Although co-existing in a single manuscript, Genesis A (ll. 1-234; 852-2936) and Genesis B (ll. 235-851) derive from disparate traditions.53 Nevertheless, the poets similarly explicate the fall of the angels by presenting the rebellion as an etiology for law, lordship, and the normal order of society for Anglo-Saxon culture. Eduard Sievers first reported that the Old English Genesis contained a metrically and lexically unique section which resembled the Old Saxon Heliand.54 As Andrew Cole observes “Sievers named this material Genesis B as a means to distinguish it from the surrounding poetry, which he termed Genesis A.”55 On philological grounds alone, Sievers concluded that Genesis B was derived from an Old Saxon original.56 Remarkably, Sievers’s hypothesis was later confirmed when Karl Zangemeister discovered several fragments of Old Saxon biblical poems, none other than Genesis and the Heliand, at the Vatican Library. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Palatinus Latinus 144757 contained 337 lines of verse, twenty-six lines of which were virtually identical to the Old English Genesis B.58 Such strong
53 As early as 1809, John Josias Conybeare postulated that there was interpolated material in the Old English
Genesis poem found in Junius 11; John Josias Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. William Daniel
Conybeare (London: Hardin and Lepard, 1826), 190-197.
54
Eduard Sievers, Der Heliand und die angelsächsiche Genesis (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1875).
55 Cole, “Jewish Apocrypha and Christian Epistemologies,” 155.
56 For more on the relationship between Genesis B and the Old Saxon Genesis and the latter’s dating see Doane, The
Saxon Genesis, 43-55 and R. Derolez, “Genesis: Old Saxon and Old English,” English Studies 76 (1995): 409-423.
See also Bernhard Bischoff, “Paläographische Fragen deutschen Denkmäler der Karolingerzeit,”
Frühmittelalterliche Studien 5 (1971): 101-134 who dates the fragments to the third quarter of the ninth century.
57 Karl Zangemeister and Wilhelm Braune, “Bruchstücke der altsächsichen Bibeldichtung aus der Bibliotheca
Palatina,” Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher 4 (1894): 205-294. Zangemeister found these fragments in 1894; they had been languishing at the Vatican Library since 1623.
58 This word-for-word overlap occurs at the beginning of Pal. Lat. 1447 (ll. 1-26a) and the concluding episode of
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correspondence suggests that these poems share a common source or lost exemplar that was perhaps much longer than either extant Genesis.
According to best estimates, the Old Saxon Genesis was composed c. 850. The original text then circulated within Carolingian households and extracts were eventually copied at Mainz on the Rhine c. 875. In all probability, the extant Old Saxon and Old English Genesis texts are separated by roughly one century. A copy was conceivably in England c. 850-900, but perhaps not transcribed into the West Saxon dialect until slightly later.
The unconventional arrangement of Junius 11 raises some important questions about textual transmission in the early medieval world. Why was an Old Saxon text brought to England? Why was it translated into Old English and later sandwiched into the narrative of
Genesis A? Finally, why did an Anglo-Saxon compiler feel it necessary to include the story of
the fall of the rebel angels once in Genesis A and then once more in Genesis B? Arguments addressing these issues were first put forth by Alois Brandl in 1908,59 and have proven to be enduring questions. Both Robert Priebsch60 and C. L. Wrenn61 have suggested that the
interpolation was made to aesthetically “enhance” the Genesis A narrative. Scholarship implying that Genesis B was interpolated because it was of “a much better quality than Genesis A”62 has been generally dismissed, particularly since Barbara Raw’s codicological discovery that Genesis
59 Alois Brandl, Die Angelsächsische Literatur, in Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie, ed. Hermann Paul, 3
vols. (Strassburg: Trübner, 1901-1909), 1090; for a further account of this see B. J. Timmer, The Later Genesis (Oxford: Scrivner, 1948), 15.
60 Robert Priebsch. The Heliand Manuscript Cotton Caligula A VII in the British Museum: A Study (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1925).
61 C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London: Harrap, 1967).
62 Peter J. Lucas, “Loyalty and Obedience in the Old English Genesis and the Interpolation of Genesis B into
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B was not initially adjoined within Genesis A, but was inserted into the codex during a repair to
make up for the loss of some of Genesis A’s pages over time.63
Aside from the codicological questions surrounding the interpolation, which as Renée R. Trilling points out “are quite likely due to the vicissitudes of textual transmission rather than to the plan of a knowing author,”64
there remains the curious fact that the story of the fall of the angels is a twice-told tale and that, in its second telling, it is the product of a narrative digression or flashback. While the dates of composition of both Genesis A and Genesis B remain unknown, Leslie Lockett’s recent comprehensive re-dating of Junius 11 to the period c. 960-99065
means that its production coincided with the Benedictine Reform (c. 964-984), an historical moment which saw a revived interest in the narrative of the fall of the rebel angels as well as a re-
imagination of the idea of kingship in Anglo-Saxon England under the aegis of King Edgar. As I have shown in Chapter One, Edgar dealt with a state of emergency within the ecclesiastical hierarchy through a sovereign exception; appealing to God’s expulsion of the angels as his precedent, Edgar revoked lands and privileges of clerics who were themselves cast as “rebels” driven only by desires and appetites that opposed the will of God.66 In a period that saw a revitalized commitment to conforming to rules in priestly, monastic, and public circles, Anglo-
63 Barbara Raw, “The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Junius 11,” ASE 13 (1984): 133-148; see also Doane, The
Saxon Genesis, 30-34.
64 Trilling, Aesthetics of Nostalgia, 70.
65 Leslie Lockett, “An Integrated Re-examination of the Dating of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11,” ASE 31
(2002): 141-173.
66
The Benedictine reformers were interested in capturing past principles of behavior to combat negligence and clerical abuse within communities and English Christianity more broadly. The Carolingian concept of norma
rectitudinis or a ‘standard of righteousness’ or ‘rule of uprightness’ became an ideal for clerics in particular. On this
concept in Carolingian thought, see Josef Fleckenstein, Die Bildungsreform Karls des Grossen als Verwirklichung
der Norma Rectitudinis (Freiburg im Breisgau: E. Albert, 1953), 7-23. See also M. A. Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula Canonicorum in the Eighth Century, Cambridge Studies in
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Saxon authors found a compelling precedent for their existence in the construct of the rebel angel as developed in texts like Genesis A and B.67