Beowulf And The Beowulf Manuscript
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The story of Beowulf and his hard-fought victory over the monster Grendel has captured the imagination of readers and listeners for a millennium. The heroic Anglo-Saxon story survives to the world in one eleventh-century manuscript that was badly burned in 1731, and in two eighteenth-century transcriptions of the manuscripts.
Kevin S. Kiernan, one of the world's foremost Beowulf scholars, has studied the manuscript extensively with the most up-to-date methods, including fiber-optic backlighting and computer digitization. This volume reprints Kiernan's earlier study of the manuscript, in which he presented his novel conclusions about the date of Beowulf. It also offers a new Introduction in which the author describes the value of electronic study of Beowulf, and a new Appendix that lists all the letters and parts of letters revealed by backlighting.
The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containing the unique copy of the epic poem Beowulf. In addition to this, it contains first a fragment of The Life of Saint Christopher, then the more complete texts Wonders of the East and Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and, after Beowulf, a poetic translation of Judith. Due to the fame of Beowulf, the Nowell Codex is also sometimes known simply as the Beowulf manuscript. The manuscript is located within the British Library with the rest of the Cotton collection.
The current codex is a composite of at least two manuscripts. The main division is into two totally distinct books which were apparently not bound together until the 17th century. The first of these, originally owned by Southwick Priory in Hampshire, dates from the 12th century and contains four works of prose.[1]
It is the second, older manuscript that is more famous. This second manuscript is known as the Nowell Codex, after the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose name is inscribed on its first page; he was apparently its owner in the mid-16th century. At some point it was combined with the first codex. It was then acquired by Sir Robert Cotton. In his library, it was placed on the first shelf (A) as the 15th manuscript (XV) of the bookcase that had a bust of the Emperor Vitellius, giving the collection its name.[2] The Nowell Codex is generally dated around the turn of the first millennium. Recent editions have specified a probable date in the decade after 1000.[3]
The Nowell Codex was written in two hands. The first extends from the beginning of the manuscript (fol. 94a) as far as the word scyran in line 1939 of Beowulf; the second hand continues from moste in that same line to the end of Judith. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie notes that although the scribes behind the two hands are contemporary, they differ markedly in appearance, the second hand appearing \"to belong to an older school of insular writing than its companion hand.\"[4]
The volume was heavily damaged in 1731 when a fire partially destroyed the Cotton library. While the volume itself survived, the edges of the pages were badly scorched; no serious attempt at restoration was made until the 19th century, by which time the margins had crumbled irreparably, and the edges of many pages are now illegible. Three pages, fol. 182a, fol. 182b and fol. 201b are in notably bad shape, showing more damage than can be explained by the Cottonian fire, with many words faded or illegible, some of which are far from the edges of the leaf. Van Kirk Dobbie suggests the damage to the third of these pages was due to Beowulf being separated from Judith prior to the 17th century, and fol. 201b was on the outside of the manuscript with no binding to protect it. But he offers no explanation for the condition of the first two pages.[5]
The damage to the Nowell Codex can be overcome to different degrees. The three pages in bad shape mentioned above have been studied under ultraviolet light, and the resulting information has been published.[6] Three modern transcriptions of parts of this portion of this manuscript are known. Two of these transcriptions, known as A and B, were made under the direction of the first editor of Beowulf, Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin in the years 1786-1787 after the Cottonian fire yet before the manuscript had deteriorated as far as it presently has. Transcript A was made by an unidentified professional copyist, while B was made by Thorkelin himself.[7] The third transcript (MS Junius 105, currently in the Bodleian Library) is of the Judith poem and was made by Franciscus Junius between 1621 and 1651. A careful copy of the poem with only occasional errors, Junius' transcription preserves the text of the poem before it suffered fire damage.[8]
These are followed by Beowulf, which takes up the bulk of the volume, and Judith, a poetic retelling of part of the book of Judith. Great wear on the final page of Beowulf and other manuscript factors such as wormhole patterns indicate Judith was not originally the last part of the manuscript, though it is in the same hand as the later parts of Beowulf.
