Although Alfred had saved his kingdom, yet it was a kingdom almost in ruins.  The hopeful advance of culture had been entirely arrested.  The great centres of learning had been utterly destroyed in the north, and little remained intact in the south.  And even worse than this was the demoralization of all classes, and an indisposition to renewed effort.  There was, moreover, a great scarcity of books.

Alfred showed himself as great in peace as in war, and at once set to work to meet all those difficulties.  To supply the books that were so urgently needed, he found time in the midst of his perplexing cares to translate from the Latin into the native speech such works as he thought would supply the most pressing want.  This was the more necessary from the prevailing ignorance of Latin.  It is likely that portions of the works that go under his name were produced under his supervision by carefully selected co-workers.  But it is certain that in a large part of them we may see the work of the great Alfred’s own hand.

He has used his own judgment in these translations, omitting whatever he did not think would be immediately helpful to his people, and making such additions as he thought might be of advantage.  Just these additions have the greatest interest for us.  He translated, for instance, Orosius’s ‘History’; a work in itself of inferior worth, but as an attempt at a universal history from the Christian point of view, he thought it best suited to the needs of his people.  The Anglo-Saxon version contains most interesting additions of original matter by Alfred.  They consist of accounts of the voyages of Ohtere, a Norwegian, who was the first, so far as we know, to sail around the North Cape and into the White Sea, and of Wulfstan, who explored parts of the coast of the Baltic.  These narratives give us our first definite information about the lands and people of these regions, and appear to have been taken down by the king directly as related by the explorers.  Alfred added to this ‘History’ also a description of Central Europe, which Morley calls “the only authentic record of the Germanic nations written by a contemporary so early as the ninth century.”

In Gregory’s ‘Pastoral Care’ we have Alfred’s closest translation.  It is a presentation of “the ideal Christian pastor” (Ten Brink), and was intended for the benefit of the lax Anglo-Saxon priests.  Perhaps the work that appealed most strongly to Alfred himself was Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’; and in his full translation and adaptation of this book we see the hand and the heart of the good king.  We shall mention one other work of Alfred’s, his translation of the already frequently mentioned ‘Historia Ecclesiastica Anglorum’ of the Venerable Bede.  This great work Alfred, with good reason, considered to be of the greatest possible value to his people; and the king has given it additional value for us.

Alfred was not a great scholar.  The wonder is that, in the troublous times of his youth, he had learned even the rudiments.  The language in his translations, however, though not infrequently affected for the worse by the Latin idiom of the original, is in the main free from ornament of any kind, simple and direct, and reflects in its sincerity the noble character of the great king.