Poem of Beowulf

Precious vessel -

here is the beginning of misfortune

that's the reason

human sorrows . [ 4, p .2 14 ]

 

In this regard, a special interest is the last part of the poem - combat hero with dragon . In retaliation for the kidnapping of the jewels of the treasure the dragon, which guarded the ancient treasures, attacks on villages, delivering fire and death of the surrounding country . Beowulf enters into a fight with the dragon, but it is not difficult to make sure that the author of the poem does not see the reasons that prompted the hero to this feat in the atrocities committed by the monster . Beowulf's goal is to take the treasure from the dragon . The dragon sat on the treasure for three centuries, but even before these values belonged to people, and Beowulf wants to return them to the human race . Having killed a terrible enemy and himself received a fatal wound, the hero expresses his dying desire : to see the gold that he snatched from the clutches of his guard . Contemplation of these riches gives him deep satisfaction . But then there is something directly contrary to the words of Beowulf about that that he has won a treasure for his people, and it is : on the funeral pyre along with the body of the king of his companions lay and all these treasures and burn them, and the remains are buried in the mound . Above treasure gravitated ancient spell, and it is useless to people ; because of this curse, disturbed by ignorance, Beowulf, apparently, and dies . The poem ends with a prediction of the calamities that will befall the Gaut after the death of their king .

The idea of the curse, how and himself the motive of revenge of the dragon for the stolen cup, with a considerable share of probability seems the introduced scribe-Christian, offer interpretation of wealth as a source of disaster . At the same time, Beowulf goes to a duel with the dragon not at all in order to stop his atrocities in the lands of people, but for the sake of gold, which is guarded by an ancient serpent . [ 11 ] Fulk, however, comments on this point that the variation in number of rulings is not as uncommon as Kiernan's discussion might suggest, for
   '...in the four Old English poetic codices, variation in the number of rulings from quire to quire is the rule rather than the exception. In the Exeter Book on hand wrote all the poetic quires, which have from twenty-one to twenty-three rulings (one time the number changes in the middle of a quire). The Vercelli Book is also in one hand, and the number of rulings varies from twenty-four to thirty-three (usually each quire has the same number of rulings throughout). Even Scribe B of the Beowulf manuscript is inconsistent, using twenty-one lines for quires twelve and thirteen, and twenty lines for Judith. Only Junius 11 shows any consistency: the main hand uses twenty-six lines throughout, in all sixteen quires plus one leaf.....in other words, the variation is unusual for this scribe [=first scribe of Beo.-MS], as far as his eleven Nowell quires go' (Fulk 348; emphasis is Fulk's)

Kiernan points to yet another interesting common feature of these two mss.-- that they are both

   '...quite inconsistent in the way they arrange the hair and flesh sides of the vellum sheets within gatherings... Hair and flesh sides often contrast noticeably in color and texture, and the normal insular practice for manuscripts of this period was to place hair sides against hair sides, and flesh sides against flesh sides, to obscure the contrast on facing pages. Our scribes [of the Beo.-ms.] ignore this trend. The same odd mixture of format occurs in the Blickling Homilies as in the Beowulf-manuscript: sometimes the contrast of hair and flesh sides is carefully observed, while sometimes it is deliberately displayed, with flesh on the outside of all leaves in a gathering in the Homilies, and hair on the outside of all leaves in Beowulf (second scribe, and first scribe, first gathering). This shared lack of uniformity, also evident in the ill-matched script, begins to look like a distinctive feature of a particularly provincial scriptorium'. (Kiernan xxi)

To conclude, the composition of the MS. itself we can probably safely place between 1000-1025 AD; the disagreement of professional palaeographers (as above) makes it difficult to feel confident in assigning a narrower band of dates.

   d. the Palimpsest? (further aspects of the structure of the Beo.-ms.)
One of the key issues of the MS, is the status of fol. 179, which is badly damaged and quite difficult to read, creating several uncertainties in the text. Julius Zupitza, in his facsimile edition of the manuscript, notes that '[a]ll that is distinct in the [facsimile] in fol. 179 has been freshened up by a later hand in the MS'. In the 1960s, Westphalen, on the other hand, identified the 'freshening up' hand as that of the second scribe, but about twenty years later than the original, and the folio itself as a palimpsest. A palimpsest is made, generally, to eradicate an old text in order to provide parchment for a new one. Kiernan, in the early 1980s, proposed that the palimpsest was made by the second scribe himself, in order that he might revise the text. Kiernan attributes the spots of illegibility of the folio to the fact that the vellum was still damp in places when the revision was made, so that the ink did not properly adhere where the parchment was still wet. The more standard position (e.g. Boyle) is that fol. 179 sustained some sort of accidental damage and someone (not the second scribe) attempted to 'touch up' all of the text that he could.