Beowulf is the first great heroic poem written in the vernacular, Old English, rather than Latin. It survives in only one manuscript, London British Library Cotton Vitellius A. XV. The manuscript (codex) contains five different works, and the only unifying feature of the works appears to be that they contain tales of monsters. Although there is no exact date assigned to the manuscript, it was most likely transcribed in approximately 1000A.D. The entire codex consists of 116 leaves, 70 of which comprise the Beowulf poem (Chickering 245).
The early history of the codex is unknown, however, its ownership can be traced back to Lawrence Nowell, Dean of Litchfield in 1563. Subsequently, in the 17th century, Sir Robert Cotton obtained the codex. The codex was moved to Essex house in the Strand, then to Ashburnham House in Westminister (British Library Online Gallery). While in Ashburnham House a fire broke out in the library destroying a good portion of the library and damaging the manuscript. Following the 1731 fire, Sir Cotton's heirs deposited Beowulf and other important manuscripts in the British Library. In 1786, GrÃmur Jónsson Thorkelin made two transcriptions of the poem. Although, Thorkelin's translations contain transcriptional errors, they still \"are invaluable for determining letters and words which have since crumbled away\" (Chickering 246).
The most damaged section of the manuscript are the leaves containing lines 1685-2339 and the last leaf of the poem (246). In addition to the fire damage, many letters of the manuscript have faded due to excessive wear. In 1845, in an attempt to preserve the manuscript, the leaves were mounted in paper frames. Although the intent was to preserve the pages from further damage, the frames covered some letters of the text; these letters were later revealed through special infrared and ultraviolet light technologies. Additionally, computer imaging was used to further enhance the readability of the text.
In 1993, the British Library began the Electronic Beowulf project. Using the latest technologies, pictures of the medieval manuscript were compiled into an electronic version of the manuscript, which permits readers to place leaves side by side for reading, as well as enabling them to examine the type and quality of the vellum employed (British Library Online Gallery). Unfortunately, this electronic version is only available for purchase on CD. Thus, for most students, access to the original manuscript is only readily available to the first leaf of the poem. Nevertheless, many of the comments regarding the first page can be applied to the other pages of the manuscript.
The Cotton Vitellius A. XV MS is small in size, measuring five by eight inches, and quite simple in its presentation (Chickering 246). It appears to be the work of journeyman, with poorly made capital letters and no illuminations. The poem \"is written in the unrhymed four-beat alliterative meter of Old English poetry\", consists of 3,182 lines, and is divided into forty-three sections. Since the divisions do not reveal clear chapter breaks, it is believed that they were a scribal addition (1). As can be seen in the image, the edges of the transcript are charred from the fire, with some words and letters being totally eradicated. Moreover, it does appear that the scribe utilized pointing to indicate the end of metrical lines. Since Beowulf exists in only one manuscript, there are no other versions of the text with which to compare the reliability of the transcription. Moreover, as the manuscript is damaged (both from the fire and wear and tear) editors have had varying emendations of the text.
For the most part the Beowulf manuscript is surprisingly well preserved and easy to read. Even the 2,000 or so letters that eventually crumbled from the edges after the Cottonian Library fire in 1731 are usually saved or restored in one way or another by the later eighteenth-century Thorkelin transcripts (Malone 1951; Kiernan 1986). Hundreds of the letters we thought were gone, moreover, are in fact only covered by the nineteenth-century paper frames individually made to prevent further deterioration of the edges of each leaf (Kiernan 1984). It is remarkable that after a thousand years the most illegible section of the Beowulf manuscript, folio 179 in the manuscript foliation, may well have been equally illegible in Anglo-Saxon times. Both recto and verso of folio 179 are severely damaged, with letters and words and whole passages appearing in facsimile as obliterated or faded beyond recognition. In the manuscript itself these sections have likewise remained obscure to the naked eye as well as to the sometimes more penetrating gaze of an ultraviolet lamp. Digital image processing, however, while providing no miraculous sightings, does help us see some things we have and have not been looking for. 59ce067264
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