The Dating of Beowulf (Toronto Old English Studies)
Date: 1997-05-31
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

The Dating of Beowulf

The date of Beowulf, debated for almost a century, is a small question with large consequences. Does the poem provide us with an accurate if idealized view of early Germanic culture? Or is it rather a creature of nostalgia and imagination, born of the desire of a later age to create for itself a glorious past? If we cannot decide when, between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, the poem was composed, we cannot distinguish what elements in Beowulf belong properly to the history of material culture, to the history of myth and legend, to political history, or to the development of the English literary imagination.

This book represents both individual and concerted attempts to deal with this important question, and presents one of the most important inconclusions in the study of Old English. The contributors raise so many doubts, turn up so much new and disturbing information, dismantle so many long-accepted scholarly constructs that Beowulf studies will never be the same: henceforth every discussion of the poem and its period will begin with reference to this volume.

†Colin Chase, the editor of this volume, was a member of the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

edited by
COLIN CHASE

© University of Toronto Press 1997

Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-7879-6

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

The Dating of Beowulf

(Toronto Old English series ; no. 6)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8020-7879-6

1. Beowulf - Manuscripts. 2. Manuscript dating.
I. Chase, Colin, 1935-1984. II. University of Toronto.
Centre for Medieval Studies. III. Series.

PR1585.D38 1997 829′.3 C97-930683-3

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Publications Fund of University of Toronto Press.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

THE DATING OF BEOWULF

Opinions on the Date of Beowulf, 1815-1980
COLIN CHASE

The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript
KEVIN S. KIERNAN

The Nowell Codex and the Poem of Beowulf
LEONARD E. BOYLE O.P.

A Reconsideration of the Language of Beowulf
ANGUS CAMERON, ASHLEY CRANDELL AMOS, and GREGORY WAITE, with the assistance of SHARON BUTLER and ANTONETTE DIPAOLO HEALEY

Metrical Style as Evidence for the Date of Beowulf
THOMAS CABLE

Hetware and Hugas: Datable Anachronisms in Beowulf
WALTER GOFFART

Beowulf, the Danish Invasions, and Royal Genealogy
ALEXANDER CALLANDER MURRAY

The Audience of Beowulf and the Vikings
R.I. PAGE

Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf
ROBERTA FRANK

Variation in Beowulf and the Poetic Edda: A Chronological Experiment
RORY MC TURK

Saints’ Lives, Royal Lives, and the Date of Beowulf
COLIN CHASE

Style as the Criterion for Dating the Composition of Beowulf
PETER CLEMOES

On the Date of Composition of Beowulf
JOHN C. POPE

The Date of Beowulf: Some Doubts and No Conclusions
E.G. STANLEY

AFTERWORD: The Uses of Uncertainty: On the Dating of Beowulf
NICHOLAS HOWE

INDEX

General Editor

Editorial Board

ROBERTA FRANK

P.A.M. CLEMOES

J.E. CROSS

H. GNEUSS

J.F. LEYERLE

M.B. PARKES

E.G. STANLEY

1 Computers and Old English Concordances edited by Angus Cameron, Roberta Frank, and John Leyerle

2 A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English edited by Roberta Frank and Angus Cameron

3 The Stowe Psalter edited by Andrew C. Kimmens

4 The Two Versions of Wœrferth’s Translation of Gregory’s Dialogues: An Old English Thesaurus David Yerkes

5 Vercelli Homilies IX-XXIII edited by Paul E. Szarmach

6 The Dating of Beowulf edited by Colin Chase

7 Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies edited by Joyce Bazire and James E. Cross

8 Old English Word Studies: A Preliminary Author and Word Index Angus Cameron, Allison Kingsmill, and Ashley Crandell Amos

9 The Old English Life of Machutus edited by David Yerkes

This book is the result of a scholarly dialogue which took place between the autumn of 1978 and the spring of 1981. It began when contributors were asked to compose brief statements describing the evidence they intended to investigate and the methodology each planned to adopt. These statements were circulated to all participants at the end of May, 1979. In January, 1980, contributors submitted finished papers, which were copied and circulated among the group. Everyone then met in Toronto 20-23 April, 1980, to discuss the papers and to weigh the implications of what others had said. A six-month period for revising submissions in the light of what had been heard at the conference followed. The final period, from October 1980 to spring 1981, was devoted to preparing the papers for the press.

At the Toronto conference, all agreed that for our purposes the word Beowulf refers to a literary artifact at least substantially the same as the poem found in Cotton Vitellius A. XV. We agreed further to revise the papers in the light of what had been heard at the conference but not to debate directly with one another. Finally, we acknowledge with gratitude that each of us has learned from other contributors much that has had to go unnoted in the apparatus.

We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, of the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Toronto and its Deans, J.F. Leyerle and E.A. McCulloch, of the Update Fund of the University of Toronto, and of the Dictionary of Old English Project, all of whom together made the Toronto conference possible. Further, we are grateful to the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto and its Director, Norman Zacour, for supporting this project from initial planning to publication. We wish also to thank Elaine Quanz, whose typographical skill and accuracy have been an editor’s delight.

My personal thanks are owing in a special way to those in Toronto who undertook many editorial tasks and thus made it possible for this volume to be produced during my sabbatical absence, particularly to Walter Goffart and Antonette di Paolo Healey, who generously volunteered to help with the index; to Prudence Tracy of the University of Toronto Press, whose counsel was always wise and whose good humour was unfailing; to Anna Burko, our editorial assistant, who bore the burdens of the day’s heat in my absence; and to Angus Cameron and Roberta Frank, whose generosity and hard work have at every turn made this book better.

Finally, for her cheerful efficiency and response to our needs at every stage of a long and complex project, we wish to express a special debt of gratitude to Grace Vallis, executive secretary of the Centre for Medieval Studies, to whom we dedicate this book.

C.C.

Pine, Colorado

June 1981

ca.

‘around’

cf.

‘compare’

ch(s).

chapter(s)

col(s).

column(s)

comp.

compiled by

diss.

dissertation

ed(s).

edition(s), editor(s), edited by

e.g.

‘for example’

esp.

especially

f(f).

following

fol(s).

folio(s)

fn.

footnote

i.e.

‘namely’

intro.

introduction

1(1).

line(s)

MS(S)

manuscript(s)

n(n).

note(s)

N.F.

Neue Folge

no(s).

number(s)

OE

Old English

OLF

Old Low Franconian

ON

Old Norse

OS

Old Saxon

p(p).

page(s)

Pt.

part

r

recto

repr.

reprint(s), reprinted

rev.

revised, revised by

s.

‘century’

s.a.

‘under the year’

SE

southeastern

ser.

series

s.v.

‘under the word’

trans.

translation, translator, translated by

v

verso

WS

West-Saxon

eWS

early

1WS

late

nWS

non-

Abbreviations for grammatical terms are taken from Alistair Campbell’s Old English Grammar (Oxford 1959).

ASE

Anglo-Saxon England

ASPR

Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records

BEHE

Bibliothèque de l’École des hautes études, sciences historiques et philologiques

BGdSL

Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur

EETS (o.s.)

Early English Text Society (original series)

EEMF

Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile

ELH

ELH

HE

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum

JEGP

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

MArc

Medieval Archaeology

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae historica

AA

Auctores antiquissimi

SS

Scriptores in folio

SSrL

Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum

SSrM

Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum

NM

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen

PBA

Proceedings of the British Academy

PL

Patrologia Latina

PMLA

PMLA

RES

Review of English Studies

SB VS

Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research

TMLT

Toronto Medieval Latin Texts

ZfdA

Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur

COLIN CHASE

The earliest published opinion as to the date of Beowulf is implied in the title of its editio princeps, printed in 1815: ‘A Danish Poem in Anglo-Saxon Dialect Concerning Danish Events of the Third and Fourth Centuries.’ Thorkelin was not arguing that the poem was composed in the fourth century, but he clearly envisaged a date shortly thereafter, ‘for in this work we have abundant sources from which an understanding of our people’s religion and poetry can be gleaned as well as a narrative of their activities in the third and fourth centuries.’1 Objections were not long in coming. Nicolaus Outzen in his 1816 review of the edition doubted so early a date, pointing out not only the many Christian references in Beowulf but its impressive literary quality as well: ‘It is therefore wholly unlikely, even impossible, that a masterpiece so perfect in its art should have been brought to completion at so early a date.’2

In the same review Outzen quoted the famous passage from Gregory of Tours describing a raid of Chlochilaichus on the Frisian coast, but apparently without fully understanding the implications. These were to be drawn out by N.F.S. Grundtvig in 1817. His identification of Chlochilaichus with Hygelac, and the conclusion that events described in the poem could be dated to between 515 and 530, put any date prior to the mid-sixth century out of the question.3

In 1849 Joseph Bachlechner identified the king referred to at line 2921 as ‘the Merovingian’ (merewioingas from MS mere wio ingas), correcting Grundtvig and Kemble’s earlier ‘sea vikings’ (merewicinga). To many this identification appeared to provide a terminus ad quem of 752, on the hypothesis that it would be unlikely for an Anglo-Saxon poet to refer to the king of the Franks as ‘the Merovingian’ very long after that line had been replaced by the Carolingians. Levin L. Schücking, defending in 1921 a date of composition in the later ninth century, sought to revive the Grundtvig-Kemble reading as merewicingas, ‘the sea-viking.’ And in 1929 Alois Brandi again accepted the merewioingas reading as indicating not only a date of composition around 700 but a Mercian origin as well.4

The mid-nineteenth century was an era of source criticism. The apparent success of F.A. Wolf’s Liedertheorie in explaining how the Homeric epics had been put together from earlier short ballads and K. Lachmann’s solid scholarship in applying the same sort of analysis to establish the literary priority of Mark to the other synoptic Gospels influenced understanding of all earlier literature, including Beowulf. Karl Müllenhoff in 1869 analyzed Beowulf along these lines and concluded that it consisted of four originally independent lays and that about sixty percent of the extant poem had been interpolated. Clearly this kind of analysis implied a different process of composition, much harder to date, than creation of a single work by one author. Still, Müllenhoff believed that in its essential structure ‘Beowulf should not be placed later, but earlier than Cædmon’; he regarded the Offa passage (1931-62) as evidence of later interpolation.5

In 1888 Bernhard ten Brink provided an even more detailed analysis of the process of Beowulf’s coming together, agreeing in principle with Müllenhoff’s method but differing in many conclusions. To ten Brink, for example, the dragon fight had existed in two versions, one originating in Bernicia and combining with the story of the troll fights around 690, the other coming from Deira and remaining separate until about 710. The closest ten Brink came to arriving at a date of composition was his postulation of a final redactor in the course of the eighth century who did his best to reduce the loose collection of stories about Beowulf to a single epic. After this redactor came a true interpolator, who added the theological material. Similar analyses were made by Richard Constant Boer in 1912 and by W.A. Berendsohn in 1935, each discovering layers of material more or less removed from a set of primitive lays. Although this tradition of analysis disappeared after Berendsohn, some aspects of the theory of oral-formulaic composition, widespread in the 1950s and 1960s produced analogous results – as, for example, when Francis P. Magoun in 1963 postulated a separate origin for the final episode of the poem.6

Müllenhoff concluded his study with the modest assertion that ‘perhaps the questions raised here will never find a completely satisfying answer, but first someone should undertake a precise philological study, directed towards penetrating more deeply into the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry and language.’ An article which sought to do just that appeared four years later, in A. Lichtenheld’s study of the weak adjective in Anglo-Saxon, based on an analysis of Beowulf, Genesis, Andreas, Maldon, and the Chronicle poems. Lichtenheld’s primary interest was not to date the poems but to discover something about Old English syntax. For that purpose he accepted the current opinion that Beowulf was the earliest of the extant poems, and he concluded that its regular use of the weak adjective without definite article was good evidence for the primitive independence and emphasis of that construction. Although Lichtenheld did not intend to devise a means for dating Old English poems, his results were used that way – in 1883 by Ernst Johannes Groth, who concluded that Exodus is older than Beowulf; then by Bernhard ten Brink in the work mentioned above (1888) and by Thomas Gregory Foster in 1892. The most thorough application of what has come to be known as ‘Lichtenheld’s test’ was carried out in 1902 by A.J. Barnouw, whose results generally confirmed the datings originally taken as premises in Lichtenheld’s study. This implicit circularity in the application of Lichtenheld’s test weakens it as a dating argument, of course, but does not disprove his conclusions. The test remained the object of lively scholarly controversy to the end of the 1920s.7

Shortly after the publication of Barnouw’s study, Lorenz Morsbach applied another dating criterion directly to Beowulf. On the basis of comparison of datable early texts, he felt he had solid evidence that the loss of final u after long root syllables and of postconsonantal h before vowels occurred close to the year 700 and that Beowulf therefore had to have been composed after that date. In 1910 Carl Richter added another pair to Morsbach’s tests; they involved contraction caused by the loss of intervocalic h and the monosyllabic or disyllabic appearance of words ending in l, m, n, or r. Richter applied these tests to the whole range of Old English poetry. In 1913, however, Friedrich Seiffert showed that application of Richter’s two tests to Beowulf and Genesis A yielded conflicting results. Although scholarly opinion was, and continues to be, divided on the value of the metrical-linguistic tests, few refinements or creative modifications have been proposed since Gregor Sarrazin’s wide-ranging study of 1913.8

Investigation of medieval cultural and historical backgrounds for possible clues to the date of Beowulf has been a scholarly endeavour since Thorkelin first suggested third- and fourth-century Denmark, although nineteenth-century interest was displayed more often in the compositional analysis and objective tests described above. In 1892, however, John Earle began his prose translation of the poem with an extensive introduction, in which he argued that ‘the praise of Offa I is in the nature of incense to Offa II,’ that ‘the fictitious name of Thrytho has been suggested (at least in part) by the name of the Mercian queen Cynethryth,’ and that ‘the names of Garmund, Offa, and Eomær shadow forth the pedigree of the Mercian kings,’ concluding that the poem is a political allegory written in the last quarter of the eighth century for Ecgferth, son of Offa. Frederick RØnning in 1883 had suggested the latter half of the eighth century, but without the sort of historical speculation appealed to by Earle. Fifty years after Earle, George Bond employed a similar kind of onomastic allegory to correlate Beowulf with the political climate in the reigns of Beornwulf (823-6) and Wiglaf (828-38) of Mercia. Not until 1951, however, was the court of Offa of Mercia again suggested. In that year Dorothy Whitelock urged scholars not to remain so fixed on Bede’s Northumbria as to disregard the possibility of composition in Mercia of the later eighth century. She pressed her argument, however, wholly without the benefit of political allegory.9

In 1917 Levin L. Schücking provoked strong scholarly reaction by his suggestion that Beowulf was composed at a Danish court in England in the last decade of the ninth century at the earliest. His reasons were largely historical. What interest would an audience in Northumbria or Mercia have had in a poem written from so thoroughly Danish a perspective? Why would an English poet composing for an English audience have filled his poem with so much ancient Scandinavian lore, unlikely to have been familiar in England? The answer, to Schücking, was that an English poet had composed Beowulf for a Danish court, possibly in order to help the king’s children learn English. The earliest period at which such a thing could have happened would have been the end of the ninth century, when Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian culture first began to mix in England. Schücking had also argued in an earlier study that the account of Beowulf’s return to his home after the adventures in Denmark had been composed to link two previously independent poems. In 1977 Nicolas Jacobs examined aspects of Schücking’s arguments for a ninth- or tenth-century date and concluded that the common objection, originating with a comment of Grundtvig and repeated by Dorothy Whitelock, that the poem could not have been composed after the viking raids on England began in earnest in 835, is without solid historical foundation: ‘To sum up: a review of Anglo-Danish relations suggests that any periods in which political considerations may have discouraged the composition of Beowulf are likely to have been brief and at most intermittent.’10

In the interim, however, between Schücking’s article in 1917 and Whitelock’s book in 1951, speculation revolved largely around dates in the late seventh or early eighth century. In 1920 F. Liebermann published a study which concluded that the poem might have been written at the court of Cuthburg, sister of Ine of Wessex and wife of Aldfrith. In a similar vein, in 1922 Albert S. Cook argued on behalf of the patronage of king Aldfrith with some classical influence from Aldhelm. To Cook, the Offa passage (1931-62) was a veiled reference to Aldfrith, whose enmity with his half-sister Osthryth, queen of Mercia, is expressed in lines 1955-60. Both of these authors dated the poem within Aldfrith’s rule (685-704). At the conclusion of the decade W.W. Lawrence urged a similar date (675-725), largely on the basis of the quality of Northumbrian culture around the time of Bede and the fresh conjunction of Christianity and Mediterranean learning in the period. Then in 1937 C.C. Batchelor discerned evidence of Pelagianism in Beowulf that, to him, seemed to offer a clue to its date of composition: ‘If the poet wrote early, about the year 700 or earlier, he might well have the trustful love of God, devoid of fear. His religion might be patterned, without his knowing why, after Pelagius rather than after Augustine .... In the South a faith of this type would encounter difficulty; in the North, too, it would not be likely to occur very much later than 705, the death of Aldfrith.’11

Two years prior to Batchelor’s study Ritchie Girvan had published a set of three lectures reexamining linguistic, cultural, historical, and folkloric evidence to support a date of composition in the second half of the seventh century. When the book was reissued in 1971, it included a supplementary chapter by R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford on the relation to Beowulf of the discovery in 1939 of a burial-ship laden with treasure at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Bruce-Mitford’s remarks generally support Girvan’s conclusions, though not all his arguments, giving special emphasis to a possible connection between early Swedish and East Anglian rulers that he saw reflected in Beowulf. This Swedish connection had been discussed in 1948 by Sune Lindqvist, who accepted a date for Beowulf of ca. 700 and felt the poem could have been composed to honour the Uffingas, ‘a branch of the Royal House of Uppsala and descendants of Wiglaf.’ C.L. Wrenn in 1959 also considered Sutton Hoo but appeared undecided between the implications of the ship-burial, favouring a date in the late seventh or very early eighth century, and the arguments of Dorothy Whitelock on behalf of a date between 750 and 800 in Mercia. Wrenn had moved from a firm dating of ca. 700 in the 1950 introduction to his revised edition of Clark Hall’s translation, to a less firm dating of prior to 750 in his own edition of 1953. In the latter he placed much emphasis on the implication of the archaic instrumental wundini which some scholars see at line 1382.12

In 1951 Dorothy Whitelock urged scholars to reconsider whether Beowulf should be assigned to the ‘age of Bede’ – not ‘that the poem could not have been composed then, but merely that it need not have been.’ Her opinion was based on three lines of thought: scepticism concerning the usefulness of previous linguistic analysis for dating, particularly if Cynewulf’s work is later than generally thought; the extent and complexity of Christian diction in the poem, implying an audience at some remove from the time of the conversion; and a sense that our more complete knowledge of Bede’s time might be diverting attention from other, equally possible eras and locales, such as the Mercian court of Offa. At the same time, she argued against a date of composition after 835, ‘when the Viking invasions began in earnest,’ because of the respect and honour showed to the Danes in the poem. Her views influenced some scholars to reconsider Offa and the later eighth century, for example C.L. Wrenn, who modified earlier opinions, as discussed above. Similarly, Kenneth Sisam in 1953 inclined towards the later eighth century on the basis of the Offa allusion, if the poem really is the work of one man.13

Perhaps a more important effect of Whitelock’s study, however, was to encourage scholars to investigate periods and places other than those commonly accepted, even those outside the boundaries she considered admissible. Since 1951 several studies have appeared investigating a possible ninth- or tenth-century date for the poem – an idea that seemed to have died after Schücking’s article of 1917. In 1961, for example, Gösta Langenfelt suggested the beginning of the ninth century, explaining the presence of Scandinavian elements in the poem by the activity of Carolingian missionaries. In 1957, Robert L. Reynolds argued on the basis of economic and social history and a connection between Beowulf and the Wonders of the East that the poem was composed in the late ninth century at the earliest, and more probably at some time in the tenth. Then in 1977 Norman Blake mounted an argument that most of the corpus of Old English poetry was composed in the late ninth or early tenth century, while in the following year Nicolas Jacobs, in an article discussed above, raised the possibility of a similar date for Beowulf.14

This is not to say, however, that more traditional positions on the question have been abandoned. For example, in 1978 alone Patrick Wormald and W.F. Bolton each published extensive commentaries on the background of the poem, assuming an eighth-century date of composition. Again, in 1974 Eric John argued for a date more or less in the age of Bede, on the basis of the system of land tenure he saw in the poem. Further, a survey of more than eighty percent of the editions and translations since 1815 fails to turn up any editor or commentator since Thorkelin who firmly commits himself to a date outside the range 650-800. Nevertheless, some commentators reach an extreme limit of scepticism, as when Bruce Mitchell said in 1968 that ‘examination of the language can do little more than confirm the possibility that the poem was composed between c. 680 and 800 (or perhaps later).’15

In the long history of scholarly interest in this subject few chronological facts have been so clear and convincing as to command immediate and lasting agreement. Only two, in fact, come to mind: Grundtvig’s identification of Chlochilaichus with Hygelac, and the general scholarly consensus that the manuscript dates from near the year 1000. Every other inference relating to the date of Beowulf’s composition is sufficiently ambiguous as to make the subject seem ready for reexamination.

KEVIN S. KIERNAN

Until now no one has investigated the possibility that Beowulf was composed at the time of its only surviving manuscript. Indeed, since the inauguration of Beowulf studies in the early nineteenth century, scholars have shown surprisingly little interest in the unique Beowulf manuscript.1 Facsimiles have been available for the past century, seemingly belying this assertion, but to a large extent they have only impeded a real understanding of the manuscript.2 They are surely unreliable, if not actually worthless, as primary sources for detailed palaeographical and codicological research. The curious neglect of the Beowulf manuscript is owing not so much to the early accessibility of the facsimiles, however, as to the earlier theory that relegated the manuscript itself to the status of a poor facsimile. The manuscript was universally presumed to be, at best, a reproduction of a reproduction, the last fuzzy stage of an incalculably long and complicated transmission of the original text. This theory is founded on linguistic and historical assumptions that many scholars now consider fallacious.3 Linguistic and historical arguments can, at any rate, serve a late date of composition at least as well as an early one, and thus can dissolve the biases that have so far precluded any serious interest in the manuscript. There is reason to be interested, for the palaeographical and codicological features of the Beowulf manuscript consistently suggest that Beowulf is contemporary with its extant manuscript.

Neil R. Ker, the acknowledged authority on Anglo-Saxon palaeography, dates the Beowulf manuscript by its script alone at the beginning of the eleventh century.4 Though his dating code for the manuscript, ‘s. X/XI,’ is usually reduced by scholars, for convenience, to ‘around the year 1000,’ Ker in fact warns us that approximate year-numbers like these are ‘not satisfactory dates for manuscripts datable only by their script and decoration unless we remember how approximate they must be ‘ (p. xx). He prefers to assign half-century limits for such manuscripts, so that ‘s. X/XI’ is best interpreted as (roughly) 975-1025. However, the nature of the Beowulf text and the political history of the period make it possible to reduce these limits considerably. Through the long, calamitous reign of Æthelred Unræd (978-1014), England was mercilessly attacked and plundered by vikings, most ferociously and effectively by Danish Scyldings under Sveinn Forkbeard.5 Since the opening lines of Beowulf unabashedly celebrate the founding of the Danish Scylding line, it is difficult to imagine Anglo-Saxon scribes placidly copying the Beowulf manuscript during Æthelred’s reign. By 1016, however, the political situation had changed completely. England had by then become the centre of the Danish Scylding dynasty, under the strong and peaceful rule of Knut the Great (1016-35), son of Sveinn and descendant of the legendary Scyld.6 The most probable time of the manuscript, then, is sometime after 1016, when the genealogical panegyric was a compliment, rather than an insult, to the reigning king. Knut’s reign is also an eminently appropriate time for the composition of Beowulf providing as it does a splendid confluence of Anglo-Saxon poetry and Scandinavian lore.

The nature of the palaeographical and codicological evidence supporting an eleventh-century provenance for both Beowulf and the Beowulf manuscript requires a meticulous distinction between the manuscript and its facsimiles. The caveat is applicable to all studies of manuscripts, of course, but it has particular relevance in this case. Most of the evidence can be gathered only by direct access to the manuscript, while some spurious evidence, derived from facsimiles alone, vanishes by looking in the manuscript. Thus John Pope, who relied on ultraviolet photographs for his first edition of The Rhythm of Beowulf, was misled by a hole, some shine-through, and some dirt on the last page of the Beowulf manuscript; after examining the manuscript itself in 1964 for the second edition, he withdrew several suggested readings, supported by the photographs but not by the manuscript.7 Kemp Malone, who of course had extensively studied the manuscript in preparing his facsimile of the Nowell Codex, nonetheless relied on a facsimile alone for the reading ‘fær (?),’ supposedly written ‘in a much later hand’ above line 2 of folio 179v; in the manuscript this ‘reading’ is nothing more than a smudge of dirt on the vellum.8 And C.L. Wrenn, who established *wun[d]ini as a proof of the early date of Beowulf, unfortunately based his reading on a facsimile, too, for the d he believed to be lost was in fact merely covered by the paper mounting, and the -ini is clearly -mi in the manuscript.9 In short, facsimiles can be dangerous, and scholars and editors of Beowulf have not always used them with due caution. Modern technology has yet to produce a facsimile of Beowulf that can furnish uniformly reliable information on such vital details as scribal proofreading, changes in ink, the texture and discolouration of vellum, sheet collations, drypoint rulings, measurements, erasures, and palimpsests.10 With time, care, good eyesight, and an open mind, the student of the manuscript itself will not be fooled, as one can easily be with facsimiles, by holes, tears, dirt, stains, shadows, wrinkles, shine-through, off-prints, burns, or the paper mountings.

A collation of the vellum leaves of the entire Nowell Codex reveals that, in all probability, Beowulf was originally copied as a separate book that was later added to the prose part of the codex. Though the threads, folds, and prick-marks from the original gatherings were all destroyed in the Cottonian Library fire of 1731, a collation of the hair and flesh sides of the separate vellum leaves can determine which leaves were probably conjugate and which leaves were certainly not. The collation shows that Beowulf could have begun either on the seventh leaf of a quarternion (the traditional view) or on the first leaf of a new gathering. In the absence of the prick-marks, the rulings themselves are not sufficient to confirm either view, however, since the sheets were ruled separately for the most part. Even with the same prick-marks it would have been impossible for the scribe to rule all of the separate sheets invariably alike, and in fact there are often noticeable discrepancies in the rulings within discrete gatherings of the Beowulf manuscript. As a result, though the width and length of the writing grid for the first leaf of Beowulf differs slightly from those of the preceding leaf, it would be unsafe to use this evidence as definitive proof that Beowulf began a new gathering. Nonetheless, since the second gathering of the prose codex is certainly a trine, while the third and fourth gatherings are trines expanded to quires by the addition of half-sheets, it is reasonable to conclude that the fifth gathering was also a trine, all that was needed to finish copying the prose texts, and that Beowulf thus began on a new gathering.

This conclusion is well supported by other palaeographical and codicological evidence. On the first page of Beowulf, for instance, the unusually heavy rulings, which have split the vellum at both margins, suggest that the page was on the outside of its gathering; in the bottom margin the worn signature, Vi[tellius] A 15, indicates that the poem was a separable part of the codex; in the first line the sudden and remarkable change in the scribe’s way of drawing capitals suggests a new codex; and in the bottom third of the page the damage to the text was most likely caused by sweat and friction when the page served as an outside cover.11 There is more pervasive corroboration, too. An exhaustive study of the scribal proofreading throughout the Nowell Codex reveals that only Beowulf was thoroughly and repeatedly proofread and intelligently corrected by both scribes. The second scribe even corrected the first scribe’s work in Beowulf (but not in the preceding prose texts), and in addition to making some needed corrections made a few unnecessary emendations, apparently to standardize the two scribes’ divergent orthography.12 The second scribe’s special connection with the Beowulf manuscript, moreover, was not limited to copying, proofreading, and making selective emendations. The manuscript must have remained in his possession, for he continued to work with it long after he had first copied his part of the poem. He later restored readings which had been damaged by accident (eowrūcynne, for example, on folio 192v2) or by ordinary wear and tear (most notably on the last page of the manuscript, where he freshened up a badly faded text). There can be no doubt, at least, that both scribes understood Beowulf and treated the Beowulf manuscript as if it were a separate, and important, codex.

The most extraordinary example of the second scribe’s special connection with the Beowulf manuscript is that he later copied a new text on a palimpsest of folio 179. The palimpsest accordingly provides us with startling palaeographical and codicological evidence that part of Beowulf was actually revised in the course of the eleventh century, long after the original text was copied. The discovery of the palimpsest was made by Tilman Westphalen, who published his stunning findings in 1967.13 A century ago Zupitza, presumably observing the unusual condition of the vellum and the strange appearance of the script on the folio, had concluded without due explanation that ‘all that is distinct in the FS. in folio 179 has been freshened up by a later hand in the MS.’14 A codicological study of the manuscript alone shows quite convincingly that folio 179 is a palimpsest. The sheet collation shows unequivocally that it and folio 188 formed the outside sheet of the penultimate gathering of Beowulf, yet it is equally clear that only folio 179 was subsequently washed down and heavily scoured, without affecting the conjugate leaf.15 Hence the original text on folio 179 was erased. Westphalen showed that the folio was a palimpsest by a systematic palaeographical study, a letter-by-letter comparison of the script with the second scribe’s handwriting in the rest of the manuscript. His brilliant discussion of Zupitza’s ‘freshening up’ theory reveals that the scribe’s handwriting on this folio had evolved into a more modern script, similar in some ways to the first scribe’s.16 The evolution of the second scribe’s a, from a four-sided angular letter to a three-sided rounded one, is particularly illustrative.17 Westphalen reasonably estimated that this kind of development in a professional scribe’s handwriting must have taken a long time, up to twenty years.

The palimpsest and the later script of folio 179 are by definition incompatible with the old belief that the Beowulf manuscript is a late, purely mechanical copy of a much earlier poem. In his effort to reconcile them, Westphalen subordinated the facts he had discovered to the theories that the poem was early and that the text on folio 179 was necessarily the original text, freshened up. This unnatural union accounts for his uncharacteristically diffident hypothesis that someone in need of vellum must have randomly chosen the Beowulf manuscript as a good source for palimpsests;18 and that the second scribe, ten to twenty years older, luckily discovered the vandalism and restored what he could still see of the original text. The evidence, however, does not well support this part of Westphalen’s otherwise splendid refinements of Zupitza’s ‘freshening up’ theory, and points instead to the conclusion that the second scribe himself made the palimpsest for the customary purpose of providing vellum for a new text, in this case for a late revision of Beowulf As A.H. Smith says, the script on the folio does not display ‘that hesitation and lack of coincidence usually associated with freshening up, forgery, and the like.’19 Surely the evolution of the scribe’s letter-forms could not have been so convincingly documented by Westphalen if the scribe had in fact been laboriously restoring the erased original, for then he would have been tracing over his old letter-forms. Moreover, some of the supposedly freshened up material cannot be logically attributed to the original. It is hard to believe, for example, that the scribe restored the mistake and the superscript correction of it at the end of line 9 on the recto. It is equally unlikely that the many strange spellings, unparalleled in the rest of the manuscript, were original readings. In a late revision, on the other hand, the scribe’s mistake and correction are no cause for wonder, while his anomalous spellings, like hard for heard in line 15 on the verso, can be consistently explained as natural signs of attrition in the late West-Saxon literary dialect, which began to break down in non-West-Saxon territory as the eleventh century advanced.20 Finally, a close look at the badly damaged condition of the text on the palimpsest, particularly at the textual lacunas, shows conclusively that we are faced with a revision, not a mere restoration of the original text. The text we now have is shorter than the original, for the erased first line on the verso was almost certainly a dittograph in the revision from r20-21: [b]roga ... sceapen can be read with confidence. As this line also illustrates, parts of the revised text were later erased. In fact, most of the gaps on the recto are erasures made after the new text was copied,21 not parts of the original text, which the scribe was unable to freshen up. Thus a full restoration of the revised text, not of the original one, was never completed.

The incipient state of the text on the palimpsest, and the fact that it displays in any case a later script than the rest of the manuscript, opens the possibility that the Beowulf manuscript amounts to an unfinished draft of the poem. As incredible as an extant draft of Beowulf may seem to some readers, there is considerable palaeographical and codicological support for the view that the Beowulf manuscript in fact preserves for us the last formative stages in the creation of the epic. Three lines of text thematically related to the new text on the palimpsest have been imperfectly but deliberately deleted on the next folio, 180vl-3.22 The erasing was never finished, though it seems likely that the vellum was being prepared for a new text as well. Presumably both folios 179 and 180vl-3 are part of the same revision-in-progress. An analysis of the construction of the Beowulf manuscript provides a possible explanation for the purpose of this revision. As we have seen, the palimpsest is the first leaf of the last two gatherings of the manuscript, and as such begins a self-contained unit of the manuscript. Moreover, the number of sheets in these last two gatherings, the manner in which the sheets are arranged, the number of rulings, and the width of the writing grid, are all features that differ sharply from the established format of the rest of the Beowulf manuscript. It is therefore possible that this part of the manuscript formerly existed separately, and was artificially appended to the extant manuscript by the second scribe.23 If so, the revised text on the palimpsest may have been written (or copied) by this scribe at a later time to provide a smoother, more natural transition between two, originally distinct, and perhaps even totally unrelated manuscripts.

The theory of a composite manuscript is substantiated by other palaeographical and codicological facts in both scribes’ sections of the manuscript. Before considering this evidence, however, one ought to note the relevant textual context in which it is found. The main palaeographical and codicological evidence, which can be characterized as unprecedented signs of extemporizing in the copying of the manuscript, is all found in the section of the text known as ‘Beowulf’s Homecoming,’ a narrative unit that makes the vital transition between Beowulf’s youthful exploits in Denmark and the confrontation in his old age with the dragon in Geatland.24 The first scribe copied all of the section on Beowulf’s youthful exploits in the first five gatherings of the Beowulf manuscript, and in the first fourteen lines of the next gathering (up to line 1887); the second scribe copied all of the section on Beowulf’s last fight, from the last six lines of this same gathering (from line 2200) to the end of the manuscript. The two scribes divided the copying of the transitional gathering, containing the transitional text of Beowulf’s Homecoming (lines 1888-2199), with the second scribe taking over in the middle of line 1939b. The scribes’ division of labour was neither by episode, nor by gathering, folio, page, or even by half-line of verse. The transition in the script is as abrupt and unplanned as Beowulf’s decision to go home. Unless it is only a remarkable coincidence that the palaeographical transition and the textual transition were achieved in the same gathering, Beowulf’s Homecoming may well have been first composed to join together two different Beowulf manuscripts and first copied in our surviving manuscript.

The exceptional nature of the transitional gathering as the essential link between two otherwise disparate palaeographical and codicological units is well illustrated by considering the aspect of the manuscript without this gathering. Without it, scholars would have been led to conclude that the two gatherings preserving Beowulf’s fight with the dragon had been copied many years before the five gatherings preserving Beowulf’s youthful fights with Grendel and Grendel’s dam. The relatively archaic script of the second scribe, in which insular letter-forms like the low s still effectively compete with the high Caroline s, would be grounds enough to argue that the second scribe’s work was somewhat older than the first scribe’s, in which the Caroline influence is more advanced.25 It would seem most probable, as well, that the two Beowulf manuscripts derived from different scriptoria, judging by the marked difference in format: specifically, the first scribe regularly uses four-sheet quires, ruled with a narrower writing grid about 10 cm. wide for 20 lines of text per page, and with sheets generally arranged so that hair faces hair and flesh faces flesh; the second scribe uses five-sheet gatherings, ruled with a writing grid over 11 cm. wide for 21 lines of text per page, and with sheets invariably arranged with hair sides facing out, so that hair faces flesh within the gatherings. In short, without the palaeographically and codicologically transitional gathering, scholars would have reasonably concluded that two virtually complete Beowulf stories had been preserved in two unrelated manuscripts, attesting to a rather lively Beowulf tradition in different parts of England in late Anglo-Saxon times. Surely it would have been a reckless theory, attacked from all sides, to propose that the first scribe’s manuscript and the second scribe’s manuscript were parts of the same manuscript, or even that the two stories were parts of the same original poem.

The second scribe takes over copying in the transitional gathering on the second leaf, folio 172v4, but since the first scribe began copying in it, the gathering was of course made up in the first scribe’s manner:26 there are four sheets to the quire, rulings with the narrower writing grid for twenty lines of text per page, and the first two sheets are arranged with flesh facing flesh, the second two with hair facing hair. Presumably the first scribe fully expected to finish copying the gathering, if not the entire poem. Because the handwriting of the two scribes is so ill-matched, it is clear that they did not plan in advance a place for the second scribe to take over the copying. If they had, the change in handwriting could have been obscured by the first scribe stopping at the end of folio 172r, rather than after three lines on the verso. There is convincing palaeographical and codicological evidence that the first scribe suddenly halted where he did, and the second scribe took over, because by that point the decision had been made to join two originally distinct manuscripts, and perhaps two originally distinct poems.

The evidence indicates that the second scribe may well have copied his part of the transitional gathering containing Beowulf’s Homecoming after he had already copied the last two gatherings of the manuscript, those containing the fight with the dragon and Beowulf’s death. What so strongly suggests that he copied this gathering last is that he resorted to various extreme measures to fit far more text within the gathering than it was originally designed to hold. Most notably, he squeezed four extra lines of text, in disregard of the original rulings made by the first scribe, on folios 174v through 176r. This extraordinary recourse would not have been necessary if the scribe had at least two extra gatherings of unused vellum (and uncopied text) ahead of him. The squeezing in of 21 lines of text per page, at this early stage, on four successive folios clearly ruled for 20 lines of text per page, can only mean that the scribe did not have vellum available after this gathering. Otherwise he could have easily fit the text of four extra lines simply by adding a few extra letters per line in the course of copying the last three gatherings of the poem. Unless he was compelled to squeeze the extra material into the transitional gathering, it was far too early in the copying for the scribe to be worrying about running out of vellum. If he really had over twenty empty folios remaining on which to copy, the scribe’s desperate recourse of ignoring the rulings of the transitional gathering is inexplicable. The last two gatherings of the poem, then, evidently had been copied already.

It should be stressed that the four extra lines on folios 174v through 176r could not have been added inadvertently. These folios do not constitute a separate sheet of vellum, and so it is out of the question that one sheet of the quire was unintentionally ruled for 21 rather than 20 lines. The third sheet of this gathering consists of folios 173 and 176, while the innermost sheet consists of folios 174 and 175. Rulings were made with an awl, making furrows that provided rulings for recto and verso simultaneously. Thus the third sheet cannot have been ruled by mistake for 20 lines on folio 176v, but for 21 lines on the recto; and the innermost sheet cannot have been ruled for 20 lines on folio 174r, but for 21 lines on the verso. The extra lines of text on these four consecutive pages, folios 174v-176r, are obviously not there by accident. On the contrary, the second scribe tried to camouflage his additions. He did not simply rule extra lines at the bottom of each page; instead, he managed to maintain a uniform written space (about 175 mm., from the first ruling to the last) by deliberately ignoring the first scribe’s inner rulings, and by carefully spacing the lines of his own text so that he would progressively pick up enough room for an extra line of text per page. The Zupitza-Davis facsimile of folio 174v is faithful enough to illustrate his method, for it faintly reproduces the first scribe’s rulings. Starting at line 3, the second scribe began lifting the line of text away from the ruling, until, at line 17, an entire line of text had been added, and his copy could once again coincide with the first scribe’s rulings. Thus, if one counts the rulings in the facsimile there are 20, despite the fact that there are 21 lines of text. This decidedly difficult way of including extra material on the folios virtually proves that, for some reason, the second scribe was compelled to fit it all within the transitional gathering.

There are other sure signs of his need to fit more text in than the gathering was designed to hold. On folio 174v, the same page on which the scribe began squeezing in an extra line of text in disregard of the rulings, he omitted fitt number XXX for lack of space. It is not surprising that he did not squander the line he had so laboriously gained on a fitt number, and that he drew the large capital O outside the area of the text. He garnered a good deal more space throughout the gathering by ignoring the first scribe’s margins, or bounding-lines, which permitted him only about 10 cm. of text per line. The second scribe added about 1 cm. of additional space per line by ignoring one or both of the first scribe’s margins. Again, folio 174v provides a good example, because of the clarity of the rulings: the right bounding-line can be clearly seen in the facsimile in line 10, between hryre and lytle. By ignoring the margin on this one page, the scribe added outside the margin over 60 characters, the equivalent of at least two whole lines, to his text. The scribe normally ignored the right margin, as in this example, though a few times he disregarded the left bounding-line too. We can even see in the facsimile the point at which the scribe knew that the remainder of his text would fit into the gathering without further violating the bounds of the first scribe’s writing grid. By folio 176v he stopped squeezing in an extra line of text in disregard of the rulings; on the next page, folio 177r, though he ignored the first scribe’s left margin for the first 18 lines, he used the margin for the last two lines, and thereafter generally adhered to the 10 cm. boundaries until the last page of the gathering (fol. 178v). His lack of consistency clearly shows that he did not simply abandon the first scribe’s format to follow his own standards, or he would have continued with 21 lines of text and 11-cm. bounding-lines throughout the gathering. The scribe undeniably went to great lengths to fit a certain amount of text within the transitional gathering. It seems most likely that he was obliged to do so because he had already copied the last two gatherings of the poem.

Thus a clear pattern emerges from all of the unusual palaeographical and codicological data associated with the second scribe. He has not only made emendations and corrected errors in his own and in the first scribe’s part of the Beowulf manuscript, and restored damages as age and use deteriorated the manuscript. His part of the manuscript provides persuasive palaeographical and codicological evidence that he helped copy a new episode, Beowulf’s Homecoming, designed to fuse two different manuscripts about Beowulf’s Danish and Geatish exploits into a unified epic. Apparently, many years later, he was still working towards a better fusion of these parts on the revised text of the palimpsest.27 There is also some palaeographical and codicological evidence that the first scribe participated in the revision that fused the two stories and the two manuscripts. There are indications, at least, that the text immediately preceding the transitional gathering underwent major revisions after the first scribe stopped copying and the second scribe replaced him. And if the second scribe was indeed copying an entirely new text in the transitional gathering, and later had to revise the first folio of the next gathering (fol. 179, the palimpsest), as well as delete three lines from folio 180v, it should not be surprising that the first scribe might also need to revise part of the text preceding the transitional gathering to accommodate the new direction of the narrative. Together, the anomalous rulings of the preceding gathering (fols. 163-170), and the fitt numbers that run through it and the transitional gathering (fols. 171-178), furnish solid palaeographical and codicological support for positing such a revision.

The first scribe ruled all of his gatherings, except the one in question, for 20 lines of text to the page. His total uniformity in this respect, not only in Beowulf but in the prose texts of the Nowell Codex as well, renders the 22-line rulings for folios 163-170 decidedly suspicious. The most obvious explanations are that the scribe had more material to copy in the gathering than he originally had planned for it (an explanation consonant with revision) or that the gathering was ruled anomalously by mistake. The latter explanation can be safely dismissed. The scribe made sure that his anomalously ruled gathering would not look much different from the rest of his gatherings by keeping the writing space identical (about 175 mm.), despite the two extra rulings. It is not extraordinary in itself, of course, that the scribe ruled his gathering in accord with the amount of text he had to copy. What is remarkable is that, for some reason, he was obliged to restrict the extra rulings to this gathering: it is strange that he ruled it for 22 lines per page, and then the next gathering for 20 lines, instead of ruling both for 21 lines, like the last two gatherings of the poem. The apparent reason is that the scribe had to copy more material on the first of these quires than he had initially planned for it, and curiously could not spread the additional material over two gatherings. As in the similar case of the second scribe in the transitional gathering, this kind of restriction may imply revision in the circumscribed area. It can be argued, then, that the first scribe, after being replaced by the second, went back and copied a revised text on the preceding quire.

This hypothetical revision, it follows, was either considerably shorter or somewhat longer than the original text. At first glance, it would appear that the revised text was longer, since it required a gathering ruled for 22 lines per page, while the original text only needed 20 lines per page. In other words, the revised text was about 32 lines longer (two lines added for 16 consecutive pages) than the original text. But these appearances are probably deceiving. Evidence from the fitt numbers indicates that the poem was shortened, which could mean that a gathering ruled for 22 lines replaced two original quires ruled for the customary 20 lines. In this case the revision is quite radical, for it means that about 288 lines (the difference between two quires ruled for 20 lines and one quire ruled for 22) were deleted from the poem. However, it is unrealistic to conceive of a major revision as simple addition or subtraction of lines. If there was a major revision, parts of the text no doubt were deleted while other parts were expanded. The fitt numbers suggest that an entire fitt may have been deleted from the poem, but aside from this clue the precise nature and scope of the presumptive revision of the text in this gathering remain a mystery.

The fitt numbers indicate that the twenty-fourth fitt of the original text was deleted in its entirety. Accordingly, they independently corroborate the conclusions reached on the basis of the anomalous rulings. All of the fitt numbers in Beowulf from I to XXIII are in perfect order, and have not been tampered with in any way. But beginning with the second number of the gathering anomalously ruled for 22 lines, and continuing through the transitional gathering to number XXXI, all of the fitt numbers either have been altered or were never written in the first place. The scribe mistakenly wrote XXV, instead of XXIIII, for the second number in the anomalously ruled quire, and thereafter he and the second scribe held to the new erroneous sequence for the remainder of the poem. A later alterer made an abortive effort to correct the number sequence, but in the process obscured the first scribe’s error, and left the false impression that the second scribe had made a series of errors. In all, five fitt numbers were altered: of the first scribe’s numbers, XXV was changed rather sloppily to XXIIII by the alterer writing two of the four I’s over the V (the inept imitation of the scribe’s I’s shows that neither scribe was the alterer); XXVI, XXVII, and XXVIII were changed to XXV, XXVI, and XXVII, simply by erasing the last I of each number. Similarly, the second scribe’s number XXVIIII, the only one of his that was altered, was changed to XXVIII by erasing the last I.

The spurious alteration of these numbers has led to some unwarranted conclusions about the number of fitts in the poem. The second scribe wrote only two fitt numbers in the transitional gathering, XXVIIII on folio 173r and XXXI on folio 177r. As we have seen, he did not write XXX on folio 174v for lack of space. He did, however, clearly mark the beginning of the new fitt with a large capital O in the margin. But when the alterer changed XXVIIII to XXVIII by erasing the I, he left the false impression (followed by most modern editors) that the second scribe had failed to write in two fitt numbers, XXVIIII and XXX, and worse, that he had failed even to mark the beginning of one of the fitts with a capital letter. Thus the alterer ingenuously shifted the first scribe’s mistake over to the second scribe, for the illusion that two fitt numbers are missing here can be directly traced back to the first scribe’s error of skipping number XXIIII, and writing number XXV instead. The second scribe, who relied on the accuracy of the first scribe’s number sequence, continued numbering the fitts where the first scribe left off. Hence the disarray in the fitt numbers of the anomalously ruled quire and of the transitional gathering, as well as the confusion over the actual number of fitts in the poem, can all be reduced to the first scribe’s omission of XXIIII. If one ignores the spurious alterations, the fitts were numbered from I to XXIII, and then from XXV to XLIII, indicating that there are 43 fitts in the poem, whereas in fact there are only 42.

The two scribes’ number sequence before the alterer obfuscated the evidence is quite significant. It effectively proves that the fitts of the poem had not been numbered in this way before the extant manuscript, and a first numbering of the fitts is in keeping with a contemporary manuscript. At the very least, the omission of XXIIII implies that the first scribe was numbering the fitts of Beowulf for the first time, without the aid of numbers in his exemplar, and that he omitted a number by mistake. The first scribe undoubtedly wrote his fitt numbers after he copied the text, for the numbers up to folio 168r9 were written by him with a much finer quill tip than the one he used to copy the text. Presumably he wrote the numbers later because, without numbers in his exemplar, he felt he could not easily keep track of the sequence while copying. The first scribe’s mistake also shows that the second scribe did not have numbers in his exemplar, for his numbers ingenuously perpetuate the first scribe’s erroneous sequence. Moreover, there are clear signs that the second scribe tried, with indifferent success, to leave space for fitt numbers that would be added later. In the last two gatherings he remembered to leave a line free on folio 183r8, and in other cases there was usually enough space, whether he remembered or not, for fitt numbers at the end of the preceding fitts. However, there was no space at the end of fitt XXXVII, folio 189vl6, and the scribe forgot to leave a line free. He realized his oversight part way through the first line of the new fitt, and remarkably improvised space by cutting off the name Wihstanes after writing only wih-. On folio 191 rl 2 he no doubt thought he had left room for a fitt number, but apparently he did not yet know that the number would be XXXVIIII, too long to fit the space, which he ultimately left blank.28

All of the facts, then, point to the conclusion that Beowulf was numbered for the first time in the extant manuscript. But the first scribe’s blunder, his omission of XXIIII, may tell us more than that the number sequence is contemporary with the manuscript. The numbering could have been initially thrown off if a revised text of the anomalously ruled quire in part entailed the deletion of the original twenty-fourth fitt. The first scribe’s numerical oversight is easily explained if one assumes that the revisions were made on the quire or quires replaced by the anomalously ruled one. If it was his practice to number the fitts as soon as he finished a gathering, the first scribe could have mechanically copied the fitt numbers he had supplied for his first copy when he transcribed the revision. To this extent the fitt numbers enhance the possibility, first suggested by the anomalous rulings, that folios 163-170 contain part of a late revision of Beowulf.

My investigation of the Beowulf manuscript began as a palaeographical and codicological description of a neglected Anglo-Saxon codex. From the start it was obvious that nearly all unusual features in the codex, features that implied something other than mechanical copying of five Old English texts, had not been adequately described before. If my investigation has ended as an interpretation of palaeographical and codicological data, it is because so much of the unusual data, alone and combined, seemed to imply that the Beowulf manuscript was contemporary with the poem: apparently it was copied as a separate codex; without doubt it was thoroughly, repeatedly, and intelligently proofread by the scribes; it was dutifully repaired by the second scribe as time and use damaged it; and most importantly, a wide range of evidence persistently suggests that it was revised by both scribes in one specific, and seemingly relevant, section of the manuscript, between folios 163 and 180, and especially between folios 171 and 179. The evidence of revision implies as well that the Beowulf manuscript is an unfinished draft of the poem, and that it preserves for us the artistic fusion of two originally distinct Beowulf narratives. A truly objective description of the codex would not completely overlook or ignore the possible significance of such features as a signature of ownership on the first page of Beowulf, marked changes in format, discrepancies in the rulings, erasures and corrections, pages that contain more lines of text than rulings, a later script, a number sequence almost certainly originating with the extant manuscript, three deliberately deleted lines, and a palimpsest. It seems more likely that all previous descriptions of the codex were begun with the presumption that such evidence was not worth describing in a very late manuscript of a very early poem.

Palaeography and codicology, in any case, do not support the theory that the Beowulf manuscript is a late copy of an early poem. On the contrary, they support the view that Beowulf is an eleventh-century composite poem, and that the Beowulf manuscript is a draft, the archetype of the epic as we now have it. With this new light on the problem of dating the composition of Beowulf, it is not hard to imagine how Anglo-Saxon poems like Beowulf might have emerged during the reign of Knut the Great as an aesthetic aftermath of the Danish Conquest. As Roberta Frank shows in her contribution to this volume, there are remarkable affinities between the Beowulf poet and the Norse skalds and storytellers who thrived in the age of Knut On its most basic level, the subject-matter of Beowulf is thoroughly Scandinavian, and may well have been composed by an Anglo-Saxon poet who grew up in the Danelaw. The poem begins with a dedicatory salute to the founding of Knut’s royal Scylding dynasty. As Alexander Murray argues in his article below, the Scylding line had been appropriated by the West-Saxon kings from the ninth century on, but the genealogy in Beowulf leads unequivocally and triumphantly to Danish kings, not English ones, and the Anglo-Saxon and Danish Scyldings were incompatible before Knut married Æthelred’s widow, Emma. Surely Hrothgar, the dominant power in Scandinavia, could have been modelled on Knut the Great, the reigning Scylding þeodcyning of a vast northern empire. The Anglo-Saxon poet who created the exploits of Beowulf in Denmark was content to suggest that even the mighty Danish Scyldings, led by a wise and noble king, were not immune to irrational disaster. Knut would not have been offended by the implication that everything in this life is transitory, or that God ultimately rules the universe.

But if there were two poets of Beowulf, the one who created the Dragon episode was more poignant than the first. The poet of the Dragon episode traces the actual disintegration of a dynasty, which culminates in the death of a glorious hero and implies the subsequent extinction of an entire race. This poet had for his model the fall of the house of Alfred, and the subsumption of his homeland and his race in the Danish empire. If he knew Anglo-Saxon history from the Chronicle, he might have remembered that fiery dragons first portended the viking invasions of England in the year 793; at any rate, he would have known that many Anglo-Saxon thanes deserted their lords when the dragon ships came in the eleventh-century Danish Conquest. This poet’s mood is elegiac and, in view of eleventh-century events, unbearably sad. The poet himself is a ‘last survivor of a noble race,’ who was left an enormous legacy after the death of his lord. If the last poet of Beowulf was the second scribe, as the palaeographical and codicological evidence encourages one to believe, he increased and continued to polish an Anglo-Saxon treasure during the reign of a Danish Scylding lord.

Editor’s Note:

Kevin Kiernan in the preceding article and Leonard Boyle in that which follows accept different foliations for the Beowulf manuscript. Kiernan uses the older foliation found in the manuscript itself and adopted in the Zupitza facsimile (EETS 77, 1882) and in Klaeber’s edition of the poem. Boyle follows the 1884 numbering accepted as official by the British Library and adhered to in Kemp Malone’s facsimile edition (EEMF 12, 1963). Readers may convert the numbers easily by adding three to the foliation in Kiernan to obtain the accounting in Boyle, e.g. Kiernan 172v3 = Boyle 175v3. We should also add that Leonard Boyle’s paper was completed several months after the Toronto conference, partially as a response to what he heard there, and that it was submitted too late to be taken into account in Kevin Kiernan’s study.

LEONARD E. BOYLE O.P.

MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV in the British Library is a volume made up of two distinct codices, the second and earlier of which (folios 94-209 of the whole volume) is known today as the ‘Nowell’ Codex, after its first known owner, the antiquary Laurence Nowell, to whom it belonged in 1563. It contains three pieces of Old English prose (a homily, now acephalous, on St. Christopher, 94-98r; an illustrated Wonders of the East, 98v-106; a ‘letter’ of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, 107-131), and two stretches of alliterative verse: Beowulf (132-201) and Judith (202-209, but deficient at both beginning and end).

This small, modest and celebrated codex later came into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) and passed with his great library to the British Museum, as the present British Library then was, soon after its foundation in 1753. Shortly before that the codex, with many other volumes, was damaged in a fire in 1731 in the Cottonian Library, then housed at Ashburnham House, London. The tops and outer parts of many leaves were burnt, and much of the physical evidence (sewing, for example) of the structure of the quires was ruined then or disappeared later through deterioration and neglect.

But although the codex today is a series of ragged folios mounted separately from each other, and two quires (NQ 3 and 4) are in reverse order, it is still possible from various indications (ink, ruling of text-frames, etc.) to be reasonably sure of the size and sequence of the quires (here called ‘Nowell quires’ or NQ).

The only problems, possibly, are quires 1-2 and 5-6. Kemp Malone, in his introduction to the facsimile of the Nowell Codex in Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile (Copenhagen 1963), gives the first two quires as 110 and 26, but they are palpably quires of eight folios each (94-101, 102-109), which surely is the import as well of a late catchword on folio lOlv. There can be little doubt either that quires 5 and 6 are in the same eight-folio mould, although the fact that Beowulf begins on a fresh folio at folio 132r, leaving a gap at the end of the previous piece (Alexander’s Letter) might suggest that the scribe had taken a new quire for Beowulf. This would mean that the scribe’s fifth quire was a quire of six folios (126-131) and his sixth one of ten (132-141). However, the ruling of the text-frame in folios 126-133, our presumed NQ 5, is, if I may so put it, of a uniform irregularity, and appreciably distinct from that of folios 134-141, our NQ 6. For the spaces between rulings 18 and 19 (giving line 19) and between 19 and 20 (giving line 20) are 9 mm. and 10 mm. respectively for each frame in folios 126-133, whereas the space ruled for folios 134-141 is the regular 7 mm. or so that one usually finds throughout this part of the Nowell Codex and for the rest of the lines in each frame in folios 126-133. Now the sheets selected for a quire were not holed or ‘pricked’ separately for ruling but rather in a bunch, one on top of the other, the guide-points or ‘prickings’ being made through all the sheets at once for the sake of uniformity within the quire as well as for convenience. Hence the egregious two rulings at the end of each frame in folios 126-133 can only mean that these folios were ruled as a quire. Probably the scribe of these folios inadvertently placed his lower pricking-marks too far apart when preparing this quire, and found himself stuck with them all through these eight folios.

Since the make-up of this and other quires in the Nowell Codex is essential to the present argument, the following schema of the codex, its quires and its units, may be of help to the reader:

***

As one may see from the above schema, the Nowell Codex today falls into three discernible units. Unit I (fols. 94-181) was written for the most part by one scribe, Scribe A, and its quires (including, as it happens, those just discussed) are consistently of eight folios, and its text-frames generally ruled for 20 lines of writing (e.g. NQ 1-9). Unit II (fols. 182-201), on the other hand, is composed of ten-folio quires (NQ 12-13) and text-frames of 21 lines, and also shows all the wear and tear of a separate unit on its first (182r) and last (201v) folios. The third unit, now represented by folios 202-9, also was written by the scribe of Unit II, Scribe B, but if one may judge from this surviving quire (NQ 14) its format, oddly, was not that of Unit II but rather the quires of eight, with a 20-line frame, of Unit I.

All of these features seem to argue against anything but an accidental unity in the present codex as it stands. Yet there are indications to the contrary. For items 1-3 and part of item 4 (Beowulf), which form the bulk of Unit I are in one hand, that of Scribe A, while the rest of Unit I (still the Beowulf of item 4) and all of Units II (end of Beowulf) and III (Judith) are in the hand of Scribe B, who in fact succeeds Scribe A without a break on the second folio (175v4) of the last quire of Unit I (NQ 11).

It is indeed in this eleventh quire that the key to the unity or disunity of the present codex lies, and it depends very much on the precise relationship there to each other’s work of these two scribes, the first of which in the codex practises an Anglo-Caroline script, the second a form of late Anglo-Insular.

Because of their distinctive hands, the precise point at which Scribe B took over from Scribe A in the eleventh quire of the Nowell Codex and the sixth full quire of Beowulf (NQ 11, BQ 6) is clearly to be seen on folio 175v at line 4. But although the hand of Scribe B was responsible from here on for the remainder of Beowulf (175v4-181, the end of NQ 11; 182-201: NQ 12-13) and for Judith (202-209: NQ 14), it is likely that these seemingly successive 35 folios were not written precisely in that order by Scribe B (i.e. 175v4-181; 182-201; 202-209). These four quires, with the exception of the beginning of NQ 11, where Scribe A penned the first 63/64 lines (174r-175v3/4), are indeed in the hand of Scribe B, but it seems almost certain that when Scribe B was called upon at folio 175v4 (in NQ 11) to take over from Scribe A, the three last quires as they are today (NQ 12-14) had been written out already.

This conclusion is based on certain features of this eleventh quire. Like the first nine (NQ 1-9) of the previous ten quires written by Scribe A, it has a text-frame that is ruled for 20 lines, yet shortly after Scribe B comes onto the scene he proceeds to disregard this ruling on four consecutive folios of the quire (177v-179r), presses 21 lines instead of 20 into each of the four frames, and then for the remainder of the quire (179v-181v) returns to the normal 20 lines.

Since there would not be any obvious reason for this departure on these four folios if Scribe B had a whole stretch of quires (NQ 12-14 at least) before him on which to see Beowulf to a conclusion and to pen Judith, it seems reasonable to suggest that the four extra lines do not represent an aberration on the part of Scribe B but rather something into which he was forced because he had to fit a precise amount of text into this quire and could not carry anything over to the next, as would have been a normal procedure. This being so, then the reason why Scribe B found it impossible to copy anything from this part of Beowulf on the next quire (NQ 12) probably was because he had already written out that quire some time before.

This would explain the extra four lines in quire 11, but why a line each on four separate folios? One may surmise that when Scribe B took over from Scribe A and discovered that he had more material to copy than the 20-line frame ruled by Scribe A would support within this quire, he had several possibilities open to him. He could have crammed the four extra lines in at once and as best he could, or he could have bided his time until towards the end of the quire. Yet he did neither. Very deliberately and carefully he spread the egregious four lines over four folios and, what is more, not over any four folios but over four consecutive folios (177v-179r), and in such a way that there would not be a notable contrast between these four folios of 21 lines each and the 20-line text of the rest of the quire. His first 21-line text is on the verso of a folio (177v), the second on the recto facing it (178r), and the third and fourth on the succeeding verso and recto (178v, 179r). In this way anyone opening Beowulf at this quire would be confronted either with an ‘opening’ of 20 lines (most of the quire) or with one or other of two ‘openings’ of 21 (177v: 178r; 178v:179r) and not with the discordant openings of 20:21 or 21:20 which would be the result if each of the four lines were inserted at random.

Although this suggests that Scribe B was a man of more than common sensitivity, there remains the question of just why he was so sure that by slipping in four lines at these points or, for that matter, at any point at all, he would be enabled to wind up his copying precisely at the end of the quire (NQ 11) and flush with the beginning of the quire (NQ 12) which he had already copied.

Perhaps his eye was so expert that he could see at a glance that the space available to him in the quire was short by just four lines. But a more likely explanation is that Scribe B knew exactly where he was in relation to the end of that quire because this quire 11 into which he had to copy this part of Beowulf was exactly of the same size, text-frame, and ruling as those of his ‘copy-quire’ (like ‘copy-folio,’ ‘copy-codex,’ and even ‘Copy-Beowulf,’ to all of which I have recourse here, an inelegant coinage, but one which avoids the implications of ‘original,’ ‘exemplar,’ and the like). Hence if Scribe B chose to insinuate the bothersome lines into four consecutive frames of 21 lines rather than all together in an ungainly block somewhere or other in the quire, this was just as much for the practical purpose of coming into line well before the end with the physical lineation of the copy-quire as for the aesthetic reason advanced above. Once he was in line with the copy-quire he would not have to worry any further about hitting his target in the twelfth quire fairly and squarely.

One may presume then that after the insertion of the fourth of the extra lines at folio 179r, the physical lineation of NQ 11 from folio 179v to the end of the quire on folio 181v is, give or take a word here and there, that of the copy-quire (CQ) that Scribe B inherited from Scribe A. One may presume, too, if it was not already a presumption, that that CQ ended precisely where NQ 11 ends today, and, consequently, that the beginning of NQ 12, a quire which Scribe B had written out previously, is again that of the CQ from which he copied this latter part of Beowulf.

***

The copy-quire, therefore, behind the eleventh quire of the Nowell Codex which Scribes A and B share was, like the Nowell quire itself, one of four sheets (eight folios) and a text-frame ruled for 20 lines. In fact, probably all of the Beowulf copy-quires were of that basic size and lineation.

This is not a wild assumption. It is verifiable in at least one other Nowell quire, NQ 10 (fols. 166-173), where Scribe A, while using exactly the same size of frame as in the previous quires (NQ 1-9), rules his frames for and fills them with 22 lines of text rather than his customary 20 lines.

As it happens, this strange behaviour was occasioned by much the same problem that Scribe B had to face when he replaced Scribe A in the very next quire (NQ 11) – or rather, the problem we saw in NQ 11 was simply the remains of a tricky situation in which Scribe A had found himself in NQ 10. For at the end of NQ 9, the fourth full Beowulf quire in the Nowell Codex (fols. 158-165), Scribe A must have noticed that if he were to maintain his usual 20-line frames of writing in his customary quires of eight folios over the quires that lay ahead, he would be hopelessly out of kelter at the end of what he still had to copy of Beowulf with the beginning of the first (NQ 12, BQ 7) of the two quires of the poem already completed by Scribe B.

By then, to judge from the present quires NQ 10 (352 lines) and 11 (324 lines), some 676 physical lines of the Beowulf copy-quires of Scribe A remained to be copied before joining up with this first quire of Scribe B. If Scribe A were to keep to his 20-line frame, there would therefore be 36 lines still to find a place for at the end of two of his normal eight-folio quires (640 lines). Two ten-folio quires, on the other hand, giving 800 lines, would be far too much (by 124 lines). Likewise, a clutch of three quires of six folios each (720 lines) would leave a similar though lesser gap of 44 blank lines, as would a combination of two quires of ten and eight folios respectively. In the circumstances the best thing to do (so I imagine him to have reasoned) was to keep to quires of eight folios and increase instead the number of lines per frame. This gave him two choices, either of which – 21 lines to each of his frames over two quires, or 22 lines for one quire, the usual 20 for the other – nicely promised him 672 lines, leaving him short of the required 676 by a trifle of four.

Scribe A, it seems, was as aware of the importance of a harmonious set of quires as B in his turn was chary of unsightly ‘openings.’ Whichever of these two possibilities he chose, the text-frame would still be that of all his other quires. It was less wearing, however, and more expeditious, to weave 22 lines into this frame in just one single quire all at once than to spread frames of 21 lines each over two quires, so, sensibly, Scribe A decided to rule the frames of the first of the two remaining quires (NQ 10) for 22 lines, and thus cheerfully carried over to the second and now normal one of 20 lines (NQ 11), those very four lines which Scribe B, when called upon, so discreetly made up after A’s departure.

* * *

All of this adroit calculation of space on the part of Scribes A and B could not, I am convinced, have been achieved by them so handily had not their Beowulf copy-quires been of eight folios each and of text-frames ruled for 20 lines, the very format, it will be noted, that Scribe A favoured for his own copying all through his section of the Nowell Codex. I shall now venture further to suggest just how many quires and folios, all of this one format, there were altogether in what I may, for the sake of caution, term the ‘Copy-Beowulf.’

To this end, the procedures of Scribes A and B are again instructive, assuming, as it must be obvious I have assumed all along, that the task of transcribing all five items now in the Nowell Codex was divided between the two scribes and that each began his own assignment at much the same time as the other.

If we may take Scribe B (Unit II) first, the immediate impression that one receives from his handiwork there (fols. 182-201) is that he went his own way, and in contrast to Scribe A, who kept strictly to the format of the copy-quires, decided on a 21-line frame and quires of ten folios for his two quires of Beowulf (NQ 12-13, BQ 7-8).

But again, this decision probably was no more one of waywardness than that of Scribe A above in the tenth quire was of whimsy. In all likelihood what happened was that Scribe B, when assigned the last part of Beowulf (Unit II) and the whole of Judith (Unit III), chose to transcribe the latter first, since Judith was a ready-made unit on its own and, in any case, it would be more logical not to commence copying Beowulf until his colleague had completed his section. This probably explains why, as opposed to his two Beowulf quires (NQ 12 and 13), the surviving quire of his Judith (NQ 14) is of exactly the same size and text-frame as the quires of Scribe A and the copy-quires. The two scribes, understandably, would have agreed on a common format before embarking on their work.

The agreed format clearly was of no trouble to Scribe B when copying Judith, but as soon as he turned from Judith (which, presumably, was meant to be, as it is today, the last of the five items commissioned) and addressed himself to his segment of Beowulf, he came up against a snag similar to that he would later encounter when taking over Scribe A’s remaining lines in quire 11. In the present case, however, the problem was not one of so filling a quire as to preserve a continuity of text, but rather that of avoiding too large a ditch between the end of Beowulf in its last quire and the beginning of Judith in the quires already copied.

Granting, as surely we now may, that the copy-quires handed over to Scribe B were of the same dimensions as those which have been established above for Scribe A, and granting as well that B in his two Beowulf quires observed by and large the lineation of his copy-quires (but, of course, at 21 lines per frame instead of their 20), then it is clear what the difficulty was and why B had to abandon the accepted format. Since, using a frame of 21 lines, he fills two quires of ten folios each to the brim with 840 lines of text, then what he had in front of him when copying these was a part of Beowulf covering 2 5/8 quires, at, that is, eight folios per quire and 20 lines per frame.

This, of course, was precisely the format that he and his fellow-scribe had agreed upon, but to have followed it to a folio in his transcription of these 2 5/8 copy-quires would have meant ending up three folios short of Judith.

In this impasse, Scribe B therefore made the reverse of the above calculation, and found that by adopting two 10-folio quires and a 21-line text-frame, he would finish Beowulf exactly on the last line of the second quire, and right on the verge of Judith. He was to succeed admirably when he took up the challenge, although as one may see on the last folio of all before Judith (fol. 201 v), he had to scramble a little at the end and, indeed, was unable to find room on the very last line for the very last word of Beowulf as we know it.

The part of the Copy -Beowulf entrusted to Scribe B amounted, then, to two quires of eight folios each and a third quire (on which Beowulf may have been the only item) with just five folios of text – 21 folios in all carrying the 840 lines which B managed to transcribe onto 20 full folios in frames of 21 lines.

A similar estimate of how many folios and quires there were in the Copy-Beowulf confided to Scribe A is also not too difficult, but it has to be a little more long-winded.

From the very beginning of the Nowell Codex as we have it, and for the six full quires (NQ 6-11) of the Beowulf text (BQ 1-6) which he prepared for writing, Scribe A sticks resolutely to the eight-folio quires and 20-line frames of his model. But clearly the problem of meeting up exactly with the text of the quires of Beowulf which Scribe B was commissioned to write did not strike him until rather late in the day and indeed not until the end of NQ 9 (BQ 4).

Had he been in a position to keep pace frame by frame with the Copy-Beowulf from the very start of his transcription, he would not have had to overload his frames in NQ 10 (BQ 5). But he had not been. In fact, he was at a disadvantage from the outset. For when he began to transcribe Beowulf on the present folio 132r, he was already almost a folio behind the Copy-Beowulf and therefore was bound to be out of step with the copy-quires allotted to B, and consequently with the quires written by B, by the time he reached the end of his assignment.

