Though the works of Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, are frequently cited in discussions of Beowulf, the connection between the archbishop and the poem is universally assumed to be merely coincidental. A Wulfstanian text may be allowed to shed light on some passage in Beowulf or provide an interpretive context for the poem, but nothing more. A careful reading of Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity may, however, suggest a more direct relationship between the two than previously supposed. The version of Polity contained in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201 begins with a curious turn of phrase: ‘Cristenum cyninge gebyrað swiðe rihte, þæt he sy on fæder stæle cristenra þeode’ [‘It is very much fitting for a Christian king, that he stand in the place of a father for the Christian people’].1¹ Though Wulfstan is often indebted to Latin sources, no such source has been found for the phrase. Moreover, the phrase does not occur in any other version of Polity, nor anywhere else in Wulfstan’s substantial body of laws and homilies—nor, for that matter, in the entire corpus of Old English prose.

中文翻译：

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Wowstan的政治学院中Beowulf的可能回声

尽管约瑟夫大主教沃夫斯坦的作品在贝奥武夫的讨论中经常被引用，但大主教和这首诗之间的联系被普遍认为只是巧合。也许可以让沃夫斯坦的文本阐明Beowulf的某些段落，或者为这首诗提供解释性的背景，但仅此而已。但是，仔细阅读沃夫斯坦政治研究所可能会表明两者之间的关系比以前想象的更为直接。剑桥，科珀斯克里斯蒂学院MS 201所包含的Polity版本以一个奇怪的词组开头：“ Cristenum cyningegebyraðswiðerihte，请关注fæderstælecristenraþeode” [‘这是非常配合的基督教国王，他站在一个父亲的地方对基督徒的人’。1 ¹虽然武尔斯坦往往是受惠于拉丁语来源，没有这样的来源已经发现了短语。此外，该短语不会在任何其他版本的Polity中出现，也不会在Wulfstan实质性法律和尊严体系中的任何其他位置出现，就此而言，也不会出现在整个古英语散文集中。