From The Thorkelin Transcripts of ‘Beowulf’, Anglistica XXV (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1986), pp. Part One: Thorkelin’s Discovery of Beowulf. Kevin Kiernan. If you think Beowulf is boring, explore this site and be prepared to change your mind. The writing is informal and fun, though written by academic contributors. 132r–201v), along with the Southwick Codex and some other items collected by Sir Robert Cotton.īeowulf on Shmoop. Shmoop organizes many types of information about Beowulf for students and teachers. Part of the Electronic Beowulf Index and Guide.ĭigitised Manuscripts: Cotton MS Vitellius A XV. Follow the link to the Nowell Codex, which contains five items, including Beowulf and Judith. XV, the composite codex containing the Beowulf manuscript. Illustrated overview of British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. A comprehensive scholarly companion to Electronic Beowulf, 4th edition (online), freely available on the same website.Ĭotton Vitellius A. Index and Guide to The Electronic Beowulf. Now freely available online, Electronic Beowulf contains facsimiles of the existing manuscript side-by-side with the text, as well as “a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.” “The facsimiles incorporate new, much higher resolution images of all 70 folios, over 130 ultraviolet images, and over 750 newly processed backlit images of the more than 1300 that reveal the hundreds of letters covered on the versos by the nineteenth-century restoration frames.” (Linked page includes complete text original article is no longer available from NEH Humanities archive.)Įlectronic Beowulf, 4th edition (online), 2015 Kevin Kiernan, Univ. The history of the manuscript is fascinating, and if you want to learn more about it and the significance of the poem, start here. Today, ultraviolet light and other technologies used in the Electronic Beowulf reveal erasures, text under the frames, and other characteristics of the manuscript that were previously undetectable. Of course the frames and the paste holding them in place obliterated a little more of the text! Fortunately, many of the lost words were recovered from a copy made before the manuscript deteriorated. The manuscript was badly damaged by fire in 1731, and its charred edges crumbled over time, losing words on the outer margins of the leaves. Finally, each leaf was carefully pasted into a frame to stop this process. Until quite recently, most scholars thought that this surprisingly complex and poignant poem was written in the 8th century or earlier, but Kevin Kiernan stirred up controversy in 1981 with the publication of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (rev sub edition 1997) by asserting that the work was composed in the 11th century, and that the manuscript itself may have even been the author’s working copy. The story, accessibly retold by Beowulf for Beginners, survives in one fragile manuscript copied by two scribes near the end of the 10th or the first quarter of the 11th century. The structure of the Nowell Codex has been examined anew and found to be far from self evident, and from this uncertainty about the integrity of the Nowell Codex has come a suggestion that the Beowulf portion is in fact a separate manuscript.Beowulf is the first English literary masterpiece and one of the earliest European epics written in the vernacular, or native language, instead of literary Latin. But now we are less sure of the date for the composition of the poem and some even question if it is the product of oral composition.
In spite of the fact that the manuscript suffered in the dreadful fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, removing any trace of its binding or even of conjugation and thus leaving a stack of disjunct and deteriorating leaves, we have had little doubt as to the original structure and makeup of the codex before the fire. That particular manuscript, now known as the Nowell Codex, was the product of a single scriptorium, the work of two scribes, who included Beowulf in a single multi-text volume which emphasized monsters. 94-209) was made sometime around 1000 AD.
We knew that the poem, originally a work of oral composition, had first been written down in the seventh century and had been copied repeatedly until the final copy (our extant manuscript: British Library, Cotton, Vitellius, A.XV, ff.
Introduction: There was a time, not too long ago, when we thought we knew a great deal more about Beowulf than we do now. Published Online (2010) Beowulf manuscript at the British Library Scribal Practice in the Beowulf Manuscript
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