Since, as we have seen, A was 36 lines behind his copy-quire at the end of his fourth Beowulf quire (NQ 9), and, as I presume, had been following the format and lineation of the copy-quires up to this, then he was already 36 lines to the bad when he began the first full quire of his own on folio 134r. But by this time he had already written out 79 lines (including section or ‘fitt’ numbers) on the last two folios of NQ 5 (fols. 132-133). Therefore the beginning of the Beowulf text that he was copying occurred some 115 lines before the first full Beowulf copy-quire (BQ 2) and just five lines from the top of the third last folio of the previous quire (possibly the Incipit of the poem writ very large, occupied these top five lines and the sixth – our line 1 – just as it does two full lines at folio 132r in the Nowell Codex, allowing only 19 lines of text in all in that first frame).

In other words, where the present Beowulf text runs in the Nowell Codex from folios 132-201, or 70 full folios, the Copy-Beowulf began at folio 6 of a quire it shared with some other text, then ran through eight full eight-folio quires of its own, ending up, according to our examination of Unit II of the Nowell Codex, on the first five folios of a quire of which it may have been the sole occupant – a total of 72 folios (3 + 64 + 5), less the problematic five lines at the top of the very first folio, as the following table may show somewhat more plainly:

The 2875 physical lines, then, which are on 70 folios of varying frames in the Nowell Beowulf, were spread over 72 folios at an even 20 lines per frame in the Copy-Beowulf (less, of course, that slender opening unit of five lines at the top of the very first folio).

These 2875 physical lines which are thus common to the two copies of Beowulf are not, needless to say, poetic lines (3182 in all), so their presence in this way in the Nowell Codex represents a very dogged if not unusual fidelity on the part of Scribes A and B. It would, indeed, be tempting to think that what they had in front of them, therefore, was a very special copy of Beowulf, perhaps even the original or an apograph in a separate codex. But the evidence as it stands does not warrant the conclusion that their Copy-Beowulf was at all a codex in its own right. The 72 folios postulated for the Copy-Beowulf may suggest a tidy codex of just nine eight-folio quires, but as we have seen (and there seems not to be any way of escaping this) these were in fact distributed over ten quires in all, beginning from the sixth folio of the first, and ending on the fifth folio of the tenth: 16–8, 2-98, 101–5. The Copy -Beowulf clearly was part of a composite codex, just as Beowulf today is in the Nowell Codex.

Whatever may be the truth about the exact size of that Copy-Beowulf one thing at least is certain: the Beowulf text in the Nowell Codex is far from ‘original.’ At best it is a copy (whether faithful or not who can tell?) of an existing text, perhaps contemporary, perhaps not.

This Copy-Beowulf, it seems, no longer is extant. That a text of Beowulf has survived at all is due to the happy chance that sometime in the late tenth or early eleventh century (to be no more precise than that), two scribes in one and the same scriptorium were commissioned by someone to put together a volume, now represented by the tattered Nowell Codex, of at least five mixed pieces of prose and poetry.

The division of labour was, however, unequal, Scribe A, who happened to write what we now call an Anglo-Caroline hand, being made responsible for three short pieces (Christopher, Wonders of the East, Alexander’s Letter) and five-sevenths of Beowulf, Scribe B, whose hand was a native Anglo-Insular one of a late variety, for the remaining two-sevenths of Beowulf and for the poem called Judith, perhaps a third of which now survives immediately after Beowulf.

The splitting up of Beowulf may seem curious until one remembers that, as we now know, the Copy -Beowulf was not a separate codex, but began on the third-last folio of a quire in a composite codex. Hence it may be that Scribe A was allocated a part of Beowulf simply because what preceded it in that quire (fols. 1-5) was part of his commission.

Was this by any chance the latter part of Alexander’s Letter, as in the Nowell Codex? Possibly. Indeed one might not be too far off the mark in suggesting that the codex of which the Copy -Beowulf was simply a part contained all that comes before Beowulf in the Nowell Codex – Christopher, Wonders, Alexander’s Letter – and that, further, Beowulf was the last item in that copy-codex since, as we have noted, the text of Beowulf in the last quire of the Copy-Beowulf occupied only five folios out of a total eight. Probably what the patron wanted, should the above be watertight, was simply a copy of these four ‘monster’ tracts in prose and verse which were cheek-by-jowl in one unbound set of quires, and then threw in Judith as well from another or a separate codex to give Scribe B a little more to copy than just a small fraction of Beowulf.

At all events, the two scribes, having agreed, or having been told, to adopt an eight-folio format and frames ruled for 20 lines, went their separate ways, A beginning with Christopher, B, in the hope, possibly, that A would have finished his part of Beowulf by the time he himself had to tackle his section, launching into Judith first rather than Beowulf. Things did not work out quite as B had planned, however, and in fact he had completed both Judith and Beowulf before A had reached his very last quire.

Scribe A seems indeed to have been a little slow (the drawings, not entirely confident, in Wonders may have held him up), and perhaps was not as much on the alert as his colleague. A first mistake was not to have planned his work well ahead to ensure that he joined up without a break with the other’s Beowulf quires. A second, possibly, was a certain casualness with section or ‘fitt’ numbers in Beowulf.

These fitts, it seems beyond doubt, were there in the copy-quires and indeed, as the calculations in the last section above presuppose, were looked upon by Scribes A and B for purposes of lineation as a part of the text. As in the Nowell text, they were numbered in the Copy-Beowulf to 43. Scribe B, working on the final quires of Beowulf and, presumably, independently of A, hardly plucked his fitts out of the sky when he numbered them XXXII-XLIII, the first a significant 13 lines into quire NQ 12 (BQ 7). Certainly he had them in mind when he planned his reduction of 21 folios of copy-quires to an even two quires of 10 folios each.

In the part of Beowulf consigned to Scribe A, it is no surprise, therefore, that the fitts run from I-XXXI, although Scribe A, whether by accident or design, did not count the ‘prologue’ (fols. 132r-133r, lines 1-26) as a fitt, but began his numbering at the second section. He carried on this faulty numeration until XXIII (fol. 169r), where he appears to have noticed that at this rate of going his last fitt would be XXX, whereas the first in Scribe B’s section was XXXII, and hence, to bring his own numeration into line, wrote XXV in place of the XXIIII one would have expected. It is surely not without interest that this change takes place in that 22-line quire (NQ 10) in which he shows his first awareness of the quires written by Scribe B with which he had to join up.

Had Scribe A not stopped his work in the middle of his fitt XXVIII (fol. 175v3/4), it is not unlikely that he would have gone back later to change all of the mistaken I-XXIII to II-XXIV. When Scribe B took over from the next line in NQ 11, he continued A’s adjusted numeration in fitts XXVIIII (fol. 178r), XXX (fol. 179r, but probably in the left margin because of a line of text that flows over and fills the fitt line), and XXXI.

Scribe B probably did not advert to A’s jump from XXIII to XXV in the previous gathering, with which, in any case, he had no concern, but someone else did later on. He altered A’s XXV to a sloppy XXIIII, XXVI to XXV, and erased the last stroke in XXVII, XXVIII, and XXVIIII in turn to give XXVI, XXVII, and XXVIII, respectively. Curiously, he made no attempt that I can discern to change Scribe B’s XXXI to XXX, nor to touch the series XXXII-XLIII in B’s own two quires (NQ 12-13). It is possible that they were unknown to him at the time.

This last point raises the possibility that Scribe A’s Unit I (NQ 1-11, fols. 94-181) had a separate existence for some time after Scribe B had completed what A had left undone, and was not joined at once to the two quires (NQ 12-13) of Beowulf (Unit II) and those of Judith (Unit III) penned earlier by Scribe B.

The smudged state of the bottom folio of Unit I (fol. 181v) gives rise to this suspicion, and the condition of the first and last folios of Unit II (fols. 182r, 201v) strengthens it considerably. The end folio (20lv) of the second of the two quires of this unit (NQ 13) is scuffed, dirty, and crinkled, and has persuaded some scholars that the Nowell Codex once ended here and that Judith (our Unit III) was either at the beginning of the codex originally, before Christopher, or was added by chance (a singular one at that) in the sixteenth or seventeenth century after the fourth item, Beowulf.

In the light of what has been suggested earlier with respect to Scribe B and Judith, it is possible to offer another explanation. After B had completed his Judith quires, he put them aside, or handed them over to the librarian or to an official of the scriptorium, while he worked on his two Beowulf quires. These, in turn, he similarly consigned to someone or other, or simply put them on a shelf, there to await the moment when Scribe A would have reached the end of his unit and the two Beowulf segments could be united.

Perhaps the shelf or cupboard was grimy and folio 201v, stuck at the bottom of this unit of 20 folios, suffered accordingly as, for example, the batch was moved about to make room for other quires or codices. Some worms indeed battened on this folio, and one worked his way back through it for several folios, petering out at folio 192.

That these two quires as a unit (fols. 182-201) were for a time on a window sill or some other exposed area is also likely. Water clearly damaged the top folio of the unit (fol. 182r) before the two quires were placed between Unit I (94-181) and Judith to form the present codex. This folio is splotched as rain splotches; and as one would expect in such circumstances, the top of the folio, being the part most exposed to rain and heat, curled back a little, allowing the rain or water to stain the first lines of the verso (182v) towards the outer margin, but leaving the more protected inner areas untouched. The top lines of other folios in the upper reaches of this two-quire unit show similar signs of inroads of rain, water, or liquids in general, while the middle and lower parts of the folios, being out of range, are generally without blemish, as, indeed, is the conjugate folio (19 1v) of the ruined 182r, safely tucked away at the end of the top quire in the bosom of the unit.

Naturally, it was this uppermost folio of all, 182r, that took the worst beating, and from top to bottom. Its appearance has not been improved over the years by erasures and by efforts later to recover what had been washed or splashed away, most of these probably by people not entirely at home in either Anglo-Saxon usage or Anglo-Insular script. Where retracing was essayed, the strokes are insecure and often fail completely to cover parts of the dimmed originals underneath. Where there was little to go on, the results are, to say the least, curious, and sometimes, or so I am assured, are at variance with known or recognizable forms of the language.

It is hard to imagine that Scribe B, whose folio this is, had any hand in such a spotty ‘recovery’ or touching up. A man as resourceful and as sensitive as he shows himself to be in the eleventh quire, when he took over from Scribe A, would not have made such a mess of his own handiwork, particularly with the appropriate copy-quire at his elbow.

The damage to folio 182r, then, must have taken place when Scribe B was no longer around to redress it. It must have occurred, too, at a time when the copy-quires which he and Scribe A had used were no longer available to any who might with intelligence have made good the damage.

How long after Scribes A and B had completed their work this damage took place is impossible to say. For what it is worth, this certainly was before, perhaps long before, the five pieces they were engaged to transcribe were brought together to form the codex that mostly survives today in three units of absorbing interest to palaeographers and philologists in the present Nowell Codex.

None of this, need I add by way of conclusion, explains the most engaging question of all: why did Scribe A give up at the beginning of his last quire? Perhaps after his valiant effort in the previous quire to catch up with his copy-quires he had grown tired of it all. Perhaps, on the other hand, Scribe B simply took over because by then he was free of Judith and his own Beowulf unit, and A was required elsewhere.

Either of these is a possibility. But a third may not entirely be ruled out of order, when one notes that Scribe A stopped towards the end of a phrase, and, it may well be, with a word incomplete (the e of [mo]ste is certainly that of B, but the st could be A’s).

Perhaps the plain truth is that he had taken ill, and died.

ANGUS CAMERON, ASHLEY CRANDELL AMOS, AND GREGORY WAITE WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SHARON BUTLER AND ANTONETTE DIPAOLO HEALEY

Although language is only one kind of evidence which can be used in ascertaining where and when a text was composed, it is an important one. Nevertheless, in the case of Beowulf, the confidence of scholars in the value of linguistic evidence has ranged from a high point at the beginning of this century when Eugen Einenkel could study methods of expressing verbal negation ‘with the gratifying result of establishing Beowulf as an Anglian poem of about 725 AD.’,1 to a present low when Nicolas Jacobs assumes that ‘the linguistic evidence is tenuous in the extreme’ and proceeds to discuss the dating of Beowulf ‘on the assumption that it may be disregarded.’2 Jacobs is, of course, referring to the conclusions which earlier scholars have drawn from the linguistic evidence; he declines to draw conclusions of his own. When opinions as to the value of linguistic evidence vary so greatly, the time has come to reconsider the language of the poem. In this paper we will take a first step towards this reconsideration by providing a catalogue of some of the linguistic forms in Beowulf, arranged in the patterns of recent grammars in order to facilitate comparison with forms in other texts.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars have been looking at the language of Beowulf and have provided us with a variety of commentaries, studies, editions, and glossaries which are useful aids in our study of the poem. These works on the language are of three main kinds. First, there is the detailed textual work involving emendations of words, restoration of missing text, and commentary on specific problems, which has resulted in the text as we have it today in the comprehensive editions of Klaeber, von Schaubert, Dobbie, and others.3 Second, there are more general studies of linguistic features in the Old English language for which the forms in Beowulf are a part of the evidence. These studies continue to be made and we can extract much valuable information about the poem from them.4 Third, there are studies of specific linguistic features in the text of Beowulf. These begin in the 1880s and deal variously with the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary.5 Most of them were written before the appearance of Klaeber’s first edition (1922) of Beowulf, which, with its sections on the language and the manuscript and with its masterly glossary, sets standards for accuracy and fullness of information which no other editor of an Old English text has achieved. Once Klaeber had assembled all the materials, scholarly interest in the language of Beowulf seemed to decline, and the last sixty years have seen fewer contributions. These studies of specific linguistic features in the text of Beowulf should now be brought together and reconsidered in a fresh analysis of the language of the poem. While some of the studies are mere lists of forms, others show an interest in questions of dating and localization, and attempt to answer the questions of when and where Beowulf was written. Many of them, however, predate the most authoritative philological accounts of the Old English language. Even Klaeber’s summary of the language of Beowulf (virtually unchanged from his first edition of 1922) was written while Karl Luick’s Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache6 was still in its early stages. We now need a new statement which takes into account Luick’s work as well as that of Campbell and Brunner,7 not to mention more recent developments in linguistic theory.

Much of the early work on the language of Beowulf assumes a simple connection between spelling systems and Old English dialects, and concerns itself with sorting out dialectal strata in the poem. To give an example, Klaeber’s primary discussion of the vowels in accented syllables is divided into three main sections: 1) Early West-Saxon Features, 2) Late West-Saxon Features, and 3) Non-West-Saxon Elements.8 Rather than only looking at mixed spellings as the necessary result of a text’s having passed through a number of recensions of various dialectal colourings, we would also like to consider them in terms of scriptorial practice and convention at the time the manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A. XV, was written. In the earlier studies and editions, many of the arguments for dating based on linguistic evidence hinge on single points. As examples, we have the syntactic and phonetic-metrical tests for dating described by Klaeber (pages cviii-cx, 274-8), and the very heavy reliance for dating which C.L. Wrenn places on the doubtful form wundiniat line 1382. In contrast, we wish to look at the language of Beowulf as a system, to see how it works in its own terms, to understand the grammar of the poem, and to establish a broad range of features at various levels of language before attempting to compare this form of Old English with others. In the end we may find that dating and localization still depend on a few significant features, but these are best interpreted in terms of the language of the poem as a whole

We could not begin a reconsideration of the language of Beowulf and its implications for the dating and localization of the texts without using the work of our predecessors. While we may occasionally have doubts about their methods and conclusions, their inventories of forms stand us in good stead. In consolidating the work of previous scholars we can also bring to bear on the question the new linguistic methods which have been developed in the twentieth century, and the great advances in Anglo-Saxon palaeography marked by the work of N.R. Ker and T.A.M. Bishop,9 to name only two of the scholars who have taught us so much about Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and the places where they were written. We also have many new studies of the language of Old English prose texts, glossaries, the recently published concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records,10 and now, as a part of the Dictionary of Old English project, a concordance to the entire corpus of Old English texts.11 If we can use these new resources effectively, and combine them with the work of our predecessors, then we can hope for new answers from the language of Beowulf, even on the subject of dating and localization.

We wish to begin our reconsideration of the language of Beowulf by presenting a catalogue of linguistic forms in the poem, arranged on the levels of orthography/phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. In this way we can look at the language of the poem as a set of interrelated systems and we can set out its features so that they can be easily compared with those in other texts.

In our work we have used Klaeber’s edition of the text and most of all his glossary. In general we have accepted his grammatical judgments, although we have not accepted emended forms as evidence as he sometimes does.

By the text of Beowulf we mean the text of the poem as we have received it in British Library MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV. Although we admit the possibility of earlier written recensions of the poem and of oral traditions lying behind it, we doubt that a description or analysis of the language of the extant copy will necessarily tell us much about them.

In making statements about the dating and localization of Beowulf, we do so in the context of the careful discussion of Old English dialects and the key texts and manuscripts whose linguistic features show reasonable consistency provided by Alistair Campbell in the opening chapter of his Old English Grammar.

In our treatment of the orthography/phonology of Beowulf we have followed the patterns for vowels in stressed syllables, vowels in unstressed syllables, and consonants given by Campbell in his Old English Grammar. Where forms can be classified in several places, we have put them in the earliest possible place in his chronological sequence.

In our treatment of the morphology we have followed the classes given by Campbell and Brunner in their grammars. For the smaller classes of forms we give word lists, but for the larger classes numerical counts only. We hope that other scholars will find our choice of the systems propounded in these standard Old English grammars a natural and convenient one for classifying spellings as to their morphological and phonological significance, and we hope that our classification makes comparison of the spellings of Beowulf with those of other texts easier.

Our treatment of syntax is much less complete than that of the phonology and morphology, and awaits the publication of Bruce Mitchell’s ‘Old English Syntax.’ In the meantime we have arranged our materials, largely gleaned from previous studies, according to Mitchell’s A Guide to Old English,12 and have made more accessible the careful analysis of clauses in his Oxford dissertation, Subordinate Clauses in Old English Poetry.

Our treatment of the vocabulary is the most sketchy of all and reflects the lack of comprehensive work on this subject. As a start we have looked at words unique to the poem, compounding patterns in the poem, and the dialect vocabulary as described by Klaeber following Jordan, by Schabram, and by Wenisch.13

We see this catalogue of the forms in Beowulf as a preliminary one, and we will welcome comments and corrections to our counts. More work needs to be done, especially on the vocabulary and syntax, but this is the work of years. We think we have assembled enough forms so that valid comparison with other texts is possible, though sweeping conclusions should not be based on our lists.

We see four necessary questions about the origins of Beowulf. For the first one, ‘What is the date of the manuscript?’, we can accept the answer of palaeographers, who agree that it was written around the year 1000 A.D. N.R. Ker puts the date in the form ’s. X/XI,’ which indicates a range of twenty-five years on either side of 1000 A.D.14 For the second question, ‘Where was the manuscript written?’, we have no definite answers. Kenneth Sisam half suggested London,15 and for more than this we can only hope that palaeographers will turn up parallels to either of the two hands in the manuscript. For the third question, ‘What is the date of composition of the text?’, we will have to be able to distinguish the language of Beowulf from the language of the manuscript itself by comparing it with the language of other texts in the manuscript. An answer for the fourth question, ‘Where was the text composed?’, will depend on the success of our comparisons. Investigations of the various levels of the language of Beowulf will give us information pertinent to these questions. For instance, the orthography/phonology and morphology should tell us about the dating and localization of the manuscript, while the syntax and vocabulary seem more likely to tell us about the dating and localization of the text itself.

In assembling this catalogue of forms in Beowulf we have already seen some trends which give us hope for the success of this approach to the language of the poem. Our work has given us a respect for the consistency and even regularity of the language of the poem, which is not ‘an unnatural medley of spellings.’16 The scribes seem to have understood what they were copying. Discrepancies in morphology and syntax are minor, and do not for the most part affect the sense.

We have been able to study the orthographic habits of the A and B scribes in Beowulf. Although these can be distinguished with respect to a few graphs, (io, i/y, for example), their overall orthographic practice is similar.

We think that careful comparison of the language of Beowulf on various levels with that of other Old English texts will allow us to place the manuscript and possibly the text in the context of the surviving Old English literary and linguistic remains. We would like to conclude by suggesting some areas of comparison.

The first and most obvious comparison is with the other texts in BL MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV. We have only begun this work, but it appears that the scribes do not consistently regularize spellings throughout the manuscript, but tolerate a number of orthographic features that are in striking variance from text to text. Nevertheless basic features of the language are consistent throughout the manuscript, and so far we have found no texts or manuscripts that are significantly closer to the spelling system of Beowulf than the texts in Cotton Vitellius A. XV.

The second comparison is between the language of Beowulf and that of the texts in the other poetic codices. Here the use of broad comparisons on many levels is necessary as the patterns of individual features or even groups of features are often contradictory. So far, it appears that the spellings of Beowulf are closest to those of the main scribe in Bodleian MS. Junius 11, especially in Exodus and Daniel. The vocabulary of Beowulf has most in common with Andreas, but shares a surprisingly high number of forms with Judith.

The third comparison is between the language of Beowulf and that of texts in contemporary manuscripts. By taking the manuscripts which N.R. Ker dates in the form ‘s. X/XI’ we get a very interesting comparison group. These are:

Ker 15

Cambridge, University Library Gg.3.28 – Ælfric, Catholic Homilies

87

Cambridge, Trinity College R.5.22 - Pastoral Care

161

British Library, Cotton Julius A. X Martyrology

175

British Library, Cotton Otho B. II - Pastoral Care

184

British Library, Cotton Otho E. I – Glossary

220

British Library, Cotton Vitellius C. V – Ælfric, Homilies

231

British Library, Harley 585 – Herbal and Lacnunga

240

British Library, Harley 3376 – Glossary

334

Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11 – Poems

364

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 943 - Homilies and Documents

382

Princeton, University Library, The Scheide Library 71 – Blickling Homilies

To these should be added contemporary charter materials from the reigns of Æthelred II and Knut, and other roughly contemporary manuscripts, such as Ker 257, BL Royal 7 C.XII, a manuscript of Ælfric’s First Series of Catholic Homilies written within a few years of 991.

Among these manuscripts contemporary with Vitellius A. XV, a group of manuscripts of mixed spellings can be isolated, as can a group of orthographically consistent Ælfric manuscripts. It may be useful to distinguish manuscripts copied by a single scribe from those on which a number of scribes have worked. If we can assume that the several scribes of the mixed spelling manuscripts use a single exemplar, their varying practices may indicate the extent to which individual scribes copied mechanically or imposed their own orthographic practices on the text.

The last comparison should be between the language of Beowulf and that of texts in manuscripts known to be earlier, such as the key dialect texts, the Hatton 20 manuscript of King Alfred’s translation of the Pastoral Care, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Kentish Glosses, and the Vespasian Psalter. While we have only begun this long job of comparison our work suggests that the mixed spellings in Beowulf are not necessarily to be explained by a long or complicated textual transmission, but may represent copying conventions or tolerances in a number of late tenth-century scriptoria. Mixtures of spellings similar in some respects to those in Beowulf can be seen in contemporary manuscripts such as the Pastoral Care manuscript, Cotton Otho B.II.17 If the conclusions which have been drawn from the varied spellings of Beowulf were applied to the Otho copy of the Pastoral Care translation then we would be compelled to posit a long, complicated, and dialectally mixed textual transmission for this translation, which was in fact composed in Alfred’s reign, less than a century earlier than its manuscript.

Our preliminary work with the linguistic forms of the poem has convinced us that the evidence of language should not be neglected in any inquiry into the date and localization of Beowulf. Although from our current understanding of the language of Beowulf we could not call any date in the Old English period impossible, on linguistic grounds, for the composition of the poem, we believe that further analysis of the language of Beowulf, of Cotton Vitellius A. XV, and of other Old English texts and manuscripts will provide useful information about the date and localization of both the poem and its manuscript.

INTRODUCTION TO SECTIONS A AND B, ORTHOGRAPHY AND MORPHOLOGY

In our study of the orthography and morphology of Beowulf we have endeavoured to establish norms of spelling or inflection in the text in addition to listing the irregular forms. Throughout, Alistair Campbell’s Old English Grammar has been used as our common reference: for the most part our sections are arranged in parallel with its setting out of sound changes and morphological features, and where we use the terms ‘regular’ or ‘normal’ they may be taken to mean ‘in conformity with the West-Saxon norms given in Old English Grammar.’ It should be emphasized, however, that our aim has been to provide a description of part of the spelling system of the text of Beowulf, not to make a phonological study. Therefore, we provide counts of features of little or no phonetic significance, we have kept phonetic interpretation of variant spellings to a minimum, and we have taken pains to distinguish the spellings of the two copyists at work on our manuscript of the poem, scribe A, who copied the entire text up to moste, line 1939, and scribe B, who finished the work and made corrections throughout the entire text.

Line references are given for forms of single occurrence or low frequency. For high frequency forms, counts are given thus: 10x:5x (e.g.) meaning ‘occurs in hand A ten times and in hand B five times.’ Our statistics are conservative in that they do not include emended forms or conjectural readings. For example, we admit neither MS bædde 2018 nor Klaeber’s emendation bælde, listed in his language section 7.2 as an example of i-umlaut of unbroken Gmc. a.

A ORTHOGRAPHY

Al Spelling of (WS , nWS ) (Cpb. §§128-9)

.1 Gmc. is spelled æ 375x (not including þær 112x) in: ædr, ædre, æfen[-, æs, æt, æþm, bædon, bær, -]bæron, gebæran, blæd[-, bræce,-]cwædon, gecwæde, -]dæd[-, fær[-, fæt[-, gefægon, grædig, græg[-, -]hwær, lægon, -]lætan, -]mæg[-, mægþ, -]mæl[-, -]mære, -]mærðo, mæte, mæton, manfordædla, nære, næron, ondrædan, -]ræd[-, rædan, -]ræs, -]ræsan, ræswa, -]sægon, sæI, sælig, gesælan, -]sæton, endesæta, slæp, slæpan, -]spræc, spræcon, -]stræl, swæfon, beswælan, swæs[-, untæle, -]pægon, geþwære, -wæd, wæg[-, wæpen[-, -]wær, wære, wæron, wræc, gewræcan pret., -]stræt.

Words of uncertain etymology not counted: ærend, æg-, æglæca, bæl, (bęl 2126 from bel, later hand), fæger, fælsian, sæmra, stæl, wæfre, Wægmunding.

.2 Gmc. is spelled e 28x: edrum 742 (ædrum 2966), ower 2870 (ohwær 1737), -]mece 6x:6x (WS poetic spelling, see Cpb. §128 f.2), folcred 3006, Headred [2202], 2375, 2388, Wonrede 2971, Wonreding 2965, sele 1135 (sæl 7x:lx), weg 3132, wegflotan 1907 (wæg[- 217, 1440, 1489), including a number of class 5 prets.: gefegon 1627 (gefægon 1014), gesegan 3038, gesegon 3128 (gesægon 1422), þegun 2633, þegon 563 (cf.geþægon 1014).

.3 Gmc. is spelled a 14x (a frequent but irregular feature in WS, normally before back vowels. See Cpb. §162): hwar 3062 (-]hwær 4x), lagon 3048 (lægon 566), maga, -um 5x:3x, heafodmaga 2151, winemagas 65 (-]mæg 24x), magan wk. f. 1391, salum 607 (sæI 7x:lx).

A2 Breaking and Retraction (Cpb. §§139-56)

.1æ + l + consonant: bealdian, bealdor, -beald, -]bealo[-* n.,-]ceald, -]cwealm[-, deal(l), eald[-, ealdor[- m. and n., ealgian, eal(l)[-, -]feald, feall, -]feallan, -]fealu, gealdor, -gestealla, -]healdan, -healdende, -]heal(l)[-, healf[-, heals[-, healsian, hwealf, nealles, -]scealc, sealt, -steald, -wealc, -weald, -wealda, -] wealdan, Wealdend, Wealhpeow, -]weal(l), weallan, -weallende.

Class 3 pret.: abealch, -]fealh, -]geald, healp, -]mealt, -]swealg, swealt. Class I pret.: acwealde, cwealdest, sealde, -stealde, tealde.

Retracted forms, spelled a, are confined to a handful of words: aldor m., + cpds. 7x:0x (ealdor 3x:lx), aldor n., + cpds. 20x:2x (ealdor + cpds. 4x:12x), baldor 2428 (bealdor 2567), Waldend 4x:4x (Wealdend I x:2x), Alwalda 316. 955, 1314 (Alwealda 928). Anwaldan 1272, Folcwaldan 1089. balwon 977 (beal- 20x), cyningbalde 1634.galdre 3052 (gealdor 2944), galgan 2446, galgmod 1211, galgtreowum 2940. halse 1566, wundenhals 298 (heals + cpds. 5x:4x), waldswapum 1403. Note also Ælmihtiga 92.

.2 æ + l+ consonant + i: byldan, -]fyl(l)[-, gefyldan, gefyllan, gehyld, hyldan, -]wylm, yldan, ylde, yldo, yldra, yldesta, ylfe.

Variation: -]wælm 0x:3x (-]wylm 9x: 7x), elde m. 0x:4x (ylde 6x: lx), eldo wk. f. 2111 (yldo 4x:9x). Æ lfheres 2604 (see Cpb. §200 f.4).

.3 æ + r + consonant: -bearda, bearhtm, bearm, -]bean[-, bearu, eard[-, eardian, earfope, earfop-, earg, earm[- adj.. earm[- m., earn, Earna-, eart (<eom), -]geard, -]gearo[-, gearwe, hearde, -]heard[-, hearm[-, hearpe, -hwearf, meare, -gemearc, mearcian, mearh, nearo-, nearwe, nearwian, -]scearp, -]searo[-, stearc-, swear t, -]pearf gepearfian, pear fa, pearle, -]weard m., -] weard f., -weard adj., weardian, -/wearh, wearn, unwearnum.

Class 3 pret.: -bearh, -cearf, -hwearf, -]mearn, -swearc, -]wearp, -]wearð. Pres. 2nd. sg. dearst.

Variation:
On the special development of Gmc. -azd- to -eord- see Cpb. §124: -heorde 3151, reVariationorde 2555, reordian 3025, gereordian 1788, hergum 3072, hærgtræfun 175 (MS hrærg-), (pearf 201, a out of r).

Appended are the problematic words in which metathesis has taken place or influenced forms (Cpb. §193d and f.4, §741): healærna 78, hordærn 2279, 2831, medoærn 69, ðryþæn 657, winærnes 654, (renweardas 770), bærnan 1116, 2313, forbærnan 2126, forbærst 3 pret. 2680, beorn 3 pret. 1880, gebarn 267, forbarn 1616, 1667, forborn 2672, be-arn 67, onarn 721 (note MS brand 1020 for beam ‘son’).

.4 æ + r + consonant + i: ahyrdan, byrgean, -]dyrne, fyrd[-, -gemyrce, -]gyrwan, hyrstan, myrðu, snyrian, -]syrce, -]syrwan, -]wyrdan, -wyrgen, -wyrnan, yrfe[-, yrmpu.

Variation: mercelses 2439, under[ne] 2911, (-]dyrne l0x), oncirran 2857, oncirde 2951, 2970 (Cpb. §200.2), -]sercean 2539, 2755 (first e from æ by blotting), (-]syrc 7x:0x), werhðo 589, perhaps wergan 133, 1747, Swertinges 1203 (Cpb. §204.7).

.5 æ + h (+ consonant): 96 broken forms spelled ea: ea-, eahta, eahtian, eaxl[-, -]feax, gefea, geneahhe, hleahtor, -leahtre, -lean, meaht (<magan), -]seax, slean, -]tear, weaxan.

Class 5 pret.: gefeah, -]seah, gepeah.

A2 .5

Variation: ehtigð 1222, geæhted 1885, geæhtlan 369, (eaht- 172, 1407, 3173), gefeh 5 pret. 827, 1569, 2298 (gefeah 109, 1624). fexe 2967, blondenfexa 2962 (-]feax 5x:0x), meht vb. 4x:0x, miht 14x:6x (meaht 19x:16x), genehost 794, geondseh 5 pret. 3087 (-]seah 10x:8x), siexbennum* 2904 (seaxe 1545. wællseaxe 2703), gepah 5 pret. 1024 (geþeah 618, 628), ombeht 287, ombiht- 336, 673 (with possible i-umlaut).

Prets. cwehte 235, þehton 513, wehte 2854 have e from the pres. system. Cpb. §753.9b.

See also A7, Smoothing and A9, Palatal Umlaut.

.6 æ + h + consonant + i:

With spirant: lyhð pres. 3rd sg. 1048, miht f., -]mihtig 11x:0x, niht + cpds. 21x:8x (see A9, Palatal Umlaut), geslyht n. 2398, (h)ondslyht m. 2929, 2972.

Loss of spirant and vowel-lengthening: style 985, stylecg 1533.

.7 e + l + consonant: unbroken, as is normal in WS, but note the following: seolfa 3067 (self 17x:0x, sylf lx, 505:16x) (Cpb. §146, 325), sealman 2640.

.8 e + r + consonant: 350 broken forms spelled eo: -]beorg, -]beorgan, -]beorht, beorhte, beorhtian, beorn[-, ceorl, deorc, eorl[-, eorðe, eorlð-, -]feorh[-, feorm, feormend-, feor(r)[-, feorran[- adv., feorran vb., -]georn, feorne, heor(r), -]heorte, heorð[-, hweorfan, -sceorp, sweorcan, -]sweord[-, -]weorc, weorpan, -]weorðan, weorð, weorð-, weorðian, -weorpung, eorclanstanf(?). Variation: byrhtan 1199 (beorht 9x:4x), ferh[- 305, 2706 (feorhf- 21x:22x),-]ferhp[- 15x:4x, biorna 2404 (beorn 4x:6x), biorg 2272, 2807, 3066, hleorberf[g]an 304, (-Jbeorg 7x: 19x). For the special development of vowels between w and r see Cpb. §§320-24: hworfan 1728 (hweorfan 2888). swurd 539, 890, 1901, swyrd[- 2610, 2987, 3048 (sweord + cpds. 16x:16x), wore 289, 1100 (]weorc 19x:10x), forsworceð 1767, wurðan 3 807, wurðap 282 (weorlð- 2x:5x), gewurpad wkVariation. II pass. part. 331, 1038, 1645 (weorlð- 3x:3x), worfðmyndum 1186 (weorðmyndum 4x:0x).

.9 e + h (+ consonant): MS aþum swerian 84 (= aþumsweoras?), feoh + cpds. 7x, feohte wk. f., gefeoht n.. gefeohtan 3 5x (see Cpb. §305 on prevention of palatal umlaut); seon 5 inf. 6x, geseon lOx; eoredgeatwe 2866 (<eoh-), wiðerrtehtes 3039 (cf. -riht); giohðo 2267, gehðo 3095. See A9, Palatal Umlaut, for Gmc. e + h + t (riht, cniht, etc.).

.10 i + r + consonant + i: 51 broken, mutated forms spelled y: hwyrfan, -]hwyrft, wyrp, -wyrpan, gyrdan, -wyrdan, ]wyrðe, hyrtan, -]hyrde, fyrst, wyrsa, fym-, -wyrht, -byrgea, fyrgen, yrre[-, fyr, -tyrwed.

Variation: Eormenrices 1201, eormen- 859, 1957, 2234 (Yrmenlafes 1324), eorres 1447 (yrre 4x:3x) Cpb. §154.3), feorran 156 (wk. I), firas 91, 2001, 2286, 2741 (fyra 2250): see Cpb. §§154.3. 241.2), leornode 2336 (Cpb. §202).

.11 i + h (+ consonant): Diphthong spellings: teohhe 2938, teohhode 951, geteohhod 1300, wk. II pret. 3rd sg. geteode 2295, tweonum 858, 1297, 1685, 1956.

With i-umlaut, gesyhð 2041, 2455. See also A7, Smoothing and A9, Palatal Umlaut.

A2 .12 Breaking of long vowels:

Normal WS development of (<Gmc. ): neah 4x:9x, near comp. 745; with i-mutation: niehstan 2511, nystan 1203.

Long i (see also A7, Smoothing): geþeon 1 25, 910, imp. sg. geþeoh 1218, geteoh 366, fela 1032 (Cpb. §229 and f.1).

A3 Raising of to (Cpb. §§164-9, 288-92)

drep 2880, hergum 3072 (?), hrefn 1801, 3024, hrefne 2448 (possibly the result of i-umlaut, see Cpb. §§193d f.4, 204.5);hrepe 991 (hrape 12x, hrpe 1914.rape 1x, hræpe 1 x);meþle 1876, meþelstede 1082, meþelwordum 236, renweardas 770 (see Cpb. §193d f.4 for discussion of this form), sel 161, precwudu 1246, Hetware 2363, 2916, Hrefnesholt 2935, Hrefnawudu 2925.

A4 Influence of Initial Palatal Consonants (Cpb. §§170-89)

.1 Before back vowels:

.1.1 There are no instances of glide development between c and a back vowel; the development of ea in -]ceald adj. 546, 1261, 2396, 3022 is attributable to breaking (see A2.1 and Cpb. §§170, 248-51).

.1.2 Development of a glide between palatal g and a back vowel (Cpb. §§171-8) is very frequent: 32x:35x beside 4 examples without glide.

Words showing glides written both e and i: geo[- 1234, 1266, 1476, gio 2521; without glide, iu 2459, iomeowlan 2931, iumonna 3052; geogoþ[- 7x:2x beside giogoð 1190, 2112, 2426; without glide, iogoþe 1674; geomor[- 4x:8x.giomor[- 2267, 2408, 2894, 3150, geond[-7x:5x, giond- 2771, geong 6x:10x, giong 2446.

Words with glides spelled only with e, not with i: gear[- 1, 1134, 1354, 2233, geara 2664, ungeara 602, 932, geoce 177, 608, 1834, 2674. geocor 765.

1.3 Development of a glide between sc and a back vowel (Cpb. §§179-84) occurs: 7x:26x, beside 55x:7x without glide. The glide is written e (except -scio 2076, Cpb. §181).

Words and their compounds which show forms both with and without glide: -]sceaða 3x:7x (MS dol saðan 479, e possibly by hand B; scaþa 9x:0x), sceacen 2306, 2727, sceaceð 2742 (scacen 1124, 1136, scacan 1802, scoc 3118), sceadu 707, sceadugenga 703 (scaduhelma 650), gesceod 2222 (scod 1887, gescod 1502, 1587, 2777), gesceop 97 (scop 78), sceoldest 2056, sceolde 0x: 13x, sceoldon 2257 (scolde 19x:0x, scoldon 6x:0x, sculon 683). On the group see Cpb. §180.

Words which appear only without glide: handscale 1317, hondscole 1963, scamigan 1026, scamiende 2850, scan 321, 405, 1965 .folcscare 13. scop 496, 1066, scopes 90, deaðscua 160, bescufan 184, scofen 918, scufon 215, scufun 3131, widscofen 936.

.2 Before front vowels:

.2.1 Palatal c (Cpb. §185):

æ > ea: cearað 1536, .cearu 1303, cearsiðum 2396, cearwylmas 282, cearwælmum 2066, aldorceare 906, guðceare 1258, mælceare 189, modeceare 1778, 1992, 3149, sorgcearig 3152, sorhcearig 245 5, ceasterbuendum 768.

For oncirran 2857, oncirde 2951, 2976 see A2.4 and Cpb. §200.2, 248-51.

.2.2 Palatal g (Cpb. §185):

.2.2.1 æ > ea: -]geador 491, 835, 1595, bengeato 1121, fæ[ð]ergearwum 3119; eal(l)gearo 77, 1230, 2241, gearo[- 8x:4x, gear(w)e adv. 4x:7x. (See A2.3 and Cpb. §209.)

A4 .2.2.1
geatolic 4x: 1x, geatwa 3088, eoredgeatwe 2866, gryregeatwum 324, hildegeatwa 2362, hildegeatwe 674, geaf 5 pret. 1x:lOx, ageaf 2929, forgeaf 5x:4x, ofgeaf 1681, 1904, 2251, 2469, begeat 5 pret. 1068, 1146, 2230, angeat 1291, ongeat 14, 1512, 1518.

.2.2.2 æ > ie, y, i as a result of palatal influence and i-umlaut: gid 1065, gidd 2105, -a 868, -um 1118, gyd 1160, 2108, 2154, 2446, gyddum 151;giomorgydd 3150, wordgyd 3112, gist 1138, 1441, 1522, -as 1602;gyste 2227; selegyst 1545; gðst 1800, gæsesfas 1893 (possibly gæst 2073, 2312), inwitgæst 2670, niðgæst 2699, gryregieste 2560, feðegestum 1976.

(gegyrwan 38, 199, gyredon 1441 .gyredon 994, gegyred 1472, gegyrwed 553, 2087, gegyrede 1028, 2192;gegiredan 3137 included under i-umlaut of Gmc. a + r + consonant, A2.4; see Cpb. §200.2).

.2.2.3 æ > ea: ongean 681, 747, 1034, togeanes 4x:0x (MS tognes 1542, a by hand A), geaf on 5 pret. pi. 49, ofgeafon 1600, begeaton 2249, begeate 2130, ongeaton 1431, 2944.

.2.2.4 e > i: gifu f. 3x:1x, maðþumgife 1301, gifeðe 1x:4x, gyfeðe 555, 819; ungyfeðe 2921, gifhealle 838.gifsceattas 378, gifstol 168, 2327, beaggyfan 1102, goldgyfan 2652, sincgifan 2311 ,-gyfan 1012, 1342, gyfen pass. part. 64, 1678, 1948, ætgif an 2878, ofgyfan 2588, gyldan 11, 1184, 2636, forgyldan 1054, 1577, 2305; forgylde 956, gylp n. + cpds. 3x:2x, gilp + cpds. 4x:0x, gylpan 2874, gylpe 586, gylpeð 2055, begylpan 2006.gystran 1334, ongitan 1484, 1911, 2770, ongite 2748, ongit 1723, ongytan 1496, ongyton 308, forgyteð 1751, and git n. 1059.

.2.2.5 e > i, y: git 5x:1x, gyt; 10x:2x, (gen, gena (?) 2x:l1x).

.2.3 Palatal sc (Cpb. §185):

.2.3.1 æ > ea: -sceaft 11x:4x, sceapen 2229, earmsceapen 1351, 2228, gesceapu 650, heahge- sceap 3084, guðsceare 1213; inwitscear 2478, sceattas 1686;gifsceattas 378, sceal(l) 22x: 18x, scealt 588, 1707, 2666.
Exceptions: gescæphwile 26, gesær 1526.

.2.3.2 æ > y as a result of palatal influence and i-umlaut (Cpb. §201.4): scyppend 106.

.2.3.3 æ > ea: no examples.

.2.3.4 e > i, y: scyld m. 3x:3x, scyldfreca 1033, scyldwiga 288; scildweall 3118, scildwigan 3005.

2.3.5 e > ie: no examples.

.3 Late West-Saxon smoothing (Cpb. §312):

Examples of late WS smoothing after palatal g, sc whereby > are: beget 5 pret. 2872, eðegete 2861, ofgefan 5 pret. pl. 2846, togenes 3114, sceft 3118, (-sceaft 2x:0x), gescer 2973 (gescær 1526), seel 455, 2804, 3010 (very often sceal), Scefing 4, scepen 2913, ofscet 2439.

A5 i-Umlaut (Cpb. §§190-204)

Approximately 1075 separate words in Beowulf show the influence of i-umlaut. The following is a summary of selected points of interest. (See also A2, Breaking for umlauted broken forms.)

.1 Where Gmc. is followed by a nasal, the i-umlaut of the vowel is regularly spelled e (104 separate words, e.g. sendan, pencan, ende[-, cempa, semninga).

Exceptions are: hildehlæmmum 2201 (hildehlemma 2351, 2544; uhthlem 2007, wælhlem 2969), mænigo 41 (menigeo 2143, and see Cpb. § 193d f.4).

.2 Restoration of a in place of æ with subsequent umlaut to æ (Cpb. §193c) occurs in: æfenræste 646, 1252, ælfylcum 2371, ælwihta 1500, bordhæbbende 2895, fæpm- 185, 188, 781, 1210, 1393, 3049, fæðmian 2652, 3133, fletræste 1241, geæfned 1107, 3106, geæfndon 538, gedræg 756, inwitgæst 2670, lindhæbbende 245, 1402, niðgæst 2699, -]ræst 9x, sæcce, -a 13x, searohæbbendra 237, sidfæðme 1917, wræcca 2613, wræcmæcgas 2379, Geatmæcgum 491.

A5 .3 The i-umlaut of Gmc. ō (Cpb. §198) normally appears as (70 words); as in æht ‘pursuit’ 2957, higemteæðum 2909 (e 2x), onsæce 1942 (e 24x), Hræ dles 1485, -an 454 (e 7x). Note also reote 2457 (cf. unrot).

.4 The i-umlaut of Gmc. au (Cpb. §200.5) is normally y (30 words, e.g. hyran wk. I 19x); before palatal g it appears as ī (Cpb. §301): acigde 3121, lig + cpds. 1 1x; the vowel is spelled e in the following: eðbegete 2861, epgesyne 1110 (yp 1244), eðe 2586 (yðe 4x, eabe 228), getan 2940, gehegan 425, [505], leg[- 3115, 2549, 3040, -]rec 2661, 3144, 3155, stred 2436, preanedlan 2223 (nyd 9x).

.5 The i-umlaut of Gmc. iu appears as y, i in ansyn 2x:2x, drysmap 1375, dygel 1357, -]gesyne 4x:4x, gestrynan 2798, try we 1165,ge- 1228, by strum 87, unhyre 2120;niw[- 3x :2x, geniwian 2x: lx.

It appears as eo, io (Cpb. §202) in leod[- 82x, deogol 275, heoru 1372, unheoru 987, unhiore 2413, neos(i)an 5x:lx, nios(i)an 0x:5x, niowan 1789, treowde 1166, peostrum 2332, wliteseon 1650, wundorsiona 995.

.6 The i-umlaut of Gmc. ŭ is spelled y in most cases (205 words), while 10 words show variation between i and y (in most cases as a result of the influence of palatal consonants): bicgan 1305, drihtfen) 27x (y 43x), -Jhicgan 5x (y 3x), hige 8x (y 5x), Higelac 23x (y 9x), scildig 3071 (y 3x), scile 3176 (y 2x), sinnigne 1379 (syn- 9x), pincean 4x (y 2x). Scribe A prefers i (55x) toy (29x), B,.y (51x) to i (12x) in these words.

.7 The i-umlaut of Gmc. ū is normally y, but e in niðhedige 3165, i in higepihtigne 746 (pyhtig 1558). wiston 1604.

.8 Variation in words subject to i-umlaut: -Jæfnan 4x:lx / efnan 1x:5x;æ I- (-fylce) 2371 / el- (-land, -peodig) 3019, 336;deore 7x / diore lx / dyre 2x; elde 0x:4x / ylde 6x:lx;eldo 2111 / yldo 4x:0x;eormen- (-cynn, -grund, -laf -ric) 4x / yrmen- (-laf) 1324;eorre 1447 / yrre 3x:2x; eape 2x:2x / epe 2586 / ype 1002, 2415;eap- (-fynde) 138;ype (-lice) 1556;epgesyne 1110 / ypgesene 1244; gast (and gast-bona, ellor-, geosceaft-gast) 7x / gæst (and ellen-, ellor-, wæ-gæst) 9x but see note, Klaeber s.v. gast;gist 4x:0x / (gryre-) -giest 2560 / (sele)gyst 1545 / (feðe)gest 1976 gæst (and inwit-, nið-gaest) lx:4x; (hilde)hlæmm 2201 / (hilde)hlemm (also uht-, wæl- hlemm) 0x:4x; hlaw 1120 / hlæw 0x:5x;leg (and leg-draca) 0x:3x / lig (and lig-draca, -egesa, -yð) 4x:5\;-mæcg (Geat-, wræc-mæcg) 1 x: 1 x / -mecg (Geat-, hilde-, oret-mecg) 5x; mænigo 41 / menigeo 2143; (hige)-maeðu wk. f. 2909, cf. (hyge)-meðe adj. 2442; morgen (and morgen-ceald, -leoht, -long, -sweg, -tid) 8x:4x / mergen lx:3x; Cpb. § 193a; (prea)-nedla wk. m. 2223, cf. (prea)-nyd f. 284, 832; neos(i)an 7x / niosfijan 4x; (heal-)-ręced 1981 / reced (and eorð-, heal-, horn-, win- reced) 16x; ræst (and æ fen-, flet-ræst) 9x:0x / rest (and sele-, wcel-rest) 1 x: 2x; æcc 3x:10x / secc 600; (ge)sellan 4x:0x / syllan 0x:2x; (anjsyn 4x / (wlite)seon 1650 / (wundor)sion 995; gesyn (and ep-gesyne) 6x / (yp)gesene 1244;syrce (and here-, leoðo-, lic-syrce) 7x:0x / -serce (beadu-, hioro-serce) 0x:2x but note: beadusercean 2755 has e over altered æ; treddode 725 / tryddode 922; wælm (and cear-wælm) 0x:3x / wylm (and breost-, brim-, bryne-, cear-, fyr-, heaðo-, holm-, sæ-, sorh-wylm) 9x:7x; wræcca 2613 / wrecca 1137;-]ywan 0x:2x, eaw- 2x:0x, eow- lx:0x.

A6 Back Umlaut (Cpb. §§205-21)

.1 æ > ea: beadu[- 10x:4x (MS bdorinca 1109, a by same hand), bealu[-, -bealu 11x:13x, eafora 9x:6x, eafoð 6x:lx, eofoð 2534, ealu- 4x:3x, eatol 0x:2x, atol 9x:lx, heafo 2477, (possibly MS heapu forheafu 1862),-Jheafolan 0x:3x, hafela llx:0x, geheaðerod 3072, heapu- 19x:15x (MS hposwata 1668, a by same hand).

A6 .1

For bealu, bealw-, gearu, gearw-, nearu, nearw-, searu, searw-, see A2, Breaking and Cpb. §209. For bengeato, cearu, ongeador, sceadu, sceapa, see A4, Initial Palatals and Cpb. §209. Back umlaut of æ is rare in WS prose texts, since æ does not normally appear before a back vowel (e.g. dæ g / dagas). In poetic texts, however, digraph spellings are quite common. (Cpb. §§206, 208.)

.2 e > eo :

.2.1 Spelled eo: eodor 4x:0x, eofor 4x:0x, Eofor 2486, eoton[- 5x:0x, eotenisc 1x:1x (etonisc 2616), heofon 6x:3x (hefene 1571), heolfre 3x:1x, heolster 755, heoro[- 11x: 1x, Heorot, Heort 17x:0x, meodu- 4x: 1x (medu[- 9x:4x), meoto 489, meotodsceaft 1077 (-]Metod 1 1x:1x, metodsceaft 1x: 1x), seofon 1x: 1x (syfon[- 0x:2x), seomian 2x:0x, sweofot 1x: 1x, sweoloð 115, sweotoð 3x:0x (swutol 90) Cpb. §218, weora 2947 (wera, -as, -um 9x:1x), -]weorod 3x:4x (-]werod 5x:0x).

.2.2 Spelled io: Iofor 0x:2x, hioro- 0x:4x, Hiorot, Hiort 0x:2x, siomian 2767.

.2.3 Spelled ea: eafor 2152, Eafor 2964, fealo 2747 (J’ela 38x).

.3 i > io, eo :

.3.1 Spelled io: frioðu 1x: 1x (friðusibb 2017), gewiofu 697, hiora 1x:2x, nioðor 2699, riodan (pret. 3 pL.) 3169, scionon (pret. 3 pL.) 303, (scinon 994), sioleða 2367.

.3.2 Spelled eo: -]freoðo[- 3x:2x, heonan 2x:ox, hear a 4x:0x, hleonian 1415 ,-hleoðu 4x:0x (-hliðo 1409), leofað 975, leomum 97.leoðo- 2x: 1x, stancleofu 2540, seonowe 817, weotena 1098 (-]wita(n) 5x: 1x), -]weotode 2x:1x (wit- 9x), wreopen 1698 (-]wripen 1x:2x); see Cpb. §214.

.4 Combined influence of preceding palatal consonant and following back vowel: geofon ‘sea’ 2x:0x (gifen 1690, gyfenes 1394), giofan inf. 2972 (-gifan 1x:2x), geofiu 1x:1x (gif- 1x:1x), geolorand 438, geolwe 2610.

.5 Back umlaut before geminates: seoððan 3x:0x (siððan (y) 37x:35x).

.6 Combinative back umlaut: swutol 90, wudu 6x, -wudu 13x, wutun 2648, uton 1x:1x.

A7 Smoothing (Cpb. §§222-33, [312-14])

.1 ea > æ before c. g, h: geæhted 1885, (geæhted 3x), geaehtle 369.

.2 ea > æ before r/l + c, g, or h: hærgtrafum 175.

.3 ea > e before c, g, h: ehtigað 1222, fex 2962, 2967, (feax 5x:0x).gefeh 3x, (gefeah 2x), genehost 794, (geneahhe 783, 3152). mehte pret. 4x (miht 20x, meaht 35x), -seh 3087 (seah 18x).

.4 ea > e before r/l + c, g, or h: hergum 3072.

.5 eo > e before r/l + c, g, or h: ferh 305, 2706 (feorh 11x), ferð 19x.

.6 eo > e before h: gehðo 3095, > æ wiðerræhtes 3039.

.7 ea > æ before c, g, h: ægweard 241.

.8 ea > e before c, g, h: aleh 80, (leag 3029), becn 3160, (beacn 570, 2777), beg 3163 ,(beag 30x), ec 3131, (eac 5x), egstreamum 577, (eagorstream 513), neh 2411, (neah 12), þeh 1613, 2967, (þeah 30x).

.9 io > e: fela 1032. See Cpb. §229 on e instead of i.

.10 io > i (from Gmc. i + h or iu): wigweorpung 176, wihstan 5x,(Weohstan 3x), lixan 3x, (-leoht 2x).

A8 Treatment of Vowels and Diphthongs Formed by Contraction (Cpb. §§120, 234-9)

.1 Treatment of vowels in original hiatus:

.1.1 u + a, u + e in buan, buende is spelled -ua-, -ue- in 10 instances (buan, buon inf., ceaster-buend, feorbuend, foldbuend, grundbuend, landbuend), and -u- in 1 instance, gebun 117, where the metre supports a reading of -bun as monosyllabic.

.1.2 e + a appears in bearn 67, 3rd sg. pret. of beirnan, and in orcneas 112, nom. pl.; the metre supports a reading of both digraphs as disyllabic.

.1.3 i + e in sie is spelled sie, sy, sig; the metre supports a reading of 3 instances as disyllabic (sy 1831, 2649, sie 682) and 2 as monosyllabic (sie 435, sy 1941); the other 2 instances (sie 3105, sig 1778) are metrically ambiguous.

.1.4 don, gedon: none of the 12 instances (don, deþ, doþ, gedon, gedeþ) has a spelling showing hiatus; the metre supports a reading of 7 instances as disyllabic (don 1116, 1172, 1534, 2166, dep) 1058, 1134, 2859) and 3 as monosyllabic (dop 1231, gedon 2090, 2186); the other 2 instances (deð 2410, gedeð 1732) are metrically ambiguous.

.1.5 gan, gegan: none of the 11 instances (gan, gæþ, gegan) has a spelling showing hiatus; the metre supports a reading of 4 instances as disyllabic (gan 386, 1644, gæþ 2034, 2054) and 5 as monosyllabic (gæp 603, gegan 1277, 1462, 1535, 2630); the other 2 are ambiguous (gæþ 455, gan 1163).

.2 Treatment of diphthongs formed after vocalisation or loss of -j- or -w-:

.2.1 20 words appear always with -w(-): blodreow, bywan, guðreow, heawan, hreow, leas-sceawere, niwe, (ge)niwian, sceawian, seowian, treow, treowan, truwian, (ge)trywe, þeaw, geþywe, (ge)ywan (see Cpb. §120). Note the spelling guðreouw 58.

.2.2 In 23 words the consonant has been lost from all forms of the word, and spellings are diphthongal (in -ea(-) and -eo-), with the exception of stred and hra[-. Of the 66 instances, the metre supports a reading of 9 as disyllabic (frean 271, 359, 1680, agedfrean 1883, liffrea 16, reon 512, 539, sinfrea 1934, stred 2436) and 55 as monosyllabic (including feaum 1081, perhaps altered from original fea); the other 2 are metrically ambiguous (frean 1166, 2662). The words are agendfrea, fea, feasceaft, frea, freaburh, freadrihten, frealic, freawine, freawrasn, gleo, gleobeam, gleodream, gleomann, hleo, hleoburh, hra, hrafyll, hreawic (see Cpb. §273), liffrea, rowan, sinfrea, stregan, preanedla, preanyd.

.2.3 Contracted forms appear for ne wæs, ne wære, ne wæron, ne wille, and ne wolde: næs 22x, nære 860, 1167, næron 2657, nelle 679, 2524, nolde 7x.

.2.4 In 4 words forms are attested both with and without -w(-): þywað 1827, þeon 2736 (probably disyllabic); Ecgpeo 373, -w 263, þeowes 12x, -þiowes 2398, -ðioes 1999 (probably disyllabic); Ongenðio 2924, 2951, -þeow 2486, -ðiow 2961, -ðeowes 2475, -þeoes 1968 (probably monosyllabic); -ðioes 2387 (probably disyllabic); Ongenðio 2986, dat. sg.; Wealhþeo 664, 1162, 1215, 2173. -þeow 612 (w added above line, same hand), -þeon 629 (digraph probably disyllabic).

.3 Treatment of diphthongs formed after loss of -h-:

.3.1 In 20 words -h- is lost from uninflected as well as inflected forms, and spellings are diphthongal (in -ea(-) and -eo-) except for fon 439, onfon 911, lyhð 1048, and gesyhð 2041, 2455. Of the 49 instances, the metre supports a reading of 10 as disyllabic (eam 881, fleon 820, 1264, lyhð 1048, nean 528, slea 681, seon 1180, 1275, teon 1036, gepeon 25), and 24 as monosyllabic (belean 511, beot 523, gebeotedon 480, 536, beot- 2510, fleon 764, neon 3104, onfon 911, purhteon 1140, gepeon 910, teode 1452, -an 43, geteoð 2526, geteode 2295, (ge)seon 10x); the other 15 are metrically ambiguous (befleonne 1003, beot 80, fleon 755, fon 439, gefean 562, 2140, nean 839, 1174, 2317, (ge)seon 6x).

A8 .3.2 A contracted form appears for ne hæbben: næbben 1850.

.3.3 In 4 words uninflected forms retain -h and inflected forms lose it: fah, feoh, heah, hreoh. Of the 13 instances of the last 3 words, the metre supports a reading of 2 as disyllabic (hean 116, heanne 983) and 6 as monosyllabic (hean 713, 919, 1016, 1984, hreoum 2581, hreon 1307); the other 5 are metrically ambiguous (feo 470, 1380, fea 156, hean 3097, hreo 548), and the manuscript reading of heaum 2212 is doubtful. Fah occurs 15x in oblique cases, 6 of them in compounds. 12 of these are spelled with -h- or -g-, and Klaeber assigns all of them except nearofages to the word meaning ‘decorated, stained’: brunfagne 2615, fagne 725, fahne 447, 716, 927, fage 1615, fagum 586, goldfahne 2811, gryrefahne 2576, nearofages 2317, sincfage 167, wælfagne 1128. The 3 instances without -h- he assigns to the word meaning ‘guilty, hostile’: fane 2655, fara 578, 1463; but the semantic distinctions are far from clear in the individual instances.

A9 Palatal Umlaut (Cpb. §§304-11)

eo/io/e + ht, hs, hp > i: occurs in most instances of cniht, niht, riht, wiht, wrixl (including forms other than those ending in - or -e) and in their compounds: cnihtwesende 372, 535 (cnyhtum 1219), miht 940, -um 700 (Cpb. §301), mihtig 6x, -an 1398, ælmihtiga 92, foremihtig 969, miht[- vb. 14x:6x (meaht 19x:16x, meht 4x:0x) (Cpb. §§301, 312, 767), niht 13x, -es 4x, -a 2x, -um 3x, niht- 4x, middelnihtum 2782, 2833, sinniht 161, riht, ryht 3x, -e 5x, ætrihte 1657, eðelriht 2198, folcrihta 2608, londrihtes 2886, unriht 1254, 2739, -e 3059, uppriht 2092, word- rihta 2631, cf. wiðerræhtes 3039, wiht 12x, -e 8x, ælwihta 1500, owihte 1822, 2432, wrixle 2969, gewrixle 1304, wrixlan 366, 874.

A10 Unrounding and Rounding of Front Vowels (Cpb. §§315-19)

.1 The A scribe shows a marked tendency to spell the i-umlaut of u as i, not y, especially in a palatal consonant environment: bicgan 1305, -]driht[- 10x:0x (y 8x:4x), -]drihten 15x:2x (y 10x:22x), hicgan 5x:0x (y 0x:3x), hige[- 5x:3x (y 2x:3x), -hydig 723, 1749, 2667, 2810, Higelac 15x:8x (y 1x:8x), scildig 3071, scile 3176 (scyle 2657), sinnig 1379, pincean 4x:0x (y 0x:2x), Wilfingum 461 (Wylf- 471), pihtig 746 (y 1558), wiston 1604.

.2 Conversely, there are many examples of original i spelled y, particularly in the work of scribe B. Pronoun forms illustrate this feature: hyne 6x:24x (hine 40x:4x), hyt 0x:9x (hit 25x:5x).

A11 Vowel Patterns in Unstressed Syllables

.1 -um/un/an/on variation (Cpb. §378):

The dative plural of nouns and adjectives in Beowulf is regularly -um, with a handful of exceptions, especially in the weak declension of adjectives:

-un for -um: 2x: herewæsmun 677, wicun 1304

-on for -um: 4x: balwon 977, grimmon 306 (MS grummon), heafdon 1242, scypon 1154

-an for -um: 10x: ærran 907, 2237, 3035, uncran eaferan 1185, feorhgeniðlan 2933, grimman 1542, heardan 963, hleorberan (for hleorbergan) 304, lapan 1505, læssan 43. (To these should perhaps be added apum swerian 84, generally taken as apumsweoran.) geongū 2860 is a reverse spelling for geongan.

.2 -an/on/en/un variation (Cpb. §§379, 735e, g):

.2.1 an:

-en for -an: frecnen 1104, d.s.f. wk. (drihtguman 1388, -en corrected to -an by same hand)

A11 .2.1

-on for -an: hæfton 788 a.s. wk., haton 849 d.s.m.n. wk., mannon 577 a.s. wk., bregdon 2167 inf., buon 2842 inf., heoldon 3084 inf. (for healdan), hlodon 2775 inf. (for hladan), ongyton 308

-un for -an: ærrun 3035 (altered from -an?).

.2.2 on:

-an for -on: 3x: 19x, pres. and pret. plurals: bæran 2850, burgan 2599, cnysedan 1328, cwoman 650, eahtodan 3173, geferian 3107. gefyldan 2706, gegiredan 3137, hnitan 2544, genægdan 2206, naman 2116, ofgefan 2846, riodan 3169, sædan 1945, gescgan 3038, sohtan 2380, ge-sohtan 2204, stodan 3047, teodan 43, wæran 2475, wlitan 2852, gewræcan 2479 -en for -on: reafeden 1212

-un for -on: scufun 3131, swæfun 1280. pegun 2633, wocun 60.

.2.3 en:

-on- for -en- medially: gecorone 206, ricone 2983, sceaðona 274, þurhetone 3049

-on for -en in subjunctive plural: feredon 3113, folgedon 1102, nefiðdon 538, gerymdon 1086; perhaps eardodon 3050, þegon 363, woldon 482, 2636, ymbsaeton 564

-an for -en: agande 1013, feran 254 subj. pl., sceawian 3008 subj. pl.

-in- for -en-: weallinde 2464.

.3 -es/as variation (Cpb. §379):

.3.1 es:

-as for -es in gen. sg.: Heaðo-Scilfingas 63, Merewioingas 2921, yrfeweardas 2453

-ys for -es in gen. sg.: wintrys 516.

.3.2 as:

-es for -as in acc. pl.: Heapo-Ræmes 519.

.4 u/o/a variation (Cpb. §373, 377):

The back vowels of Old English are frequently confused in unstressed syllables. The following analysis distinguishes the substitution of one back vowel (or e) for another in inflectional endings, and the variation between o and u in word-final position, in suffixes, and before the syllabic liquids.

.4.1 Substitution in inflectional endings:

Gen. pl. -a as -o: hynðo 475, 593, medo 1178, yldo 70

Gen. pl. -a as -e: fyrene 811, -hwile 2710, myrðe 810, nænigre 949, sigehwile 2710, sorge 2004, yrmðe 2005 .fyren 879 (same hand)

Expected -u as -a: geara 1914 n.s.m., guðgewazda 2623 a.pl ., morðbeala 136 a.s., pusenda 1829 a.pl., 2994 (?)

Expected -u as -e: wynsume 612 n.pl.n., wlence 508 d.s.

Expected -a as -u: sunu 1278 g.s., 344 d.s., 2013 a.pl.?

Expected -e as -u: fullæstu 2668 1st sg. pres. ind.; perhaps neodlaðu 1320 d.s.

Expected -a/-e as -u: hynðu 277 a.s.

Expected -a/-e as -o: gehðo 3095 d.s., fæhðo 2489 a.pl., giohðo 2267 a.s.

Weak preterite: -od- as -ad-: 29x;-od- as -ed-: 20x.

.4.2 Variation of -u and -o in word-final position (including the first elements of compounds, e.g. beadogrima):

Headwords: 158; instances: 285.

In -u: 65x:35x; in -o: 110x:73x; in ϕ: fæhð n.s. 2403, 3061 (cf. fæhðo 2999).

A11 .4.3 Variation of-u- and -o- in suffixes (-ud, -uld, -ut, -uά)

Headwords: 32; instances: 155.

In -u-: 8x:11x; in -o-: 63x:22x; in -e-: 31x:20x.

.4.4 Variation of -u- and -o- before syllabic l and r:

Inflected instances without a vowel (e.g. swegles) are not counted; only uninflected instances without a vowel have been counted (e.g. sweglwered).

Oðer and ofer and their compounds occur only with -e-; they occur 78x:40x and are excluded from the following count.

Headwords: 170; instances: 465.

In -u-: 3x:9x; in-o-: 96x:62x; in -e-: 184x:88x; in -a-: hafalan 446; without vowel: 18x:4x.

The rune appears 3x for epel; the spelling oncear-bendum 1918 may stand for oncerbendum.

.5 æ/e variation (Cpb. §369):

æ appears for e in: nalæs 43 (cf. nealles 8x, nal(l)es 11x, nal(l)as 5x), fæðmie 2652 3rd sg. pres. subj., onlicnæS 1351 (written onlic næs in MS).

Variation in the superlative:

Headwords: 28; instances: 60.

-æst: gingæste 2817; -est: 23x:T5x; -ost: 14x:6x; -ust: mildust 3181, mon(ðw)ærust 3181.

.6 Syncopation of medial vowels (Cpb. §§388-93): Syncopation occurs sporadically after both long and short syllables. Some examples (not an exhaustive list) are: bisgum 1743 (cf. bysigu(m) 2x), egsan 276 (cf. egesan 4x), Heort 78, 991, Hiorte 2099 (cf. Heorot, Heorut, Hiorot 16x), nicras 1427 (cf. nicera(s) 3x), wilna 4x, etc.

After 2 consonants: corðre 1153, 3121, cumbles 2505, galdre 3052, (-)wundra 3x, wundre 931, etc.

After a long vowel: dogra 1090, dogrum 2200, 2392 (cf. dogore, dogora, dogera 4x), Hylaces 1530 (cf. Hyge-, Hige- 32x), sawle 4x, sawlberend 1004 (cf. sawele 1742), etc.

.7 Use of glides after palatal consonants (Cpb. §45):

.7.1 The addition of e before a to inflectional endings to indicate the palatal quality of c occurs in both scribes: 17x:21x: ecean 1692, 1779, secean 187, 200, 268, 645, 821, 1597, 1869, gesecean 684, 692, þeccean 3015, geþencean 1734, þincean 1341, þinceað 368, gewyrcean 20, 69, aglæcean 2520, 2534, 2557, 2592, beadusercean 2755, hiorosercean 2539, ecean 2330, secean 1989, 2422, 2495, 2820, 2950, 3102, seceanne 2562, seceað 3001, gesecean 2275, weccean 2046, 3024, gewyrcean 2337, 2802, 2906.

.7.2 The addition of e before a in an inflectional ending to indicate the palatal quality of g also occurs in both scribes: 11x:6x: angengea 165, byrgean 448, ferigeað 333, gepingea 525, leodge- byrgean 269, licgean 966, 1427, ðicgean 736, wanigean 787, warigeað 1358, winigea 1664, alicgean 2886, fricgean 1985, gefricgean 2889, gefricgeað 3002, licgean 3040, 3082.

.7.3 The addition of e before o to indicate the palatal quality of g occurs only once: menigeo 2143 beside mænigo 41.

.8 Other variation in unstressed syllables:

.8.1 Alternate spellings for -e:

-a for -e: leoda 3001 a.p., geprolianne 1419, nal(l)as 5x (cf. nealles 8x, nalles 10x)

-i for -e: bineat 2396, weallinde 2464, wundini 1382 (the reading of the MS is disputed)

-o, -u for -e: hafo 2150, 3000, hafu 2523 (cf. hæbbe 1st sg. pres, indiC. 5x), Cpb. §762

-y for -e: feormynd 2256, niwtyrwyd 295.

A11 .8.2 Alternate spelling for -i-: -e- for -i-: fyrwet 1985, 2784 (cf. fyrwyt 232).

.8.3 Alternate spelling for -io: -ie for -io: hie 2019, sie 2219.

.8.4 Alternate spelling for -o-: -e(-) for -o-: atertanum 1459, te 2922.

A12 In addition to the io graphs listed under A2, Breaking and A6, Back Umlaut, the following are noteworthy:

.1 Gmc. eu (WS eo) appears as io: biodan 2892 (beodan 2x: lx), biorsele 2635 (beor 8x: lx), ciosan 2376 (geceosan 2x:0x), diope 3069 (deop 2x: lx), dior 2090, 3111 (deor 7x:4x), drior 2693, 2789 (dreor 8x:lx), hiofende 3142, niode 2116 (neodlaðum 1320), sioc 2754, 2787 (seoc 2x:2x), þiod 2219, 2579 (þeod 12x:9x), þioden 2336, 2788, 2810 (þeoden 20x:17x).

