One of the major Old English works produced during the reign of King Alfred (d. 899) was a translation of a history of the world written by Paulus Orosius (d. 420) as a defence against the charge that the adoption of Christianity and the neglect of the old gods had brought catastrophe upon the Roman Empire. Orosius's work is more polemic than history--a dreary recital of the many calamities that had befallen the earth while Rome worshipped pagan gods. Nevertheless, it was enthusiastically read in the Middle Ages, which regarded it as an authoritative history of the world. The Old English translation was formerly ascribed to King Alfred, but is now thought to be the work of a contemporary writing at the king's direction or urging.

Orosius's History begins with an account of the geography and peoples of the ancient world. The Old English translator greatly expanded this with a survey of the Germanic nations and other matter; embedded in this survey are the narratives of two travellers, Ohthere and Wulfstan. Ohthere was a Norwegian (the Old Norse form of his name would have been Óttarr) who lived by hunting, whaling and trading; we are told that he "sought" the court of King Alfred, presumably as a market for his goods. He had travelled over the top of present-day Norway, above the Arctic Circle, then around the Kola Peninsula and into the White Sea, where he had encountered the Bjarmians. He had been to the Norse ports of Skiringssal and Hedeby. Less is known about Wulfstan: we are not told his nationality or anything about his business. But we are told that he sailed from Hedeby east into the Baltic Sea, where he visited the city of Truso near the coast of present-day Poland and the Ests (the ancient Aestii) in the region beyond the Vistula. Someone at Alfred's court--perhaps the king himself--was impressed enough by these travellers that he engaged a scribe or scribes to take down their narratives. The scribe responsible for Wulfstan's narrative seems, in places at least, to have taken down his very words.

It is difficult to verify much of what is in these accounts, which seem to have been inserted into the translation of Orosius's History with little or no editing. The trickiness of memory, the frequent inaccuracy of secondhand reporting, and, in the case of Ohthere at least, the difficulty of communication between Englishman and Norseman, cause us to question some details. But the narratives of Ohthere and Wulfstan are plainly different from many of the travellers' tales that circulated in the Middle Ages, which were long on the fantastic and short on fact. Despite our questions about the details, there is little reason to doubt that we have here a rare and valuable glimpse of life outside the royal courts and monasteries of viking-age Europe.

The standard edition of the Old English Orosius is by Bately [xx], who cites many useful studies of the places and peoples mentioned here. In this text, sentences 1-18 are from a manuscript nearly contemporary with King Alfred. This early manuscript is unfortunately defective, so the remainder is from an eleventh-century copy: see the Textual Note for details.