Questions

[wellinghall]

For mathmos and physicists:
(1) What is the force generated by a three-pound pheasant falling from sixty feet?

For medicos:
(2) How will the human head and neck react when this pheasant falls on you?

(No, this didn't happen to me. It did, however, happen to my father!)

For economists:
(3) Just how does the UK's current economic situation lead to a weak pound?

For Anglo-Saxonists:
(4) What is the current thinking on when Beowulf was composed and written down?

Comments

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

4. The Translator's Introduction to my edition, published 2002, says, "The poem called Beowulf was composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first millennium." The Preface says, "The range reflects the current lack of consensus among Beowulf scholars and signals that (for the purposes of his translation) Heaney prefers to remain noncommital about the issue. For much of the twentieth century, there was a rough consensus favoring an earlier date of composition, often expressed as 'early eighth-century', but since about 1980 the issue has undergone extensive scrutiny, which has in some cases cast doubt on the earlier certainties and in others found new advocates for specific periods within the larger span." So, um, yes: there doesn't seem to be anything helpful in the way of 'current thinking'.

There is one surviving manuscript. "Palaeographers have determined from characteristics of the scribal hands that wrote the text that the manuscript was copied down in the late tenth century or perhaps the first decade of the eleventh."

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks!