Why Read Beowulf
Why Read Beowulf?
By Robert F. Yeager
Beowulf, the rousing Old English poem of man and monster, has been a classroom classic for generations. Its own survival as a text is nearly as epic as the story it tells. Beowulf’s presence among us reminds us upon what slender threads our knowledge of the past depends.
Only through a series of extraordinary escapes has Beowulf come down to us. In the late 900s, two anonymous scribes wrote the story on parchment using West Saxon, a Germanic dialect dominant for literary composition in England at the time. Known among scholars as the Cotton Vitellius A.XV, the Beowulf manuscript is modest, measuring only about five by eight inches, and without any illumination. Compared to the three other extant codices containing Old English poetry, Cotton Vitellius A.XV seems rough-hewn, almost journeyman work.
Beowulf was bound together with four other works in Old English: three in prose (The Passion of St. Christopher, The Wonders of the East, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle), and Judith, a poem. Judith and Beowulf are composed in the unrhymed, four-beat alliterative style characteristic of Old English poetry and are among the earliest wholly vernacular works in the English canon.
Why these five works were considered of a piece ten centuries ago is one of the mysteries surrounding Beowulf, although the presence of monsters in each suggests that perhaps this was the common thread. It may be this everlasting human interest in monster stories that initiated Beowulf’s survival.
The whereabouts of the manuscript during the five hundred years after it was written is unknown. We hear of it in 1563, when the Dean of Litchfield, Lawrence Nowell, owned it at least long enough to write his name and the date on the first page. Very likely Nowell saved the manuscript and Beowulf from destruction when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and broke up their libraries. From Nowell, again via unknown ways, the manuscript found its way into the famous
By Robert F. Yeager
Beowulf, the rousing Old English poem of man and monster, has been a classroom classic for generations. Its own survival as a text is nearly as epic as the story it tells. Beowulf’s presence among us reminds us upon what slender threads our knowledge of the past depends.
Only through a series of extraordinary escapes has Beowulf come down to us. In the late 900s, two anonymous scribes wrote the story on parchment using West Saxon, a Germanic dialect dominant for literary composition in England at the time. Known among scholars as the Cotton Vitellius A.XV, the Beowulf manuscript is modest, measuring only about five by eight inches, and without any illumination. Compared to the three other extant codices containing Old English poetry, Cotton Vitellius A.XV seems rough-hewn, almost journeyman work.
Beowulf was bound together with four other works in Old English: three in prose (The Passion of St. Christopher, The Wonders of the East, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle), and Judith, a poem. Judith and Beowulf are composed in the unrhymed, four-beat alliterative style characteristic of Old English poetry and are among the earliest wholly vernacular works in the English canon.
Why these five works were considered of a piece ten centuries ago is one of the mysteries surrounding Beowulf, although the presence of monsters in each suggests that perhaps this was the common thread. It may be this everlasting human interest in monster stories that initiated Beowulf’s survival.
The whereabouts of the manuscript during the five hundred years after it was written is unknown. We hear of it in 1563, when the Dean of Litchfield, Lawrence Nowell, owned it at least long enough to write his name and the date on the first page. Very likely Nowell saved the manuscript and Beowulf from destruction when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and broke up their libraries. From Nowell, again via unknown ways, the manuscript found its way into the famous