Æthelweard (historian)

Æthelweard ( Ethelward ) was an Anglo-Saxon historian . He was the great-grandson of Æthelred , brother of Alfred the Great , and Ealdorman or " Earl of the Western Provinces", which is probably Wessex .

Life

He is first mentioned as dux or ealdorman 973 and appears until 998, after which he must have died. In 991 he and Archbishop Sigeric the Serious of Canterbury negotiated a peace treaty with the Danes who were victorious at Maldon . Together with Bishop Alfheah of Winchester , Æthelweard was sent to King Olav I Tryggvason in Andover in 994 to make peace with him.

Æthelweard was the author of a Latin chronicle that goes back to 975. Up to the year 892 he followed the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in his work , supplemented by a few details of his own, followed by his own work. Æthelweard gave himself the bombastic title of Patricius Consul Quaestor Ethelwerdus . His style of language is very stilted, and since he also tried to be shorter than Tacitus , his descriptions are often somewhat obscure.

Recent research has shown the cause of Æthelweard's peculiar style in Latin . Æthelweard wrote his work in Latin at the instigation of the Essen abbess Mathilde , although he himself probably preferred the language that is now known as Old English. His history served to enable Mathilde to commemorate the dead of the English ancestors of her sex.

Æthelweard was the friend and patron of Ælfric Grammaticus .

literature

• Elisabeth van Houts: Woman and the writing of history in the early Middle Ages: the case of Abbess Matilda of Essen and Aethelweard. In: Early Medieval Europe . 1, 1, 1992, pp. 53-68, doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0254.1992.tb00004.x .