyng (Arngart 1955: 7-8). Even though the proverbs do not 
exactly match (ibid.), to me this connection indicates that the sayings in one 
form or another have been familiar to the public and have circulated at least in 
the literate parts of the society. On the basis of oral citing being familiar and 
common (Morey 2005: 83, Arngart 1955: 54), I find that they have possibly 
circulated within all parts of the society.  
 
6 ANALYSIS – LINES 247-342 OF THE PROVERBS OF ALFRED (SKEAT'S 
EDITION OF 1907) 
 
After discussing the type of ‘proverbs’ found in The Proverbs of Alfred, it is now 
time to look at the text of the poem. As discussed above, according to Arngart 
(1955: 5) and in reference to the wisdom literature genre, “many points of 
resemblance to the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament allow us to draw 
parallel between our text and the Proverbs ascribed to Solomon, and to suggest 
that these may have furnished the model for our collection.” (ibid.). As I have 
noted, also the titling of the poem may be considered to follow the same Biblical 
style.  
The length of the whole poem extends up to 709 lines, the Trinity 
MS being the longest and out of the entity, I have chosen 95 lines, numbered 
247-342 in Skeat’s Jesus MS edition. In the following I use Skeat's 1907's 
transcription of the text and also his line markings found in the 1907 edition, 
which is to be found online (see the references of this thesis). The linguistic and 
social aspects in The Proverbs of Alfred, ll. 247-342 are dealt with in the 
sections below, offering commentary to a limited number of lines at a time. The 
reason for this is that it seems more suitable for the context to discuss the 
linguistic and social aspects at once in the running text in connection to the 
specific lines commented, rather than write on those aspects in different 
sections, which would lead to the formation of a relatively random selection of 
27 
 
various kinds of short discussions. Furthermore, another reason for giving the 
commentary on linguistic and social aspects for a selected number of lines at a 
time is to avoid the reader’s need to browse the text back and forth when 
referring to the lines of the poem, which would happen, should the ll. 247-342 
be quoted only once in its entirety and all the linguistic commentary offered in 
the several pages following that. Before discussing the abovementioned 
aspects, I shall first introduce the lines that are to be analysed at the time and 
after that a transcription into Present-Day English. This in done in order to allow 
the reader to follow the poem’s text.  Then, on the basis of Skeat's (1907) and 
Borgström’s (1908) studies, I will offer definitions and explanations for linguistic 
aspects – word choice, possible scribal interference etc. – in the text. After 
addressing the linguistic details, I will discuss the chosen lines from the social 
perspective, focusing on the social status of women in the Anglo-Saxon era (i. 
e. the time that the poem covers). 
 
6.1 Lines 247-257 (Choose No Evil Wife; as named by Skeat 1907) 
 
A. 15. 
 
Þus queÞ Alured: 
‘Ne schal-tu neuere Þi wif 248 
by hire wlyte cheose, 
for neuer none Þinge 
Þat heo to Þe brungeÞ.    
Ac leorne hire custe, 252 
heo cuÞeÞ hi wel sone. 
For mony mon for ayhte  
vuele i-auhteÞ; 
and ofte mon of fayre  256 
frakele icheoseÞ.  
 
A rough translation of the ll. 247-257, resulting from the aim of retaining word 
order and the relatively rigorous use of glossaries provided by Skeat (1907) and 
Borgström (1908) goes as the following: 
So says Alfred: 
“Never shall you choose your wife 
by her beauty 
nor for any thing 
she will bring to thee. 
But learn her ways, 
28 
 
she will show them very soon. 
For many a man for wealth 
makes a poor choice 
and often a man, choosing a fair woman, 
chooses a rotten one. 
 
 The lines 247-257 begin the sections which consider the choice of 
a good wife. The lines start with a sentence that is used throughout The 
Proverbs of Alfred: “Þus queÞ Alured” meaning “So says Alfred”. Line 248 
contains the word ‘wif’, which in the text stands for ‘wife’. The Old English words 
‘hire’ (line 249, 252) and ‘heo’ (251, 253) stand for ‘her’ and ‘she’. It is advised, 
in the lines 248-51, that one - or directly put, ‘you’ - should never choose your 
wife by her looks (= ’wlyte) or for anything she will bring to you.  
 Here I find that the scribe is referring to dowry, and another 
possible source of property besides dowry would be any personal wealth a 
woman, mainly a widow (by heritage), may possess. At first thought then, based 
on the poem's message, it may seem presumable that any wealth of a woman 
was truly passed on to her husband in marriage. However, scholars are 
unanimous about the fact (Mumby 2012: 159). Women were, for example, gifted 
with some property after marriage. There existed a tradition of 'morning gift', 
that was a property granted for the new wife on the morning following a wedding 
(Jewell 1996: 27, 29). It could have been land, jewellery, money or for example 
even sheep and it was for the woman to keep and use as she wished 
throughout the marriage (Jewell 1996: 29). It is not, then, entirely the case that 
only the man 'gains' something in marriage and the woman 'brings' with her 
objects of value, but also the woman gains something concrete. Followingly, in 
the reality of the Middle Ages, a woman was not a mere thing of increasing the 
man's property but an alliance in which something was gained and something 
given.  
The other MSS, against the text in the Jesus MS, include the word ‘bury’ 
meaning ‘house’ (Trinity MS: Ne for non ahte / to Þine bury bringen), stating that 
one should not bring the bride to one’s home for the sake of property (Arngart 
1955: 169). The sense, and the alliteration between bury and bringen, is lost in 
the Jesus MS and the variant, according to Arngart (ibid.) is thus inferior. Also, 
in the Jesus MS, the word ‘Þinge’ (line 250) replaces the word ‘ehte’ or ‘ayhte’ 
29 
 
of the other MSS (Arngart 1955: 170) and the wording and sense of the 
following line is altered accordingly to form a rhymed couplet (“for neuer none 
Þinge / Þat heo to Þe brungeÞ”) (Arngart 1942: 81). A direct translation into 
Modern English would be, as demonstrated above, ‘or for any things / that she 
brings to you’. 
 The following sentence starting with ‘Ac’ (= ‘but’) urges the man to 
learn the manners of the potential bride before making the decision and it is 
also stated that it will not take long for the woman to show her true self. In the 
words of Skeat (1907: 60) the sentence translates as, “[b]ut learn her virtues; 
she will show them very soon”. Borgström (1908: 56) offers a more detailed 
explanation of the request. For ‘custe’ he uses ‘qualities’ (whereas Skeat used 
‘virtues’) and for the last lines he offers an elaborate translation:  
 
“’[N]or [shalt thou] for any property to bring her to thy home, before thou 
hast learnt to know her qualities (character)’ […] ‘For many a man hastens 
badly for the sake of property (i.e. acts badly in his ardent desire for 
property) and often a man chooses a wretched woman in a faire one’.” 
(Borgström 1908: 56).  
 
Above I have made use of Borgström’s notes on the Trinity MS, hence the 
occurrence of the words ‘to thy home’ (c.f. Jesus MS lacking the word 'bury'). In 
the quotation occurs also the word ‘hastens’. Arngart (1955: 170) comments 
that in that line number 255 in the Trinity MS there is a spelling error, and the 
correct present English wording is ‘to estimate’ or ‘to calculate’. To these last 
lines Skeat (1907: 60) offers “For many a man for wealth’s sake reckons amiss” 
and “And often a man, of a fair one [i.e. woman; my addition], chooses a base 
one.” The word 'base' translates in Modern English as “low in the social scale; 
not noble, low-born” (OED s.v. “base”, adj.). In addition, Arngart (1955: 170) 
states that although 'frakele', according to OED means ‘dangerous’ or ‘deceitful’ 
(OED s.v. “frakel”, adj.), its meaning, when contrasted with ‘faire’ shifts into ‘vile’ 
or just ‘bad’. The general idea of the lines is that the beauty and the property of 
a woman may deceive a man to make a wrong choice in choosing a life partner.  
 Christianity prevailed in the United Kingdom during the composing 
of The Proverbs of Alfred, and there are for example many references to God in 
the text. Not only were the clerics able to guide one on the troubles of life, 
according to Jewell (1996: 18), churchmen defined among other things also 
30 
 
how the female gender should behave. She (ibid.) continues that “[m]oderation, 
modesty and patience [and, I add, chastity] were feminine virtues.” There are 
certain passages in the Bible portraying for example a virtuous woman 
(Proverbs 31:10-31) which also function as grounds for the abovementioned 
'definitions' made by clerics. Based on the poem's text it seems that medieval 
English society seems to have expected women to be passive, or perhaps even 
submissive.  
 According to Jewell, to support the view that women were 
supposed to act in a modest fashion, we only have the proof of literal sources 
that were in almost entirely written by men (1996: 15-18). Women in the 
medieval times were not able, also simply because wide illiteracy, to write down 
texts on their own times, and the situation was even more so when it came 
down to influencing contemporary religious or political circles with literary 
means (Jewell 1996: 15). Women had little say about the texts that described 
the organisation of the society, traditions, behaviour in general and also the 
accepted norms of behaviour (ibid.). Jewell continues that as they were not able 
to participate in the creation of literary work that formed and described the 
essentials of the contemporary society, they were, followingly, not able to record 
their feelings and opinions on what was expected, and in some cases, 
demanded from them (1996: 15-16). The found opinions and records of the 
Anglo-Saxon society are not those of women and we also cannot in the 
absolute define the extent of the abovementioned expectations and the 
realisation of them in the genuine medieval everyday (Jewell 1996: 18). In short, 
Jewell sums up, that the picture of women's place in the society of Middle Ages 
is one that we cannot recreate by texts made by women; although women's 
voices from the era are heard if they are found, “the woman’s point of view” 
most often just does not exist (Jewell 1996: 15-16). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
31 
 
6.2 Lines 258-267 (Choose No Evil Wife; as named by Skeat 1907) 
 
Wo is him Þat vuel wif 
bryngeÞ to his cotlyf!  
So him is alyue  260 
Þat vuele ywyueÞ.  
For he schal vppon eorÞe  
dreori i-wurÞe.  
Monymon singeÞ  264 
Þat wif hom bryngeÞ;  
wiste he hwat he brouhte,  
wepen he myhte.’ 
 
Below is a rough translation of the ll. 258-267. Also this time, the lack of 
aesthetics is the result from the aim of retaining word order as well as precise 
glossary use. 
 
Woe is him that an evil wife 
brings to his humble life 
So is to him in life 
that evil marries 
For he shall, upon earth 
become dreary. 
Many a man sings 
who a wife to home brings 
If he had known what he brought 
To weep he might. 
 
The lines 258-67 (above) contain elements of end rhyme. The two first lines 
rhyme with ‘wif’ / ‘cotlyf’. Furthermore, the lines 262-3 rhyme with ‘eorÞe’ / ‘i-
wurÞe’ and the lines 264-5 with ‘singeÞ’ / ‘bryngeÞ’. Of the line 262, Arngart 
(1942: 81) states that the form ‘uppon eorÞe’, “a tag of which the J[esus MS] 
reviser was fond”, is hardly the original form and is used (against the wording of 
the other MSS) to form a rhyme (ibid.). As stated, rhyme is a feature in poetry 
that partly started, as a more modern style, to replace alliteration (Arngart 1955: 
135) around the time when the MSS of The Proverbs of Alfred were written (at 
the turn of Old English into Early Modern English). As rhyme was common and 
also popular in the fourteenth century (seen for example in Chaucer's The 
Canterbury Tales), I assume that the scribe of the Jesus MS may have tried to 
gain popularity to the text by revising it in considerable amounts (Arngart 1955: 
32 
 
135) and putting work to creating rhyme instead of using the alliteration which is 
thought to have been the original method (ibid.). This might speak in favour of 
the text being a piece of entertainment, rather than a piece of serious advice 
and norms, as suggested by Cannon (2010: 415-416). 
 The lines 260-3 are translated by Borgström as “So it is in life for 
him who marries badly, for she will often make him sorrowful” (1908: 56). Skeat 
(1907: xlv) notes with a quote from Zupitza that there has been found a German 
text (translation below) corresponding to the lines 264-7 in 1575:  
 
“Mennich man lude syngeth,  
Wenn men em de brut bringet : 
Weste he, wat men em brochte, 
Dat he wol wenen mochte.”  [punctuation as in the original] 
 
“Many a man full loudly sings 
When his bride he homeward brings 
Wist he, what he home had led, 
He well might weep and wail instead.” (Skeat 1907: xlv) 
  
Skeat (1907: xlv) and Arngart (1942: 88; 1955: 170) moreover, note that also 
these lines, as well as the passage in the previous section of the thesis (6.1), 
occur in a slightly different layout and form in the abovementioned Proverbs of 
Hendyng and thus seem to be borrowed in either one (Arngart 1942: 88).  
 The position of a man in the Middle Ages seems, in the light of The 
Proverbs of Alfred, to be quite independent and seem to have been able to 
make choices for themselves. Considering women and their lives in the early 
Middle Ages, women basically had two options: to get married or to become a 
nun. There was a need to have someone to maintain one, be it a monastery or 
a husband. Becoming a nun meant for example a possibility of gaining a degree 
of literacy (Mate 1999: 26), an advantage that was not available for many at that 
time, but restraining life in other ways. It is important to note, however, that also 
being a nun meant being in the ‘management’ of a higher authority - if wives 
were to be, according for instance to Rouse (2005: 29) and to The Proverbs of 
Alfred as well, managed by their husbands, so, I argue, were nuns to be 
managed by the abbesses, who were in turn managed by a higher ecclesiastic 
authority. 
33 
 
To the majority of women, marriage was the means of being maintained and 
cared for and it was expected to last. Both in the Anglo-Saxon times and after 
the Norman conquest, divorce has been a complex issue in Great Britain 
(Emery 2013: 677; Cultural Sociology of Divorce: An Encyclopedia: s.v. “Law: 
United Kingdom”). Marriages were mostly seen as unbreakable sacraments 
(ibid.) and the option of divorce was legally almost non-existent (Emery 2013: 
677). Marrying concerns not only the couple but also their relatives. As the 
Middle Ages was a time for feuds (Crépin 1994: 49), there must have been 
even a great pressure for the married couple to stay together in order to 
maintain peace between families. There, nevertheless, was an option of 
separation and should that have happened, it seems that Anglo-Saxon women 
were relatively fortunate (Emery 2013: 677). They had for example a right to the 
children and some part of the marital property (ibid.). In the case of divorce and 
possible remarrying, however, the options were very limited while the former 
spouse still lived (Emery 2013: 677). 
 