.2 Contraction gives rise to the following (see also A8): bio(ð) 2063, 2747 (beo(ð) 5x), Biowulf 0x:14x (Beowulf 37x:3x), oncniow 2554, fiond 2671 (feond 22x:4x), (ge)iode 2200 ((ge)iode 12x:8x), giong 2214, 2409, 2715 (geong 2x:3x), hio 3x:8x (heo 18x:0x), hiold 1954 (heold 15x: 16x), sio 0x:16x (seo 10x:3x), Swiorice 2383, 2495 (Sweo- 0x:4x, and once Swona 2946), Ongenðio(w) 0x:5x (Ongenþeo(w) 0x:3x); Ecgðio(w) 0x:2x (Ecgþeo(w) 10x:4x, Wealþeow 5x:lx), þrio 2174 (þreo 2278, þreotteoða 2406).

.3 The i-umlaut of Gmc. iu appears as nWS io, eo:

Mutated forms spelled io, eo: diore 1949 (deore 4x:2x, deorestan 1309 (and WS i-mutation, dyre 0x:4x), nios(i)an 0x:4x (neos(i)an 6x:lx), wundorsiona 995 (wliteseon 1650), unhiore 2413 ((un)heoru 987, 1372 and monophthong in y 2120).

Mutated forms spelled io only: niowan 1789 (and monophthongs in i 5x:4x).

Mutated forms spelled eo only: treowde 1166, peostrum 2332.

.4 Note also the use of i before o to indicate the palatal nature of g: e.g.giomor (see A3.1.2).

A13 Consonant Patterns

.1 Use of k: k occurs 5 times in kyning: 619, 665, 2144, 2335, 3171; cyning is the usual spelling (50x). Sporadic use of k in Old English texts is normally confined to this word: see Cpb. §427 f.l.

.2 Use of g:

In general this graph is used in Beowulf as normally in 1WS for the voiced, palatal, and velar spirants and stops.

Variations:

(1) ge > ig in unigmetes 1792 (Cpb. §467)

(2) -ig/-ī: normal -ig beside Wilaf 2852 (Wig- 6x), Hylaces 1530 (Hyge- 9x, Hige- 24x), fami- 218, -sæli 105 (Cpb. §267). Note wigtig 1841 for witig (685, 1056),

(3) Before þ, d, n palatal g appears irregularly: e.g. brogden- 1667 (broden 1616), gesægd 141 (gesæd 1696). g is retained 57x:28x, lost 20x:12x. See Cpb. §243 on this normal and widespread fluctuation. Before other consonants palatal g is retained.

(4) Class II weak verbs, -i-/-ig-: normal infinitive is -ian, beside scamigan 1026, sceawigan 1391 (sceawian 5x); 1st sg. pres. indic, -ige 6x:lx, -ie 0x:lx; pl. pres. indic. -iað 3x:2x, -eað lx:0x, -igað 2x:0x; sg. pres. subj. -ige 0x:lx, -ie 0x:lx; pl. pres. subj. -ian 0x:lx, -igan 1x:0x (Cpb. §§243, 757)

(5) Other unusual spellings: geomor 1960 (for Eomor);g > c in ætspranc 1121, possibly guðrinc 1118 (= guðhring?), gecranc 1209; sorhge 2468, fæghð 2465; ligge 727 (lige 3x), wigge 1656 (wige 3x), hig 1085, 1396

A13 .2

(6) The doubled consonant is usually spelled eg, note seeggende 3028, fricgcean 1985, Ecpeowes 957, Eclafes 980, E.þeow 263 (g added by same hand), sec 2863.

.3 Use of h:

Loss of initial h: of 312, -reade 1194, inne 1868.

Loss of medial h (see also A8.3): het 7x:6x, gehet 0x:3x (heht 5x:2x), -ferð 2785, fe.þe 1718 (h by a later hand) (ferhp 18x), beo.tre 158 (h by a later hand), f.ðe 2948 (h by same hand). Superfluous initial h: -hnægdon 2916, hroden 1151, Hunferð 499, 530, 1165, 1488, hand-, hond- 1541, 2094, 2929, 2972, hattres 2523, (:unhyre 2120, erasure of h). (H)raþe alliterates on h: 356, 543, 963, 991, 1576, 1914, 1937; on r: 724 (MS rape here only), 1390, 1975.

Unvoicing of final g: it is interesting to note that although there is considerable variation between g/h in spelling originally voiced spirant g (final), rarely is g used to represent an original unvoiced spirant. Voiced spirant: e.g. strong 1 pret. astag 782, astah 1118, 1160, 3144;strong 3 pret. gebearg 2570, gebearh 1548. Unvoiced spirant: e.g. strong 5 pret. seah, geseah 10x:6x; exceptions to the h spelling are strong 6 pret. ahlog 730, slog 421, 2179? (sloh 2x:4x) which show extension of g from pret. pl. (Cpb. §744). The lexical confusion of fag ‘variegated, shining, decorated’ and fah ‘hostile, guilty’ is reflected in the breakdown of this distinction of g/h for voiced, h for unvoiced spirant in the spellings of these words. Other spellings: abealch 2280;ahlæcan 646, 989 (ag-, æg- usually).

.4 Use of n:

Before f b, n > m (Cpb. §484): gimfæSte 1271 (ginfæstan 2182), hlimbed 3034.

Loss of n: cyniges 3121 (Cpb. §474-5).

See B, MORPHOLOGY passim for loss of final or inflectional n.

.5 Doubling of Consonants (Cpb. §§453-6):

Normal doubling before r: (h)attres 2523, ættren 1617, and by analogy attor 2715, 2839 (ator 1459 and many other forms are undoubled, e.g. bitre 2331, biteran 1746, 2692, togædre 2630, ætgaedere 7x).

Note the variation between þð, þ, and d in maððum and cpds. (see Klaeber, p. 276). Orthographic confusion or misunderstanding have probably caused the following doublings: fættum 716, gegrettan 1861, gehedde 505, sceatta 752, æþellingum 906, medostigge meet 924, Scedenigge 1686. preotteoða is a common form. Cpb. §287. Scribe B tends to double final l after a short vowel or diphthong: sceall 0x:12x (sceal 16x: 1lx, seel lx:2x), till 2721 (til 61, 1304), well 1951, 2162, 2812 (wel 8x:3x).

.6 Simplification of consonants:

Normal simplification (Cpb. §458) in: eorlic 637, atelic 784, wildeor 1430.

Scribe A simplifies final double consonants, while B prefers double consonant spellings (Cpb. §§66, 457): e.g. eal 21x:0x, eall 2x:15x, -]ful adj., adv., n. 1 1x:0x, -]full 0x:3x (note fullne 512, the exception to usual -lr-, -In-), but man, mon, men 30x:12x, menn 0x:lx.

Other simplifications include: genehost 794 (hh), hetende 1828 (tt), irena 673, 1697, 2259 (nn), niða 2215 (ðð).

A13 .7 Simplification of three consonants:

Loss of t: -wæsmun 677, siðas sige (between two words) 2710.

Loss of d: heaðabearna 2037, heaðobearna 2067, heaðobeardna 2032 (d added above line), hearede 2202 (for Heardrede).

Loss of b: d.s. symle 81, 489, 1008, symble 119, 2104; g.p. symbla 1232; a.s. symbel 3x:1x.

Loss of n: a.s. hioroweallende 2781 (< -ne), umborwesende 46 (< -ne).

.8 Metathesis:

sk > ks spelled x (Cpb. §440): hronfixas 540 (but discas 3048), hildetuxum 1511;ahsode 1206, ahsodon 423, geahsod 433 show metathesis and backspelling of hs for cs following the early change of xs > ks (see Cpb. §416, ahsian in Orosius).

Normal metathesis of r throughout (ærn + cpds., etc.) except for ren- 770 (archaic), græs- 1881 (not unusual), grynna 930 (gyrn 1775) (Cpb. §459).

ts > st (Cpb. §459.5) in gystað 1749 (gitsian wk. 11).

-]bold 7x and -]seld[- 249, 1280, 3065, 1984 are Anglian and poetic forms of WS botl, setl (Cpb. §425).

.9 u for intervocalic f: occurs once in hliuade 1799 (hlifade 81, 1898).

.10 Other selected features, chiefly copying errors:

Confusion of d and ð:* d for ð: madm- 8x:0x, yðlidan 198; ð for d: stanðeð 1362, -swearð 2064, að 1107.

Confusion of f and w: f for w: fergendra 2882 (cf. alfwealda 1314); w for f: warode 1253, sefa 2632 (f out of w).

Confusion of p and w: p for w: peard 2210; w for p: sceawode 2793 (w out of p), forspeof 2814, speop 2854.

Confusion of c and t: c for t: secan 1602, wac 1830, wræce 2771, 3060.

Confusion of g and t: g for t: wigtig 1841, truwode (t out of g) 2322 ;t for g: hetge 684, genga (second g out of t) 1908, let 3145.

Confusion of m and n: fremu 1932 (for frecnu?), cames 107 (for caines), camp 1261 (for cain), gimme 466 (for ginne), grimme 2136 (for grimne), me 3007 (for nu), midgripe (for nid-) 976; n for m in wæsmun 677, grimne 1234, wicun 1304.

B MORPHOLOGY

B1 Nouns

In the following sections nouns are classified according to and matched against the standard WS paradigms as given by Campbell; divergences from these paradigms are noted.

.1 Strong declension:

.1.1 a-stems, masculine and neuter (Cpb. §§570-74):

Nouns of this class are extremely regular in their forms.

.1.1.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 397; instances: 1450. There are 34 forms which could be masc. or neut.

Gender confusion: segn: m. 47, n. 2767.

Variation in inflection:

- gen. sg. in -as: yrfeweardas 2453

- gen. sg. in -ys: wintrys 516

- dat. sg. without ending: ham 7x:lx all instances, Cpb. §572

- acc. sg. in -on: hæfton 788

- dat. pl. in -un: herewæsmun 611.

.1.1.2 Neuter:

Headwords: 308; instances: 1026. There are 11 forms which could be masc. or neut.

Gender confusion: breost: n. 2331, f. 453.

Variation in inflection:

- nom. and acc. pl. in u or o: -u 19, -o 7

- dat. sg. without ending: dogor 1395 (dogore 1797, 2573: the e of 1797 is added in another hand)

- dat. pl. in -on: heafdon 1242

- dat. pl. in -un: wicun 1304.

.1.2 ja-stems (Cpb. §§575-9):

.1.2.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 28; instances: 102; regular. One form, æfen, could be masc. or neut.

Questionable ja-stem: -þrym(m).

.1.2.2 Neuter:

Headwords: 60; instances: 165.

Gender confusion: westen(n): m. or n. 1265, f. 2298.

Variation in inflection:

- nom., acc. pl. in -o: geþingo 1085, guðgewædo 227

- gen. pl. in -ea: geþingea 525

- acc. pl. guðgewæda 2623 (might be taken as gen. pl.).

.1.3 wa-stems (Cpb. §§580-84):

.1.3.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 2; instances: 11 (n.p. bearwas 1363, n.s., a.s. hleo 10x).

.1.3.2 Neuter:

Headwords: 16 (cwealmbealu, (e)aldor-, feorh-, hreper-, leod-, morð, morþor-, niht-, sweord-, wig-; fyrdsearo, guð-, inwit-, searo; galgtreow); instances: 35.

Cases not attested: gen. and dat. sg.

Bl .1.3.2

Variation in inflection:

- gen. pl. in -ewa: leodbealewa 1946, cf. nihtbealwa 193

-o for -u: 12x.

.1.4 ō-stems (Cpb. §§585-9):

Headwords: 170; instances: 479; regular.

Variation in inflection:

- dat. sg. in -o: gehðo 3095

- acc. sg. without ending: eotonweard 668, firen 1932 (-e 4x), frofor 698 (-e 4x)

- acc. sg. in -o: giohðo 2267, mærðo 659, 687, 2134

- acc. sg. in -u: hynðu 277, MS mærðū 2514

- gen. pl. in -e: fyrene 811 (-a 3x; 879 MS fyren, same hand)

- gen. pl. in -o: hynðo 475, 593, medo 1178

- acc. pl. in -o: fæhðo 2489.

Normal variation occurs between -e and -a in nom. and acc. pl., and between -ena and -a in gen. pl.

.1.5 jō-stems (Cpb. §§590-93):

Headwords: 43; instances: 143.

Questionable jo-stems: bend, ræst, wynn.

Normal variation occurs between -e and -a in nom. and acc. pl.: ecg shows nom. pl. -a 2828, -e 1145.2683.

.1.6 wō-stems (Cpb. §§594-8):

Headwords: 10 (beado, eoredgeatwe, frætwe, geatwa, gryregeatwe, guðgetawa, hildegeatwe, seonu, 254;eod254;rea, wiggetawa); instances: 26.

Cases not attested: nom., dat., and acc. sg.

Variation in inflection: frætwe in acc. pl.: frætwe 6x, frætwa 896.

.1.7 -in-stems (Cpb. §589.7):

Headwords: 25; instances: 47.

Some follow the o-stem paradigm, others use u/o for all endings except gen. pl. (which does not occur) and dat. pl. Four words have mixed -e and -o/u endings: hælo, strengo, wlenco, yldo.

.1.8 i-stems (Cpb. §§599-610):

.1.8.1 Masculine: Headwords: 120; instances: 384; regular.

Stem uncertainty: ellorgast, gæst.

Gender confusion: list, sæ, sæl.

Variation in inflection:

- leod in nom. pl.: leode 11x, leoda 3001

- wine in gen. pl.: winia 2567, winigea 1664; cf. g.p. Dena + cpds. 14x, Denia 2125, Deniga 7x:0x, Denigea 5x:0x.

.1.8.2 Feminine:

Headwords: 65; instances: 196; regular.

Gender confusion: Klaeber marks 9 as f.n.i, 3 as f.m.i, 1 as f.n.m.i.

Cases not attested: nom. pl.

Variation in inflection: dæd in acc. sg.: dæd 585, 940, 2890, dæde 889.

Normal variation occurs between - and -e in acc. sg., and between -a and -e in acc. pl.

B1 .1.8.3 Neuter:

Headwords: 9 (aht, ealdgewyrht, gehyld, gescipe, geslyht, gewif, hilt, orlege, owiht); instances: 15; regular.

.1.9 u-stems (Cpb. §§611-14):

There is considerable variation in the forms of u-stem nouns in Beowulf, -u and -o vary freely in compounds of these words: there are 33 instances in -o-, 17 in -u-. -u is preferred in inflectional endings: 42 instances in -u, 6 in -o (Cpb. §373). Six nouns, etymologically u-stems, have been assimilated to the a-stems and are counted there: eard, flod, ford, had, herg, winter.

.1.9.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 17 (brego, fela, heoru, lagu, mago, medo, sunu; wudu, bæl-, bord-, gomen-, heal-, holt-, mægen-, sæ-, sund-, prec-); instances: 65.

Cases not attested: gen. and dat. pl.

Variation in inflection:

- nom. sg. in -o: brego 609, mago 1465, 1867, 2011

- gen. sg. in -u: sunu 1278

- dat. sg. in -o: medo 604

- dat. sg. in -u: sunu 344

- acc. sg. in -o: brego 1954

- voc. sg. in -o: brego 427

- acc. pl. in -u: bordwudu 1243.

.1.9.2 Feminine:

Headwords: 2 (duru, hand), instances: 31; regular.

Cases not attested: gen. sg. and nom., gen., and acc. pl.

.2 Weak declension (Cpb. §§615-19):

.2.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 181; instances: 431; regular.

Gender confusion: gebedda, healsgebedda, uhta.

Variation in inflection:

- nom. sg.: bundenstefn 1910: last e is marked through and an a in same hand set above it

- dat. pl. in -an: eaferan 1185, feorhgeniðlan 2933.

.2.2 Feminine:

Headwords: 38; instances: 99. lufu and cpds. are inflected weak.

Cases not attested: gen. pl.

Variation in inflection: acc. sg. in -ean: beadusercean 2755, hiorosercean 2539.

.2.3 Neuter:

Headwords: 1; instances: 4 (g.p. eagena 1766; d.p. eagum 726, 1781, 1935).

.3 Minor declensions:

.3.1 Athematic nouns (Cpb. §§620-28):

.3.1.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 9 (fot, man, fyrn-, gleo-, gum-, iu-, lid-, sæ-, wæpned-); instances: 91 (man 80x). man has wk. ending 6x, only in acc. sg.: mannan 297, 1943, 2127, 2774, 3108; mannon 577.

.3.1.2 Feminine:

Headwords: 12 (burh, freo-, freofþo-, hea-, hleo-, hord-, leod-, mæg-, epelturf, niht, middel-, sin-)-, instances: 40; regular. Cases not attested: nom. pl.

B1 .3.2 Nouns of relationship:

.3.2.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 5 (fæder, ær-, eald-, broðor, ge-), instances: 25 (fæder 15x).

Cases not attested: nom., gen., and acc. pl.

.3.2.2 Feminine:

Headwords: 2 (modor, dohtor); instances: 15; regular.

Cases not attested: gen. and dat. sg.; nom., gen., dat., and acc. pl.

3.3 Nouns in -nd- (Cpb. §632):

Headwords: 37; instances: 100.

Variation occurs between - and -e in nom. and acc. pl.: foldbuend has n.p. foldbuend, foldbuende.

.3.4 Dental Stems (Cpb. §637):

.3.4.1 Masculine:

Headwords: 1 (hæle, hælep); instances: 30.

Cases not attested: gen., dat., and acc. sg.; acc. pl.

Nom. sg. is hæle 2x, hælep 3x.

.3.4.2 Feminine:

Headwords: 1 (mægð); instances: 4; regular.

Cases not attested: gen., dat., and acc. sg.; nom., dat., and acc. pl.

B2 Pronouns

.1 Personal pronouns (Cpb. §§701-4):

.1.1 The frequent use of direct speech by the Beowulf poet provides us with a good sample of most of the personal pronoun forms: first, second, and third persons, singular, plural, and dual. Statistically significant consistencies (>5x) include: 1st pers.: n.s. ic (180x), d.s. me (42x), n.du. wit (9x), n.p. we (24x); 2nd pers.: n.s. pu (62x), d.s. pe (36x), n.p. ge (12x), d.p. eow (6x); 3rd pers.: n.s.m. he (284x), g.s.m. his (78x), d.s.m. him (ca. 180x) hym (1x:0x), d.p. him (32x).

.1.2 Individual scribal preferences:

.1.2.1 i/y variation: in the pairs hine/hyne, hire/hyre, hit/hyt A prefers i, B, y 40/6:4/24, 8/4: 0/3, 25/0:5/9.

.1.2.2 eo/io variation: n.s.f. heo 18x:0x, hio 3x:8x, hie 1x.

.1.3 Variation:

.1.3.1 1st and 2nd pers. acc. forms with and without -c: me 5x:0x, mec 8x:8x; usic 1x:3x;pe 6x:2x, pec 7x:1x; eowic 1x:1x.

.1.3.2 3rd pers. pl: n.p. hi 3x:6x, hie 44x:9x, hig 2x:0x, hy 3x:4x; a.p. hie 4x:1x, hig 1x:0x, hy 1x:2x; g.p. heora 4x:0x, hiera 1x:0x, hiora 1x:2x, hira 3x:0x, hyra 5x:3x.

.2 Possessive pronouns (Cpb. §§705-7):

Min- 61x (a.s.m. mine 255, 418, minne 7x), pin- 25x.

See Cpb. §706 on poetic us- forms in place of WS ur- forms. Beowulf: n.s.m. ure 0x:1x, g.s.n. usses 0x:1x, d.s.m. ussum 0x:1x, urum 0x:1x, a.s.m. userne 0x:2x. No variation from the WS paradigm otherwise. Eow(e)r- 10x. D.p. uncran 1185 is comparable with wk. and comp. adj. d.p. -an.

Reflexive possessive: d.s.m.n. sinum 3x, a.s.m. sinne 4x.

B2 .3 Demonstrative pronouns (Cpb. §§708-15):

.3.1 se:

Instances: ca. 660, of which 237 are substantival (99 of these are immediately followed by þe). se is largely consistent with the WS paradigm (e.g. se 175x, þone 65x, etc.).

Variation:

- dat. sg. masc., dat. sg. neut., dat. pl. þæm 38x:0x, þam 11x:40x

- gen. pl. þæra 3x:0x, þara 20x:6x

- nom. sg. fem. seo 10x:3x, sio 0x:16x, sie 2219 perhaps freshened from sio

- dat. sg. fem. þære 10x, þara 1x:0x

- inst. sg. neut.: normal variation between þy, þe, þon in conjunctive phrases

- nom. sg. masc.: si 2237.

.3.2 þes:

Instances: 30.

Normal WS forms occur throughout, including eWS fluctuation of y and i (e.g. a.s.m. þisne 1x:0x, þysne 1x:0x.

Variation: acc. sg. masc. þes 2x:0x, þæs 1x:0x.

.4 Interrogative and indefinite pronouns (Cpb. §§716-25):

Instances: 33.

Normal paradigms occur except for 1WS d.s.f. gehwære 25 (unmetrical) which replaces normal OE gehwæm.

Variation:

- in dat. between æ 3x:0x and a 3x:1x (hwam is WS only)

- in hwone between o 3x:lx and a 0x:2x

- gehwelcne 148 beside normal hwylc.

B3 Adjectives

.1 Strong adjectives (Cpb. §§639-55):

.1.1 a- and ō- adjectives with short root syllable:

Headwords: 12 (æfengrom, ferhðfrec, from, gemet, gram, longsum, siðfrom, sum, til, trum, unfrom, wynsum); instances: 47.

Paradigm is incomplete.

N.s.f. tilu 1250 shows normal inflection, but n.p.n. wynsume (for -u) 612 varies.

.1.2 a- and ō- adjectives ending in -lic:

Headwords: 29; instances: 49.

Paradigm is incomplete.

Variation: between - and -u: n.s.f. -lic 3x:lx, -licu 1x:2x; a.p.n. -lic 2x:2x, -licu 2x:0x. (See freolic, sellic, þyslic, wrætlic; fuslic, geatolic, laðlic, sarlic.)

.1.3 a- and ō- adjectives with short root vowel æ:

Headwords: 7 (blæc, fyrdhwæt, glæd, goldhwæt, hwæt, læt, sæd); instances: 16 (all masc.).

Variation: only in acc. pl. masc. root vowel: hwate 2517, 2642, 3005, goldhwæte 3074 (loc. desp.), glæde 58 (see Klaeber, note to 1. 58).

B3 .1.4 a- and ō- adjectives with long root syllable:

Headwords: 198; instances: 575.

Paradigm is complete. The few anomalies are probably explainable as scribal misreadings or copying errors: d.s.m. geong 2044, d.s.n. (wk.?) deoran 561, a.s.m. grimme 2136, a.s.m. brade 2978, a.s.f. grimne 1234, d.p. (wk.?) heardan 963.

.1.5 a- and ō- adjectives with disyllabic root and possible syncopation:

.1.5.1 Short-syllable stem:

Headwords: 26; instances: 98.

Syncopation is shown only in n.p.m. fægne and a.p.m. neowle. Micel, however, shows regular syncopation in 12 possible forms.

.1.5.2 Long-syllable stem:

Headwords: 79; instances: 200.

Paradigm is complete in masc. only. Gen. sg. masc., acc. sg. fem., dat. pl. masc., nom. pl. masc., and acc. pl. masc. show a mixture of syncopated and unsyncopated forms (including 4 unsyncopated spellings where syncopation is metrically necessary) in biter, blodig, eacen, elpeodig, hæpen, hremig, hringed, lytel, lungor, meagol, modig, mistig, niðhedig, omig, -snottor, werig, windig. In nom. sg. fem. -u lx, - 4x. The possible archaism wundini (instr.) 1382 has been frequently discussed: see Klaeber and Wrenn eds.; cf. John C. Pope, this volume, pp. 189-91.

.1.6 a- and ō- adjectives ending in unvoiced spirant:

Headwords: 8; instances: 26.

Beside normal dat. wom 1747 occur heaum 2212 (?) and hreoum 2581; beside normal fane 2655, 1WS heanne 983 in a.s.m.

.1.7 ja- and jō- adjectives:

Headwords: 98; instances: 208.

Paradigm is incomplete in fem. and neut. Irregularity is found in inflection of nom. sg. fem.: -e 2x:7x, -u 2x:lx, - 2x: lx, and nom. pl. neut. -e 0x: 1x: deore. gemæne 3x, getæse, gifre, onsæge 2x, scyne; heoru, mæru, unheoru; iren 2x, egl. Acc. sg. masc. -ne > -e in pres. part.: umbor-wesende 46, hioroweallende 2781.

.1.8 wa- and wō- adjectives:

Headwords: 8 (bealo, eal(l)gearo, fea, fealu, gear-o, -u, -a, geolo, nearo, unslaw); instances: 26. Paradigm is incomplete. There is variation in n.s.m. -gearo 2x:2x, -u 1x:0x, -a 1x:0x. D.p. balwon 977.

.1.9 i- and u- adjectives:

Headwords: 1 (freme); instances: 1 (fremu n.s.f. 1932).

All u- adjectives have passed over into the a-, ō-, or ja-, jō- declensions; note the forms of cwicu and compare with Cpb. §655 (where u forms preserved in WS are given): n.s.m. cwico 3093, g.s.n. cwices 2314, a.s.m. cwicne 792, 2785, n.p.n. cwice 98. Cf. swegle a.p.m. 2749.

.2 Weak adjectives (Cpb. §656):

Headwords: 63; instances: 120.

Dat. pl. is consistently -an, not -um 963, 1505, 1542. Irregularity is found in d.s.f. frecnen 1104, d.s.m. geongum 2860, a.s.n. gimme 466, d.s.m.n. haton 849.

.3 Comparative adjectives (Cpb. §§657-60):

Headwords: 21; instances: 51; regular.

The dat. pl. is consistently -an, not -um 43, 907, 2237, 3035. Note anomalous n.s.m. weorþre 1902 and retention of spirant-graph in hnahran 952, 677.

B3 .4 Superlative adjectives (Cpb. §§657-60):

Headwords: 24; instances: 64.

Inflectional system is consistent overall with WS; there is variation in the superlative suffix: -ost- 17x, -est- 28x, -ust- 2x (in B), -æst- lx (in B). (Individual words are consistently spelled, e.g. gelicost 4x, selest 1 lx.)

.5 Numerals (Cpb. §§682-700):

.5.1 Cardinal:

Regular WS forms except for the following: þusenda (for -u) 1829, 2994 (?); twelfa (for -e) 3170.

The scribes show variation in the two WS forms of a.s.m. of an: ænne 3x:0x, anne lx:4x.

The rare plural of an occurs: g.p. anra 732, 784, d.p. anum 1x:0x.

The weak form of an, ana ‘solus’ occurs 10x.

.5.2 Ordinal:

Regular WS forms.

B4 Adverbs (Cpb. §§661-81)

Headwords: 176; instances: 1143.

Adverbs in -lice: 19; in -e: 49; in -es: 7; in -um: 6.

Comparative adverbs: 16; superlative adverbs: 6.

Variation in form: singala 190, singales 1777, 1135, soðe 524, 871, soðlice 141, 273, 2899; ungemete 2420, 2721, 2728, unigmetes 1792.

geo ‘of old’ is spelled variously: geo 1476, gio 2521, iu 2459, and iumonna 3052, io-(iomeowlan 2931); see Cpb. §§58, 172.

ricone 2983 appears for recene.

B5 Verbs

.1 Strong verbs:

Headwords: 302; instances: 1224.

The strong verbs are quite regular in their forms. Of over 1200 instances only about 60 diverge from Campbell’s paradigms, and of these only about 40 instances represent inflectional irregularities or changes of the stem vowel not to be explained by standard sound changes.

.1.1 Class 1 (Cpb. §739):

.1.1.1 Headwords: 57; instances: 172.

.1.1.2 Variation in inflection: pret. pl. indic, in -an: hnitan 2544, riodan 3169, wlitan 2852.

.1.1.3 Class confusion: (ge)teon, ofteon, class 1, has pret. influenced by class 2: (ge)teah 553, 1051, 1332, 1545, 2610, ofteah 5, 1520, 2489.

.1.1.4 Variation in stem vowel:

riodan 3169 for expected ridon (back umlaut)

scionon 303 for expected scinon (back umlaut).

.1.2 Class 2 (Cpb. §740):

.1.2.1 Headwords: 51; instances: 132.

.1.2.2 Variation in inflection: pret. pl. indic, in -un: scufun 3131.

B5 .1.2.3 Variation in stem vowel:

abreot 2930 for expected abreat
abreoten 1599 for expected abroten
aleh 80 for expected aleah (smoothing)

bræc 2097 for expected breac (smoothing)

ofscet 2439 for expected ofsceat (1WS smoothing)

strade 3073 for expected strude.

.1.3 Class 3 (Cpb. §741):

.1.3.1 Headwords: 87; instances: 339.

.1.3.2 Variation in inflection:

infinitive in -on: bregdon 2167
pret. pl. indic, in -an: burgan 2599
pass. part, in -un: geworden 1304 (has -en altered from -un).

.1.3.3 Variation in stem vowel:

forsworceð 1767 for expected forsweorceð
hworfan 1728 for expected hweorfan.

.1.3.4 Patterns of variation:

- Verbs like singan vary freely in pret.: sang/song

- findan, onfindan vary in pret. sg.: fand 11x, fond 2X, funde 5x

- bregdan and its cpds. have pret. sg. in -ægd- and in -æd-: (ge)brægd 3x, gebræd 3x, abræd lx, onbræd 1x, and participles in -ogd- and in -od-: brogdne lx, (ge)broden 3x (§243)

- frinan/frignan is attested with and without medial -g- (Cpb. §741): frinan 351, frin 1322, ge-frunon 3x, (ge)frægn 11x, gefrungon 666

- hyrnan varies in pret.: beorn 1880 (for bearn), gebam 2697, forbarn 1616, 1667, forborn 2672.

.1.4 Class 4 (Cpb. §742):

.1.4.1 Headwords: 22; instances: 166.

.1.4.2 Variation in inflection: pret. pl. indic, in -an: bæran 2850, cwoman 650, naman 2116.

.1.4.3 Variation in stem vowel: gescer 2973 for expected gescær (fronting).

.1.4.4 Patterns of variation:

cuman varies in pret.: com(on) 22x, cwom(on) 25x
niman varies in pret.: nam 6x, nom 2x.

.1.5 Class 5 (Cpb. §743):

.1.5.1 Headwords: 48; instances: 290.

.1.5.2 Variation in inflection:

infinitive in -on: ongyton 308
pret. pl. indic. in -an: ofgefan 2846, gesegan 3038, gewræcan 2479
pret. pl. indic. in -un: swæfun 1280, pegun 2633
pres. pl. subj. in -ean: 1x: gefricgean 2889.

.1.5.3 Variation in stem vowel:

beget 2872 for expected begeat (1WS smoothing)

drep 2880 for expected dræp (fronting)

dropen 2981 for expected drepen (Cpb. §743)

gefegon 1627 for expected gefægon (ē for WS )

gefeh 3x for expected gefeah (smoothing)

B5 .1.5.3
geondseh 3087 for expected geondseah (smoothing)

giofan 2972 for expected gifan (back umlaut)

lagon 3048 for expected lægon (Cpb. §743)

ofgefan 2846 for expected ofgeafon (1WS smoothing)

þegon 563, þegun 2633 for expected þægon (ē for WS ).

.1.5.4 Patterns of variation:

- 3rd sg. pres. indic. is regularly unsyncopated (-eþ), but note: acwyþ 2046, cwiþ 2041, gesyhþ 2041, 2455

- (ge)seon varies in pret.: (ge)sawon 7x, sægon 1x, gesegon 2x.

.1.6 Class 6 (Cpb. § 744):

.1.6.1 Headwords: 37; instances: 125.

.1.6.2 Variation in inflection:

infinitive in -on: hlodon 2775 (for hladan)

pret. pl. indic, in -an: stodan 3047
pret. pl. indic. in -un: wocun 60.

.1.6.3 Class confusion: (ge)scepðan, class 6, has both weak and strong pret.: sceþ ede 1514, (ge)scod 1887, 1502, 1587, 2777.

.1.6.4 Variation in stem vowel:

ahæfen 1108 for expected ahafen
hæfen 3023 for expected hafen
hlodon 2775 for expected hladan
gehleod 895 for expected gehlod
scepen 2913 for expected scapen
sceapen 2229, gesceop 97 for expected scapen, gescop (initial palatal)

sceaceð 2742, sceacen 2306, 2727 for expected scaceð, scacen (initial palatal)

gesceod 2222 for expected gescod (initial palatal).

.1.6.5 Patterns of variation: 3rd sg. pres. indic. is regularly unsyncopated (-eþ), but note: lyhþ 1048.

.2 Reduplicated verbs (Cpb. §746):

.2.1 Headwords: 50; instances: ca. 200.

The reduplicated verbs almost consistently follow Campbell’s paradigm, having only ca. 10 irregularities.

.2.2 Variation in inflection:

pres. part. in -inde: weallinde 2464 beside weallende 546, 847, weallendu 581
pres. pl. subj. in -an: hatan 2806.

.2.3 Variation in stem vowel:

- gangan varies in 3rd sg. pret. indic.: geong 2x:3x, giong 0x:3x, gang 3x:0x (Cpb. §§736h, f.2, 745)

- healdan varies in 3rd sg. pret. indic.: heold 9x:9x, hiold 1954

- oncnawan occurs once in 3rd sg. pret. indic. oncniow 2554.

.2.4 Patterns of variation: hatan shows both the presence and absence of medial -h-: heht 5x:2x beside het 7x:6x.

B5 .3 Weak verbs:

.3.1 Class I (Cpb. §§748-53):

.3.1.1 Headwords: 235;instances: 615.

There are about 50 irregularities in inflectional endings.

.3.1.2 Variation in inflection:

- pret. pl. indic. in -an: 7x: cnysedan 1328, forlæddan 2039, gefyldan 2706, gegiredan 3137, genægdan 2206, sohtan 2380, gesohtan 2204

- pret. pl. subj. in -on: 4x: beweredon 938, feredon 3113, neðdon 538, gerymdon 1086

- pres. pl. subj. in -an: 2x: gebringan 3009, feran 254

- pres. 1st sg. indic. without ending: 2x: wen 338, 442 (both followed by ic)

- pres. 1st sg. indic. in -u: lx: fullæstu 2668.

.3.1.3 Class confusion:

neosan, niosan show 7 infinitives belonging to Class I beside 3 belonging to Class II.

telge 2067 appears as a compromise spelling of telle (Class I) and telige (Class II).

.3.1.4 Variation in stem vowel:

efnan (1041, 1941, 2133, 2535, 2622, 3007) appears beside expected æfnan (1107, 1254, 3106)

fyredon 378 appears beside expected feredon 1154, 3113
syllan 2160, 2729 appears for expected sellan.

.3.1.5 Patterns of variation:

- alecgan shows loss of medial g (Cpb. §243) in pret. aledon 34 beside alegdon 3141

- gengan shows loss of medial g in pret. gende 1401 beside gengde 1412

- (ge)gyrwan shows loss of u before i (Cpb. §406) in the past forms (ge)gyre-, gegire- 6x, beside (ge)gyrwe 4x.

.3.2 Class II (Cpb. §§754-61):

.3.2.1 Headwords: 130; instances: 295.

There are 5 irregularities in inflectional endings.

.3.2.2 Variation in inflection:

pret. pl. indic. in -an: eahtodan 3173
pret. pl. indic. in -en: reafeden 1212 (Klaeber emends to -on)

pret. pl. subj. in -on: folgedon 1102
pret. pl. subj. in -an: sceawian 3008
pres. 3rd sg. indic. in -ę: fæðmię 2652.

.3.2.3 Variation in stem vowel:

tryddode 922 appears beside expected treddode 725
pres. pl. ehtigað 1222 and pass. part. geæhted 1885 beside eaht- 3x
wæccende 708, 2841, wæccendne 1268 (Cpb. §764) appear beside waca 660.

.3.2.4 Patterns of variation:

- pret. sg. is written -ode 68x:30x ,-ede 2x:1x,-ade 12x:4x

- pret. pl. is written -odon 3x:4x,-edon 13x:lx

- pass. part. is written -od(e) 19x: 14x, -ed 3x:0x, -ad 7x:6x

- Variation of medial -i- and -ig- (Cpb. §267) is seen in the following verbs: bewitigað 1428, bewitiað 1135; ehtigað) 1222; leanige 1380;sceawigan 1391, sceawige 2748 beside sceawian 5x; starige 1781 beside starie 2796; talige 532, 677, 1845 beside talað 2027; warigeað 1358; wisige 292, 3103; gewunigen 22

-weorðian shows pass. part. gewurþad 331, 1038, 1645 beside geweorðad 250, 1450, geweorðod 1959, 2176.

B5 .3.3 Class III (Cpb. §§762-4):

.3.3.1 The following Class III weak verbs occur in Beowulf: habban 80x, forhabban 2x, wið- habban 1x, hycgan 1 x, forhicgan 1x, gehycgan 1x, oferhycgan 1x, libban, lifgan 16x, secgan 30x, asecgan 1x, gesecgan 2x.

.3.3.2 Spelling conventions:

pres. 2nd sg. and 3rd sg. of habban are always unsyncopated: hafast 5x, hafað 9x
pres. part. of libban is uniformly lifigende 4x, not the usual libbende
neg. adj. is unlifigende 5x, not unlibbende.

.3.3.3 Variation in inflection:

pret. pl. indic. in -an: sædan 1945
pres. 1st sg. indic. of habban in several forms: hæbbe 4x, hafu 2523, hafo 2150, 3000.

.3.3.4 Patterns of variation:

- libban varies in pres. 3rd sg.: lyfað 944, 954, lifað 3167 beside leofað 974, 1366, 2008

- secgan shows pret. pl. in -gd-, -d-: sægdon 277, sædan 1945; and pass. part. in -ægd-, -æd-: gesægd 141, gesæd 1696.

.4 Preterite-present verbs (Cpb. §767):

.4.1 The following preterite-present verbs occur in Beowulf: agan 8x, cunnan 22x, dugan 9x, durran 8x, magan 83x, motan 32x, gemunan 22x, onmunan lx, sculan 90x, purfan 12x, unnan 5x, witan 25x.

.4.2 Variation in inflection: gemyne 659 appears for expected gemun as imper. sg. (Cpb. §767, p. 345, fn. 1).

.4.3 Patterns of variation:

- cunnan varies in pres.: can 2x, con 3x, const 1x

- gemunan varies in pres.: geman 3x, gemon 3x

- magan varies in pres. 2nd sg. and pret.: meaht- 19x:16x, miht- 14x:6x, meht- 4x:0x

- sculan varies in pres. 3rd sg.: sceal(l) 15x: 14x, scel 1x:2x; and varies in pret.: scold- 25x:0x, sceold 0x: 14x

- witan varies in pret.: wiss- 4x:3x, wist- 6x:0x

- Two verbs show umlauted pres. subj.: dyrre 1379, scyle/scile 3x; two verbs unumlauted pres. subj.: duge 3x, þurfe 2495.

.5 The verb ‘to be’ (Cpb. §§743, 768d):

The following forms are attested: Indicative: pres. 1st sg. eom 4x, beo 1825, 2nd sg. eart 4x, 3rd sg. is 31x, ys 0x:4x, bið 22x, byð 1x:1x, nis 5x; pres. pl. sint 388, synt 364, syndon 5x, beoð 1838, bioð 2063; pret. 1st sg. wæs 4x, næs 2x, 3rd sg. wæs 243x, næs 20x; pret. pl. wæron 18x, wæran 2475, næron 2657. Subjunctive: pres. 3rd sg. sie 3x, sig 1778, sy 3x; pret. 2nd sg. wære 1478, 3rd sg. wære 14x;pret. pl. wæron 2x? Infinitive: wesan 6x. Imperative: sg. beo 3x, bio 2141, wes 5x, wæs 407. Beo, beoð spellings belong to the A scribe, bio, bioð to the B scribe.

.6 Anomalous verbs, excluding beon (Cpb. §768):

.6.1 The following anomalous verbs occur in Beowulf: don 25x, gedon 3x, gan 22x, fullgan lx, gegan lx, ofergan 2x, oðgan 1x, ymbgan 1x, willan 76x.

.6.2 Variation in inflection: pret. pl. subj. in -on: woldon 482, 2636.

.6.3 Variation in stem vowel: gegan shows pret. 3rd sg. geiode 2200 beside geeode 2676.

.6.4 Patterns of variation: willan shows pres. 3rd sg. with both double and single consonants: wille 4A, wylle 1B beside wile 5A, wyle 1B.

INTRODUCTION TO SECTION C, SYNTAX

This section is heavily indebted to the work of Dr. R.B. Mitchell, for its arrangement to his Guide to Old English, and for much of its data to his dissertation Subordinate Clauses in Old English Poetry.

No attempt has been made to provide an exhaustive catalogue of the syntactic features of the poem. But where previous investigators have remarked on particular syntactic features, especially in connection with dating, we have evaluated and conflated the published evidence, checking it, where possible, against our own lists from sections B, Morphology, and D, Vocabulary. As in other sections of the paper, we draw heavily here on Klaeber’s analysis (Beowulf pp. xci-xciv, §25).

C SYNTAX

C1 Sentence Structure

Beowulf has a relatively high proportion of sentences with unexpressed subjects or unexpressed objects. Similar sentences are found in Old English of all periods, but they are never common. See Samuel 0. Andrew, Syntax and Style in Old English (Cambridge 1940) §103, and Postscript on Beowulf (Cambridge 1948) §§75-8; Alois Pogatscher, ‘Unausgedrückte Subjekt im Alteng-lischen,’ Anglia 23 (1901) 261-301; Urban Ohlander, ‘Omission of the Object in English,’ Studia neophilologica 16 (1943-4) 105-27; Ashley Crandell Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts, Medieval Academy Books 90 (Cambridge, Mass. 1980) pp. 132-5.

.1 Unexpressed subject:

.1.1 Omission of personal pronoun as subject (excluding instances where the missing subject is the subject of an immediately preceding main clause, like 6, 286, 567, etc.): 22 or 23x: 57, 68, 142, 300, 470, 667, 850, 886, perhaps 1020, 1187, 1291, 1421, 1487, 1590, 1820, 1903, 1923, 1947, 2252, 2344, 2467, 2520, 2880.

.1.2 Omission of man as subject: 2x: 1365, 2546b-2547a (2547 may imply a missing he rather than man).

.2 Unexpressed object:

Omission of an object to be inferred from neighbouring phrases or clauses: 19x: 10-11, 24, 31, 48, 93, 387, 554, 674, 747-8, 1045, 1193-4, 1452-3, 1487, 1717-18, 1757, 1808, 2812, 2940, 3092-3.

C2 Noun Clauses (total 200)

.1 Noun clauses following ordinary verbs (total 138):

.1.1 þæt clauses (112): following geahsian (1) 433, beodan (1) 1086.gebeodan (1) 3112, gebeotian (2) 482, 537, gebidan (3) 1721, 1780, 2445, biddan (4) 177, 429, 1995, 3096, cunnan (1) 1181, cweðan (5) 92, 858, 1894, 2158, 3180, gecweðan (2) 988, 2665, gecyðan (3) 701, 1972, 2325, geferan (2) 1221, 1855, findan (1) 2315, onfindan (8) 595, 751, 812, 1499, 1523, 2220, 2301, 2714, gefremman (1) 954, gefricgan (1) 1821, gefrignan (1) 694, gegan (1) 2918, gegangan (1) 894, forgiefan (1) 698, ongitan (3) 15?, 1486, 1513, hatan (1) 2151, gehatan (2) 1671, 2636, healsian (1) 2132, hyegan (1) 634, forhycgan (1) 437, oferhyegan (1) 2346, hyran

C2 .1.1

(3) 62, 2163, 2172, gehyran (1) 290, gelæran (2) 417, 3081, gelyfan (1) 910, murnan (1) 3130, myntan (1) 731, benemnan (2) 1098, 1099, geneþan (1) 1935, geryman (1) 2984, secgan (12) 379, 392, 411, 591, 945, 1175, 1347, 1702, 1819, 1946, 2871, 3153, gesecgan (1) 388, geseon (1) 1593, sprecan (2) 1478, 1596, talian (2) 533, 1850, treowan (1) 1167, truwian (2) 2371, 2954, þencan (1) 691, þeon (1) 2839, geþolian (1) 88, unnan (3) 503, 961, 2875, geunnan (2) 347, 1662, wenan (10) 338, 442, 779, 937, 1184, 1597, 1604, 2187, 2240, 2329, witan (8) 274, 681, 822, 1832, 2340, 2651, 2657, 2726, gewyrcan (1) 22 forwyrnan (1) 431.

.1.2 dependent questions/exclamations (26): following agan (1) 2252, abidan (1) 979, gebidan (1) 2530, cunnan (3) 163, 2071, 3068, gecyðan (1) 257, eahtian (1) 173, gefrignan (2) 3, 2403, gildan (1) 1186, behealdan (1) 737, gelæran (1) 279, mearcian (1) 1696. gemunan (1) 1186, neosian (1) 116, reccan (1) 2093, sceawian (1) 844, secgan (4) 52, 474, 1725, 3026, seon (1) 2718, geþencan (1) 1476, witan (2) 1331, 2519.

.2 Noun clauses following impersonal verbs (total 10):

þæt clauses following gegangen (2) 1846, 2822, beirnan (1) 68, gelimpan (3) 77, 627, 1754, gesælan (2) 574, 890, geweorðan (2) 1599, 2028.

.3 Noun clauses, subject or complement of beon (total 2):

þæt clauses (2) 1763, 1768.

.4 Noun clauses following nouns (total 23):

.4.1 þæt clauses (18): following bena (1) 365, gefea (1) 563.gemet (1) 2534, ræd (1) 3081, sið (2) 2534, 2587, þanc (1) 1780, þearf(1) 2494, þeaw (2) 1247, 1942, wen (2) 1850, 1875, gewrixle (1) 1305, ealdgewyrht (1) 2657, wundor (3) 771, 772, 1608, wyrd (1) 735.

.4.2 dependent questions/exclamations (5): following dom (1) 979, fyrwyt (2) 233, 1986, hlytm (1) 3126, wundor (1) 3062.

.5 Noun clauses following adjectives (total 16):

.5.1 þæt clauses (13): following cuþ (3) 151, 706, 2924, gedefe (1) 3175, gifeðe (3) 300, 556, 2683, leofre (1) 2651, gerysne (1) 2653. ofost is betost (1) 3008. selre (1) 1385, gesyne (2) 1256, 3058.

.5.2 dependent questions/exclamations (3): following undyrne (1) 2002, gesyne (2) 2318. 2948.

.6 Dependent nexus questions (total 6):

.6.1 following verbs (5): bidan (1) 1314, cunnan (1) 1356, frignan (1) 1319, þencan (1) 1140, witan (1) 272.

.6.2 following a noun (1): fyrwyt 2785.

.7 Noun clauses in which þæt is absent (total 5):

.7.1 following a verb (3): cweðan 199, 1810, 2939.

.7.2 following a noun (2): wen 383, 3000.

C3 Adjective Clauses (total 228)

.1 þe clauses (total 32): 15, 45, 138, 192, 238, 355, 500, 831, 941, 950, 993, 1271, 1334, 1482, 1654, 1858, 2135, 2182, 2364, 2400, 2468, 2490, 2606, 2635, 2712, 2735, 2796, 2866, 2982, 3001, 3009, 3086.

C3 .2 seþe clauses (total 3): 1298, 1342, 1462.

.3 se þe or seþe clauses (total 54): 79, 87, 90, 103, 230, 289, 378, 495, 506, 603, 789, 809, 825, 869, 878, 909, 1003, 1049, 1054, 1061, 1135, 1260, 1344, 1387, 1445, 1449, 1497, 1592, 1618, 1700, 1744, 1756, 1883, 1887, 1915, 2008, 2041, 2042, 2173, 2212, 2215, 2222, 2257, 2272, 2292, 2542, 2595, 2685, 2766, 2807, 2864, 2898, 3055, 3125.

.4 se þe clauses (total 29): 98, 183, 186, 206, 785, 843, 937, 996, 1051, 1123, 1196, 1407, 1461, 1578, 1625, 1686, 1779, 1839, 2056, 2130, 2251, 2295, 2383, 2601, 2861, 3003, 3034, 3059, 3116.

.5 se clauses (total 36): 13, 41, 113, 143, 310, 370, 374, 402, 453, 704, 766, 875, 989, 1267, 1305, 1428, 1456, 1610, 1617, 1688, 1796, 1977, 2022, 2048, 2238, 2258, 2407, 2421, 2500, 2704, 2751, 2848, 2865, 3070, 3073, 3157.

.6 Sentences punctuated as principal clauses which begin with part of the pronoun se, seo, þæt (total 34): 12, 59, 196, 309, 454, 469, 588, 898, 1037, 1145, 1273, 1296, 1349, 1354, 1363, 1458, 1548, 1559, 2024, 2087, 2148, 2194, 2391, 2406, 2412, 2479, 2611, 2612, 2616, 2629, 2769, 2804, 3014, 3042.

.7 Minor patterns (total 22):

- þe + 3rd person pronoun: 1436?

- se þe + personal pronoun: 441

- þæt showing lack of agreement on gender: 766

- relatives other than þæt, not agreeing in number: 1625?

- lack of agreement in gender: 1260, 1344, 1887, 2421, 2685

- sentences in which þæt seems to serve as both antecedent and relative: 1466, 1748

- sentences in which se. seo, þæt has the case of the principal clause and in which the adjective clause requires a different case: 1398, 2199, 2779

- adjective clauses introduced by swilc alone: 299; with a noun or pronoun antecedent: 72, 1156, 1797, 2869

- clauses with swilc ... swilc: 1249, 1329, 3164.

.8 Adjective clauses of place, introduced by þær (total 18): 508, 522, 693, 1007, 1359, 1378, 1514, 1648, 1815, 2003, 2050, 2276, 2355, 2633, 2787, 2893, 2916, 3167.

C4 Adverb Clauses (total 651)

.1 Clauses of place (total 65):

.1.1 introduced by þær (19): 286, 356, 420, 777, 866, 1079, 1163, 1188, 1279, 1313, 1394, 1923, 2023, 2075, 2486, 2698, 2851, 3082, 3108.

.1.2 swa clauses (1): 93.

.1.3 clauses taken by editors as principal which are subordinate according to Andrew (30):

.1.3.1 þær clauses (20): 32, 440, 493, 513, 550, 775, 794, 852, 977, 1190, 1243, 1269, 1365, 1470, 1951, 2095, 2137, 2214, 2244, 2369

.1.3.2 þanon clauses (6): 463, 520, 1265, 1373, 1960, 2359 .1.3.3 þanon clauses which cannot easily be taken as subordinate (4): 111, 123, 224, 853.

.1.4 þær wæs clauses (14): 36, 89, 497, 611, 835, 847, 856, 1063, 1232, 2076, 2105, 2122, 2231, 2762.

.1.5 þær wearð clause taken by editors as principal (1): 2961.

C4 .2 Clauses of time (total 313):

.2.1 Subordinate þa clauses (49): 140, 201, 323, 402, 419, 512, 539, 632, 706, 723, 733, 798, 967, 1068, 1078, 1103, 1291, 1293, 1295, 1467, 1506, 1539, 1621, 1665, 1681, 1813, 1988, 2204, 2287, 2362, 2372, 2428, 2471, 2550, 2567, 2624, 2676, 2690, 2756, 2872, 2876, 2883, 2926, 2944, 2978, 2983, 2992, 3066, 3088.

.2.2 þa clauses said to be subordinate by Andrew but which cannot reasonably be so taken (12): 74, 331, 415, 465, 544, 579, 730, 1522, 1666, 2980, 3061, 3169.

.2.3 þa clauses said to be subordinate by Andrew which can be so taken (27): 86, 229, 461, 518, 662, 671, 710, 809, 1095, 1162, 1274, 1280, 1512, 1598, 1600, 1605, 1644, 1698, 1802, 2131, 2312, 2484, 2694, 2711, 2715, 2752, 2773.

.2.4 þa gyt, þa gen clauses (6): 47, 1050, 1164, 1866, 2677, 2702.

.2.5 þa wæs clauses (47): 53, 64, 126, 128, 138, 223, 467, 491, 607, 642, 771, 837, 917, 980, 991, 1008, 1136, 1151, 1288, 1306, 1399, 1495, 1527, 1629, 1647, 1677, 1787, 1884, 1896, 1905, 2117, 2283, 2306, 2324, 2372, 2472, 2561, 2580, 2625, 2688, 2727, 2821, 2860, 2957, 2982, 3035, 3058.

.2.6 Subordinate þonne clauses referring to the past (18): 485, 880, 934, 1033, 1040, 1042, 1066, 1143, 1326, 1327, 1580, 2114, 2544, 2634, 2686, 2867, 2880, 3117.

.2.7 Subordinate þonne clauses referring to the present or future (15): 23, 573, 1179, 1285, 1374, 1485, 1535, 1609, 2034, 2447, 2453, 2742, 3064, 3106, 3176.

.2.8 þonne clauses which can be taken as subordinate (2): 1741, 1745.

.2.9 þonne clauses which cannot be taken as subordinate (4): 377, 1106, 1121, 2446.

.2.10 þonne wæs clauses (3): 484, 1745, 3051.

.2.11 þenden clauses (12): 30, 57, 284, 1177, 1224, 1859, 2038, 2418, 2499, 2649, 3027, 3100,

.2.12 siþþan clauses (58): 6, 106, 115, 132, 413, 470, 604, 648, 656, 722, 834, 886, 901, 982, 1077, 1148, 1198, 1204, 1206, 1235, 1253, 1261, 1281, 1308, 1420, 1472, 1556, 1589, 1689, 1775, 1784, 1947, 1949, 1978, 2012, 2051, 2064, 2072, 2092, 2103, 2124, 2201, 2351, 2356, 2388, 2437, 2474, 2501, 2630, 2888, 2911, 2914, 2943, 2960, 2970, 2996, 3002, 3127.

.2.13 ær clauses, positive main clauses (9): 252, 264, 676, 731, 1371, 1496, 2019, 2818, 3038.

.2.14 oðþæt clauses (33): 9, 56, 66, 100, 145, 219, 296, 307, 545, 622, 644, 1133, 1254, 1375, 1414, 1640, 1714, 1740, 1801, 1886, 2039, 2058, 2116, 2210, 2269, 2280, 2303, 2378, 2621, 2782, 2791, 2934, 3147.

.2.15 oðþe clauses (3): 649, 2475, 3006.

.2.16 swa clauses (may also be causal) (2): 881, 1677.

.2.17 þæt clauses (13):

.2.17.1 referring to adverbs (4): 84, 932, 2592, 2846

.2.17.2 referring to nouns (9): 623, 717, 1009, 1464, 1528, 2059, 2626, 2647, 3036.

.3 Clauses of purpose (total 5):

.3.1 þæt clauses (4):

.3.1.1 after an imperative (2): 2747, 2749

.3.1.2 after a main clause containing sculan (1): 2070

.3.1.3 in dependent statement (1): 1141.

.3.2 þy læs clauses (1): 1918.

C4 .4 Clauses of purpose or result (total 15):

.4.1 After a negated indicative in the main clause (1): 681.

.4.2 After a main clause containing sculan (1): 2806.

.4.3 After other main clauses (12):

.4.3.1 containing magan (6): 313, 1032, 1446, 1453, 1504, 2954

.4.3.2 containing sculan (1): 965

.4.3.3 containing motan (3): 1087, 1939, 3053

.4.3.4 containing another verb (2): 1318, 1833.

.4.4 swa... þæt clauses (1): 1451.

.5 Clauses of result (total 47):

.5.1 þæt clauses (39):

.5.1.1 after a negated verb in the main clause (2): 563, 1521

.5.1.2 after other main clauses, result clause indicative (23): 358, 404, 772, 891, 1434, 1521, 1532, 1540, 1544, 1566, 1664, 1674, 1901, 2577, 2679, 2699, 2700, 2701, 2716, 2830, 2966, 2975, 3104

.5.1.3 result clause with ambiguous verb form (14): 65, 221, 567, 571, 698, 989, 1082, 1566, 1721, 1911, 2528, 2770, 2963, 2974.

.5.2 swa clauses (4): 1508, 2006, 2184, 2574.

.5.3 swa ... þæt clauses (2): 1733, 1772.

.5.4 pæs ... þæt clauses (1): 1367.

.5.5 to pon ... þæt clauses (1): 1877.

.6 Causal clauses (total 33):

.6.1 forþon clauses (8): 149, 418, 1336, 1957, 2349, 2645, 2741, 3021.

.6.2 forþon þe clauses (1): 503.

.6.3 nu clauses (8): 430, 1343, 1475, 2053, 2247, 2745, 2799, 3020.

.6.4 þæs þe clauses (8): 108, 228, 626, 1628, 1751, 1779, 1998, 2797.

.6.5 ðe ... ðe clauses (1): 2638.

.6.6 swa clauses (7): 352, 1142, 2144, 2310, 2444, 3098, 3140.

.7 Clauses of comparison (total 87):

.7.1 þonne clauses (8): 44, 70, 248, 1385, 1560, 1824, 2572, 2579.

.7.2 swa clauses (46): 29, 273, 401, 435, 444, 455, 490, 561, 666, 956, 1055, 1058, 1134, 1172, 1231, 1234, 1238, 1252, 1381, 1396, 1451, 1571, 1587, 1670, 1676, 1707, 1786, 1828, 1891, 1975, 2332, 2470, 2480, 2491, 2521, 2526, 2585, 2590, 2608, 2664, 2696, 2859, 3049, 3078, 3140, 3174.

.7.3 swa clauses with the subjunctive (1): 490.

.7.4 swa ... swa clauses (5): 594, 1093, 1223, 1283, 3168.

.7.5 swilc ... swa clauses (1): 2233.

.7.6 swa + superlative (1): 3161.

.7.7 swilce clauses (3): 757, 2459, 2869.

.7.8 þe ... þe clauses (2): 488, 1436.

.7.9 þæs clauses (2): 272, 383.

C4 .7.10 þæs þe clauses (3): 1341, 1350, 3000.

.7.11 Contracted comparative clauses (14):

.7.11.1 introduced by þonne (10): 469, 505, 534, 678, 1139, 1182, 1353, 1579, 2433, 2891

.7.11.2 introduced by swa (4): 642, 1787, 1854, 2622.

.7.12 Others (1): 435.

.8 Clauses of concession (total 41):

.8.1 þeah clauses (12): 203, 526, 587, 589, 680, 1102, 1613, 1660, 2031, 2161, 2467, 2855.

.8.2 þeah þe clauses (15): 682, 1130, 1167, 1368, 1716, 1831, 1927, 1941, 2218, 2344, 2481, 2619, 2642, 2838, 2976.

.8.3 þeah (þe) clauses with an indicative verb (2): 1613, 2467.

.8.4 Other concessive clauses (12):

.8.4.1 correlative clauses (1): 2160

.8.4.2 indefinite concessive clauses (6): 142, 942, 967, 1366, 1506, 2029

.8.4.3 indefinite concessions (2): 1392, 2764

.8.4.4 parataxis (3): 513, 857, 2877.

.9 Clauses of condition (total 45):

.9.1 gif clauses (27):

.9.1.1 not in dependent speech (14): 272, 280, 346, 447, 527, 661, 944, 1382, 1822, 1826, 1836, 1846, 2514, 2841

.9.1.2 in dependent speech (7): 442, 1104, 1182, 1185, 1477, 1852, 2637

.9.1.3 with a ‘volitional expression’ in the then-clause (3): 452, 1379, 1481

.9.1.4 with sculan in the then-clause (1): 684

.9.1.5 in other conditions (2): 280, 593.

.9.2 þær clauses (4): 762, 797, 1835, 2730.

.9.3 butan clauses (2): 966, 1560.

.9.4 nefne clauses (7):

.9.4.1 with nefne (3): 1056, 1353, 3054

.9.4.2 with nemne (2): 1552, 2654

.9.4.3 with nympe (2): 781, 1658.

.9.5 Contracted conditional clauses (5):

.9.5.1 with butan (2): 657, 879

.9.5.2 with nefne (3): 1934, 2151, 2533.

C5 Concord

.1 Lack of concord in case:

Four instances show variation between dative and accusative, two with parallel objects of the preposition wip, 424-5, 1977-8, and one with the verb gebræd, 2703-4. In 1830-31 the preposition on is not repeated for the appositive (‘Ic on Higelace wat, / Geata dryhten ...’). Niilo Peltola’s categories for lack of concord in apposition (indeclinable foreign name, vocative, extraposition) do not explain these instances (‘On Appositional Constructions in Old English Prose,’ NM 61 (1960) 159-203.

C5 .2 Lack of concord between subject and verb:

- Plural subject plus singular verb: 3x: 904-5, 1408, 2163-4

- þrara þre plus singular verb: 8x: 843, 1051, 1407, 1461, 1686, 2130, 2251 (MS þana ðe), 2383

- Singular verb plus noun and noun: 10x: 1008, 1063, 1629, 2105, 2462, 2472, 2509, 2659, 2884, 2999

- Singular subject plus singular verb plus singular subject: 6x: 431, 1055, 1210, 1671, 1681, 2341

- Singular subject (collective) plus plural verb: 2x: 1032, 1627

- Single subject with first a singular, then a plural verb: 6x: 171-2, 1099-1101, 1424-5, 2251-2, 2458-9, 3030-31.

Except for the first category of examples, sentences like those listed above are found in Old

English of all periods. See H.B. Woolf, ‘Subject-Verb Agreement in Beowulf,’ Modern Language

Quarterly 4 (1943) 49-55; Mitchell, Guide to Old English §187.3.

C6 Adjectives

.1 Use of comparative adjective where comparison is not explicitly expressed:

The following lines have been proposed as examples of the absolute comparative in Beowulf, but in most the missing number of the comparative is clearly implied: 14x: 134 (where comparison may be stated), 525, 821, 951-3, 980, 1703, 1739, 1759, 1839, 2496, 2555, 2651, 2969, 3038. See Moritz Scheinert, ‘Die Adjectiva im Beowulfepos als Darstellungsmittel,’ BGdSL 30 (1905) 405-6; S.M. Ingersoll, ‘The Comparative Absolute in Old English,’ NM 77 (1976) 177-89 (listing further examples where comparison seems clearly implied, pp. 187-9); Bruce Mitchell, ‘The Expression of Extent and Degree in Old English,’ NM 77 (1976) 27-8.

.2 Use of weak adjective:

.2.1 Comparative weak adjective: 5 lx: 43, 134, 136, 247, 282, 337, 468, 469, 533, 576, 577, 677, 719, 753, 763, 861, 907, 915, 951, 952, 953, 980, 1011, 1197, 1282, 1324, 1353, 1384, 1436, 1468, 1560, 1703, 1759, 1823, 1839, 1850, 2016, 2066, 2098, 2193, 2199, 2237, 2378, 2392, 2555, 2571, 2651, 2880, 2890, 3035, 3038.

.2.2 Article plus weak adjective plus noun: 26x:

with appositive force: 758, 813, 2011, 2587, 2928, 2971, 2977, 3120
other: 102, 432, 713, 716, 919, 997, 1016, 1448, 1463, 1474, 1622, 1984, 2255, 2264, 2675, 3024, 3028, 3097.

.2.3 Article plus weak adjective: 42x: 92, 205, 258, 270, 310, 355, 363, 384, 399, 401, 416, 675, 762, 777, 1163, 1190, 1308, 1313, 1318, 1397, 1406, 1518, 1629, 1685, 1698, 1786, 1807, 1956, 1963, 1975, 2327, 2382, 2421, 2435, 2690, 2817, 2823, 2851, 2944, 2949, 3011, 3122.

.2.4 Weak adjective plus noun in vocative: 10x: 947, 1216, 1475, 1483, 1758, 1759, 1854, 1987, 2663, 2745.

.2.5 Weak adjective plus noun in superlative: 5x: 412, 1871, 2049, 2517, 2817.

.2.6 Weak adjective plus noun in dative/instrumental: 20x: 141, 561, 849, 963, 977, 1104, 1423, 1502, 1505, 1542, 1746, 1789, 2102, 2290, 2347, 2240, 2482, 2492, 2594, 2692.

.2.7 Other weak adjective plus noun: 62x: 83, 116, 132, 167, 375, 670, 740, 873, 933, 978, 1093, 1136, 1146, 1177, 1203, 1243, 1262, 1343, 1398, 1400, 1405, 1435, 1503, 1527, 1547, 1553, 1692, 1694, 1729, 1733, 1747, 1779, 1792, 1847, 1859, 1871, 1919, 1949, 2008, 2014, 2105, 2123, 2156, 2181, 2182, 2199, 2207, 2234, 2286, 2330, 2330, 2474, 2487, 2511, 2573, 2625, 2626, 2845, 2849, 2890, 2968, 2997.

C6 .2.7

Adjectives in constructions like those in C6 .2.1-4 normally follow the weak declension (Cpb. §638); Beowulf has an unusually large number of weak adjectives in C6 .2.5-7. See A. Lichtenheld, ‘Das schwache Adjectiv im Ags.,’ ZfdA 16 (1873) 325-93; Raymond W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem ..., 3rd ed. with supplement by C.L. Wrenn (Cambridge 1959) pp. 105-7; Andrew, Postscript on Beowulf §90; Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining Dates pp. 110-24.

C7 Adverbs

In Beowulf, as in Old English generally, ‘the senses of rest and movement towards tend to be confused’ (Cpb. §677), or at least different from our modern notions, for adverbs of place and for prepositions. Klaeber lists a number of examples (§25.5, p. xciii, fn. 2-5), but the practice in the poem does not seem to be unusual in this respect.

C8 Pronouns

.1 Use of dative of possession:

The dative of possession is used frequently in Beowulf, especially with pronouns (among the examples are 40, 47, 49, 726, 755, 816, 1242, 1446), but also with nouns (2044, 2122). See Mitchell, Guide to Old English §191; Arthur Ahlgren, On the Use of the Definite Article with ‘Nouns of Possession’ in English (Uppsala 1946) §§128-36.

.2 Use of sīn:

The possessive pronoun sīn occurs 7x in Beowulf (1236, 1507, 1960, 1984, 2160, 2283, 2789), his 81x. Sīn is rarely found in the prose, but occurs in a wide range of poems, including Genesis, Daniel, Andreas, the Riddles, Judith, the Metres of Boethius, Lord’s Prayer II, and Death of Edward. See Gero Bauer, ‘Über Vorkommen und Gebrauch von ae. sin,’ Anglia 81 (1963) 323-34.

.3 Use of neuter plural ealra:

The use of the objective genitive ealra in 1727 (he ah ealra geweald) is unusual; Klaeber considers it ‘no doubt a Latinism’ (§25.9, p. xciv).

C9 Verbs

.1 Cases used with verbs:

.1.1 Verbs taking the genitive case (17): abidan, angyldan, behofian, gebidan, brucan, costian, cunnian (also with acc.), ehtan, friclan, gyman, neosan, neotan, reccan, tilian, wilnian, wlatian, wyrcan.

.1.2 Verbs with accusative of person and genitive of thing (7): frignan, lettan, onmunan, onsecan, getwæfan, getwæman, weorpan.

.1.3 Verbs with dative of person and genitive of thing (5): forwyrnan, ofteon, ofþyncan, onleon, þancian.

.1.4 Verbs taking the genitive or dative case (6): æthrinan, gefeon, gilpan, linnan, truwian, getruwian.

.1.5 Verbs taking the dative case (40): ætfeolan, ætwindan, arian, bebeorgan, bedælan, behreosan, beleosan, belimpan, beneotan, beniman, beorgan, gebeorgan, bereafian, bereofan, besnyððan, bewerian, bregdan, gebregdan, drincan, folgian, forgrindan, forgripan, forleosan, forniman, for-scrifan, forswerian, forþringan, hrinan, hyran, læstan, lician, gelyfan, onfon, scrifan, spiwan, spowan, treowan, wiðfon, wiðhabban, wrixlan.

C9 .1.6 Verbs with dative of person and accusative of thing (6): gebannan, belean, leanian, oðwitan, gescrifan, witan.

.1.7 Verbs with accusative of person and dative of thing (1): beceorfan.

.1.8 Instances of a verb with instrumental genitive (6): ofercuman 845, (ge)nægan 1439, 2206, tilian 1825, bewennan 2035, weorpan 2791.

.2 Durative and perfective uses of verbs:
It is not clear that simplex verbs are used more often in a durative, and ge- prefixed verbs in a perfective, sense in Beowulf. See Klaeber §25.5, fn. 6, p. xciii; Frederick Klaeber, ‘Studies in the Textual Interpretation of Beowulf,’ Modern Philology 3 (1905-6) 262-3; J.W. Richard Lindemann, Old English Preverbal Ge-: Its Meaning (Charlottesville, Va. 1970) pp. 20-21.

.3 Violation of sequence of tenses:
The change from preterite to present tense in dependent clauses occurs at least 6x: 1313-15, 1921-4, 1925-9, 2484-6, 2493-6, 2717-19. Similar constructions are found elsewhere in Old English; see Hubert G. Shearin, The Expression of Purpose in Old English Prose, Yale Studies in English 8 (New York 1903) 123-8, and ‘The Expression of Purpose in Old English Poetry,’ Anglia 32 (1909) 250-51.

C10 Conjunctions

.1 Conjunctions also used as prepositions: ær, butan, nefne.

.2 Conjunctions also used as adverbs: ær, forþon, hu, hwær, ne, nu, siððan, swa, swylce, þa, þær, þæs, þeah, þenden, þonne.

C 11 Prepositions (total 24)

.1 Forms also used as adverbs (14): labelled ‘adv.’ below.

