Pentecost and Linguistic Self-Consciousness in Anglo-Saxon England: Bede and Ælfric

The miracle of Pentecost must have appealed to the imagination of the Anglo-Saxons. As Germanic settlers in areas inhabited by Romanized Brit ons, they had been confronted with linguistic diversity from moment they set foot on British soil, and their conversion to Christianity by Roman and Irish missionaries would only have heightened their awareness of linguistic difference.1 Fostered by a tradition of scholarship,2 their lin guistic self-consciousness developed into a tradition of composition and translation in the vernacular that outshone any contemporary efforts in Germanic Europe. The Anglo-Saxons' views of language and its diversity, as we know them, are predominantly Christian.3 In the Christian world-picture, language was, of course, a gift from God to the first man, Adam, and through him