6.3 Lines 268-284 (Choose No Evil Wife; as named by Skeat 1907) 
 
A. 16. 
 
Þus queÞ Alured:  268 
'Ne wurÞ Þu neuer so wod,  
ne so wyn-drunke,  
Þat éuere segge Þine wife   
alle Þine wille.   272  
For if [heo] iseye Þe bi-vore  
Þine i-vo alle,  
and Þu hi myd worde  
i-wreÞÞed heuedest,   276 
ne schulde heo hit lete,  
for Þing lyuyinde,  
Þat heo ne scholde Þe forÞ vp-breyde  
of Þine baleu-syÞes!  280 
Wymmon is word-wod,  
and haueÞ tunge to swift; 
Þeyh heo wel wolde,  
ne may heo hi nowiht welde.’ 284 
 
A rough translation is as follows: 
So says Alfred: 
‘Never be so mad 
34 
 
or so wine-drunken, 
to ever tell your wife 
all your thoughts. 
For if she saw you before 
all thy foes 
and you had angered her 
with words  
she would never stop 
for any living thing 
that she should not upbraid thee continually  
for your times of misfortunes 
Woman is unrestrained in speech 
and has a tongue too swift; 
although she wished to, 
she can in no way control it. 
 
 As with others, also this section starts with “So says Alfred”. 
Besides a preface, it may, in addition, have another function in a text. As the 
opinions considering women in the poem are relatively misogynous, it may be 
that the scribe, although anonymous, does not want to take a full responsibility 
for the attitudes that seem to have been prevalent at those times. The way of 
attributing discourse to someone is sometimes used as a means for the scribe 
to distance himself from the actual ideas presented in the work, as explained by 
Fiedler (2007: 87-88). She states that sometimes “writers [may] have the feeling 
that their use of [proverbs] […] is not appropriate for a text or speech[.] Since 
they want to dissociate themselves from their own language use to a certain 
degree, their [text is] […] often accompanied by expressions such as as the 
saying goes, as they say[.]” (ibid.).  
 The lines 268-284 consider the sharp tongue of a woman and as a 
result, the need for men to limit the amount of thoughts they share with their 
wife. As Skeat (1910: 18) puts it, the first lines (269-72) of the section read: 
“Never be so mad” [or so wine-drunken] “as ever to tell” [thy wife all thy desire]. 
In his edition of 1907, Skeat explains the lines 273-84 in a relatively detailed 
way although at the same time he also tries to retain some poetical aspects in 
his explanatory section. For these lines, he offers the following comments: 
 
For if she saw all thy foes before thee and thou hadst made her wrath by a 
word, she would never desist (lit. let it go), for any living thing, (so) that she 
would not upbraid thee continually for thy times of adversity. Woman is 
35 
 
word-mad, and has a tongue too swift; though she might well wish it, she 
can in no way control it. (Skeat 1907: 61) 
 
 Borgström, on the other hand, is more straightforward. Of the ll. 
277-80 (“ne schulde heo hit lete / for Þing lyuyinde / Þat heo ne scholde Þe forÞ 
vp-breyde / of Þine baleu-syÞes!”)  he translates “[s]he would not for any living 
thing give up upbraiding thee for thy misfortunes” (1908: 56). Of ll. 283-4 
Arngart (1955: 171) states that the Jesus MS here retains the correct form ‘hi’ in 
reference to ‘tunge’, which is a feminine word. For ‘word-mad’, the Middle 
English Dictionary online (s.v. “wō̆rd” (n.) → “~wode”) provides the explanation 
unrestrained, i. e. not controlled, in speech. As can be seen, some attitudes in 
The Proverbs of Alfred are visible also in the present. Even today a common 
topic of joking is the presumption that women speak very much and get easily 
angry for small reasons. Examples and my translations of Finnish: “naiset 
kälättää/juoruaa” [women talk/gossip a lot], “paha/hankala akka” [lousy hag]. 
They largely prevail even though the contrasting sayings as well (Mieder 1993: 
70-71; see page 20 of this thesis) that try to repair the damage of the old 
sayings and views they have created. 
 As stated, Mieder (1993: 65) suggested that “proverbs contain the 
value system of the time of their origin”. I, however, slightly disagree with 
Mieder (ibid.) in that even if there may not have been counters to the 
misogynous proverbs of the Middle Ages, even The Proverbs of Alfred (contrary 
to the message of the lines 247-338) shortly on the last four lines judge that 
there can also be good women. Women were things to be managed by fathers 
and husbands (Mate 1999: 99-100; Rouse 2005: 29) but not mere subjects. 
They seem to have had, as mentioned above, rights to their property and 
children and the possibility to separate from their husbands (Emery 2013: 677; 
Jewell 1996: 29) and were, followingly, recognized in the society.   
 
6.4 Lines 285-295 (Keep Thy Wife Busy; as named by Skeat 1907) 
 
A. 17.  
Þus queÞ Alfred:  
'Idelschipe and ouer-prute,  
Þat lereÞ yong wif vuele Þewes;  
and ofte Þat [heo] wolde  288 
36 
 
do Þat heo ne scholde;  
Þene vnÞev lihte  
leten heo myhte,  
if heo ofte a swóte  292 
for-swunke were;  
Þeyh hit is vuel to buwe  
Þat beo nule treowe. 
 
A rough translation of the lines goes as follows: 
 
“So says Alfred: 
‘Idleness and excessive pride  
which teach a young wife evil habits; 
that she often would  
do what she should not; 
those evil habits  
she might easily let go 
if she often with sweat 
worn out with toil were  
though it is difficult to control  
that which will not be faithful 
 
 On line 287, the Jesus MS scribe has changed an original word 
‘leÞere’ (= bad) into a more modern ‘vuele’ (=evil) (Arngart 1942: 93). Here an 
authentic alliteration is spoiled, as ‘leÞere’ would have alliterated with ‘lereÞ’ 
(ibid.). On  line 288, the scribe has substituted ‘wolde’ for ‘Þencen’ (= ‘to intend’, 
‘to have in mind’ Arngart 1955: 176), found in the Trinity and Maidstone MS), 
which probably also would have been authentic (Arngart 1942: 82). With the 
change, he has created a “feeble rhyme” (ibid.) but has at the same time also 
spoiled the grammar of the lines. In my opinion the “feeble rhyme”, however, 
testifies in favour of the scribes aim to target the text for a wide audience. It 
seems reasonable that with all the effort put into copying an original text into a 
manuscript slowly by hand, one surely wanted the manuscript to please the 
public and have a function, be that for example entertainment or teaching. I find 
it would have been only practical to modernize the text even ever so slightly 
along with the tedious task of copying, for this may lead to the continuous 
popularity of the text and thus justify the making of the copy. Based on these 
ideas, I argue that if the scribe saw it fit and purposeful to modernise the text to 
please the audience, the text, then, should be seen as entertainment and not as 
a set of compulsory rules (Rouse 2010: 415-416). Entertainment does not 
37 
 
exclude the fact that The Proverbs of Alfred may have been a schoolbook 
(ibid.), but to me it suggests that the target audience may have been wider and 
this could also be a text aimed for example for oral citing in public happenings. 
 Lines 290-3 in the Jesus MS (Þene vnÞev lihte / leten heo myhte, if 
heo ofte a swóte / for-swunke were) are “two original, alliterating couplets.” 
(Arngart 1955: 176). For the last six lines (290-5) Skeat (1907: 61) offers the 
following translation: “That light misdemeanour she might give up, if she were 
often overtoiled in sweat; though it is difficult to bend that which does not wish 
to be true”. For this section, Borgström (1908: 58-59) comments on the text of 
the Trinity MS and offers the following explanation: “If, tired with work, she were 
in sweat, she would not think so, i.e. to do what she should not”. It has to be 
noted, that even though the idea of both texts is exactly the same, the Trinity 
MS lacks lines 290-1 of Jesus MS (Þene vnÞev lihte / leten heo myhte) and 
replaces them with a more general statement. Of this section in general, 
Borgström states that the last two lines (294-5) are hard to explain and 
comment on but supposes that they refer to some other proverb. He (1908: 58-
59) provides an example in Swedish, which corresponds to the Finnish “nuorna 
vitsa väännettävä”, literally translated as “a twig has to be bended whilst it is 
young” (in order to be able to bend it at all). 
 
Possibly these lines are an allusion to some such proverb. […] At any rate, 
the meaning seems to be: ‘Yet it is hard to bow a woman against her will, 
[…] for her self-will is often due to her nature’. […]  For tre Skeat reads 
trewe […] = true, straight, upright etc. According to his explanations, the 
sense may also be that it is hard to bend [straight] that which will not be 
upright. (Borgström 1908: 58-59) 
 
 Above in Borgström’s suggestion that women's will originates from 
what woman's nature is, we see another example of the style in which the 
woman is portrayed like Eve. Eve was forbidden to eat the fruit of a tree in Eden 
but wilfully, and with some push from the snake, she acted against the warning. 
Skeat offers another similar proverb to consider: “The tree growing crooked, if 
you’l have it mended, Whilst that it is a twigg, it must be bended.” (1907: 61; 
spelling as in the original) and continues “The wilful woman is not one who 
objects to being a tree (i.e. to growing up) but to being a straight tree.” (ibid.)  
 
38 
 
 Arngart, in his study, concludes that (as seen above) most scholars 
have taken the abovementioned lines “to contain allusion to a proverb of the 
type ‘crooketh the tree timely’” but states that he believes “no such allusion is 
intended” (1955: 177). The problematic part is the word ‘treowe’ in the Jesus 
MS, which Arngart (ibid.) states many have taken to refer to a tree but which in 
fact is to be derived from Old English “trustworthy, faithful […], true” (1955: 
176). The translation for the lines discussed above (294-5) provided by Arngart 
(1955: 176) is “Yet it is difficult to control that which (anyone who) will not 
remain faithful”. There is one certain proverbial allusion to be found in this 
section, however, in the lines 286-7 (“Idelschipe and ouer-prute / Þat lereÞ yong 
wif vuele Þewes”). Fiedler (2007: 85) mentions the proverb, “’The devil finds 
work for idle hands to do’ (‘those who are not kept busy by the work will start 
doing harmful things’)”. The proverb is very old and in the Oxford Dictionary of 
Proverbs (5th edition) there is a long etymology to be found. The proverb is of 
biblical origin and according to the dictionary, “[i]dleness and mischief are linked 
in St. Jerome's Letter cxxv. xi. 'fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus 
inveniat occupatum', do something, so that the devil may always find you busy”. 
It is further pointed out in the dictionary that for example Chaucer uses the 
proverb in one of his works, the Tale of Melibee: “Therfore seith Seint Jerome: 
‘Dooth somme goode dedes that the devel, which is oure enemy, ne fynde yow 
nat unocupied.’”. Furthermore, it is also found in eighteenth century songs and 
proverb collections and a similar version, “whoever the devil finds idle he will 
employ” is described as a “homely proverb, which speaks a shrewd truth” 
(Fiedler 2007: 85).  
 Rouse (2005: 29) writes that “[i]n Alfred’s society, wealth and 
women must be managed, and so must children”. In other words, it is for the 
best of the husband to keep his wife busy so that she will not have time to 
develop harmful manners and a wilful mind and - should she posses such 
already - she would ‘bend’, i.e. condescend and settle for her position in the 
marriage and in the household. A woman worn out with toil would probably not 
be interested in using her energy for bothering and pestering her husband, so 
he should feel responsible for providing her with enough tasks and, will he not, 
have only himself to blame. Again, the woman is something to keep an eye to, 
not one that can manage to stay out of trouble or show benevolence on her 
39 
 
own. This can be linked to Borgström’s suggestion above: Men have to take 
responsibility over the women in their families (to 'bend' them, as Borgstöm and 
Skeat discuss on page 20 and 38 of this thesis), because women are, according 
to the Biblical story of Eve, necessarily disobedient, disrespectful and 
misbehaving. 
  
6.5 Lines 296-305 (Keep Thy Wife Busy; as named by Skeat 1907) 
 
The lines 296-305 are a part of the Jesus MS section 17, but because it is long, 
I have split it in two halves. I shall first give my rough translation of the lines in 
Modern English. 
 
For ofte museÞ Þe kat 296 
After hire moder. 
Þe mon Þat let wymmon 
his mayster iwurÞe, 
ne schal he neuer beon ihurd  300 
his wordes louerd;  
ac heo hine schal steorne 
to-trayen and to-teóne; 
and selde wurÞ he blyÞe and gled, 304 
Þe mon Þat is his wiues qued. 
 
