Beowulf

[wellinghall]

Last one for now.

What is the current thinking as to when Beowulf was (a) composed and (b) written down? And why do we think that?

Comments

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

I'm watching this space to see if anyone has anything new to say. I'm afraid I don't!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

See below!

[aranelcharis.livejournal.com]

Both (a) and (b) vary from scholar to scholar. In 2006 (when I was studying Beowulf at Leeds Uni) there seemed to be no consensus. However, I don't think most scholars currently think that there's a huge gap between (a) and (b), and the guestimates are before 750 for (a) and between 750-1000 for (b). As to the why, scholars use evidence from lots of different sources. Philologists are the ones that study that though, not strictly impoverished English people like me.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that.

[widsidh.livejournal.com]

Tha manuscript is from c.1000, so it can't be later, but exactly when it was first written down is impossible to ascertain - it might have been put inot writing soon after composition in its present form, or transmitted orally for generations.

Articles and books are still written debating the composition date, from all kinds of perspectives. personally I think that parts of it go back a long way, because of the things that are described, such as some of the weaponry and the burials at the beginning and end, but that does not mean that the exact extant text is that old.

I'm looking forward to other people's comments and can dig up a reference for a dicussion in a while, but will be offline fo a week or so now :-)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. One question: how do we know the manuscript is from c1000? Is it the age of the physical materials, or the handwriting, or the grammar?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of it being originally written down as part of Alfred's literacy project in the 880s/90s. But I am not sure there is an orthodoxy on this, isn't it one of the great 'don't knows'?

Shippey thinks Tolkien is right about it being composed quite early, doesn't he? Mind you, he would.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Nice idea on Alfred :-)

Really needs a Tolkien icon

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

And why do we think that?

Because a time-travelling Tolkien fan in 2347 went and made it so!

Alas it is too long since my Anglo-Saxon university days to comment on what current scholarship thinks. I really must read "Finn and Hengest"; I have a soft spot for the Finnsburh Fragment for its "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's an army!"

Re: Really needs a Tolkien icon

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten that bit :-)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. I think Shippey talks about the floor.

[segh.livejournal.com]

My sister, whom I have mentioned to you before, offers this:

The date of Beowulf.

The author of Beowulf is unknown, as is the exact date of the composition of the poem.

We may say that Beowulf was composed somewhere in England between about 521 AD (the approximate date of the death of the historical model for the character Hygelac) and 1026 AD (more or less the latest possible date of the manuscript itself). We do not know for sure where in England the poem was composed. Nor do we know if the poem was composed by a single author, or whether it is the result of the merging together of ballads by different authors, nor whether the poem was significantly altered subsequent to its first written form.

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. 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.

Arguments made for a late date (9th - 11th century) are usually based at least in part on the Danish focus of the poem, 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.

Important linguistic clues to the dating of the poem include the apparent lack of any Scandinavian loan words - the lack of such items is particularly suggestive in poem so intimately concerned with Scandinavia and suggests a pre-Viking date (<835).

…The upshot of this [i.e. some discussion of the linguistic variants compared with other AS poems] is that Beowulf could constitute a relatively early poem (8th-century), or poems--as the evidence of Kaluza's law [concerning alliterative patterns] would seem to require --and yet have been revised in certain (limited) ways at a later point.

[i.e. have your cake and eat it! Magnus Magnusson sums up, in a recent copy I bought of a modern translation, that it was probably composed early in the 8th century but that its building blocks came from the 6th - N.]

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. One question: how do we know the manuscript is from c1026? Is it the age of the physical materials, or the handwriting, or the grammar?

[segh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and she recommends this website:
http://www.heorot.dk/beowulf-vorwort.html

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Ta