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Electronic Beowulf
From: The British Library
| By:
Kevin Kiernan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The British Library owns the only known medieval manuscript of the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, which dates from the early 11th century. Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of 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.
Kevin Kiernan's Electronic Beowulf is a ground-breaking achievement in digital preservation, which has restored several passages from the manuscript that are impossible to see with the naked eye. |
 lthough arguments still rage over the date of the Old English epic known as Beowulf, the only surviving manuscript was written in the early eleventh century, at the start of the last millennium. We do not know who composed the poem, but we do know that he or she or they had extraordinary poetic powers. |
 Beowulf is not simply a tale of a superhero who battles monsters and dies in a final confrontation with a fire-breathing dragon. On a deeper and broader level it is about humankind's constant conflict with evil: with murderous jealousy and the killing of kin; with the urge for vengeance and the vicious tradition of representing it as noble rather than monstrous behavior; and with violent self-destructive greed and its dire consequences for kings and countries. |
Since its rediscovery in modern times, Beowulf has appeared in editions and translations in Arabic, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. A thousand years after the manuscript a new English translation by Nobel poet laureate Seamus Heaney has become an international best seller. The Electronic Beowulf gives modern readers the opportunity to examine as never before the ancient manuscript that preserves this world-wide cultural phenomenon. |
Modern readers are probably not aware that all translations are based on modern editions, rather than on the manuscript itself. What kinds of things are lost in the process? A glance at the manuscript will reveal that Old English language is quite unlike its descendent Modern English. |
The format of the manuscript is very different from print editions and translations. As the illustration shows, the story is divided into sections, this one beginning section viii (of more than 40) with an elaborate initial H for the name Hunferth (the letter eth stands for th). The first readers of the Old English manuscript understood the verse even though the text is not displayed in verse lines. These readers shared a different level of literacy from us, because they could also dispense with capitalizing proper names, hyphenation, word-boundaries, and punctuation. The scribes understood what they were doing and corrected their work, as illustrated in the erased mistake in the bottom line of the page. |
By ignoring the original structure and emphasizing the three battles with the monsters, editors and translators almost compel readers to see many coherent sections as digressions from these three events. Based on various theories and interpretations, modern editors have often changed the names of characters in the poem, here the name Hunferth to Unferth, as well as many scores of individual words. To help modern readers understand the poem, the editors must arrange the text into lines of verse and add modern standards of punctuation. When translated, all of these altered manuscript features are hidden, greatly lessening the possibility of new interpretations of the evidence. |
When we study Beowulf by itself, rather than in its manuscript context, we also strip it of an eleventh-century cultural setting that could include it with such diverse texts as a Life of St. Christopher, the Wonders of the East, Alexander the Great's Letter to Aristotle, and another poem based on the apocryphal Book of Judith. Seeing the illumination of the thirteen-foot giantess in the Wonders of the East perhaps gives us a better idea of Grendel's mother. |
A digital camera, different lighting techniques, and image processing often disclose aspects of the manuscript that are difficult or even impossible to see even when using the manuscript itself. For example, ultraviolet fluorescence sometimes reveals effects that are not evident in ordinary light. Here at the beginning of the dragon episode there is evidence that the poem was still undergoing revision in the early eleventh century when the extant manuscript was written. Most theories of the dating of Beowulf ignore manuscript evidence that we may actually have an eleventh-century draft of the poem. |
In 1846, more than a century after an eighteenth-century fire damaged the edges of the manuscript, the manuscript leaves were placed in protected paper frames to keep the burnt edges from crumbling. The paper frames protect the manuscript, but they also cover hundreds of letters and parts of letters along the damaged edges. We can restore these covered readings, however, by shining fiber-optic light behind the frames and digitizing the surviving letters that shine forth. |
Beowulf was rediscovered in modern times by an Icelander named G.J. Thorkelin, who hired someone to make a copy and made a second transcript himself. Thorkelin also produced the first edition of Beowulf with a facing Latin translation in 1815. Annotated copies of the first edition as well as the two Thorkelin transcripts of the manuscript, all of which provide important information about the state of the manuscript before it was placed in its protective frames, are all available for study in the Electronic Beowulf. |
In addition to the unique manuscript of Beowulf, the Electronic Beowulf has assembled a wide range of primary and secondary resources, including a comprehensive collection of images of the entire composite codex, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv. |
 Supporting the digital images, the Electronic Beowulf features an SGML-encoded transcript and edition, both displayed in HTML for viewing with a network browser, and a comprehensive glossary, with folio references to make it possible to translate the manuscript as well as the edition. Powerful search facilities for both the transcript and the new edition facilitate extensive and varied investigations of the manuscript as well as of an edited version of it that engages readers in the paleographical and linguistic challenges Beowulf continues to pose. |
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