A rough translation: 
 
For often the cat catches mice 
like her mother.  
The man who lets a woman 
to become his master 
he shall never be heard to be 
the lord of his words 
but she shall him cruelly 
torment and greatly vex; 
and seldom will he be blithe and glad, 
the man who is under his wife’s scorn.” 
 
 In the first two lines (296-7) there is to be seen a certain recurrent 
proverb pattern (Fiedler 2007: 46): Like X like Y (‘like father like son’, or in this 
case ‘like mother like daughter’). The translations given by Borgström and Skeat 
are “for often the cat mouseth like her mother” (Borgström 1908: 59) and “For 
40 
 
the cat often catches mice in the same way as her mother” (Skeat 1907: 61). 
This sentence is a straightforward proverb (Arngart 1955: 177) which has 
parallels in for example Latin, German and French (ibid.). According to Arngart 
(ibid.) “[t]he proverb is found later in the form ‘Cat will after kind’[.]” When these 
lines are considered in their context - that it is later hard to ‘bend’ what has 
grown crooked from beginning on - it is implied, clearly, that a disobedient 
mother will raise disobedient daughters. Noteworthy for the purpose of this 
thesis is thus the fact that what is not directly stated - that a fine woman will 
raise fine children. Again we see the misogynous attitude being the prevalent 
one in ll. 247-342 of the poem. Women are seen as creatures with far more 
negative characteristics than positive and it is also suggested that this is only 
natural.  
 Coming back to the idea of Rouse's (2005: 29) - the fact that 
women should be 'managed' - the poem continues with a warning of what will 
happen if this is not actualised. For this, Skeat (1907: 61) provides a detailed 
explanation. To quote, “He shall never be heard (to be) master of his word; but 
she shall sternly torment and vex him; and seldom shall he be blithe and glad, 
the man that is in his wife’s aversion” (ibid.). Originally, line 298 (“Þe mon Þat let 
wymmon”) contained the word ‘(h)is wif’ instead of ‘wymmon’ (Arngart 1942: 
95). Arngart (ibid.) states that the Jesus MS scribe has applied the original 
statement (‘the man who lets his wife…’) in a more general way (‘the man who 
lets a woman…’) but is definitely wrong, as ‘his wif’ is “required by the context[.]” 
On  line 300 (“ne schal he neuer beon ihurd”) there is again an alteration made 
by the Jesus MS scribe against the other MSS (Arngart 1942: 82). The line is in 
other respects similar as in the other MSS except for an added word ‘ihurd’ at 
the end of it, which is there to create rhyme with ‘louerd’ on the following line 
(ibid.). Following Arngart (1942: 82), “in an earlier copy the form may have been 
iherd rather than ihürd” which, he states, would have created a better rhyme.  
 The scribe has also tried to produce rhyme in the lines 302-5 (“ac 
heo hine schal steorne / to-trayen and to-teóne; and selde wurÞ he blyÞe and 
gled / Þe mon Þat is his wiues qued”). The lines, found also in the Trinity MS, 
originally seem to have contained alliteration (Arngart 1942: 83), but again, this 
is changed into a rhyme by the Jesus MS scribe with wording and adding an 
extra line (305) where ‘qued’ rhymes with the previous line’s expression “blyÞe 
41 
 
and gled”. This combination (blyÞe and gled), “frequent in ballads and later 
popular verse”, replaces an old-fashioned wording (‘sele’ = ‘happy’) found in the 
Trinity MS (Arngart 1955: 177). For the word ‘qued’, as the original OE sense of 
the word is ‘dung’ and in ME, “’bad or wicked person’, ‘the Evil One’, and ‘evil, 
mischief, harm’” (Arngart 1955: 177), Arngart (1942: 83) states that it seems to 
be forced into the context by the Jesus MS scribe and does not seem to fit it. 
This, again, shows the scribe’s efforts to modernise the text and to create 
rhyme although sometimes impairing it in terms of odd word choices. 
 All this advice, in the opinion of Cannon (2010: 416) does not seem 
so much as any noble advice but they “do sound, very much, like the words of a 
school teacher.” The same voice is heard also in the following sections. As the 
rest of the poem (all but the advice concerning women) consists of polite and 
fine advice given to nobility, the malevolence and a certain lack of sohpistication 
of the lines 247-342 somehow strike one as an odd supplement. Arngart (1942: 
76) notices a certain ‘monkishness’ in the style of writing of the scribe of The 
Proverbs of Alfred in, for example, the fact that he seems fond of “enlarging 
upon moral themes” (1942: 75). He also feels that although dealing with the 
subject of women in rather great detail, the “poet shows a misogynistic attitude 
that is the reverse of courtly and complimentary” (1955: 3).  
  
6.6 Lines 306-316 (Woman Is Deceitful; named as a separate topic by 
myself) 
 
Mony appel is bryht wiÞ-vte, 
and bitter wiÞ-inne; 
so is mony wymmon 308 
on hyre fader bure; 
schene vnder schete, 
and Þeyh heo is schendful. 
So is mony gedelyng 312 
godlyche on horse, 
and is Þeyh lutel wurÞ ;…  
wlonk bi Þe glede 
and vuel at Þare neode.’ 316 
(Punctuation as in the original. At the end of line 314 Skeat notes with 
punctuation as well as a footnote, that there seems to be a line missing here.) 
 
A rough translation is as follows: 
42 
 
Many an apple is fair on the outside  
and bitter on the inside 
as is many a woman 
in the lady’s chamber of her father 
beautiful under the sheet 
and yet she is disgraceful. 
So is many lowborn companion 
excellent on a horse, 
and is, nevertheless, of little worth; 
fine by the fireside 
and lousy at the time of need. 
 
 
Also these lines are a part of the section 17 in the Jesus MS, but in the longer 
Trinity MS they form a separate section starting with the phrase “Þus queÞ 
Alured”. Of the first two lines (“Mony appel is bryht wiÞ-vte / and bitter wiÞ-
inne”) Arngart (1955: 174) states that only the Jesus MS “preserves this proverb 
in its original form”. It is an alliterating couplet (Arngart 1955: 41) and has 
“regular alliteration between bryht and bitter” (Arngart 1955: 175). The 
alliteration is spoiled in the other MSS with an added line after the two: “briht on 
beme/leme” (bright in the sunlight, Skeat 1907: 61) (Arngart 1955: 41). The 
proverb is found for example in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and it exists 
in addition in German language (ibid.). Arngart (1955: 41) continues that there 
are also more proverbs of similar sense in other languages and offers the 
example “All that glitters is not gold.” The proverb in Finnish is “Ei kaikki kultaa, 
mikä kiiltää.”  
 For line 309, “on hyre fader bure”, there are controversial 
explanations. A reason for this is that in the Trinity MS it reads “in hire faire 
bure” (Borgström 1908: 13; Skeat 1907: 31; underlining added). Skeat has, in 
the edited text (ibid.) corrected the word ‘faire’ for ‘fader’ in brackets.  Borgström 
comments on the word ‘faire’ as follows: “I think the original reading was fader 
[which Skeat also has; my shortened version of Borgstöm’s text].” (1908: 58). 
For ‘bure’, Borgström (1908: 56) states that: “[bure] is especially applied to a 
lady’s private apartment”. Hence, they both seem to agree that the meaning is 
something like ‘in their own lady’s chamber which is owned by their father’, i. e. 
'in their father’s household'.  
 Contrary to Borgström’s and Skeat’s opinion that line 309 reads ‘on 
hyre fader bure’, I would have accepted also the sentence as saying ‘on hyre 
43 
 
faire bure’ as it would then read in Modern English something like ‘her fair (here: 
‘lovely’ or perhaps ‘bright’) maiden’s chamber’. With this reading, the implication 
that many women are first stated to be ‘beautiful on the outside and ugly on the 
inside’ would be enhanced by describing them ‘beautiful when covered under a 
veil in their fair chambers and yet disgraceful below the surface’ when you truly 
get to know their alleged nature. Nevertheless, also Arngart (1955: 48) sees 
‘faire’ as an error, justified by ‘fader’ in all the other MSS, but concludes that the 
word ‘wymmon’ may be an error as well. The discussed couplet does not 
contain rhyme or alliteration and following Arngart (ibid.), the absence of both 
may indicate corruption. He suggests (1955: 48) that for 'wimman' there should 
be 'burde' ('bride'; another word for 'woman') to create alliteration with 'bure'.  
Nevertheless, “if so, the error must have occurred in O1 too, the original 
common to the extant texts, for it is shared by them all.” (Arngart 1955: 48).  
 For line 315 Skeat suggests that ‘bi Þe glede’ should read as 
“beside the glowing coal, i.e. by the fireside” (1907: 62). Borgström (1908: 75), 
on the other hand, explains the lines followingly: “proud in mirth but miserable in 
need” deriving ‘glede’ from the Old English ‘glæd’ (gladness). He (ibid.) 
continues that “[p]roud vows, made at a merry party […] were often contrasted 
with the performance of them in the hour of danger” and offers examples of 
other old works of literature where the same stylistic device is applied. For the 
purpose of this thesis I have settled for Skeat’s explanation because firstly, this 
meaning of ‘glede’ (= fire, fireside) is also found in the MED and secondly, the 
word choice is also shared by the Cotton MS (Arngart 1955: 43). In a way also, 
the sense as ‘at the fireside’ could in the following way be considered to cover 
the ‘merry party’ that Borgström mentions above; there is a possibility in for 
instance many inns and taverns for people to gather around the fireside to enjoy 
the evening and the lines, in my opinion, refer to companions that may not be 
too familiar but may still be good and merry company in various kinds of social 
gatherings. A further reason is that the lines also refer especially to companions 
of low birth and, as it is mentioned, The Proverbs of Alfred are directly aimed at 
highborn noblemen and church officials. This, in my opinion, implies that the 
fast-made comrades that one may get in various social situations are still not 
equal to the high nobility who not only seem fine but can, contrary to the 
lowborn, also be trusted to be true to their word even ‘at the time of need’.  
44 
 
6.7 Lines 317-328 (Avoid Women's Advice; as named by Skeat 1907) 
 
Þus queÞ Alured:  
‘[N]Eure Þu, bi Þine lyue, 
Þe word of Þine wyue 
to swiÞe Þu ne aréde. … 320 
[Skeat notes with punctuation and a footnote that there seems to be a line 
missing here] 
If heo beo i-wreÞÞed 
myd worde oÞer myd dede, 
wymmon wepeÞ for mod 
oftere Þan for eny god; 324 
and ofte, lude and stille, 
for to vordrye hire wille; 
Heo wepeÞ oÞer-hwile, 
for to do Þe gyle. 328 
 
A crude translation of the above lines is as follows: 
 
So says Alfred: 
Never thou, in thy life, 
the word of thy wife  
too greatly listen.  
If she is angered 
with words or deeds, 
a woman weeps for anger 
rather than for any good reason; 
and often, in all circumstances 
for to promote her desire; 
She weeps at various times 
for to deceive you. 
 
 The explanation for the lines 318-26 offered by Skeat (1907: 62) is 
“Never do thou, in thy life, too seriously take as your counsel the word of thy 
wife. If she be angered by word or deed, a woman weeps for temper, oftener 
than for any good; and often, in all cases, in order to further her will”. In the 
translation, the part “oftener than for any good” seems odd, but a newer 
translation provided by Arngart (1955: 181) also adds the word “reason” (“For 
when (if) she becomes angry through words or deeds, woman weeps for rage 
rather than for any good (reason) and, aloud and soft, to further her wishes.”) 
which makes the sense of the lines much clearer.  
 
