On the date, provenance and relationship of the ‘Solomon and Saturn’ dialogues

Although recently the object of renewed scholarly interest, the ‘Solomon and Saturn’ dialogues remain among the most enigmatic of Old English works. To some extent the problem resides in their strange subject-matter and hyperbolic style, exemplified by grotesque personifications of the letters of the Pater noster , endless enumerations of its extraordinary attributes, and the esoteric, Middle-Eastern background attributed to the speakers Solomon and Saturn. But hardly less daunting are the textual difficulties posed by the primary surviving manuscript, and the manner in which modern editors have handled them. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422 is composite, the first two quires of which (pp. 1–26), dating from the mid-tenth century, contain the Old English. Within these two quires the sequence of texts is as follows: a poetic dialogue of 169 lines on the Pater noster (pp. 1–6); followed without a break by a prose dialogue on the same subject, ending abruptly at the end of p. 12 (coinciding with the loss of a leaf); and another poetic dialogue of 335 lines on various aspects of time, nature, good and evil, also ending abruptly, at the end of p. 26. Yet in the editions of Menner and Dobbie the arrangement of texts is altogether different: the prose section is removed and labelled a separate work; and the verse is divided into two discrete poems. The effect, almost inevitably, has been to create a perception of three independent, even unrelated, works.