The 'water-damage' theory seems rather unlikely - one would expect damage to other folios as well if that were the case.The suggestion of Tilman Westphalen and Kiernan that fol. 179 is a palimpsest seems the most likely explanation. However, Robert Fulk (1982) offers a very plausible alternative scenario for the creation of the palimpsest, which is worth quoting at length:

    '....the person who altered the fitt numbers XXV-XXVIIII did not alter any after that [presumably] because the manuscript unit comprising quires twelve and thirteen was unavailable to him. Likewise [Leonard Boyle (1981)] states that folio 178v, the last page of the eleventh quire, is smudged, as if it had been at one time an outside cover--and it is true, in the facsimiles the script all over 178v looks quite worn in comparison to the preceding pages. Since the last folio of Beowulf of the wear and soiling it received, if folio 179 was the other cover of the unit, doubtless it was also in bad condition. Perhaps it was grimy as well as worn, and that is why the scribe decided to immerse and scour it. Of course he did not have to scour the verso side, but perhaps he simply preferred writing the text anew to tracing over the old letters faded by the immersion--a preference he did not later indulge on the last folio when he saw what a ruin this practice had made of 179. Before he washed away the text he must have preserved it somewhere: either he copied it elsewhere or committed it to memory. I suggest he chose the latter course--a natural course, I think, for a short text in Anglo-Saxon times--one is reminded of King Alfred's famous feat of poetic memorization. This choice explains a great many of the peculiarities of the palimpsest. An experienced scribe would know better than to write on wet vellum, and even an inexperienced scribe would have stopped when he saw the ink begin to run. But a scribe who had committed his irrecoverable exemplar to memory might write on wet vellum, being afraid he would forget the verses before the parchment dried. The same haste would also account for the carelessness that produced the long dittograph. It is now also possible to say why the scribe did not fill in his erasures when he wrote the single thorn [þ] at 179r10--he had in fact forgotten the verses by the time the leaf was dry' (355).

Kiernan's argument for the palimpsest as a result of active revision nearly contemporary with the MS. itself, however, is appealling in certain respects, and is supported by various aspects of the MS and its text:

    'The signs of revision on fol. 179 receive repeated support elsewhere in the MS. To begin with, it is not the only folio in the Beowulf MS from which the original text has been deliberately deleted. The first three lines of text on fol. 180v have been carefully rubbed off with the aid of some liquid solution, which has left the vellum napped and discolored'. (Kiernan 1981:245)
    'It is virtually certain...that the second scribe copied the eleventh gathering....after he had already copied the twelfth and thirteenth gatherings....The evidence that the second scribe copied the eleventh gathering last is that he had to squeeze in four extra lines of text, in disregard of the original rulings, on fols. 174v-176r. The compression would not have been necessary if the scribe knew he had at least two extra gatherings of unused vellum ahead of him...Unless he was compelled to fit the extra material into the eleventh gathering, it is far too early in the copying for the scribe to be worrying about running out of vellum...The twelfth and thirteenth gatherings must have been copied already'. (258-9)

Fulk argues that the revision is not actually editorial 'smoothing' of the textual transition, but rather simply the somewhat careless result of trying to fix a dittograph:

    'If Kiernan and Boyle are right, Scribe B had to go to some extraordinary lengths to fit his text into the eleventh quire. Likewise he had to resort to some extreme abbreviations on the last page of Beowulf, and actually wrote part of the last word on an extra line, in order to make the end of the poem coincide with the end of the quire. If Scribe A copied the tenth quire after he had begun the eleventh, it is extraordinary that he did not need to resort to such unusual methods to make the text fit'. (Fulk 1982:347)
    'Syntactically lines 2251-52 [at the transition of f.179v & fol.180r] are corrupt....Metrically, too, the transition between the two folios is defective....we have the testimony of Scribe B that gesawon seledream(as) is not one verse, since he has inserted a point between the two words, according to Kiernan. We can be sure, then, the scribe himself did not think the end of 179v and the beginning of 180r fit together....And so certainly some material seems to be missing between the two folios, the gap being the result of the dittograph. This ultimately explains the erasure at the top of folio 180v. Faced with the realization that the text did not fit, the scribe decided to erase the following page 180r, and recopy it writing twenty-three lines of text in order to fit in the extra material. But a better opportunity offered itself in the observation that a mere three lines further, on 180v, the end of a manuscript line coincided not only with the end of a sentence, but also with the end of an off-verse--a natural break in both the manuscript and the poem. ... He began to erase the three lines but never finished that job, and so never started erasing 180r'. (356)