45 
 
 For the line 318, “[N]Eure Þu, bi Þine lyue”, Arngart (1942: 84) 
states that it is probably added later as there is no counterpart for that in the 
Trinity MS and also no paired line in the Jesus MS. There is also, again, a 
rhyme in the Jesus MS between the words ‘lyue’ of the added line and ‘wyue’ 
on the following. Hence, it may be an alteration of the scribe or it may also be a 
consequence of “corruptions […] in the original” (Arngart 1942: 84) The same 
kind of advice as in lines 318-20 is also found in other works of literature, mainly 
old Latin texts (Arngart 1955: 181) and thus the recommendation (= never in 
your life take the words of your wife too seriously) can be for the purpose of this 
thesis be considered proverbial in the traditional sense.  
 For the last word of the line 320, “to swiÞe Þu ne aréde”, Skeat 
offers in his glossary the modern English wording “accept as counsel [or] agree 
to” (1907: 62) whereas Borgström (1908: 61) offers a glossary translation 
“hear”. In short, Borgström’s translation is “Do not listen too much to the words 
of thy wife” (1908: 61). Aréde, as explained in the MED online (s.v. “arēden”, v.), 
directly means “to form or render an opinion, make a conjecture or guess”. As a 
whole, should one want to be as precise as possible, the line is “take as an 
advice too earnestly”. For ‘lude and stille’ on line 325, Skeat offers the following 
explanation: “Lude and stille, ‘loudly and silently’; a common adverbial 
expression, meaning ‘under all circumstances’[.]” (Skeat 1907: 62). The next 
line (326; for to vordrye hire wille) rhymes with lude and stille, and according to 
Arngart (1955: 42), the Jesus MS is the only one retaining the original form 
vordrye ('to further, promote'), replaced for example in the Trinity MS with a 
word wurchen ('to carry out'). Vordrye, he continues (ibid.), is rather rare a word 
whereas the substituted wurchen is more commonplace, and it also impairs the 
wanted sense of the line (ibid.).  
 For the oÞer-hwile on line 327, possible translations are ‘now and 
then’, ‘sometimes’, ‘occasionally’, and ‘at various times’ (MED, s.v. “while” →  
“ō̆ ̣̆ther-whīle”, adv.), of which the first and the last refer to time intervals 
relatively short, and those also seems to suit the context in providing an often 
deceitful image of a woman. The rhyming Old French word gyle (= deceive) on 
the last line seems to be a substitution (Arngart 1942: 90) for the original biwilen 
of the same meaning in the Trinity MS. Arngart (ibid.) states that biwilen 
“rhymes with hwile [on the previous line] […] and alliterates with wepeÞ” so this 
46 
 
substitution seems to be made purely because of word-modernisation as it does 
not create any new rhyme. For the two last lines, “she weeps sometimes only to 
deceive you”, parallels “of similar content [can be found] from Latin, French, 
Scand[inavian] and English sources[.] […] ‘A girl’s word shall no one trust, nor 
that which a woman speaks’; […] Ther is no trust in woman’s saw, No trust faith 
to belefe[.]” (Arngart 1955: 182). Nevertheless, although parallels exist, the 
phrase does not as such seem to be proverbial in the traditional sense.   
 As for the general message of the section, I would like to draw the 
attention again to Mieder's example on page 20 of this thesis (Mieder 1993: 65): 
“Women naturally deceive, weep and spin” and his statement that almost all 
proverbs even mentioning women show women in negative light (ibid.). The 
Proverbs of Alfred employs the Eve-style picture of a woman and, I find, also 
downgrades the person of a woman in the way he suggests (Mieder 1993: 65). 
Mann (2002: 57) states, that antifeminist writing in Medieval tradition was 
recurrent and drew force from still earlier works of literature. She lists the Book 
of Solomon to be one such (ibid.) work. The Book of Solomon is, coincidentally, 
also used in The Proverbs of Alfred as a 'source' for a statement on lines 329-
330 (below in section 6.8). She continues that there are, in addition, various 
other texts, which include a number of what Mann calls ”antifeministic proverbs 
and anecdotes” (Mann 2002: 57). One of the examples provided by Mann 
(2002: 57) is Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves. The Book of Wikked Wyves is a 
fictional book mentioned in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and contains 
various stories about treacherous women and the unhappy marriages caused 
by their behaviour. 
 For the purpose of this thesis, the fact that there is a fictional 
misogynous book inside a fictional work of Early Middle English literature, is 
important. It, on one hand, speaks on behalf of satire and ridicules misogynous 
attitudes by exaggerating them, and, on the other, reinforces the fact that 
misogynous texts were not unusual in the Middle Ages (Mann 2002: 26). I argue 
that the fact that misogyny is ridiculed and treated with irony proofs that the 
people in Middle Ages did in fact, on the contrary, view women with respect. It 
is, in my opinion, not a proof of a misogynous society but a proof of the 
opposite, as the fictional Book of Wikked Wyves is a source of humour and 
sarcasm and thus indicates that a work such as that would have been regarded 
47 
 
as laughable. We come back to the idea of Weeks (2010: 1, see page 22 of this 
thesis) in that as 'crime fiction' is not literature for promoting crime: In this light, 
misogynous literature is not literature for promoting misogyny. 
 
6.8 Lines 329-342 (Women's Counsel Is Cold; As named by Skeat 1907) 
 
Salomon hit haueÞ i-sed, 329 
Þat wymmon can wel vuelne red. 
… 
… 
Þe hire red foleweÞ, 
heo bryngeÞ hine to seorewe. 332 
For hit seyÞ in Þe l[e]oÞ, 
“as scumes, forteoÞ”; 
hit is ifurn iseyd, 
Þat “cold red is quene red”; 336 
hu he is vnlede 
Þat foleweÞ hire rede. 
Ich hit ne segge nouht for-Þan 
Þat god Þing [n]ys gid wymmon, 340 
Þe mon Þe hi may icheose 
and icouere over oÞre.’ 
(Punctuation as in the original.) 
 
Once more, a rough translation on the lines above: 
 
Salomon it has said, 
That woman knows well evil advice. 
He who follows her counsel 
she brings him to sorrow 
For it says in the Song 
how women deceive 
it is long since said 
that “a cold advice is a woman’s advice” 
oh, how he is miserable  
he, who follows her advice. 
Nevertheless I say 
that a good woman is a good thing  
provided a man could get to know her 
and choose her from among other women. 
 
Before going further in the analysis of this section of the poem, I would like to 
draw the reader's attention to a detail. For the last statement of the section, 
Skeat has in his edition of the Jesus MS Skeat provided [n]ys (line 340), 
48 
 
whereas Arngart in his much later edition (1955) has provided ys (Cannon 
2010: 413-414, 431). The use of ys would, however, change the meaning to be 
“I do not say therefore that a good woman is a good thing when a man can 
choose her and win her over others” (Cannon 2010: 414). The use of ys, in this 
context, is clearly an error because with that there is no real point to the 
sentence and thus I argue the negation [n] indeed needs to be provided, as 
Skeat does. 
 On the lines 329-330, there is a reference to King Solomon, who, 
as mentioned before, was considered a wise speaker and an originator of many 
proverbs. Here he is claimed to have said that “women know well some evil 
advice”. Mentioning him here adds authority for King Alfred's utterance and, 
hence, a strong element of apparent truth for the citation. Nevertheless, 
although in The Book of Solomon the proverbial content is similar to that of The 
Proverbs of Alfred, the proverb is not found in the actual Solomon's proverbs. 
The proverbs of Solomon, like the ones of King Alfred, promote wise behaviour 
and acquiring wisdom and warn against foolishness. There are some that are 
about women, but the content in all of them seems to be either 'be a wise son in 
order to make your mother proud' or 'do not fall into temptation by strange 
women' [my summary].  
 On line 333, Skeat (1907: 62) has added the letter [e] in brackets 
as it originally, in the Jesus MS, reads only loÞ and he states it to be an error, 
the correct form being leoÞ, ‘a song’. This is also mentioned by Arngart (1955 
:182). The word in the Trinity MS is lede, which Borgström (1908: 61) also 
translates as ‘song’ but he also notes (ibid.) that although Skeat, in his note to 
this line translates “in Þe l[e]oÞ” as “in the song”, however in his glossary “in 
lede” (as in the Trinity MS) is translated as “among people”. This seems 
troublesome because Skeat is normally rather consistent in his notes 
considering both manuscripts. As he has offered an explanation of the 
misspelling of ‘l[e]oÞ’ and does not, in his explanatory section, offer any notes 
to the mentioned lede in the Trinity MS, I have decided to use the word ‘song’ in 
the final translation of the line. The following line (“as scumes, forteoÞ”) reads in 
Modern English, according to Skeat (1907: 62) “like twilight shadows, (they) 
mislead (us)”. He also mentions that the exact line is found in the New English 
Dictionary (nowadays: Oxford English Dictionary) under the word ‘fortee’. The 
49 
 
OED explanation is “to draw away (to evil): to seduce” (OED, s.v. “fortee”, v.). 
Skeat (1907: 62) continues that unfortunately the song from which the quotation 
comes is unknown.  
 Arngart (1955: 182) on the other hand, offers a more plausible 
explanation for the lines. He concludes that the word ‘scumes’ is probably 
corrupt (ibid.) as there has been various suggestions for its meaning. He 
mentions for instance “’?scum, bubbles’ […]; ‘dusk, twilight’ […]; ‘suggestion, 
persuasion, incitement’.” None of these is, in his opinion, completely satisfactory 
for various reasons and he concludes that “[t]he best suggestion is that of 
Brandl-Zippel’s glossary, which reads as cuenes [cuene, quene = woman; my 
addition] for as scumes: ‘It is said in the Song (the Book of Proverbs) as (how) 
women deceive’” (1955: 182). To support this view, I quote also Lapidge, who 
has written on the subject. He states that manuscripts of texts from Middle Ages 
are most often direct copies of an original but “have come down to us [having 
been] copied, usually many times” (Lapidge 2003: 107). Because of humane 
reasons, he continues, they may contain mistakes which may have been 
caused by eye-skip leading to omission or addition (ibid.). Other possible 
reasons are “miscomprehension of unfamiliar words and names, or voluntary 
errors caused by deliberate scribal interference (interpolation, emendation, and 
so on)” (Lapidge 2003: 107). In this light I find that 'as cuenes' is the most 
probable version of the possible translations.  
 The lines 335-6 (“hit is ifurn iseyd / Þat “cold red is quene red””) 
contain another allusion, this time directly to a recognisable proverb. According 
to Arngart (1955: 182) the word pair ‘iseyd / red’ can be considered a rhyme as 
such, but also, the original form of ‘iseyd’ may have been ‘i-sed’, which makes 
even a better rhyme. Line 335 reads: “it has long since been said” followed by 
“that a woman’s advice is a cold advice” on line 336. Skeat (1907: 62-63) states 
that the proverb “will be found in the Icelandic dictionary, s. v. kaldr : - ‘Köld eru 
opt kvenna-rāð,’ cold [fatal] are oft women’s counsels.” [punctuation as in the 
original]. He (1907: 63) continues that there is a corresponding Latin text, “uulgo 
dici consueuit, Consilium feminile nimis carum aut nimis uile” and mentions that 
Chaucer uses also this proverb in The Canterbury Tales (The Tale of 
Melibee)(Skeat 1907: 62; also Arngart 1955: 182). The translation for the 
50 
 
proverb is “[T]he counsel of women is either too costly or worth very little” 
(Chaucer 2011: 371) and it is also mentioned by Borgström (1908: 61).  
 Schieberle discusses the female councelor in her article "Thing 
Which a Man Mai Noght Areche": Women and Counsel in Gower's Confessio 
Amantis. Gower's work dates some hudred years after the Jesus MS of The 
Proverbs of Alfred, but, Schieberle has discussed about advice-giving by 
women in general and I find her study to be of much use. The Confessio 
Amantis, that Schieberle discusses, tells a story of a young lay woman who, at 
the end, ends up as a king's wife. The narrative, in short, tells of a masculine 
ruler of some sort, who is quick to judge and aggressive. The woman in the 
narrative is in a submissive but at the same time in a counselling position to the 
man and although not making a number out of herself, persuades and, gently 
guiding, tempers the man to reconsider cruel judgement and showing kindness 
to the less fortunate. (Schieberle 2007: 94-99). She is depicted as wise and 
kind, but also sly, making good use of her low social status and role, e.g. 
kneeling (signifying her low rank in front of those with more power) when it may 
further her cause (Schieberle 2007: 98). In the narrative, a woman is, contrary 
to The Proverbs of Alfred, seen as a remarkably good advisor. There are other 
contemporary literary texts as well, Schieberle (2007: 92, 96 etc.) notes, where 
woman's counselling is seen as a means to 'feminize' the leader in a good way. 
Women are, in other words, able, as more 'delicate' and emotional creatures, 
especially to inflict pity on their husbands and if needed, other decision-makers, 
for example in the court. Women are non-threatening and need not be seen as 
rivals (Schieberle 2007: 99).  
 Skeat, in the edition of the Jesus MS, records two lines missing in 
this passage (the dotted lines after line 330). In his edition of the Trinity MS 
version which is complete with no lines missing, he has the following: 
 
“Hue ne mai hit non oÞir don,  
for wel erliche hue hit bi-gan.” 
 
The lines translate roughly as “She cannot do otherwise / for she began it very 
early” (Arngart 1955: 182). Borgström (1908: 17) and Arngart (1955: 182) 
suggest that these lines, missing from the Jesus MS, refer to Eve, and it is easy 
51 
 
to see that it functions as a generic reference to every woman. The reference 
seems to be directly to the first woman giving a bad advice (Eve tempting Adam 
to eat the forbidden fruit) (Borgström 1908: 17), and also from this passage we 
can see the clerical influence on the writing of The Proverbs of Alfred 
(Borgström 1908: xvi; Rouse 2005: 24). Reference to Eve and her ‘evilness’, 
caused by committing the original sin, once again enhances the viciousness of 
all women. Furthermore, the line seems to suggest that the viciousness cannot 
fully be eliminated [“she cannot do otherwise”]. To me this suggests that in the 
compiler’s opinion the ‘evil quality’ obviously seems to be naturally hereditary. 
Arngart (1955: 182) suggests that the lines may be a scribe’s addition to the 
Trinity MS as they seem only “loosely inserted” and therefore the Jesus MS 
would have retained the original content of this section. 
 As stated, and as is clear to see, many of the attitudes towards 
women in 13th century literary texts spring up from the Bible, where it was Eve 
who, persuaded by the Devil, committed the original sin. It is not, then, a far-
fetched conclusion that women must be easily deceived (by the evil) and weak 
in understanding and faith, and hence it seems advisable not to trust a female 
and not to give them too much freedom. Clark (1997: 112-113) writes that even 
in the centuries following the Anglo-Saxon era, women were by general 
principle considered to be  
 
by nature weaker than men in respect to fundamental intellectual and 
psychological qualities and, hence, had […] ‘a greater facility to fall’. […] 
[T]heir ‘inordinate affections and passions’ made them resentful of 
authority and difficult to discipline so that they were always a potential 
threat to God’s order. The key to their wickedness lay, above all, in their 
carnal appetites, which were far greater than those of men. Women were 
thus feeble in mind and unstable in behaviour inherently imperfect 
creatures from whom evil and depravity were only to be expected. 
(Clark 1997: 112-113) 
 
