The Myth of Orpheus in the Work of Notker III of St Gall (with a Look Back at the Translation by Alfred the Great)

Abstract

The paper will examine the reworking of the myth of Orpheus by Notker III of St. Gallen in his annotated translation of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. As is well known, the myth of Orpheus has spanned all ages from antiquity to the present day and represents one of the greatest and most important cycles of European culture. The myth of Orpheus is not static or immutable; on the contrary, its strength lies in its adaptability over time. A vast repertoire of elements is therefore available that form a whole that can be summarized under the label “Myth of Orpheus”. In 1997 S. Sonderegger published an essay on Orpheus in Notker, mainly focused on the problem of sentence structure, alliteration and stylization of the final rhyme – all aspects of style, completely neglecting the interesting content aspects of Notker’s reworking. In fact, if Boethius was the first Latin author to develop an ethical allegory of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the doctissimus magister of St. Gall fits in an original way into the multi-faceted Christian reinterpretation of the myth, which in the Germanic linguistic area had begun with the translation into Old English, commonly attributed to King Alfred the Great. The proposed analysis will deal with the reworking of the myth of Orpheus in Notker: the interpretations of ancient mythology (Tantalus, Titius, the Danaids, Sysyphus); the figure of Eurydice, the role of quotations from classical literature (Virgil’s Eclogues) and from the Gospel of Luke, the hitherto unnoticed points of contact between the poem of Orpheus and the central poem III, IX of the Consolatio, the (possible) use of commentaries (“Anonymous of St. Gall” and Remigius).