.2 Forms also used as conjunctions (3): labelled ‘conj.’ below:

æfter, adv., 71 x: + dat. 70x, + instr. 1x (724). ær, adv., conj., 3x: + dat. (1388, 2320, 2798). æt 61x: + dat. be, bī, big 28x: + dat. 27x, + instr. 1x (1722). beforan, adv., lx: + acc. (1024). butan, conj., 2x: + dat. (73, 705). for 34x: + acc. 3x (947, 1175, 2348), + dat. 30x, + instr. 1x (110); fore, adv., 3x: + dat. (1064, 1215, 2059). fram, adv., 14x: + dat. geond 9x : + acc. in, adv.. 46x: + dat. 40x, + acc. 6x. mid, adv., 69x: + acc. 6x, + dat. 62x, + instr. 1x (2028). neah, adv., adj., 8x: + dat. nefne, conj., 1x: + dat. (1081). of 36x: + dat. on, adv., 371x: + acc. 121x. an 3x (677, 1247, 1935), + dat. 246x, on efn 1x (2903). ongean, adv., 3x: + dat. oþ 3x: + acc. samod, adv., 2x: + dat. (1311, 2942). to, adv., 138x: + dat. 129x (te 2922), + instr. 4x, + gen. 5x. togeanes, adv., 5x: + dat. þurh 18x: + acc. under, adv., 59x: + dat. 34x, + acc. 25x. wiþ 61x: + dat. 33x, + acc. 28x. ymb 24x: + dat. 14x (ymb 11x, ymbe 3x), + acc. 10x (ymb 8x, ymbe 2x);ymbe spelling is used by scribe B.

D VOCABULARY

D1 Although many studies involving the vocabulary of Beowulf have been made, the very full glossary in Klaeber’s edition is probably the best place to begin. We cannot hope to document all of the significant vocabulary patterns in the poem, but the following notes set up some patterns which we hope will be useful for comparative purposes. Although exact figures are given in what follows, they represent a first count and should be treated with caution.

In Klaeber’s glossary, which lists 3121 headwords for the poem, he employs an elaborate system for marking vocabulary. The sign ‡ indicates words not found elsewhere in the poetry (or prose) – 672 headwords, † indicates words (or meanings) found in poetry only – 459 headwords. (‡)+ indicates when the word, not elsewhere found in poetry, occurs in prose also – 89 headwords. This leaves, after the three categories have been subtracted, a common Old English vocabulary of approximately 1900 headwords.

D2 We can look for distinctiveness in Beowulf in the patterns of word formation found in the poem. The following notes set up some general categories, and further refinement can follow the work of Hans Marchand in The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word Formation, 2nd ed. (Munich 1969). Two studies which also can be used are D. A. Reibel, A Grammatical Index to the Compound Nouns of Old English Verse (Indiana diss. 1963), and C. Koban, Substantive Compounds in Beowulf (Illinois diss. 1963).

.1 Nouns:
In Beowulf there are 622 simple nouns, 99 nouns with affixes, and 876 compound nouns for a total of 1597 headwords.

Among the affixed nouns the most common prefixes are ge (51 examples), an (6), and un (5). The most common suffixes are end (9 examples) and ing (5).

Among the compound nouns the most common pattern is noun + noun – although this can be subdivided according to the relationship between the nouns. Other patterns are adjective + noun (42 examples), past participle + noun (8), noun + present participle (23), adverb + present participle (2 examples, feorbuend, ymbsittend), adverb + noun (24).

Common first elements are: guð (26 examples), wæl (21), hilde (21), sæ (17), wig (15), here (14). Common second elements are: weard (16 examples), cyning (12), sele (12), dæg (11), mod (11), bealo (10), weorc (10), wudu (10).

2 Adjectives:
In Beowulf there are 177 simple adjectives, 151 affixed adjectives, 186 compound adjectives, and 20 numerals for a total of 534 headwords.

Among the affixed adjectives the most common prefixes are un (25 examples) and ge (21). The most common suffixes are ig (31 examples), lic (28), leas (12), and weard (5).

Among the compound adjectives the patterns are noun + adjective (96 examples), adjective + noun (31), noun + past participle (10), past participle + noun (8), noun + present participle (9), adjective + present participle (3 examples, heardhicgende, swiðhycgende, wishyegende), adjective + past participle (3 examples, niwtyrwed, sidfæþmed, widscofen), adjective + adjective (13), adverb + adjective (8), adverb + past participle (3 examples, forðgewiten, forðgewiten, welþungen), noun + noun (2 examples, guðmod, hægsteald [?]).

D2 .3 Verbs:
In Beowulf there are 517 simple verbs (including 104 ge- prefixed verbs), and 217 verbs with other prefixes for a total of 734 headwords.

The distribution over the classes of verbs is as follows:

The most striking feature of this distribution is the very small number of Class II weak verbs with prefixes. Among the prefixed verbs, the most active prefixes are be (46 examples), a (43), an/on (34), for (32), ofer (12), and æt (12).

Active stems are sittan (9 examples), hycgan (8), habban (6), beran (5), gan (5).

.4 Adverbs:
In Beowulf there are 176 adverbs of which 14 are also prepositions and 13 conjunctions.

The most common pattern is adjective + e (35 examples). Other patterns are adjective + lice (19 examples), ending in um (6), ending in es (7), ending in inga/unga (5).

.5 Conjunctions:
In Beowulf there are 29 different conjunctions of which 15 are also adverbs and 3 prepositions.

The conjunctions are ac, ær, butan, forþon, ge, gif hu, hwær, hwæþer, ne, nefne, noðer, nu, nymþe, ond, oðþæt, oððe, siððan, swa, swylce, þa, þær, þæs, þæt, þætte, þe, þeah, þenden, þonne.

.6 Prepositions:
In Beowulf there are 24 different prepositions of which 14 are also adverbs and 3 conjunctions.

The prepositions are æfter, ær, æt, be/bī / big, beforan, butan, for/fore, fram, geond, in, mid, neah, nefne, of, on/an/on efn, ongean, oþ, samod, to/te, togeanes, þurh, under, wiþ, ymb.

D3 Dialect Vocabulary

On pp. xciv and xcv of his edition Klaeber, following the work of Jordan, gives a brief list of Anglian dialect words found in Beowulf, He cautions us as to the utility of such a list ‘since the testimony of prose texts of a later date is of only limited value.’ We can, nevertheless, look at the list and make notes on the distribution of these words in the poetry.

.1 Nouns:

.1.1 beam: compare WS cild. Bearn is common in Beowulf and throughout the poetry; cild is largely restricted to the Vercelli and Exeter Books and seems much more limited in meaning.

D3 .1.2 morðor: compare WS morð. Both occur in Beowulf, morðor 5x, 4 more in compounds; morð in the compound morðbealu (136). Morð otherwise appears only in Genesis A, morðor and its compounds throughout the poetry.

.1.3 rec: in Beowulf 1 example (3155) and the compounds wælrec (2661) and wudurec (3144) occur. Rec also occurs in Genesis, Elene, the Riddles, and the Paris Psalter.

.1.4 snyttru: compare WS wisdom. Both occur in Beowulf, snyttru 4x and unsnyttru 1x (1734), wisdom 2x. Snyttru also occurs throughout the poetry; unsnyttru in the Vercelli and Exeter Books and the Metres of Boethius, wisdom only in Daniel in the Junius MS, but otherwise throughout the poetry.

.1.5 tid: compare WS tima. Tid occurs throughout the poetry; tima only in Guthlac 754, Phoenix 246, Judgment Day II, and Instructions for Christians 248.

.1.6 worn: occurs 9x in Beowulf It occurs throughout the poetry but is rare in the Vercelli Book (2x in Andreas, 1x in Elene).

.1.7 To these can be added as a result of Hans Schabram’s work in Superbia I, oferhygd: compare WS ofermod. Oferhygd occurs in Beowulf 2x and occurs throughout the poetry. Ofermod as a noun is restricted to Genesis B and the Battle of Maldon, and as an adjective to Genesis B, Solomon and Saturn, the Metres of Boethius, and the Paris Psalter.

.1.8 Franz Wenisch’s study, Spezifisch anglisches Wortgut in den nordhumbrischen Interlinear-glossierungen des Lukasevangeliums (Heidelberg 1979), identifies the following nouns in Beowulf as Anglian: bid (lx in Beowulf [2962] and 1x in the Riddles), ombeht (2x in Beowulf, also in Genesis A and B, Christ, the Metres of Boethius, and the Paris Psalter), symbel (frequent in Beowulf and throughout the poetry), and þreat (2x in Beowulf, common throughout the poetry).

.2 Adjectives:

.2.1 bront: occurs 2x in Beowulf, 1x in Andreas 273 and 1x in Elene 238.

.2.2 gneaþ: occurs 1x in Beowulf and 1x in the Prudentius glosses.

.2.3 To these Wenisch’s study adds: hatgsteald (Beowulf 1889, also in Genesis), nænig (frequent in Beowulf and throughout the poetry), gerysne (Beowulf 2653 and also in Genesis), soþfæst (Beowulf 2820, common throughout the poetry), and wisfæst (Beowulf 626 and in the Vercelli and Exeter Books and the Paris Psalter).

.3 Verbs:

.3.1 The three verbs listed are: gefeon, compare WS fægnian (which also occurs in Beowulf if Klaeber’s emendation at 1333 is accepted), bebycgan, and teo(ga)n ‘make, form.’ Gefeon occurs throughout the poetry; bebycgan occurs in Christ and Satan, Metrical Charm 6, and the Paris Psalter; and teon in Genesis, Daniel, Andreas, the Exeter Book maxims, and the Paris Psalter.

.3.2 To these Wenisch’s study adds: aeweþan (2x in Beowulf, throughout the poetry), byrgan (Beowulf 448, also in Genesis, the Dream of the Rood, the Phoenix, and the Paris Psalter), for-gripan (Beowulf 2353, also in Genesis, Guthlac, the Phoenix, and the Paris Psalter), (ge)frignan (compare WS ascian; (ge)frignan is frequent in Beowulf and throughout the poetry), fullæstan (Beowulf 2668, also in Elene and the Exeter Book), gyrwan (common in Beowulf and the poetry), lixan (3x in Beowulf, common in the poetry), sceþþan (frequent in Beowulf and the poetry), and wæccan (3x in Beowulf, also elsewhere in the poetry).

.4 Adverbs:

.4.1 gen, gena: compare WS gyt, gieta. All but gieta occur in Beowulf.

D3 .4.2 nefne, nemne, nymþe: compare WS butan. All occur in Beowulf. See H.M. Flasdieck, ‘OE nefne: A Reevaluation,’ Anglia 69 (1950) 135-71, and ‘Nochmals ae. nefne,’ Anglia 70 (1951) 46.

.4.3 semninga: occurs 3x in Beowulf and also in Alexander’s Letter. In the poetry it also occurs in the Vercelli Book 4x, the Exeter Book 7x, and 1x in the Paris Psalter.

.4.4 To these Wenisch’s study adds: recene (Beowulf 2983 and throughout the poetry).

.5 Prepositions:

.5.1 in used for WS on: Klaeber notes the erroneous substitution of in for on at 1029, 1952.

.5.2 mid + accusative: occurs 6x in Beowulf as opposed to 62x with the dative case and 1x with the instrumental (2028).

.5.3 ac used as an interrogative particle: 1x (1990). See Bruce Mitchell, ‘Old English ac as an Interrogative Particle,’ NM 78 (1977) 98-100.

THOMAS CABLE

In late Old English and early Middle English alliterative poetry, certain features of metrical style correspond clearly with the dates of the poems independent of the stylistic proclivities of the individual authors. One can follow J.P. Oakden, for example, in tracing a diminution in the occurrence of Sievers’ metrical types D and E, and a marked increase in the occurrence of the ‘rising-falling’ or B/A type.1 The B/A pattern (x x x), which was either disallowed or severely restricted in classical Old English metre, eventually became the single most frequent type in Middle English alliterative poetry. Since it is possible to draw striking generalizations about the development of metrical style in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, it is worth asking whether similar tendencies, though certainly more muted, can be discovered in the poetry of the eighth and ninth centuries. Whatever the absolute dates might be, the identification of ‘early’ and ‘late’ features of metrical style and an account of their occurrence in various Old English poems would clearly be useful in any consideration of the date of Beowulf.

Two serious problems face a metrical typology of this sort, and it is well to recognize them at the outset. First there is the lack of a fixed point from which to work. One can propose metrical features to distinguish Cædmonian, Cynewulfian, and Alfredian poetry, but the extant lines that can definitely be assigned to the Cædmonian period are few, and generalizations deriving from them risky; and Cynewulf, though represented by an adequate corpus for metrical generalizations, presents almost as much uncertainty in date as Beowulf. The second problem is that the individual metrical style of a poet can override the presumed style of his age and turn our chronological typology into a wishful ideal. This is especially true as we focus on the subtleties of style, as we must, in the strongly uniform metrical tradition before the Conquest; and a poet can diverge from the prevailing style through excellence or ineptness.

With an awareness of these problems in mind, I have scanned several of the major Old English poems and all of the minor poems that can be closely dated. I have made use of John C. Pope’s indispensable scansion of Beowulf adapting his findings where necessary to conform to my own understanding of Old English metre.2 In fact, there are only occasional verses in which my marking of the crucial features differs from Pope’s, for though we have different theories of the implications of these features for the composition and performance of the poetry, our starting-point is the same. Pope accepted Sievers’ classification of syllabic patterns and stress as a basis for his theory of the rhythm of Beowulf, and I have done the same as a basis for my speculations on the melody.3 In using metrical style as an indicator of date, it is prudent to stay with the skeleton of the metre and keep theories of rhythm and melody out of the picture, lest hypothesis build on hypothesis.

Yet even staying with Sievers’ Five Types, questions of fact and theory arise, because it is by no means clear that everything in Sievers’ system is a metrical fact, pure and beyond debate. I (like Pope) consider Sievers’ division of the verse sīdra sorga into two feet to be theory, not fact, and (unlike Pope) consider it to be wrong theory. Other metrists find wrong theory in Sievers’ description of secondary stress, or his description of syllabic length, though on both of these matters I happen to agree with Sievers. The point is that few metrists will scan an Old English poem exactly the same way, even leaving aside the superimposed marking of rhythm or melody.This lack of agreement on the very fundamentals of the Old English verse-form provides my reason for covering the ground anew. Any account of metrical style will assume certain features to be important and others to be irrelevant. Whether two poems are seen as being in the same style depends on the features that one abstracts and assigns value to. My own system, as I have indicated, follows Sievers’ system closely, but there are several points of divergence on specific, technical matters which, taken together, allow a significantly different statement of the metrical paradigm.4

From my scansions of twenty-two Old English poems, I have found that half a dozen stylistic groupings can be made. These groups contain poems that, for one reason or other, have been put together chronologically in past scholarship. There are some surprising exceptions, but generally certain metrical tendencies appear to correlate with dates of composition. For clarity of exposition, it is best to describe these tendencies in the later period, and then project backwards.

Oakden correctly observed that alliterative poetry after the Conquest eventually eliminated the types that Sievers labelled D ( | x: heardhicgende) and E ( x | : wonslī wer), but he undervalued the effect that this change worked on the system. Types D and E are different from other patterns of English metre in any period, and indeed different from patterns of metres in other languages that I am familiar with, because they require more than a binary discrimination of ictus. The familiar European metres require only a binary opposition to establish the metrical pattern: long vs. short, stress vs. less stress, the existence of a syllable vs. the absence of a syllable – these for systems of temporal, stress, and syllabic metres, respectively. Types D and E in Old English (and supposedly in the other Germanic languages as well, although I would disagree) are anomalous in requiring three consecutive distinctions: ictus, less ictus, and less ictus again. Type E contains these three falling levels of ictus and then a fourth, contrastively high level. Type D contains not just three falling levels of ictus, but four: x. It happens that type C also contains three levels of ictus (x x: of brdbure), but the necessity for this pattern is clear only after understanding types D and E within the context of the whole system.

Examining the poetry with these characteristics in mind, one can learn something about the evolution of poetic form in the late Old English period. For example, one can compare the percentages of the various types in Beowulf (excluding the eleven hypermetric lines) with those in The Death of Edward, a poem of thirty-four lines composed shortly after the event of 1066 that it commemorates:

Beowulf

Death of Edward

A

45.1%

54.4%

B

16.6%

19.1%

C

17.7%

7.3%

D

13.5%

14.7%

E

7.1%

2.9%

?

1.4%

In types A, B, and D, the two poems are fairly close in their percentages. Type C shows a considerable drop from Beowulf to Edward, and type E, the least common in both poems, falls from 7.1% to 2.9%. But the three types with more than two levels of ictus, C, D, and E still amount to a fourth of the hemistichs in the poem. Only two hemistichs of the sixty-eight depart from the classical Old English metre, and one of those, 15b, is almost surely a completely ordinary type A, with disyllabic kyning for kyng. There is a difference in style between these two poems but not a difference that amounts to a change in the metrical paradigm.

As far as I can determine, however, The Death of Edward is the last extant poem that is in the Beowulf metre. The next poem that survives, A Description of Durham, composed probably in the first decade of the twelfth century, shows metrical changes so fundamental that description in terms of the Five Types becomes meaningless and misleading:

A Description of Durham

A

38.1%

B

11.9%

C

9.5%

D

2.4%

E

2.4%

3-stress

14.3%

B/A

11.9%

?

9.5%

Not only has there been a further decrease in the crucial types C, D, and E among the forty-two hemistichs (including a significant drop in type D from 14.7% to 2.4%), but there has also been an opening of the paradigm to allow types that are common in Middle English but disallowed in Old English: several three-stress and B/A (or rising-falling) types and apparently one one-stress type. With 36% of the verses falling out of the classical patterns it seems clear that what is involved is more than a mere stylistic change. Alliteration remains, but the essence of the metre has been abandoned. The distribution of patterns in this poem, as in subsequent alliterative poems from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, can be explained by simpler principles, which are beyond the concerns of the present inquiry.

If indeed, as I would argue, the end of the classical Old English tradition coincides with the Norman Conquest, then one can say that Old English poetry in the strict metre was composed for four centuries between Cædmon’s Hymn in the second half of the seventh century and The Death of Edward in 1066. In considering a date for Beowulf, it is worth asking whether the strict metre showed stylistic tendencies during those four centuries that correlate with the dates of composition. I have scanned all the lines in Cædmon’s Hymn, Bede’s Death Song, The Leiden Riddle, Daniel, Exodus, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, the Preface and the Epilogue to The Pastoral Care, Judith, the poems of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The Battle of Maldon, and A Description of Durham, and a sample of lines from Genesis A, Juliana, Andreas, and The Metres of Boethius.5 Because of the importance that I assign to the metrical types C, D, and E as touchstones of metrical style, I have computed the percentages of these patterns in each of the poems or samples, excluding from the computations the usually rare hypermetric verses. The combined percentages of these three types are given here in a roughly chronological list. Beside each poem I have indicated a date or century of composition traditionally considered likely, although it goes without saying that none of these dates is certain, and some have more support than others.

Combined percentages of types C, D, and E:

657-80

Cædmon’s Hymn

22.2

735

Bede’s Death Song

60.0

8th c.

Leiden Riddle

21.4

8th c.

Genesis A (I)

29.0

8th c.

Genesis A (III)

32.4

8th c.

Daniel

33.6

——

Beowulf

38.3

8th-9th c.

Exodus

40.8

9th c.

Elene

35.8

9th c.

Fates of the Apostles

34.0

9th c.

Juliana

34.5

9th c.

Andreas

36.8

890-99

Preface and Epilogue, Pastoral Care

33.7

897

Metres of Boethius

34.5

937

Brunanburh

34.3

942

Capture of the Five Boroughs

42.3

10th c.

Judith

35.3

973

Coronation of Edgar

25.0

975

Death of Edgar

29.8

991

Maldon

24.5

1066

Death of Edward

24.9

1110

Durham

14.3

It must be remembered that the percentages represent corpuses of widely varying sizes. Bede’s Death Song has ten verses; Elene has 2,607 normal verses (plus 31 hypermetric verses), Beowulf 6,342 (plus 22). The anomalous percentages of two or three of the shorter poems can probably be attributed to their brevity more than to any other factor. Still, with this and earlier cautions in mind, certain groupings are possible: I would bracket together the three Northumbrian poems (the first three poems on the list) for reasons that I will explain. I would put Genesis A in a class to itself and make a distinction between the part that precedes Genesis B and the part that follows. Beowulf and Exodus should be bracketed together in a group of two. All of the poems on the list from Elene to Judith, except for the brief Capture of the Five Boroughs, should be put together; to this group I would add Daniel. The four poems between the mid-tenth century and the Conquest form a stylistic group. And finally, the poem that moves out of the old tradition and marks the beginning of a new one, A Description of Durham, should stand by itself. Still cautiously, but more specifically, I would venture the following conclusions:

(1) After the mid-tenth century there is a significant drop in the percentage of lines with three levels of ictus. All five extant poems after that date have types C, D, and E in proportions of less than 30%; all of the preceding poetry that I have scanned except the three early Northumbrian poems and Genesis A (I) have those types in proportions of more than 30%. Beowulf, with 38.3%, would not fit metrically with this group of late poems.

(2) A variation of five or ten percent may seem too small to be significant, but one of the interesting discoveries of this survey is that the usual range of variation is much less than one would expect. The many poems in the middle – those that can be dated neither very early nor very late – are remarkably close in metrical style as I have defined it. The Cynewulfian poems vary within three percentage points: Elene 35.8%, Fates of the Apostles 34%, Juliana 34.5%, Andreas 36.8%. The Alfredian poems, the Preface and the Epilogue to The Pastoral Care and The Metres of Boethius, with 33.7% and 34.5%, continue this metrical style without change; and, surprisingly, so also do Brunanburh, 34.3%, and Judith, 35.3%. (The high percentage in Judith corroborates findings by the authors of ‘The Language of Beowulf’ for this volume; Angus Cameron et al. have identified a large number of vocabulary items shared by Beowulf and Judith.) The question that the consistency among these poems raises is the period over which such a unified tradition could be sustained. Is it probable that a full century separates Elene and Judith, two poems which are metrically identical in terms of the feature that I have abstracted?

(3) Beowulf and Exodus stand apart from the rest of the poems in their high proportions of verses with three levels of ictus, although Andreas comes close. They are surpassed only by two short poems of five and thirteen lines. The relevance of this stylistic feature to the date of composition brings us back to the matter of the individual poetic genius. At the risk of venturing an aesthetic judgment that might have meant nothing to the Anglo-Saxons, I will acknowledge that I equate a higher proportion of types C, D, and E over the long stretch with a higher degree of technical competence and craftsmanship. I would judge Exodus at least as highly crafted metrically as Beowulf, and it is the only poem that I would so judge. Since the authors of these two poems rose above the ground of their tradition, they conceivably could have written at any period during the four centuries of classical Old English metre. Yet it is intuitively more plausible that they rose from the metrical highlands than from the plain that slopes to the sea. I would not expect such metrical skill in the second half of the tenth century. I would expect it from periods that produced Andreas and other poems in the middle of our list.

(4) The three definitely early poems, those that can be dated in Northumbria during the seventh and eighth centuries, all have metrical peculiarities that may simply be due to their brevity. The nine lines of Cædmon’s Hymn contain no type C verses, while Bede’s Death Song is half composed of verses in the C pattern. Of the ten verses in the Death Song five are type C, four are A, and one is D; types B and E do not occur. In the Leiden Riddle, a poem of fourteen lines, it is type D that is missing, and type A occurs in the extraordinary proportion of 60.7%. Proportions of the Five Types become more stable in longer poems, and it may be as well not to attempt stylistic generalizations based on this small number of lines. The one negative conclusion to state is that there is no extant poem definitely from the seventh or eighth century that could be considered stylistically close to Beowulf.

(5) The portion of Genesis A that precedes Genesis B has a notably different metrical style from that which follows, and the metrical indicators that I have used would corroborate Sievers’ division of the poem into three parts: Genesis I (1-234), Genesis II (Genesis B), and Genesis III (852-2936). The most recent editor of Genesis A finds that poem and Beowulf to be closely similar in style, vocabulary, and metre: ‘Any dating of Genesis A must be on a sliding scale, but Genesis A and Beowulf must slide together.’6 To that I would add that Beowulf and Exodus form an even closer sliding unit, as indeed do Beowulf and some of the later poems.

(6) There are advantages and disadvantages in a stylistic study, such as the present one, that is not tied to sound changes. The most familiar phonological inquiries seek indications of sound change, such as contraction through loss of intervocalic h, in the metre. These inquiries not only must assume a system of metre but also must answer questions concerning the date of the sound change (for which evidence is sparse), the spread of the change, the dialect of the poet, and the options available to the poet in his use of conservative or archaic forms. In contrast, the relevant features in types C, D, and E are affected little by dialectal variation. The disadvantage is that the ranking from purely metrical criteria must always remain relative. There is nothing inherent in the metrical features to tie them to events external to the poem and through those events to absolute dates.

When I began this survey, I assumed that Beowulf was an eighth-century poem and that my goal was to determine whether it was composed towards the beginning, the middle, or the end of that century. The strongest conviction that I carry away from marking metre at tedious length and reviewing past scholarship is that the metrical and phonological evidence before the tenth century does not justify specifying a date within a period of ten, twenty, or thirty years, or even half a century. Almost as strong as this negative conclusion is a more positive one, stated as (2) above: There is a remarkable metrical unity in the poems between Cynewulf and Judith. Beowulf and Exodus diverge from this unity mainly in carrying the tendencies of these middle poems even further, as a crafty, gifted poet of the period could be expected to do. My inclination is to compress the period of this narrowly defined style as much as other considerations will allow – say to a century at most. This, of course, would have the effect of sliding most of Old English poetry towards a later rather than an earlier date, since it is from the time of Alfred and afterwards that the middle poems can be dated. Traditional phonological indicators, such as uncontracted forms with h, count for something in placing Beowulf earlier than most of the other poems, but I can find no metrical reason why all the poems in our list from Daniel to The Metres of Boethius, including Beowulf, should not be assigned dates of composition in the ninth century.

WALTER GOFFART

The account in Beowulf of Hygelac’s fatal raid on the Merovingian kingdom features four names of continental peoples: Franks, Frisians, Hetware, and Hugas.1 Of these, the Franks and Frisians are well known to history, whereas the name ‘Hetware’ is uncommon to say the least, and ‘Hugas’ is extremely obscure. Some scholars have maintained that the Hetware descend from the ancient Chatti and Chattuarii and that the Hugas are connected to the equally ancient Chauci, but neither identification can be adequately justified.2 Beowulf is not the only place where these rare names are mentioned. A Frankish history written in the early eighth century states that Hygelac attacked the Attoarii, and two Saxon histories, close in date to 1000 A.D., attach the name Huga or Hugo to the Merovingian Franks.3 Beowulf, however, is generally regarded as independent of all three continental narratives.

These accounts, and the Old English poem, have been thought to document or to imply mysterious, underground channels for the transmission of accurate historical information. In the case of the name ‘Hetware,’ a narrative written 200 years after Hygelac’s raid is believed to report an additional fact about the incident, a detail omitted by the earlier historian Gregory of Tours. The Beowulf poet is understood to provide independent confirmation for this same detail. In the case of ‘Hugas,’ the process of transmission seems to be even more prolonged, more deeply underground, and altogether more enigmatic. Perhaps the ancient Chauci are one of the tribes that, in the third century A.D., were transmuted into the Franks, but there is no certainty at all that their name is the root of Hugas.4 Failing the Chauci, Hugas has no early attestation in any form. The first documented person called Hugh occurs only in the seventh century. From wholly unobserved origins, the tribal name seems to proceed invisibly through time and then suddenly to spring to the surface, always in reference to the Franks and the earlier sixth century, but in the context of different events: in Beowulf the Hugas are a people that joins in the resistance to Hygelac; in the Saxon writings, the name is attached to an incident of alliance between the Franks and the mainland Saxons against the Thuringians.

In examining these puzzling circumstances, I should like to proceed in three steps. First, I shall look at the Attoarii in the eighth-century Liber historiae Francorum (hereafter LHF), with a view to determining whether this name is an authentic piece of information about Hygelac’s attack or a fictional amplification. Second, I shall turn briefly to Beowulf in order to find out how the Franks, Frisians, Hetware, Hugas, and Merovingians are meant by the poet to be related to each other. Finally and at greatest length, I shall concentrate on the term Hugas and consider what person or persons named Hugh that word might be referring to.

* * *

In reporting Hygelac’s raid, Gregory of Tours says that the Danish king made an attack simply on Gaul.5 The relevant section of the eighth-century LHF is a direct abridgement of Gregory. It reproduces his account, including the reference to Gaul, but where Gregory vaguely mentions ‘one district,’ the LHF says, in its shaky Latin, Theuderico paygo Attoarios vel alios, ‘a district of Theuderic’s, the Attoarii or others.’ If vel means ‘and,’ as it often does, the sense is ‘the Attoarii and others.’ 6 In Beowulf, there is no reference to Gaul or to a district; the Hetware are mentioned as one of four peoples who fought the Geats on this occasion.7

It seems to be taken for granted that the eighth-century addition of the Attoarii to Gregory’s account provides a valuable new detail – information that somehow weathered the ages and came to the knowledge of the author of the LHF. According to Dorothy Whitelock, this information is the more likely to be accurate because the author was an Austrasian, living in that part of the Frankish kingdom where the raid had occurred; local tradition would have retained a pertinent detail that the earlier, but more geographically distant, Gregory of Tours had missed.8 She was wrong, however, to call the LHF Austrasian. The book has long been acknowledged to be Neustrian work, written in the vicinity of Paris.9 Besides, the LHF is abundantly enriched with legendary matter, such as a single combat between King Chlothar II and a Saxon duke, and several delightful novelettes about Queen Fredegonde.10 These circumstances are disquieting but do not permit us to doubt the historicity of the Attoarii as victims of Hygelac’s raid. Even if the author was Neustrian and an occasional writer of fiction, what point would there have been to adding the Attoarii unless he had true information?

A stricter approach was taken many decades ago by Godefroid Kurth, in a general study of the LHF. He observed that, on twenty-one occasions including that of the Attoarii, the author adorned his abridgement of Gregory of Tours with novel geographical touches. After analyzing each case, Kurth concluded that none of them implied the possession of extra sources: ‘In all this information added to Gregory’s text, we find ... mere interpretations of evidence. [The additions] are interesting in as much as they introduce us to the author’s mental processes ....’ 11 Kurth noted besides that one passage explicitly contradicts Gregory in order to conform to eighth-century conditions. He accounted for the Attoarii by suggesting that the author took their pagus to suit Gregory’s specifications for a battle on the seacoast in Theuderic’s kingdom.12 This final point can be improved on, as we shall see; its inadequacy hardly detracts from the importance to Beowulf studies of Kurth’s findings.

Although the Attoarii went unnoticed in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, anyone examining the early folios of the Monumenta Germaniae historica realizes that the pagus Attoarius was newsworthy in the eighth century. It acquired notoriety by being the locale of a Saxon attack in the year 715, during the painful transition from Pepin of Heristal to Charles Martel.13 Once this fact is established, we have a better reason than geographical verisimilitude (about which more shortly) for our Neustrian author’s addition to Gregory. Not only was it his habit to embellish Gregory with geographical details but recent events also allowed him to inject a note of drama: the Saxon attack of 715 was anticipated 200 years before when the Danes fell upon the Attoarii along the lower Rhine.

When Kurth’s analysis of all the geographical additions is combined with the newsworthiness of the pagus Attoarius, there is a solid basis for our regarding the introduction of the Attoarii as apocryphal. Are there additional grounds for doubting the author of the LHF? Might we not consider his contribution to be a kind of lectio difficilior? As it happens, the LHF makes two other changes in Gregory’s report of Hygelac’s raid, and both of them move the story toward banality. Gregory says that Theuderic sent his son ‘with a strong army and a great abundance of weapons,’ and he specifies that the Franks won a naval battle over the Danes. Neither detail occurs in the LHF, where we read of an engagement on land by a ‘large army.’ 14 It would be consistent if the Attoarii, the third departure from Gregory, were also a factual impoverishment of the tale.

Considerations of geography make the pagus Attoarius an improbable target for sixth-century pirates. Professor Magoun, who believed in the historicity of Beowulf, once plotted the course that Hygelac’s raid would have taken.15 The reconstruction makes edifying reading, since a descent upon the Attoarii required a voyage of several days up the Rhine, excluding any possibility of surprise. Ninth-century vikings behaved in this fashion, but they did so only after having gradually gained boldness over a period of decades; they began with landings on the coast.16 The fifth-century chronicle of Hydatius, much closer in date to Hygelac’s raid than the LHF, reports two instances when Herules pounced by sea on northern Spain; their descents were on the seashore. In an even closer parallel, a poem by Fortunatus celebrates the defeat of a Saxon and Danish landing between 565 and 575 on the far northern coast of Frisia.17 The narrative of Gregory of Tours is compatible with raids of this suitably modest kind (so, for that matter, is the Liber monstrorum).18 Only the LHF forces us to think otherwise.

Every relevant consideration strengthens Kurth’s conclusion. Once we realize that the LHF contains many freely added geographical details and that, besides, the invocation of the Attoarii lent dramatic colour to the narrative, we are in a position to eliminate an anomalous detail from the history of Hygelac’s attack. Rather than suppose that an eighth-century author was able to ‘preserve features that are wanting’ in Gregory of Tours,19 we can espouse the more normal belief that Gregory, who lived closest in time to the event, was also fuller and more precise about it than any later author.

If this is so, where did the Beowulf poet get his information? Dorothy Whitelock thought it ‘possible ... but not very likely’ that the poet had seen the LHF.20 I believe that the possibility and likelihood she had in mind were matters of date rather than content; like R.W. Chambers, she was deeply impressed by the departures of Beowulf from the two historical narratives and seems to have made no close comparisons.21 Before itemizing the differences, I should point out that the major ones set the poem in opposition to both Gregory of Tours and the LHF; on the other hand, Beowulf has three traits in common with the LHF but in contradiction to Gregory of Tours.

I begin with the details that clash with both historians: the poet omits the Frankish king Theuderic, his son Theudebert, and the regional name Galliae; he mentions the Merovingians, the Frisians, and the Hugas, three proper names not found elsewhere in this context; he injects the hero Beowulf into the story along with a Frankish warrior called Dæghrefn; he presents Hygelac as a king of the Geats rather than of the Danes; and he specifies that Hygelac’s body was left behind as a spoil to his intended victims. For our purposes, the main issue raised by these five differences is whether, in order to account for them, the poet must be understood to have had sources about Hygelac’s raid that we lack. This seems unlikely. Most of the omissions and substitutions are matters of style rather than substance. The exceptions are the Geats in lieu of the Danes and the heroes Beowulf and Daeghrefn.22 These novelties can be explained otherwise than by the survival of additional facts about Hygelac’s adventure. Dæghrefn need not be a more historical personage than Beowulf himself, and no one is able, on the basis of the poem, to contradict the assertion of the historians that Chlochilaic was a Dane.

There is more to be learned from the shorter set of differences, those that depart only from Gregory. Above, I listed the ways in which the LHF alters Gregory; it omits the naval battle, substitutes a ‘large army’ for a ‘strong’ one, and introduces the Attoarii. All these changes are endorsed by the Beowulf poet. The presence of the Hetware and absence of a naval battle are too obvious to any reader of the poem to need commentary. The one subtle coincidence involves the ‘large army.’ In line 2917, the poet specifies that Hygelac and the Geats were beaten by ‘superior force’; they were outnumbered.23 This detail could be extracted only from the LHF. The unanimous agreement of the poem with the eighth-century historian is difficult to explain otherwise than by supposing that the Beowulf poet used the LHF as his source for Hygelac’s raid. Because of the Attoarii, the alternative hypothesis of a source common to the LHF and Beowulf is less acceptable than that of dependence (possibly indirect) by Beowulf on the LHF. The reference to the Attoarii is very different from the allegation that a ‘large army’ defeated Hygelac’s force; the latter expresses only an editorial choice that any rewriter might make, whereas the addition of the Attoarii specifically implies the existence of someone who was both excerpting Gregory’s History and impressed by the Saxon raid on inner Frisia in 715. The Neustrian who wrote the LHF fulfils the first condition and belongs to the right time period for fulfilling the other. It seems praeter necessitatem to imagine that a different author, known to the Beowulf poet but lost to us, fulfilled them even more closely.

The LHF was a popular and widely diffused history. Completed in 727, it is not likely to have reached England, at the earliest, until after the death of Bede.24 However that may be, the poet’s use of the LHF is easily adapted to current views concerning the probable date of composition, for Dorothy Whitelock particularly urged an open mind about the later eighth century.25 What tends to be contradicted is the opinion of Chambers that ‘there is no reference in the poem, not even by way of casual allusion, to any continental events which we can date with certainty as subsequent to the arrival [in Britain] of the latest settlers from the continent.’26 By narrating Hygelac’s raid in the version of the LHF, the Beowulf poet reveals that knowledge of this incident came to him as an import from the continent no earlier than the mid-700s. It need no longer be thought that he tapped a mysterious channel of information preserving in England accurate memories of events in the lower Rhine valley in the early sixth century.

* * *

We now leave the Hetware and move on to the Hugas, but I should like, first, to consider the context in which the Hugas are found in Beowulf, that is to say, the five proper names that are gathered together in the last digression about Hygelac’s raid. If the poet used the LHF, it follows that he substituted the dynastic name Merovingian for the two kings mentioned by his source, and, in lieu of the place name Galliae, he multiplied the tribal names from one or two to a full four. What is to be made of these changes?

Commentators of Beowulf believe that the poet’s reference to the Merovingians implies a date of composition prior to the overthrow of the dynasty by Pepin the Short in 751. Klaeber, Chambers, Hoops, and others agree on this.27 Familiarity with continental histories dispels such an opinion. The Merovingians, though deposed, never ran the risk of being forgotten. Einhard is chiefly responsible for creating our image of the Do-Nothing kings lurching in oxcarts toward oblivion, but a dynasty cannot be ridiculed without being mentioned.28 Chapter one of the Vita Karoli, the very passage in which the memory of the Merovingians is condemned, begins with the words gens Meroingorum, and the name is also found in the LHF.29 There was no chance that a dynasty commemorated in such popular works of history would be forgotten. The Carolingian kings were so far from suppressing the memory of the line they superseded that they eventually introduced into their own family the names Louis and Lothair, which celebrate the first and second founders of Merovingian greatness.30 The name Merovingian in Beowulf, therefore, tells us nothing about the date of composition. It does suggest that the poet, by substituting the dynasty for specific kings, wished to impart a more definite colouring to his narrative than the common and confusing names Theuderic and Theudebert would permit.

In passing from the dynastic name to those of the four tribes, it might be observed that the Franks are virtually implied by the reference to the Merovingians, that the Hetware were drawn from the LHF, and that the two others are extras. The Hetware are taken more seriously in Beowulf than in any continental writings. In the latter, the Attoarii are only the inhabitants of a minor district, whereas the Anglo-Saxon poet allows us to believe that the Hetware were a tribe comparable to the Franks. However that may be, the poet made no mistake by referring to the Frisians, a well-known people who are also involved in the Finn episode; there was ample reason for him to connect them to an early Danish raid even if he was unaware that the Attoarii were neighbours.31 As for the Hugas, they are the mystery we shall soon be turning to. But how, in Beowulf, are these peoples related to each other and to the Frankish dynasty? According to Klaeber, the Hetware were in the Frankish ‘sphere of influence’; Magoun says that they were ‘an independent tribe allied with or somehow dependent on the Franks.’ Chambers observes that the Frisians were an independent people who would ‘naturally’ have made common cause against Hygelac, a pirate from overseas.32 These interpretations are troublesome because they lack a basis in the poem. Modern ideas of national homogeneity also seem to intrude; Chambers suggests this by a remark that, unless we had extra information, we might imagine that the four names were synonyms for a single tribe.33 Would a contemporary reader have needed extra information to avoid making this mistake?

An important passage for interpreting these names is the one in which Dæghrefn is mentioned. The poet says that Beowulf, by killing the standard-bearer of the Hugas, prevented him from presenting the spoils of Hygelac to the ‘king of the Frisians.’ Hoops’s commentary to Beowulf notes the oddity: one would have expected a king of the Franks. Hoops then suggests that the poet confused the terms Fresan and Hugas in the same way that, in the Finn episode, he confused Frisan and Eotan.34 Magoun, more respectful of the poet’s accuracy, says that Dæghrefn ‘appears to be in the service of an unidentified king of the Frisians.’ 35 These observations are consistent with the milder speculations about alliances, spheres of influence, and common causes. But could not a single king rule simultaneously over the Hugas, Frisians, Hetware, and Franks?

The final reference to the raid in Beowulf – the only one in which all five names are grouped – is the passage in which, as it seems to me, the poet most clearly expresses what he wishes us to make of this perhaps confusing multiplicity. No need for us to imagine diplomatic ties or special Frisian kings. The poet presents us with a common pattern of medieval government, that of a single realm composed of distinct regna with corresponding gentes. A brief seventh-century glossary of official ranks defines a king as a ruler over one tribe or several, ‘rex qui super unam gentem vel multas.’ 36 The official titulature of Charlemagne makes him king of the Franks and Lombards, and these were not the only nationes subject to his sway.37 Our most familiar contact with kingship of this sort involves the various Tribal or Stem duchies of Franconia, Swabia, and so forth, gathered under the medieval German emperors.38 As we are beginning to learn from K. F. Werner and other specialists, the prolonged existence of a major political entity – a regnum of some kind – had a more basic role than distinctive tribes (gentes, Stämme) in the development of these and other early medieval principalities, which themselves had as large a place in the formation of early France as in that of Germany. It has been observed, besides, that the possession of several regna was an indispensable condition for Carolingian and later emperorship, and that, in the tenth century, those kings who ruled several gentes in France, England, and Christian Spain strove to affirm the imperial dimension of their monarchy – their immediacy to God in the Christian world.39 One cannot properly claim that the Beowulf poet was anachronistic in fitting the Merovingian dynasty into such a pattern. By grace of the kingdoms that the Merovingians annexed, or of the gentes of ‘Franks, Romans, Burgundians, and other nations’ that a seventh-century formulary attributes to them, they in fact ruled a convincingly hegemonial realm.40 Even though the four names in Beowulf do not precisely correspond to the Merovingian regna, they are an effective gauge of Hygelac’s audacity in undertaking his raid: he had led the Geats in attacking a power whose greatness was expressed in part by the multiplicity of regna and gentes subject to its dynasty.

These considerations tell us something about the Hugas that has not been realized before. As one of the names related to the Merovingians in Beowulf, the Hugas may have to be classed with the Hetware as an English mistake, corresponding to no known regnum; but, failing proof, this assumption can hardly be adopted as long as other possibilities exist. Alternatively, the name denotes a gens that may be as familiar to us as the Frisians and the Franks themselves. When the poet called Dæghrefn a Huga, the audience was meant to recognize him either as a particular sort of Frank, such as a Neustrian or Austrasian, or as belonging to one of the regna subject to the Merovingians, which is in part the same thing. We should therefore expect the concept Huga to be narrower than ‘Frank’ rather than synonymous with it. Let us examine the Hugas more closely.

* * *

There would be reason to dwell on the supposed links with the ancient Chauci if this connection had not been denied at least as often and as reputably as it has been affirmed. The meagre evidence is ambiguous and leads nowhere.41 A more promising point of departure comes from the observation that Hugas as the name of a people is obviously similar to the man’s name Hugh. Beowulf is not the only early medieval text where a tribe or eponymous chieftain called Hugh occurs. A second one is Widukind of Corvey’s History of the Saxons; the Annals of Quedlinburg are a third, and there is one more that I shall reserve for the time being. In the absence of other attestations of the tribal name, these parallels to Beowulf offer the only opportunity for coming to grips with the problem.

Widukind wrote his Res gestae Saxonicae in the vicinity of 967A.D.42 After narrating the first establishment of the Saxons on the German coast, he introduces the next incident in a merely sequential chronology: ‘After this, King Huga of the Franks died, leaving no heir to the realm other than an only daughter called Amalberga, whom he had married to Irminfrid, king of the Thuringians. The Frankish people, however, chose to repay the humane and mild rule of their [late] lord by taking the son named Theuderic whom he had had by a mistress and anointing him as their king.’ 43 Having thus explained how the throne went to an illegitimate son, Widukind launches into the troubles Theuderic had at the hands of Irminfrid and his half-sister, and how, with Saxon help, he utterly crushed the Thuringians.

A few commentators of Widukind maintain that, when he said Hugh, he meant Clovis, but we are not really dealing with a mistake; Widukind could tell his Clovises from his Hugas perfectly well.44 In the book quoted from, he builds up a deliberate fiction from information given by Bede and Rudolf of Fulda, information that Widukind rightly recognized to be legendary and open to further legendary development.45 It is true that the Theuderic who fought the Thuringians was an illegitimate son of Clovis and that Amalberga was Irminfrid’s wife. These are the grains of fact. On the other hand, Theuderic had no sister called Amalberga (Irminfrid’s wife was related to Theodoric the Ostrogoth, not to Clovis); Clovis’s real son Theuderic had three legitimate half-brothers; and he did not ally himself with the Saxons against the Thuringians.46 Widukind’s reason for mixing fact and fiction was to assemble a plausible legend of Saxon origins. By avoiding the historical Clovis and substituting a fictional Frankish Huga, he made his procedure entirely clear. Nevertheless, Widukind leaves us with one genuine problem: how did he happen to invoke the un-Merovingian name of Hugh as his disguise for Clovis?

The Quedlinburg Annals, the second of our texts, have received more attention from students of Beowulf than Widukind has, because they directly say that Hugones was a name for the Franks.47 Robert Holtzmann established that the Annals were begun soon after 1000 A.D. and ended by 1030.48 In the early section about Roman emperors, the annalist mainly followed Bede’s Chronicle but paused occasionally to insert information from other sources; the additions include the history of barbarian rulers like Ermanaric and Attila, and they feature a rather reckless mixture of legend and history. For example, Attila first occurs in reference to the emperor Theodosius II, whose reign began in 408, but Attila dies only in the section on Justinian, whose dates are 527 to 565. The annalist’s explicit but slipshod chronology should warn us against expecting precision from him.49

The first passage of the Annals of interest to us is a summary of the early Frankish past based directly or indirectly on the LHF; it occurs in connection with the emperor Valentinian I (363-375). Among other details, the annalist mentions Clovis and the partition of Clovis’s kingdom among his four sons, including a certain Hugh Theodoric. We have here the first appearance of the Hugdietrich of later German literature. The annalist adds that Hugh Theodoric was born to Clovis by a concubine, and that he gave most of Thuringia to the Saxons.50 This information deliberately anticipates the next entry about Hugh Theodoric, an entry that coincides, like Attila’s death, with the imperial reign of Justinian. The text opens as follows: ‘In this year, King Hugh Theodoric, son of King Clovis by a concubine, honourably invited King Irminfrid of the Thuringians to his election when he succeeded his father in the realm. This Theodoric is called Hugh, that is, “the Frank,” because, formerly, all the Franks used to be called Hughs (Hugones), after a certain duke of theirs named Hugh (Hugo)’, 51 The annalist then continues with an abbreviated version of the same Thuringian incidents narrated by Widukind.

According to several authorities, including Helmut Beumann, the tale of the Thuringian war in both Widukind and the Quedlinburg Annals is based on a common vernacular source – a so-called Iringlied or sage – and this lost source is presumed to have included the reference to the Franks as Hugones.52 Bruno Krusch, however, considered the vernacular source superfluous and doubted its existence; he maintained, rightly as it seems to me, that Widukind used Rudolf of Fulda, that the annalist used Widukind, and that no extra source of a formal kind is needed to account for the information that they provide.53 The best indication that the annalist depended on Widukind is that he, too, felt bound to explain how an illegitimate son was able to succeed to the throne.54

Widukind, therefore, refers to a Frankish king named Huga, and the Quedlinburg annalist spells out a point that Beowulf may perhaps imply, namely, that ‘the Franks used to be called Hugones.’ The annalist even tells us how they acquired this name (he availed himself of the same sort of explanation as Isidore of Seville had used for the name ‘Frank’ itself).55 The question that needs to be asked about Beowulf is no different from the one posed by Widukind and the Annals: where did all of them get the idea of associating the name Hugh with the Frankish royal dynasty or the Frankish people? What factual basis did they have for evoking an eponymous ancestor called Hugh?

Those who have searched the distant past for an answer have produced nothing more definite than the Chauci. The fruitlessness of their quest merits attention, for we can hardly explain it away by reference to the poverty of surviving evidence or to losses of early poetry. However defective the sources for the fifth and sixth centuries are in general, the kings of the Franks claim a disproportionate share of their attention, and the names associated with the royal family are well recorded. Of all subjects this is not one about which we can trust an eleventh-century annalist to tell us something that is both historically true and wholly alien to Merovingian texts. There is one document, however, in which ‘Hugh’ occurs in a dynastic sense, and, as we might perhaps expect, it belongs to the same period as the rest of the dated evidence. In one of the books of Miracles of St. Benedict, a work exactly contemporary to the Quedlinburg Annals, Aimoin of Fleury applies the name of ‘Hugonid’ to the royal family currently ruling his part of the world.56 He was referring to the dynasty that we call Capetian. There are no Hughs, real or poetic, in the sixth and fifth centuries, let alone in the fourth and third, but there were Hughs galore from the ninth century onward.

The name ‘Hugh’ caught on only in the Carolingian period, when it was current even among the direct descendants of Pepin the Short. A vir honoratus Hugo witnessed a will in 616, but since this document survives only in a twelfth-century copy of a ninth-century book, it seems prudent to start somewhat later.57 The first well-attested Hugh is mentioned in two seventh-century narratives: the Fredegar chronicle, where a certain Chucus is one of three great dignitaries accepting a Lombard bribe, and the Life of St. Arnulf of Metz, where a homonym who probably was the same man does St. Arnulf the favour of paying money for a heavy piece of silver plate.58 These texts locate at least one important Hugh in the opening decades of the seventh century, but Chucus is far from being royal, let alone eponymous. The next Hugh, though delayed for nearly 100 years, is worth waiting for. He is a distinguished descendant of St. Arnulf, a grandson of Pepin of Heristal and nephew of Charles Martel; he managed to be bishop of Paris, Bayeux, and Rouen all at once, as well as abbot of several monasteries on the lower Seine; a respectable source even refers to him as a saint.59 The first half of the eighth century also reveals persons named Hugh farther east, among the benefactors of the monasteries of Honau and Weissemburg.60 Now established in several major families, the name was given at the opening of the ninth century to one of the last of Charlemagne’s children. Ewig suggests that it belongs to the names that the Carolingians reserved for their bastard sons.61 Among other families, ‘Hugh’ had been thoroughly acclimatized among legitimate offspring by the time Charlemagne died. The catalogue need not be continued. There was a pride of prominent Hughs in the ninth century and even more in the tenth, when one Hugh was king of Italy for twenty years and when another, as everyone knows, achieved an enduring promotion for himself and his descendants in France.62

As we saw above, Aimoin of Fleury attests to ‘Hugonid’ as the family name for the king ruling France at the opening of the eleventh century. Ferdinand Lot observed that the term would have been more suitable for the dynasty than the name of Capetian that in fact won out. Lot even helps us to understand why Hugonid dropped out of contention: the third Hugh in the family died prematurely in 1025 after having been associated as king for almost eight years with his father Robert the Pious, and the name went with him.63 Modern usage, in spite of Lot’s encouragement, has not redressed the balance. The ancestors of the Capetians are invariably called Robertians, after Robert the Strong, a nobleman who died heroically in 866 while holding a great command in the kingdom of Charles the Bald; it was Robert’s great-grandson who became king in 987.64 If we wish to understand ‘Hugas’ and ‘Hugones,’ we are well advised to look away from both Robert the Strong and the kingship of Hugh Capet. Our attention should focus instead on the region that Robert was governing at his death, and on two mighty but non-royal Hughs whose associations with the same region were at least as long and valorous as his.

Robert the Strong won his fame as leader of the district called Neustria, corresponding to the part of the Carolingian dominions situated between the Seine and Loire rivers. In Merovingian days, Neustria had been the extensive ‘new realm’ centered on Paris that Clovis acquired at the expense of Syagrius, the last Roman ruling in Gaul; it was also the dominant regnum of the seventh century. When the early Carolingians brought into being a vast ‘middle Francia’ extending from Paris to the Rhine and beyond, the original Neustria was superseded by a smaller district between Seine and Loire to which, by the mid-ninth century, the old name was routinely applied in histories and charters. The inhabitants of this territory, though generally classifiable as Franks, were recognized to have a distinctive identity, expressed by a variety of colourless terms; they were Transsequani and Ultrasequanenses as well as Neustrians. Finally, after an interval of eclipse, ‘Neustria’ was revived in the early eleventh century by authors like Dudo of St. Quentin who used it in a pseudo-antiquarian sense. In this third definition, Neustria was meant to be the primitive or original name of the territory that, by then, was vulgarly known as Normandy.65

The district relevant to our concerns is the Carolingian land between Seine and Loire. If it fell short of being a regnum when mentioned in the partition of 806, it approximated this status when assigned to young Charles (our Charles the Bald) in 838 and when Charles gave it to his son Louis in 856. Neustria was one of the two regna attributed to Louis III in the partition of 879. In 898, Charles the Simple named Robert, son of Robert the Strong, to be its princeps, and this Robert’s son, Hugh the Great, was known to the annalist Flodoard as the princeps of the Transsequani. (The head of a regnum, when not royal, was characteristically called princeps.)66 The name most commonly applied to this land evoked memories of Clovis and other Merovingians. Carolingian Neustria embraced both a smaller territory and a people whose distinctiveness one poet expressed in the 880s by saying that ‘Francia’ rejoiced at someone’s kingship despite his being a ‘Neustrian’ (Nustricus).67 Yet there was nothing consecrated or solemn about the regional name. Though exotic to our ears, and perhaps already to Dudo’s, Neustria meant no more than ‘new realm’; once the fifth-century novelty had worn off, the label could have been little more stirring than one derived from the cardinal points. The persistent alternation of geographical names with ‘Neustrians’ in Carolingian annals helps to explain the hiatus after which ‘Neustria’ was revived in an antiquarian sense. It seems that the Carolingian regnum was firmer in its frontiers and in the Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl of its inhabitants than in its nomenclature.68

Over the decades, the men from between Seine and Loire were headed not only by Robert the Strong but also by the two Hughs who matter to us. We know the first as Hugh the Abbot, most prominent from 866 to the 880s, and the second as Hugh the Great, active from 923 to 956. They were not blood relatives. Hugh the Abbot succeeded to Robert’s command in Neustria, and the later Hugh followed his father as princeps of this regnum.69 But that is only part of their story, for the two Hughs acted on more than a regional stage. Hugh the Abbot distinguished himself as regent and strong man of West Francia from 877 to his death.70 Hugh the Great was kingmaker in 936 and 954; he married a sister of King Athelstan in 926 and, twelve years later, a sister of Otto I of Germany. He also begat the Hugh whom we know as Hugh Capet.71 A final detail merits notice. As the first Hugh in Neustria had succeeded a Robert (at best a cousin if a relative at all), so the second Hugh followed another Robert, his father, whose control of the regnum between Seine and Loire filled most of the interval between the two Hughs. These repetitions help us to understand why historians of the late tenth century believed that homonyms were a major difficulty in the writing of political history.72 The Hughs and Roberts were just as liable to being telescoped as were the Charleses, Louises, Ottos, and Williams. As though to illustrate the problem, William of Malmesbury would manage in a brief story to roll Hugh the Abbot, Hugh the Great, and Hugh Capet into one and the same successor of a certain King Louis, whom he called the last of the Carolingians.73

If we wish to find a Frankish regnum whose denizens were ever called Hugas or Hugones, there cannot be a better candidate than this one. The region between Seine and Loire could, through the name Neustria, be associated with Clovis/Louis and the foundation of the Frankish kingdom; its inhabitants in the ninth and early tenth centuries formed a people normally distinguished from the Franks north of the Seine; the regional name had none of the durability of such terms as Burgundy, Aquitaine, or Bavaria; and, by the time the second Hugh flourished, the first one had been dead long enough to evoke an already misty past: the subjects of Hugh the Great could have identified themselves by his name while honestly believing that it was traditional for them to be so called. How were the sometime Neustrians commonly labelled in the early tenth century? When West Frankish envoys appeared at the court of King Athelstan in 928 and 936, how did they express the dignity of their sponsor Hugh, whom Flodoard calls the prince of the Transsequani? We do not know, but the poem Beowulf and the items from Saxony offer a suggestive hint.

The inhabitants of two other late Carolingian regna are known to have been identified, more or less durably, with former kings. In Widukind and later German authors through the twelfth century, the names Karoli, Karlenses, and Karlingi are used to designate the West Franks or subjects of the king of France: ‘Francorum regnum, quod a Karolo nomen habet.’ There is a connection here with the idea, embodied in the chansons de geste and elsewhere, that the Carolingians, though ruling over many nations, were characteristically French. As Lot explains, this nomenclature resulted from late circumstances rather than ancient history; members of the Carolingian family reigned in West Francia for seventy-five more years than they did in Germany, with the result that the family came to look distinctively French.74

The second instance of a name derived from a ruler is the more familiar one of Lotharingia or Lorraine. In the imperial division of 843, Lothair I obtained a band of territory running from the North Sea to Italy and Rome. Lothair’s kingdom was divided in 855 among his three sons. Its northern portion – the old Austrasia, including the capital city of Aachen and the cradle of the Carolingian family – went to Lothair II, a man best known for his marital troubles. When the second Lothair died in 869 he left no legitimate heir, and the territory was long disputed by his collaterals. No other Lothair gained control of the regnum, but two generations were enough. We learn from Regino of Prüm that, by the close of the ninth century, the name of Lothair was firmly associated with this land. It was only a matter of time until the coinage Lotharingia came along.75

The naming of territories and peoples after their rulers is a more unusual and evanescent phenomenon than these examples may suggest. The learned doctrine that tribes are descent groups called after a common ancestor is rarely confirmed outside books. But when a realm was shared out among brothers, as the Frankish one was by the Carolingians as well as the Merovingians, a convenient way to indicate the transitory character of the division was to call each share the regnum of so-and-so.76 Circumstances sometimes made such ostensibly mortal labels surprisingly durable. Gregory of Tours shows that ‘the Franks who had formerly obeyed the older Childebert’ retained enough group consciousness some eighteen years after the death of Childebert I to engage in concerted action against his third successor.77 This instance was surely not unique, but there is no parallel to it in surviving evidence; none of the documented names of Merovingian regna is that of a royal personage. In the ninth century, the circumstances leading to the crystallization of the term Lorraine seem to have been the childlessness of Lothair II, and his subjects’ desire to perpetuate his regnum as a unit, rather than anyone’s affectionate remembrance of either king.78 Yet it may not be entirely coincidental that the moment when ‘the Lothairs’ became everyone’s name for the former Austrasians was close to the time when, for other reasons, ‘the Charleses’ became a frequent German epithet for the West Franks.

Widukind, while composing a legend about dim antiquity, disguised Clovis as King Huga; Beowulf and the Quedlinburg Annals intimate that certain ancient Franks were properly called ‘the Hughs.’ How are we to account for these curious ideas? What epoch could have furnished them with a historical basis? The most distant past offers nothing better than the Chauci, and the Merovingian age, though its royalty is well documented, also lacks eponymous Hughs. The only constellation of circumstances that holds the promise of an explanation occurs at the close of the ninth century and in the early decades of the tenth, when the Nustrici living between Seine and Loire, whom contemporaries explicitly distinguished from Franci, could in fact be identified with princes called Hugh, a name that by then enjoyed an at least left-handed association with royal blood and was exceptionally popular among the Frankish aristocracy. The colourlessness of ‘Neustria’ and of its geographical alternatives left the inhabitants of this regnum as open to renaming themselves as were those Franks to the northeast who changed from ‘Austrasians’ into Lotharii. But, unlike the latter territory, neither the lands between Seine and Loire nor the name Hugh survived the tenth century as an associated unit; the political disintegration of the region is known to have been one of the costs of Hugh Capet’s kingship, and the Hugonids became identified, though only briefly as we saw, with their new and loftier rank.79 There was a short time span nevertheless during which the Franks sometimes called ‘Neustrian’ might have been known as Hugas. It could not have begun until after the death of Hugh the Abbot, when some Transsequani had scope for expressing a pro-Carolingian resistance to the current Robertian regime by invoking the name of their late leader; and its zenith would have been reached within the three decades that it took until a new Hugh, son of the second Robert, effaced whatever trace of opposition the eponym contained.80 Although a text conclusively attesting to such nomenclature would be welcome, the evidence of Beowulf and the two Saxon histories is perhaps enough to cap the complicated circumstances that have now been traced. The Quedlinburg annalist need not have been wrong to suggest that ‘Hugones’ was an ancient epic name for Franks, provided the moment of poetic inventiveness is sought a century or less before the annals were written rather than in a remoter age.81

* * *

Within two years of the first printed edition of Beowulf, the digressions about Hygelac’s raid were recognized to be paralleled by the report of Gregory of Tours about the Dane Chlochilaic.82 Ideas concerning the historicity of the poem have always hinged on these passages, which have often been thought to document the oral commemoration among the Anglo-Saxons of events from their distant continental past. After our examination of the evidence, the historical assessment of Beowulf seems still to depend on the Frankish digressions, but the reason for their importance is different: in the names Hetware and Hugas, they provide a pair of detectable anachronisms that may guide us toward the date when the poem was composed.

However vague Gregory of Tours is about the locale of Hygelac’s raid, he never intimates that the Danes rowed up the Rhine in order to attack an inoffensive district situated at three days’ journey from the coast.83 The eighth-century LHF was responsible for injecting the inhabitants of the pagus Attoarius into the story. Its author often used geographical details to embellish his abridgement of Gregory; he named the Attoarii as Hygelac’s victims because of a famous incident of the year 715. By the addition of this geographical improbability, the author lent drama and verisimilitude to his narrative of the attack of 200 years before. When the Beowulf poet speaks about the Hetware and adopts both of the other departures of the LHF from Gregory of Tours, he reveals that the LHF was his source. The more definite terminus a quo for the poem that this finding provides tends to confirm rather than to undermine the currently orthodox date of composition. Hardly anyone should be upset to learn that Beowulf was probably written no earlier than the latter half of the eighth century.

The poet’s reference to Hugas poses a more arduous problem than the Hetware. Besides being unattested in early sources, the name is a very odd appellation for ancient Franks, the more so as Frankish royal names are one of the few subjects about whose documentation we have little cause for complaint. Yet the close relationship between Hugas and Franks in Beowulf is beyond doubt. The usual explanation for this anomaly – that old poems, transmitted orally, were the source not only for the Hugas in Beowulf but also for Clovis as King Huga in Widukind and for the Franks as Hugones in the Annals of Quedlinburg – is sustained by little else than a dubious theory of early Germanic poetry. Documented history, which proved useful in the case of the Hetware, may also help us to do better with the Hugas.

There is a recorded moment when men named Hugh controlled a Frankish regnum. The region best known to us as Neustria formed a unit that combined a link to early Merovingian history with an acknowledged distinctiveness in the West Frankish kingdom of the ninth and tenth centuries; from 866 to the 880s the Neustrians were headed by Hugh the Abbot, from 923 onward by Hugh the Great. Whatever is to be precisely made of these facts, only they and the circumstances that accompany them provide a historical basis for the curious nomenclature adopted in Beowulf, Widukind, and the Annals. It is possible that, for a few decades, the Transsequani were known as ‘the Hughs’; it would be very hard to find such an eponym, to which Beowulf and the two histories attest, materializing at any other place or time.

The implications of this argument for the date of Beowulf seem to be that the poem was written no earlier than in the second quarter of the tenth century. Its terminus a quo would have to be fixed, not at 727, but near the year 923, when Hugh the Great took charge of his Neustrian patrimony.84 Palaeographers tell us that the manuscript of Beowulf was written comfortably later than this.85 If the language and metre of the poem do not impose an earlier date – and it seems to be agreed that they do not – then the historical criterion offered by the name Hugas may merit consideration. Its main disadvantage is to point to a much later period for the composition of Beowulf than most commentators have thought likely. Whether we can live with such a date remains to be seen.

ALEXANDER CALLANDER MURRAY

In The Audience of Beowulf, Dorothy Whitelock rightly reminded students of Beowulf that to date the poem it is not enough to demonstrate that it fits into a particular historical context without exploring the suitability of other contexts.1 That such an obvious point needs to be made is symptomatic of the reluctance to look outside the age of Bede.2 A number of factors account for this reluctance, but behind the scholarly reasons for an early date, and behind the richness of sources for the age of Bede which makes a case possible, the traditional dating of ca. 700 also rests upon – to use E.G. Stanley’s phrase – ‘a conspiracy of romantic hopes.’3 It is as well to admit that to most of us the value of Beowulf, as either a literary or a historical monument, would increase in proportion to the earliness of its date. This has been a fundamental characteristic of Beowulf studies from the beginning, though usually each major reassessment of the poem has tended to bring the possible range for a date nearer the date of the manuscript. Yet the closer the composition of Beowulf approaches 1000, the harder it becomes to accept it as a window on the migration period and the origins of English literature and society. The extent to which Beowulf has been used as the principal source for early Scandinavian history, for instance, is considerable,4 and if it should prove to be the creation of a ninth- or tenth-century poet many a chapter on the early history of the north would surely have to be rewritten. These considerations, not surprisingly, have tended to concentrate scholarly efforts upon investigating an early historical context for the poem, which accounts for the pastiche of commonplace and irrelevant connections made between the worlds of Bede and Beowulf. The remarkable discovery at Sutton Hoo has also focused attention upon a possible seventh-century background to the poem. Sutton Hoo and related finds are often said to lend weight to the hopes of the traditional dating;5 and archaeology is now invoked as being more likely to illuminate the poem’s origins than literary history.6 Perhaps one day, but certainly not at present. There are parallels between the material world of Beowulf and the equipment and artifacts of the sixth and seventh centuries which illuminate our understanding of the poem, but until there are discoveries from the ninth and tenth centuries comparable to the richness of Sutton Hoo and the Vendel-period graves, it is foolhardy to draw any conclusions about date from the silence of the later archaeological record. Even where we do have a fairly clear idea of the changing military technology of the early middle ages, the results when applied to Beowulf are, to say the least, inconclusive. Certain terms in the poem, for example, pretty clearly refer to pattern-welded sword blades, and we know that such blades were in use in sixth- and seventh-century England. But there are also English examples from the viking period; pattern-welding continued into the ninth century and blades made by this technique remained in use long after that date.7 There is no reason, in fact, why a ninth- or tenth-century poet would not be familiar with pattern-welded weapons and the poetic terminology describing them; indeed, he might find the terms particularly appropriate for the ancient heirlooms of his heroes.

Since The Audience of Beowulf, Dorothy Whitelock’s rehabilitation of the old suggestion of the age of Offa of Mercia for the composition of Beowulf has found support and convincingly extended the terminus ad quem to the late eighth century.8 Yet she rejects the likelihood of a later viking-age context on the grounds that a poem seemingly favourable to the Danes could not have been composed in English England between the 830s and the reign of Knut; any attempt to give it a viking-age date would have to place it, as did Schücking, in the tenth century in the court of an Anglo-Danish king in the Danelaw, although she sees linguistic difficulties because the language of these courts was Norse.9 In general the argument excluding a ninth-century date or later suggests among the English the kind of attitude of mind that would change a Battenberg to a Mountbatten or a German shepherd to an Alsatian; as a view of ninth- or tenth-century English reactions to the Danes it is too uniform and naïve. It is also an argument which makes the preservation and transmission of the poem all the more remarkable.10 Whitelock’s approach suggests that there are two aspects to the problem. (1) Do the social and political conditions of the Danelaw in the ninth and tenth centuries preclude composition of Beowulf in an area of Scandinavian hegemony? The problem of the language of the northern courts seems to me irrelevant, unless we could be sure Beowulf was a court composition. More to the point is that English and Dane often shared a community of interest which could be variously directed against expansion from the south or Norse intrusion.11 In general nothing precludes an English poem with Danish references being composed in regions under Scandinavian rulers; nor need a poet originating from one of these regions be loath to deal with Danish materials. However, there are specific elements in Beowulf, I believe, which make it very unlikely that this poem was the product of an independent Anglo-Scandinavian principality. (2) Do the hostilities between English and Danes preclude an English poem with favourable reference to Danish antiquities being composed and finding a receptive audience in either English England throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, or the Danelaw under West-Saxon rule? This question forms the larger context of the following pages. One might note that the preservation of the poem largely in late West-Saxon already shows that for some reason it did find a receptive audience. But I would like to approach the question from the specific standpoint of the nature of Anglo-Saxon interest in royal genealogy in the viking period. The implications of Kenneth Sisam’s work on this material, which will be considered below, and which have generally been passed over as regards the dating of the poem, make it plain why Englishmen would be interested in the Danish context of Beowulf; more importantly, they also point to positive reasons for placing the composition of the poem in the late ninth century or later.

At the outset it is worthwhile considering the reasoning behind the old and attractive theory which connects the Beowulf poet with the court of Offa of Mercia.12 The gratuitousness of the Offa episode, the ‘superlative praise’ reserved for the Anglian hero, and the inclusion of Offa of Angle in the genealogy of the Mercian royal house have suggested that the Offa digression was meant to flatter the ancient king’s namesake, Offa of Mercia. It is very likely that, by the eighth century at any rate, a reference to the continental Offa would bring to mind the Mercian line of kings, although the abruptness of the transition and unsuitability of the allusion as a whole has equally suggested an interpolation. The Offa episode, however, is not the only instance of possible contemporary dynastic flattery in Beowulf. A far more significant example occurs in the opening lines of the poem describing the arrival of Scyld Scefing. By the late ninth and tenth centuries Scef and Scyld were regarded as the ancestors of the West-Saxon dynasty. As far as the date of the poem is concerned, little attention has been paid to this point of contact between Beowulf and the Wessex kings because of the prevailing conviction that the poem is of early date and of Anglian origin. Yet if there are Anglian elements in Beowulf, there are of course many good reasons why by the late ninth and tenth centuries an Anglian poet might wish to begin his epic by acknowledging the ancestors of Alfred or his successors; there are also many good reasons why a patron with West-Saxon connections would appreciate and take interest in the purported ‘Danish’ background of the surviving native line of English kings and why reference to Offa of Angle would elicit friendly response. These are points which I will come back to, but to begin with it is necessary to have a closer look at the Anglo-Saxon genealogies in the context of Beowulf. This will help clarify the important connections between the heroic world of the Beowulf poet and the late fictional creations of the Anglo-Saxon genealogists. It will also tell us something about the attitude of the English towards Danish antiquities during the period of viking invasion and English reconquest.