 For the line 337, “hu he is vnlede”, I provide in the translation ‘Oh, 
how’ for ‘hu’. The word could be translated as only ‘how’ but according to the 
MED online, 'hu' (s.v. “hǒu”, interrog. adv.)  was also used in the sense of “(a) in 
what a way!; (b) to what an extent or degree!” in exclamations. As the 
exclamation sign left out in all the lines of The Proverbs of Alfred, I find this may 
be the way the poet has expressed an actual outcry. Furthermore, ‘vnlede’ also 
52 
 
rhymes with the ‘rede’ on the next line, which seems to reinforce the sense of a 
poetic exclamation. The lines occur only in the Jesus MS but seem to be 
authentic (Arngart 1955: 182).  
 At the very end of the sections studied in this thesis, on the lines 
339-342, we get to a sort of praise for good women. Of these, the first line, “Ich 
hit ne segge nouht for-Þan”, contains a double negative ‘ne - nouht’ but 
according to Skeat (1907: 63) this is “equivalent to a single negative”. Following 
Arngart (1955: 182) the actually redundant ‘ne’ “may be taken as a 
reinforcement of nouht”, and so that, in my opinion, puts weight on the acclaim 
and suggests, that the conclusion which is stated after the expression seems at 
least to some extent earnest and sincere. The two first lines (339-340) are 
translated by Skeat (1907: 63) as “I do not say this because a good woman is 
not a good thing” and the following lines (341-2) as “’for the man that may 
choose her, and gain (her) over others’, i.e. ‘as against other wooers’” (ibid.). 
According to Arngart (1955: 183), however, the word ‘over’, here, stands for ‘in 
preference to’.  Borgström’s slightly more complicated translation (1908: 61-62) 
is “I do not say it therefore (= I do not mean by these words) that a good woman 
should not be a good thing if a man (to a man who) only might know her and 
choose her from among others.” (A newer wording by Arngart (1955: 182) is 
“Nevertheless I say that a good woman is a good thing[…]”.)   
 Arngart (1942: 91), comparing the Trinity MS and Jesus MS, states 
that it is easier to accept the Trinity MS reading of these lines. In it, the last two 
lines are as follows (ibid.): “Þe mon Þat michte hire cnowen / ant chesen hire 
from oÞere.”, i. e., ‘The man that might know her and choose her from among 
others’ [my translation]. The reason for the acceptance is that, as seen above in 
Skeat’s translation, ‘i-cheose’ and ‘i-couere’ of the Jesus MS mean ‘choose’ and 
‘gain’ or ‘get’, correspondingly. Following Arngart (1942: 91), “The T[rinity MS] 
reading gives a better meaning, for the whole of the preceding portion of the 
section is to the effect that woman often deceives a man: it is therefore 
essential to know her before choosing her.” [Emphasis as in the original]. Lines 
339-342, as we can see, are not strictly a direct compliment but they are, 
nevertheless, a notion of the fact that there are also good women as opposed to 
the ones described in the other 91 lines. Arngart (1955: 3) summarises that 
after everything the poet has stated in the various sections on the ‘qualities’ of 
53 
 
women, he, at the end “- a little grudgingly it would seem - concedes that a 
good woman, provided she can be found, is a good thing[.]” It remains, 
however, an important duty for a man to choose the future wife carefully for as 
the rest of all the sections about women (ll. 247-338) show, it is told in detail 
what will happen if the man, for any possible reasons, makes a bad choice.  
 
7 ORAL RECITAL AND AUDIENCE 
 
Volk-Birke has studied Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and medieval 
preaching. The Canterbury Tales is approximately of the same age as the MSS 
of The Proverbs of Alfred and the style of The Proverbs of Alfred also seems to 
correspond Volk-Birke's themes (audience persuasion and oral preaching). For 
both these reasons I have used Volk-Birke as a reference. I also justify the use 
of The Canterbury Tales as a reference to the Jesus MS version of The 
Proverbs of Alfred because Arngart (1942: 76) uses of the scribe the term 
'reviser'. Arngart thus gives credit to the fact that the text of the Jesus MS, up to 
some extent, resorts to newer stylistic devices (e.g. rhyme) than the other MSS, 
and may have additions (more lines, loanwords etc.) that partly update the 
original text to a new century.  
 The sermon was in the Middle Ages the most important medium to 
influence people and instructions, explanations and encouragements to 
Christian ways were given using persuasion techniques – both emotional and 
rational (Volk-Birke 1991: 42-43). Timing and rhythm are important factors in 
preaching (Volk-Birke 1991: 57) as are also examples, that attract interest in 
listeners and keep up their attention (Volk-Birke 1991: 65), and, to help 
memorizing, repetition (1991: 205). Rhythm is easily achieved in The Proverbs 
of Alfred by using a poetical form (alliteration and, especially in the Jesus MS, 
rhyme), examples are widely available and repetition is provided in the 
beginning of each theme of the text as well as, in many sections, a small 
summary at the end of a topic. Volk-Birke continues to explain, that in narratives 
and sermons ”[a]uthorities are introduced [for example] by ”as seith... or - - ”I 
rede”, and variations of these (ibid.). The reference ”So says Alfred:” also 
follows the example.  
54 
 
 The poem's address and message closely resemble a sermon. 
Moreover, the poem seems remind a narrative such as The Canterbury Tales. 
These facts may suggest, that even though there is no sign of such, the text has 
been intended, besides reading, for recitation. According to Volk-Birke (1991: 
303): ”Obviously, there are no immediate records of medieval orality. […] 
However, we do know something about the delivery of [Chaucer's] works, since 
it was customary to recite to a circle of men and women from a manuscript, thus 
creating a communal situation which had some features in common with 
traditional orality.” Also Frank (2003: 154) suggests, that passing a harp or a 
lyre from hand to hand in feasts as to tell a tale was a typical custom of the 
Anglo-Saxon time. On behalf of oral recital it should also be noted that ”[i]n a 
society without widespread literacy - - preaching was the most important vehicle 
of teaching, be it the Scripture - - or catechetical information[.] (Volk-Birke 1991: 
26). Christian doctrine is seen as the absolute truth and oral citing was the most 
effective means to reach large amounts of people (ibid.).  
 If we consider The Proverbs of Alfred as a text for 'preaching' or, 
here, teaching, it would seem well considered for the scribe to add rhyme and 
alliteration. As there are only four surviving manuscripts of The Proverbs of 
Alfred, it will not as a written copy have reached all possible school pupils. It 
seems to me more likely that there has been a teacher who has recited the 
book and the pupils have been told to memorise the text. Therefore, oral citing 
could be a reason for revising the original in such large amount. Oral recital 
would have been, as stated in the above chapter, an effective means to reach 
all the pupils (or any possible audience) at once.  
 Normally, there are no real visible signs or markings in the texts of 
the Middle Ages, that they have been targeted for recitation. As Frank (2003: 
158) puts it, trying to find signs of that an Anglo-Saxon poem is intended for oral 
recital is as hard as trying to find their wooden buildings. They were there but in 
the centuries following the era they have vanished altogether (ibid.) so it is not 
possible to prove a poem is intended to be recited to an audience.  
 
 
55 
 
8 CONCLUSION 
 
I set out to write this thesis with an open mind as I had never before come 
across The Proverbs of Alfred. As stated in the introduction, I was not sure of 
how the text is meant to be received. My initial thought when browsing through 
the pages was that the poem is written primarily for entertainment. At the same 
time, however, another option I considered was that it is a work serving as a 
serious guideline for Christian life. It was hard to tell as there are elements of 
both; poetical teachings but also what I perceived to be certain sarcasm (e.g. 
poetic illustrations of a man with a lousy wife, wailing and weeping for his poor 
choice). The more I studied my source material, the more I came to conclude 
that the poem's primary aim is not serious guidance in life but entertainment 
and, on the basis of Cannon (2010: 415-416), perhaps school teaching.  
 In the end, Alfred, whether it be the real King Alfred or a fictional 
character made up for didactical purposes (Cannon 2010: 415-416), is a man 
talking to other men. There is no-one to feminize his thoughts (Schieberle 2007: 
92, 96) and as schooling and literacy were almost entirely the luxury of men, it 
is very probable that neither the writer of the original nor the scribe is a woman. 
The text is thus, in a way, all 'masculine'. Perhaps the composer had a need to 
enforce the targeting towards the male gender especially by removing femininity 
from the text, but the possible reason (if this ever was the case) remains a 
mystery. May the advice, given by men to men, deliberately accentuate the 
weakness of a counsel by a woman and if so, what for? Does it add more 
assertivity to men's advice? We can keep in mind the explanation given by 
Cannon 2010: 414: ”the bulk of Alfred’s ‘advice’ has no particular applicability to 
kings, courts, or a particular historical occasion, but is offered, rather, in the 
voice of a generalized age and experience to a generalized ‘youth’.” If this is a 
schoolbook, it is indeed written by men to men and the masculine style may 
seem effective when it comes to teaching young men. If this is a schoolbook, it 
also is one more reason to assume that it does not represent the normal 
everyday or the time of writing (or the time of King Alfred). Instead, it would be a 
text used for example on learning administrative and organisational skills as 
well as sheer reading and writing. 
56 
 
 As for genre, The Proverbs of Alfred is didactic poetry. Of what 
proverbial wisdom kernels are found in the stanzas (see page 24 of this thesis), 
only some can be classified as traditional proverbs. The title of the work, in this 
light, does not seem entirely appropriate. It is, nevertheless, understandable 
and well considered, and the most plausible explanation for titling seems to be 
the exploitation of a Biblical model (i.e. the Book of Proverbs; see page 21 and 
26 of this thesis; Cannon 2010: 415-416) as the poem consists of same kinds of 
“units of teaching” (Weeks 2010: 1).The religious taste of the title may perhaps 
increase the amount of interested readers and/or persuade a reader to easily 
adopt the ideas presented in the work. The reader may expect to get some 
good moral guidelines, yet The Proverbs of Alfred is first and foremost poetry, 
not guidance. The moral guidelines that are offered do follow the style of the 
guidelines in the Bible but seem not to be taken seriously. There is little humour 
as for how it is seen today but on the other hand, it cannot be said for sure what 
the reception for the text was like more than seven hundred years back. It is 
very similar to The Canterbury Tales (Volk-Birke 1991: 299) which, clearly, is 
not a work to promote wisdom or offer religious guidelines but to entertain and 
this seems to be the case also with the MSS' contemporary The Owl And The 
Nightingale.  
 Coming back to the discussion about currency and traditionality 
(see section 4.1 of this thesis, page 17 onwards), the 'proverbial extent' in The 
Proverbs of Alfred has had parallels in other works of literature of the time and 
has thus enjoyed currency at least among the more learned circles. On the 
whole the text on the ll. 247-342 has very little proverbial content in the 
traditional sense. If we consider the text of the poem not to consist of proverbs 
there would be little possibility to evaluate the lexicality and currency. However, 
if we expand the term 'lexicality' to cover the language understanding and 
familiarity, it can be argued that the style of the poem and of the text (and 
possibly topics) was in peoples' 'lexis'. This can also be applied to the ll. 247-
342, as also misogyny in literature was conventional and traditional (see page 7 
of this thesis), and thus the way of speech was in the language use of the 
people. Currency, followingly, is more easily proven: there were parallels to the 
MSS such as The Canterbury Tales, The Proverbs of Hendyng and The Owl 
and the Nightingale, which, even based on the amount of their many MSS, 
57 
 
seem to have been popular. The poems have a frame story inside which 
information is provided, and all contain life teachings. In this light I find the text 
has been current in its day.  
 Rouse (2005: 40) suggests that the poem could be considered a 
social commentary but as for the lines 247-342, in the light of Eve/Mary 
dichotomy being prevalent in writing (see pages 5-7 of this thesis) I disagree 
with him. There were two popular ways of writing about women and the 
composer has chosen the Eve-type, which probably does not reflect the real 
everyday at all. To a modern reader, the text may awaken dissatisfaction or 
irritation but it is to remember that it is not targeted to a modern reader and 
does not reach the audience the same way it did in the thirteenth century. If we 
keep in mind that misogyny was conventional in the literature of the Middle 
Ages (Mann 2002: 26), it was of course also familiar to the audience. Familiarity 
helps a listener to be able to identify with the topic, and misogynous style must 
have been an easy device to employ. This in turn, I find, may suggest, that the 
audience could well have enjoyed it and even wished for its appearance in 
literal texts.  
 The misogyny present in the text is not a direct attack towards 
women but a conventional style (Clark 1997: 117, Mann 2002: 26) of the 
literature of the Middle Ages. Social activism such as feminism, to stand up to 
women in literature, did not appear in centuries following the composing of The 
Proverbs of Alfred and even if it had, women were not the literate part of the 
society and in a position to be able to write about themselves (see page 30 of 
this thesis). On the part of the misogyny, this is one work of literature in a huge 
mass of texts, which deteriorates the value of woman and, as Mieder (1993: 70-
71) puts it, “[a]lmost every proverb that touches on women contains a severe 
negation of the value of women in society.” Written language (as well as citing) 
is even today a powerful tool for creating opinions and also prejudice. As 
mentioned above, (see page 35 of this thesis) agree with Mieder (ibid.) on that it 
will take a very long time to repair the damage misogynous proverbs have done 
to the social value of and the attitudes towards a woman.  
 The poem leaves me with questions considering the possible 
female audience. On audience in general, I find it hard to pinpoint any specific 
group of listeners for the text for there is 'something for everyone'; if the 
58 
 