Some sort of revision seems to have taken place round folios 179v & 180r -- whether this revision was repairing accidental damage, incomplete correction of a dittograph or other scribal error, or deliberate revision of the text, is more difficult to establish, as the above discussion of various explanations shows. These arguments are also bound up with different theories about the composition and its time period. Kiernan's argument that there is textual revision contemporary with the MS itself is complementary to his thesis of a late dating of the composition of the text of Beowulf itself, as discussed in the following section. As stated above, the dates ranging from the sixth century to the early eleventh century have been proposed for the composition of Beowulf. The terminus a quo (earliest date) has been established by Grundtvig's identification of Hygelac of the poem with the historical figure Chochilaicus, mentioned by Gregory of Tours (d. 594) in his History of the Franks as falling during his raid on Frisia (though Gregory identifies Hygelac as a Dane, not a Geat), which probably dates somewhere between 515 and 530 CE. Obviously, the latest possible date for the composition of the poem would be contemporary with the manuscript itself, ca. 1000 CE, probably in the reign of King Cnut. Two quotes are illustrative of the arguments for dates at the extreme ends of this span; the first from Clark Hall's introduction to his translation of Stjerna's Essays on Questions connected with the Old English poem of Beowulf :

'…suppose we take A.D. 504 as the date of the birth of the Geatic prince Heardred, 515 as that of the death of his father, King Hygelac, in the historic raid against the Frisians, and 520 as that of the death of (King) Heardred and the accession of Beowulf to the throne. Let us assume also that the statement that Beowulf reigned fifty years is a poetical exaggeration…and give him twenty. This brings us to A.D. 540. Very soon after that the Geatic kingdom is conquered and annexed by the Swedes. On its downfall a Geatic scóp [oral poet] journeys to Denmark to escape from the unsympathetic and unremunerative society of the conquerors. Here he would be able to sing freely about the last hero of his race, giving the first place to an adventure in Denmark, for some details of which he may have had recourse to local tradition, and, speaking of the Danes, his paymasters for the time being, in flattering terms. After singing his lays threadbare at the Danish court, he moves on to the territory of the Angels, and finally migrates with members of that tribe to the new El Dorado beyond the sea, which he reaches about A.D. 550, when the last Anglian invasion of England is generally supposed to have taken place. A later date, say A.D. 560, or even 570, is not impossible…' (pg. xxi-i)

We may note that Clark Hall's theory supposes not only Hygelac, but other characters from Beowulf to be historical as well--which has not been proven to be true. He also supposes a 'Geatic' origin (which he supposes to be in West Göteland, in southwest Sweden) of a poem narrating the adventures of a Geatish prince, which picks up its Danish setting on the poet's way through Denmark before he ends up in England--where he is seemingly able to pick up not only English, but the verse-techniques of the Anglo-Saxons--where the poem reaches its final form (more or less). A foreign origin of Beowulf has also been espoused by Thorkelin, who in his 1815 edition claimed that the poem was a translation from Danish. Sarrazin took this a step further, and not only identified the translator as Cynewulf (whose 'runic signature' is embedded in some Old English poem, but not Beowulf), but identified the original (Danish) author as the skald [oral poet] Starkathr, who he placed at the Danish court of King Ingeld at Lejre ca. 700 CE. The famous German metrist Eduard Sievers (1886) refuted the notion of a Danish origin on linguistic grounds.

In sum, it is blindingly improbable that Beowulf is either a translation of a non-English poem or the work of a non-English poet. That much, at least, seems clear.

Arguing largely from paleographical and codicological grounds, Kevin Kiernan proposes that the extant Beowulf MS was actually the working copy of the poem, and attributes authorship to the two scribes themselves (implying that the second scribe may have been the primary director of the project):

'…the obvious conclusion is that the Danish and Geatish exploits of Beowulf were first brought together in the extant MS by the second scribe. The aesthetic fusion of these parts does not reflect a dim, romantic view of a non-Anglo-Saxon past, but rather a vivid imaginative response to chilling contemporary events. The fall of a great and noble hero, and the imminent extinction of the race he ruled, was well understood by this 11th-century Anglo-Saxon who had recently seen the fall of [King] Alfred's house and the subsumption of his homeland in the Danish empire. The second scribe begins to look like "the last survivor of a noble race", while the Beowulf MS, the treasure he continued to polish after the death of his old lord, no longer looks like a reproduction' (12).

