The Consolation of Philosophy

[German] Philol.), I have enough to do in commemorating these interpreters and commentators.¹)

It is established that King Alfred, when translating the Consolation into Anglo-Saxon, had at his disposal a commentary or, rather, a paraphrase composed by Bishop Asser, who was the king's tutor no earlier than 880. Schepss²) demonstrated that a certain similarity exists between Alfred’s version or paraphrase and the scholia attached to the Consolation, having inserted specimens of that old commentary into the Würzburg program of 1880/81 (pp. 32–37), which he took from codex W, where a continuous commentary (which he marked with the letter K) follows the Consolation, and from the Munich manuscript 19.452 (Y).³) The same scholar believes this commentary was completed before 890 and was available to Asser. Upon investigating the author of the commentary, neither the metrical genres of Lupus of Ferrières nor the words of Trithemius—for information on the imitators and authority of the text, see chapter five of this preface.