audience would consist only of monks, why give fatherly advice to someone 
who has chosen to live without possessions or family? If it were targeted for the 
nobility, why give advice on the tasks of a priest to a knight? There are advice 
for raising up a child, about choosing a wife and about organising oneself a 
happy life in old age. It seems an impossible task to name one certain group for 
whom the poem is written to, but it is easy to say that literally it is not targeted 
for women. It offers no advice for them for any aspect of life although if aimed to 
entertain, the text may well be meant for them also. Nevertheless, with all this 
consideration, it seems to me quite plausible, that Cannon's suggestion above 
could be true: The Proverbs of Alfred could be in sort a 'general' work of 
literature indeed aimed for school teaching as well as, I think, oral citing for the 
pleasure of a group of hearers. We are restricted to some guesswork. 
 There is also another viewpoint in considering, whether The 
Proverbs of Alfred would most importantly be a schoolbook. Frank (2003: 153) 
writes that ”[w]e confuse the reconstructed [past in poems] […] with the far 
different world in which their authors lives and worked[.]”. We are prone to think 
that a Middle Age poem with a frame story of a knights and priests is also 
targeted for knights and priests; the subject of the poem in our minds easily 
becomes also the target audience (ibid.). Frank suggests that the idea is not 
realistic; instead, he argues, we might as well say that the target audience of 
Walt Disney's cartoons are ducks and mice (ibid.). Followingly, the idea that The 
Proverbs of Alfred is written as a guideline for nobility seems to be unrealistic. It 
does not really teach warcraft or the Bible, subjects, that might be of use for 
clerics or cavalry. Instead, also Frank's suggestions above give way to the idea 
that The Proverbs of Alfred is written for either as a schoolbook to be 
memorised easily or (or possibly, at the same time as) entertainment for lay 
audience. 
 On the ll. 247-342 it is repeatedly said that women are vile and 
deceitful and it is suggested that they should be kept busy in household and 
other chores in order to prevent them from intriguing and misbehaving. In other 
words, women have to be “managed” (Rouse 2005: 29), and the responsibility 
seems to first fall on fathers and later on, on husbands. As it was seen, The 
Proverbs of Alfred had one good thing to say about (some) women. However, I 
argue that in some aspects The Proverbs of Alfred has, rather, good things to 
59 
 
say about a man who is capable for making a good decision, as it is the man 
that needs to know and choose her. It is, as it were, and indirect praise of a 
woman who has proved herself to be worthy of appreciation. Besides this short 
expression of respect, nevertheless, the terrible warnings and grumpy advice 
for the 'choosing' cover all the rest of the ll. 247-342 of The Proverbs of Alfred; 
that is, the abovementioned recognition consists of four lines whereas the rest 
of the text considering women and their various faults extends to 91 lines.  
 In the end, I feel that the work did not change or affect the society 
in the way I started out believing. In my mind, I compared the poem with the 
catechism or a similar biblical text giving serious advice about the everyday and 
followingly considered it an influential text in terms of religion. However, the 
more material I read the more I came to realise it could not be compared with 
the such. According to Volk-Birke (1991: 42), many texts of the time were not 
directly supposed to teach people but to promote piety, a good Christian way of 
life and for example stir emotions and ”hold up models which were to be 
emulated”. Volk-Birke continues, that the importance and impact of texts is, 
nevertheless, not to be overestimated – for every literate and at all interested 
person who actually read any text there were masses of people who 
demonstrated no interest whatsoever.  
 It has been interesting but challenging to try to find studies of the 
feminine views and voices for the purpose of this thesis. At the same time, I 
came to realise that some views I wanted to find for a good discussion – 
women's own voice and perhaps their writings in which they would write about 
victorious and respectable women – just are not there. There is not, as stated 
above, almost any text written by women. There are, however, contradictory 
poetical images of women in the texts little younger than The Proverbs of 
Alfred, written by men. Slowly there emerged, besides Eve/Mary, also other 
ways of describing women in text. The scribes' contemporaries, for example 
Chaucer and Boccaccio, did not write of women as the composer of The 
Proverbs of Alfred. They wrote of women of more character, also of joyous and 
strong women (Mann 2002: 5-7) instead of vicious subjects that need constant 
monitoring.  
 The views of women's place in the society in Middle Age texts is 
one that hopefully can be, in the case of scarce material written by women, 
60 
 
studied further. I hope I have offered the reader at least some ideas on how it 
can and is being studied and what conclusions have been made based on the 
material that exists. The text does perhaps not reflect the everyday of the 
society but it does inform one about the literary traditions and textual and 
stylistic devices of its time. I hope the study of women and their voices in the 
literature of the Middle Ages continues and that more information on their real 
everyday can be found and abstracted.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
61 
 
Rerefences 
 
Primary sources 
 
Arngart Olof S. A:son 1942. The Proverbs of Alfred. I. A Study of the Texts. 
Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup. 
 
Arngart Olof 1955. The Proverbs of Alfred. II. The Texts Edited with 
Introduction, Notes and Glossary. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup. 
 
Borgström Edvard 1908. The Proverbs of Alfred. Re-edited from the 
manuscripts with an introduction, notes, and glossary. Lund: Håkan Ohlsson.  
 
Skeat, Walter W. 1907. The Proverbs of Alfred. Re-edited from the manuscripts. 
Oxford: Clarendon Press.  
Found online: https://archive.org/details/proverbsalfred00skeagoog/page/n6 
 
Secondary sources 
 
Cannon Christopher 2010. Proverbs and the wisdom of literature: The Proverbs 
of Alfred and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee. Textual Practic 24, no. 3: 407-434. 
Accessed 12 November 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502360903471862 
 
Chaucer Geoffrey 2011. The Canterbury Tales – Oxford World's Classics. 
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
 
Clark Stuart 1997. Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early 
Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997. 
 
Crépin André 1994. Mentalités anglaises au temps d'Henri II Plantagenêt 
d'après les Proverbs of Alfred. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 37: 49-60. 
 
Dalzell Alexander 1996. The Criticism of Didactic Poetry. Essays on Lucretius, 
Virgil, and Ovid. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.  
62 
 
Discenza Nicole Guenther 2005. The persuasive power of Alfredian prose. In 
Johnson & Treharne 2005. 122-135. 
 
Emery Robert E. (ed.) 2013. Cultural Sociology of Divorce: An Encyclopedia. 
University of Virginia: SAGE reference. 
 
Fanego Teresa, Méndez-Naya Belén & Seoane Elena (eds.) 2002. Sounds, 
Words, Texts and Change: Selected Papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de 
Compostela, 7-11 September 2000. Volume 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins 
Publishing Company. 
 
Fiedler Sabine 2007. English Phraseology: A Coursebook. Tübingen: Gulde. 
 
Frank Roberta 2003. The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet. In Scragg: 
137-160. 
 
Hill Thomas D. 2005. Wise Words: Old English Sapiental Poetry. In Johnson & 
Treharne: 166-182. 
 
Jewell Helen 1996. Women in Medieval England. Manchester: Manchester 
University Press.  
 
Johnson David & Treharne Elaine (eds) 2005. Readings in Medieval Texts: 
Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
 
Lapidge Michael 2003. Textual Criticism and the Literature of Anglo-Saxon. In 
Scragg: 107-136. 
 
Lutz Angelica 2002. When did English begin? In Fanego, Méndez-Naya & 
Seoane (eds.): 145-172.  
 
Nelson, Janet L., Susan Reynolds & Susan M. Johns (eds.) 2012. Gender and 
Historiography: Studies in the Earlier Middle Ages in Honour of Pauline Stafford. 
London: School of Advanced Study, University of London. 
63 
 
Mate Mavis E. 1999. Women in Medieval English Society. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
 
Matsuda Takami 1997. Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry. 
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.  
 
Mieder Wolfgang & Holmes Deborah 2000. Children and Proverbs Speak the 
Truth: Teaching Proverbial Wisdom to Fourth Graders. Vermont: The University 
of Vermont.  
 
Mumby Julie 2012. "Property Rights in Anglo-Saxon Wills: A Synoptic View." In 
Nelson, Reynolds & Johns: 159-74.  
 
Morey James H. 2005. Middle English Didactic Literature. In Johnson & 
Treharne: 183-197. 
 
Rouse Robert Allen 2005. The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English 
Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 
 
Scragg Donald (ed.) 2003. Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon 
England: Thomas Northcote Toller and the Toller Memorial Lectures. 
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 
 
Sternbach Ludwik 1974. Subhasita, Gnomic and Didactic Literature. A History 
of Indian Literature Vol. IV. Scientific and Technical Literature, Part I. 
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag.  
 
Weeks Stuart 2010. An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature. London: 
T&T Clark. 
 
Wood Diana (ed.) 2003. Women and Religion in Medieval England. Oxford: 
Oxbow Books. 
 APPENDIX 1: FINNISH SUMMARY 
Suomenkielinen lyhennelmä 
 
1 JOHDANTO 
 
Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena on valottaa 1200-luvun runoteosta The 
Proverbs of Alfred, jossa tarjotaan lukijalle elämänohjeita. Ohjeiden antajaksi 
teoksessa nimetään kuuluisa Alfred Suuri, jonka valtakausi oli 800-luvulla. Teos 
sisältää muun muassa ohjeita siitä, mitkä ovat ritarin tehtävät, miten kohdella 
toisia ihmisiä sekä ohjeita sopivan vaimon etsimiseen ja naisen kanssa 
elämiseen. The Proverbs of Alfred on kaksiosainen, mutta olemassa olevien 
neljän käsikirjoituksen sisällöt vaihtelevat suuresti ja ovat osittain hyvin 
puutteellisia. Tähän tutkielmaan on valittu MS Jesus College, Oxford, 29:n 
riveiltä 247-342 löytyvä osio, joka keskittyy yllämainittuun vaimon löytämiseen ja 
hänen kanssaan elämiseen. Syy valinnalle on se, että tutkielmaan oli tarpeen 
saada pitkästä teoksesta jokin tarkasti rajattu osa, ja lisäksi olin kiinnostunut 
siitä, miten The Proverbs of Alfred naisia kuvaa. Rivit 247-342 ovat ainoita, 
joissa nainen teoksessa mainitaan. 
 Tutkielmaa tehdessäni huomasin, että The Proverbs of Alfred:n 
naisista kertovat osiot ovat asenteeltaan hyvin misogynistisiä eli 
naisvihamielisiä. Tässä tutkielmassa pyrin tarjoamaan kommentointia ja 
lisätietoa siihen, mikä naisen sosiaalinen asema todellisuudessa oli ja millä 
tavoin The Proverbs of Alfred:n antama kuva mahdollisesti vastaisi todellisuutta. 
Tutkielmassani pohdin myös sitä, mikä teoksen todellinen tarkoitus lienee ollut 
sekä sitä, millaiselle yleisölle se on suunnattu. Lisäksi pyrin tarjoamaan 
yhteenvedon siitä, mitä eri tutkijat ja tekstin editoijat ovat kyseisten rivien 
sanavalinnoista ja mahdollisista käsinkopiointivaiheiden kirjoitusvirheistä 
kommentoineet.  
 
Sanan scribe käännöksenä käytetään tässä lyhennelmässä sanaa kirjuri, ja 
sanan manuscript käännöksenä sanaa käsikirjoitus. Sanan proverb 
käännöksenä käytetään sanaa sananlasku. 
 
 
 2 LÄHTEET JA TERMIT 
 
Käyttämäni lähteet ovat osin vanhentuneita, joten haluan perustella niiden 
valintaa. The Proverbs of Alfred on teksti, joka kiinnosti tutkijoita etenkin 1900-
luvun alkupuolella, ja kaksi käyttämääni editiota kommentteineen ovatkin 
vuosilta 1907 (Skeat) ja 1908 (Borgström). Vuonna 1955 siitä julkaistiin kattava 
kommentointi ja tutkimus (Arngart), mutta tätä myöhempiä lähteitä juuri tästä 
nimenomaisesta tekstistä on ollut haastavaa löytää. Saatavilla oli muutamia 
artikkeleita, mutta pääasiassa olen etenkin rivien kirjurivirheiden, kirjurin 
tekemien muutosten ja sanavalintojen kommentoinnissa The Proverbs of 
Alfred:n nojannut näihin kolmeen lähteeseen. 
 The Proverbs of Alfred:n kommentoinnissa usein käyttämäni termi 
”misogynistinen” ei nykypäivän mielleyhtymiltään vastaa täysin sitä, mitä se on 
1200-luvun kirjallisuudessa tarkoittanut. The Proverbs of Alfred käyttää 
misogynistä tekstiä ja kirjoitustapaa tyylikeinona, jota tuskin on tarkoitettu 
erityisen halventavaksi, saati todelliseksi ohjenuoraksi naisten kanssa 
elämiseen – keskiaikaisessa kirjallisuudessa misogynistinen kirjoitustapa oli 
tavanomaista (Mann 2002: 26) ja on todennäköisesti auttanut tekstin lukijaa tai 
kuulijaa samastumaan tekstiin ja nauttimaan siitä.  
 Keskiaikaisessa kirjallisuudessa asenne naisia kohtaan oli lisäksi 
hyvin raamatullinen: nainen nähtiin pääasiassa helposti houkutuksiin 
lankeavana, ns. ”heikompana astiana”, joka ei osannut itse tehdä hyviä 
päätöksiä ja oli taipuvainen pahantekoon ja vilppiin (Clark 1997: 114) (tässä 
tutkielmassa ns. ”Eeva”-tyyppi). Toinen mahdollinen kuvaustapa naisesta oli 
pyhimysmäinen (Mann 2002: 1) (ns. “Maria”-tyyppi). Juuret tällaiselle 
kahtiajaolle ovat jo antiikin Roomassa (ibid.) ja nämä kirjallisuudessa käytetyt 
kuvaukset ovat olleet suuressa osassa siinä, millaisia stereotyyppisiä käsityksiä 
naisista on olemassa (Mann 2002: 2; Mieder 1993: 71). Tätä “Eeva/Maria” -
kahtiajakoa käsittelen tutkielmani analyysiosiossa sekä yhteenvedossa 
tarkemmin. 
  