In some respects the origins of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies appear as intractable as Beowulf’s. Fortunately, however, since the work of Kenneth Sisam13 we are far better able to understand the development of these compilations than were earlier scholars. In general Sisam has shown that the earlier genealogical material purports to be, the more artificial are its elements and the more chronologically recent its manufacture. The expansion backward of the royal pedigrees took place in a number of phases. The earliest perceptible stratum of the genealogies took the royal pedigrees back to Woden. This appears to have been the extent of the genealogists’ art in the age of Bede. A further development, fully completed for some kingdoms by the late eighth century (though not Wessex), gave Woden a progenitor and then ancestors leading through several generations to Geat. The latest expansion, which is ninth-century, was limited to the West-Saxon dynasty and it is here that we find close parallels with Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s.a. 855 gives a genealogy for Æthelwulf, who died that year, which contains, among others, Sceldwa (Scyld) and Sceaf (Scef). The pedigree of Æthelwulf appears in two forms: a longer form found in the surviving tradition of the Chronicle and related texts, and a shorter form, much closer to the genealogy of the Beowulf poet, which is given by Æthel-weard in his chronicle composed some short time after 975.14 Æthelweard was himself a descendant of Æthelwulf and his interest in family matters was considerable.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (late 9th C.)

Æthelweard (late 10th C.)

Beowulf

…

Noah

Sceaf

Scef

Scef

Bedwig

Hwala

Hathra

Itermon

Heremod

Sceldwa

Scyld

Scyld

Beaw

Beo

Beo[wulf]

Tætwa

Tetuua

Healfdene

Geat

Geat

…

…

…

…

There is no doubt that the pedigree of the West-Saxon kings going back to Scyld and Scef is viking-age, and that it almost certainly was created in the late ninth century in the reign of Alfred. Earlier scholars attributed this fiction to the court of Æthelwulf since he is the subject of the chronicle entry, and believed the entry under the year of his death marked the end of an earlier annal incorporated into the Chronicle. But both these ideas are certainly mistaken. The entry under 855 is no longer thought to be the conclusion of an earlier compilation. The Chronicle from about 840, including Æthelwulf’s pedigree, is now generally ascribed to the ‘Alfredian’ annalist of the late ninth century.15 Æthelwulf’s pedigree would serve for all his successors, particularly Alfred, who was still alive when the annalist was writing.16 The novelty of this creation is apparent if we compare it with other West-Saxon genealogical materials current in the ninth century. For instance, the West-Saxon Regnal Table, revised as late as Alfred’s reign, knows only of descent from Woden.17

What conclusions can be drawn from the attribution in the late ninth century of ‘Danish’ ancestors to the West-Saxon kings? In the first place, the attribution clearly contradicts the notion that a poem featuring the ancient Danes could not have been written in English England between the 830s and the reign of Knut. Precisely during this period supporters and members of the West-Saxon dynasty were claiming descent for the kings of England from the ‘Danish’ Scyld and Scef. Another conclusion, I think, must be drawn from this late genealogical fiction, and that is that the Danish presence in England was in some way a stimulus to the creator of Æthelwulf’s pedigree. David Dumville has recently stressed the ideological and propagandist value of early medieval genealogies; at the time of its creation a genealogy represented not only antiquarianism but also current relationships and aspirations.18 This characteristic of genealogical speculation is clearly what accounts for the West-Saxon interest in Scandinavian ancestry. By the early years of Alfred’s reign the Danish presence in England was longstanding; as early as the 830s and 840s big battles had been fought in southern England against the vikings. By the 860s and 870s this presence was made permanent by the Danish suppression of the independent northern English kingdoms and by the creation of Scandinavian kingdoms and the settlement of Danes in Northumbria, East Anglia, and eastern Mercia. Wessex knew that from now on it would be dealing with Scandinavian rulers and not the old dynasties of the Heptarchy. Æthelwulf’s pedigree, extending beyond the old termination of Geat into a new line of Danish kings and heroes, reflects the political realities of late ninth-century England. It also reflects the aspirations of the West-Saxon kings. A Danish background was intended to give them prestige and leverage among the petty and disunited Scandinavian kings and earls of northern England and to support the claim of West-Saxon suzerainty over the north. The evidence of the West-Saxon genealogy shows that the Danish invasions and settlements did not lead Englishmen to disassociate themselves from the Scandinavian heroic age. On the contrary, the heroic North attracted them, and their interest in it permitted them to establish a common background for contemporary political and ethnic relations.

Some of the interest in specifically Scandinavian material which is found in Beowulf and the West-Saxon pedigree also appears in the Alfredian translation of Orosius’ History, which contains a long addition to the Latin work giving a description of Scandinavia.19 The sources for the description were two navigators, Ohthere, a Norwegian, and Wulfstan, who had told their travels to their lord, Alfred. The addition to Orosius, which extends the original homeland of the English from the mainland to the Danish islands, is singularly free of references to depredations in England or of condemnations of northern heathenism. The readers of Orosius knew that all the northern lands described were pagan, and that some were the source of the Danes now in England (just as they had formerly been the source of the original English), yet this elicits no adverse comment. Even the description of Esthonian funeral practices, which presupposes that an English reader would know about the cremation of the dead, is a subject of genuine curiosity and not an excuse for vituperation. To Hodgkin the chief lesson to be learned from the northern geography of Orosius was the absence of bitterness toward the Danes: ‘the stories wipe out any idea that Scandinavians and English were glaring at one another in hatred across the North sea.’20 What is equally important, heathen practices and heathen peoples, as in Beowulf, could interest without scandalizing. Elsewhere, even the problem of the virtuous pagan could elicit the sympathy of the Old English translator. Construing an ambiguous passage in Leonidas’ favour, he permits the hero to trust in God to shield him and his men for better times.21

Another conclusion which must be considered is that Danish sources lie behind some of Æthelwulf’s pedigree. Such a possibility is not unlikely, and could have influenced its form anytime from the period of Alfred to Æthelweard. The earlier strata of the West-Saxon genealogies show dependence on northern genealogical sources,22 and this process may have continued with the coming of the Danes; Æthelweard’s genealogical material, we know, was subject to Scandinavian influence because in it he introduces the names Balder (Baldr) and Withar (Viðarr).23 It is likely also that indigenous material was adapted to the new ‘Danish’ context of English polity. This may be the case with Scef, who is known to later continental sources only through English influences. In pre-Conquest English sources he appears only in Widsith, the pedigree of Æthelwulf, and Beowulf. If the relative chronology of Beowulf is left out of the question for a moment, it seems to me significant that in the early English tradition of Widsith (1. 32) he is a ruler of the Lombards, but in the viking-age West-Saxon pedigree he is put in a Danish context; and in Beowulf he is the progenitor of a Danish line of kings.24

The resemblance between the West-Saxon genealogies and the beginning of Beowulf is best seen if, with the poem in mind, we consider the differences between Æthelweard and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Each represents a distinct perception of Æthelwulf’s ancestry. Æthelweard (with Beowulf) takes Scef as the end point, while the Chronicle continues the ascent through Noah to Adam, claiming in the process that Scef was born in the ark. More significantly, while Æthelweard (with Beowulf) regards Scyld as the son of Scef, the Chronicle separates them with five descendants, including Heremod, who appears in Beowulf as a Danish king ruling earlier than Scyld. We would be in a better position to interpret these differences if we could be sure of the condition of the chronicle archetype and its relation to Alfred. Stenton thought it probable that Æthelweard preserved the pedigree of the original Chronicle. Sisam, agreeing that the five descendants between Scef and Scyld are later additions, believed Æthelweard simply maintained sounder family tradition in the face of additions to the Chronicle texts.25 However we explain the differences between the Chronicle and Æthelweard, these sources, nevertheless, represent by the tenth century two distinct traditions current about the descent of the English kings – one attached to a cadet branch of the West-Saxon dynasty, and another to at least one form of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

That a cadet branch should maintain a genealogical tradition is worth noting. Æthelweard was not the only person in the ninth and tenth centuries with important connections to the royal house: as Cyril Hart has noted, most ealdormen of this period were scions of cadet branches of the West-Saxon dynasty.26 Whether others took as much interest in family matters as Æthelweard is impossible to say. Acknowledgement of their descent in poetry, however, was no doubt appreciated. Interest in genealogical material was probably not limited to Æthelweard, particularly in circles with a claim to learning; Alfred’s Handbook, we know, contained genealogical material of some kind.27 A poem beginning in the manner of Beowulf would be bound, and surely would be intended, to catch the attention of an audience or patron with West-Saxon connections.

As to the malleability of the genealogical material in the traditions we have discussed, this should not be surprising. It is characteristic of genealogical data generally; and indeed Sisam has used the fluid character of the traditions to question the notion that mention of the heroic names in the lists necessarily unlocked a store of well-ordered information to the Anglo-Saxons.28 The prevalence of discrepancies in seemingly well-ordered genealogical material should be kept in mind because, considering the divergent traditions about Æthelwulf’s pedigree found in the closely related accounts of the Chronicle and Æthelweard, the differences between Æthelweard and Beowulf are slight. Both agree, as opposed to the Chronicle, that Scyld was the son of Scef and that the latter is the starting point of the line of descent. Whether both agree as to the next generation is a question which, for our purposes, can be left aside.29 To the creators of genealogies and to poets the number of offspring and descendants attributable to Scyld is limited only by imagination and credibility ; however, Scyld could only have one father. That Scyld the son of Scef was the ancestor of English and Danish lines of kings is a pleasing fiction upon which genealogist and poet could agree. Both Beowulf and Æthelweard also recount in virtually identical terms the story of the foundling who becomes king of the Danes.30 The important point of difference is that in Æthelweard the story is told of Scef, in Beowulf, of Scyld.31 Æthelweard is closely related to Beowulf, but not dependent on it. Although Sisam believed that Beowulf as a whole was of seventh- or eighth-century date, the late creation of the remote stages of Æthelwulf’s pedigree, and the resemblances between Æthelweard and Beowulf convinced him that the introductory episode of the poem was viking-age.32 Unless, along with Sisam, we regard Beowulf as we now have it as a composite work, the Scyld Scefing episode points to a late ninth- or tenth-century date for the composition of the poem.

Drawing on Sisam’s research, Alistair Campbell, in examining the poet’s use of earlier verse sources, has remarked that the story of Scyld Scefing in Beowulf is clearly not based on a lay but upon the annotation to a genealogy.33 That the point of contact between Beowulf and Æthelweard was a genealogical source not only explains the form and content of the Scyld episode, but bears directly upon the date of the poem; all indications show that the genealogical material dealing with Scef, Scyld, and ‘Danish’ heroes was a product of ninth-century speculation. I believe that the mechanics of making and interpreting a genealogical list also account for the story of the foundling being applied variously to Scyld (Beowulf) and to Scef (Æthelweard). In the farthest reaches of Æthelwulf’s pedigree Æthelweard numbers the ascendants and gives their proper name, ending with Scef and an annotation as to his arrival in Scani: ‘octauus decimus Scyld, nonus decimus Scef. Ipse Scef cum uno dromone aduectus est etc.’34 His method differs somewhat from the convention of his Chronicle source and the usual practice of genealogical lists.35 The vernacular sources usually proceed by proper name and patronymic, ending in a patronymic only; occasionally an annotation is also appended. For example, from the Chronicle s.a. 855:

A

Itermon Hraþraing se wæs geboren in ðæe ærce

B,C

Bedwig Sceafing id est filius Noe se wæs geboren on ðære earce Noes

This method can be ambiguous as to whether the appended clause modifies the proper name or the patronymic.36 Considering the resemblances that have already been noted between Beowulf and Æthelweard it seems to me likely that the poet had access to a late ninth- or tenth-century source identical or closely related to Æthelweard’s in which the termination of the genealogy, ‘Scyld Scefing,’ was followed by a brief (and ambiguous) description of the foundling’s arrival in Scedeland (Beowulf 19; Scani: Æthelweard). The author of Beowulf has understood the story to pertain to ‘Scyld the son of Scef’; Æthelweard has applied it to Scef, the last mentioned ancestor of Æthelwulf.

The reasons for regarding the opening of Beowulf as a contemporary allusion to the West-Saxon dynasty are numerous and strong. Earlier I also agreed that the Offa episode was likely an allusion to the Mercian royal line, which traced its descent from Offa of Angle. Is this an indication that Beowulf is composite? I think not.37 Alfred’s wife Ealhswith was herself a member of the Mercian royal house and consequently could claim descent from Offa of Angle; so could her children.38 In fact in the descendants of Alfred the lines of Scyld and Offa come together in more ways than one: Alfred’s and Ealhswith’s daughter, Æthelflæd, effectively ruled Mercia for seven years in alliance with the West-Saxon king until her death in 918;39 thereafter the kings of Wessex became also the kings of Mercia. Not all the relations of Wessex with the independent traditions of Mercia were harmonious, but some West-Saxon rulers show strong connections with the distinctive traditions of the northern kingdom. Æthelflæd, as ‘Lady of the Mercians,’ under West-Saxon overlordship, led her people successfully against the Danes and, having subjected Derby and Leicester, was on the point of accepting the submission of the people of York on her death. Athelstan, whom Stenton has called ‘the first king of Wessex who was intimate with the Mercian aristocracy’ was brought up in the household of Æthelflæd and her husband Ealdorman Æthelred.40 According to the Mercian Register, before his succession to the West-Saxon throne he was independently chosen as king by the Mercian aristocracy. The poem inserted in the Chronicle celebrating his victory at Brunanburh gives the Mercians equal billing with the West-Saxons as conquerors of the northern coalition. Again, in 957 the distinctive relationship of Mercia to the West-Saxon royal house asserted itself with the Mercian repudiation of Eadwig and the election of his brother Edgar.41 By the late ninth and tenth centuries a poem which opened by flattering the house of Alfred could, without difficulty, also allude to Offa, the great ancestor of the Mercian royal house, because Alfred’s successors were themselves descendants of Offa of Angle and had succeeded to the rule of the self-conscious kingdom of Mercia.

I have emphasized the Mercian links of Athelstan, but his international connections are well known, as is the multinational character of his court and administration.42 Stenton has noted that, although Athelstan himself largely remained in the south, he maintained his authority through the north by requiring the attendance of distant magnates at his court. A large proportion of these provincial rulers appears to have been Scandinavian, and there was apparently no wholesale displacement of Danes by English among the northern aristocracy. Six of the thirteen earls attending him at Colchester in 931, for instance, were probably Danes. A poem such as Beowulf would no doubt go over well in such a group and could be understood on various levels by the audience. The significance of the introduction, which casts the ancestor of the West-Saxon dynasty as a great ruler and protector of the Danes, and founder of a Danish line of kings, would not be lost on an audience of English and Danish retainers and officials; the charter style which calls Athelstan ‘Angelsaxonum Denorumque gloriosissimus rex’43 may be a rarity, even a peculiarity, but it accurately reflects the nature of his kingdom.

However, I do not wish to argue that Beowulf arose in Athelstan’s court, although it could have; nor that it was a propaganda piece, although poetry can serve many purposes.44 We simply happen to know something of the make-up of Athelstan’s councils. What is worth noting is that his kingdom was not built upon the kind of inveterate hostility which would preclude the composition and appreciation of a poem like Beowulf. Also, the Anglo-Scandinavian quality of Athelstan’s court is not peculiar to his reign. His nephew Edgar could be praised as godly and, in the same breath, criticized for his court’s acceptance of heathen manners and foreigners.45 At an earlier date, Alfred, whose interest in heroic poetry is well attested, had employed Scandinavian retainers, if Oh there is any indication, and had received Danish hostages and converts.46 In any case, it may not be necessary to assume that in the viking period Beowulf could only have arisen in a mixed English-Danish milieu, or only during times of relative peace.47 English interest in the heroic age was long standing; this interest, which was hardly extinguished, the genealogies, and Orosius all indicate that the appreciation of the world of Beowulf was genuine, because, in part, of the values it presented, because of the marvels and curiosities it contained, and because it told Englishmen, or so they thought, about their own past as well as that of the Danes.

And if we know very little about the activities and tenor of royal courts in the viking period and before, we know even less about other circumstances which could have produced Beowulf. The genealogical allusion suggests simply that the poem was intended for a patron connected with the West-Saxon dynasty, but he need not have been a king nor an immediate member of the royal family ; he may have been a cleric or layman and his poet could have come from any part of England that the language of the poem will allow.

At the beginning of the notes to his edition of Beowulf Klaeber posted the motto ‘omnia autem probate: quod bonum est, tenete.’ I cannot pretend to have tested every aspect of the poem, but as regards its date of composition, it does seem there is something worth holding: the Scyld episode, springing from ninth-century genealogical interests, is a viking-age allusion to the descent of the West-Saxon kings, and Beowulf, as we now have it, is a late ninth- or tenth-century composition. Sisam’s solution to the conflict between the implications of his own work on the genealogies and the accepted early date of the poem was his belief that the poem was composite and that the introduction was merely a late addition. The theory of a composite poem is, of course, of great antiquity in Beowulf studies. It arose from the belief that the poem as it has survived is somehow out of joint, that the ‘original’ and worthwhile Beowulf was ‘historical’ and ‘pagan’; the funeral of Scyld was traditionally regarded as part of the earliest strata and those passages marked as interpolations usually had a ‘Christian’ flavour.48 As the linguistic case for a patchwork poem failed to maintain itself, however, and as Christianity, and the monsters, were recognized as integral parts of a unified vision, the ‘composite’ Beowulf fell into disfavour. Literary scholars, and others, passing over Sisam’s conclusions about the introductory genealogy and being largely content with the traditional date, have increasingly emphasized the unity of the poem; in particular, the funerals are now seen as integral elements of a single conception. Since it seems unlikely at this stage that a ‘composite’ or ‘revised’ Beowulf could make an easy comeback, the implications for dating the poem are obvious. Although it would be unwise to dismiss out of hand the possibility that Beowulf is composite or underwent extensive revision in the ninth or tenth centuries, clearly the onus is on those who think so to show that some element of the poem can only be dated before the viking age. I am not prepared to judge whether metrical or linguistic considerations can justify an early date, but I doubt that any such historical, literary, or archaeological evidence is forthcoming.

R.I. PAGE

Professor Whitelock argues most cogently for putting Beowulf before the viking age. She writes: ‘The poem is surely pre-Viking Age. It may be true that we should not attach an exaggerated importance to the high terms of praise and respect with which the poet speaks of the Danes and their rulers.... Yet, I doubt whether he would have spoken in these terms during the Viking Age, or whether his audience would have given him a patient hearing if he had. It is not how men like to hear the people described who are burning their homes, pillaging their churches, ravaging their cattle and crops, killing their countrymen or carrying them off into slavery. So, if the poem is later than the time when Viking invasions began in earnest, about 835, it can hardly be placed before the tenth century, and even then it would have to be put, as Schücking puts it, in the court of an Anglo-Danish king in the Danelaw. It could hardly be located in English England until the reign of Cnut, and that is later than our surviving manuscript.’1

The argument seems to me too simple. It implies an unsophisticated audience for a sophisticated poem. Its weakness is that it assumes that all Danes are the same Dane; that because the Anglo-Saxon disliked the Dane who attacked his property and people, he disliked all people of Danish race of whatever time and place. I am not convinced that this is true. It may be that the English could recognise that whether a Dane was praiseworthy or not depended on whether he stayed in Denmark or came to ravage England. Beowulf, after all, is a poem about Danes in Denmark, not marauders, and perhaps the English who listened to it were mature enough to make the distinction.

One Anglo-Saxon who could distinguish was Athelstan of Wessex; it is worth considering his relationship with the vikings. Most interesting are his dealings with Norwegians – I do not think the distinction between Norsemen and Danes significant for the present argument. Thirteenth-century Icelandic historians and historical novelists linked Athelstan closely with the court of Haraldr hárfagr of Norway. Best-known is the story that Snorri Sturluson tells in his version of Haraldr’s life in Heimskringla.2 Snorri saw historical events in personal terms: to him the diplomacy between Englishman and Norwegian becomes a witty and rather absurd story of two men of mettle striving to outwit one another. He tells how Athelstan sent an embassy to Haraldr, ostensibly offering him a jewelled sword. As Haraldr touched the hilt the English emissary laughed at the success of the trick, ‘Now you have seized hold of it as our king wanted you to. You must be his liegeman since you have accepted a sword from him.’ Pausing till his anger had cooled, Haraldr plotted a retort. He sent to England his honoured friend Haukr hábrόk bearing Haraldr’s infant son Hákon, born of the aged king’s mistress Thóra morstrst, who was known as ‘konungs ambátt,’ the king’s serving-maid. Haukr marched into the English monarch’s great hall in style. When Athelstan had welcomed him formally, Haukr set the baby on the king’s lap and said, ‘King Haraldr bade you foster up his serving-maid’s child.’ Snorri explains the point of this lumbering joke: ‘the saying goes that a man who fosters another’s child is lower in rank than him.’ Only later and in something of an aside did Haukr suggest that the child was also the Norwegian king’s. In the whole episode Haukr played his part with such dash that Athelstan restrained his natural impulse to cut Hákon in pieces. Instead he took the child, brought him up honourably, had him christened, gave him the great sword Quernbiter, and, on Haraldr’s death, helped him seize the Norwegian crown. Snorri gave the story no motivation save an ambitious quest for recognition and respect by the two kings. He did not invent the tale, nor even probably his way of telling it. Fagrskinna, a collection of kings’ sagas roughly contemporary with Heims-kringla, has a similar account, in part using the same phrases, though it is sharper, more biting.3 There Haukr introduces the child by a trick, pretending he has, wrapped in his robe, a present for Athelstan sent by Haraldr in forgiveness for the English king’s arrogant jest. Fagrskinna is less explicit about the child’s paternity though Athelstan realises that its eyes are not those of a servant – a traditional motif in Old Norse literature. It is Haukr who reveals pointedly the social implications of fostering another’s child, and he needs a show of strength to win his way safely out of English hands. In fact, Fagrskinna makes the Norwegians win the contest of wits more openly, but the story is essentially the same as Snorri’s.

There is of course no reason to believe it true in its details, but the central point, that the Norwegian king Hákon had been brought up at the English court, was a commonplace of the Scandinavian historians of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Historia Norwegiae (perhaps ca. 1170) says that Athelstan adopted Hákon as his son, ‘sibi in filium adoptavit,’ and elsewhere calls Hákon ‘alumnus Adalstani regis Angliae,’ foster-son of King Athelstan of England.4 The Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium of Theodoricus monachus (ca. 1180) tells how Haraldr sent one of his sons to Halstanus of England to be brought up and learn the customs of that people, ‘ut nutriretur et disceret morem gentis.’5 Agrip, a short history of the Norwegian kings written at the end of the twelfth century, says only that Haraldr sent Hákon to Athelstan ‘til fóstrs,’ to be fostered up.6 It is presumably from a simple beginning like this that the saga-writers, with their traditional interest in men’s rivalries, developed the story that Snorri records.

We do not know how detailed was the Hákon tradition that the late twelfth century had to build upon. Two facts must have supported it: that Hákon had the nickname ‘Aðalsteinsfóstri,’ Athelstan’s foster-son, and that he was brought up as a Christian, and so came into religious conflict with his fellow-Norwegians. Both can be traced some way back in Scandinavian sources. Hákon is called ‘Adalsteins enka fostri,’ Athelstan’s special foster-son, in the twelfth-century Nóregs kononga tal, a poem which is said to derive from the work of the Icelandic historian Sæmundr Sigfússon who died in 1133.7 The soubriquet ‘Adalstæinsfostri’ occurs in a list of Norwegian kings in Flateyjarbók that could go back to Ari Thorgilsson, Sæmundr’s younger contemporary.8 The earliest use of the term that I know of is in the Bersglisvisur of the skald Sighvatr Thórtharson which, if it is a genuine poem of the early reign of Magnus the Good, dates from the 1030s, barely a century after Hákon’s fostering. The two words ‘Aðalsteins fóstra’ are three lines apart in this verse and presented without explanation, so the nickname must already have been well-known if the hearer was to understand the allusion.9

Hákon’s Christianity, learned in England, is less easy to document from early sources, and it is notorious that his funeral ode, Hákonarmál, is pagan in tone and form.10 Yet the tradition of his Christianity existed in twelfth-century Norway - Ágrip notes it - and there is independent confirmation of a sort in the occasional English mention of an Anglo-Saxon cleric in Norway in the tenth century. William of Malmesbury, listing Glastonbury monks who became bishops in various countries during the reign of Edgar (which would coincide with the later years of Hákon’s rule) gives the obit of one Sigefridus who was bishop in Norway, ‘Norwegensis episcopus.’11

English sources give no warrant for the tale of Haraldr, Hákon, and Athelstan, but they do draw a picture of the Anglo-Saxon king that is consistent with it. They show him active in foreign affairs, furthering his power abroad by marrying his sisters to continental princes. More significant, there is the suggestive set of episodes in tenth-century Frankish texts which show how Athelstan assisted princes of neighbouring, overseas, territories to regain their rights, and how he fostered royal children in his household. Flodoard’s Annals, under the year 936, reports how Ludowicus, son of Charles the Simple, was at the court of his uncle Alstanus. Duke Hugh sent for the lad to take over the West Frankish kingdom, and Athelstan took oaths from the ambassadors before sending him to Francia with certain bishops and other faithful retainers, ‘quem ... accepto prius jurejurando a Francorum legatis, in Franciam cum quibusdam episcopis et aliis fidelibus suis dirigit.’ Later, in 939, Athelstan sent a fleet over to Lewis for his protection, though the chronicler drily remarks that it returned without achieving anything, ‘nullo ... negotio propter quod venerant peracto.’12 More directly, the Chronicle of Nantes speaks of Alan, the young son of the count of Britanny, being brought to England when Britanny was being put in terror of Danish attack. This, says the Chronicle, was the Alan whom Athelstan had sponsored in baptism, ‘quem ipse rex Angliae Adelstannus jam prius ex lavacro sancto susceperat.’ Because of this Christian connection Athelstan was a faithful supporter of Alan, and helped him regain control of his county. Specifically, Alan was brought up at the court of Athelstan, ‘iste vero Alanus cum rege Anglorum Adelstanno ab infantia fuit nutritus.’13 Athelstan’s treatment of Alan is so like his behaviour to Hákon (as Snorri and others tell it) that the one tends to confirm the general truth of the other.

For a specific link between Athelstan and Norway in the English sources we again turn to William of Malmesbury who produced his Gesta regum Anglorum in a set of editions between ca. 1125 and 1145, that is about a century earlier than Snorri and a couple of hundred years after Athelstan. William’s account of the English king is a detailed one and he had some written sources for it. One of them was in a certain ancient book, ‘in quodam ... volumine vetusto,’ but this, he says, he did not quote because of the bombast of its language.14 He had a second source, a poem in Latin rhyming hexameters, which Michael Lapidge dates to the late eleventh or early twelfth century. Part of William’s history of Athelstan quotes this text, some seems to paraphrase it, but it is not always clear whether, when he is writing of that king, he is using this specific source or rewriting some other which he does not define. At one point he talks of the book ‘from which I have gathered all this,’ but does not make clear how much of his own prose that refers to. He further distinguishes what he has written of the king in true faith, ‘fide integra,’ from the more doubtful material taken from old songs corrupted in the course of years, ‘cantilenis per successiones temporum detritis.’15

Apparently in the more reliable section is William’s account of an embassy from Haraldr of Norway to Athelstan. William introduces it in a general discussion of the English king’s relations with neighbouring peoples, the control he established over other nations within Britain, and the alliances he made with continental princes. Within this context, says William, all Europe declared his praises, so that foreign kings were glad to win his friendship. Hence a certain Haraldr, king of the Norsemen, ‘Haroldus quidam, rex Noricorum,’ sent him a ship with ambassadors called Helgrim and Osfrid, whom the king received at York.16

Again, there seems no reason to doubt the general truth of this story. William’s quite extensive description of the ship is probably rhetorical, and should not be taken too seriously, any more than the elaborate accounts of viking fleets in Encomium Emmae reginae. Otherwise the story is convincing enough. The ambassadors are well named. The place, York, is a plausible one, for Athelstan was several times in the north of England, and for a period occupied the city, which was accessible to a sea-going ship as recent excavations have shown.17 There is a good reason why Haraldr and Athelstan should have made diplomatic contact like this, though William does not give it. Certainly the two kings had a common interest, for they would have been wise to join together in destroying groups of dissident Norse vikings who had fled Haraldr’s tyranny and wanted to use the British Isles as a base to attack the homeland from. Sir Frank Stenton saw this as the reason why the kings got together,18 but that is rather to take William’s story as more important than Snorri’s. Hákon’s history is remarkably like those of Lewis and Alan who both came to Athelstan for security in time of trouble. There may then have been this second reason why the Norwegian mission came to England. Hákon, we are to believe from the Norse sources, was the son of Haraldr’s old age, and only the youngest of several claimants to the kingship. The favourite, and the man who got the job, was his elder brother Eirikr, who later earned the title Bloodaxe, or more explicitly ‘fratrum interfector,’ ‘brœðra sφkkvi,’ brother-killer.19 Hákon’s maternal kin may have sent him to Athelstan so that he could be kept safe from Eirikr’s vindictiveness and in due course have his chance of getting the throne, aided by a powerful prince. There is yet another reason why Athelstan should have welcomed the Norwegian king’s son to his household. The English kings sometimes tried to use Christianity as a weapon against the vikings, presumably believing that it might mitigate their ferocity or encourage them to spare the wealthy religious foundations that were often their prey. A Christian Norway, if it could be achieved, might provide less formidable foes than a pagan one.

I have rehearsed the material in detail to show how strong is the evidence that Athelstan was on good terms with the leading power in Norway. Yet despite this, indeed perhaps because of it, he was a remorseless enemy to marauding Norwegians. The episode in his reign that procured for him eternal glory, ‘ealdorlangne tir,’ was the battle of Brunanburh, where he led his army to victory against a mixed invading army of Scots and Irish Norsemen. Both nations are named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s poem on the conflict, which dwells on the discomfiture of the Norwegians:

þær geflemed wearð
Norðmanna bregu,      nede gebeded,
to lides stefne      litle weorode ...
Gewitan him þa Norþmen      nægledcnearrum,
dreorig daraða laf,      on Dinges mere
ofer deop wæter      Difelin secan,
eft Iraland,      æwiscmode.20

The invasion that led to Brunanburh was in part the effect of Athelstan’s policies in the Norwegian kingdom of York. The Chronicle tells that in 926 Athelstan and Sihtric, the Norse leader, met at Tamworth where Sihtric married Athelstan’s sister. The Norwegian prince died the following year, and York came under the control of one Óláfr, Sihtric’s son by an earlier marriage, supported by his uncle Guthfrith from Ireland. Athelstan drove them out, and for a time occupied the city. Clearly his attitude to Norwegians – or to men who could properly be called ‘Norþmen’ – was ambiguous, and depended upon political circumstances.

There is even a further complication, though it depends on uncertain evidence. If the thirteenth-century Egils saga is to be believed, Athelstan’s army at Brunanburh (if that is rightly identified with the saga’s Vinheiðr) included a contingent of Norsemen, ‘norrœnir menn.’ They were led by two Icelandic brothers descended of a good family in western Norway, Egill and Thórólfr, sons of Skallagrimr.21 Supporting the late prose is a group of lausavisur attributed to Egill and accepted as genuine by many critics though the attribution must always remain a little doubtful. In addition there is a fragment of a drápa composed by Egill in honour of Athelstan and specifically linked by name to that king.22 If this bit of evidence is added to the others, it looks as though Athelstan’s attitudes to men of Norwegian extraction were many and various.

Norwegians are not Danes, though indeed parts of viking-age Norway were several times under Danish control. The Anglo-Saxons were not always alive to the distinction between the two peoples. As a well-known instance, the 787 entry in the Chronicle records three ships that came to the south coast during the reign of Beorhtric of Wessex. Some versions call them ‘ iii scipu Norðmanna of Hereða lande,’ but all texts sum them up by saying, ‘Đæt wæron þa erestan scipu Deniscra manna þe Angelcynnes land gesohton.’ Moreover, not all armies commanded by Danish leaders were made up entirely of Danes. There are two famous cases defined in runic inscriptions from Uppland, Sweden. The stone at Väsby commemorates a man called Ali who was in Knútr’s army; it boasts that he took payment of danegeld from Knútr in England. Úlfr of Yttergärde was even more successful since he collected three lots of geld, one from Tosti, one from Thórkell, and one from Knútr. Sveinn, whose monument is at Husby Lyhundra, also in Swedish Uppland, died in Jutland, ‘but he was to go to England.’ From Galteland, Austagder, Norway, is a stone recording a man ‘who died in the army when Knútr attacked England.’23 Thus, whether the word Dene as used by a later Anglo-Saxon writer had any clear ethnic content must remain in some doubt.

Even more telling in the present argument is the fact that Anglo-Saxon references to vikings were often not racist. Many writers were less concerned that the attackers were Danes or Norwegians than that they were heathens, and expressions like ‘hæðene men,’ ‘hæþen here,’ ‘pagani,’ ‘paganorum infestationes’ are common. To a great extent this is a literary device since the struggle between viking and Englishman was formalised in religious terms, a pattern of thought that occurs as early as the first raids on northern England. In a group of letters that Alcuin wrote to Northumbrians after raiders had pillaged Lindisfarne in 793, the Christian writer interpreted the attack as God warning or punishing an impious race.24 In his letter to Æthelred, king of Northumbria, he rebuked the people through their prince. The evil that had overwhelmed the Northumbrians was unusual and unheard-of, ‘inconsuetum et inauditum malum’; perhaps it was the reward of an equally abominable wickedness. The nobles were avaricious. They robbed and judged harshly, despoiling the people. The people in turn were sinful and luxurious. For precedents Alcuin appealed to both ancient history and scripture, and often adapted holy writ to his purpose. Lindisfarne was God’s chosen vineyard, the vikings the foxes that pillage it. They could not devastate the holy places did God not permit it. God’s intent was to chastise his backsliding people to bring them to eternal life, for ‘whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth.’ Only in God is security. In his letter to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, sent to comfort the monks in their distress, Alcuin put the terrible events of 793 into a historical and biblical context. He compared Lindisfarne to Jerusalem, ablaze in the flames of the Chaldeans; to Rome, sacred with the blood of martyrs, in the power of the barbarians; to Europe attacked by the Goths and Huns. He hoped that Lindisfarne would rise again, as did Europe, now glittering with churches as the sky with stars. The attacked English represent religion, civilisation, a chosen people; the vikings are pagan barbarians.

One further point about Alcuin’s treatment of the Northmen. By definition they come from the North. To Alcuin, indeed to anyone who knew the Old Testament well, the North was the land of the enemies of the chosen race. Notably in Jeremiah, but sometimes elsewhere, the North is seen as the place from which attackers descend upon God’s land, particularly if the people disobey God’s commands. ‘Ab Aquilone pandetur malum super omnes habitatores terrae’; ‘malum ego adduco ab Aquilone, et contritionem magnam’; ‘ecce populus venit de terra Aquilonis, et gens magna consurget a finibus terrae ... crudelis est, et non miserebitur,’ and so on.25 That Alcuin had Jeremiah in mind is shown by his reference to Jerusalem in the hands of the Chaldeans (from Jeremiah 52), for he clearly saw the monastery at Lindisfarne shattered as the Chaldeans had destroyed the temple.26

Thus Alcuin described the viking attack as one by men, not of an alien race, but of an alien religion. The technique is common enough in later Anglo-Saxon writing. It is frequent, for instance, in the ninth-century entries of the Chronicle. The 855/6 entry has an explicit contrast between viking heathenism and the West-Saxon king’s Christian duty and piety: ‘her hæþne men ærest on Sceapige ofer winter sætun; and þy ilcan geare gebocude Æþelwulf cyning teoþan dæl his londes ofer al his rice Gode to lofe, and him selfum to ecere hælo.’ In the 883 entry there is a slightly mysterious episode where the English came into conflict with vikings encamped at London. The English king, Alfred, kept his promise to send alms to Rome and elsewhere, and was rewarded for his faithfulness: ‘and hi þær Godes þances swyðe bentigðe wæron æfter þam gehatum.’27 According to the great 893 entry, Alfred’s army chased the vikings across England that year. In the end the invaders were intercepted and besieged in a fortress at Buttington on the bank of the Severn, where they ran so short of food that they ate most of their horses. Eventually they sallied from their stronghold to take on the English, ‘and þa Cristnan hæfdon sige.’ Though, we are told, part of the viking army had been introduced to Christianity earlier that year, they clearly remained unreclaimed since under stress they reverted to the reprehensible heathen habit of eating (the chronicler uses the word fretan) horse-meat.

Asser’s Life of King Alfred gives firmer stress to this opposition between pagan/viking and Christian/English. Throughout his account of the Danish wars, the Anglo-Saxons are called ‘Christiani’ and the vikings ‘pagani.’ Indeed, the term ‘pagani’ is used consistently throughout the work, and Asser even employs it as an ethnic term in a list of races represented at Alfred’s court: ‘Franci autem multi, Frisones, Galli, pagani, Britones, et Scotti, Armorici.’28 Interesting too are the cases where he diverges from the wording of the Chronicle which is his source: ‘se here’ commonly becomes ‘paganorum exercitus’; ‘feower scip hlæstas Deniscra monna’ (annal 882) becomes ‘paganicas naves’; ‘hloþ) wicenga’ (annal 879) becomes ‘magnus paganorum exercitus.’ Alfred is portrayed as a man working under divine guidance, ‘divino fultus adminiculo,’ ‘divino nutu,’ even learning to read and interpret Latin ‘divino instinctu.’ Perhaps Asser’s expanded account of the battle of Ashdown reveals this type of treatment most clearly.29 The two English leaders, Alfred and his elder brother Æthelred, are servants of God, but in different ways. As the armies took up position, Æthelred was hearing mass, and refused to leave until it was finished, not wanting to desert divine for human service, ‘divinum pro humano ... servitium.’ Alfred had to begin without his brother’s aid, but was supported by God’s help and advice, ‘divino fretus consilio et adiutorio fultus.’ At length Æthelred appeared and started the battle on his own behalf, calling upon the Almighty, ‘invocato magni mundi principe.’ The pagans had taken up the stronger position, on higher ground; despite this the Christians beat them ‘divino iudicio.’

The practice of defining the vikings as heathens rather than as Danes or Norwegians continued for decades. It is found, though sporadically, in later Chronicle entries, and in charters and other legal documents.30 The group of apocalyptic homilies ascribed to Archbishop Wulfstan uses ‘cristen’ as the equivalent of English, and avoids the racial name for the attackers, preferring terms such as ‘wicing,’ ‘sæmen,’ ‘flotmen.’31 The Battle of Maldon calls the invading vikings ‘Dene’ once only (though indeed they included at least a contingent of Norwegians), and otherwise refers to them as ‘wicingas,’ ‘brimliþende,’ ‘sæmen,’ ‘brimmen,’ ‘hæþene,’ ‘æschere,’ ‘laðe gystas,’ ‘wælwulfas,’ ‘lidmen,’ ‘særincas,’ ‘drengas,’ ‘flotan.’ On the other side, the 942 Chronicle entry, the poem on the capture of the Five Boroughs, uses the racial term ‘Dæne,’ but to mean the wretched inhabitants of the Danelaw, oppressed by the heathen Norsemen. These usages make it the less likely that the audience of Beowulf, hearing the glory of the Danes praised and knowing that they lived long ago, ‘in geardagum,’ and far away, ‘Scedelandum in,’ would automatically identify them with the savage fighters who plundered their land.

The viking attacks on England varied a good deal in ferocity, intensity, and effect. The massive later ones, of the reign of Æthelred the Unready, were certainly launched from Denmark and led by princes of the blood, and in their time it might indeed have been hard to get an audience to listen with patience to any praise of the Danes.32 The earlier raids were rather different. Their destructive effect on the English kingdoms and the number of vikings engaged in them have been the subject of controversy in recent years. Some historians, notably P.H. Sawyer, have wished to diminish their importance, asserting that they were neither so widespread nor so devastating as the biased English sources claimed; they should be seen ‘not as an unprecedented and inexplicable cataclysm, but as an extension of normal Dark Age activity made possible and profitable by special circumstances.’33 Kenneth Cameron accepted the small size of the viking armies, but suggested on the place-name evidence that there was an additional and apparently peaceful occupation of large areas of the eastern Danelaw by Danish peasants who migrated to lands which were standing unoccupied, and who set up farms there under the protection of the armies of the Five Boroughs.34 Arguments such as these again do something to diminish the strength of Professor Whitelock’s position. However, any successful refutation of her argument must ultimately rest on an examination of the relationship between the two races in the crucial years between 835 and the last decades of the tenth century. If it can be shown that at certain times and places there were friendly and even cordial relations between Anglo-Saxons and Danes, the way is opened for an attribution of Beowulf to a date after the beginning of the viking age proper.

Alfred, as I have noted, had pagans at his court, and if Asser is to be believed, he treated them well: ‘omnes [i.e. all foreigners], sicut suam propriam gentem, secundum suam dignitatem regebat, diligebat, honorabat, pecunia et potestate ditabat.’35 One of these pagans was the Norwegian Ohthere, with whom he had one or more interviews that led to the account of contemporary Scandinavia in the Alfredian translation of Orosius’s Historia adversum paganos. Ohthere was most likely a temporary resident with Alfred, for he owned property and tribute rights in northern Norway, and presumably intended to return to them. Though his paganism and his language (when he reached Alfred’s court) must have linked him to the Danes who were such a trouble to the king, this does not seem to have affected the relationship between the two men. Ohthere told Alfred of his travels along the coast of Norway and down through the Danish straits to Hedeby in south Jutland. At about the same time Wulfstan, whose name shows he was English, reported to Alfred his journeys from Hedeby across the Baltic.36 In neither of these accounts is there any indication of hostility to the Danes. At the mention of Jutland and the adjoining territory the writer adds that ‘in these lands the Angles lived before they came here,’ but there is no parallel comment that in Denmark dwelt the viking raiders before they attacked England.

On occasion Alfred was even ready to make friendly overtures to viking chiefs leading raiding armies, if only in diplomatic necessity. A case occurred in 892-3 when Wessex was threatened by the great Danish army. Another viking, Hæsten, brought a smaller contingent to King’s Milton, Kent. The king tried to secure their neutrality by paying them and by sponsoring Hæsten’s son in baptism. The plan did not work, but at least it shows the two peoples in some sort of friendly contact, even at a time of major viking attack. When Alfred died there was some dispute over the succession. His nephew Æthelwold revolted against the new king Edward, and after a show of defiance, ‘ þa bestæl he hine on niht on weg, and gesohte þone here on Norðhymbrum,’ presumably taking with him his personal retinue, the men ‘þe him to gebugon.’ Æthelwold achieved some authority over the vikings for in 902 he reappeared with a fleet in Essex, and thereafter combined with East Anglians to plunder Mercia. In his entourage there must have been a group of Englishmen sympathetic to the Danes, though whether they could have composed Beowulf is another matter.37

Elsewhere in ninth-century England there were Anglo-Saxon courts which surely would have welcomed the Danes. In the 870s there were influential Mercians prepared to collaborate with the enemy. In 874 the Danes expelled King Burgred, and gave the kingdom instead to ‘Ceol-wulfe anum unwisum cynges þegne,’ who was to hold it at the Danes’ pleasure. Three years later the army divided Mercia, settling part themselves and leaving the rest under Ceolwulf s jurisdiction. How long and how firmly he reigned we do not know, but at least enough for a coinage to be issued in his name. Two of Ceolwulf’s charters survive (though in late copies and one of uncertain authority), attested by the bishops of Worcester and Hereford, and by ‘duces’ who had served under Burgred. Three of Ceolwulf’s moneyers also worked for Alfred.38 Though he had compromised with the Danes, Ceolwulf apparently held something of the respect of important Englishmen. North of the Tyne too there was an English king, Egbert, ruling from 867 with the connivance of the Danes who occupied part of the old kingdom of Northumbria. In 872/3 the Northumbrians expelled Egbert (together with Wulfhere, archbishop of York), and he was replaced by Ricsige. At this point the Danes intervened, and there followed a period of unrest during which Ricsige died. A second Egbert succeeded him, perhaps also a puppet king of the Danes.39 Here too there was a division, not between English and Danes, but between the Danes with their English collaborators and the rest.

In the tenth century, as the Danish raids declined and the English kings pressed their power further and further into the Danelaw, the distinction between Danish settler and Anglo-Saxon must have weakened. A couple of charters show Edward and Athelstan cultivating a multiracial society by settling on English owners regions formerly occupied by men of northern descent, authorising land to be bought ‘a paganis’ for the purpose.40 If the Mercian Register is accurate here, Æthelflaed extended her control over the Midlands by peaceful means, ‘gesibsum-lice,’ as well as by conquest.41 Athelstan’s alliance with the northern kingdom of York must be kept in mind. Moreover, as the English told the tale, the Danes of the Five Boroughs should have welcomed Edmund’s intervention of 942, as it freed them from the heathen fetters of the Norsemen.42 Edmund’s reign also saw a case of a prominent Englishman collaborating with vikings against the English. Wulfstan, archbishop of York, was involved in an escapade with the Norse king Óláfr, which led to their taking Tamworth and occupying Leicester.43 Finally, in Edgar’s peaceful reign, there was at least royal enthusiasm for viking customs. The only fault that Edgar’s panegyrist can find in him is ‘Ane misdæda he dyde þeah to swiðe / þæt he ælþeodige unsida lufode / and hæðene þeawas, innan þysan lande, / gebrohte to fæste.’44 Presumably ‘hæðen’ here, as elsewhere, means Danish or viking.

This scanty survey suggests that the period from 835 to the end of the tenth century cannot be thought of as a single one in which the Anglo-Saxons are lined up against the Danes. In the different parts of England a variety of positions was possible, and there must have been times when, even in ‘English England,’ a poem in praise of the Danes was acceptable.45 For a post-835 date for Beowulf we do not have to look for Schücking’s ‘court of an Anglo-Danish king in the Danelaw.’

To sum up. I think that Professor Whitelock’s argument presents too simple a picture of the distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Dane in the later Anglo-Saxon period. I argue:

(1) the Anglo-Saxon reaction to the viking invaders was often, perhaps overwhelmingly, expressed in religious rather than racial terms.

(2) there were influential Anglo-Saxons who could distinguish, even in the midst of the viking raids, between the villains who attacked England and their more virtuous compatriots who stayed at home.

(3) at various times and places there were important Anglo-Saxons who were on friendly terms with the Danes, even with those taking over parts of England. I doubt the realism of the distinction between ‘English England’ and the Danelaw during much of the tenth century.

I do not seek to show that Beowulf is a late poem. I leave that to other scholars writing in this volume. I do suggest, however, that the word ‘Dene,’ used in a poem that is clearly not realistic and is set in an ancient and distant context, would not automatically conjure up in its English hearers the picture of a people who were ‘burning their homes, pillaging their churches, ravaging their cattle and crops, killing their countrymen or carrying them off into slavery.’ If there is other reason for placing Beowulf after, say, 835, there is nothing in the political situation in England to preclude it.

ROBERTA FRANK

When after one hundred and fifty years of speculation we have reached no certainty regarding the date of Beowulf, certainty may not be attainable. Still, there is always the chance that one’s own peculiar perspective may suggest new lines of inquiry, add something, however minuscule, to the small kernel of evidence that is safe to regard as the established fact of Beowulf scholarship. This kernel is even smaller today than it was thirty years ago when Dorothy Whitelock advanced the terminus ad quem of Beowulf from 750 to 825, halting before the viking incursions of mid-century. She cited ‘the high respect with which the poet speaks of the Danes and their rulers’; no Anglo-Saxon would praise people who were draining England’s coffers and ale kegs and carving blood-eagles on Christian backs.1 Nicolas Jacobs has recently reminded us that ‘from 927 onwards the Danes constituted a widely accepted element in English society, and an English poem complimentary to them is conceivable at least down to the resumption of raids in 980.’2 Only three generations separated Danish veteran from Benedictine reformer: Oda, bishop of Ramsbury under Athelstan and archbishop of Canterbury from 940-958, was the son of a Dane who came to England with the first settlers. Oda’s nephew was the Fleury-trained St. Oswald, prominent founder and renovator of monasteries.3 If Oswald’s contemporaries thought well enough of Beowulf to preserve the poem, the two preceding generations were just as capable of responding to the poet’s lonely fenland monsters, drunken thanes in army blankets, and golden pagan hero. No linguistic or historical fact compels us to anchor Beowulf before the tenth century; if we do so, it is more from our emotional commitment to an early date than from hard evidence. Our one secure terminus is the palaeographic dating of the manuscript to around the year 1000.

Attempts over the last century to show Norse influence on the language of Beowulf have produced interesting similarities, but ‘no proofs of imitation.’4 The absence of demonstrable Scandinavianisms in an Old English poem, however, does not rule out a late date of composition. The Battle of Brunanburh from around 937 has one loanword (cnear [ON knrr], a name for a viking ship) and one Nordicism - the Old English word eorl ‘man’ found in line 31 in its Norse sense of ‘ruler’ (like eorl Ongenþio ‘king Ongentheow’ in Beowulf, line 2951).5 No Scandinavianisms appear in The Capture of the Five Boroughs (942), The Coronation of Edgar (973), The Death of Edgar (975), or The Death of Edward (1065). The Battle of Maldon, composed more than a century and a half after the first Danish settlements, has two loanwords (gri, 35; dreng, 149) and one Nordicism (eorl as a title).6 Old English loanwords are equally difficult to detect in skaldic poetry, even that produced in England for English kings; and a number of suspected Anglicisms in early Norse verse are found in Old English only in Beowulf, creating some doubt as to which poetry is the borrower and which the lender.7 Similarly, the fact that the Scandinavian names of Beowulf are English in form tells us little about the date of the poem: poets on either side of the linguistic frontier readily adapted each other’s names to their own phonological systems: the skalds invariably assimilated Athelstan to Athalsteinn; the Old English poet just as automatically and correctly translates Halfdanr into Healfdene and Hugleikr into Hygelac.8 If we are ever to trace Beowulf to its point of origin in the period between 700 and 1000, it will be essential either to catch the poet in a telling anachronism or to establish some kind of convincing typological sequence – the stylistic equivalent of a dated series of coins – into which the poem can be fitted. My goal in this paper is less ambitious: it is to see whether Old Norse skaldic verse can persuade us that the Old English poet’s interest in and knowledge of things Scandinavian was the result of the Danish settlements in England and not part of a distant folk memory imported by the Anglo-Saxons from their continental homeland.

An extensive body of skaldic verse survives from the tenth and early eleventh centuries – over a thousand stanzas taking up some three hundred double-columned pages in Finnur Jónsson’s edition. Many of these stanzas are datable, the work of known individuals composing for known princes. As a guide to the Danishness of Beowulf, the corpus has its limitations: skaldic verse emerges only in the late ninth century and what has been preserved tends to reflect purely West Scandinavian concerns; skaldic style is so intricate, allusive, and knotty that we are not always sure what a poet is saying; and, finally, skalds in later centuries were so fond of putting their favourite compositions into the mouths of viking heroes of the past that we must question the authenticity of every stanza that does not exist in a contemporary inscription. There are various imperfect methods at our disposal for making sense of the verse and for distinguishing genuine from spurious stanzas: philological and metrical tests, kenning and contextual studies, luck and intuition.9

Somehow enough material comes through the sifting process to provide historians with useful primary sources. Curt Weibull cited skaldic verse in 1917 to buttress his case for Geatish survival after the sixth century.10 He was able to show that until the end of the tenth century all battles fought by Norwegian kings against Sweden and recorded in skaldic verse are against the Geats (ON Gautar). not the Swedes. Thórbjrn hornklofi around 900 calls Haraldr hárfagr ‘enemy of the Geats’ (23, 21, 13), Guthormr sindri claims halfway through the century that Hákon the Good ‘made the Geats pay tribute’ (62, 55, 34); Glúmr Geirason around 970 rejoices that Haraldr gráfeldr ‘reddened his sword in the blood of the Geats’ (76, 66, 41); Einarr skálaglamm in the 980s reports that Earl Hákon not only ‘wanted to destroy the lives of the Geats’ (130, 123, 69) but that he ‘trampled all Geatland’ (130, 123, 69). Being a Geat in tenth-century skaldic verse may not have been much fun, but at least you knew that you were not extinct, something the standard editions of Beowulf still fail to acknowledge.11 The fact that the Geats held together as a people into the eleventh century does not pinpoint the date of Beowulf, but it does suggest that they were as known and topical in the tenth century as in any preceding one – and perhaps more so. Skaldic verse can provide similar information about dynasties, political catchwords, and heroes in Beowulf, even, perhaps, about the origin of the Scyldings.

Unlike the Geats, who were known to Ptolemy, Procopius, and Jordanes, the Scyldings are surrounded by silence. Nobody mentions a single Scylding, let alone a nation swarming with them, until the Beowulf poet uses the name thirty-five times for his sixth-century Danish dynasty. Names like Healfdene, Hrothgar, and Heorogar, if they are found in England at all, are not documented before the tenth century.12 Legends of the Scyldings in skaldic verse get off to an equally slow start. The first reference by a skald to an event associated with one of the Scyldings of Beowulf occurs around 965 when Eyvindr skáldaspillir calls gold ‘the seed corn of Fýrisplains’ (73, 64, 39), alluding to the story of how Hrólfr kraki (OE Hrothulf) sowed those plains with gold to delay the Swedish horsemen pursuing him. The first mention of a royal residence on Zealand comes in 1062 when the skald Steinn Herdisarson identifies the Danish king Sveinn Estrithsson as he who sits at Leire’ (407, 377, 187). Old Norse dictionaries and the historians Sven Aggesen around 1187 and Saxo Grammaticus around 1200 all tell us that Norse poets use skjldungr (OE Scylding) as a general poetic term for king, and never as a dynastic title the way the Beowulf poet does, as in ‘the old Scylding’ (1792, 2105).13 This may be true for the twelfth century, at least by 1153 when Einarr Skúlason calls both God and the Greek emperor yfirskjldungar ‘over-Scyldings’ (468, 439, 216; 471, 444, 218); but in the early eleventh century, Norse skalds appear to bestow the title in a specifically political way.14 In the quarter century between 1014 and 1040, they use Scylding to designate three kings: Knútr the Great, ruler of an Anglo-Danish-Norwegian empire; his contemporary and defeated rival, Óláfr Haraldsson, king of Norway; and the latter’s son, Magnus the Good, king of Denmark and Norway and later claimant to the English throne of Hortha-Knútr. There seems to be a connection between a poet’s use of the title and the English adventures of these kings. The skald Thórthr Kolbeinsson around 1014 describes Knútr’s arrival in England: ‘The Scylding, Knútr, he who struck the waves, brought his longships in to the shallows by the gravel bank’ (216, 205, 107). Around 1026, another skald, Óttarr svarti, records one of Knútr’s English battles: ‘Mighty Scylding, you worked a deed of war under a shield at Ashington’ (297, 274, 140). By 1038, the association of Scylding with Knútr, shields, and England was familiar enough for the poet Sighvatr to play on the etymology of the title, addressing the king as hlifskjldr ‘protecting shield’ (250, 234, 121) of the Danes. Both Sighvatr and Óttarr associate the term Scylding with King Óláfr Haraldsson, but in a less precise way, perhaps because he had trouble holding his own kingdom, let alone an empire. Óttarr, relating around 1023 the early viking exploits and English battles of Óláfr, calls him skjldunga þopti ‘rowing-bench mate of Scyldings’ (294, 270, 139) and ‘he who holds the empire of þrjóðskjoldinga’ (295, 272, 139), the power of ‘national-Scyldings’ - the same word, þeod-scyldingas, used by the Beowulf poet for Hrothgar and Hrothulf (1019). Magnus the Good, whose kingdom almost matched Knútr’s, is addressed ‘O Scylding’ five times by his proud skald Arnórr (333, 306, 155; 335-6, 309, 157; 338, 311, 158, 343, 315, 160).

The relevance of these Scyldings to their sixth-century counterparts in Beowulf would be easier to demonstrate or disprove if skaldic verse on Danish rulers before Knútr had been preserved; all we have is one stanza on Haraldr blátonn, obscene and not certainly genuine (176, 166, 89). What is clear from the poetry that survives is that Knútr’s skalds were eager to show their king’s continuity with the Danish settlers of England in the ninth century. Sighvatr’s Knútsdrápa opens with a reference to the victory of Ívarr at York in 867, thereby reminding eleventh-century Danes that they had inherited the English conquest of this viking chieftain and his brothers (248, 232, 120). Evidence that these brothers and their followers went under the name of Scyldings in the conquered territories comes from the anonymous History of St. Cuthbert, first compiled around 950 and based mainly on the charters and records of donation to the church of St. Cuthbert, then at Chester le Street.15 The chronicler three times calls the Danes Scaldingi, the first occasion referring to Ívarr’s battle for York in 867, the second and third to the subsequent ravages of Ívarr’s brother Halfdanr.16 We do not know how far back this usage goes, but we can be fairly confident that Scaldingi means Scyldingas ‘shieldmen’ or ‘descendant of Scyld’ and not ‘men of the Scheldt’ or ‘men of the punted ship,’ the two other etymologies suggested.17 By 1200, when Saxo wrote his Danish History, both Ívarr and Halfdanr, sons of the legendary Ragnarr Lothbrók, were entered into the royal genealogies as ancestors of the kings of Denmark, a line running from Skjoldr (OE Scyld) to Gormr the Old and beyond.18

The skalds who acclaimed as Scyldings the three Norse kings who fought in, ruled over, or pressed rights to England between 1014 and 1040, may have been trying to confer legitimacy on their empire-hungry patrons by linking them to the earlier Danish conquerors of England. English documents from the 880s and 890s reveal, I think, similar attempts by the West-Saxon house to establish its right to rule over both peoples in England. The dynasty legitimized its present – the Alfredian design of Dane and Anglo-Saxon as equal partners in a united kingdom - by revising its past. The author of the Old English Orosius, for example, reporting Ohthere’s account to King Alfred of his passage from the Oslofjord to Hedeby along the eastern coasts of Jutland, adds on his own the comment that the Angles lived in this area before they came to England.19 Such a belief may lie behind the Beowulf and Widsith poets’ special interest in Offa I, king of Angeln. Yet the Danish origin of the Angles has no early authority: Ptolemy places them well inland in north-central Germany.20 If the Alfredian program to promote Anglo-Danish brotherhood could fill in a misty past, it could also outline a future: when the English king stood sponsor for Guthrum at his baptism, he gave the Danish king the aristocratic West-Saxon name of Athelstan.21

The West-Saxon regnal table that was compiled or reworked after Alfred’s succession in 871 did not go back beyond Woden, the old stopping point for royal genealogies.22 The name of Scyld, eponymous ancestor of the Scyldings, is first found, along with other Scandinavian names like Beaw, Geat. and Heremod, in the remotest part of the official royal pedigree, the genealogy of Alfred’s father Æthelwulf, that was added to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle around 892 and copied by Asser around 893.23 If, in the period between 871 and 892 (and presumably not before Alfred’s peace with Guthrum at Wedmore), the house of Cerdic suddenly found itself saddled with an ancestor named Scyld, it is likely that there were people calling themselves Scyldings in the neighbourhood, recent arrivals who had to be assimilated. The new genealogy reflected a new social reality.24 In the course of the tenth century, the West-Saxon royal house continued to develop its past in a Danish direction. Alfred’s great-grandnephew Æthelweard, whose Chronicle ends in 975 at the close of the golden age of the dynasty, places Scef, Scyld, and Beo in the same order followed by the Old English poet, tells of a mysterious arrival by boat in Scani (although he attributes the landing to Scef, not Scyld), and introduces even more Norse names into the royal genealogies.25

What little Old English and Old Norse evidence there is suggests that the Scyldings and their legends may have been an Anglo-Danish innovation. By acquiring a founder named Scyld, the West-Saxons strengthened their position in the Danelaw. By calling a Norse king Scylding, a skald confirmed his patron’s English heritage. The Beowulf poet’s incentive for composing an epic about sixth-century Scyldings may have had something to do with the fact that, by the 890s at least, Heremod, Scyld, Healfdene, and the rest, were taken to be the common ancestors both of the Anglo-Saxon royal family and of the Danish immigrants.26

The political geography of Beowulf fits comfortably into the period between Alfred and Æthelweard. The Old English poem is almost exclusively concerned with one particular corner of the Scandinavian world, with relations between Dane, Geat, and Swede on the shores of the Kattegat, the inland sea that separates present-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. These coasts were for much of the ninth and tenth centuries a Danish sphere of influence, and in later legend form the backdrop for the youthful careers of Ragnarr Lothbrók and his sons.27 Beowulf the Geat is connected to each of the three major Scandinavian peoples in the poem, as well as to the Wulfings and Wægmundings.28 Similar multiculturalism enters into the Ynglingatal, a genealogical praise poem composed around 900 by Thjóthólfr, skald of King Haraldr hárfagr; he dedicates the eulogy to the king’s cousin Rognvaldr, a prince of Vestfold on the northern shore of the Kattegat.29 Like Beowulf, the Ynglingatal speaks of Geats, Swedes and Scylfings, Danes (but no Scyldings), Jutes and giants, and even Vendill; the skald, however, mentions Norway, a region the Beowulf poet studiously ignores. Thjóthólfr apparently attached the six Vestfold dynastic names known to him to twenty-one names from the royal house of Sweden, including such Beowulf characters as Ohthere, Eadgils, and Onela. The Vestfold line was new and probably of Danish origin; its royal house acquired not a little mythological depth and perhaps even some political legitimacy by this linkage with its neighbours. The Beowulf poet, too, seems to have been aware that the more peoples his hero could attach to himself, the more authentically representative of the culture and traditions of central Scandinavia he would be.

Ynglingatal gives the title pjóðkonungr (OE þeodcyning) ‘great’ or ‘national king’ to the first member of the Vestfold dynasty, one Halfdanr (13, 12, 8). The Old English poet gives the same epithet to Hrothgar, Ongentheow, and Beowulf, and displays this political catchword prominently in his opening sentence: ‘We have heard of the splendour of the great kings of the Spear-Danes.’ In tenth-century skaldic verse, the title is used of only two kings, the Vestfold Halfdanr and his descendant, Haraldr hárfagr (23, 21, 13), the king who united all Norway before 900 and who apparently had diplomatic relations with Athelstan.30 The term pjóðkonungr does not occur again in skaldic verse until the next viking age of England, the quarter century between 1014 and 1040, when the skalds restricted its use to the same three kings they called Scyldings: Knútr, Óláfr, and Magnus.31 Pjóðkonungr has, if not imperial overtones, at least a suggestion of overwhelming power; in Beowulf, it is explicitly associated with regional overlordship of surrounding tribes. The Beowulf poet depicts the Danish nation’s former glory in a time when powerful þeodcyningas had been able to unite the various peoples of the land, something that did not occur in Denmark, as far as we know, until the late tenth century.32 He is probably imposing his own monarchic mentality upon the past, just as Thjóthólfr did when he called a petty eighth-century breaker-of-rings in Vestfold a pjóðkonungr. The vision of both poets seems to derive from contemporary politics and not from historic reality, from a need to establish in the present an ideological basis for a rex gentium and for national unity.

Skaldic verse can sometimes help to establish the chronological bounds of a heroic legend alluded to in Beowulf. Sigemund’s dragon fight, for example, is often cited as proof either of the Old English poet’s confusion and incompetence or of the great age of his poem. Wrenn’s edition offers both explanations, affirming that ‘in Beowulf ... the deeds of the son Sigurthr have been transferred to his father Sigemund, but it is quite as likely that the Old English, being set down several centuries before the Norse accounts, has the older tradition.’33 The evidence of skaldic verse suggests that the Beowulf poet could have been working very late indeed and still not have been acquainted with any of young Sigurthr’s doings. No Norse skald alludes to that hero’s dragon fight, dragon-heart roast, sword, horse, Brynhildr, Rhine gold, or any of the rest before the last half of the tenth century and in most cases not until the early eleventh.34 A stanza from around 1030 by Thórfinnr munnr is the first to mention Sigurthr’s fight with Fáfnir and the subsequent roasting of that dragon’s heart (315, 292, 149). Scenes from the Sigurthr legend appear frequently on English and Manx sculpture - but only in the late tenth and eleventh centuries.35

There is, however, good skaldic evidence for the early existence of Sigemund and Fitela: the former’s immunity to poison is alluded to in Bragi’s Ragnarsdrápa, probably from the second half of the ninth century, while both heroes appear in the Eiriksmál, a pagan memorial eulogy composed shortly after 954 to commemorate Eirikr Bloodaxe, Haraldr hárfagr’s son and the last king of Northumbria. The poem depicts Eirikr’s reception in Valhll after his death on an English battlefield; the chief speaker is Óthinn, who bids the warriors Sigemund and Fitela go forth to welcome the king to their hall. A second pagan memorial eulogy, the Hákonarmál composed around 960 for Eirikr’s half-brother, King Hákon the Good of Norway, probably used Eiriksmál as a model.36 The skald portrays the gods summoning Hákon to them; this time Óthinn sends Heremod (ON Hermóthr) with Bragi to greet the king who, as Athelstan’s baptized foster son, is understandably apprehensive about his reception.37

There is general agreement that the Beowulf poet’s coupling of Sigemund and Heremod as heroes of greatest renown springs from Scandinavian tradition; the two are paired again as Óthinn’s heroes in the eddic Hyndluljóð.38 The usual assumption is that whatever borrowing there was took place at some dark period in pre-viking-age England or even in the Angles’ continental homeland. But if we start from the known – the fact that Heremod and Sigemund act as Óthinn’s henchmen in two mid-tenth-century skaldic poems, one of which was probably composed in England while the other has English ties - we can test an alternative hypothesis, that the Beowulf poet had his sixth-century Danish scop sing of Sigemund and Heremod because contemporary Danes sang of them, because pagan skalds like the poets of Eiriksmál and Hákonarmál singled out these two men as Óthinn’s favourites, Valhll’s finest. If this is true, though, we must be able to explain why the Beowulf poet does not regard these heroes with the same esteem as the skalds do. Heremod, despite the fact that his name is registered in the West-Saxon royal pedigree of Alfred’s time, is for the poet a bloodthirsty, blackhearted table-companion; the incestuous Sigemund is equally infamous for his feuds and crimes.39

Everyone recognizes that the Beowulf poet shares common narrative motifs and conventions with his Scandinavian counterparts; what has not been sufficiently noted, perhaps, is that these conventions are sometimes used as literary borrowings, as familiar quotations from a set text that the poet can then cap – Waste Land style – with a new and pointed ending. A number of apparent Scandinavianisms in Beowulf, words or idioms for which there are parallels in Norse poetry, seem to be inserted by the poet in order to underline the traditional nature of an incident in which Beowulf reacts in a most untraditional manner. As he lay dying, Beowulf rejoiced over three things: that he never fomented strife, never swore empty oaths, never murdered his kin (2738-42). The poet wanted an uncommon hero and found him: the anti-Odinic, anti-Volsung pagan champion.

For example, the poet tells of the tragic death of Hrethel’s son Herebeald, killed by his brother Hæthcyn when they were playing with arrows: miste mercelses ‘he missed the target,’ says the poet, ‘and shot his kinsman’ (2439). The similarity between this accidental royal fratricide and the myth of Baldr’s death at his brother Hothr’s hand has long been noted.40 But in addition to employing similar name elements (beald: Baldr; hæth: Hthr), the Beowulf poet inserts what seems to be a Nordicism: missan (ON missa) ‘to miss, not hit’ with a genitive of the object, a usage common in Old Norse but otherwise unknown in this sense in Old English. The idiom seems to mark the spot where pagan myth and the poet’s own reconstruction of northern history converge. The poet goes on, however, to compare Hrethel’s plight to that of a man whose son is hanging on the gallows, a man who has no heart to wait for another son, now that this one is gone; revenge was not to be had for an executed criminal under Anglo-Saxon law, nor could a father take vengeance on his own child. Beowulf seems to express admiration (2470) for Hrethel’s heroic resignation and restraint. Yet the myth tells how Óthinn, Baldr’s father, took swift vengeance on Hthr by begetting another son for the sole purpose of slaying the former; this fratricidal sequel to the Baldr story is alluded to by at least one tenth-century skald, while the gods’ revenge on the instigator Loki is portrayed on the early tenth-century Gosforth cross from Cumberland.41 Æthelweard’s Chronicle confirms that Baldr’s affiliation to Óthinn was known in tenth-century England.42 The Beowulf poet’s adaptation of the myth diminishes and condemns Óthinn’s role as reported in Norse story.

Unlike normal Odinic warriors, Beowulf insists on making friends of potential foes. A set piece in Norse eddic poetry is the encounter between a quarrelsome coastguard and a hero reaching the end of his journey.43 The Beowulf poet’s strange observation as the Geats depart from Denmark that the coastguard ‘did not greet the strangers with insult’ (1892) suggests some familiarity with this narrative cliché. Earlier the coastguard, having directed Beowulf towards Heorot, opened the shortest speech in the poem, a farewell, with the Bogart tough-guy line mæl is me to feran ‘time for me to go’ (316). The metre of the half-line is irregular, the only verse of its kind in Beowulf in which the noun in stressed position - mæl – does not alliterate.44 Identical half-line types occur in Norse poetry: Helgi, Sigemund’s son and Fitela’s half-brother, departs abruptly for Valholl with the words mál ér mér at riða ‘time for me to ride’ (HH II, 49); the heathen thyle in Hávamál begins his chant just as abruptly with mál er at þylja ‘time to perform’ (111). In all the eddic examples, as in Beowulf, the half-line opens a stanza of speech and the initial noun – mál – never alliterates. It is possible, though not provable, that the Beowulf poet introduced the phrase as a context marker, a kind of pagan Norse colouring to remind the hearer that the encounter between coastguard and champion here described had, traditionally, a far more violent outcome.

