The driving principle behind this book is that the differences between the OEHE and its source are revealing and important. An anonymously translated vernacular history that circulated in England from the earliest phases of Old English prose to the Norman Conquest and beyond, the OEHE engages and deploys Bede's voice and authority, but presents a shorter version of Bede's great work with different emphases. Readers who believe that the chief duty of a translation is to transmit the content of its source text with absolute fidelity (whether word by word or sense by sense) may disagree with some of the methods by which Bede's translators transformed their source. As I show in my Introduction, however, there was an active debate about the art and nature of translation in Anglo-Saxon England. Bede's translators combined lexical precision with a sometimes Latinate syntax to create a text that has been both praised for its poetic skill and criticized for being unidiomatic and too literal. Although this combination seems paradoxical at first glance, analyzing the text more closely reveals the translators' deep knowledge of Latin and creative, flexible, often pointed use of English.

Historically, the fact that the translators had these skills becomes important in a way that transcends the debate about fidelity in translation. The very existence of the OEHE challenges King Alfred's famous claim that Latin learning had fallen off completely south of the Humber.