Introduction

The Metres of Boethius is a versification of selections from the Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius's wildly-popular work De Consolatio Philosophiae, a work often attributed to the translation program of King Alfred the Great. The proem of the work claims that the Metres are the work of the king himself, and many scholars have taken the claim as fact (and there's really no reason to believe or disbelieve it).

The Metres consist of 32 poems, and are found in two versions: London British Library Cotton MS Otho A.vi, an incomplete parchment manuscript which was badly damaged in the fire at Ashburnham House, and Oxford Bodley Library MS Junius 12, a paper manuscript transcription of Otho by Franciscus Junius in the late seventeenth century. Junius is the only record of many of the individual lyrics.

The collection of poems is not a complete rendering of the metra of Boethius's work, and are presented in a very different order from the original. This is because the Metres were made from the Anglo-Saxon translation, which compresses much of Boethius and presents material taken from Latin commentaries on the Consolation as integral parts of the tract. An example of this usage of the commentaries can be found in the first poem of the Metres, which versifies a traditional introductory description of the events that led to the composition of the Consolation.

The poems of the Metres of Boethius are presented in posts organized by their number in the manuscript.

The text of the poems is taken from George Philip Krapp's 1932 edition published in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series. So far I have not been able to locate a more recent edition than this.