GREATEST BOOK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 August 1942, Page 2

GREATEST BOOK

MASTERPIECE IN ENGLISH

LANGUAGE

SUCCESSIVE STAGES REVIEWED.

ROTARY CLUB ADDRESS.

“How Britain got her Greatest Book,” was the title of an interesting and informative address given at the Masterton Rotary Club luncheon today by the Rev. A. T. Thompson, M.A., B.D. Mr Thompson traced the gradual stages by which the Latin Bible was transformed into the masterpiece in the English language—representing not the work of one man but rather a growth to which many hands contributed. Specimens were displayed to illustrate these stages. The first step, said Mr Thompson, was taken by a humble peasant, Caedmon, a cowherd at Whitby Abbey in 675, and was in the form not of exact translation but of poetic paraphrase, belonging to the interesting period of Teutonic minstrelsey. This “Milton of our ancestors” .thus laid the foundation of our literature in verse. His poetry was in truth the only Bible of the Anglo-Saxons. The next contribution was from the hands of a scholar, possibly the greatest of his time in Western Europe, the Venerable Bede td. 735). He translated the Gospel of St. John into Anglo-Saxon and thus laid the foundation of our literature in prose. Then followed the work of King Alfred the Great, who prefaced his “Book of Laws” with a translation of the Ten Commandments, other portions from Exodus and the first piece of Christian legislation as contained in Acts 15 (23—29). His work represented “the earliest extant portion of Scripture in Anglo-Saxon prose.” Soon after this certain portions of Scripture, as contained in the Liturgy, were rendered in English, as was also three well-known versions of the \ Gospels, namely, “The Lindisfarne” (1000) in the Northumbrian dialect,” the Rushworth” (1030), with Matthew in the Mercian dialect, and the Wessex, which, unlike the others, appeared in Anglo-Saxon alone, without the accompanying Latin text. These represented the earliest extant translations of the Gospels into English. About this time, said Mr Thompson, Abbot Aelfric presented certain paraphrase versions of the narrative books of the Old Testament—of great literary interest. The Norman conquest, because of the introduction of Nor-man-French, served as a check upon the use of Anglo-Saxon as a literary medium. However, in the fourteenth century two complete translations appeared as evidence that English had come to its own as a literary language. All these efforts so far were broken and fragmentary . It was not until the appearance of John Wyclif (1325-1384), patriot, scholar, preacher and reformer, that they had for the first time a complete Bible in the English tongue. Wyclif’s Bible was no isolated literary phenomenon, but part of a general movement towards the expression in a national language of a growing sense of nationality and stood as the greatest monument in prose of such a movement. It was, however, only a translation of a translation and the last of the hand-written versions.

Between the times of Wyclif and Tyndale, said Mr Thompson, the next great translator, a change little short of a complete literary, intellectual and religious revolution had taken place. New creative forces had been liberated through the New Learning, the invention of printing, the manufacture of paper, the growth of nationalism, and the demand for reform. Tyndale grew up in the midst of these influences and was shaped by them. Greece rose from the dead with all her treasures of literature, art, and culture. Tyndale took from her hand the New Testament in the original Greek and rendered it in masterly English prose,, which proved a model for all future versions. From the original Hebrew he rendered a great part of the Old Testament. The influence of his work was readily detected in the versions of Coverdale, Matthews, the Genevan, and finally in the Authorised Version of 1611, the masterpiece in our English language, or as Quiller Couch put it in his brilliant Cambridge lectures: “The Authorised Version is not only intrinsically but historically out and away the greatest book of English prose. Our language, our literature, our laws, our liberties and our way of life are moulded by it as a people.”