Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript

by Kevin S. Kiernan

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.

This important volume will be a must-read not only for the scholar of early English history and literature, but for all those who are interested in practical applications of the new technologies.

303 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1981

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This highly technical palaeographical work explores the contents, construction and history of the Beowulf manuscript. To cut a long story short, Kiernan's study attempts to show that the Beowulf Manuscript has an eleventh century origin (never in doubt, see Ker's Catalogue), but Kiernan's controversial theories also place the composition of the poem as contemporary with the manuscript. Kiernan argues that the political climate at the time of king Cnut are the necessary conditions in which a poem about Danish kings would be composed in Anglo Saxon England.

While this is undoubtably an excellent work and sheds valuable light on the construction and provenance of the manuscript, Kiernan's theories on the date for the composition of the poem have not gained universal acceptance amongst the majority of Old English scholars. The work should be approached with an open mind and should be studied alongside Ker's catalogue and Colin Chase's Dating of Beowulf for a broader perspective on the date of composition of Beowulf.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

For years I (mistakenly) taught my students that Beowulf was composed around the year 700 and written down about 300 years later. Kevin Kiernan, by his meticulous study of the actual Beowulf manuscript, has argued convincingly that the poem was in fact composed and written down at the same time, in about the year 1000; in fact, he believes the second Beowulf copyist (of two) was the anonymous poet himself. Much of this book is highly technical regarding his analysis of the manuscript -- but it's fascinating stuff and very readable nevertheless.