«Because they eat oil in that country with their food as we do butter»: Daily life, adjustments and explanation of exotic items in Ælfric's homilies

In the last decades, scholarly investigation has occasionally detected Ælfric’s concern about his audiences’ background and understanding as a peculiar aspect of his homilies. The aim of this article is both to evaluate Ælfric’s attitude towards his reading and listening audiences’ reception more thoroughly and to broaden the discussion topic to the literary or traditional lore he may have drawn on for his purposes, focusing on adjustments and additions in some of his Old English homilies and lives of saints compared with his Latin sources. Some passages from Ælfric’s vast vernacular corpus have been examined in some details, namely his digressions or short asides about olive oil (§ 1), the elephants (§ 2), the healing power of dog’s licking (§ 3), and the egg’s white and yolk (§ 4). The present analysis confirms that Ælfric was able to answer the requirements of his readers/listeners’ various levels of understanding not only contextually, but also at the same time, offering hints and explanations helpful for all audiences. Interesting clues emerge also in Ælfric’s treatment of his sources, especially in the way he combines them or picks out from different passages or works by the same author; but he may also draw inspiration from everyday life and popular knowledge, so that sometimes his excursions make it possible to recreate an economic and social background that hardly appears in contemporary literary sources, and is therefore all the more worthy of consideration.