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From the mid-nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, English histories celebrated Alfred, king of Wessex, as "England's Saviour" for his defeat of the Vikings at Edington in 878. We have since learned to notice the anachronism and the nationalistic mythmaking at work in this epithet, which participates in a retrospective historiography that presupposes a common English destiny for the shifting and competitive Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, of which Alfred's Wessex was only one. To the degree that this act of collective memory contributed to a sense of Englishness and English military prowess, Alfred truly became "England's Saviour"-but in the nineteenth century, not the ninth. Likewise, Alfred's other designation as "the father of English prose" helped to shape a continuous national literary tradition during the period of philological nationalism in which Old English texts were institutionalized, and it is only recently that editors of Old English manuscripts have been undoing the linguistic standardization produced by earlier editors.
This pattern of nationalistic mythmaking, achieved through the projection of a national identity into the past, is perhaps the most widely recognized and consistent characteristic of national writing. The critical apprehension of this dependency upon a historically constructed past that validates the nation's existence, its "people," and its borders, and that also stabilizes its norms, values, and institutions, has been an invaluable tool in recent investigations of the modern nation, and has been particularly important to postcolonial studies. By deconstructing this historiographical process, postcolonial critics have both exposed the tactics through which imperialism produced a universalizing, Western narrative of the nation, and have investigated the risks of nation-formation in former colonies. 1 In this theoretical context, it may seem that an argument for the presence of national discourse in a ninth-century Old English text, especially Alfred's famous Preface to his Pastoral Care, would be a misguided reinscription of nineteenth-century retrospective nationalism. Is it the case, however, that if we acknowledge this modern historicism, which claimed early medieval texts such as Alfred's to "father" a teleologically developing modern nation, then we must also assert that these texts must precede the idea of the nation altogether? Such a conclusion would, obviously, invert but not disturb the subjection of the medieval text to the modern nation, and that alone would argue against...