Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript

✍ Scribed by Kevin S. Kiernan

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 359
• Edition: Rev Sub
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 10
Foreword......Page 12
Re-Visions......Page 18
Introduction......Page 34
The Poem's Eleventh-Century Provenance......Page 44
The History and Construction of the Composite Codex......Page 96
The Beowulf Codex and the Making of the Poem......Page 202
Works Cited......Page 310
Index......Page 322
The State of the Beowulf Manuscrip t1882-1983......Page 336