SOME TIME TOWARDS the end of the tenth century, the Winchester-trained scholar and future abbot of Eynsham, Ælfric, completed his translation of Genesis. One of the topics discussed in his preface to this, which takes the form of a letter to his patron Æðelwærd, is the way in which he has translated Latin words and phrases into English. Of the scripture's title, he declares:

Although this may not be the first use of ‘gecyndboc’ in English – it is also offered three times as a gloss for ‘geneseos’ in manuscripts of Adhelm's De virginitate III – Ælfric presents it here as a word which might be expected to be unfamiliar to his audience, or at least to merit an explanation, and the etymological explanation he provides is telling both of his attitude towards English and the way in which it relates to Latin. Firstly, his dissection of the word suggests that English is a language established enough, and robust enough, to withstand the type of etymological scrutiny more commonly given to Latin, and contains sufficiently ample resources to create a new compound word out of existing vocabulary which is capable of conveying the title of a sacred work of scripture. Secondly, Latin is presented as an uncompromisingly foreign language in relation to English. There is no attempt, as we saw in some of the French texts in Chapter 1, to offer an Anglicised version of the Latin word. Rather, an English calque is offered, which, Ælfric tells us with the mathematical precision of an equation, ys Genesis (‘Genesis […] ys “gecyndboc”’).

In Germanic-speaking areas, Latin had always operated as a conceptually distinct foreign language, and was necessarily learned as such. The undeniable need for linguistic translation rather than transferral generated a greater translation-awareness in Germanic writers wishing to make Latin learning available in their own languages, and necessitated a more rigorous approach to the task than anything seen in contemporary Romance-speaking Europe.