The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on October 22, 2008
The Review of English Studies 2009 60(245):339-370; doi:10.1093/res/hgn146
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press 2008; all rights reserved
Suicide in the Works of Ælfric
University College Dublin
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Abstract |
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This article deals with the treatment of suicide in the works of Ælfric (c.950–c.1010). Suicide in the Middle Ages has recently been the subject of a two-volume study by Alexander Murray but he does not deal in detail with the period before 1000; this article attempts to remedy this deficit for one late Anglo-Saxon author. After an overview of how suicide was regarded in the early Middle Ages, Ælfric's treatment is considered in three parts: the suicides of biblical characters (those he omits as well as those he treated), the suicides of characters in texts concerned with saints (in his Catholic Homilies II texts for the feasts of St Stephen, St Matthew and St Martin) and, finally, a very suggestive passage in which he links fasting and suicide. The immediate sources for each of these passages are considered, as are other texts which appear to have influenced Ælfric's thinking. He evidently had at his disposal texts which took very different stances on suicide and, in some cases, as in the Life of St Martin, his own thinking seems to have been at odds with that of his source. How he negotiated these tensions is therefore revealing about his views on the matter. Ælfric's stance appears to have been a hard-line one, opposed to any concessions which would mitigate the guilt he attached to suicide. He knew, however, and occasionally drew on, the influential pronouncements on suicide in the group of texts associated with Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690; these texts took into account the mental state of the person who took his or her own life and proposed various concessions with regard to burial rites depending on the circumstances. In linking fasting with suicide, Ælfric appears to have in mind the kind of suicidal delusions associated with excessive fasting in Cassian's Conlationes; he was clearly unwilling to discuss these in any detail but his cryptic allusion to the link between fasting and self-harm is in keeping with his suspicions about the ascetic solitary life. The article concludes by considering Ælfric's choice of word for a suicide; his preference was for agenslaga, recorded in his work only, at the expense of the seemingly more common sylfcwala.