 
 
 
 3 THE PROVERBS OF ALFRED 
 
The Proverbs of Alfred -runoteos sisältää elämänohjeita, jotka on järjestetty 
osioihin. Yksi osio käsittelee yhtä aihetta. Esimerkiksi riveillä 247-342 osioihin 
lukeutuvat muun muassa Choose No Evil Wife (rivit 247-284) sekä Keep Thy 
Wife Busy (rivit 285-316). The Proverbs of Alfred:n käsikirjoituksista kaikissa on 
perusosa, joka koostuu 23 osiosta. The Proverbs of Alfred:sta on nykypäivälle 
säilynyt neljä käsikirjoitusta: MS Cotton Galba A. XIX; MS Maidstone Museum 
A. 13; MS Trinity College, Cambridge, B. 14. 39 sekä MS Jesus College, 
Oxford, 29. Näistä Trinity Collegen käsikirjoitus on pisin, ja sisältää The 
Proverbs of Alfred:n perusosan (ohjeita pääasiassa ylhäisölle ja papistolle sekä 
neuvoja vaimon hankintaan) lisäksi myös toisen kokonaisen osan (14 osiota), 
joka sisältää isällisiä neuvoja pojalle (ks. sivu 9). Toinen osio ei kuitenkaan 
tutkijoiden mukaan ole välttämättä alun perin ollut The Proverbs of Alfred:ssa 
vaan vaikuttaisi enemmänkin olevan myöhempi lisäys (Arngart 1942: 114). 
 Tässä tutkielmassa on käytetty Skeatin vuoden 1907 edition 
tekstiä, joka on MS Jesus College, Oxford, 29:sta (myöhemmin: Jesus MS). 
Analyysiosion numerointi vastaa Skeatin edition numerointia. Skeatin editio on 
löydettävissä kokonaisuudessaan verkossa (ks. lähdeluettelo). Syy tämän 
lähteen valintaan on se, että tutkijoiden mukaan Jesus MS vaikuttaa olevan 
kaikkein lähimpänä alkuperäistä tekstiä (Arngart 1955: 39; ks. Sivu 15-16). On 
mahdollista, että Jesus MS on eriytynyt The Proverbs of Alfred:n arkkityypistä 
eri aikaan kuin muut kolme käsikirjoitusta, ja siten edustaa kokonaan eri 
sukulinjaa. Tämä voisi selittää sen, miksi muissa teksteissä ilmenee enemmän 
virheitä ja esimerkiksi puutteita kopioinnissa (Arngart 40-49; ks. Sivu 15). 
 
4 SANANLASKUN MÄÄRITELMÄ 
 
Sananlaskut ovat lyhyitä lausahduksia, jotka sisältävät yleensä jonkinlaisen 
viisauden (Mieder 1993: 25). Käsite on epätarkka; on vaikea määritellä 
vaihtelurajoja sille, mikä voidaan määritellä sananlaskuksi ja mikä taas vastaa 
enemmän esimerkiksi selityksen tai pohdinnan määritelmää. Yksi vaikeus 
määritelmässä on se (Mieder 1993: 6), että sananlaskun odotetaan yleensä 
olevan jollakin tavoin ”perinteinen”. Sen oletetaan olevan myös vakiintunut 
 kieleen ja jossakin määrin aktiivisesti tunnettu ja käytössä (Fiedler 2007: 21 ja 
Mieder 1993: 6), jotta se voidaan kategorisoida nimenomaan sananlaskuksi. 
The Proverbs of Alfred:n aikalaisissa on samankaltaisia sanontoja kuin itse 
teoksessa (Arngart 1955: 7-8), joten vastaavien sanontojen ja kirjallisuudessa 
esintyneiden asenteiden voidaan olettaa olleen yleisiä sillä hetkellä, kun 
teoksen arkkityyppi on tehty. Kaikki sanonnat eivät kuitenkaan tunnu täyttävän 
varsinaisen sananlaskun määritelmää, ja yhteenvedossa pohdin tarkemmin sitä, 
voiko The Proverbs of Alfred:a todella kutsua sananlaskukokoelmaksi vai 
pitäisikö se kategorisoida ennemminkin didaktisten eli opettavien runojen 
kategoriaan.     
 Sananlaskut voivat käsitellä mitä tahansa elämänpiirin aiheita, 
kuten ystävyyttä tai lasten kasvatusta. Samalla ne helposti saattavat sisältää 
myös erilaisia arvoja. Naisiin liittyvät sananlaskut ovat hyvin usein halventavia, 
ivallisia tai jopa vihamielisiä (s. 18-19). Vaikka tällaiset koetaan nykyään 
sopimattomaksi, niissä näkyvät asenteet ovat tuttuja myös nykyään, vaikka niitä 
käytetäänkin kenties enemmän huumorimielessä kuin varsinaisina neuvoina. 
Monia naisia koskevia sananlaskuja on myös muokattu nykyajan ilmapiiriin 
sopiviksi ja naisia kunnioittavammiksi (Mieder 1993: 70-71; s. 20), esimerkkinä 
”A woman’s place is in the House… and in the Senate!” (s. 20), mutta näistä 
huolimatta misogynististen sananlaskujen aiheuttamaa vahinkoa naisten arvolle 
on hankalaa ja hidasta korjata. 
 
5 'ALFREDIN SANANLASKUN' MÄÄRITELMÄ 
 
Kuten yllä on kerrottu, The Proverbs of Alfred ei sisällä pelkästään sananlaskuja 
vaan ennemminkin ohjeistusta ja opetusta. Tämä on tyypillistä didaktiselle 
kirjallisuudelle. The Proverbs of Alfred sisältää ajatelmia, jotka ovat hyvin 
samankaltaisia kuin sananlaskut, mutta joille ei löydy mitään suoraa vastinetta 
muusta aikalaiskirjallisuudesta. Lisäksi jokaisessa osiossa on alkuasetelma (ks. 
tarkemmin esimerkkejä sivuilta 27-47), neuvoja sekä varoituksia heille, jotka 
eivät kyseistä neuvoa noudata. Usean lauseen kokonaisuus ei varsinaisesti 
täytä sananlaskun määritelmää (Arngart 1955: 1, ks. myös yllä). Osioissa tuntuu 
olevan tietynlainen ”sananlaskullinen ydin” (Cannon 2010: 414), mutta tarkempi 
luokitus teokselle on yllä mainittu didaktinen kirjallisuus sekä viisauskirjallisuus. 
 Viisauskirjallisuudelle ominaista on se, että sitä sanelee joku 
yleisesti viisaaksi määritelty taho. The Proverbs of Alfred:n tapauksessa 
opettajana toimii Alfred Suuri, jota on usein (myös The Proverbs of Alfred:ssa) 
kutsuttu viisaaksi ja hyväksi hallitsijaksi (Skeat 1907: 4; rivit 19-24 sekä Rouse 
2005: 20-21). Tästä kertoo myös se, että Alfred Suuri mainitaan sananlaskujen 
ja elämänohjeiden kertojana muissakin teoksissa (esimerkiksi The Owl and the 
Nightingale) (Arngart 1955: 7-8) sekä se, että hänet on The Proverbs of 
Alfred:ssa nostettu päähenkilöksi, vaikka Alfredin hallinnon (800-luku) ja 
teoksen arkkityypin kirjoittamisen (1200-luku) välillä aikaa on kulunut noin 400 
vuotta.  
 
6 ANALYYSI (Rivit 247-342; Skeatin editio vuodelta 1907) 
 
6.1 Rivit 247-257 (Choose No Evil Wife, s. 27-30) 
 
Naisia käsittelevän osuuden ensimmäisessä osiossa annetaan miehelle 
varoituksia siitä, miten pieleen tulevan vaimon valinta voi mennä. Osiossa 
käsitellään muun muassa sitä, mitä omaisuutta nainen voi avioliittoon tuoda ja 
kerrotaan, että tätä ei kuitenkaan tule käyttää perusteena vaimon valinnassa. 
Ulkopuoli voi pettää. Mieluummin kuin luottaa ulkokuoreen miehen tulisi 
tutustua naiseen ja hänen todelliseen luonteeseensa, jonka nainen ”näyttää 
pian”. Lähtöoletuksena on, että nainen on petollinen ja huijaa miehen uskomaan 
olevansa jotakin parempaa kuin aidosti on. 
 Uskonnolliset tahot oletetusti odottivat ja määrittivät, että naisen tuli 
käyttäytyä hillitysti ja siveästi, ja käytösihanteena olivat raamatussa mainitut 
hyveelliset naiset (Jewell 1996: 18; s. 30). Kyseisistä määritelmistä ja niiden 
vastaavuudesta keskiajan arkeen ei ole olemassa naisten kirjoittamia lähteitä, 
koska naiset olivat lähes kokonaan luku- ja kirjoitustaidottomia. Sen lisäksi, että 
naiset nähtiin alisteisena ihmisryhmänä, joiden käytöstä määrittelivät miehet, 
heillä ei myöskään ollut mahdollisuutta vaikuttaa vallitseviin käsityksiin. Koska 
avioliitto oli useimmille naiselle välttämättömyys toimeentulon turvaamiseksi, 
oletan, että asetettuihin normeihin oli hyödyllistä myöntyä. Lisäksi uskon, että 
normeihin sopiva käytös siirtyi myös helposti äidiltä tyttärelle, eikä sitä juurikaan 
kyseenalaistettu. 
 6.2 Rivit 258-267 (Choose No Evil Wife, s. 31-33) 
 
Rivit 258-267 jatkavat edellistä teemaa ja sisältävät kuvauksen siitä, mikä 
seuraus ohjeen uskomatta tai tottelematta jättämisellä on. Lyhykäisyydessään 
runossa näillä riveillä todetaan useaan kertaan, että se, joka huonon vaimon 
valitsee, tulee elämässään onnettomaksi. Koska avioliitto oli naiselle 
välttämättömyys toimeentulon turvaamiseksi, naisten oli syytä elää 
mahdollisimman moitteettomasti ja hyväksyttävällä tavalla. Toinen tapa 
toimeentulolle oli ryhtyä nunnaksi, joka antoi naiselle tietynlaisia vapauksia – 
esimerkiksi mahdollisuuden hankkia luku- ja kirjoitustaitoa – mutta sisälsi myös 
uskonnon vuoksi tiukempia rajoituksia kuin normaali elämä luostareiden 
ulkopuolella. Vaimot olivat ikään kuin miestensä alaisuudessa samoin kuin 
nunnat olivat viime kädessä papiston ja kirkon johtajien alaisuudessa, eli 
varsinaisesti vapaita naiset eivät olleet kummassakaan tapauksessa.  
 
6.3 Rivit 268-284 (Choose No Evil Wife, s. 33-35) 
 
Rivit 268-284 ovat Skeatin aiheotsikoinnista huolimatta eri osiota kuin kaksi 
edellistä. Otsikoinnin virheellisyys johtuu Skeatin edition (1907) sivujaosta, 
jossa kyseisellä otsikolla merkityllä sivulla alkaa kuitenkin jo uusi osio. Riveillä 
268-284 kerrotaan siitä, kuinka terävä kieli naisella on. Miestä neuvotaan 
olemaan kertomatta vaimolleen kaikkia asioitaan, koska nainen voi pienistäkin 
miehen vastoinkäymisistä johtuen alkaa piinata ja sättiä miestä. Nainen ei voi 
kontrolloida puhettaan, vaikka toivoisi niin. 
 
6.4 Rivit 285-295 (Keep Thy Wife Busy, s. 35-39) 
 
Osiossa Keep Thy Wife Busy käsitellään naisen luontaista taipumusta 
laiskuuteen ja pahantekoon. Vaimo tulee pitää kiireisenä kotitöissä, jotta hän ei 
ehdi paneutua ilkeyksiin tai saada ilkeitä ideoita liiasta vapaa-ajasta johtuen. 
Samaa aiheuttaa myös ylimielisyys, joten tekstin mukaan ”kotitöissä hikoilu” 
tekee nöyräksi. Tässä osiossa on mahdollisesti viittaus kahteen sananlaskuun. 
Ensiksi osion viimeisillä riveillä (294-295) lukee: ”Þeyh hit is vuel to buwe / Þat 
beo nule treowe”. Tutkijat eivät ole olleet yksimielisiä siitä, mihin kyseisillä 
 riveillä tarkalleen ottaen viitataan (s. 37-38). Todennäköisimmin kyse on joko 
viittauksesta samantyyliseen sananlaskuun kuin ”nuorna vitsa väännettävä” 
(Borgström 1908: 58-59), jolla tässä tarkoitetaan sitä, että nainen pitää pienestä 
asti opettaa tottelevaiseksi, tai vanhahtavasta tavasta todeta, että on vaikea 
taivuttaa sitä, mikä ei ole luotu taipumaan.   
 Toiseksi osiosta löytyy sananlasku, jossa todetaan vapaasti 
suomennettuna, että “Paholainen löytää toimettomille käsille tekemistä” (s. 38). 
Kristinoppi on siis yhtenä perusteena myös siinä, että The Proverbs of Alfred:n 
mukaan nainen tulee pitää kiireisenä. Nainen on raamatun käsityksen mukaan 
kuitenkin vilpillinen ja tottelematon (ns. kirjallisuuden Eeva-tyypin 
lähestymistapa naiseen, ks. yllä). 
 
