Beowulf

Beowulf is the oldest surviving epic in British literature. It describes the adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century. B0eowulf exists in only one manuscript, written in Old English in the 11th century, and is housed in the British Library. An electronic version of the manuscript has been published on CD-ROM.

Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon epic poem which relates the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel’s mother. He then returns to his own country, Geatland, and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monster, defeating it, and then having to live onin the exhausted aftermath.

The story was composed sometime between the 8th century and the time of the manuscript in the early 11th century. The history of the transmission of the Beowulf text is complex. The manuscript itself poses many interesting questions. The scribes took a lot of trouble to try and provide an authoritative text, but there are still many intriguing erasures and gaps.

The manuscript was acquired in the 17th century by Sir Robert Cotton and he donated it to the nation in 1700. It was almost destroyed by a fire in 1731, but the edges were scorched and the heat left it very brittle. Subsequently the manuscript’s fragile edges were further damaged through repeated handling, so that today sections of the poem are known only from 18th- and early 19th-century transcripts. Further deterioration of the manuscript washalted in 1845 when Frederic Madden, the British Museum’s Keeper of Manuscripts, had each leaf mounted in paper frames. Although these frames protected the manuscript very effectively, they concealed many letters around the edge of the leaves, which were recently revealed with the aid of special lighting devices.