The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior by Leonard Neidorf (review)

This monograph begins with the claims that Beowulf is a unitary composition, entirely the product of one poetic mind, and that the poet in question worked between 685 and 725, likely around the year 700. The two scribes who prepared the extant manuscript, written between 1001 and 1010, together introduced three types of errors to the text: errors of orthography in that they replaced Anglian word-forms or unrecognized letter-forms with their best guess at West-Saxon versions of the same, or perhaps a similar and more common word; errors in comprehending the proper names and tribes of Germanic legend and history, and transcribing them awkwardly or replacing them with a word that might have seemed appropriate in the context; and errors in syntax and meter brought on by misunderstanding the poem's subtleties of composition and its dialect. In all, Neidorf states that his concern is three hundred errors of sense and form that constitute the emended and corrected words and passages in modern editions of Beowulf. The monograph thus purports to appraise the current state of textual criticism of the poem, an argument that would make the book a work of editorial theory or textual studies. Neidorf's purpose is to explicate what happened to the poem linguistically, onomastically, culturally, paleographically, and scribally in the intervening three hundred years between the creation of the poem and its inscription in the extant manuscript. The approach is intentionally polemical in its treatment of other scholars, by turns rather fawning in its praise and withering in its criticism of those scholars who do or do not share Neidorf's beliefs. Neidorf presents the book as simply a manual for those wishing to double-check their understanding with respect to some verses in the poem, stating, for example, that "this book presents a wealth of material for scholars to consult when they must evaluate textual evidence bearing on the dating and editing of Beowulf" (p. 10). From a young scholar this is not an unusual approach, but usually the excesses of this kind of enthusiasm are tempered at the thesis defense, and if not there, by the press readers and editors, who have here done no favors to the author. In short, those who agree with Neidorf will read approvingly, although they might find the lack of detailed scholarship and analysis worrisome. Those who want to know more about the issues will not find this book helpful, as it lacks many useful things: a general index, a list of the three hundred textual variants that are the core evidence, a list of proposed emendations, even a table of the relevant verses with some sense of how other scholars have treated them. And those who disagree will perhaps be too harsh in their criticisms of this important young scholar.

Neidorf presents the book as newly written since his dissertation at Harvard, although discussed with and read by his supervisor, Joseph Harris. The bibliography does not have a reference to the dissertation, "The Origins of Beowulf: Studies in Textual Criticism and Literary History," defended in April 2014 at Harvard University, but there is much similarity between the two. The opening paragraph, for example, is word for word the same as the dissertation. The individual chapters of the thesis, as indicated in the Acknowledgments, were all published as separate articles or as the Introduction and one chapter of Neidorf's edited collection The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (2014). Here, too, there is considerable overlap to this monograph, in both content and argument. The book's Introduction briefly surveys the issue of the dating of Beowulf. Chapter 2 concerns language history—really scribal modernizations and misreadings. Chapter 3 is entitled "Cultural Change" but addresses proper names and their complexity of transmission (Chapters 3 and 4 of the dissertation). Chapter 4 concerns scribal behavior not in philological detail but by comparing similar passages...