Did King Alfred Know the Psalms? Yes.

King Alfred of Wessex was in certain ways one of the models for Tolkien's Aragorn. He is also the model for the poem character Alfred of Wessex in The Ballad of the White Horse, which Tolkien had read.

At a rereading, he found it less good than he recalled, due to historic fairly gross inaccuracies. Which was of course not the point, Tolkien wrote exactly that kind of thing himself in Farmer Giles of Ham, or Goscinny in Asterix. We need not believe Vercingetorix had a daughter saved to one small village in Aremorica to enjoy Asterix, we need not believe Cole of Colchester descended from a man with a blunderbuss to enjoy Farmer Giles and we need not believe Alfred had Gaelic allies from Ireland (more like Brian Borumha on Ireland also had his fights with Vikings) in order to enjoy The Ballad of the White Horse.

Now, I have not actually read all of the poem of Chesterton yet. When my time was good, I had no access to it on internet, and there was no paper version of the text at hand, and when my internet access came, no time to read a new text that long. Worries offline and debates online ... nevertheless, I do know some of the poem's main content. Or perhaps, I read it just once, too little to actually get a grip on it. But here is a fourliner where Chesterton gives words to a tradition that King Alfred had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Uffingdon White Horse. Here are the words he gave Her:

Naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
save that the sky grows darker yet
and the sea rises higher.

And here are words from the same poem, often cited, and when I had cited them under a quote of above, it occurred to me, they were an echo of these words:

The High Tide, King Alfred said!
The High Tide and the turn!

How so?

Psalm 103: [6-9] The deep like a garment is its clothing: above the mountains shall the waters stand. At thy rebuke they shall flee: at the voice of thy thunder they shall fear. The mountains ascend, and the plains descend into the place which thou hast founded for them. Thou hast set a bound which they shall not pass over; neither shall they return to cover the earth.

The other relevant quote was actually Jeremiah 33:[25, 26] Thus saith the Lord: If I have not set my covenant between day and night, and laws to heaven and earth: Surely I will also cast off the seed of Jacob, and of David my servant, so as not to take any of his seed to be rulers of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will bring back their captivity, and will have mercy on them.

So, when the Blessed Virgin tells King Alfred (in Chesterton's poem) that the sea shall rise higher, he knows this can't go on for ever. He foresees there will be a high tide and the turn. And likewise, when she tells him the sky shall grow darker, he knows that cannot go on for ever either.

The real King Alfred is an example of how Catholicism all through the first millennium was very friendly to laymen reading the Bible. He translated 50 psalms which he required every ealdorman to know at least in Ænglisc - English he would have meant, while we would say Old English or Anglo-Saxon. He also translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (with some reflections on digestion added, he had a sensitive stomach) and a few more things.

The bound above which the waters shall not pass over was not set in Creation week, nor in fact directly after the Flood. Rather, first the waters fled "at God's rebuke", then mountains rose and plains descended during the ice age, then waters rose again at the end of the ice age, and then God set a limit for them.

This second rise of the waters, not a new deluge, may have been part of what Nimrod's men considered as a threat of a new deluge and a reason to get to heaven to avoid that, building a tower in disobedience, precisely as some imagine rocketry will serve to save humanity from a destroyed earth "to other planets out in space" which it also will not.

Nimrod should have trusted the promise of the rain bow. The new rise of waters had a high tide and a turn too.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Audoux
St. Timothy
24.I.2020

Apud Ephesum sancti Timothei, qui fuit discipulus beati Pauli Apostoli; atque, ab eodem Ephesi ordinatus Episcopus, ibi post multos pro Christo agones, cum Dianae immolantes argueret, lapidibus obrutus est, ac paulo post obdormivit in Domino.