Beowulf also manages to avert strife in his subsequent flyting with the thyle Unferth, a stylized exchange with many parallels in Norse verse and prose.45 Beowulf’s countercharge that Unferth was a multiple fratricide (587) has a word-for-word parallel in the first Helgi poem, in Guthmundr’s countercharge against Fitela, who actually had killed two of his brothers (HH I, 36). Unlike the eddic combatants, however, Beowulf proves that he can contain his wrath: the Geat ends his rebuttal on a bright note, and eventually secures Unferth’s friendship. Echoes of Norse poetry again serve as narrative moorings, pointers to a world of popular Odinic heroes against whom the Old English champion was to be measured.

Beowulf’s nationality is not one that skalds would naturally associate with an anti-Odinic hero. Ninth- and tenth-century Norse poets regularly call Óthinn Gauta Týr ‘God of the Geats’ (64, 57, 35), Gauta spjalli ‘counsellor of the Geats’ (42, 37, 24), Her-Gautr ‘War-Geat’ (2, 2, 1), Val-Gautr ‘Slaughter-Geat’ (319, 295, 150), or simply and most frequently Gautr ‘Geat’ (75, 66, 40; 79, 69, 42; etc.), what Beowulf is called four times in the Old English poem. Skaldic diction confirms place-name and other evidence that Gautland remained a centre of Óthinn worship into the eleventh century. 46 A fierce Odinic warrior named Hathagat (Hathugaut ‘Battle-Geat’) leads sixth-century Saxons to victory in Widukind of Corvey’s national history, the first version of which was composed by 967; the pagan Saxons hail Hathagat as godlike, and the tenth-century monk calls him pater patrum ‘founder of the tribe.’47 The Old English poet’s choice of a Geat as his heathen prince of peace, his northern Good Samaritan, is perhaps the boldest manipulation of Scandinavian poetic convention in Beowulf.

It has recently been pointed out how the Maldon poet imparted Norse colouring to the speech of his viking messenger, in what may be the first literary use of dialect in English.48 A number of syntactic oddities in Beowulf can also be explained as imitations of normal Norse word order. One construction not found in Old English outside Beowulf is the half-line consisting of a masculine compound in the accusative followed by the demonstrative pronoun pone ‘that’; such lines occur six times in the latter part of Beowulf: three times in connection with the dragon (grundwong þone, 2588; eorðweard þone, 2334; goldweard þone, 3081); twice in connection with the Swedish wars (freoðowong þone, 2959; wælhlem þone, 2969); and once when Beowulf, at home in Geatland, reminisces about Grendel’s attack (uhthlem þone, 2007).49 Since skaldic word order is notoriously skewed, the sporadic appearance in a verse of a demonstrative following its noun is not very significant. But the postpositing of the demonstrative ‘that’ to its noun also occurs in Norwegian and Swedish runic inscriptions from the seventh century on, while ‘this’ following its noun is a notable characteristic of viking-age runic monuments such as the Danish or Swedish gravestone from St. Paul’s Churchyard, London.50 Finally, the suffixing of the definite article to its noun (unless an adjective preceded) appears to have been normal Norse, especially Norwegian, practice by the end of the tenth century.51 Whatever their origin, the postponed demonstratives of Beowulf might have sounded northern and darkly heathen to an Anglo-Saxon ear, the way the inversion in ‘Castle Dangerous’ somehow calls up the atmosphere of a Gothic romance, and that in ‘Eggs Florentine’ an elegant menu. The Beowulf poet may have copied a prominent linguistic feature of the Danelaw in order to colour the last third of his poem Geatish.

Sometimes the Beowulf poet seems to count on his listeners’ familiarity with a contemporary skaldic genre, on their ability to recognize the changes he rings. In the final forty-six lines of Beowulf, we witness the building and kindling of a funeral pyre and hear a Geatish woman’s song of lament as she predicts hard times ahead: ‘she sang,’ the poet says, ‘in memory of Beowulf a mournful song, said over and over that she greatly dreaded evil days, many slaughters, the terror of troops, shame and captivity.’ Then we watch the construction of a barrow on the headland and the deposition within of Beowulf’s ashes and his gold. Twelve horsemen ride round and round the barrow, intoning a eulogy to their dead leader, enumerating his deeds and qualities. Each of the two physical rites - cremation on the pyre and deposition in the mound – is thus accompanied by a libretto, a chant that the poet twice describes as a gyd. The mourners’ voices move from memory of past deeds to triumphant praise, focussed in the last three lines on the man himself: ‘They said that he was of earthly kings mildest to his men and gentlest, kindest to his people and most eager for fame.’

This combination of personal lament and public eulogy, a prophecy of impending catastrophe joined with praise of a hero’s deeds and goodness, is characteristic of tenth- and early eleventh-century skaldic memorial odes or erfidrápur; the sequence of laments that concludes Beowulf could have been put together with these Norse poems in mind.52 In the pagan Eiriksmál and Hákonarmál, in Hallfrethr’s Christian lament for Óláfr Tryggvason (159, 150, 82), and even in a 1076 stanza (416, 384, 191) by the last Norse skald we know of with direct English connections, the same balance is struck: only wars, humiliation, and terror after the death of the prince, but the glory of the man, his fame and goodness, will survive to the end. In the erfidrápa, as in Beowulf, at the moment of closure all attention is riveted on the fallen king. Lament as a genre has inevitably a certain sameness of content; but elegy – perhaps for this reason – has always been one of the most tradition-bound of literary forms, and the pattern of consolation found in Beowulf and the early Norse memorial eulogies is not easily paralleled. It is certainly not present in any of the analogues usually brought to bear on the ending of Beowulf.53

The last word of the poem, lofgeornost ‘most eager for fame,’ is a lexicographer’s nightmare: the speakers clearly intend to praise (the word caps the Christian sequence ‘mildest,’ ‘gentlest,’ ‘kindest’), but it is found elsewhere in Old English only in a bad sense meaning ‘ostentatious, boastful.’54 Lofgeorn is documented in an unambiguously good sense in Scandinavian verse, however; Old Norse lofgjarn occurs in an eddic stanza praising the Vlsung hero Sigurthr as he passes through encircling flame.55 Similar complimentary compounds ending in -gjarn abound in tenth-century skaldic poetry: tirargjarn ‘eager for glory’ (159, 150, 82) occurs in the final stanza of Hallfrethr’s praise poem on Oláfr Tryggvason, while freniðargjarn ‘eager for glory’ (228, 216, 113) occurs in the final stanza of Sighvatr’s Vikingarvisur in praise of Óláfr Haraldsson. The earliest example I can find is in the Ynglingatal, where a Swedish king - Beowulf’s Eadgils in fact - is extolled as dáð gjarn ‘eager for great deeds’ (12, 11, 7). The Beowulf poet makes sure that sixth-century pagan Geats and not he describe their fallen king as lofgeorn; they said,’ he insists, forcing his audience to take the word in its secular, heroic sense, that of the skaldic cognate. A comparable distancing technique occurs in Lycidas, when Milton adds a coda to his final consoling vision: ‘Thus sang the uncouth Swain.’ In both cases, the poets go out of their way to separate themselves from the character and motives of the lamenters, thereby ensuring that the questions raised by the poem remain for Christian hearers far more compelling than the answers.

Both Old English poet and Old Norse skald are concerned with one particular group in society. The chief metre of the skalds was called dróttkvætt, the metre fit for the drótt, the king’s band of retainers. The same élite and its aristocratic pastimes are a preoccupation of the Beowulf poet; his people act out elaborate rituals of greeting and drinking, boast and poetry, gift-giving and parting, the generative grammar of life in the hall.56 The poet and the skald seem to be able to draw upon the same technical vocabulary. The benchplanks of Heorot, twice designated by the Beowulf poet as bencþelu (486, 1239), either stand dripping with blood after Grendel’s depredations or are removed at nightfall to make room for the men to bunk down. The compound occurs only once again in Germanic poetry: in the mid-tenth-century Eiriksmál, all bekk-pili (175, 165, 89), all benchplanks within Valhpll, creak noisily as the prince approaches.57

Like the skald, the Old English poet keeps a careful eye on where and how securely men park their weapons. The Geats march in armour to Heorot; they are instructed to leave their shields and stacked spears outside, but have explicit permission to enter the hall in helmet and mailcoat. In the mid-tenth-century Hákonarmál, the slain king urges his men to keep wargear on when entering Valholl, saying: ‘One must watch over one’s helmet and mailcoat. It’s good to be prepared’ (67, 59, 37). The Geats in Heorot sleep with their helmets, mailcoats, and spears ready on a bench above them; the skald Sighvatr describes the similar interior decoration of Oláfr Haraldsson’s court: ‘The king’s retainers furnish the royal hall with helmets and mailcoats; I see a choice of both on the walls’ (238, 224, 116). The skald associates meaddrinking and versemaking: poetry for him is Óthinn’s precious mead;58 the Beowulf poet also associates the two activities whenever the scop in Heorot is called upon to entertain the Geats (496, 1066). In Beowulf, Unferth has a place of honour at the king’s feet; Wulfgar stands before the Danish king’s shoulders: ‘he knew,’ the poet assures us, ‘the custom of retainers’ (359). For the early skalds, the relevant royal bone was the knee: Egill Skallagrimsson delivers his poem ‘before the knee of the king’ (45, 39, 25); Thórmóthr Bersason declares, ‘He who long stands before your knee, o king, needs courage’ (282, 260, 134); and Sighvatr Thórtharson boasts: ‘Up to now I have had luck with all the good marshalls of the battlebold king, those who go before our king’s knee’ (267, 247, 128).

The Beowulf poet believed that the hall protocol and rituals he described were facts, whether they were familiar from literature or current practice; and he seems to have expected his audience to understand his aristocratic shorthand. When Beowulf tells Hrothgar that the latter will not need to ‘hide the head’ (446) of his champion if Grendel eats him, no further explanation is offered. We need not, however, assume great age for this expression, tracing in it a memory of old Anglian funerary customs or even a reference to the cloth enfolding the seventh-century abbess mentioned by Bede (HE IV, 17). The same phrase - hylja hfuð ‘to hide the head - occurs in an anonymous, mid-eleventh-century skaldic poem on the death of King Magnus the Good: ‘The king’s retainers have hidden the head of the one who was the highest of princes’ (425, 395, 196).59 Nor need we assume that dim antiquity has caused the battle standard set high over Scyld’s head, the one given to Beowulf by Hrothgar, and the one standing over the dragon’s hoard, to be portrayed as ‘golden’: segen gyldenne and segn eallgylden. King Edwin’s seventh-century banners, standard, and tufa as described by Bede (HE II, 16) and the royal standard (or lampstand) of Sutton Hoo have nothing of gold about them, nor do the war banners of Vergil, Statius, or the Bible; but when we reach the stanzas of Sighvatr we again encounter golden standards (gyld stong, 229, 218, 113; 258, 240, 124) lifted high in battle before the Norwegian king.

Sighvatr, who spent some time in England and who belonged to the first generation of Christian skalds, is the Norseman whose voice most reminds me of the Beowulf poet’s. They share a fondness for sentiment, moral promptings, and the gentler pursuits of court such as horseback riding and diplomacy. Departing on a mission, Sighvatr recites a farewell that Beowulf might have directed at Hygelac: ‘Remain now in health in your hall, King Oláfr, until I come back to serve you, until we meet here again. I pray that the prince will hold his life and this land’ (267, 247, 128). Reaching Knútr’s court in England and left to cool his heels for a while, Sighvatr complains as Beowulf could have at Heorot: ‘I had to inquire outside the door of the hall before I could get a word with the lord of the Jutes; I saw the house barred before me’ (241, 226, 117). To a royal officer who assists him, Sighvatr offers a careful compliment: ‘Often, Bjorn, you put in a good word for me with the prince. You give good advice, soldier, because you know a lot’ (267, 247, 128). Like the Beowulf poet, Sighvatr takes time out to cast scorn on the ignorant heathenism of rural folk;60 and he, too, seems to have a particular horror of kin-slayings. One verse rebukes a cousin-killer: ‘Áslákr has increased kinsman-guilt; the lord of the Hordalanders is killed; no one should start a conflict this way; a family-killing cannot be denied; born kinsmen should hold back from wrath; they should look to the old sayings’ (246, 230, 119). Though working perhaps more than a century apart, Sighvatr and the Beowulf poet probably appear at the same moment in their respective literary traditions, a moment when learned Christian poets were being called upon to celebrate the roots of a new and only partly literate secular aristocracy.61

Our excursion through the skaldic landscape is almost at an end. This might be an appropriate moment to pause and recall what the exercise was all about. Nothing in the bits and pieces of information extracted from skaldic verse was found incompatible with a date for Beowulf in the late ninth century or the first half of the tenth century; and some facts were more compatible with this period than with any other. I cannot prove that Beowulf was composed then; nevertheless, accepting that the poem came into existence between 890 and 950 solves far more problems than it poses. An Alfredian or post-Alfredian date means that the central fable of Beowulf could have come from the lips of English Scandinavians and not from the wellspring of folk memory;62 it explains the poet’s and audience’s apparent acquaintance with Norse literary genres, his ability to manipulate Scandinavian legend and myth, and theirs to follow what he was doing. A late date accounts for the cumulative, allusive richness of the poem, and for the congruence of outlook, idiom, and theme in Beowulf and skaldic verse; it provides in Alfred and his successors a focus and an incentive for the production of court poetry. Even the similarity between the poet’s description of Grendel’s mere and the conclusion of the sixteenth Blickling homily becomes more explicable.63 If. on the other hand, we assume that Beowulf is early, we also have to assume that for over three centuries Old Norse poetry remained static, that Sigemund and Heremod held their frozen paired pose like figures on a Grecian urn, that golden standards, bloodied bekkpili, and idioms like ‘to hide the head’ belonged to Scandinavian hall-vocabulary as early as 700 or - conversely – were borrowed by tenth-century skalds from a static Old English verse. But this won’t work: neither poetry remained the same for three hundred years. Between 900 and 1200, we observe skald after skald striving to outdo his predecessor, just as he must have done in the centuries that preceded; imitation for him meant making something different, taking stock of the tradition with an appreciative or cool eye. The Beowulf poet, too, took stock, and the material he seems to have weighed was that of the Danelaw skalds and storytellers. When the Old English poet inverts the character of a traditional Norse hero, changes the outcome of traditional Norse incidents, and modifies the ending of a traditional Norse memorial genre, all the while garnishing his epic with Norse names, colour, and decorative motifs, it is easy to imagine that he was composing not long after, or far from, the Danish skalds he was outdoing.

The effect on Old English poetry of decade upon decade of Anglo-Danish interaction - two peoples speaking closely related languages, living in the same area, praying to the same god, and working within similar political and ecclesiastical structures - has probably been rendered imperceptible to us by the very congruity of the two cultures, the way archaeologists in the Danelaw have not yet been able to distinguish a single Scandinavian farm or village from indigenous settlements.64 For much of the tenth century, the Danes and the English do not seem to have formed discrete, mutually-hostile communities:65 the coinage, inscriptions, and sculpture of the first Scandinavian settlers show them striving to be more Christian and English than the English;66 native artistic traditions can be seen absorbing more and more Norse elements as time goes on.67 The Anglo-Saxons did not ’catch’ Scandinavian taste from the vikings like a case of cultural measles. Nevertheless, between Bede’s Death Song and Maldon something did happen to Old English poetry, whether we call this something rebarbarization or ’conceiving Christian experience afresh in terms of Germanic heroic poetry.’68 Unlike Anglian stone crosses of the eighth century, English religious sculpture after the Danish invasions drew on pagan myth and heroic legend: Wayland in Leeds parish church, Thor in Gosforth church, Sigemund at Winchester Old Minster.69 We have learned to recognize Scandinavian symptoms in much English sculpture and drawing from the Middleton crosses to the Caedmon manuscript; even in the heart of tenth-century Wessex, stones were carved with intricate Norse designs.70 Not all Old English verse was immune to this taste. The Beowulf poet pondered his northern heathens and northern heroes, and raised to their memory a monument far more Christian and, at the same time, far more Scandinavian than the mound at Sutton Hoo.

R.W. MCTURK

In his article ‘The Old English Epic Style,’ published in 1962, Alistair Campbell maintains that ‘the new epic style was developed from that of the lays,’ and that ‘it was... probably the elaborate development of the art of parallelism that distinguished most clearly the new style from the old.’1 He does not define ‘the art of parallelism,’ but his examples suggest that parallelism as he sees it differs little from variation as defined by Walther Paetzel, to whose study of the subject, dating from 1913,2 Campbell does not refer in his article. It is also clear from his examples that Campbell is not using the term ‘parallelism’ by any means exclusively in the sense in which it was used by Arthur G. Brodeur, to whose work on the subject (dating from 1959)3 Campbell does not refer either. Paetzel’s definition of variation has recently been adapted from German to English by Daniel G. Calder, in the following words: ‘Variation occurs when a concept, already sufficiently characterized for understanding, is brought to the attention of the listener or reader once again, often with interruption of the syntactic context.’4 Its main features, to quote Paetzel’s original German, are ‘1) begriffliche, 2) syntaktische Entbehrlichkeit, woraus sich ergibt 3) seltenes Vorkommen in der Prosa.’5 In other words, it is not essential to an understanding of the concept varied, or to the syntax of the sentence in which it occurs, and is consequently a luxury more characteristic of poetry than of prose.

The main difference between Campbell’s and Paetzel’s approaches is that Campbell divides parallelism into ten types, as will be shown in more detail below, whereas Paetzel classifies variation under two main headings, each with an elaborate series of sub-headings: word-variation (involving nouns, adjectives, and verbs), and sentence-variation (involving clauses, whether main or subordinate, and parts of clauses).6 Other differences between the two approaches which are relevant to the present discussion will be described below. As far as possible, the words ‘parallel’ and ‘parallelism’ will be used here when Campbell’s views are in question, and ‘variation’ when Paetzel’s are.

One of the differences just mentioned is that, whereas Paetzel finds no significance in the development of variation for dating poems in relation to each other,7 Campbell clearly sees parallelism as indicative of a ‘new’ as opposed to ‘old’ style in Old English poetry. Campbell is not quite saying, it is true, that the more parallelism there is in a poem, the later the poem must be, but his remarks quoted above seem to lend themselves to this interpretation when taken together with certain statements by other scholars about style and chronology in Old English poetry. As will be shown below, certain of Campbell’s ten types of parallel often occur in chiastic form; that is to say, the second element in the parallel often reverses the word order of the first. Now according to R.F. Leslie, ‘chiasmus as a stylistic device in Old English poetry would not have been possible without the development of what Kemp Malone calls “plurilinear units.’”8 Such units, according to Malone, are a distinguishing mark of classical as opposed to pre-classical Old English poetry. In the latter, he claims, ‘the end-stopped style prevailed: every line ended with a syntactical pause and every sentence made either a line or a couplet (i.e., a two-line unit).’ Classical poetry, on the other hand, was characterized by the use of run-on lines, which made possible the development of longer units of poetry.9 It may be noted here that Paetzel finds a connection between the development of variation and the use of run-on lines in the non-strophic formation of West Germanic poetry generally.10 By ‘run-on lines’ are meant, quite simply, lines in which the sentence continues into the next line of verse; by ‘run-on style’ is meant the tendency for sentences to end with an on-verse and begin with an off-verse, that is, to end and begin in the middle of a line, so that when the sentence comes to an end, the line requires completion, and when the line comes to an end, the sentence requires completion.11 Malone further distinguishes three stages in the development of the run-on style. In each stage the plurilinear units become progressively longer, so that in the third they are barely discernible; in the second and third stages they may consist of more than one sentence. In each stage, moreover, syntactical pauses in the middle of a line become more frequent and decisive. The second stage is illustrated by Beowulf, where single-line and couplet units are rare, and where some of the plurilinear units are of great length; some of the natural divisions (though none of the fitt divisions) end with an on-verse, and some of the speeches begin with an off-verse. Malone’s views on the end-stopped and run-on lines in relation to the chronology of Old English poetry have recently been quoted with evident approval by Calder.12

In the passage quoted above, Leslie goes on to say: ‘the development of chiastic phrases and patterns would require a syntactical pause in the middle of a line and would stimulate, or be stimulated by, the development of multilinear sentences....’13 If this is true, and if Malone’s chronological scheme, just outlined, can be accepted, then parallelism or variation occurring in chiastic form, at least, might be expected to serve along with other factors as a guide to the earliness or lateness of a poem in the Old English poetic corpus.

The terms ‘plurilinear’ and ‘multilinear’ are scarcely appropriate to Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, which falls naturally into strophes which are seldom longer than eight verses or vísuorð; that is to say, the equivalent of four lines of Old English poetry. The Icelandic term vísuorð will be used here to refer to a verse or half-line of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, and also to the type of verse (known as Vollzeile in German) which constitutes the third and sixth verse in a ljóðaháttr strophe – that is (in its simplest form) a strophe of six vísuorð which follows the normal rules of alliteration in its first and second vísuorð, and also its fourth and fifth, but which has independent alliteration of two stressed syllables in each of the two remaining vísuorð.14 According to Malone, the ljóðaháttr half-strophe developed from an earlier ‘line-and-a-half unit,’ of which he gives some Old English examples.15 Apart from ljóðaháttr, the eddic metres normally take the form of four-line strophes of eight vísuorð each. The commonest metre of this type is fornyrðislag, which is more frequent than ljóðaháttr; the others are mála-hattr and kviðuháttr, which are less frequent than ljòðaháttr. Gustav Neckel, who worked out for eddic poetry in fornyrðislag a chronological scheme in some ways comparable to Malone’s for Old English poetry, distinguished three successive stages, the first and second of which show a development from a single-line unit of two vísuorð to a two-line unit of four (i.e. the equivalent of a half-strophe), often as a result of variation.16 To this extent at least, Neckel sees variation as going hand in hand with a chronological development, much as Leslie sees chiasmus in relation to Old English poetry. His third and final stage, however, shows a development from the two-line unit of four vísuorð not, as might be expected, to a still longer unit, but to the much shorter one of a single vísuorð. At this stage, according to Neckel, the vísuorð is largely ‘isolated’ in relation to its neighbouring vísuorð, as regards syntax and presumably also variation.17 Neckel’s scheme has been criticized for its third stage in particular by Jan de Vries and Peter Hallberg,18 the former producing evidence that the vísuorð represents the oldest unit of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, and of West Germanic poetry as well.

These considerations – taken together with T.A. Shippey’s reminder that ‘in Old English, style is not the man’19 – might give rise to the assumption that the more variation there is in an Old English or eddic poem, the later the poem is likely to be. In this paper I shall test the validity of this assumption in relation to eddic poetry, with a view to showing whether or not the distribution of variation in Old English poetry – a larger and less manageable corpus – is likely to reflect a chronological development. It is true that few, if any, of the eddic poems can be dated with certainty, but it has been found possible to classify them broadly into ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ poems, as Einar Ólafur Sveinsson has done in his Ìslenzkar bókmenntir í fornöld, published in 1962.20 I shall first outline and in some cases develop Campbell’s definitions of his ten types of parallel, illustrating them with examples from Beowulf in addition to the few he provides himself, and showing that Paetzel’s examples of variation in the eddic corpus21 fit Campbell’s ten-type classification with striking frequency and neatness. This will be enough to show that what Campbell calls ‘parallelism’ is essentially the same phenomenon as what Paetzel calls ‘variation,’ and that its workings in eddic poetry are much the same as in Old English. I shall then outline the criteria according to which Sveinsson divides the eddic corpus into earlier and later poems, and list the eddic poems in two groups according to this classification, showing the numbers and distribution of the variations recorded by Paetzel as they occur in each group. If one group turns out to have noticeably more variations than the other in relation to the total size of each group, this may be significant chronologically, and might suggest that an extensive study of variation in Old English poetry would help to place Beowulf chronologically in relation to other Old English poems. If not, then it is unlikely that such a study will help in this respect, unless, perhaps, it can be shown that the circumstances determining the use of variation in Old English poetry are very markedly different from those determining its use in eddic poetry.

By “the eddic corpus’ I mean, incidentally, all those Old Norse-Icelandic poems which Paetzel took into account; that is to say, the poems (other than Forspjallsljöð) contained in Sæmundar Edda hins fróða, edited by Sophus Bugge (1867),22 and the closely related Eddica Minora (EM), edited by Andreas Heusler and Wilhelm Ranisch (1903).23 While the examples of eddic variation given below are Paetzel’s, the examples of parallelism in Beowulf are my own unless otherwise stated.

In Campbell’s first type, the balanced parallel, ‘an element generally double is repeated by one syntactically equivalent and of approximately equal bulk.’24 His one example from Old English, from Finnsburg 44-45a (sæde þæt his) / byrne ābrocen (wre,) / heresceorp unhrōr,25 shows a subject noun with a past participle as predicate paralleled by a noun with a predicative adjective. The second element in the parallel is ‘syntactically equivalent’ to the first in that the relationship of the adjective to the noun in the second element is the same as that of the participle to the noun in the first; and it is ‘of approximately equal bulk’ in that it is not significantly longer or shorter in number of words or parts of words than the first, the only difference of this kind being that the simplex noun (byrne) in the first element is paralleled by a compound noun (heresceorp) in the second. Such a difference is only significant if one element in the parallel consists solely of a simplex word, which is not the case here.26 Balanced parallels involving a predicate adjective or participle are relatively rare in Beowulf, and hardly seem to occur at all among Paetzel’s examples of variation in eddic poetry. The only two clear-cut examples in Beowulf are lines 49b-50a, (him wæs) geōmor sefa, / murnende mōd, and 2283b-84a, (Ða wæs) hord rāsod, / onboren bēaga hord, in the second of which the word order is chiastic. The only possible examples in eddic poetry, to judge from Paetzel’s list, are Skírnismál 13, 5-6, (mer var) aldr vm scapapr / oc alt lifvm lagið,27 and Baldrs draumar (Vegtamskviða) 7, 1-3, Her stændr Balldri / of brugginn miðr, / skírar væigar.28 In the first of these, the conjunction oc (‘and’) occurs between the two elements of the supposed variation, making it debatable whether the second phrase is really intended as a variation on the first;29 and in the second example, it seems, only the past participle, brugginn, is used predicatively, whereas the adjective skirar is used attributively. Paetzel, indeed, seems to recognize this in that he does not include the word brugginn in his quotation of the example,30 which presumably means that he sees the variation as restricted to the words mjðr, skírar væigar, and thus, in Campbell’s terms, as an instance of the expanded parallel (i.e. Type 6, see below).

A grammatical combination which is much more frequently subject to variation in the form of the balanced parallel, both in Beowulf and the eddic corpus, is that of a noun with a participle or adjective as attribute. An example of this combination occurring in the nominative as a subject, and giving rise to a balanced parallel, is Beowulf 111 lb-12a, swn ealgylden, / eofer īren-heard, which may be compared with Sigurðarkviða hin skainma 68, 2-3, malmr hringvaripr, / egghvast iárn,31 where the parallel also involves a subject in the nominative and differs from the Beowulf example only insofar as its word order is chiastic. Among examples in both Beowulf and the eddic corpus of this combination occurring in the accusative as an object, and in a balanced parallel, may be noted, on the one hand, Beowulf 214b-15a, beorhte frætwe, / gūðsearo geatolīc; 325b-26a, sīde scyldas, / rondas regnhearde; 2253b-54a, fted wge, / dryncfæt dēore; and, on the other, Sigurðarkviða hin skamma 17, 7-8, eiða svarna, / vnnar trygdir32 (where the first element inverts the phrase svarna eiða of the immediately preceding vísuorð); Reginsmál 16, 3-4, hávar vnnir, / haf glymianda;33 and EM II, 4, 6-7 friðar hnossir, / fagra bauga.34 A much rarer type of balanced parallel is the one in which a subject and object are paralleled; its rarity in Beowulf and the eddic corpus makes its occurrence in both all the more striking. The one case in Beowulf, at lines 65 2-3a, (Gegrētte þa) / guma ōþerne, / Hrōðgar Beowulf may be compared with the one case among Paetzel’s examples from the eddic corpus – Völundarkviða 23. 1-3, (Snemma kallaði) / seggr annan, / broþir a broþur.35

Campbell’s phrase ‘generally double’ is of course applicable to compound words in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, and these may sometimes occur as elements in balanced parallels in Beowulf and the eddic corpus – compound nouns, it would appear, more frequently in the former than in the latter, and compound adjectives almost equally rarely in both. The compound noun in the accusative plural paralleled at Beowulf 1713b-14a, bēodgenēatas, / eaxlgesteallan, may be compared with the one in the accusative singular paralleled in Atlakviða 28, 4-5. menvorð ... dolgrögni;36 and the compound adjective paralleled at Beowulf 640b-41a, goldhroden / frēolicu, may be compared with Hymiskviða 10, 1,3. vascapadr... harðrápr37 It may be noted that each of these two adjectival examples refers to the subject of a verbal expression of motion, as is also the case with one of the only two other instances in Beowulf of a balanced parallel consisting of compound adjectives;38 no other such instance in the eddic corpus appears to have been recorded by Paetzel.

Campbell’s qualifying adverb ‘generally’ presumably means that he would allow as examples of the balanced parallel cases where each element in a parallel consists either of just one simplex word or of an expression involving more than one word but not readily divisible into just two main parts. If so, then it is reasonable to regard as examples of the type the simplex adjectives wlitig and ēacen at Beowulf 1662 - 63a, þæt ic on wāge geseah / wlitig hangian / ealdsweord ēacen. These occur in the accusative, and may be compared with the simplex adjectives harpa and snialla. also in the accusative, at Gripisspá 9, 5-7, pv mvnt harpa / Hvndings sono / snialla fella.39 Examples of balanced parallels in which each element is arguably divisible into more than just two main parts are, on the one hand, Beowulf 1273b-74a. (ðy hē) pone fēond ofercwom, /gehngde helle gāst, and, on the other, Hamðismál 28, 5, 7, varr inn vigfrcni... gvmi inn gvnnhęlgi.40

Campbell’s second type may be called the partial parallel; its characteristic feature, according to him, is ‘to parallel only part of an expression, and to add something new to replace what is omitted. For example, in Finnesburg 25-26, weana gebad, heordra hilda, by omitting to parallel gebad, the poet makes room to enlarge the parallel to weana to adjective and noun.’41 The element of enlargement to which Campbell here refers means that there is sometimes a risk of confusing this type of parallel with Type 6, the expanded parallel, as will be shown below. Among other examples of the partial parallel Campbell gives one from Beowulf 1695b-96a, rihte gemearcod, / geseted ond gesd. Here the poet has omitted to parallel the adverb rihte in the second element of the parallel, and instead has used the conjunction ond to link another past participle to the one paralleling gemearcod in the second element (precisely which of the two past participles in the second element is meant to parallel gemearcod is a question which depends for its answer on whether or not the word order of the parallel is seen as chiastic). If Campbell and Paetzel are to be relied on, this type of parallel is very much more common in Old English poetry than in the eddic corpus; according to Campbell it is ‘employed continuously’ in the Old English epic style, and is ‘capable of infinite variety,’42 whereas according to Paetzel’s list of variations in eddic poetry only one clear case of the partial parallel occurs in the entire corpus; this is EM II, 9, 2-3, Arngríms synir, / megir meinsamir,43 where it would be theoretically possible to substitute for the adjective meinsamir in the second element a noun in the genitive singular with an appropriate number of syllables as a parallel to the proper noun Arngríms in the first element. The chiastic word order of this one example should be noted.

Campbell’s third type involves a compound word being paralleled by a two-word phrase; the one example he gives is from Beowulf 16b-17a, (him þæs) Līffrea, / wuldres Wealdend, where it will be noticed that there is a semantic correspondence between each element in the compound word and one of the two words forming the phrase which parallels it. Cases of two-word parallels to compound words where this correspondence is not found are best regarded as instances of Type 6, as will be shown below. Campbell’s third type of parallel also seems more common in Beowulf than in eddic poetry; I have found twenty reasonably clear cases of it in Beowulf,44 and only two in Paetzel’s list of variations in the eddic corpus. One of these is from Rígspula 36. 9-10, oðalvollu, / alldnar bygðir,45 both elements of which are in the accusative plural, and where the first element, oðalvollu, is repeated from the preceding visuorð, where it occurs as an object; and the other is from EM XVIII J, 6a, 3, 6, í trollkonum ... í konu vándri,46 where it will be noticed that, if the preposition í (here taking the dative) is left out of account, the ordering of the word-elements and words is chiastic. The second example is perhaps improved if the emendation of trllkonum from a plural to a singular form, suggested by a number of editors,47 is accepted. The first of these cases may be compared with Beowulf 82b, 83a, heaðo-wylma... lāðan līges, where an object in the genitive plural is paralleled in the genitive singular; and the second may be compared with Beowulf 1260a, 1261a, wæteregesan ... cealde strēamas, one of the very few chiastic examples of this type of parallel in the poem, here consisting of an object in the accusative singular paralleled in the accusative plural.

Campbell illustrates his fourth type, the ‘parallel equivalent in sense but not in syntax,’48 with one quotation from Beowulf 514a, 515a. mton merestrta ... glidon ofer gārsecg, where a transitive verb followed by its object is paralleled by an intransitive verb followed by an adverbial phrase; and with one from Genesis 112b-13a, ēce Dryhten, / helm eallwihta, where a noun preceded by an attributive adjective is paralleled by a noun followed by a limiting genitive. The word order of the second example is easily recognized as chiastic. This type of parallel is reasonably frequent both in Beowulf and the eddic corpus, and is more varied than Campbell’s examples imply. With his second example may be compared, on the one hand, Beowulf 1554b-55a, wītig Drihten, / rodera Rdend, and 1682, gromheort guma, / Codes andsaca; and, on the other, Grípisspá 41, 5. 7, itr konungr... Givca arfi,49 and Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, 49, 2-3, snefgir kiólar, / racca hirtir.50 The occasional tendency for the first element in this type of parallel to consist of two words linked by a conjunction meaning ‘and’ may be illustrated from Beowulf by I22lb-22a, feor ond nēah, / ealne wideferhp, where two adverbs are so linked, and from EM XIV, 7,5-7. æsir / ok ásyniur, / grvll regin,51 where two nouns are. In both cases the second element consists of a noun with an adjective as attribute; and in the Beowulf example this combination constitutes an adverbial phrase. Beowulf and the eddic corpus each have an example of a parallel of this fourth type in which an intransitive verb in the first element is paralleled in the second by a verb of being or becoming followed by a predicative adjective: Beowulf 61 1b-12a. hlyn swynsode, / word wron wynsume, cf. Skírnismál 25, 5-6, hnigr sa inn aldni iotvnn, / verpr þinn feigr faþir;52 and if the emendations of Grundtvig and Trautmann may be trusted. Beowulf 1519b-20, mægenrs forgeaf / hildebille, / hond sweng ne ofteah,53 may be taken as a parallel of this type in which the first element is an affirmative sentence, and the second a negative one, and may be compared with Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, 9. 5 -8, hann galt oc gaf / gvll verþvngo, / sparþi eigi hilmir / hodd bloprekinn.54 Beowulf 1363-4. ofer pm hongiað / hrinde bearwas, / wudu wyrtum fæst / wæter oferhelmað. which comes close to Type 1 with the strong impression of balance given by its neat chiastic word order, may be compared with Sigurðarkviða hin skamrna 32, 5-8, sęir brþr þinom / blopvct sár, / vndir dreyrgar / knęttir yfir binda.55 Finally, it may be noted that Beowulf and the eddic corpus each also have an example of a parallel of this type in which the second element consists entirely or mainly of an adverbial genitive. In Beowulf 677a, 678a, an herewæsmun ... gūþgeweorca, the genitive is one of respect; in Sigurðarkviða hin skamma 55, 4, 6, enn inn heiði dagr ... solar geisla,56 the relevant genitive (geisla) is one of comparison.

Campbell defines his fifth type, the ‘summarizing parallel,’ as ‘an expression of two parts of which each is a compression of a preceding phrase,’57 giving an illustration from Genesis 2331-2b, godcunde gife / gāstes mihtum, / frēondspēd fremum, where the first and second words of the expression frēondspēd fremum parallel the phrases godcunde gife and gāstes mihtum respectively. This may be compared with Beowulf 550b-51a. 552a, līcsyrce min / heard hondlocen ... beadohrægl broden, which in turn may be compared with Hyndluljóð 1, 1-3 (Vaki mær meyia, / (Vaki) min vina, / Hyndla systir!58 where the first and second words in the phrase Hyndla systirspecify rather than summarize the phrases mær meyia and min vina respectively. This is the only case I have found in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations of ‘an expression of two parts,’ each of which comes at all near to summarizing a preceding phrase; and in Beowulf there seem to be rather more summarizing expressions, whether consisting of two parts or otherwise, than in the eddic corpus. There is, however, enough evidence in eddic poetry as well as in Beowulf to suggest that the summarizing parallel may be profitably redefined as ‘a compression of a preceding word or phrase;’ this would allow the type to include among its examples not only the two-part compressions described in Campbell’s definition, but would also make room for parallels in which the second element consists solely of a simplex word (and the first of a compound word or a phrase), and for ones in which the second element is divisible into more than two parts (and the first into still more). This latter, relatively lengthy type of summarizing parallel is not uncommon in Beowulf, but is hard to identify with certainty among Paetzel’s list of variations from the eddic corpus. A possible example might be Völuspá 39, 7-9, þar saug Niðhöggr / nái framgengna, / sleit vargr vera,59 if Paetzel’s view that the referent of vargr is the same as that of Niðhöggr may be trusted;60 if so, then this may be seen as a summarizing parallel in which the statement sleit vargr vera, itself divisible into three parts, parallels a longer and more detailed preceding statement, and which is thus comparable to Beowulf 1417b-20a, Denum eallum wæs, / winum Scyldinga / weorce on mōde / tō geþolianne, / ðegne monegum, / oncð eorla gehwm, where the expression oncð eorla gehwæm, itself divisible into three main parts but taking up only one half-line of verse, parallels the more complex content of the preceding two and a half lines. Both Beowulf and the eddic corpus have occasional examples of a summarizing expression consisting solely of a simplex word, however;Beowulf2340-41a, (þæt him) holtwudu / (helpan ne meahte) / lind (wið līge), for instance, where a simplex parallels a compound noun, may be compared with EM XVIII Aa, 1, Geirhildr, getta, where a simplex nickname parallels a compound proper name; and both have instances of a simplex word paralleling a preceding phrase, such as Beowulf 1148a, 1149b, grimne gripe ... sorge, which may be compared in this respect with Grípisspá 10, 1-2, itr konungr, / ęttingi61 (where the word qttingi is suffix-formed rather than strictly simplex).62 For the sake of completeness it may be mentioned that the very rare cases of a two-word phrase paralleled by a compound word where there is a semantic correspondence between each word in the phrase and one element in the compound (i.e. cases of Type 3 in reverse), may reasonably be regarded as examples of Type 5.1 have found no certain examples of this in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations; a possible example in Beowulf is 1896b, 1897b, sgēap naca ... hringedstefna, if Klaeber’s gloss of sgēap as ‘curved’ may be trusted. It also seems appropriate to include in Type 5 instances of a two-word phrase paralleled by a compound word where there is no such detailed semantic correspondence between word and word-element, such as Beowulf 268a, 269a, sunu Healfclenes ... lēodgebyrgean, but of this I can find no certain case, either, in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations.

Campbell’s sixth type, the expanded parallel, shows the summarizing parallel operating in reverse, and may thus be defined (if his terms are adapted once again) as ‘an expansion of a preceding word or phrase.’ As with Type 5, Campbell chooses to illustrate Type 6 with two juxtaposed expressions each paralleling a preceding expression, pointing out that in Juliana 534b-35, Hēo facet dēofol (tēah), / breostum inbryrded, / bendum fæstne, ‘heo and þæt deofol each receive expanded parallels.’63 This remark implies an acknowledgement of separate as well as coupled instances of such parallels as examples of the type. Coupled instances of the kind quoted by Campbell are, indeed, relatively rare, both in Beowulf and the eddic corpus, though commoner in the former than in the latter. An example from Beowulf 151b-53, (þætte Grendel wan) / hwīle (wið Hrōþgār), / hetenīðas (wæg). / fyrene ond fhðe / fela missēra, where hwīle and hetenīðas ‘each receive expanded parallels’ (in chiastic order, be it also noted), may be compared with EM V 2, 1-4, (þá er Herþiófr) / Harald (of) vélti, / sér óiafnan / sveik ī tryggðum,64 where Harald is expanded by the adjectival phrase sér óiafnan, and where the verb vélti is paralleled by the verb sveik and expanded by the addition to the latter of the adverbial phrase í tryggðum.

Campbell’s remark that, in the example quoted from Juliana 534b - 35, ‘heo and pæt deofol each receive expanded parallels’ raises two questions relevant to the problem of how far variation as defined by Paetzel is comparable to parallelism as exemplified by Campbell. The first of these is the question, which Paetzel answers in the negative, of whether a pronoun (such as heo, as here) may constitute the first element in a variation.65 The second is the question, which Paetzel also answers in the negative, of whether a participial or adjectival expression, when not used substantivally (as bendum fæstne, in the example quoted, plainly is not), may constitute the second element in a variation when the first consists exclusively, or (as with þæt dēofol) mainly, of a noun.66 I shall not discuss here the problem of whether Paetzel’s views on variation should be modified in the light of Campbell’s on parallelism (or vice versa) in respect of these questions, but will point out that the examples quoted in this paper from Beowulf and the eddic corpus, whether of the expanded parallel or of other types, do not include ones which raise these questions, apart from EM V, 2, 1-4, which raises the second of them when considered as a case of two expanded parallels coupled together, as it is in the preceding paragraph. Paetzel lists this example as an instance of sentence variation as opposed to word variation,67 which means, among other things, that he finds it appropriate to consider the noun Harald and the adjectival phrase sér óiafnart not only as equivalent to each other, but also as objects in the sentences of which they form parts in the first and second elements of the variation respectively. Thus he sees the adjectival phrase sér óiafnan in the second element as being used here substantially, forming as it does the object of the verb sveik, just as Harald forms the object of vélti in the first element. It should be noted, however, that his list of eddic variations does include a few instances in which the first element consists exclusively of a noun, and the second exclusively of a participial expression used in a manner which is only debatably substantival.68 These are not quoted here as examples, but are used together with certain other debatable cases in the numerical lists given below.

Before further examples of the expanded parallel are given, it may be helpful to distinguish as clearly as possible this sixth type of parallel from the second, the partial parallel, which, it was suggested above, sometimes runs the risk of confusion with Type 6, and which, it was also suggested, is common enough in Old English poetry, but excessively rare in the eddic corpus.

The dividing line between Type 2 and Type 6 is particularly hard to determine, not least because of the element of enlargement in Type 2, noted above, and also because identification of Type 2 as opposed to Type 6 involves a consideration of the difficult question of what a poet could or might have written instead of what appears in the surviving text. The difference between the two types may perhaps be illustrated from Beowulf 662-5a:

Đā him Hrōþgār gewāt      mid his hæleþa gedrylit,
eodur Scyldinga      ūtofhealle;
wolde wīgfruma       Wealhþēo sēcan,
cwēn tō gebeddan.

The relevant pairs of expressions here are, on the one hand, Hrōpgār gewāt... eodur Scyldinga, and, on the other, Wealhþēo sēcan, / cwēn to gebeddan. The first of these I see as an example of Type 6 (once the verb gewāt has been excluded from consideration) and the second as an example of Type 2. In the first of them, it seems idle to look for an appropriate verb in the third person singular (such as [ge]ēode?) as a potential replacement for the genitive plural noun Scyldinga and as a parallel to gewāt, since the noun eodur, when occurring in precisely this form, or as eodor, is always accompanied by a limiting genitive in Old English poetry,69 and seems naturally to require such a genitive if its meaning is taken to be ‘protector,’ in order to show whose protector the person in question is. Thus the verb gewāt should be excluded from consideration, and the parallel seen as restricted to the words Hrōpgār... eodur Scyldinga, with these last two words forming an ‘expanded parallel’ of the word Hrōpgār. In the second pair of expressions, however, it seems theoretically possible to replace the adverb-equivalent to gebeddan with a verb in the infinitive (such as ymbclyppan?) paralleling sēcan, since the noun cwēn, unlike what seems to be the case with eodur in certain forms, need not always be accompanied by a limiting expression in Old English poetry. Here it is possible to say, in Campbell’s terms, that ‘by omitting to parallel’ sēcan, ‘the poet makes room to enlarge the parallel’ to Wealhpēo to noun and adverb-equivalent. Only part of the expression (the Wealhþrēo part) is paralleled (by the noun cwēn), and ‘something new’ (the adverbial phrase tō gebeddan) is added ‘to replace what is omitted’ (i.e. the infinitive sēcan). On the other hand, the infinitive sēcan must not be excluded from consideration as part of the parallel; on the contrary, it must be seen as participating in it, so that the poet’s choice of a substitute for it in the second element of the parallel can be appreciated, and so that an effect of balance can be achieved between the two elements. It is significant in this connection that Campbell describes the partial parallel as a ‘variation upon’ Type 1, the balanced parallel.70

In its simplest form, the expanded parallel consists of a simplex word paralleled by a compound; but it may also consist of a simplex word paralleled by a phrase, or of a compound word paralleled by a phrase in circumstances other than those appropriate to Type 3, and described above, or of a phrase paralleled by a longer phrase, and so on. In these forms, at least, it is reasonably common both in Beowulf and the eddic corpus, as a few examples will indicate. Beowulf 43b, 44a, lācum ... pēodgestrēonum, where a simplex noun used adverbially in the dative is paralleled by a compound noun so used, may be compared with Völuspá 21,9, opt, óaldan,71 where a simplex adverb is paralleled by a compound. Beowulf 1207b-8a, frætwe ... eorclanstānas, where a simplex noun occurring as object in the accusative plural is paralleled by a compound noun, may be compared with Guðrúnarhvöt 14, 5-6, ioþ, / erfivorþo,72 where precisely the same phenomenon occurs. Examples of simplex nouns occurring in the nominative and paralleled by phrases are provided by, on the one hand, Beowulf 569b, 570a, lēoht... beorht bēacen Godes and, on the other, by Grímnismál 11, 4, 5, Scðai... scir brvðr goða,73 where the simplex nouns in question occur as subjects. Examples in the accusative are provided by Beowulf 1546b-47a, bearn ... āngan eaferan, and by Atlakviða 1,2,3, ár... kvnnan segg,74 where the simplex nouns occur as objects. Examples in the genitive are provided by, on the one hand, Beowulf 487b, 488a, holdra ... dēorre duguðe, where a partitive genitive is paralleled, and on the other by Atlakvifta 17, 4, 6, lypa (sinnis)... recca onęissa, where the genitive is either partitive or possessive, depending on how sinnis, the noun which governs lyþa here, is interpreted.75 Examples in the dative are provided by, on the one hand, Beowulf 1778b, 1779a, Metode... ēcean Dryhtne, where the dative is required by the expression meaning ‘thanks be’ which surrounds the word Metode, and on the other by Grímnismál 38, 2, 3, solo (fyr)... scinanda goði,76 where the dative in solo is required by the preposition fyr. It may be repeated here (from the discussion of Type 3, above) that two-word parallels of compound words where the detailed semantic correspondence characteristic of Type 3 is not apparent may reasonably be regarded as examples of Type 6. Two such cases from Beowulf, 32b, 33b, hringedstefna ... æpelinges fær, and 504b, 505a, middangeardes ... under heofenum, may be compared with two from the poetic Edda, Skírnismál 34, 2-3, hrimþvrsar, / synir Svttvnga,77 and Hamðismál 15,,, 2-3, sciþiiarn, / mękiss eggiar.78 Finally, an example of a phrase paralleled by a longer phrase is provided by, on the one hand, Beowulf 1644b-45, ealdor ðegna, / ddcēne mon / dōme ge-wurþad (after which line 1645 combines with 1646a to provide an example of Type 5), and on the other by EM XVIII J 19, 1,3-4, Hringr konungr... eztr ðlinga / und Ymis hausi.79

The remaining four of Campbell’s ten types of parallel come nearer to being equally rare in Beowulf and the eddic corpus than the six already discussed. His example of the seventh type of parallel, ‘a parallel to the subject or object ... placed between the elements of a periphrastic verb,’80 is from Beowulf 1696b-97, (hwām pæt) sweord (geworht), / īrena cyst / rest wre, where irena cyst, an expanded parallel of sweord, the subject of the clause, is placed between the past participle geworht and the auxiliary wre, which together form a periphrastic verbal expression. This type of parallel, it will be noticed, combines here with Type 6. Type 7 is perhaps seen at its most impressive in Beowulf 1446-7, where it combines with Type 3 and Type 1, and where both the subject and the object are paralleled: (pæt him)hildegrāp / hrepre (ne mihte), / eorres inwitfeng / aldre gesceþðan. Here hildegāp, the subject of the clause, finds a parallel of Type 3 in the phrase eorres inwitfeng, which is placed between the auxiliary mihte and the infinitive gescepðanhich together form a periphrastic verbal expression; and hreþre, the object of the clause, finds a balanced parallel in the noun aldre, which is also placed between the two parts of this periphrastic expression. I have found no example of precisely this type of parallel in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations. The nearest approach to it recorded by Paetzel seems to be EM XII, 18, 5-7, (hann lét) Hálfdan / (hníga at velli), / frœknan stilli,81 where Type 7, as Campbell describes it, may be seen operating in reverse; Hálfdan, the object of the sentence, is placed between lét and hniga, the two parts of a periphrastic verbal expression, and is provided with an expanded parallel, frœknan stilli, after this expression has been completed.

In Campbell’s eighth type of parallel, according to his definition, ‘a subordinate clause is added to a main sentence, and a parallel to some part of the main sentence is then added.’82 He gives as his first example Genesis 1939-41a, (Ac hē) pre mðede / monwīsan (flēah / pēah pe hē on pām lande / lifian sceolde) / fācen and fyrene, where the subordinate clause which takes up line 1940 is added to the sentence completed in the preceding half-line, and the expression fācen and fyrene is added as a partial parallel to pre mgðe monwīsan after sub-ordinate clause has been completed. Among his other examples Campbell gives two from Beowulf one of which, lines 1080b-85a, may be quoted:

(Wīg ealle fornam

Finnes þegnasn      nemne fēaum ānum,
þaet hē ne mehte       on þm meðelstede
Wig) Hengeste      (wiht gefeohtan,
nē pā wlāfē      wīge forþringan)
þēodnes þegne.

Here a co-ordinate clause (with mehte understood) dependent on the subordinate clause of lines 1082-3 is added to the sentence completed in line 1083, and the phrase þēodnes þegne is added as an expanded parallel to Hengeste after the co-ordinate clause has been completed. Of the three comparable examples in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations, Sigurðarkviða hin skamma 52, 3, 5,83 is the neatest, though it should be recognized that while the subordinate clause which here separates the two elements in the parallel is grammatically complete in itself, as is also the case with Campbell’s examples of such clauses, it differs from the latter in requiring semantic completion which it does not receive until after the parallel is itself complete. This may be illustrated by quotation:

(þo mvn a beinom
brenna ydrom)
fri eyrir,
(þa er ér fram comiþ,)
nęit Menio god,
(min at vitia)84

As will be evident, the meaning of the subordinate clause pa er ér fram comip (‘when you advance’) separating the two elements in the balanced parallel fri eyrir... nęit Menio god needs to be filled out by the phrase min at vitia (‘to visit me’) in order to be fully understood.

In Campbell’s ninth type, according to his definition, ‘an expression may be divided, but its parallel may be undivided.’85 His one example is (from Juliana 337b-39a, (Gif) sōðfæstra / (þurh myrrelsan) / mōd (ne oðcyrreð), hāligra hyge, where the words sōðfaestra and mōd which, if juxtaposed, could combine with hāligra hyge to form a balanced parallel, are separated from each other by the adverbial phrase purh myrrelsan. From among the very few examples in Beowulf of this type of parallel may be quoted lines 822-3a, (þæt his) aldres (wæs) / ende (gegongen), / dōgera dægrim, where the phrase aldres ... ende is paralleled by the undivided phrase dōgera dægrïm yet is itself divided by the past tense wæs, which here forms part of a periphrastic verb external to the parallel. This may be compared with a correspondingly rare case in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations, Hamðismál 3, 4-8 (which is repeated virtually word for word in Guðrúnarhvöt 2, 8-12):

ióm (vm traddi,)
hvitom oc svortum
(a hervegi),
grám, gangtömum
Gotna hrossom.86

Here the noun ióm on the one hand, and the adjectival phrase hvitom oc svortum on the other, are together paralleled by the rather lengthier undivided expression grám, gangtömum / Gotna hrossom, yet are separated from each other by the words vm traddi, which do not participate in the parallel (the verb traddi takes an object which is external to the parallel, and does not appear in the quotation).

In the tenth and final type, according to Campbell, ‘a parallel may be uninflected if the case is clearly indicated in the expressions which it parallels.’87 His main example is from Andreas 1672-3b, (Wuna) in pre winbyrg, / (wigendra hlēoj / salu sinchroden. Here the adverbial phrase in pe winbyrg, where the dative case is clearly indicated by the form of the pronoun pre, following the preposition in, is paralleled by the plural expression salu sinchroden, which Kenneth R. Brooks takes as accusative, presumably because he sees it as the object of the imperative wuna.88 Campbell, however, who evidently prefers to regard wuna as intransitive, seems to take salu sinchroden as formally nominative, to judge at least from his other examples, which show instances of expressions in the oblique cases paralleled by ones formally in the nominative. This suggests that Campbell’s description of the type should be rewritten as follows: ‘an expression in one of the oblique cases may be paralleled by one formally in the nominative if the oblique case used in the first expression is clearly indicated.’ Beowulf 1830b-3la, Ic on Higelāce wāt, / Gēata dryhten, where Higelāce, which is clearly in the dative, is paralleled by the phrase Gēata dryhten, in which dryhten is formally in the nominative, provides a less ambiguous example than Campbell’s from Andreas and may be compared with the one example I have found of this type of parallel in Paetzel’s list of eddic variations: Völuspá 19, 1-3, Ask veit ek standa, / heitir Yggdrasill / hár baðmr ...,89 Here the noun ask, which is clearly in the accusative, appears to be paralleled by the expression hár baðmr, which is clearly in the nominative, perhaps as a result of attraction to the predicative Yggdrasill which precedes it, and is itself in the nominative.

These examples show that the phenomenon under discussion, whether it is called ‘parallelism’ or “variation,’ takes essentially the same form in Old English and eddic poetry. It remains to discover whether or not its distribution in the latter shows it to be especially characteristic of a ‘new’ as opposed to ‘old’ style, or whether any development can be seen in the way it comes to be used in later eddic poems. Campbell himself makes use of the eddic poems in discussing the development of the Old English epic style, though with reference to metre rather than parallelism, and with the reservation that “some of them are late, others are reflections of early lays rather than those lays themselves.’90 This should be kept in mind at all stages of the following discussion.

Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, in his book mentioned above,91 accepts for the most part the traditional division of the eddic corpus into mythological and heroic poems, but also distinguishes between earlier and later poems, as already indicated.92 His specific reasons for doing so emerge in his discussions of individual poems; only his more general criteria for dating, as outlined in his chapter on the subject,93 will be summarized here. He begins by emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between the poems themselves as they have been preserved, and the sources on which they may have been based. He then mentions the Codex Regius of the second half of the thirteenth century as a terminus ante quem for the poems contained in it, which are copied from an earlier compilation, and points out the chronological significance of the fact that eddic poems are used in Völsunga saga, and by Snorri and Saxo. As for a terminus post quern, he finds it unlikely that any extant eddic poem was composed before the period of syncope was complete (i.e. by ca. 700 A.D.), for if so, it would be impossible to scan or to read aloud. With this in mind, and considering that no extant skaldic poem is older than the ninth century, he concludes tentatively that no extant eddic poem is either, while at the same time suggesting that legends relating to Sigurðr Fáfnisbani, the Gjúkungar, and Jörmunrekr, who of course figure in the heroic poems of the corpus, were probably known in Norway before 800 A.D. - earlier, that is, than Heusler and others were ready to admit.94 He next considers loan-words, pointing out that poems containing words borrowed from Old English or Irish are likely to have been composed in the viking age or later, and other words and word forms found in the poems, such as the expletive of (sometimes written um) which he regards as a sign of early composition, most notably (and controversially) in the case of þrymskviða.95 Increased regularity and consistency in the use of metrical forms will tend to be a sign of late rather than early composition, and references to historical figures and events of known date, to viking activity, and to the past generally (whether anachronistic or archaizing) will naturally help in different ways to date the poems in which they occur. Clear signs of Christian influence in the poems, rare though they are, will obviously be significant chronologically ; though the absence of pagan religious feeling from a mythological poem need not mean that it was composed in the Christian period, which begins in earnest around 1000 A.D.96 While poems in which the gods are highly praised probably are of pre-Christian origin, it should not be thought that ones in which they are treated ironically are necessarily later. Sveinsson draws attention to the sparseness of pagan religious kennings in skaldic poetry in the period following the conversion, which led de Vries to the conclusion that no post-conversion eddic poems on mythology were composed before 1150,97 but does not fully accept this conclusion himself. In general, however, he accepts Heusler’s view that the older heroic poems in fornyrðislag tend to be brisk and dramatic, with dialogue rather than long speeches, and an overriding interest in the narrative material, much of which may be covered in a single poem, whereas the younger ones tend to deal with fewer events each, to be more leisurely and lyrical in their treatment, and to concentrate more on the elaboration of feelings, often in the form of lengthy monologues.98 In cases of close verbal similarity between two poems, it can sometimes be shown which is likely to be the older by a study of the contextual suitability in each poem of the words found to be similar; if one of the two has borrowed from the other, the poem in which the words are more suitable in context is likely to be the older. It should be recognized, however, as Sveinsson is well aware, that verbal similarity between poems may often be due to oral formulism or to a common source, and thus of little significance for dating the poems in relation to each other. Verbal similarities between eddic and skaldic poems deserve special attention, as the latter can often be safely ascribed to poets whose dates are known; and the þulur or poetic lists preserved in manuscripts of Snorra Edda, and dating mostly from the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century, may help to determine the dates of eddic poems with which they show affinities. Finally, the use of eddic material in iconography, or in writings of mainly non-Scandinavian origin or inspiration, may occasionally be used supplementarily to help solve problems of dating.

In each of the two lists below, the poems are given in the order in which they are discussed by Sveinsson. This order, it should be emphasized, is primarily according to subject-matter; he first discusses mythological, and then heroic poems, and only within each of these categories is the order roughly chronological. Those of the Eddica Minora which he does not discuss individually are grouped together as ‘later poems,’ regardless of their subject-matter, at the end of the second list, in accordance with his view that none of them is likely to date from before 1100 A.D. They are listed in the order in which they are edited by Heusler and Ranisch, which is by type rather than by date or subject.99 After deciding to accept Sveinsson’s chronological grouping of the poems, I have thought it best to do so whole-heartedly, in order to give as unified a picture as possible of the distinction between earlier and later poems, even in cases where his dating is open to doubt.100 The dividing line between the two groups is apparently to be drawn somewhat after 1030 A.D., the latest likely date of inspiration for the composition of Bjarkamál.101 In the very few cases of poems or strophes which Sveinsson does not discuss in detail or at all, I have placed these in the lists in accordance with what I take to be his principles. Of the fragments in Snorra Edda numbered 1-14 by Bugge, for instance, nos. 9-11 are clearly pulur and seem to belong in the later list,102 where I have accordingly placed them. Somewhat arbitrarily, however, I have placed nos. 12-14 here also, and nos. 1-8 in the earlier list. As for the fragments in Völsunga saga, numbered 1-5 by Bugge, I have placed no. 2 in the earlier group, in accordance with what seems to be Sveinsson’s view,103 and, somewhat arbitrarily, no. 1 in the earlier group and nos. 3-5 in the later. The unambiguously Christian poem Sólarljóð, dating most probably from the twelfth century or later,104 of course belongs in the later group. The poems are listed by title where well-established titles exist; and the Eddica Minora, most of which are preserved as incidental verses in prose writings, are listed by their numbers in Heusler’s and Ranisch’s edition, but also, in cases where they contain examples of variation, with an indication of the speaker or speakers to whom they are attributed in the prose. The expressions ‘A-’ and ‘B-strophes,’ used in connection with Reginsmál and Fáfnismál, refer respectively to the ljóðahattr strophes in these poems, which Sveinsson dates relatively early, and to the fornyrðislag strophes, which he dates relatively late.105 Metrical forms are indicated by abbreviation as follows: ljóð(aháttr), forn(yrðislag), kvib(uháttr), mál(aháttr). P.E. Müller’s term, forma quædam metrica,106 is used with reference to the rhythmical prose of EM XXV (Tryggðamá, the basic units of which (mostly two-stress phrases sometimes linked in pairs by alliteration) are treated here as vísuorð. The numerical records in the lists differ from Paetzel’s in three principal ways: no percentages are given (until afterwards);107 the length of a poem is given in numbers of vísuorð or half-lines rather than lines; and, most importantly, account is taken of the number of vísuorð in those poems and fragments which contain no examples of variation. Paetzel excludes these from his own list, thus surely giving a misleading impression of the distribution of variation in eddic poetry as a whole.108

These lists suggest very strongly that variation cannot be regarded as a feature especially characteristic of either ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ eddic poetry; the percentage of variations in relation to the total number of vísuorð in each group is 1.30% in the case of the earlier group, and 1.26% in the case of the later - a difference of simply .04%, which, while it is hardly significant enough to indicate a decrease in the use of variation in the later group, certainly does not show the increase which might have been expected from the opinions quoted and discussed at the beginning of this paper. Essentially, the amount of variation in both groups is the same. It is true that Sigurðarkviða hin skamma shows considerably more examples of variation than any other poem in the corpus, and that it is one of the very youngest poems;109 on the other hand, Hamðisml and Atlakviða, which are closely related, stylistically and otherwise, and are among the very oldest,110 make up together practically the same number of vísuorð as Sigurðarkviða hin skamma, and together show only one less example.

As to whether the later group shows a development in the types of variation used, it should first be remembered that Campbell sees Type 1 as ‘the simplest type of parallel,’ and presumably, therefore, as the one most likely to occur in older poetry, if ‘the elaborate development of the art of parallelism’ is to be seen as characteristic of ‘the new style.’ He regards Type 2 as ‘the simplest variation upon’ Type 1, as indicated above, and also seems to regard Types 3 and 4 as variants of Type 1, since he introduces his discussion of them with the remark that ‘the epic poets ... give endless variety even to balanced parallels by internal grammatical variation.’111 This perhaps suggests that he finds ‘elaborate development’ best exemplified in Types 5 and 6 as he illustrates them (that is, each as an instance of two parallels coupled together) and Types 7-10. Not all the variations recorded by Paetzel conform as neatly as the ones discussed above to Campbell’s ten-type classification, so that only approximate statements can be made about the distribution of each type in the eddic corpus. On the other hand, some of the types are so rare in eddic poetry in the form in which Campbell describes them that exact statements can in some cases be made about the number of times they occur.

Type 1 occurs reasonably frequently in both groups, though more frequently in the later than the earlier; Type 2 occurs only once in the entire corpus, and then in the later group; Type 3 occurs only twice, once in each group; Type 4 occurs in both groups, though rather less frequently than Type 1, and more often in the later group than the earlier; Type 5 is generally less frequent than Type 4, and marginally more frequent in the earlier group than the later, though the specialized, two-part form in which Campbell exemplifies it occurs only once in the entire corpus, and then in the later group. Type 6 is more frequent than any other type, and occurs equally often in both groups; the specialized or ‘coupled’ form in which Campbell exemplifies it occurs only twice in the entire corpus, once in the earlier group (in Atlakviða 16, 8-10), and once in the later (in EM V, 2, 1-4, as shown above). Type 7, as indicated earlier, occurs in eddic poetry in the reverse of its Old English form as described by Campbell; the only clear example I have found of its doing so occurs in the later group. Type 8 occurs three times in the entire corpus, once in the earlier group and twice in the later; Type 9 occurs three times in the entire corpus, twice in Hamðismál (3, 4-8 and 10, 1-3), a poem in the earlier group, and once in the later group in what seems to be a clear case of borrowing from Hamðismál (Guðrunarhvöt, 2, 8-12).112 Type 10 occurs only once in the entire corpus, and then in the earlier group.

The conclusion must be that the amount of variation does not differ sufficiently between the groups to show a chronological development; and that information about the distribution of the different types of variation in both groups can only be approximate and slight. The negative result of this paper, then, is that, if the Old Norse-Icelandic evidence is anything to go by, variation is unlikely to serve as a guide to the chronological interrelationship of Old English poems. The positive result, however, is that Old English and eddic poetry show a number of striking similarities in their use of variation, that deserve further study.

COLIN CHASE

Our successors, I believe, will say that twentieth-century Beowulf criticism was more constantly and consistently divided over the poem’s emotional intent than over anything else. ‘Celebration’ would describe the oldest strain of criticism, from W.P. Ker, through W.W. Lawrence, Kemp Malone, Norman Garmonsway, and until very recently the school of oral-formulaists:1 ‘The poem is intended to celebrate an heroic ideal embodied in the person of Beowulf and in his lifelong struggle.’ ‘Lamentation’ said others, ambiguously J.R. R. Tolkien, but explicitly John Leyerle, Eamon Carrigan, John Halverson, Margaret Goldsmith, Harry Berger, Jr. and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., and James Smith:2 ‘The poem is a complaint mourning the passing of a man and a way of life, destroyed because essentially flawed.’ These points of view are not logically compatible. Man or society cannot be both perfect and imperfect in respect to the same attitude, decision, or action. Moving towards the dragon’s lair, Beowulf is greedy or generous, foolhardy or prudent, proud or selfless, but he cannot be all these things nor even both of any opposed pair. Our conflict over the poem’s implicit attitude towards its hero and the heroic culture he embodies is apparently unresolvable.

Paradoxically, this critical impasse may provide us with solid evidence for dating Beowulf’s composition. Selectively to question the authority of the unique manuscript being no longer in fashion, most of us take seriously the evidence offered by the other side. Hrothgar’s admonitory discourse to Beowulf is moralistic in tone and explicitly opens up the possibility that the hero might one day succumb to just the kind of pride some say drove him to his last battle. At the same time, from his first introduction the poem constantly heaps Beowulf high with superlatives, until he dies, ‘manna mildust ond mon(ðw)ærust, / leodum liðost ond lofgeornost’ (3181-2). Still, is there not a subtle indication of Beowulf’s fatal flaw even in the poem’s closing ‘lofgeornost’? And so it goes. The evidence is subtle, often indirect, and never so compelling that intelligent readers are left wholly without doubts. If we cannot insist on a resolution, can we perhaps discern in the very quality of our present disagreement a more general and perhaps more important consensus?

With some trepidation I hazard the following as a description of important common ground: the Beowulf poet recognizes and celebrates an heroic ideal in figures such as Sigemund, Wiglaf, and Beowulf himself, at least in his early contests; at the same time he brings to light painful contradictions in the heroic aspirations of such as Heremod, Hygelac, Hengest, or Ingeld, frequently involving the suffering of the innocent; together, these factors suggest an attitude towards heroic culture which is neither romantic idealizing nor puritan rejection, but a delicate balance of empathy and detachment. If this or something near it is a true character of the poem, then the cause of our present interpretive difficulties may itself become a reliable indicator of the date of its written composition, for not every period in Old English literary history is likely to have sustained an attitude towards heroic culture so finely balanced between nostalgia and disillusion, appreciation and admonition, romance and tragedy. At least such is the working hypothesis of this paper: Beowulf was written at a time when heroic culture could be treated fully and positively but without romanticizing, by an author neither afraid nor infatuated.