6.5 Rivit 296-305 (Keep Thy Wife Busy, s. 39-41) 
 
Rivit 296-305 jatkavat samaa osiota kuin rivit 285-295. Riveiltä 296-297 löytyy 
eri muodossa sananlasku “Like father like son”, joskin tässä esimerkkinä on, 
negatiivisessa mielessä, käytetty naista: riveillä todetaan, että nainen seuraa 
äitinsä esimerkkiä. Myös tässä voi huomata The Proverbs of Alfred:n 
misogynistisen asenteen: tekstissä ei anneta ymmärtää, että hyväkäytöksinen 
ja lempeä nainen kasvattaa samanlaisia tyttäriä vaan, että huonokäytöksinen, 
laiska ja pahantekoon taipuvainen nainen kasvattaa samanlaisia tyttäriä. 
  
6.6 Rivit 306-316 (Woman Is Deceitful, s. 41-44) 
 
Riveillä 306-316 tarjotaan vertauksi sille, kuinka ulkonäkö ja iloinen luonne voi 
pettää – todellisuus ihmisestä paljastuu myöhemmin ja on jotain täysin muuta. 
Riveiltä löytyy eri muodoissaan sananlaskuja, jotka suomeksi kääntyvät 
esimerkiksi “ei kaikki kultaa, mikä kiiltää” tai “moni kakku päältä kaunis”. Lisäksi 
myös näillä riveillä todetaan, että isiensä valvonnan alaisuudessa nainen voi 
vaikuttaa hyväkäytöksiseltä ja kauniilta, mutta pinnan alla totuus onkin täysin 
päinvastainen. 
 6.7 Rivit 317-328 (Avoid Women's Advice, s. 44-47) 
 
Osiossa, joka löytyy riveiltä 317-328, käsitellään sitä, kuinka naisen neuvoon ei 
voi luottaa. Runon ohjeiden ja varoitusten mukaisesti: jos nainen jostakin syystä 
vihastuu, hän itkee vihasta, ja hän itkee myös saadakseen tahtonsa läpi, joka 
tilanteessa sekä tehdäkseen kiusaa miehelle. Mieder (1993: 65, s. 20, 46) 
toteaa, että lähes jokainen sananlasku, jossa nainen mainitaan, kuvaa naisen 
negatiivisessa valossa. Vaikka misogynia oli keskiaikaisissa kirjoituksissa 
tavallista (Mann 2002: 57), siitä saatettiin myös tehdä pilaa ja liioitella sitä (s. 
46-47). Tämä kertoo mielestäni siitä, että misogynistinen asenne tekstissä ei 
vastaa todellisuutta.  Jos tietynlainen negatiivinen asenteellisuus (tässä: ns. 
Eeva-tyyppi, ks. yllä) nähdään ja kuvataan naurun aiheena, se kertoo 
enemmänkin todellisuudesta, jossa ihmiset uskovat naisen olevan arvokas ja 
tärkeä yhteiskunnan jäsen.  
 
6.8 Rivit 329-342 (Women's Counsel Is Cold, s. 47-53) 
 
Riveillä 329-330 viitataan kuningas Salomon viisauksiin, jonka jälkeen 
raamatullisessa hengessä varoitetaan jälleen naisten neuvojen seuraamisesta. 
Salomon sananlaskut mainitsemalla The Proverbs of Alfred hakee omille 
viisauksilleen lisää auktoriteettia (s. 48) vaikka todellisuudessa kyseistä tai edes 
kyseisen kaltaista sananlaskua ei Salomon sananlaskuissa ole. Riveillä 335-
336 on viittaus aitoon sananlaskuun: islannissa on sananlasku “kylmä neuvo on 
naisen neuvo”. Nainen kuvataan siis jälleen välinpitämättömäksi ja 
tunteettomaksi. Schieberle (2007: 92-99) on tutkinut sitä, miten nainen on nähty 
neuvonantajana. Hän (ibid.) toteaa, että esimerkiksi teoksessa Confessio 
Amantis (iältään noin sata vuotta nuorempi kuin Jesus MS) nainen nähdään 
hyvänä neuvojana, joka saa kovasydämisen kuninkaan osoittamaan lempeyttä 
ja armollisuutta vähäosaisille ja “feminisoi” mieshallitsijaa. Nainen kuvataan 
viisaana, kilttinä ja myös hyvällä tavalla ovelana (s. 50); hän käyttää alhaista 
sosiaalista asemaansa hyväkseen näyttääkseen nöyrältä ja saadakseen niin 
neuvojaan paremmin läpi. 
 Sivulla 50 mainitaan Jesus MS:stä puuttuvat kaksi riviä, joilla 
toisessa käsikirjoituksessa (Trinity MS) lukee suomeksi: “hän ei voi tehdä toisin, 
 koska hän jo varhain näin aloitti”. Tässä on jälleen viittaus raamattuun ja 
Eevaan, joka kiellosta huolimatta söi kielletyn hedelmän ja sai aikaan 
karkoituksen paratiisista. Nainen ei pysty kieltämään tai muuttamaan luontoaan, 
joka periytyy aivan alusta asti. 
 
7 RUNONLAUSUNTA JA YLEISÖ 
 
Volk-Birke on tutkinut tapaa, jolla keskiaikaisessa tekstissä vedotaan yleisöön. 
Hänen esimerkkeinään ovat saarnaaminen sekä The Canterbury Tales. 
Samankaltaisia elementtejä yleisön vakuuttamiseen löytyy myös The Proverbs 
of Alfred:sta. Yleisöön vedotaan muun muassa kertomalla viisauksien lähde 
(auktoriteetti) sekä toistamalla tärkeäksi koettuja opetuksia (s. 50). The 
Proverbs of Alfred hyödyntää keskiaikaisen saarnauksen keinoja ja toisaalta 
sisältää hyvin samanlaisia elementtejä kuin kertomakirjallisuuden teos The 
Canterbury Tales. Volk-Birke ehdottaa (1991: 303), että vaikka 
runonlausunnasta ei löydy teoksista konkreettisia merkkejä, The Canterbury 
Tales (sekä, lisään, The Proverbs of Alfred) voivat hyvin todennäköisesti olla 
suunnattuja nimenomaan yleisölle luettavaksi. Ääneen lukeminen oli keskiajalla 
kaikkein tärkein opetustapa, koska sillä tavoitettiin suuri määrä ihmisiä eikä 
vallinneesta lukutaidottomuudesta muodostunut estettä tekstin tuntemiselle 
(Volk-Birke 1991: 26). 
 Cannon (2010: 414-416) kokee, että The Proverbs of Alfred voisi 
alkujaan olla laajan yleisön sijasta tarkoitettu koulukirjaksi. Tämän puolesta 
puhuu se, että se paitsi muistuttaa saarnaa, sisältää runollisia elementtejä 
(alliteraatio, rytmi, riimit), jotka helpottavat kuullun muistamista. Lisäksi 
Cannonin (2010: 414) mukaan The Proverbs of Alfred ei tarjoa mitään 
varsinaisia opetuksia papistolle tai ritareille vaan ennemminkin kertoo iän 
mukanaan tuomia huomioita ja opetuksia ja pyrkii siirtämään tällaista tietoa 
nuoremmalle sukupolvelle. Myös tämä voisi puhua sen puolesta, että kyseessä 
on koulukirja, jota olisi voitu käyttää esimerkiksi puhtaasti lukemisen ja 
kirjoittamisen oppimiseen, mutta koska keskiaikaisesta runonlausunnasta tai 
ääneen lukemisesta ei ole säilynyt teoksessa minkäänlaista merkintää, sen 
alkuperäistä tarkoitusta on mahdotonta yksiselitteisesti osoittaa (Frank 2003: 
158). Kenties teos on suunnattu monenlaisille yleisöille. 
 8 YHTEENVETO 
 
Kun lähdin tutkimaan teosta The Proverbs of Alfred, en heti tiennyt, onko sen 
tarkoitus olla vakavasti otettava vai onko se tehty huumorimielessä. Johtuen 
tietynlaisesta sarkasmista ja humoristisista esimerkeistä (huonon vaimon 
valinnut surullinen mies, joka kovin suree ja valittaa huonoa valintaansa) sekä 
runollisista elementeistä (esimerkiksi riimit) oletan, että kyseessä on 
viihteellinen runo, joka on myös saattanut palvella koulukirjana (Cannon 2010: 
414). 
 Puhuja, Alfred Suuri (tässä teoksessa fiktiivinen tai todellinen), on 
mies, joka antaa neuvoja toisille miehille. Naiset ovat neuvojina täysin 
poissuljettuja ja kukaan ei ”feminisoi” puhujan neuvoja. Voiko tähän olla syynä 
se, että miehille annettuna ”maskuliinisilla” neuvoilla on enemmän arvoa ja 
auktoriteettia? Kenties maskuliininen tyyli olisi voinut toimia hyvin koulukirjassa, 
koska koulutus tavoitti nimenomaan nuoria miehiä. Kirjaimellisesti tekstissä on 
jotakin melkein jokaiselle; ohjeita kirkonmiehille, ylhäisölle ja sotilaille. Naisille 
suoraan kohdennetut ohjeet tai kannustus puuttuvat. Pääasiassa kuitenkin 
neuvot ovat melko yleisluontoisia ja myös yleistietoa: ihmisiä kehotetaan 
pelkäämään ja kunnioittamaan Jumalaa, ottamaan esimerkiksi köyhät 
huomioon, kuuntelemaan päälliköitä ja heidän antamiaan neuvoja sekä muuta 
vastaavaa. Nämä sopivat todellisuudessa yleisiksi elämänohjeiksi kenelle 
tahansa. 
 Huolimatta niistä sananlaskuista, joita tekstissä on, tekstiä ei voi 
kategorisoida sananlaskuiksi. Tältä osin otsikko ei siis vastaa sisältöä. Teos on 
kuitenkin viisauskirjallisuutta, ja samankaltaista siltä osin, että myös 
sananlaskujen odotetaan yleisesti ottaen kertovan lyhyitä ja ytimekkäitä 
viisauksia. Sananlaskujen myös odotetaan usein olevan sisäistettyjä ihmisten 
kulloiseenkin kielenkäyttöön. The Proverbs of Alfred:n kohdalla näyttäisi siltä, 
että vähintäänkin misgynistinen tapa kuvata naista on nimenomaan tuttua kirjan 
aikalaisille ja sisäistynyttä heidän puheessaan. Voi myös olla, että koska tyyli oli 
niin tavanomaista (Clark 1997: 117, Mann 2002: 26), ihmiset ovat keskiajalla 
jopa toivoneet sellaista kirjallisuudessa. Tällainen arvomaailma on tunnettu 
myös nykyään ja kuten Mieder (1993: 70-71) toteaa, misogynististen 
sananlaskujen vaikutuksien korjaamiseen menee todennäköisesti pitkään. 
  Riveillä 247-342 kerrotaan naisen lukemattomista huonoista 
puolista ja neuvotaan, miten häntä pidetään kurissa. Viimeisillä neljällä rivillä 
(339-342) annetaan naisille kuitenkin lievä tunnustus: vapaasti suomennettuna 
”en sano tätä siksi, etteikö hyvä nainen olisi hyvä asia, jos mies vain voi 
tunnistaa ja saada hänet.” Väitän kuitenkin, että tämäkin kehu kohdistuu itse 
asiassa enemmän mieheen. Tekstin piiloviesti on ikään kuin se, että mies, joka 
osaa valita hyvän (normeja noudattavan) naisen, on hyvä ja viisas mies. Naista 
ei niinkään kehuta vaan todetaan yleisluontoisesti, että heitä on olemassa 
hyviäkin. 
 Todennäköisesti The Proverbs of Alfred:lla ei ollut sellaista 
yhteiskunnallista vaikutusta kuin alun perin luulin. Vertasin sitä lähinnä 
katekismukseen, mutta mitä pidemmälle asiaa tutkin, tulin enemmän siihen 
tulokseen, että teoksen tavoite on viihde tai kouluopetus. Naisen asemaa 
tukevia lähteitä on tutkielman kannalta ollut haastava löytää, ja tärkein syy on 
se, että naisten kirjoittamia tekstejä ei ole. Naiset, jos miehetkään, eivät 
keskiajalla pääsääntöisesti olleet luku- ja kirjoitustaitoisia, ja säilyneistä 
kirjoituksista kaikki ovat joko miesten tai ylhäisönaisten tai korkea-arvoisten 
nunnien tekemiä. Tavallisen kansan naisista ja heidän arkipäivästään kertovia 
luotettavia lähteitä ei löydy. 
 Ajan kanssa kertomakirjallisuuden tyyleihin tuli enemmän 
variaatiota kuin Eeva/Maria -kahtiajako. The Canterbury Tales:ssa naisia 
kuvataan myös iloisina ja vahvempina hahmoina ilkeiden ja petollisten vaimojen 
sijasta, ja nykyajan kirjallisuudessa The Proverbs of Alfred:n tyyli kuvata naisia 
tuntuisi, oikeutetusti, hyvin vanhentuneelta. Toivon, että naisten sosiaalisen 
aseman tutkiminen jatkuisi ja lisää tietoa heidän arkielämästään keskiajalla 
voitaisiin löytää ja yhteenvetää teoksista, joissa naiset ihmisryhmänä mainitaan.