Kiernan locates the composition of the poem within the reign of King Cnut (r. 1016-35), who accompanied his father, the Danish King Svein Forkbeard, on his invasion of England which forced King Æthelred II (the 'Unready') into exile in Normandy. Cnut became king on the death of his father and married Æthelred's widow, Emma of Normandy, to help legitimise his reign. Cnut's reign was peaceful, especially when compared against the harsh Danish raids which preceded his rule. Kiernan suggests that like Cnut, Beowulf created a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon and Danish culture, though forestalling Whitelock's objections that 'if the poem is later than the time when the Viking invasions began in earnest, about 835, it can hardly be placed before the tenth century, and even then it would have to be put, as Schücking puts it, in the court of an Anglo-Danish king in the Danelaw' (25). Kiernan remarks that 'Cnut brought together Danish and Anglo-Saxon culture in the way no petty king of the Danelaw ever could have done' (22).

We shall return to examining the different possibilities for the date of the origin of Beowulf, but it is here expedient to observe the import of assigning a date to the poem, as it affects not only our possible interpretations of the 'meaning' or 'purpose' of the poem, but also our view of the relationship between the extant Beowulf MS and the poem itself. If, for instance, Beowulf was first written down in the 6th century and our extant MS is the result of a long line of copies, made by speakers of different dialects of Old English, then we have much reason for suspecting 'scribal corruption' and thus will suppose more licence to make emendations to the extant text. If, on the other hand, we take the composition of the poem to be contemporary with our extant MS, we will assign more authority to the MS text and feel more wary of emendations. Similarly, both the date and location we posit for the composition will colour our reading of the poem based on what we know of Anglo-Saxon history. For instance, if we assume a post-Danelaw date, we might suspect a political purpose to the poem, i.e. a literary synthesis of English and Danish cultures, which emphasises the commonality between the races. On the Danish elements in Beowulf as clues for dating, see further below, Section c.

Early scholarship of Beowulf tended to favour placing the composition of the poem in late 7th or early 8th century Northumbria, in the time of the Venerable Bede (673-735), most likely in the court of the scholar-king Aldfrith (d. 705), considering that age the height of Anglo-Saxon learning, and cultural pre-eminence of Northumbria in that time. The Northumbrian connexion of Cædmon, often thought of as one of the pioneers of Anglo-Saxon poetic literature has also bolstered that notion. More recently, Schneider suggested, based on the inherent paganism in the poem, as well as the linguistic features, a composition in Mercia between 640-50 in the reign of King Penda.

Arguments made for a late date (9th - 11th century) are usually based at least in part on the Danish focus of the poem (e.g. Schücking 1917, Frank 1981, Kiernan 1981, &c.), which does have a possible political motivation in providing a notion of the kinship of the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes, which from the start of the Danish invasions in 835 until the 11th century was a central issue in English politics: the synthesis of the two cultures. Kiernan's argument for an 11th century origin rests largely on his claims for evidence of active participation of the scribes in the production of the poem - the core of which is his analysis of fol. 179 (see section I:MS above). Since the identity of the apparent third hand in this folio is argued variously as being that of the second scribe himself several years after his original writing of the MS or that of an unknown third person the status of fol. 179 is not yet proved decisive in determining the date of the origin of Beowulf's written source.

Various scholars have attempted to date the poem by possible allusions to historical persons: Earle suggests that the seemingly incongruous lines about Offa I, the legendary late 4th century King of the Old Angles, as an allusion to the 8th century King Offa of Mercia, taking the supposed name 'Thryth' (l. 1934b) to be a form of Cynethryth - the name of Offa II of Mercia's queen (see n. to l. 1934 for a counterargument on this latter point); Cook, again placing the poem in 7th century Northumbria, sees King Aldfrith concealed beneath the name Offa; Brandl, because of the character Wiglaf, dates the poem to the reign of Wiglaf of Mercia (r. 827-38)--seeing in the character of the evil king Heremod a representation of the 'pagan' king Penda of Mercia (r. ca. 632-55); Kiernan (xxi) to early 11th-century Lincoln (in part because of the possible connexions between the Beo.-ms. & the Blickling Homilies ms. [see above]). I favour, with Bruce-Mitford & Sam Newton, a location somewhere in East Anglia.