This hypothesis is difficult to test because we lack a very full, diachronic description of pre-Conquest literary history. Major figures such as Aldhelm, Bede, Alfred, and Ælfric aside, scholars are forced more often than we would like to admit to describe over four centuries of literary culture as if it were all somehow simultaneous. Or, more improbable still, we impose a theoretical concept of aesthetic and literary development on the relatively firm chronological matrix established by political, religious, and social historians. Thus, when Patrick Wormald speaks of a ‘zone of silence’ lying between Bede’s history and Beowulf, I am led to wonder if that zone is not to be measured more in temporal than in social units.3 The impression grows stronger when I page through Clinton Albertson’s lively and stimulating but largely unconvincing commentary in Anglo-Saxon Saints and Heroes, where again and again strained comparisons are drawn from heroic poetry to illuminate the eighth-century lives he is translating.4 Why are the reminiscences and comparisons all in the notes and almost never in the text? Is it possible that Cuthbert and Wilfrid and Boniface would have found such comparisons with Beowulf, Hygelac, and life in Heorot just as disconcerting and improbable as they appear to me? If so, we have an even broader ‘zone of silence’ to explain, for at least Guthlac and Wilfrid and Boniface were themselves all part of the Adelskirche which Wormald tells us Bede did not understand, and yet their biographers consistently fail to exploit the fact with anything at all like the rich, evocative comparisons adorning Father Albertson’s book.5

Such hints and suspicions do not build a case, but they point to the limited methodology of the present study. In the absence of a firm diachronic account of pre-Conquest literature, I have turned to the saints’ lives. The result has been partially to confirm my suspicion, for reasons presented below. To me, the early lives appear not just to be silent about heroic culture and values but positively to avoid and even suppress significant exploitation of them. The later lives move towards a celebration of heroic values in a way that has been fully integrated with Anglo-Saxon culture. The stages in this progress suggest, I believe, that Beowulf is likely to have been written neither early, in the eighth century, nor late, in the tenth, but in the rapidly changing and chaotic ninth. Such a conclusion is of course limited by the nature of both the method and the evidence. The history of English literature boasts too many evolutionary sports for us ever to be certain that an author can be assigned a date wholly on the basis of literary sensibility and cultural attitudes. Further, one might argue that in the early period there were not only two cultures strongly polarized in their value systems, but that each culture had its literature, Bede’s History and the lives of the saints belonging to one, Beowulf to the other. Such an assumption seems to me impossible to disprove but unlikely, given the close connection between monastic, ecclesiastical culture and the introduction of writing in Anglo-Saxon England; nevertheless, it is an assumption not further examined in this paper. Finally, with the history of pre-Conquest hagiography in England yet to be written, the evidence presented below is sketchy and incomplete, a preliminary foray along unmarked trails rather than a logical progress through territory familiar at least in maps.6

Some measure of the kind of change that overtook Anglo-Saxon literary attitudes between the eighth century and the tenth can be gained by looking briefly at the use later generations made of inherited material. To begin with Ælfric’s use of Bede in his well-known homily on the Life of St. Oswald, the most important observation is also the most obvious: that Ælfric has composed a formal vita on a subject which Bede’s age never commemorated in that way.7 In fact, the observation can safely be generalized: until Asser’s Life of Alfred there is no literary life of an English king. To the student systematically reviewing the course of insular biography from Adamnan’s Columba and the Whitby Gregory to Abbo and Ælfric and Osbern, Asser’s Life (893) comes with sudden surprise – largely because it is an epideictic life of someone still alive, but also because it is the life of a king and not of a bishop, monk, hermit, or virgin.8 Royal lives were not neglected for lack of subject matter, as the number of vitae later constructed out of material drawn from Bede’s Historia shows, but they do not occur, perhaps because the tradition as it existed in England lacked a proper model or because there was felt to be something inappropriate or dangerous in celebrating the memory of a secular ruler, however saintly. Alcuin’s remark to the monks of Lindisfarne about Ingeld tells us that some models must have existed in oral culture, but the tenor of what he says also suggests why such models were alien to literate monastic society.9

When Ælfric came to compose his Life of Oswald he had precedents, then, at least in Asser and in Abbo’s Edmund. Further, the form of the life followed the conventional three-fold structure: life, passion, posthumous miracles. Finally, its content was drawn entirely from Bede without obvious addition or alteration of history. And yet, even though so many elements of the work were determined by the tradition, its overall emphasis and character are essentially changed. We may take as a convenient example representing what happens on the large scale a single sentence occurring early in Ælfric’s homily and based directly on a sentence in Bede’s History’. It describes the defeat of the British king Cædwalla which first brought Oswald to power:

When, after the slaying of [Osric’s] brother Eanfrid, [Oswald] came over with a force, small but fortified by their faith in Christ, the unspeakable leader of the Britons along with that whole immense army which he boasted to be irresistible, was destroyed in the place called Denisesburna in English, that is the stream of the Denise.10

Oswold him com to   .   and him cenlice wiðfeaht
mid lytlum werode   .   ac his geleafa hine getrymde   .
and crist him gefylste to his feonda siege.11

The most obvious change in the sentence is Ælfric’s characteristic economy and simplicity. The reference to Eanfrid’s death is not repeated, since it had already been dealt with. The identification of a stream near the site is dropped silently, and the wicked character of Cædwalla is not emphasized here, though it is elsewhere in the Old English. Less obvious, perhaps, is what happens to the character of the passage because of such changes and some minor additions. Bede’s passage provides us with a strong contrast, the forces of good pitched against the apparently overwhelming forces of evil and the only defense the faith, which finally brings victory to Oswald’s side. In Ælfric’s version, the focus is almost entirely on Oswald with his ‘lytlum werode.’ His faith provides him strength and Christ gives him help, but the battle is not quite so miraculous in the Old English as it was in the Latin, and the fact that Oswald and his forces fought cenlice has more to do with the outcome.

Something similar to this transformation occurs in the Life as a whole because of the way Ælfric assembles what he drew from Bede. Perhaps the most striking example is the description of Oswald’s death. In Bede, the end of Oswald’s life is announced in the introductory paragraph of a chapter devoted to his posthumous miracles. In no sense is it a narrative account of a martyrdom:

When the circuit of his years was finished he was slain, on the occasion of a great battle, by the same pagan people and the pagan king of the Mercians by whom his predecessor Edwin had been killed, in a place called Maserfelth in English, in his thirty-eighth year, on the fifth of August. How great was his faith in God, and of what quality was his heart’s devotion, became clear in marvelous miracles even after his death ...12

The narrative sequence is instructive, and I have therefore tried to retain it at the cost of some awkwardness in translation. First, we are told of Oswald’s death, then that there was a great battle, next that Penda was the slayer, and finally that Penda also killed Edwin. Holding Penda’s connection with Edwin’s death until last effectively masks the possibility that Maserfeld was the continuation of an old blood-feud, particularly since Bede fails to mention that Edwin was Oswald’s kinsman. Ælfric shows no such restraint:

Hit gewearð swa be þæm þæt him wann on penda
myrcena cyning . þe æt his maeges siege ær
eadwines cyninges cedwallan fylste .
and se penda ne cuðe be criste nan pincg .
and eall myrcena folc wæs ungefullod þa git .
Hi comon þa to gefeohte to Maserfelda begen .
and fengon togædere oð þæt þær feollon þa cristenan, 13

Ælfric’s treatment emphasizes what Bede’s account appears designed to avoid, that is, the conscious connection of the battle at Maserfeld with the pattern of the blood-feud. Ælfric’s description gives renewed emphasis to a theme introduced at the very beginning of the homily, where we are told how ‘Eadwine his earn’ was slain by Cædwalla, how within two years ‘twegen his [Edwin’s] æftergengan’ were also killed, and how Caedwalla shamefully ill-treated the Northumbrian people, until ‘Oswold se eadiga his yfelnysse adwæscte.’ The first and last battle fought by Oswald were both part of a feud extending back beyond the beginning of his reign. Since elsewhere Bede is not especially reluctant to tell the story of the death of a hero, one is led to wonder if precisely the blood-feud character of Oswald’s death was not the reason for the perfunctory and disjointed way in which Bede describes it. For example, not until three chapters after that quoted above are we told that the king died praying for his men, and even then it is part of a discussion of Oswald’s devotion to prayer rather than a narrative description of his death:

It is popularly known and has become proverbial that he was praying when he died, for when, surrounded by weapons and enemies, he saw he was going to be killed, he prayed for the souls of his army. For that reason, the proverb runs: ‘God have mercy on their souls, said Oswald falling to the earth.’14

Ælfric weaves Bede’s reflection into his narrative, uniting ideas three chapters apart in his History, and, without adding any significant detail of his own, turns a sober announcement of the date, place, and people present at Oswald’s death, into a relatively dramatic narrative:

þa geseah he genealecan his lifes geendunge  .

and gebæd for his folc þe þær feallende sweolt  .

and betæhte heora sawla and hine sylfne Gode  .

and þus clypode on his fylle  .  ‘God gemiltsa urum sawlum.’

þa het se hæpena cynincg his heafod of-aslean ....15

An apparent paradox emerges from Bede’s account, so fragmentary and dry, yet providing fairly direct evidence of popular interest in the story of Oswald’s death, at least sufficiently widespread to have become enshrined in the proverb quoted. If such traditions existed, why does Bede appear to go to such lengths to avoid treating Oswald’s death in any detail? One might argue that the proverb is all there was, or that memories of Maserfeld never took on a structured, narrative form. To me a more likely explanation is that the very existence of popular traditions, precisely because of the heroic character they are likely to have taken in the celebration of the memory of a departed king, seemed dangerous to Bede, and that he therefore avoided emphasizing the story of Oswald’s slaying. That the same pagan slew both Christian uncle and sainted sister’s-son was perhaps a topic too explosive for Bede to handle.

Careful study of the Ecclesiastical History would support such a reading, I believe. One further example may be offered to suggest how. Elsewhere I have argued that Bede’s treatment of the death of king Oswine suggests the same sort of ambivalent response to heroic values we have just seen in his treatment of Oswald.16 The principal difference in the Oswine account is that Bede momentarily breaks Wormald’s ‘zone of silence’ in a brief flash of emotion which shows him to be formed at least partially in a value system very like that undergirding Beowulf and other Old English heroic literature. Briefly to recapitulate: Oswine, king of Bernicia, becomes the object of a Drang nach Süd by king Oswy of Deira at the head of an immense army. Going to meet Oswy at a place called Wilfaresdune near Catterick, and seeing the size of the opposing forces, Oswine decides that the better part of valour would be to disband his army and save himself ‘ad tempora meliora’ by taking refuge at the home of a trusted follower:

... and he went away with only one of his most loyal soldiers, named Tondhere, to hide in the home of his thane Hunwald, who he also felt certain was entirely loyal to him. Sed heu!pro dolor! It turned out far otherwise; for betrayed by that same thane, he was killed by Oswy through the agency of his reeve Æthelwine, in a murder detestable to everyone.17

The curious thing about Bede’s treatment is that while his paradoxical anguish at Hunwald’s treachery is obvious in the wholly uncharacteristic exclamation, ‘Sed heu! pro dolor!,’ it leads nowhere. In fact, he takes deliberate steps to prevent any close or sustained identification with the king’s outraged innocence or any indulgence in the emotions appropriate to such identification, first, by immediately emphasizing Oswy’s act of reparation in building a monastery at Gilling in memory of Oswine, then, by gradually shifting attention from the character and holiness of Oswine to that of Aidan,18 and finally, by giving subsequent emphasis to Oswy’s missionary activity and faith, which allowed him to defeat Penda and an army thirty times larger than his own at the battle of Winwæd stream in 654.19 The eventual effect of this way of fashioning the narrative is to move Oswy from the role of villain to that of potential saint and champion of the cause of right at Whitby in 664. At the same time it distracts attention from the unavenged betrayal and murder. Bede seems to recognize the nature of the material he is dealing with and then to turn deliberately from it.

As with Oswald, Bede’s Historia provided material for a later Oswine Vita. The response of the later writer, who composed his life certainly after the Conquest and probably in the early twelfth century, is interesting.20 Like Ælfric he adds no facts whatever to the story, but what he does add tells us that he missed in Bede’s account very much the sort of thing Wormald does or that anyone would miss who has been nurtured on Beowulf, Waldhere, the Finn Fragment, and the Chronicle entry for 755. Far from failing to dwell on revenge and feuding as acceptable motivation, the anonymous author takes such for granted, for when Cædwalla kills Oswine’s father Osric, he feels that some explanation is necessary for the son’s failure to respond:

His relatives and followers took the blessed Oswine away because he was too young, and the tenderness of his years and his lack of means did not permit him to avenge the death of his father.21

Further, Oswine’s decision not to fight Oswy’s forces at Wilfaresdune seems to this author to need an explanation which will save both the courage and the sanctity of the king:

But king Oswine, the holiest of men, though he was aware that all his followers were not only willing to fight the enemy but even prepared to lay down their lives for their king, began to reflect on the cold-blooded evil to which this crisis had given rise and that he alone was the reason for the commission of so much manslaughter near and far, and becoming sincerely concerned rather to spare his men than himself, addresses them in the following words:

‘O faithful thanes and valiant soldiers, I am very grateful to you for your service to me in war and for your honour, and I give you thanks for your good will towards me. But far be it from me that you should meet the hazard of war only for my sake, after you made me your king at a time when I was a poor exile. I prefer to return to exile with a few of my followers as I did once, or even by myself. In fact, I would prefer to die than that so many fine men should be endangered for my sake.’22

Even more interesting is the response of his followers to Oswine’s plea:

‘O remarkable king, O king worthy of the name of king, we beg you to be kind to us, though we are unworthy. Was there some time when we proved cowards or disgraces to our families, or did you find us too slow somewhere in going to battle? In fact, many a time we passed unscathed through the enemy lines. So we want you to let us fight against the enemy in this battle that is approaching, and to take the auspices of these evil times with iron, on the point of the sword. If things should go badly for us in the fight, it is better that we die in battle than that we become a byword for cowardice in the songs of the people, as deserters of our lord.’23

As Wiglaf puts it, ‘Deað bið sella / eorla gehwylcum þonne edwitlif! ‘ (2890b-91). Here, much more explicitly than ælfric, this post-Conquest author has cast Bede’s facts into the mould of heroic legend. Revenge, the generosity of the lord, the fidelity of his thanes, their friendly contest in battle, the fear of lifelong disgrace for deserting one’s ring-giver – all these commonplaces of heroic literature take their place in a narrative virtually without them in Bede’s original context. At the same time, they have been added not only without replacing or even displacing the conventional piety of the saint’s life, but even in support of it. The ethics of the battlefield and the sanctuary are more closely identified with one another in the Vita Oswini than in Ælfric, and certainly more than in Bede or Beowulf. The same literary fashion which put a bloody, bright blade into Archbishop Turpin’s hands is at work here, though with somewhat more subtlety than in most crusader literature.

If the sort of shift in sensibility suggested by these isolated examples can be generalized – and that is matter for discussion and further elaboration – then, in conjunction with other evidence, the process of literary evolution suggested might help us to guess at the most reasonable date for Beowulf’s literary composition. The tentative suggestion is that a society sharply polarized in the eighth century into separate secular and monastic cultures came to be integrated by the late tenth and eleventh centuries. The absence of positive expressions of heroic commonplaces in the literature which can be firmly dated to the early period is not to be explained by supposing that the society did not cherish such things but by this division into a literate, monastic culture and an oral, secular counter-culture. By the later Anglo-Saxon period a literary form is in place which no longer sees unresolvable contradictions between the two cultures and the literature consequently freely employs the counters of heroic tradition to express a piety closely identified with the norms of secular society.

Leaving out of account works of doubtful date and examining lives of saints or kings during the roughly four centuries of Old English literary culture, one is impressed by the absence or avoidance of explicit and positive references to heroic values in the early period and by the increasing intrusion of such secular norms on later hagiographic tradition. The anonymous author of the Life of Cuthbert mentions but passes by without comment the time ‘when he [Cuthbert] was with the army encamped in the face of the enemy.’24 Felix models his Life of Guthlac not on any heroic exemplar, nor even on the popular Life of St. Martin of Sulpicius Severus, which gives a moderate emphasis to Martin’s early military career, but on Evagrius’ translation of Athanasius’ Life of Antony of Egypt.25 Far from creating opportunities to treat ecclesiastical or sacred figures in heroic terms, as the poet of Andreas appears to have done, early English hagio-graphers turn away even from such opportunities as their subjects naturally provide.

The incident in Eddius’ Life of Wilfrid (710-20) when his outnumbered followers win a miraculous victory against the pagan South Saxons appears to contradict this general tendency.26 What could conform more closely to the heroic code than the promises exchanged just before the battle ‘that no one would turn tail in flight from another, but that everyone would earn either death with honour or life with victory’? This clearly reflects the same heroic value system most eighth-century hagiographers are so hesitant to exploit. While the sentence is solid evidence, I believe, for the operative strength of such values in Eddius’ time, it does not provide a significant model for current literary practice, not only because it is an isolated example, but because in its own context the sentence functions ornamentally and at the periphery of Eddius’ meaning. The narrative is a miracle story in which God makes up for the small numbers of Wilfrid’s following just as he did for Gideon and his 300 men, who ‘killed 120,000 Midianites in a single charge.’ and he does so principally because Wilfrid and his clergy pray as Moses did on behalf of Joshua against Amalek and ‘triumphed by continually begging for the protection of God, while Hur and Aaron held up his hands.27 The battle boasts here are related neither to the victory nor to a long and difficult encounter and reflect Eddius’ essential purpose no more than Bede’s sudden ‘heu! pro dolor!’ reflected his. In the final analysis, there is very little difference between Eddius’ use of this heroic convention here and Willibald’s description (770) of Boniface’s final exhortation to his followers not to fight at all against their attackers but to ‘fix the anchor of your hope in God.’28 In both, man’s striving counts for very little. What is important is his abandonment to faith.

Alcuin’s treatment of Oswald’s first battle in his poem on York (780-82) makes clear the difference in attitude. Where Bede, as we have seen, suppressed any reference to the blood-feud, and Ælfric puts a sense of the feud at the centre of his treatment, Alcuin alludes directly to revenge but assigns the feud to God:

Hoc tamen [i.e. Edwin’s death] omnipotens fieri non passus inultum est,

Sed dedit Oswaldum regis regnare nepotem.29

God himself balances the scales of justice by permitting the nephew to succeed the uncle. For Alcuin here as for Eddius and Bede in the references cited above an isolated echo of heroic sentiment is so firmly placed in a context of divine purpose that any dangerous associations are neutralized. The ineffectiveness of human instruments is emphasized when contrasted with God’s irresistible power. As Æthelwulf puts it, describing Eanmund’s decision to abandon military life in De abbatibus (803-21):

militiam sterilem magno devotus amore
deseruit, famulans cuncte per tempora vitae
rectori magno, moderat qui secula cuncta.30

This Eanmund, who with all his brothers in religion, ‘meruit parmam captasse supernam,’ has exchanged vanity and weakness for purpose and strength, vulnerable secular armour for impenetrable divine protection.31

The literary sensibility characterizing early Anglo-Saxon culture right into the ninth century, when viking fire and sword spilled and dried up all the ink, is thus consistent. Signs of heroic culture appear unexpectedly, like a badly kept family secret, to be avoided, explained away, or repented of, but never to be celebrated. Such a period seems less likely than others to have produced a poem like Beowulf, particularly in its explicit and shameless appreciation of the old heroic values.

On the other hand, later literature seems to me very confident in the ease with which heroic values nestle down with Christian piety. Byrhtnoth’s exultant rapture when, seeing his poisoned spear point lodged in the heart of his enemy, he ‘sæde Metode þanc / ðæs daegweorces Pe him Drihten forgeaf,’ (lines 148-9) would to me have been impossible earlier and is inconsistent with the tone of Beowulf. Even Ælfric’s moderate exploitation of heroic values appears to reflect a similar identification of heroic with Christian culture.

To conclude on the basis of a study of pre-Conquest saints’ lives that the ninth century is the most likely period for the composition of Beowulf is anomalous since hagiography is not a genre characteristic of that time. Another way to describe the study, however, would be to say that a survey of pre-Conquest biography, particularly royal biography, suggests the ninth century as the most probable date for the composition of the poetic life of Beowulf. In Asser’s Alfred, after all, we find not only the first literary life of a king, but, to my knowledge, our earliest evidence for vernacular poetry in written form, together with the same interest in Germanic genealogy and antiquities one sees in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Beowulf. Further, Asser’s Life manifests an unresolved but balanced duality between heroic values and Christian piety such as I have argued is likely to have been characteristic of the time when Beowulf was composed.32 The constant lifelong illness which Alfred suffers as a burden from the Lord in Asser’s account puts this life right in the tradition of early Northumbrian ascetic literature and makes him a worthy son of his pious father, but does not prevent him from sending his fleet to East Anglia looking for booty.33 The story of Offa’s daughter Eadburh, so reminiscent of the kind of tale that seems hinted at in the difficult Modthryth crux, combines pious reflection with violence, treachery, and death in a manner something like Beowulf’s but not at all like that of the eighth-or tenth-century lives.34 In the Life as a whole there is an easy acceptance of the claims of heaven, together with a feeling that the world has its rights too, which reminds one of the balance between human strength and divine support insisted on in Beowulf. Asser and Alfred seem to share an exasperation that this balance is being violated when Athered stays so long praying in his tent after battle has already begun, an exasperation something like Beowulf’s when he finds Hrothgar sitting bemoaning the loss of Æschere and not doing anything about it:

Ne sorga, snotor guma!     Selre bið æghwaem,
þæt he his freond wrece,     þonne he fela murne.

Ure æghwylc sceal     ende gebidan
worolde lifes;     wyrce se þe mote
domes ær deaþe;     þæt biðdrihtguman
unlifgendum     æfter selest. (lines 1384-9)

PETER CLEMOES

At the heart of any attempt to date the composition of Beowulf lies the poem itself – the kind of poetry it is. Yet to many it seems like a sleeping monster they would prefer not to disturb. To tackle it, they think, would be to give battle to a fiery dragon with only the puny weapon of subjective impression to wield. Much better, they say, to keep stalking round it at a distance with one’s eyes on extraneous objects. But they do so at their peril. The poem remains a primary force to be reckoned with. Any inference which has not taken it fully into account is bound to be insecure. Only a conclusion true to the nature of the poem can be valid. Are we then so deceived subjectively that nothing objective can be discovered in its poetry? Surely not. Stylistic analysis over the centuries has revealed, albeit slowly, a number of conventions which Old English poets observed. Hans Kuhn’s ‘laws’ about the disposition of various classes of words are a good example; and he recognized that the Beowulf poet followed these ‘laws’ more strictly than other known poets did.1 Other basic distinctions of this sort between Beowulf and most other surviving Old English poems are, I believe, crucial for the dating question. I hope to show that in several essentials, which cannot be explained away as mere replication, Beowulf, subtle as it is, is more archaic, more primitive than those other poems are.2

To frame my discussion I want to begin with some material which Professor E.G. Stanley has discussed for a different reason,3 namely two treatments of the topic of peacemaking, the one, in verse, in Maxims I in the Exeter Book and the other, in prose, in Wulfstan’s tract Episcopus. The former is as follows:

Þing sceal gehegan
frod wiþ frodne;      bi hyra fer gelic,
hi a sace semaþ,    sibbe gelæra,
þa ær wonsælge     awegen habba.

Ræd sceal mid snyttro,      ryht mid wisum,
til sceal mid tilum.4  (18b-23a)

The latter reads: ‘He [i.e. a bishop] sceall georne saca sehtan 7 fri wyrcan mid þam worulddeman þe riht lufian.’5 As Professor Stanley remarks, superficially the two are not unlike – in fact, the prose is probably a scion of the other’s stock. But I want to emphasize a basic difference between them. In the Maxims the thought is indivisible from the wording. It involves only a contrast between those who keep the peace and those who disturb it and a belief that peacemaking follows when the wise act together. It does not invoke the abstract idea that peacemaking is wise and does not depend on definition which would require other statements. It is simply a piece of social tradition. The verbs sceal and biþ and the adverb a relate the statement to all circumstances and all times. In the cultural milieu to which the pronouncement belongs these words act as recognized signals of generalization. The expression thus represents, enshrines, and so ensures, social acceptance of the truth it enfolds. Exhortation would be superfluous. Thought and wording thus form a socially organic unit of expression which neither just informs us that peace is made by wise men nor just advises us that it ought to be but, rather, makes a statement about behaviour traditional to wise men as such. Wulfstan’s words, in contrast, belong to a different order of thinking. They are no longer concerned with the generic ‘wise man’ but with the particular social category of ‘bishop.’ They are produced by prior analysis of what a bishop’s duties are: they identify a particular duty and direct the bishop how to go about it. They do not present the specified behaviour as inherent absolutely in the nature of a bishop but as subject in degree to the individual’s zeal. The words are thus an instruction addressed to the bishop from outside. Synthetic, verbal conceptualizing in the Maxims has been replaced by analytic, verbalized categorizing in Episcopus. Expression in which language is intrinsic to thought has given way to expression in which style is applied to thought. And this could not just be a difference between one author and another; it must be part of a more general movement in society. The relatively ‘modern’ has taken over from the relatively ‘primitive.’ The growth of preaching more than anything else was responsible for this shift, I suspect. Be that as it may, here is a distinction between a ‘primitive’ way and a ‘modern’ way of relating thought and expression which I think is of fundamental import for the relative chronology of Beowulf on the one hand and most other Old English poems on the other.

Word order is one way in which this unlikeness shows itself. In Beowulf it is used continuously as a means of control, as part of the fabric of the poem. Take, for example, this account of the dragon, enraged by the violation of its hoard, returning after a night of ravaging the countryside by fire:

hord eft gesceat,
dryhtsele dyrnne      ær dæges hwile.

Hæfde landwara      lige befangen,
bæle ond bronde;      beorges getruwode,
wiges ond wealles;      him seo wen geleah. (2319b-23)

And set beside it this account of Beowulf’s reaction to the news of the devastation:

Hæfde ligdraca      leoda fæsten,
ealond utan,      eorweard one
gledum forgrunden;      him aes gukyning,

Wedera þioden      wræce leornode. (2333-6)

Each of these passages contains a description of the damage inflicted by the dragon: ‘Hæfde landwara lige befangen, / bæle ond bronde’ in the first and ‘Hæfde ligdraca leoda fæsten, / ealond utan, earweard one / gledum forgrunden’ in the second. In the former the past participle, befangen, ‘enveloped,’ is itself enclosed by references to the dragon’s means of encirclement, its fire – lige and bæle ond bronde; in the latter the past participle, forgrunden, ‘destroyed,’ stands clear in final position. The ‘embedded’ participle in the first instance corresponds in position to the simple finite verb in the preceding clause and to the simple finite verb in the clause that follows: expressions of the object surround both gesceat, the first of these verbs (‘hord eft gesceat, / dryhtsele dyrnne’), and getruwode, the second (‘beorges getruwode, / wiges ond wealles’). But the dragon was in for a surprise: him seo wen geleah. Absorbed in its habitual actions it did not know what was coming. The sequence of three ‘embedded’ verbal forms is thus psychologically apt. And so too is the final position of forgrunden in the second passage: it is matched by the verb which expresses Beowulf s opposition and which stands last in the next clause: wræce leornode. The one verbal form confronts the other. Subtle as these deliberate word-placings are they are but part of the supreme mastery with which the poet wove his verbal texture. They are not special ‘figures’; they simply exemplify his ever-present skill as master craftsman.6 By contrast Cynewulf’s word order in a typical purple patch is more consciously artful:

Ic wæs weorcum fah,
synnum asæled,     sorgum gewæled,
bitrum gebunden,     bisgum beþrungen,
ær me lare onlag      þurh leohtne had
gamelum to geoce,      gife unscynde
mægencyning amæt     ond on gemynd begeat,
torht ontynde,       tidum gerymde,
bancofan onband,      breostlocan onwand,
leoucræft onleac. (Elene 1242b-50a)

The poet’s subject is the inspiration that came to him when he learned about the finding of the true cross. His sentence, taking the form of ‘I was so-and-so before (ær) such-and-such happened,’ has two main members. In the first member four past participles all expressing ‘afflicted’ (asæled, gewæled, gebunden, and beþrungen) follow one another in unrelieved succession; each is in final position in its verse, they are rhymed in pairs, and each is preceded by a dative plural, these dative plurals alliterating in pairs. In the second member five finite verbs expressing ‘opened’ (ontynde, gerymde, onband, onwand, and onleac) form a like sequence; each is in end position in its verse, the first four are formed into two pairs by rhyme, and the members of the second pair are preceded by words which themselves rhyme. The process of inspiration is thus conveyed through the one contrived verbal series giving place to the other. The five verbal items supersede the four. This is exploitation of word order as a stylistic device for heightened, outward effect. In Beowulf word order is integral to the poet’s psychological imagination; in Elene it is a technique to be applied as an extra.

Language is integral to imagery in Beowulf more than it is in other poems. In Beowulf metaphor is widespread but rarely emerges beyond the confines of the vocabulary. By that I mean that many a word, from long-standing social consensus, possesses a metaphoric capacity which, when revealed, renders it graphic – as when a sword ‘bites’ (bitan) or a man ‘sleeps’ in death (swefan) or a battle is a ‘storm’ (scur etc.) or blood shed in battle is ‘sweat’ (swat). The linguistic base can be extended. ‘To die’ as ‘to sleep’ can become swefep æfter symle (1008a) or hlimbed (‘bed of rest’) healdan (3034a), for instance. The suggestion of ‘something filled’ in the word ful enables the sea to be called ya ful, a ‘cup of waves’ (1208b) – aptly, since treasure is being carried across it. The linguistic self-consciousness of Latin loan words facilitates the metaphors of rodores candel (1572a) and woruldcandel (1965b), with classical, biblical, and ecclesiastical models,7 and heofones gim (2072b). The social involvement in metaphor can be exploited, as in the irony of ‘Ic him þenode / deoran swurde’ (560b-1a) (meaning ‘I killed them’) or of hiorodryncum (2358b) (i.e. ‘sword blows’). But the linguistic expectations of society cannot be exceeded without explanation, as hildegicelum (1606b) shows, though this is not far from battle as ‘storm’:

Þa þæt sweord ongan
æfter heaþoswate      hildegicelum,
wigbil wanian;      þæt wæs wundra sum,
þæt hit eal gemealt       ise gelicost ... (1605b-8)

The metaphor of ‘battle icicles’ receives the gloss it needs. There are only four explicit comparisons in Beowulf: ‘hit [i.e. a sword] eal gemealt ise gelicost’ is one; ‘gewat ... / flota famiheals fugle gelicost’ (217-18), ‘him [i.e. Grendel] of eagum stod / ligge gelicost leoht unfæger’ (726b-7) and ‘stira nægla gehwylc style gelicost’ (985) are the others. In each case no more than an essential likeness is stated as simply as possible.8 Nowhere in Beowulf is there as pictorial an image as (for instance) a ship regarded as a ‘seahorse.’ The ‘boat’ terms in -hengest and -mearh, which are plentiful in poems such as Andreas, those by Cynewulf, and Guthlac B, do not occur, although, of course, contexts suitable for them do. Nor is gim used of the human eye, as it is in Guthlac B and, in the form heafodgim, in Andreas, Christ III, and Maxims I. We can say that the linguistic constraints on fanciful perception of natural phenomena are more severe in Beowulf than they are in these other poems.

The perception on which descriptive technique is based is also from a less external viewpoint in Beowulf than in other poems. In Old English narrative poetry the prevailing principle is that we experience what someone else has experienced already. Our imagination does not have its own independent access to events.9 We respond to the reaction of a participant or participants or to that of a narrator with prior knowledge. For example, in Beowulf we hear Grendel’s cries of pain as the listening Danes heard them:

Nor-Denum stod
atelic egesa,      anra gehwylcum
þara þe of wealle      wop gehyrdon,
gryreleo galan      Godes andsacan,
sigeleasne sang,      sar wanigean
helle hæfton. (783b-8a)

In Beowulf the internal relationships are strictly adhered to and our connection with them is skilfully managed. For instance, an act of observation may be recorded for its own sake:

Hræþe wear on yum     mid eoferspreotum
heorohocyhtum      hearde genearwod,
nia genæged,     ond on næs togen,
wundorlic wægbora;      weras sceawedon
gryrelicne gist. (1437-41a)

Sometimes the reaction involved in the observation affects our imagination by being only implied:

Flod blode weol      – folc to sægon –
hatan heolfre; (1422-3a)

Þa wæs be feaxe      on flet boren

Grendles heafod,      þær guman druncon,
egeslic for eorlum      ond þære idese mid,
wliteseon wætlic;        weras on sawon. (1647-50)

The perceiver(s) may be expressed indefinitely:

Goldfag scinon
web æfter wagum,      wundorsiona fela
secga gehwylcum      þara þe on swylc stara, (994b-6)

or he/they may be just implied:

him on eaxle wear
syndolh sweotol; (816b-17a)

Æt þæm ade wæs      eþgesyne
swatfah syrce; (1110-1 la)

þær mæg nihta gehwæm      niwundor seon,
fyr on flode. (1365-6a)

From time to time the narrator supplies a comment:

wæs þæt gewin to strang,
la ond longsum! (133b-4a)

But the Beowulf poet never strays outside relationships internal to his narrative. He never, for example, takes the step of inventing a spectator who has no function in the story other than to tell us what he sees, as Cynewulf does in his description of St. Helena’s fleet speeding across the sea to find the true cross (a description owing nothing to the poet’s source):

Þær meahte gesion,      se one si beheold,
brecan ofer bæweg,      brimwudu snyrgan
under swellingum,      sæmearh plegean,
wadan wægflotan. (Elene 243-6a)

‘Se one si beheold’ does not belong to the story proper as observers in Beowulf do. He is not in a psychological relationship with other participants. He has the fanciful, pictorial perception of ‘seahorses’ sporting. He imparts a sense of the outward excitement of the expedition. His viewpoint is outside the action. It will not be long before poets are addressing narrative directly to us as witnesses in our imagination.

The fundamental concepts enshrined in traditional words have greater integrity in Beowulf than in some other poems. For instance, ellen in Beowulf expresses essentially a spiritedness, a toughness of spirit, in fighting – as an attribute, indifferently, of the dragon-slaying Sigemund (893-5a) or of the evil tyrant Heremod (901-2a), of Beowulf and Wiglaf or of the dragon (2348-9a)10 – and, as such, it is a self-sufficient term in its own right. Beowulf’s absolute use of the word when he is about to fight the dragon is typical:

‘Ic mid elne sceall
gold gegangan,      oe gu nime,
feorhbealu frecne      frean eowerne! ’ (2535b-7)

Ellen and eafo, its physical counterpart,11 together constitute their possessor’s fighting capability.12 In Beowulf underpinning ellen by variation, as in
ond þær in eode,      elnes gemyndig,
hæle hildedeor, (Andreas 1001-2a)

would be otiose; it is not down-graded as a merely rhetorical item, as it is in

Đa wæs gemyndig      modgeþyldig,
beorn beadwe heard,      eode in burh hrae,
anræd oretta,      elne gefyrred,
maga mode rof,      meotude getreowe; (Andreas 981-4)

it is not reduced to denoting just bad temper, as it is in

Đa wæs ellenwod,      yrre ond reþe,
frecne ond fergrim,      faeder wi dehter; (Cynewulf’s Juliana 140-1)

it has not lost all connection with fighting capability, as it has in

Oer [i.e. Cain] his to eoran      elnes tilode; (Genesis A 972)

Gebæd ic me þa to þan beame      blie mode,
elne mycle; (The Dream of the Rood, in the Vercelli Book, 122-3a13)

Ne þæt ænig mæg      oþrum gesecgan
mid hu micle elne      æghwylc wille
þurh ealle list      lifes tiligan,
feores forhtlice,      for aolian,
synrust þwean      ond hine sylfne þrean. (Christ III 1316-19)

Beowulf dies thinking of his kin, whereas Byrhtnoth, in the late poem, The Battle of Maldon, thinking of the destiny of his soul, has an explicitly Christian end. But to the Christian poet the passion of the saint is more sublime than the death of a warrior can ever be. Saintly dying is the subject to evoke all the artistry he can command. An Old English Christian poet’s task was no less than to create out of inherited poetic practice an aesthetic of holiness which would have been quite unsuited to any basic concept in Beowulf. Guthlac B shows how imaginative this transformation could be. Its portrayal of the death of Guthlac (Guthlac 1269b-1326a) is both valid in vernacular terms and independent of the Latin prose of its source.14 Strong supernatural light shines steadily down upon the saint, contrasting with the changing light and darkness of nature. His action of lifting his hands, humbly taking communion, gladly looking towards heaven and sending forth his spirit becomes an apotheosis of a holy spirit when throngs of angels carry off the saint’s soul amid upward-directed supernatural radiance, indescribable fragrances, and heavenly music. The glory of the spiritual event is experienced theatrically through a heightened and refined sensuousness. This is Anglo-Saxon Baroque. The inner quality which the saint possesses as he prepares for death, as he awaits it and as he goes to meet it, is ellen (1271a, 1285a, and 1294a). He is eadig (1294a, 1306a, and 1319a). It is his gæst – the word sawol is not used – which is eager to leave the body (1299b), which he sends forth to joy (1303b), and which the angels carry up (1305b). Much that has gone before has made the word gæst distinctive and prom inent: for example, the saint, just before his death, has revealed that every morning and evening since he took up his solitary abode God has sent him gæst haligne, engel ufancundne, a spirit from above, from whom he has received wisdomes giefe beyond the range of earthly experience. Light is æþele (1278b); when it shines round the saint it is æþele ymb æþelne (1287a). So too the eucharist he takes is æþele (1301a). When the saint arises in the morning after the light has shone upon him he is se wuldormago (1293b), torht (1295a). The saint is halig (1276b); so is the light that shines through the night (1283a); so is the house surrounded by light nocturnally (1290a) and next day (1310a); so are the saint’s eyes (heafdes gimmas) as he looks towards heaven (1302a); and so is the joyful singing of the heavenly host (1316b and 1323b). In all these uses of halig there is an alliterative correlation between ‘holiness’ and ‘heaven,’ the word heofon occurring only in this collocation. And, in fact, many such relationships between pieces of language intensify local effects or join parts of the design, as in

Wæs se leohta glæm
ymb þæt halge hus,      heofonlic condel,
from æfenglome      oþþæt eastan cwom
ofer deop gelad      dægredwowa.15 (1289b-92)

Words are being used as sensuous images of Christian spirituality. The vocabulary traditional to Old English poetry is serving an aesthetic radically different from the social feeling for the integrity of traditional experience in traditional language which has moulded Beowulf.

The conceptual and verbal distinctions I have drawn between Beowulf on the one hand and poems such as Andreas, those by Cynewulf and Guthlac B on the other are of a fundamental kind. Each in its own way marks a departure from a traditional mode of expression, in which, as sanctioned by society, ‘subject’ and ‘style’ are intrinsically inseparable and in which, therefore, perception is focused on language and only through language on meaning; each marks an adoption of a way of composition in which language is applied to a story as an actualizing and vivifying ‘rhetoric’ and as a means of expressing perception directed outside and beyond language. A general shift of this sort, in my view, is inherently likely to have involved the passage of time. In all probability we are dealing with an ‘earlier’ kind of poetry and a ‘later.’ No doubt for a long while the two coexisted: the new subjects would not have ousted the old immediately; at any one time some poets would have been more conservative and others more innovatory. But at some point a stage would have been reached when the social consensus on which the old depended was available no longer. Beowulf is a mature poem by a mature poet in a mature social tradition. It could not be the confident work of art it is if the poet were not in a living rapport with traditional society. That is not, of course, to say that his society must have lived up to the values he expressed. But he cannot have been later than the survival of his verbal tradition as a social bond. An antiquarian exercise in an out-of-date social mode could never have attained the fullness and flexibility of imagination that we find in Beowulf. And by the same token the social bond that held the Beowulf poet had loosened when the other poems I have been citing were written. They served different needs. They too could not be the poems they are if their modernism did not accord with the outlook of their society. The role of the poet had altered. Beowulf was composed before that change; the other poems, in general, were written after it.

This redirection of poetry was associated with a change in the process of composition, and this gives us a first broad chronology. The earliest poetry that we have survives only incidentally, because it was inscribed on a whale-bone box (the Franks Casket) ca. 700, or because it was added as an afterthought in a manuscript in the 730s à propos of a story (that of Cædmon) in the main text, or because it was carved in the margins of a stone cross (the Ruthwell Cross), probably by 750. We do not know that there ever was a text of any of the many songs Cædmon sang in the third quarter of the seventh century apart from the few verses he was believed to have sung miraculously in his dream,16 and we do not know when verses corresponding to those on the Ruthwell Cross were first committed to parchment. The author of the Old English Bede, on the other hand, retelling the story of Cædmon probably late in the ninth century, in the time of Alfred,17 took for granted that the poet’s teachers had written down the poems they had heard him recite.18 And Cynewulf, who, on Kenneth Sisam’s reasoning,19 was a ninth-century Mercian or Northumbrian ecclesiastic, worked into the epilogues to his poems ‘signatures’ in runes which involve the eye of a reader. If we think of Cædmon as standing for the oral phase of Old English poetry and Cynewulf as representing its written stage, Beowulf in my opinion, lies somewhere in between. While authentically fulfilling the conditions of oral culture it is extraordinarily free from the stereotyped phrases which we would expect in a poem depending on memorized performance rather than on reading from parchment. The poet both exercised his imagination freely and controlled it precisely and this discrimination has not been blunted in the text we have. Perhaps he first composed a run of verse and then wrote it down. A poet might well have adopted this method during the second half of the eighth century or early in the ninth. Within the close connections between noble families and religious institutions at this time an individual with an aristocratic feeling for Germanic antiquity could have learned to write.20

The means of pictorial description used in Beowulf indicate the same general period. The Old Saxon Heliand, it is generally agreed, is substantially in a tradition of vernacular poetry which was brought to the continent by Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the eighth century, especially in the first half of that century. Not only does it have no -hengest and -mearh terms for ships, like Beowulf but also it has almost none of the descriptive compounds which are frequent in Beowulf (wegflota, sægenga, ylida, hringedstefna, sæwudu, and the rest): only hurnidskip occurs (hoh hurnidskip, Heliand 2266 and 2906; cf. hea hornscipe, Andreas 274a, but not in Beowulf). Nor do we find in it any equivalent to the Beowulf poet’s ‘candle’ and ‘gem’ terms for the sun. By contrast, Old Norse skaldic poetry, which had its origins in the ninth century, deployed many fanciful, often extravagant, animal terms for ships, especially ‘horse’ ones. Likewise the ninth-century Cynewulf, as we have seen, used -hengest and -mearh terms freely, and King Alfred, who was certainly no inventer poetically and can be relied on to reflect standard practice, employed a -hengest term when he versified his Old English prose version of Boethius’ Metres towards the end of the century (merehengesta, XXVI.25).

The latest stylistic component in Beowulf seems to me to be Hrothgar’s moralizing ‘sermon’ (1700-84). Coupling of finite verbs which are synonyms or near-synonyms occurs three times in this address – weaxe ond wride (1741a), forgyte ond forgyme (1751a), and forsite ond forsworce (1767a) – but only seven times in all the rest of the poem.21 Pairing words in this way may merely have been natural to a didactic manner in general.22 But, more specifically, I would say that the coupling of finite verbs was probably not indigenous to Old English verse structure.23 Its occurrence in poetry is likely to have been due to outside influence. It is significant, therefore, that this was a common feature of Old English prose homilies which may be among the earliest that survive24 – for instance, the group in the Vercelli Book (homilies XV-XVIII) for which Dr. Scragg has postulated ‘a Mercian homiliary of unknown date’ as exemplar25 (for example getyde ond gelærde, 97rl 8, homily XVIII). The verbs (ge)weaxan and (ge)-wridan/-ian are coupled, in the same relative order, in the St. Michael homily which is extant only in the Blickling manuscript.26 This homily derived its depiction of the mouth of hell from a source which either suggested features in the scenery of Grendel’s mere or was similar to one that did.27 The Blickling manuscript had access to material that was probably early;28 the homily in question could easily be in that category. I am inclined to think, then, on the evidence of the verb-pairs in Hrothgar’s ‘sermon,’ that the composition of Beowulf had some vernacular preaching in its background.29 We have no way of telling, on present knowledge, how early an ‘early’ homily may be. But to suppose that vernacular preaching influenced Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ we need only postulate that religious instruction in English had a settled manner, a recognizable style, in the poet’s time. And there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in that being so by the second half of the eighth century.

Certainly Hrothgar’s moralizing is paralleled then, both in matter and in manner. Boniface and seven other bishops on the continent, in a Latin letter of 746-7 urging Æthelbald, king of Mercia, to mend his wicked ways, say to him, ‘Beware of the darts (iacula) of the ancient enemy, by which you have seen your own relations fall wounded in front of you.’ 30 And they go on to put Wisdom 5:8-11 into the mouths of the wicked on the Day of Judgement: ‘What hath pride profited us or what advantage hath the boasting of riches brought us? All those things are passed away like a shadow, and like a post that runneth on, and as a ship that passeth through the waves; whereof the trace cannot be found, or as when a bird flieth through the air.’ Similar sentiments are commonly expressed in the Latin proems to charters. The preamble to a grant of land to the church of Wells by Cynewulf, king of Wessex (757-78), perhaps in 766, is a case in point: ‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Since it is agreed by all catholics and true believers in the Lord that the times of this temporal life far and wide throughout the globe daily pass away by uncertain and divers causes, and also men, overcome by sudden sickness, immediately give up and end their lives and lose at the same time all transitory things; for that reason we here expend and bestow the Lord’s benefits to the poor without any delay, in order that there we may receive the harvest of reward in the eternal country with the Lord happily without end.’, 31

Grendel’s sinfulness may have the stamp of this early period on it too. The idea that a race of evil giants was descended from Cain was believed to have biblical authority on the strength of the interpretation given to Genesis 6:2 and 4 by Augustine and others.32 The Beowulf poet was thus in an orthodox position when he stated:

Þanon [i.e. from Cain] untydras      ealle onwocon,
eotenas ond ylfe      ond orcneas,
swylce gigantas,     þa wi Gode wunnon
lange þrage;      he him aes lean forgeald. (111-14)

But the notion that some of this wicked progeny survived the Flood must have come to him from uncanonical, fabulous tradition.33 As Stephen Bandy has pointed out,34 he designated the giants God destroyed in the Flood by the Latin loan word gigantas:

syþan flod ofsloh,
gifen geotende      giganta cyn,
frecne geferdon;      þæt wæs fremde þeod
ecean Dryhtne;      him þæs endelean
þurh wæteres wylm      Wealdend sealde. (1689b-93)

Grendel, a þyrs (426a) and an eoten (761a), and his mother are, on the other hand, never termed gigantas. The poet seems to have distinguished between some giants descended from Cain who perished in the Flood (gigantas) and some others who, also descended from Cain and to be designated by words of Germanic tradition, did not. It is therefore worth reminding ourselves that the only other extant reference from Anglo-Saxon times to surviving evil descendants of Cain is in Felix’s Vita Sancti Guthlaci, written by 749: there the saint calls the demons tormenting him semen Cain.35 As Professor Whitelock has pointed out,36 the Old English prose translation of Felix’s Latin has instead forwyrde tuddre, ‘offspring of perdition.’ 37 The statement that the murder of Abel had placed Cain — and with him Grendel — in a state of feud with God is distinctive also:

siPan him [i.e. Grendel] Scyppend      forscrifen hæfde
in Caines38 cynne – þone cwealm gewræc
ece Drihten,      þæs þe he Abel slog;
ne gefeah he þære fæhe,      ac he hine feor forwræc,

Metod for þy mane      mancynne fram. (106-10)

There is a parallel sense of a feud with God occasioned by murder in the legend of St. Mildthryth who was abbess of Minster in Thanet by 696. Most versions of her legend describe how Egbert, after the killing of his cousins, Æthelberht and Æthelred, offered their wergild to their sister, who elected to take it in the form of land. Minster in Thanet was founded on this land. The wergild payment was not a normal one, since it was made within the family and resulted from a killing which had been deliberately concealed from human eyes; it was made because the killing had not been kept hidden from God: it was God who revealed the corpses and whose anger Egbert is said to have feared. The clear inference is therefore that the foundation of Minster in Thanet was effectively a wergild paid to God to avert a feud.39 There is a strong presumption that the legend of St. Mildthryth originated in Kent before that kingdom became dependent on Offa of Mercia, and there is no reason to suppose that the wergild payment was not a feature of it from the beginning.40 It is perhaps also worth noticing that the idea that the Jews were in feud with God, because of the killing of his son, is developed with a full use of legal terminology by the Irish poet Blathmac mac Con Brettan in the third quarter of the eighth century.41 Evidently an English poet of the second half of that century could have been familiar with both the idea that evil progeny of Cain had survived and the idea of a feud with God.

Another motif consonant with the sentiment of that time is the siting of Beowulf’s memorial mound. The dying Beowulf instructs Wiglaf to see that it is built on a promontory by the sea so that sailors may be continually impressed:

‘Hata heaomære      hlæw gewyrcean
beorhtne æfter bæle      æt brimes nosan;
se scel to gemyndum      minum leodum
heah hlifian      on Hronesnæsse,
þæt hit sæliend      syan hatan

Biowulfes biorh,      a e brentingas
ofer flodu genipu      feorran drifa.’ (2802-8)

And his wish is carried out:

Geworhton a      Wedra leode
hlæw on hlie,      se wæs heah ond brad,
wægliendum      wide gesyne. (3156-8)

Kings of Mercia as early as Æthelbald, who was murdered in 757, were buried in just such a position at Repton, overlooking the flood-plain of the River Trent, and a magnificent mausoleum was built there to house their remains at least by 840, 42 It is noteworthy that in the Old English list of saints’ resting-places in England, extant in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 201 and London, British Library MS. Stowe 944,43 the items specifying places at which the relics arrived in the ninth century or earlier almost invariably relate the named site to nearby river, sea, or fen, whereas the entries containing later information hardly ever do, 44 Typical of the former is ‘Đonne reste sancte Wigstan on þam mynstre Hreopedune neah þære ea Treonte.’ 45 This was not a matter of practical identification, for sometimes small streams are cited. Rather it seems that in the early period, but not in the later, there was a feeling for the setting of commemoration like that which the Beowulf poet attributed to his hero.

Several features of Beowulf, then, chime in with the dating that belongs to the kind of poetry it is. And nothing is known to me that demands a later date. For instance, those who see Norse influence in the poem do not have to wait for the viking age to account for it. Alcuin, writing in 793, after the viking raid on Lindisfarne, upbraids Æthelred, king of Northumbria, and his chief men for having brought on themselves the disaster that has befallen them: ‘Consider the dress, the way of wearing the hair, the luxurious habits of the princes and the people. Look at your trimming of beard and hair, in which you have wished to resemble the pagans. Are you not menaced by terror of them whose fashion you wished to follow?’ 46 The Norsemen could hardly have set their bad example if they had not been familiar to Englishmen earlier in the century, at least in the north. And, certainly, to argue on external evidence that composition of the poem was possible in the viking age or later is not to make it probable. King Alfred, for example, may well have known poems like Beowulf but it is hard to imagine that he, or any other major patron in his reign, would have provided the conditions for an ambitious new composition about the far Germanic past when, at first, he was desperate for survival, or when, later, he could look no further than reconquering London and consolidating Wessex, or when, finally, he was intent on reestablishing contemporary continental, Christian culture in his kingdom. At some point in the ninth century the internally coherent verbal system of Beowulf drawing on and reexpressing an oral, synthesizing, craft sense of social tradition, ceased to be a medium for contemporary poetic creation. Written poetry could not sustain that ancient burden. Vernacular composition, in prose or verse, became part of the new ecclesiastical milieu of texts, liturgy, art, analytic thinking, and literary style. That Alfred was not taught to read until he was eleven or more was thought by Asser to need explanation.47 Alfred himself tells us that before the Danish wars ‘Monige cuon Englisc gewrit araedan,’ 48 and he based his post-war education policy on training as many young men as possible to do just that.49 When he was a boy his mother offered to give a book of vernacular poetry, with a handsome initial, to whichever of her sons learned it quickest.50 Vernacular poets serving an educated audience were by this time as text-based in the poems they wrote as they were in the sources they used. The authors to whom the poetic inheritance passed in the ninth century were Cynewulf and others like him. Harking back to a lost Anglo-Danish past could well account for a revival of interest in, and hence recopying of, any text of a poem such as Beowulf that had survived until about 1000, but nostalgia alone could not have created the unsentimental, unselfconscious masterpiece that Beowulf is. The poem’s ripeness certainly contains the seeds of change: I have envisaged a poet who had learned to write; probably he was familiar with vernacular sermonizing; his religious contacts included apocryphal and uncanonical elements. But the poem’s characteristic, organic blend of social constraint and active imagination could not have been contrived artificially. That must have belonged to a still living aristocratic tradition. It could not have come about in the society that produced Ælfric’s articulate and articulated prose for laymen any more than the maxim about peacemaking could have done. Telling afresh tales about old Germanic times would have been part of sub-culture. But in the second half of the eighth century or the early ninth conditions would have been right for the origination of Beowulf. Surely, then, that is when, in all probability, the poem was composed. Nor should we forget the praise which, as scholars have long noticed, the poet lavishes on Offa, the fourth-century king of the continental Angles (1947b-60a): the compliment would receive its readiest explanation if the Mercian Offa, king 757-96, had been a power in the land when it was offered. Certainty is not possible; proof is not available; but I regard composition of Beowulf during the second half of the eighth century as much the most likely.

JOHN C. POPE

Dating the composition of Beowulf may prove to be an enterprise of that endlessly inconclusive sort that Milton allotted to the philosophers among his fallen angels. In face of so many unknowns we can hope at most to agree upon broad limits, and to treat these limits as only reasonable probabilities. Of course the date of the manuscript provides a limit close to the year 1000, but the manuscript is manifestly at some remove from the original, and few students of both poem and period will believe that the date of the manuscript is close enough to the date of the poem to be seriously considered as a useful terminus ad quem. It is about as useful as to take the fairly well documented establishment of Homeric recitations by Peisistratus as a terminus ad quem for the composition of the Iliad – or somewhat less useful, because some scholars have believed that Peisistratus caused a drastically edited text (though not quite like the one we have) to be put in writing for the first time. There is nothing Peisistratean about our one manuscript of Beowulf.

I am still of the old opinion that Beowulf was first put in writing at some time in the eighth century. When Dorothy Whitelock argued for a widening of the limits from the first half of the eighth century (as proposed by Chambers and Klaeber) to a period, at the broadest, between about 670 and 835,1 she was allowing, among other things, for the fact that we have no reliable evidence for the part of England where Beowulf was composed. Northumbria, as we know from Bede and from its art and architecture, was sufficiently advanced culturally, and sufficiently Christianized in high places, to have provided an author and an audience for such a poem even as early as the reign of Aldfrith (685-705). But conditions in Northumbria might have been at least as propitious a good many decades later, and if the poem was in fact composed in Mercia (not to mention other kingdoms),2 conditions might not have been right till the eighth century was well advanced. Professor Whitelock had particularly in mind as a possibility the court of Offa (who reigned from 757 to 796) partly because she suspected a compliment to Offa in the digression concerning his legendary ancestor, Offa of Angel. Such a connection cannot be proved, but it is surely one of the possibilities we must keep in mind.3 Professor Whitelock’s consideration of the historical possibilities in the light of what the poem itself implies about the knowledge and the interests of the poet and his audience seems to me incomparably the most thorough and the most persuasive of anything that has been written on the subject. It may be that, in the course of her entirely sensible dismissal of Schücking’s suggestion that the poem was composed about 900 by an Englishman at the court of a Danish ruler in the Danelaw,4 she dismissed too sweepingly the possibility of a sympathetic audience for the poem between the middle of the ninth century and the reign of Knut; but this hardly matters if, as I believe, there are non-political reasons for the improbability of a date after 835, the limit she proposes as reasonably safe.

Professor Whitelock’s position has been complemented and strengthened on the side of archaeology and history by the recent article of Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf, and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy.’ 5 He contends very persuasively that Beowulf is directed toward an aristocratic audience such as existed both within the monasteries and in the courts, and that certain features of Beowulf that the doctors of the church, even Bede and certainly Alcuin, would have felt obliged to disapprove of, would have been entirely congenial to a less theologically rigorous nobility conscious of its pre-Christian ancestry. Mr. Wormald’s interpretation of the poet’s religious position seems to me as reasonable as his estimate of the general climate of opinion among members of the Christian aristocracy in pre-Alfredian England. He sets even wider limits than Professor Whitelock did for the possible composition of the poem, but with an important reservation. ‘Assuming,’ he says, ‘that linguistic scholars, whose arguments I cannot claim to judge, are unable to reach agreement on the dating of the poet’s language, I would defend dating limits of 675-875, but would wish to make no further commitment on historical grounds.’

I believe there is reason on linguistic grounds to push the later limit, 875, back to about 800. Although there has been justifiable scepticism, in recent years, of two sets of linguistic tests devised for chronological guidance toward the end of the last century and applied with more enthusiasm than discretion to most of the Old English poems, it is not clear that these tests are wholly without value.6 One set of tests was propounded by Lichtenheld in his study of the use of the weak adjective and the definite article in the poetry, and was applied by Barnouw to most of the important poems.7 The other set, in which metre was used as an index to changing linguistic usage, grew out of distinctions observed by Sievers in the course of his metrical studies. It was developed and applied by a number of scholars, among them Trautmann, Sarrazin, Mors-bach, and Richter.8

Application of the two sets of tests led to overprecise and often conflicting chronological inferences. It has rightly been concluded that a precise chronology for all Old English poetry cannot be achieved by these tests. Yet scepticism can be carried too far. Kenneth Sisam, an outspoken sceptic, and one whose command of the linguistic features of the whole range of Old English documents in prose and verse was matched by unusually keen judgment, did not consider such tests entirely without value. In his famous Gollancz lecture on Cynewulf he had this to say about them: ‘ Because these tests leave out of account differences of authorship, of locality, of subject, and of textual tradition, the detailed results, whether of relative order or absolute date, are little better than guess-work hampered by statistics. Still, they point to one broad conclusion: that Cynewulfs poetry, though it does not show the failing technique of poems known to belong to the tenth century, is later than poems like Genesis, Exodus, and Beowulf, which have the best claims to be considered early.’ 9

Although it is clear that Sisam was predisposed on other grounds (shared by most of his contemporaries and predecessors)10 to accept the relative antiquity of Genesis A, Exodus, and Beowulf he nevertheless brought out in this passage what is immediately apparent to anyone who takes the trouble to examine the linguistic-metrical evidence marshalled by Carl Richter and the various uses of the weak adjective and the definite article assembled and analyzed by Barnouw. A few other poems (Daniel, Guthlac A, and several of the Riddles) come fairly close to Genesis A, Exodus, and Beowulf, but a striking contrast appears between the three poems named by Sisam and the signed poems of Cynewulf. This contrast appears all the greater because differences between Cynewulf’s poems and those that are certainly or probably later than 875, so far as these particular tests are concerned, are comparatively slight. Disyllabic treatments of contractions, monosyllabic treatments of words like wundr and tacn, free use of the weak adjective without the definite article, all well represented in the three supposedly early poems, become infrequent, while the use of the definite article tends to increase. There is no perfect uniformity in all these categories, but poems known on other grounds to be late, if they show a few early features in one category, lack them in the others. The Judith fragment, which is persuasively assigned to the first half of the tenth century, is conspicuously lacking in early features, a fact that may seem doubly significant because it follows Beowulf in the one surviving manuscript and is written in the hand of the second scribe of Beowulf.

The broad distinction noticed by Sisam became one of the chief grounds for Charles Wrenn’s dating of Beowulf in the eighth century. Accepting Sisam’s ninth-century date for the poems of Cynewulf, he argued that it was reasonable to place Beowulf about half way between Caedmon and Cynewulf.11 The older scholars, by dating Cynewulf’s work too early, crowded a great many poems into the eighth century and left the ninth almost a blank; but Sisam’s dating of Cynewulf to the ninth century allows a much more reasonable spread.

Wrenn makes a good deal also of the manuscript form wundini in the instrumental phrase wundinigolde, Beowulf 1382.12 This puzzling form has been retained by several editors from Chambers to von Schaubert as a possible survival from an eighth-century manscript, and was supported by Hoops on the basis of forms that appear in the early Épinal and Erfurt glosses.13 Klaeber, among other editors, preferred to treat wundini as a scribal error for what might have stood in the exemplar as wundnū for wundnum, but in the Second Supplement to his third edition (page 467) he said, ‘It may, after all, be advisable to give wundini (instead of wundnum) as an archaic instrumental form a place in the text.’ Sisam expressed strong doubts of wundini not only as unlikely to have been preserved through a succession of copies, but as having a medial i that ought to have been subject to syncope after the long stem: wundni would seem somewhat more likely than wundini.14 Error in transcription appears all the more possible because the scribe wrote wun at the end of a line and what certainly looks like dini at the beginning of the next. Thus wundini offers frail support, if any, to the argument for an eighth-century date.

Yet in justice to the editors who have given wundini a place in their texts it should be said that we do not know the number or the dates of the copies that separate our one manuscript from the original. Even if many copies intervened, most of them may have been early. The scribe’s exemplar, or more probably its immediate ancestor (since there are a few traces of early West-Saxon spellings) might have belonged to the eighth century. Moreover, it may be well to point out what seems not to have been noticed, that emendation to wundnum, though it offers a ready explanation for the supposed error, is not well supported by the usage of this or other poetical manuscripts. To judge by the comparable instrumental phrases in Beowulf, the likeliest form of the adjective is wundnan, with both wundnum and wundne poor seconds. The instrumental singular of adjectives that, like the participial wunden, can be declined either strong or weak, appears some fourteen times with the weak ending -an or (once) -on, only twice with the strong instrumental ending -e (getrume micle 922, elne unflitme 1097), and once with the strong dative ending -um (dymum cræfte 2168, against dyrnan cræfte 2290).15 In the only other surviving example of the actual phrase in Old English poetry, it appears as wundnan golde (Widsith 129), and when Beowulf recapitulates his adventures in Denmark, he says he was rewarded by fættan golde (2102). There are, of course, several other examples of -an where the weak declension is obligatory, and several examples of -e such as the formulas mine gefræge and ore sie where the strong declension is obligatory.16 The evidence of Genesis A is similar, though it offers more support for the strong instrumental -e, and very slightly more for dative -um.17

On the one hand, therefore, wundini as an archaic form of wundne cannot be categorically dismissed. On the other hand, however, the support for it is extremely weak. As evidence for an early date it will probably carry conviction only to those already convinced.

Although I have indicated my agreement with Sisam that the linguistic tests tend to support an earlier date for Genesis A, Exodus, and Beowulf than for the signed poems of Cynewulf and the poems most nearly associated with them in style and subject matter, something must be said about the pitfalls of these tests when they are applied indiscriminately to the whole body of Old English verse, even if there is no effort to reach a precise chronology by means of them. Certain obvious exceptions to the assumed changes in usage need not lead to total rejection of these assumptions if the exceptions can be at least partially accounted for. I wish to take up a few of these exceptions as they appear in specific poems.

A single but startling exception, to which one of the contributors to this volume has called attention,18 is the presence of the disyllabic form heahan (so spelled in one manuscript, hea an in the other), in the trivial poem called The Gloria I, which survives in two eleventh-century manuscripts and is printed by Dobbie in the sixth volume of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (pages 74-7). The surprising heahan appears in line 27 and normal scansion demands that its two syllables be respected. Yet one of the most persuasive of the linguistic-metrical tests assumes that inflectional suffixes of heah, if they began with a vowel, caused loss of h at an early period with consequent contraction to a single syllable. The poems supposed to be early contain metrical evidence for both disyllabic and monosyllabic treatment of inflected heah and all similarly contracted words, though the scribes of the manuscripts almost always wrote them in contracted form. Klaeber’s Beowulf is sprinkled with the circumflex signs he used to indicate the disyllabic value of the contracted words.19 Such disyllabic treatment is rare in Cynewulf, appearing mainly in contracted verbs such as don and gan where analogical expansion is likely to occur at any time, and it appears to die out in still later poems. Thus the heahan in the very late Gloria I needs to be explained.

But an explanation is not far to seek. A reformed treatment of this particular word is conspicuous in the works of Ælfric. Already in the earliest manuscript of the Catholic Homilies, Royal 7 C. XII in the British Library, we find oblique forms of heah spelt heaga, heagum, etc., as if to insist on the syllabic status of the inflectional endings; and these spellings are standard in the manuscripts of Ælfric’s works.20 The reformed spelling may have originated in Æthelwold’s school at Winchester, where Ælfric received his education. It does not appear in the Blickling Homilies or in the early manuscripts of King Alfred’s writings, though Sedgefield prints heohan from the twelfth-century MS. Bodley 180, where it is the sole authority for the prose translation of one of the Metres of Boethius.21 The most interesting example of the spelling heagum is in MS. Junius 11 at Genesis A, line 8. There indeed the verse calls for two syllables, but everywhere else in the poem we find contracted forms that must usually be expanded to fit the metre. Evidently the scribe of Junius 11 had encountered the reformed spelling and made use of it once before yielding to the older spellings of his exemplar. In any case we may assume that the heahan of The Gloria I is not the disconcerting survival of a supposedly obsolete form but a witness to the reformed spelling (and pronunciation) promulgated in the late tenth century. For poems earlier than the reform the test need not be challenged.

Allowances of another sort must be made for the narrowly datable Metres of Boethius, but they also supply helpful information about the metrical tradition. In all probability it was Alfred himself who versified his own prose translation of the Latin metres,22 and if so we can date the verses to the last decade of the ninth century. If not, they were certainly composed before the middle of the tenth century, the date of the unique manuscript.23 The language of the Metres combines many of the words and expressions taken directly from the prose version with occasional words and verse formulas that can be found in the supposedly earlier poetry, including Beowulf. The result is only occasionally of poetic merit, but the Metres understandably exhibit some presumably traditional usages, such as the instrumental formula geomran stemne with its weak adjective and a good many examples of monosyllabic treatment of the word tung(o)l ‘star,’ which can reasonably be attributed to the author’s familiarity with older poetry, most likely in written form. Such traditional bits need not be considered evidence of contemporary usage on the part of less obviously bookish composers. More important is the fact that the versifier, in spite of certain departures from tradition, shows a remarkable awareness of the metrical rules of ‘classical’ Old English verse. His chief lapses, apart from intrusions of prosaic words and phrases, are in his use of alliteration. He puts the alliteration in the right places but every now and then on words of minor importance: for example on ær in preference to gladu (seo þe ær gladu onsiene wæs, Metre 5.11), and on the auxiliary mæge in preference to the infinitive findan (his modes hus, þær he mæge findan, Metre 7.32).24 On the other hand he seems thoroughly acquainted with the metrical patterns we now identify according to the classifications of Sievers or Bliss. This is apparent in his choices between alternative forms. He uses both the West-Saxon syncopated forms of verbs in the second and third person singular of the present indicative and the Anglian or generally poetical full forms: for example both byrn and byrne in Metre 8.45 and 50, where each is metrically correct; scrif and walde in the same line, Metre 25.15, again each metrically correct; wyræ in the same Metre, line 34, but pynce in line 35 and cyme in line 43, each of the three metrically correct. There are instances here and there of the short form where the full form is needed, but these lapses are probably to be charged to the scribe in view of the prevailing effort to distinguish. Equally interesting and even more surprising is the choice, almost always indicated by the spelling, between monosyllabic and disyllabic treatment of tungol. This is one of the controversial long-stemmed words with post-consonantal l m n or r, which are treated as either monosyllabic or disyllabic according to the metre in what are regarded as early poems and more often as disyllabic later.25 The frequently monosyllabic use of this one word in the Metres may be somewhat archaic, but the distinction in spelling, nearly always corresponding to the metrical requirements, is unusual and must stem from the author. Thus we find tungl correctly in Metre 24.23, Metre 28.6 and 12, and Metre 29.9 and 38, but tungul, Metre 28.20, and tungol, Metre 29.32 (in a correctly formed hypermetric verse), besides heofontungol, Metre 22.24. The only place where I have noticed a mistake is in Metre 29.34 Habba æele tungol emne gedæled. Here the scribe may have carelessly repeated the disyllabic spelling from two lines before, where it is correct. At any rate a monosyllabic tungl (neuter plural as in 28.12) is called for, giving a verse of type B. Twice we find accusative plural tunglu (Metre 4.5 and 29.4) where two syllables are proper. These examples seem to show, contrary to what is sometimes supposed,26 that a real choice could be made between two pronunciations of the long-stemmed words with post-consonantal liquids or nasals. The linguistic-metrical test based on the treatment of such words yields rather uncertain results, partly for want of sufficiently numerous examples of a decisive sort, but it may be of some significance if applied to the long poems of the ‘classical’ tradition.

Two other late poems should perhaps be mentioned as requiring special treatment. In Genesis B (late ninth-century at the earliest), which has many irregularities that stem from an almost word-for-word translation of the Old Saxon original, Klaeber marked a few words that the scribe set down in monosyllabic form with a circumflex, to suggest an uncontracted pronunciation:27 hn 300, 545; onfôn 697; bûn (opt.) 735 (cf. būan 239);nr 760. But the corresponding Old Saxon words are disyllabic in the Heliand: hôhon, antfâhan, bûen, nâhor. It is probable that the translator had these very words before him in the original and was primarily concerned to use their cognates in his translation. He may have been familiar with the somewhat archaic uncontracted forms in Old English and expected them to be used, since they would have made his verses a little more regular, but he may have been indifferent to such niceties. It is thus safer not to include these forms in any chronological survey.

Finally, The Battle of Maldon, as a poem certainly later than 991, the date of the battle, has sometimes been pointed to as showing the unreliability of the Lichtenheld tests concerning the weak adjective and the definite article. It does conform to expectations in its frequent use of the definite article, but it has very few examples of the article plus weak adjective plus noun (supposedly a combination that was used with increasing frequency), and it has a few examples of what look like weak adjectives before nouns without the definite article, a combination almost entirely confined to poetry and rare in poems after Alfred’s day, though The Capture of the Five Boroughs (942) has brada brimstream, line 5, where the weak form fills out the metre. The examples in Maldon may be as many as four, though some of them are doubtful: ealde swurd 47 (either accusative singular neuter weak, or a generalized form of the strong accusative plural, as certainly in feolhearde speru 108); fealohilte swurd 166 (nominative singular neuter, but weak only if -hilt rather than -hilte is the uninflected form, a matter about which authorities differ); min ealda fæder 218 (where ealda is certainly weak but ealda fæder means ‘grandfather’ and the expression is not peculiar to poetry: see the Bosworth-Toller Supplement under eald. VIa); and be swa leofan men 319 (where leofan may be idiomatically weak after swa or a late levelling of the strong leofum). Thus the list is not impressive, but if we concede that ealde swurd and fealohilte swurd may have genuine weak forms of their adjectives and dismiss the other two examples as not peculiar to the poetic tradition, we shall only be confirming what we already know is one of the distinguishing characteristics that set Maldon apart from all the other heroic poems and from the narrative religious poems, biblical or hagiographic, as well. All the features I have mentioned are the natural consequence of these distinguishing characteristics. This is the only surviving poem that describes a complicated battle with attention to a large number of individuals and with emphasis on the particulars of the setting. Hence the great frequency of the definite article. It is also a poem that has much in common with the concise lay even while it gives a minutely elaborated account of what it represents as the facts. Hence there are very few descriptive adjectives and little occasion for honorific identifications like the once-occurring one æelan Æþrelredes þegn 151, which marks out Byrhtnoth as his end approaches. Above all, as Irving has pointed out,28 it is a poem that celebrates the transformation of the not particularly distinguished men of a local company into heroes, heightening their tragedy and their heroism by interspersing the unpretentious, matter-of-fact particulars with the time-honoured formulas of the glamorous past. It is here that the slightly archaic ealde swurd and fealohilte swurd belong, and also the feolhearde speru and the ætteme ord, expressions that have a similar quality without their adjectives being classifiable as weak. Once the uniqueness of this poem is grasped, its creation of something altogether new from many sources – from the language of everyday, the lilt and the vigour of popular lays, the dignity of epic – there will be no reason to expect it to fit into the sort of evolution that can be partially glimpsed among the longer ‘classical’ poems.

I have dwelt overlong, perhaps, on the provisos and exceptions that have to be recognized before one can make use of linguistic tests that, at best, may be considered confirmatory rather than decisive, and can be expected to yield only very broad distinctions. There were many scholars who believed in the comparative antiquity of Beowulf before such tests were applied, and some of the reasoning behind their belief has survived alongside the tests. It is vaguer but perhaps stronger. The impact of Chadwick’s Heroic Age and of Chambers’ Widsith and his Introduction to Beowulf though the opinion of Chadwick especially needs qualification, has been strong in support of an early date, especially perhaps because it is hard to believe that so rich and detailed a tradition of Scandinavian legend, interspersed with other Germanic lore and coupled with an indulgent view of the pagan past would have long survived the pressures of a rapidly developing and changing Christian Europe. Professor Whitelock rightly argued that the poem implies, in its audience, an acceptance of and familiarity with Christian ideas and practices, so that one must not press for too early a date; but she did not refuse to recognize the claim of the opposite argument. What she proposed was a moderate compromise.

