The Dating of Beowulf

Review Article The Dating of Beowulf THEODORE M. ANDERSSON Colin Chase, editor. The Dating of Beowulf Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1981. 220. $27.50 Consultations beginning in 1978 and culminating in a conference at Toronto 20- 3 April 1980 have produced an exceptionally important volume: The Dating of Beowulf. Its importance lies in a thorough review of the evidence, copious references to earlier work, wide coverage of the types of evidence used to decide the issue, and ahigh level ofargumentation. Included in the volume are individualstatements by twelve scholars and a collaborative reassessment of the language of Beowulf. The intrinsic difficulty of the dating problem is reflected by great diversity in method and opinion. Codicological, linguistic, metrical, historical, stylistic, and archaeological arguments are mustered. Judgments on the proper dating range over three centuries, from the eighth to the tenth, but are usually tempered with much caution and uncertainty. It is rare to have so much information on acrucial issue in medieval literature concentrated in one place, and there is no doubt that these proceedings will become a standard reference work for several decades. Reviews of such collaborative volumes are generally confined to a few sentences on each contribution, but this volume deserves more. The editor opens the volume with a quick survey of 'Opinions on the Date of Beowulf, 1815- 1980': Thorkelin and N.F.S. Grundtvig (no earlier than the mid-sixth century), joseph Bachlechner (before 752), Levin Schiicking (last decade of the ninth century at the earliest), Alois Brandl (ca 700), Karl Miillenhoff (earlier than Caedmon), Bernhard ten Brink (fmal redaction in the eighth century), A.j. Barnouw (application of 'Lichtenheld's tesf suggesting an early date), Lorenz Morsbach (after 700), john Earle (Mercian in the last quarter of the eighth century), George Bond (Mercian in the fust half of the ninth century), Dorothy Whitelock (later eighth century), Nicolas jacobs (any time after 835 except for brief intermittent periods), Felix Liebermann and Albert S. Cook (Aldfrith's rule, 685-704), W.W. Lawrence (675-725), c.c. Batchelor (no later than ca 700), Ritchie Girvan (second half of the seventh century), Sune Lindqvist (ca 700), c.L. Wrenn (700-50), Kenneth Sisam (later eighth century), Gosta Langenfelt (beginning of the ninth century), Robert L. Reynolds and Norman Blake (late ninth or tenth UNIVERSIlY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 3, SPRINC 1983 0042M0147/83/osoo-0288-0301$ol.Solo 10 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS THE DATING OF BEOWULF 289 century), Patrick Wormald, W.F. Bolton, and Eric John (eighth century). This chaos provides in itself ample justification for the Toronto conference, but Chase adds an interesting note suggesting that opinion has not been quite so random as it might appear: 80 per cent of the editions and translations since 1815 concur on a date in the period 650-Boo. In the first paper Kevin S. Kiernan, 'The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the BeowulfManuscript' (pp 9-21), summarizes the results of his recent book Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 19B1) and argues that the palaeographical and codicological features of the Beowulf manuscript consistently suggest that Beowulf is contemporary with its extant manuscript' (p 9). The argument centres on Kiernan's contention that scribe B copied a new revised text onto a palimpsest on folio 179. The special nature of folio 179 was set out in detail by Tilman Westphalen in Beowulf3'50-55: Texlkritik und Editionsgeschichte (Munich: Fink 1967). Westphalen theorized that the leaf fell into the hands of a palimpsest-maker, but was luckily recovered before it was too late and repaired by scribe B (pp 95-7). Kiernan believes that the folio was erased to make room for a revised text and that gaps in the text furthermore reveal that the revision was never completed. This surmise 'opens the possibility that the Beowulf manuscript amounts to an unfinished draft of the poem' (p 14). Folio '79 is the first folio of the next-to-Iast gathering; these last two gatherings may have existed separately and may have been added to the other gatherings by scribe B. In this case the revised text of the palimpsest could have been written...