I suppose I have lived so long with the convictions of Chadwick, Chambers, and Klaeber, along with the supporting literary criticism of Girvan, Brodeur, and many others, that the idea of an early date for Beowulf has sunk into my bones and I cannot easily reconcile myself to supposing that it does not belong to an older world and an older state of the poetic tradition than the works of Cynewulf and the anonymous poems that seem closest to his interests and his manner. I will not try to sort out and assemble the scattered observations that these scholars have embedded in their writings, but for better or for worse their cumulative effect has probably shaped my opinion more than any single specific argument, linguistic or historical.

I am inclined, however, to accept with composure a date for the composition of Beowulf, more or less as we have it, at almost any time in the eighth century, and to feel that a seventh-century date is unlikely, though of course not unacceptable if strong reasons for it could be discovered. In addition to Professor Whitelock’s argument, and to the marginally possible validity of the Morsbach dating of the loss of u after a long accented syllable,29 I am chiefly swayed by what seems to me the probability of a long period of gestation of both story and style before the poem we have was composed and put in writing. It is hard to believe that so eloquent, so elaborate, and so serenely controlled a style arose suddenly from the stimulus of the Aeneid, or that the story itself had not a period of growth, accumulation, and shaping. There are indications in the poem itself that it is a twice-told tale. Moreover, I cannot imagine that the author himself did not have a long period of apprenticeship in the art of poetry before composing such a masterpiece. It would not be surprising if he had acquired most of his skill by oral composition. Certainly he had mastered a style well suited to oral delivery. As a pure conjecture I would suggest that the oral poets of the seventh century were largely responsible for the growth of the style and the story, and for pointing the way, in courtly and sometimes monastic surroundings, for that remarkable adjustment of Christian beliefs and pagan story that Beowulf represents and the Icelandic poems and sagas (greatly to our present satisfaction) so conspicuously lack. But time has run out. I have not proved that Beowulf was composed in the eighth century, but I have yet to be persuaded that another period will do as well.

[This paper has been reproduced in all substantive details as it was submitted at the end of January, 1980. Consequently it takes no account of several papers that were submitted later, some of which advanced fresh arguments for a date as late as the tenth century. I have not been persuaded to change my opinion that the most probable date is toward the middle or end of the eighth century, but some of the fresh arguments for a later date should be carefully weighed.]

E.G. STANLEY

The greater the distance between the date of the Beowulf manuscript – ‘s. X/XI’ by palaeo-graphical dating1 – and the posited date of the poem as we now have it, the heavier the element of hypothesis. We may go further than that, into the predilections of medievalists: we like things to be genuinely old. There is some spurious linguistic antiquity in medieval English – the Proclamation of Henry III,2 for example, or the rhyming charters,3 as all will acknowledge; and La3amon’s Brut, as I think4 – but Beowulf does not seem in any way spurious to me. The language of the poem gives the impression that it is new of the poet’s age (though, of course, like all Old English verse it is written in the traditional language of poetry); candel, gigant, and non point that way.5 The ‘Christian elements’ 6 seem well integrated. Scyppend, ece Drihten, Metod (without trace of pre-Christian implication), and Caines (MS altered from cames) feel as much in place as untydras, eotenas, ylfe ond orcneas. They are not merely in place: the balance of the two sets is sophisticated. We do not know when or where in England literary sophistication first arose.

In the period before the Beowulf manuscript was written, we know a little about what they did in Benedictine monasteries (especially those directly affected by the reform movement) in the last quarter of the tenth century; Benedictines do not seem to have gone in for vernacular poetry. Clerics of that age seem not to have minded and may even have favoured an interest in what we now call current affairs: the Chronicle provides evidence for that; and it provides evidence also for the survival of attitudes which led to the tracing back to earlier times of dynasties: it was not forbidden to copy such things out. We know a little about vernacular literature in Alfred’s reign. We know of earlier periods what Bede tells us. We have good, but fragmentary information about quite a lot. It is not sufficient for us to be able to say much about provincial centres (i.e. non-Northumbrian in the age of Bede, non-Mercian in the age of Offa, non-Canterbury or non-West-Saxon from Alfred’s accession onwards).

We know very little indeed about how the Anglo-Saxons regarded the raiding and settling Scandinavians. From late in the eighth century the Anglo-Saxons were in conflict with the Scandinavians. Our poem is about the Scandinavians. The English were Christians throughout the period of pagan incursions. As we in modern times contemplate that conflict we jump to the conclusion that the Anglo-Saxons were, in the Younger Pitt’s phrase, ‘at war with armed opinions,’ 7 and opposed them with armed contrary opinions. Nicolas Jacobs has convincingly demolished the old argument of Grundtvig’s that Beowulf must have been written before the Scandinavian raids affected Anglo-Saxon attitudes.8

Kenneth Sisam’s very careful study of the contents of the manuscript9 is particularly good in insisting on how little we know that might help us to date and localize the compilation of the Beowulf manuscript (as distinct from the composition of the poem). Sisam shows that Judith is really very different from the other texts in the manuscript. He thinks it could well have been added to the collection when our manuscript came into being. That would agree well with the West-Saxonisms of the poem, of which hopian ‘to hope’ instead of hycgan is important.10 A late date seems indicated by the presence in Judith of the compound forms beæftan, binnan, of dune, on ufan;11 but such compounds are not confined to West-Saxon. Sisam takes the first text, the Christopher, to be, like Judith, not necessarily part of a compilation antedating and underlying the existing Beowulf manuscript. On the other hand, Judith allows palatalized ġ to alliterate with the stop g in lines 2, 9, 13 (judith with initial sound =ġ), 22, etc.; unlike very late verse, for example Battle of Maldon.12 The other prose texts could have been together with Beowulf in an earlier compilation; it seems likely. But even that does not really take us much earlier than the middle of the tenth century.

Before we get down to details, let us deal in impressions. Does the heroic spirit go for nothing? Can we attach no date to the poet’s poetic manner, his style? As for the spirit, the tenth-century poems Brunanburh13 and Maldon,14 both battle-pieces, seem too close to Beowulf to allow of any safe inference of the kind that suggests that the battle poems are artificial, mere exercises by versifiers of about 937 and 991, but that Beowulf is genuine. The argument is circular. In poetry, success is ‘genuine’; failure, ‘artificial.’ Metrically Brunanburh goes with Beowulf; Maldon less so, and where Maldon differs, for example in the greater incidence of verbal co-alliteration in the first half-line, it often15 seems to be metre of a kind later than Beowulf and Brunanburh.

Style, alas, is little help in dating. Almost our earliest poem in the language, Bede’s Death Song is uncharacteristic of Old English poetic style as we think of it. I am not now concerned with the spirit of the poem, that for a Christian the moment of death is a fearful event whereas for a hero there is no fear. Stylistically, as Alois Brandi said long ago,16 the single-sentence poem is not in the manner of heroic song, less so than Cædmon’s Hymn. The balance, ominous alike in sense and wording, of what man thinks before death and what God determines after death is unlike anything in heroic verse. The poem Judgement Day II is a late translation of Bede’s Latin poem. It has a spring opening, alone among pre-Conquest vernacular poems. That opening is derived from Bede’s Latin. No earlier translation of it into Old English survives; none may have been made. We cannot give reasons for non-existence. It could have been thought unsuitable for translation because the spirit and the style are against the traditions of vernacular poetry. That English speakers, especially those living in the Midlands and the North, retained a knowledge of some significant features of the ancient alliterative art of versifying, and recognized them as ancient, is familiar to readers of Middle English alliterative poems from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Yet alliterative verse can be used in many ways, and unheroically. Bede’s Death Song is merely our first evidence for that, and Judgement Day II and the other poems of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS. 201 are among our last witnesses for it before the Conquest.

It would be a great gain to know how late Judith is. Its date is important. It is like the Junius poems in paraphrasing bible story; it is like Juliana and Elene in having a heroine as its protagonist; it is like Andreas in giving its protagonist heroic magnificence, and with better justification, for she was actively, throat-slittingly heroic, while he let God do it all.

We have only very few manuscripts very much earlier in date than the four poetic codices.17 The poetic codices were written after the Benedictine Reform began; we do not know if they were written at Benedictine centres. The evidence we have is sufficient to tell us that, if versifying in the heroic manner of biblical or hagiographical or doctrinal or liturgical themes had been widely prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England after ca. 1000, we should have a better supply of late examples than the small number of poems known or thought to be tenth-century or later.18 It looks as if during the reign of Æthelred the Unready (or perhaps of Cnut) the heroic versification of Christian subjects was prohibited or discouraged. Byrhtnoth, the hero of Maldon, was an important figure in the world. Beowulf, in my reading of the poem, was similarly set in the world. Judith was in the world, though in biblical times long before the age of Æthelredian England or Hygelacian northern Europe. Judith, as has often been said in connection with the poem, is the name of King Alfred’s stepmother, but the poem is not thought to be so early. Much later, Ælfric writing ‘On the Old and New Testament’ singled out the widow Judith of the bible as an example of armed defence at a time of attackers.19 We can seek out whatever parallel accords with our inclination for dating. For Judith we are content now with a date no earlier than the tenth century. Not so for Beowulf; and we are justified in distinguishing, because Beowulf belongs, if Sisam is right, to a different stratum of compilation, an earlier stratum. But how much earlier?

Two pieces of evidence are thought to be significant: first, the praise of Offa of Angle, thought to be suitable as a compliment for Offa of Mercia; and secondly, the mention of the Merovingians, garbled, alas, in transmission. Dorothy Whitelock, writing at a time when Northumbria in the age of Bede was regarded as the probable cradle of our poem, made Mercia in the age of Offa seem attractive.20 Her arguments are well known; she pushed forward the date of composition by fifty years or more. Beowulf and the seventh century – the title of Ritchie Girvan’s book21 – came, as a result of her book, to seem a hundred years removed from probability.

In the Ordnance Survey map, Britain Before the Norman Conquest (871 A.D. to 1066 A.D.) South Sheet,22 a blood-red line cuts deep into England from the Thames Estuary to near the Wrekin. To the north and east of it is the Danelaw. If we assume a date of composition for the poem after 886, the date of Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum which divided the country into Alfred’s part and the part under Danish administration, we have to decide in which of the two halves we believe the poem to have been written.23 It is inconvenient to have to decide, yet inconvenience is no reason for shirking the decision; for the onus of proof becomes heavier the further away in time we move from ca. 1000, i.e. the greater the distance between the palaco-graphical dating of the manuscript and the putative date of composition of the poem. L. L. Schücking. in his celebrated article proposing a late date, thought the poem was written under the Danes.24

We know so little about English speakers in the Danelaw, or those who were bilingual. Did they cultivate English heroic poetry there? Perhaps so, especially if, as Schücking thought, they celebrated Scandinavian glory in English heroic poetry. If the poem were written nearer the border of the Danelaw, but on the Danish side, can we really believe that an Englishman, bilingual though he may well have been, would have celebrated Danish glory as the forts went up?

It seems unlikely, for example, that contemporaries of Edward the Elder and his sister, the Lady of the Mercians, should have been what seems to modern readers so reckless of their national identity. If it were written at any time after 886,1 think it more likely that the poem was written in an Anglo-Saxon area.25

I may perhaps be permitted to say how the Toronto Conference has affected my views on these problems. Ever since I was an undergraduate, about thirty years ago, I have thought that the widely accepted date of the poem, late eighth-century, is too early. I believed then, as I believe now, that the onus of proof of a date so much earlier than the date of the manuscript is on those who assume such an early date. My guess has been that the poem was written at some time between the accession of Alfred and the death of Athelstan; but I knew it to be no more than a guess. On the other hand, Schücking’s belief that the poem was composed in the Danelaw seemed unlikely to me: the complexity of Scandinavian glory long ago, as presented in the poem, accords better with what I thought a sophisticated English poet might have written from the English side than from the Danish side. Having heard the discussion and read the discussion papers of those who attended the Toronto Conference and made Anglo-Scandinavian relations in the later Anglo-Saxon period the centre of their concern (especially Professor Roberta Frank’s paper [which I heard her deliver at Oxford 29 January 1980, after I had sent off my own discussion paper], and also Dr. R.I. Page’s as well as Dr. Alexander Murray’s, I now consider a date of composition in the earlier tenth century more rather than less likely than a date in the later ninth century, and origin in some part of the Danelaw is not impossible, though I still incline on the whole to origin of the poem ‘among the English.’

The poem is written in such a curiously twisted way, that the poet’s national sympathies are far from clear. One way of reading the poem is as in celebration of Scandinavian glory; another, as moving from Danish impotence to Geatish national cowardice and extirpation26 with a Geatish hero to the rescue, one of whom no other source speaks by name and whose exploits are of a kind familiar from folk-tales, not history. With such malleable material the imaginative reader can construct any shape of causal relationship to please his fancy.

What of the Merovingians? The form of the words in the manuscript is clearly mere wio ingasmilts27 interpreted by those who do not emend as a genitive singular masculine Merewioingas with milts tacked on without any space. There are several other cases of as for es genitive, including one other in this part of the manuscript.28 The philological arguments in favour of abandoning an attempt to read Merewioinges in some form is well set out in Else von Schaubert’s note;29 she persuasively attributes attempts to retain the bungled form of the manuscript to the ardent desire to find evidence for an early date of the poem as it underlies the extant version. Alistair Campbell’s emendation to Merewiging30 is probably no better than retaining the manuscript as Merewioinges (or -as); and emending to merewicingas conveniently disposes of the problem. Some single, odd, ancient-looking spelling provides no firm basis for early dating.31

The age of Bede as the age of Beowulf has recently received some support in a paper by Patrick Wormald.32 Acceptance of the age of Bede for Beowulf would require new facts, facts stronger than those found wanting before. Wormald regards Beowulf and the age of Bede a satisfying conjunction. The wish to connect our one heroic poem of any length with our one great historian is understandable, but without hard evidence it falls short. Besides, Wormald seems to understand literature not as invention contrived by art but as evidential written matter: The historical examination of early medieval Christian culture is a better method, in my view, of deciding between alternative interpretations of Beowulf than analogy with the plays of Shakespeare.’ 33 Late in the twentieth century, in virtual ignorance of the circumstances in which our poem was composed, a reader can strive towards an understanding of the poem as a work of the imagination only by analogy with what he knows and on what he has shaped his literary sensibility, rather than by analogy with a construct of historical theory. The poet is remarkably good at enduing the impossible with reality. He teaches us how to strike a dragon to kill, and how, when opportunity serves, a dragon hot and fierce encompasses a warrior’s neck all round, till the life-blood surges forth wave upon wave. When the fight is on in Heorot, the poet makes the meadbenches coil away from the foundation-planks with the violence of the superhuman Beowulf and the supernatural Grendel on that floor. A poet who is excellent at letting us experience what he himself cannot have seen is not to be trusted as witness. Heroic society as he presents it is real, not because he was near to it, but because he has the poetic skill so to present it.

Better dig up the past with a spade. Sutton Hoo gives evidence of a glorious civilization, with Scandinavian contacts, in an area – Suffolk – of which we knew too little before the discovery to suggest the possibility that such riches might be found. Whenever a bit of dark-age Britain is lit up by knowledge, Sutton Hoo, Bede, Aldhelm,34 Offa, Alcuin, Alfred, Athelstan, it is tempting to connect with it our unique poem; an Offa35 is named in the poem, but it is not the right Offa; and with the others the connection is even more tenuous. The connection of Beowulf with Sutton Hoo is attractive, yet it remains unproven. Neither East-Anglian origin for Beowulf nor even proximity of date of composition to date of burial is demonstrable. On the other hand, we should not at present allow Sutton Hoo for King Redwald to harden into a fact, nor so firmly dismiss the view that Beowulf is of the age of Bede that, given better evidence than we now have, Sutton Hoo dated late and Beowulf dated early may not be brought as close to each other in time as they seem in spirit and in Scandinavian implication.

Sutton Hoo is not only glorious as evidence of Anglo-Saxon civilization; it has provided a splendid chapter of cautious, and therefore persuasive, archaeological scholarship,36 though, inevitably, the connection with Beowulf has involved some circularity. As soon as the nature and magnificence of the royal treasure mound excavated at Sutton Hoo was understood, the relevance of Beowulf to its understanding was accepted. As early as the accounts of the treasure-trove inquest in August 1939, the connection of Sutton Hoo with Beowulf is stated in print: ‘The nature of the objects found reminds one ... very strongly of the passage in “Beowulf” in which jewels and treasures from different lands are piled round the dead king’s body in the centre of a ship’ (The Times 15 August 1939, 9/2). It appears that Beowulf was accepted as evidence in the Coroner’s Court when the decision was reached that it was not treasure-trove. (One even learns that the Sutton Hoo inquest is regarded by competent authorities of the law of treasure-trove as significant, and that in part because of, not in spite of, the use made of the evidence of Beowulf.)

Conversely, Anglo-Saxonists, not so lost in lexicography that they did not know that words are the daughters of earth but things the sons of heaven, made the things of Sutton Hoo do service for the words of Beowulf.37 The Swedish element at Sutton Hoo brought to mind the fact that English heroic song in Beowulf celebrates events in southern Sweden and adjoining regions.38 That some of the arms deposited at Sutton Hoo were ancient when buried recalled the affectionate retrospection of the poem, which, if, for example, it were written in the seventh century, still looks back to a period five generations or so earlier to the age of Hygelac. The Sutton Hoo helmet explained the wala in Beowulf;39 the wall-hangings in the poem explained the remains which may be tapestry;40 and the harp, or lyre, gave reality to the long lost sounds of Heorot and supported some theories of scansion.41 The genealogy of the Wuffings of East Anglia was found to include one or two names not unlike those borne by Wæmundings in the poem.42

The date of the burial is not a matter for non-experts. Coins are usually good for dating. Why should they have buried what seem to be gold coins from Merovingian dies in East Anglia? Experts first thought that the coins resembled coins buriable about 650-660;43 now they think that the date of such coins could be early enough for them to have been assembled about 625.44 Rupert Bruce-Mitford has cautiously suggested that the date of the contents of the purse need not be the date of the burial. The following recent statement by him sums up the matter admirably – though I venture to reserve doubt in the view that when the selection was made the latest available coins were included, for later coins of inferior fineness could have been rejected deliberately by selectors knowledgeable enough to know that later coins were less fine than earlier coins, not sufficiently fine to be acceptable for whatever may have been the purpose of the purse in the ship-burial: ‘It is an odd fact ... that no two of the thirty-seven coins in this king’s grave come from the same mint. The hoard contains no concentrations, however small. It is almost as though the coins had been hand-picked somewhere, at some stage (not necessarily at the time of the funeral) to represent as many different types and mints as possible. No doubt the latest available when the selection was made would be included. If, however, the hoard had been at some time brought or sent over from the Continent as a gift or part of a diplomatic payment, the absence from it of later types circulating on the Continent cannot be used with assurance as grounds for depressing the date of its burial in Suffolk. The hoard might, as a gift, have been kept intact for some years, or have been extracted from a larger group of coins that had been kept unreplenished for some years, before it came to be relinquished to the soil at a king’s death. So there are considerations which made it necessary in the Sutton Hoo instance to bear in mind the distinction between the date when the coins can have come together and that of the burial.’ 45

One would expect that at a time of gold coinage in England the contents of the purse would include English coins. Have we the evidence that rules out the possibility that this is an ancient purse-full of good gold buried when silver is common tender? For whom was it intended? Is the Germanic Charon a collector of early Merovingian gold oboli (of perhaps datable fineness)? Did pagans in England believe in a Charon? P. Grierson addresses himself to the possible supernatural uses to which the coins might be put, one obol each (including the three blanks) for the ghostly oarsmen now known to be forty in number for the Sutton Hoo ship and the two much heavier ingots for the steersmen.46 I do not know what the evidence is for belief in ghostly oarsmen among pagan Anglo-Saxons, and therefore do not know how to apply to England or Beowulf Grierson’s statements (p. 17) about ‘two fairly distinct funerary practices which are normally found at different cultural levels,’ and ‘Perhaps the first hearers of Beowulf envisaged ghostly oarsmen taking over the conduct of Scyld’s funeral ship once it was out of sight of land. On such a matter the Christian Beowulf is understandably silent, but the coins from Sutton Hoo suggest that this may have been the case’ – but a fairly wide reading of Beowulf criticism and scholarship has hardened me against exciting attributions to the original audience of knowledge coincident with the scholarly surmise advanced by those who make the attribution.

Some of the puzzling features of the Sutton Hoo coins are not explained by a Charonic theory and they involve the dating of the burial. The contents of the Sutton Hoo purse were not rich by the standards of the rest of the gold treasure. But if the coins were relatively poor for a royal purse, would the treasurer of the Wuffings when he buried the purse have needed to make up the required number with blanks (and perhaps ingots too) if he had had available to him more coins of a kind with those buried? The coins (more even than the blanks) are of a fineness superior to that of later coins. Does this point to their rarity at the time of burial? If so, that rarity might be conveniently explained if the selection for burial is assumed to have taken place when the operation of Gresham’s Law has led to the hoarding of the better coins and their nonavailability, i.e. it might point to a date of burial long after the reign of Dagobert and the death of Redwald.

It has been proposed to dig over our mound for a third time. A corpse for Charon, that is what we want. A bit of Redwald, demonstrably Redwald, would do well. The coming together in Redwald of Christianity and paganism is not so far from the world created dechristianized by the poet of Beowulf: Redwald had double-worship, according to Bede, but the Beowulf poet is pretty silent about worship both of the old gods and also of the God of Christianity.47

In the excitement of the discovery, the connection of Sutton Hoo with Beowulf has almost certainly been made too specific; the value of Sutton Hoo for understanding the rich aristocratic society of Beowulf remains great, and increases as step by step Dr. Bruce-Mitford and his collaborators establish greater knowledge of one part of seventh-century England, an age (if not an area) to which the poet of Beowulf may in part look back. But the still unsettled date of the burial is not likely to help us with the even less settled problem of dating the poem. If we are basing our solution of that on the real things in England in the poet’s time a date as early as that of Redwald would be unlikely. Thus the tamed hawk, presumably trained for hunting, of the ‘song of the last survivor’ might have seemed a very new thing even in the middle of the eighth century when an English king, Æthelbald of Mercia, received a hawk and two falcons from Boniface, and another king, Æthelbert of Kent, asked Boniface for two falcons because those in Kent are less good than those on the continent. A poet sensitively recreating a period much earlier than that of Beowulf himself is not likely to have put into his recreated world the latest for hunting to be found in Europe but not yet (or not so well) in England, other than as a gift from the continent fit for a king. At the Toronto Conference it was suggested to me that the evidence goes no further than that at the time of Boniface English hunting hawks, though probably available, were less well trained for sport than those procured on the continent by Boniface’s agents. I do not find these arguments convincing: the only good hawks we know of in England at the time of Boniface are continental imports; from the later ninth century onward good English hawks may well have contributed to establish the sport better, as we know it existed from the time of Alfred to that of Ælfric.48

Imaginative recreation of the past by a sophisticated poet makes it impossible to pursue a search for the date of composition on the basis of what use the poet makes of concepts of mutability vaguely reminiscent of Boethius. The poet is clearly aware that the events of the poem lie in the past. The customs described are not those of the poet’s time; or he would not have referred to them as swylce þy dogore (1797) ‘such as at that time’ with þy exceptionally bearing the stave.49 The poet shows that the paganism of the Danes, condemned near the beginning of the poem, is not his own religion,50 but, of course, if the poem were written, say, during the ninth-century Danish wars, contemporary Danish paganism would be much like the religion at Heorot.51

At Heorot, in Hrothgar’s great speech – the ‘sermon’ – Christian values are uppermost, though perhaps informally expressed. There may be an inconsistency there, an inconsistency consistent with virtuous paganism, and in tune with the idealization of Beowulf as the most glorious of kings and the mildest.52 The paganism of the Danes from Scyld Scefing to Beow (written Beowulf)53 to Healfdene and his sons including Hrothgar reminds us of the genealogies of pious English kings in Christian times.54 They traced their line back to Scyld and Scef (inconsistently transmitted in the sources);55 but intermediate between these ancestors and the historical Anglo-Saxon kings is Woden, of whom our poem makes no mention. There is probably no reason why it should, for it is dealing with a different genealogical stratum. In the glorification of the Mercian king Offa the Chronicle s.a. 755 [for 757] tells the heroic story of Cynewulf56 and Cyneheard, how the retainers of Cynewulf fought and died for their lord, though immorality, the king’s visit to his mistress at Merton, led to their having to make the supreme sacrifice. At the end of the annal for 757 Offa’s genealogy is traced back to Woden. Woden mattered to the Anglo-Saxons in historical times, so much so that Æthelweard twice euhemerized him.57 That is one way of dealing with paganism incidentally important; the poet of Beowulf, however, left out all mention of Woden.

If Beowulf had been composed in an age when contacts between Anglo-Saxons and Danes were frequent because the Scandinavians in England had established some hold beyond that of raiders, should we not expect some evidence of direct contact in the forms of names? It is often pointed out that in the poem Scedenigge58 is used for the area called Sconeg in Wulfstan the navigator’s account at the beginning of the translation of Orosius. We can date Sconeg philologically 59 – in fact, the philological dating depends on the date of the Orosius. We cannot date the obsolescence of Scedenig. All the other Scandinavian names are also given their English form in the poem, as if the poem were the work of a man who either had an ancient source in which the names were transmitted stage by stage, or who was unusually good at comparative Germanic philology. I want to plead for the second alternative. When speakers of closely related languages are in contact to the extent that, even if not genuinely bilingual, they develop a sense of what in the other language often corresponds to something in their own language, they become comparative philologists by custom. When, in the texts we have, they get it wrong we can never be sure if it is the poet’s fault or that of a scribe, whether it is badly transposed into the poet’s language or badly transmitted. The problem has been often discussed, and Andreas Heusler has a well-known paper on heroic names in variant phonological form.60 His list of phonologically inexact correspondences include from Beowulf: Eadgils / Ails; Froa / Froi; Heremod / Armor; Ongenþeow / Angantyr; Wælsing / Vlsungr; Weland / Vlundr; and also Hremen, cf. Reigotar. All these are English / Scandinavian. But for one name of the Finn episode in the poem we can produce a similarly inexact correspondence from the Fragment, where knowledge of Scandinavian forms does not arise, and we are presumably dealing with imperfect transmission: Oslaf / Ordlaf;61 not so certain are two examples of imperfect correspondence involving the Fragment and Widsith: Sigefer / Sæfer; and even less certain Garulf / Gefwulf.62 English and continental Germanic are involved in the singer’s name in Deor: Heorrenda and Horant of the Middle High German Kudrun, both Deor and Kudrun praising the similarly named singer in similar terms.63 With such a large number of inexact correspondences it would be rash to jump to conclusions about how the faulty correspondences might have arisen; but I think it would be even rasher to base a theory of an early date of composition on the fact that many of the Scandinavian names appear in tolerably good English correspondences. Some may be traditional in England (Scedenig, for example); some could be the result of correct transposition (thus Scyldingas / Skjldungar); and then there are the names they got wrong for some reason.

When so very many factors operate, I have very little faith in philological dating. C.L. Wrenn was among those who put much faith in wundini, but the manuscript basis for the theory is uncertain;64 the reading wundnum with omission in the manuscript of the m line over the u seems safer; and, as Else von Schaubert said,65 even if wundini were granted it would have to be regarded as a fossilized form – though that seems very doubtful. I think Kenneth Sisam’s objection wholly convincing; it disposes of dating based on wundini golde.66

Isolated forms can lead to far-reaching conclusions. Sometimes the evidence points in opposing directions simultaneously. The strongest evidence for the theory that a poetic text might be three hundred years from the date of composition to the surviving full manuscript version is the Ruthwell Cross inscription and The Dream of the Rood in the Vercelli Book of about A.D. 1000. Philologists dated the inscription and historians of art, after expressing doubt in philologists and the like, came to the same conclusion: the Ruthwell Cross is of about A.D. 700.67 But the ending of blodæ is bad and the ending of rodi is worse, and the ending of weak galgu is not very good either (though explicable without resort to case-syncretism leading to wrong specification). Could it be that the rune-smith wrote, not in the half-century around 700, but later in an earlier manner?68 Perhaps when one resorts to runes one inevitably resorts to ancient linguistic forms; one is constantly having to make orthographic, i.e. runological, distinctions of a kind one is no longer called upon to make in ordinary manuscript orthography: runic epigraphy requires the ancient endings long after they were current.69 I am not sure if I know how late the Ruthwell Cross is, nor how to interpret the spellings I have mentioned. But I am sure that Cædmon’s Hymn, Bede’s Death Song, and the Leiden Riddle are extant in forms which go back to a very early non-West-Saxon version on the one hand and survive also in standard late West-Saxon, for the Riddle a version in one of the great poetic codices.70

Philological evidence is cumulative. As we have the rule that the strength of a chain is that of its weakest link, so the strength of cumulative evidence is that of its strongest constituent part. I sense in everything that Beowulf is relatively early. But when I look for the details of why I feel that the poem is early the hoped-for solid facts melt in my hand like battle-icicles. In Beowulf the metre requires the -i- of Denia (variously spelled) and winia (variously spelled). Thus Denia leode (line 2125b) and winia bealdor (2567a) would be short without the -i-. The poem elsewhere also has the form Dena and forms like Ingwina, so that genitival -i- of i-stems is no longer compulsory. The forms with -i- would require careful pronunciation; if we were to substitute carelessly in our reading a form without -i- we should be opening the door to short half-lines. Such half-lines exist – for example kyning mnan (3171b) where we must not add ond if we are to avoid breach of Kuhn’s Law, as well as two (or conceivably three) other lines,71 as well as some bad lines with fæder.72 These lines could be of a kind to which a man who no longer says Denia but normally says Dena grows accustomed metrically. He is, however, at least old enough to know about the old forms, though young enough to feel perhaps that the old forms mispronounced licence the short half-line which he occasionally allows himself to use.

Our poet regularly makes use of uncontracted forms in the metre – for example egesan êon (2736b): but so does the rhymester of The Gloria I in Þone heahan dæg (27a, variant hea an), a poem of about the early eleventh century.73 We cannot use contracted forms for dating. The poets even at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period knew how to avail themselves of uncontracted forms to help along their metre. We cannot use Lichtenheld’s test, that a weak adjectival ending when the adjective is not preceded by an article or the like is a sure sign of early;74 for at Battle of Maldon line 47 ealde is probably weak in 7 ealde swurd (accusative singular); it can hardly be plural when the preceding ord is singular. A weak form like that is very rare in very late verse: perhaps, but there is not very much datable late verse.

I know all these objections to the evidence for an early date of the poem. Nevertheless, I incline towards an early date against reasonable doubts. With a poem so retrospective in feel, how can I curb that inclination? Though none of the evidence is conclusively for an early date, there is nevertheless nothing against it, other than the methodological objection that the greater the distance in time between the known date of the manuscript and the assumed date of composition of the poem the heavier the onus of proof.

What in actual dates does early mean, and what is late? Late is easily defined in figures. From the death of Athelstan in 940 or perhaps from the date (937) of his great victory at Brunanburh to the death of William the Conqueror in 1087; in other words, late Old English poetry runs from The Battle of Brunanburh to The Rime of King William, including much loose and rhyming verse but also the tight and traditional battle poems about Brunanburh and Maldon. As far as we know, the poems of the late period either are late West-Saxon or share in the West-Saxon colouring widely prevalent in England even outside the homeland of West-Saxon speech. In my definition, early goes back in time from the reign of Athelstan; i.e. I regard as early The Metres of Boethius and the Alfredian verse preface and epilogue to The Pastoral Care, though strictly West-Saxon. Though West-Saxon, The Metres (for example in mece and waldend) share in the poetic Anglian features a little.

Two poems, which I believe to be West-Saxon in origin, may be used to exemplify the hesitation we must feel when we try to decide if they are late or early, Genesis B and Judith.75 I can see no way of demonstrating that they are not earlier than ca. 900, though I should be surprised. Solomon and Saturn is similar, and similarly not clearly assignable to early tenth-century West-Saxon rather than later ninth-century West-Saxon.76

We know so very little about the area in which to look for the scriptorium of the Beowulf manuscript. Linguistically all that is certain is that the manuscript was written without care to regularize non-standard spellings. The spellings of Beowulf look provincial. Provincialisms perhaps include the use of the rune for æel, which we know is rare in Old English:77 three times in Beowulf, once in Waldere (some dialectal features of which have been related to Northumbrian origins, on precious little evidence),78 and once in the Lauderdale Orosius about the nonprovincial origin of which we happen to know more than usual, because the manuscript is by or close to the second hand of the Parker Chronicle.79 We know very little about the distribution, in the products of provincial scriptoria, of the peculiarities which we recognize as not standard West-Saxon either of the Alfredian period or of the Benedictine Reform and the half-century that followed it, i.e. the time when the great poetic codices were written. At present we cannot distinguish ‘early’ from ‘late but provincial,’ unless ‘early’ is very early.

With the new concordances we can do better than we have done. It still requires much work. The coming together in a text of non-standard features calls for an analysis of the evidence for the distribution of each feature. An obvious example, the coming together of two bits of poetic Anglian colouring, is the short text of the Alfred Jewel: the text is presumably poetic in linguistic colouring because the object speaks in the first person in the manner of some of the Riddles: AELFRED MECHEHT GEVVYRCAN. As long ago as 1901, John Earle related the poetic first person to the use of the first person by Alfred in the poetic preface to the Pastoral Care;80 Michael Swanton usefully draws attention to this poetic usage.81 An inscription on a recently found whale-bone implement from Wallingford (Berkshire) has EADBURH MEC AH.… 82 The distribution of the Anglian form mec in verse is not identical with the distribution of the Anglian form heht in verse; mec is rarer. It is not used in The Metres of Boethius – I am surprised that it is used so late in Berkshire, near to Alfred’s birthplace. But heht is common in verse.

For verse as for prose Alfredian is relatively early, and nothing can be called late before the middle of the tenth century. When the date of Beowulf was first discussed by scholars they were too much influenced by Grundtvig’s argument that the poem must have been written before the Scandinavian raids assumed proportions so great that no Anglo-Saxon could have written with loyal respect and even affection of southern Scandinavian courts and heroes. That assumption seems to me to carry with it too firm a belief in the narrowness of spirit of Anglo-Saxons of the fifty years around 900, in spite of Alfred’s treatment of Guthrum, and in spite of the evidence of the royal genealogies in the several versions of the Chronicle and elsewhere. The poet is not writing of the Scandinavians of his day, but of long ago as his opening line proclaims. We have difficulty with the successful poetic art of bringing a society into imaginary being that conforms, not with the little we know of England around 900, but with the less we know of a civilization which was old when Gregory of Tours was young.

In Kenneth Sisam’s preamble to his essay ‘Dialect Origins of the Earlier Old English Verse’ 83 he is very careful to distinguish what is generally believed by critics from what he himself accepts as true:

For the period to which the earlier poetry is commonly assigned – the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries1 – hardly any consecutive prose survives.

1 The eighth century is favoured by most critics, and the ninth tends to be a blank. By ‘earlier poetry’ I mean poetry generally thought to be of the period specified above.

If we have so little prose with which to compare the early verse thought to be contemporary with it, I cannot see how we can date the verse as belonging to such an early period, unless we have non-linguistic and non-metrical evidence. Without that evidence, I shall assign most of the verse, and I include Beowulf to the period after the early ninth century. Most of it is demonstrably non-West-Saxon linguistically. What provincial centres there were that might have produced a poem like Beowulf I do not know, and I have no means of assigning the poem to any particular non-West-Saxon area; but I would rule out Kent. We do not know enough about East-Anglian English before the Conquest for us to be able to rule out East Anglia as the provenance, unless we rule out the Danelaw for some inconclusive reason. We do not even know where the manuscript was written: London is not impossible.84

AN AFTERWORD BY NICHOLAS HOWE

This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.
- Wallace Stevens, ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,’ 1918

Reading letters by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets can be very disturbing to Anglo-Saxonists, for they are filled with exactly the information we long to know - and despair of ever discovering - about Old English poems: who wrote them, and when, and where, and even perhaps, why they did so. Take, for example, something as banal as the short letter and accompanying list sent by Wallace Stevens to his publisher Alfred A. Knopf on 16 October 1930 from Hartford, Connecticut. The letter reads in full: ‘You wrote to me in the spring about re-printing Harmonium. I hand you such new material as I have, with a suggestion or two.’1 In the attached list, Stevens names three poems to be dropped from the second edition of Harmonium and fourteen to be added in a precisely specified order. Stevens’s letter and list can seem almost heartbreaking to the Anglo-Saxonist because, in their exquisite brevity, they provide more information about the dating and circulation of poems than do all the surviving records of pre-Conquest England.

The dating of Beowulf, the question of how to set a year and perhaps with it a local habitation for the longest, most widely read poem in the language, can be taken as an emblematic critical issue for Old English studies.2 Worrying about when Beowulf was composed is, as a problem, closely akin to asking if Cynewulf is the only poet who can reasonably be described as the author of more than one Old English poem, or to wondering about the political allegiance and literary taste of the poet who composed The Battle of Maldon.3 Anglo-Saxonists must accept a burden of ignorance about matters of authorship and chronology that would be, I think, intolerable to those who work in most other periods of literary history. Yet our predicament rests not simply on our ignorance about such matters. It is also that Anglo-Saxonists have been trained as literary and historical scholars to work in disciplines that treat such knowledge as basic to all serious study. Yet, by ironic contrast, even literary theorists who celebrate the death of the author, or historians who resist the temptations of vulgar biography, can still rely on knowing basic chronological facts about authors and texts. Whatever they might do with this knowledge, these readers can be certain that the poems in Harmonium come at the start of Stevens’s career and those in The Auroras of Autumn come towards its end. About Old English poets, we will probably never know even these trivial facts.

Our uncertainty about the shape of an Old English literary career stands on a small scale for our uncertainties about the shape of Old English literary history. We have firm dates for some of the prose, many conjectures about the poetry, and an unspoken habit of pretending to more certainty about such matters than the evidence warrants. Or, perhaps more accurately, we have a tacit agreement not to worry in public about the chronological premises of our scholarly work. That is, the discipline argues freely and vociferously about when Beowulf might be dated, but it tends to evade the underlying questions about whether Beowulf can be dated within the state of our current knowledge. We evade these questions, naturally enough, because they threaten to induce a critical paralysis that is, if not unthinkable, then certainly unproductive. The dating of Beowulf is in this regard simply the most visible form of a larger disciplinary problem. To put it more historically, the controversies that have animated Old English studies over that last century or so have always swirled around Beowulf and the question of dating is no exception. Indeed, arguments about how and when to date Beowulf are never merely about chronology but extend to the ways in which we read other Old English poems both in themselves and as forming a larger context for Beowulf.

Attempts to date Beowulf almost always carry with them some implicit, often unacknowledged, sense about the way the poem came into being. In the nineteenth century, to speak broadly, scholars emphasized the oral development and transmission of Beowulf from generation to generation so that they could establish a very early date for the original composition of the poem, as distinct from the date of its transcription in the manuscript. The poem was not the work of a single author, according to this argument, but the result of a long folk evolution by which anecdotes gradually cohered into episodes and then into an extended narrative as the matter of the poem was told and retold by anonymous bards. The slow growth of the poem through popular circulation was for such scholars essential to its greatness as folk-epic; it mattered as a cultural monument precisely because it was early and could not be assigned to a single author or precise moment of composition. That Beowulf had no set date proved that it had always been traditional, that is, it proved that the poem was not and had never been ‘modern’ within its own culture because it was not created through the new technology of literacy.4 Indeed, much nineteenth-century writing on Beowulf is more comprehensible as the manifestation of nationalistic and ethnic desires than as literary scholarship. Beowulf mattered because it was epic, Germanic, originary, that is, because it was not at root Christian, Latin, derivative. If it seemed Christian, that was merely the thin glaze of piety left by monks who, through the very act of writing it down, consciously betrayed its authentic genius as a poem of the folk.

The obvious analogy for this vision of Beowulf would seem to be the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it is partial at best - and then quite misleadingly so - because these two poems occupy a position of radical earliness in Greek literature. Classicists may disagree about their dates but none would argue, as do reputable Anglo-Saxonists for Beowulf that the Iliad and the Odyssey close out the last moments of a poetic tradition. None would make their Homers into Alexandrians. Classicists have this great advantage over Anglo-Saxonists: they know that these two long poems, whatever their dates, appear early in Greek poetry and are originary for much that follows. The dating of the Iliad and the Odyssey depends at least partly on the references to and retellings of them that appear in later works. Indeed, if we lacked these poems we could reconstruct their narratives and much of their verbal texture from this commentary tradition. Above all, we could posit their existence and argue their cultural significance.

By contrast, if BL MS. Cotton Vitellius A.XV had been lost, as it might easily have been, no trace of the poem we call Beowulf would remain and Anglo-Saxonists would have little if any reason to imagine its existence. For Beowulf is unusual not simply in being the longest poem in Old English. It is also in its historical, ethical, and political concerns quite different from Old English poems that run to longer than lyric length. The absence of references to Beowulf elsewhere in Old English or Anglo-Latin works means that there is no external cultural evidence to help us date the poem or at least set some plausible boundaries for it. If late in the eighth century Alcuin had alluded to Beowulf in one of his letters bemoaning the Viking ravages in northern England - ‘Why aren’t they like the peaceable Danes whom Beowulf befriended at Heorot?’ - there would be much less need for this collection of essays, for we would be able to narrow the poem’s date to the relatively acceptable term of a century. That there is no commentary tradition for Beowulf obviously frustrates attempts at dating the poem, but also should chasten those who argue that it thrived for a long time as an epic in Anglo-Saxon England.

The impetus to date Beowulf early had its origin at least in part in the position of Homer’s works early in the Greek tradition. If Beowulf were to be the epic of Anglo-Saxon England, and achieve literary parity with the Iliad and the Odyssey, it required a comparably early date. If it did achieve such parity, then Germanic philology could enjoy a status comparable to that of classical philology.5 Call it Homer-envy, or, the beginnings of English studies as a discipline. When Anglo-Saxonists became less willing, in the wake of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf. The Monsters and the Critics,’ to identify the poem as an epic, some of the impetus for an early date was lost.6

Yet one feature of oral composition did survive this critical shift away from reading Beowulf as an epic. Scholars who wished to maintain an early date for Beowulf found it useful to assume a long interval of circulation for the poem between the time it was composed and the time it was written down in manuscript. Like the people they study, Anglo-Saxonists have tended to relate the value of a text to its antiquity: wisdom comes with age, as the meanings of the Old English word frod instruct us. No one surveying this debate should discount what Roberta Frank identifies as the ‘emotional commitment’ of past scholars to an early date.7 More recently, especially through the work of Kevin S. Kiernan, the orthodoxy of an early date for the poem has been challenged much as was the orthodoxy of its oral-formulaic origin.8 In ways that would have been unimaginable as recently as the 1970s, none of the contributors to this volume explores the dating of Beowulf through the machinery of oral-formulaic theory. On the contrary, the undercurrent in these essays is that Beowulf as we know it is a written text with, quite probably, an identifiable moment of composition.

Arguing the written status of Beowulf is not, however, at all the same as demonstrating that it had a set meaning throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Textuality does not fix meaning in an over-determined or deadening manner, despite what some idealizers of oral composition would have us believe. Instead we must recognize that any inscription of Beowulf in a manuscript creates a new context for the poem and thus shifts the grounds for its interpretation. As a result, the poem’s status in a manuscript as textuality rather than orality must be recognized as decisive by the interpreter. This new position in Old English studies is well articulated by Carol Braun Pasternack, who closes her The Textuality of Old English Poetry by arguing that the manuscript version of a poem is not merely a mechanical transcription of a previously composed work: ‘we should consider the extant texts of Old English poetry as treating issues of concern contemporary to the era of their manuscript production.’9

It may well be a healthy corrective to the excesses of oral-formulaic theory that none of the contributors in The Dating of Beowulf articulates a gradualist creation for the poem: that is, none suggests that its text grew through a slow process of accretion as it passed orally from one generation to the next until it achieved a form something like that recorded in Cotton Vitellius A.XV. In ‘The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript,’ Kiernan argues for the joining of two distinct poems about a figure known as Beowulf sometime after c. 1016, but he does so without recourse to oral-formulaic theory: ‘Palaeography and codicology, in any case, do not support the theory that the Beowulf manuscript is a late copy of an early poem. On the contrary, they support the view that Beowulf is an eleventh-century composite poem, and that the Beowulf manuscript is a draft, the archetype of the epic as we now have it.’10 His claim that Beowulf was written at or very close to the time when it was written down in the manuscript, in the years after Knut came to the English throne in 1016, brings us much closer to our own literary climate in which poets like Stevens publish their poems shortly after writing them. It would thus follow in Kiernan’s argument that Beowulf with its evocation of a Danish past, had a precise political and poetic function to play in a Danish-ruled England that it would not have had in an earlier period when lines of political and cultural allegiance were drawn less starkly or at least with less insistent reference to the overseas connection.

Arguments about the date of Beowulf are thus also arguments about the circulation the poem may have enjoyed in Anglo-Saxon England. The closer a date to Cotton Vitellius A.XV that one offers for the composition of the poem, the less time it would have had to circulate, and thus, arguably, the less cultural work it could have accomplished in the interval. Conversely, the more compelling a case one wishes to argue for the poem’s epic centrality, the earlier a date one would presumably be likely to offer. Remembering these competing visions for the function of poetry in Anglo-Saxon England, one can understand why reputable scholars have dated Beowulf anywhere from (roughly) 675 to 1025, a span of some 350 years. The embarrassment, even the scandal of Old English scholarship is not merely that we have no accepted date for Beowulf but that we cannot even agree on a century. Roy Michael Liuzza offers a disturbing comparison for our critical uncertainty:

Without a doubt, the date of Beowulf matters; imagine the confusion that would result if some critics placed Paradise Lost in the late seventeenth century, others in the early sixteenth, still others in the middle of the nineteenth, and viewed Milton variously as a contemporary of Wyatt, Pope, or Tennyson.11

Perhaps all that saves us from the interpretive anarchy envisioned by Liuzza is that Anglo-Saxonists have not only no date for our Paradise Lost (Beowulf) but also no dates for, as it were, our Wyatts, Popes, or Tennysons (e.g., the poets of Deor, The Seafarer, or Exodus). In this larger context, the problem of unknown dates becomes less of a source of confusion than in Liuzza’s scenario about a Paradise Lost stranded undatably within the ineluctable chronological march of English poetry.

Liuzza’s telling observation also prompts one to speculate that our desire to date Beowulf precisely has been shaped, as well as preserved, by our practice of reading it within the otherwise chronologically secure tradition of English literature. We may argue about which of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written in the late 1380s or the early 1390s, or about which of Shakespeare’s plays were written early rather than late in the 1590s, but these are uncertainties of a relatively few years and do not seem as disconcerting as the uncertainty of centuries we face with Beowulf. Indeed, the problem of its date might seem less troublesome to us as readers if we were to remove Beowulf from the chronological frame of this tradition, especially as it has been maintained by undergraduate anthologies.

A reader, especially one who learned to love Beowulf after reading it in a standard survey course, might well ask if there is any reason for scholars to date Beowulf so variously. Is the nature of the evidence so malleable that it can yield such widely divergent results? For not only is the period from 675 to 1025 a very long stretch of time, it also constitutes about three-quarters of the period traditionally labelled Anglo-Saxon (600-1100). One might answer this question by quoting Emerson’s aphorism: ‘If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.’ That is, from the type of evidence offered, one can predict a scholar’s dating of Beowulf. In general terms, the more closely one works with the language and metre, the more likely one is to date the poem early. Conversely, the more closely one works with the manuscript, the more likely one is to date the poem late.12

Perhaps the only generalization about the dating of Beowulf I would hazard is that the evidence one chooses will shape, even predetermine, one’s findings. The situation of those who argue from historical evidence may seem rather different because they have offered a very wide range of dates for the poem. Yet one can still observe that the type of historical evidence adduced will usually determine the date offered for the poem. If one reads the poem through other depictions of Germanic tribes before the conversion to Christianity, one will probably date it early. If one reads it as a treatise on rulership, one will probably relate it to some exemplary Anglo-Saxon king, such as Offa or Alfred the Great.13 If one seizes on the poem’s flattering (or at least not overtly hostile) depiction of the Danes, then one might well argue it was written very late in the period.

These generalizations can, of course, be complicated or refuted by other examples. What seems less open to contradiction is the further claim that almost every scholar who has pursued the date of Beowulf has chosen to do so largely from a single perspective: that of language, or social institutions, or manuscript (to cite only the three most common). While Beowulf scholars are usually scrupulous about admitting counter-examples from within their own type of evidence, they have been less willing to consider opposing or complicating factors from other types of evidence. Those who pursue the linguistic approach rarely engage with those who pursue the manuscript approach, and vice-versa. And those who pursue the historical approach, broadly defined, are usually reluctant to engage the technical aspects of language and manuscript study. If there is to be a persuasive case for the poem’s date, it will of necessity draw from and synthesize these various kinds of evidence. As the current debate demonstrates to anyone who can maintain even a minimal distance, any monocausal argument for the date of Beowulf is inevitably weakened because it does not refute or otherwise accommodate arguments based on different but equally legitimate types of evidence. Only if we believe a priori that one category of evidence is more compelling than all others can we accept a monocausal argument. If that turns out to be the case, then there is further evidence for my claim that most debates about Beowulf are arguments in shadow about how we are to do Old English studies.

Rereading the essays brought together in The Dating of Beowulf some fifteen years after their original publication has the great value of reminding us that the central monument of this poetic corpus - on which rests most critical claims for the value of the language and its poetry and thus for the place of the discipline within the scholarly and academic world - has no fixed basis in time or place. The most immediate contribution that The Dating of Beowulf made to Old English studies was to destroy the illusion that there was substantial evidence for the then-current consensus about the poem’s date. That this collection has effected a deep change in our way of thinking as a discipline is vividly signalled by the differences between the first and second editions of the standard history of Old English literature. Writing in 1965, Stanley B. Greenfield rehearsed the critical consensus of the time: ‘Whether the Beowulf as we have it was orally composed or not - and I incline to the latter view - a written text in the Anglian or Mercian dialect probably existed by the middle of the eighth century.’ Some twenty-one years later, and after the influence of the Chase collection had been registered, Greenfield and his co-author, Daniel G. Calder, could only make this observation: ‘The early consensus on dating, that Beowulf, a poem of Mercian or Northumbrian origin, was fixed in its present form by the eighth century and then transmitted through one or more scribal copies to its present manuscript, has crumbled. Various linguistic, historical and esthetic arguments suggest dates of composition from the late eighth through the early eleventh century.’14

Ten years after Greenfield and Calder spoke with a hint of despair about a consensus that had crumbled, we can speak more persuasively about the uses of uncertainty. The most profound contribution made by The Dating of Beowulf to Old English studies in general has been to introduce a vital and stringent uncertainty into a discipline that for too long proceeded comfortably in the belief that certainty was itself a marker of critical value. Yet with this sense of uncertainty comes as well the recognition that it makes for a difficult and potentially self-contradictory critical practice. If, as I argue elsewhere, the dominant and persistent critical method in Old English studies has been historicist in one variety or another, how then can one work on a poetry that has no accepted chronology or even sequence?15 To put it bluntly, how can one be a historicist if one cannot conclusively date Beowulf within the span of three centuries?

One answer to this question, though not a very happy one, is to follow those general handbooks on the subject that imply Anglo-Saxon England enjoyed a degree of cultural consistency during these centuries sufficient to allow one to date the poem at any moment within that duration.16 A stasis of 300 years is, however, a very long claim to make, even if one believes Anglo-Saxon England to have been a dark age. Another answer, more complicated and perhaps more satisfying, is to suggest there is a historicism that can accommodate this problem because it is not completely invested in locating and dating a work, but instead defines its critical method by articulating the relation between its object of study and its own moment. In other words, one might envision a historicism that takes as its central issue this matter of historical understanding. Liuzza has noted that this situation makes our critical practice formalist despite our historicist allegiances; as he puts it with epigrammatic force: ‘any approach to Beowulf is of necessity not documentary but monumental.’17

This claim that we search for meaning in forms of expression, in the text itself, because we remain in such uncertainty about the context of the work is compelling, and damaging to a strict historicist position. Yet there can be in the techniques of formalism, in its struggle with language and figuration, ways to apprehend a text’s cultural and historical position. Formalism can become something more than a description of the text as verbal artefact; it can also be an interpretive method to engage historical questions. The insight offered by the art historian Michael Baxandall that ‘the style of pictures is a proper material of social history’18 can be translated to a poetic canon, especially one that has certain set forms of metrical, verbal, and figural expression. The traditional moves of formalist practice can, when revived by a theoretically informed historicism, yield evidence about the thematics and thus the historical situation of Old English poems. The danger, of course, is that the critic will employ style as others employ historical context: not as the material of history but as the key that alone will unlock the chronology of all Old English poetry.19

There is perhaps only one critical assumption shared by all parties to this debate about dating, though it remains largely implicit: that once we fix the date of Beowulf with reasonable exactness, our interpretive difficulties will resolve themselves. This claim seems most immediately evident of the late-daters: if the poem’s composition in its current form should be dated after 1016 then its function as pro-Danish propaganda seems to impose a self-evident reading on the poem. Yet one must resist the assumption that a firm date for Beowulf will settle any or all of our interpretive difficulties. To belabour the obvious, there are many texts in English about which critics disagree in every particular - except their dates of publication. Moll Flanders (1722), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Heart of Darkness (1902), and Ulysses (1922) are just a few works of known date that have yielded radically divergent interpretations. To have the date of Beowulf would be useful in itself and also as a corrective to its misuse as historical evidence; but in the absence of such knowledge we must not overestimate its value. Having the date of Beowulf would not in itself resolve any of our interpretive problems because they must be traced as much to our own cultural moment as to the historical milieu of the poem. In fact, this quest for the date of Beowulf shows at times a touch of the interpretive error that has flawed much historicist criticism of Old English poetry: namely, the belief that we know enough about Anglo-Saxon England to know how our interpretation of the poem would be affected by the fact that it was datable to 725 or 895 or 1025. And, to press this claim harder, we must resist attributing to Anglo-Saxon England at any given date - 725 or 895 or 1025 - a cultural homogeneity that would make our work easier but which is otherwise unwarranted. To know the date of a poem is not the same as to know the contexts that date might provide.

At the risk of seeming merely paradoxical, one can suggest that our interpretive work with Beowulf would become more difficult the more exactly we could date it. Thus, for example, if it is late and written in an England under Danish occupation, is it an encomium of the continental Danes and thus flattery of their descendants, the occupiers of the island? Or, more problematically, is it meant to chasten the occupying Danes into some recognition of their shared ancestry and thus commonality with the Anglo-Saxon English they have conquered and oppressed? Or, if the poem was written as a primer for princes in Alfredian England, what was its lesson? That a young Anglo-Saxon prince should follow Hrothgar’s injunctions to the young Beowulf? Or that the young Christian prince should understand that Beowulf’s pagan virtues as manifested by the crisis at Hrothgar’s court are admirable but fatally limited? Chronology, no matter how precisely measured, never yields only a single context.

All this said, where do we stand today in 1997 with the dating of Beowulf? The reader can choose a date for the poem from among the possibilities argued in these essays as well as in other sources. To decide on a date for Beowulf is certainly possible, especially as it allows one to recognize that any date is also implicitly a theory about the poem’s composition, circulation, and meaning. Alternatively, one might decide that all one can do is adopt, as I once did, the engaging (though somewhat obscurantist) scepticism of Alain Renoir: ‘I readily confess that I should be at a loss to tell when, where, by whom, and under what circumstances, this greatest of all early-Germanic epics was composed.’20 Or one might end by suggesting that while we may never know the date of Beowulf we should keep asking the question because it has been for generations, and seems likely to remain so, a powerful means for thinking about the poem. If we hold to this position, then it follows we should also entertain the possibility that there was never a single, commonly accepted reading in Anglo-Saxon England of this poem we call Beowulf. Instead, as is typical of complex texts, we should accept the likelihood that for as long as people knew the poem in Old English there may have been different, possibly contradictory readings of the poem - even among those who lived at the same time and in the same place. Our anxiety as scholars who work in a time of interpretive multiplicity should not lead us to imagine nostalgically that Anglo-Saxon England was a haven of certainty for readers. To quote Stevens one last time, from ‘The Poems of our Climate’ (1938), his meditation on the ‘flawed words and stubborn sounds’ of poetry: ‘the imperfect is our paradise.’ Our sense of the past and its poetry should honour the same possibilities for subtlety, contingency, and contradiction we admit in our time.

To have a date for Beowulf would simply allow us to begin in another way our work of interpretation.

Abbo, abbot of Fleury, Life of St. Edmund 163-4

Adamnán, abbot of Iona, Life of St. Columba 163

Ahlgren, A. 70

Aimoin of Fleury, Miracula s. Benedicti 94-5

Albertson, C.E. 162

Alcuin of York 118, 164, 169, 184, 188, 202

Aldfrith, king of Northumbria (ca. 685-704) 6, 187

Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne 6, 162, 202

Alfred the Great, king of Wessex (ca. 871-899) 162, 202
and Anglo-Danish relations 110, 118-21, 200
at Ashdown 119, 170-71
and date of composition of Beowulf 137, 170, 184-5, 200
royal house of 20, 108-9
stepmother of 199
and trained hawks 205
and vernacular literature 77, 110, 197
and West-Saxon genealogy 105, 128-9
see also OE texts, Alfredian translations

Alfred Jewel 210
alliteration: see linguistic criteria

Amalberga, Thuringian queen 91

Amos, A.C. 63, 70

Andrew, S.O. 63, 65-6, 70

Annales Quedlinburgenses 83, 91-4, 97-100
archaeological parallels 6-7, 90-91, 101-2, 111, 122n., 132, 136, 138-9, 179-80, 184, 187-8, 200n., 202-6

Ari Thórgilsson, historian (ca. 1067-1148) 114

Arnórr Thórtharson, skald 127

Arnulf, St., bishop of Metz 94

Asser, bishop of Sherborne, Life of King Alfred 119-20, 163-4, 170, 185

Athanasius, Life of St. Antony 168

Athelstan, king of Wessex and Mercia (ca. 924-940) 124, 202
and date of composition of Beowulf 200, 209
and Hákon, son of Haraldr hárfagr 113-15, 131

Mercian links of 109
and Oda, bishop of Ramsbury 123

Scandinavian and continental connections of 109-10, 113-17, 121, 130
sister marries Hugh the Great 97
and treaty of Eamont 137n.

Athelstan alias Guthrum 128

Attoarii: see Hetware

Austrasia, Austrasians 84, 90, 98-9

Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham 162-70, 185, 205

Æthelbald, king of Mercia 205

Æthelbert, king of Kent 205

Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians 109, 121, 200

Æthelred, king of Northumbria 118, 184

Æthelred I, king of Wessex 119

Æthelred II (the Unready), king of England (ca. 978-1014) 10, 20, 37, 119, 199

Æthelweard, chronicler 104-8, 128-9, 132, 207

Æthelwold, son of Æthelred I 120-21

Æthelwold, St., bishop of Winchester 191

Æthelwulf, king of Kent and Wessex 104-7, 118, 128

Æthelwulf, poet, De abbatibus 169

Bachlechner, J. 3

Bandy, S.C. 182

Barnouw, A.J. 4, 188-9

Batchelor, C.C. 6

Bauer, G. 70

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 5-7, 8, 87, 91-2, 136, 162-8, 187-8, 197-9, 201-2, 205
see also OE texts, Alfredian translations

Beornwulf, king of Mercia 5

Berendsohn, W.A. 4

Berger, H. 161

Beumann, H. 93

Bishop, T.A.M. 34

Blake, N.F. 7

Blathmac mac Con Brettan, poet 183

Bliss, A.J. 192

Boer, R.C. 4

Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae 205
see also OE texts, Alfredian translations

Bolton, W.F. 8

Bond, G. 5

Boniface, St., archbishop 162, 169
correspondence of 181, 205

Bragi Boddason, skald 131

Brandi, A. 3, 198
ten Brink, B.A.K. 4

Brodeur, A.G. 141, 195

Bruce-Mitford, R.L.S. 6, 203-5

Brunner, K. 34, 35

Bugge, S. 144

Burgred, king of Mercia 121

Cædmon 4, 77, 180, 189
see also OE texts

Calder, D.G. 141-2

Cameron, A.F. 81

Cameron, K. 120

Campbell, A. 34-5, 38, 108, 141, 143-54, 201

Capetian, dynastic name 94-5

Carrigan, E. 161

Ceolwulf II, king of Mercia 121

Chadwick, H.M. 194

Chambers, R.W. 70, 86-9, 187, 189, 194

Charlemagne, emperor 89, 95

Charles Martel 85, 94

Charles II, the Bald, king of West Francia 95-6

Charles III, the Simple, king of West Francia 96, 115

Chauci, Germanic tribe 83, 90, 94, 98

Childebert I, king of the Franks 98

Chlochilaichus: see Hygelac

Chlothar II, king of the Franks 84, 88
see also Lothair

Christian elements 3, 4, 6, 7, 101, 102n., 103n., 110, 139, 162, 181, 188, 194, 195, 204, 205, 206-9

Chronicle of Nantes 115

Clovis, king of the Franks 88, 91-3, 95-8, 100

Cnut: see Knut

Cook, A.S. 6

Cuthbert, St. (d. 687), anonymous Life of 168, History of 127

Cuthburg, wife of Aldfrith 6

Cynethryth, wife of Offa II 5

Cynewulf, king of Wessex 182

Cynewulf, poet 7, 77, 80, 82, 174, 176-7, 179-80, 185, 189, 191, 195
see also OE texts, s.v. Elene, Fates of the Apostles, Juliana

Dagobert I, king of the Franks 205

Danelaw 20, 102-3, 110, 113, 119-22, 123-9, 137-9, 187, 200-1

Danes 7, 10, 14, 17, 20-21, 84-7, 89, 99-100, 102-10, 113-39, 187, 190, 200-1, 206

Dæghrefn 86-7, 89-90
dialect vocabulary: see linguistic criteria

Dobbie, E.V.K. 33, 191

Dudo of St. Quentin, historian 96

Dumville, D.N. 105

Eadburh, daughter of Offa II 170

Ealhswith, wife of Alfred 109

Earle, J. 5, 210
eddic poetry 131-3, 141-60

Einenkel, E. 33

Ecgferth (Ecgfrith), king of Mercia (d. 796) 5

Eddius Stephanus, Life of St. Wilfrid 168-9

Edgar, king of England (d. 975) 109-10, 115, 121

Edmund, St., king of East Anglia (d. 870) 123n.; see also Abbo

Edmund, king of England (d. 946) 121

Edward the Elder, king of England (d. 924) 120-21, 200

Edwin, king of Northumbria (d. 633) 136, 165

Egbert I and II, kings of Northumbria 121

Egill Skallagrímsson, skald 117, 136

Einarr skálaglamm, skald 125

Einarr Skúlason, skald 126

Einhard, Vita Karoli 88

Eiríkr Bloodaxe, king of Norway (ca. 931-2) 116, 131

Emma, wife of Æthelred II and Knut 20

Encomium Emmae reginae 116

Ewig, E. 95

Eyvindr skáldaspillir, skald 126

Felix, Vita s. Guthlaci 168, 183

Flasdieck, H.M. 75

Flodoard, Annales 96-7, 115

Fortunatus, Venantius, poet 86

Foster, T.G. 4

Frank, R. 20, 200-1

Franks 3, 83-4, 88-94, 96-100

Fredegar Chronicle 94

Fredegonde, Frankish queen 84

Frisia, Frisians 83-4, 86-90

Garmonsway, G.N. 161

Geats 14, 17, 84, 86-7, 90, 125-6, 129, 133-5, 201
genealogical evidence 10, 20, 103-10, 127, 128-9, 131, 170, 206-7, 211

Girvan, R. 6, 195, 200

Glúmr Geirason, skald 125

Goldsmith, M.E. 161

Gormr the Old, king of Denmark 127

Gregory, bishop of Tours, historian 3, 83-7, 98-100, 211

Gregory the Great, St., Life of by monk of Whitby 163
see also OE texts, Alfredian translations (Pastoral Care)

Grierson, P. 204

Groth, E.J. 4

Grundtvig, N.F.S. 3, 6, 8, 197, 211

Guthlac, St. 162

Latin Life of, see Felix
poems on, see OE texts

Guthormr sindri, skald 125

Guthrum, king of Danelaw 128, 200, 211

Hákon the Good, king of Norway (ca. 933-960) 113-16, 125, 131

Hákon Sigurtharson, ruler of Norway (ca. 970-995) 125

Halfdanr, Vestfold king 129

Halfdanr, viking king of Northumbria 127

Hallberg, P. 143

Hallfrethr Óttarsson, skald 134-5

Halverson, J. 161

Haraldr blátçnn, king of Denmark (ca. 940-985) 127

Haraldr gráfeldr, king of Norway (ca. 960-970) 125

Haraldr hárfagr, king of Norway (ca. 860-931) 113-16, 125, 129-31

Hart, C.R. 107

Harthacnut (Hortha-Knútr), son of Knut (d. 1042) 126

Hæsten, viking leader 120

Heliand 180, 193

Henry III, Proclamation 197

Hetware (Lat. Attoarii) 83-90, 100

Heusler, A. 144, 155, 207

Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne 118

Historia Norwegiae 114

Hodgkin, R.H. 106

Holtzmann, R. 92

Hoops, J. 88-9, 189

Huga, legendary king of the Franks 83, 91-3, 98, 100

Hugas, tribal name 83-4, 86, 88-90, 95, 97, 99-100

Hugh, personal name 83-4, 90-95, 99-100

Hugh the Abbot, marquis of Neustria 97, 99-100

Hugh Capet, king of France 95, 97, 99

Hugh (of Arles), king of Italy 95

Hugh the Great, duke of the Franks 96-7, 99-100, 115

Hugh Theodoric (Germ. Hugdietrich) 92-3
see also Theuderic I

Hugonid, dynastic name 94-5, 99

Hydatius, Chronicle 86

Hygelac (Lat. Chlochilaichus) 3, 8, 83-90, 99-100, 124, 199, 203

Ine, king of Wessex (ca. 688-726) 6

Ingersoll, S.M. 69

Irminfrid, king of the Thuringians 91, 93

Irving, E.B., Jr. 194

Ívarr, viking king in England 127

Jacobs, N. 6-7, 33, 123, 197

John, E. 8

Jónsson, F. 125

Jordan, R. 35, 73

Karoli (regnum), occasional name for France 97-8

Kemble, J.M. 3, 123n.

Ker, N.R. 10, 34, 46

Ker, W.P. 161

Klaeber, F. 33-5, 46, 63, 70-75, 88, 110, 187, 190-1, 193-4

Knut (Knútr), king of Denmark and England (ca. 1014-1035) and of Norway (ca. 1028-1035) 10, 20, 37, 102, 113, 117, 126-7, 130, 137, 187, 199

Koban, C. 72

Krusch, B. 93

Kuhn, H. 173, 209

Kurth, G. 84-5, 86

Lachmann, K. 3

La3amon, Brut 197

Langenfelt, G. 7

Lapidge, M. 115

Latin parallels 3, 8n., 83-8, 91-3, 98-100, 106-8, 128-9, 136, 166-8, 170-71, 175n., 181-2

Lawrence, W.W. 6, 161

Leicester, H.M., Jr. 161

Leslie, R.F. 142

Leyerle, J.F. 161

Liber historiae Francorum (LHF) 83-8, 92, 100

Liber monstrorum 86

Lichtenheld, A. 4, 70, 188, 193, 209

Liebermann, F. 6

Lindemann, J.W.R. 71

Lindisfarne, monastery 164

Lindqvist, S. 6
linguistic criteria 6, 7, 9, 11, 33-5, 37, 110, 188-95, 198, 201, 207-11
alliteration 5n., 180-1, 198
dialect vocabulary 73-5, 198, 210-11

Scandinavianisms 123-4, 133-4
vowels subject to contraction 45, 81, 189-92, 209
weak adjective 4, 69-70, 188-90, 193-4, 209

Lot, F. 95, 98

Lothair I, emperor 88, 98

Lothair II, king of Middle Francia 98

Lotharingia, Lorraine 98-9

Louis (the Stammerer), king of West Francia 96

Louis III, king of West Francia 96

Luick, K. 34

Magnús the Good, king of Norway (ca. 1035-1046) 114, 126-7, 130, 136

Magoun, F.P. 4, 85, 89

Malone, K. 10-11, 23, 142-3, 161

Manuscripts

– British Library, Add. 47967 (Lauderdale MS): 210

Arundel 375: 87n.

Cotton Julius A.X: 37, 167n.

Cotton Otho A. VI: 192n., 199n.

Cotton Otho B.II: 37

Cotton Otho E.I: 37

Cotton Vespasian D.VI: 199n.

Cotton Vitellius A.XV: 9-21, 23-32, 34-7, 181n., 197-8

Cotton Vitellius C.V: 37

Harley 585: 37

Harley 3376: 37

Royal 7 C.XII: 37, 191

Stowe 944: 184

– Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41: 182n., 199n.

CCC 173: 210

CCC 198: 181n.

CCC 201: 184, 199

Trinity College R.5.22: 37

University Library Gg.3.28: 37

– The Exeter Book: 73-5

– Le Mans, Bibliothèque Municipale 224: 94n.

– Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180: 191

Hatton 20: 37

Junius 11: 36-7, 74, 192, 199

Junius 121: 199n.

Oxford, Corpus Christi College 82: 87n.

– Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 943: 37

– Princeton, University Library, The Scheide Library 71: 37, 181n.

– The Vercelli Book (Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII): 73-5, 178, 181

Marchand, H. 72

Mercian Register 121

Merovingians 3, 83-4, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94-6, 98, 100, 199, 201, 203-4
metrical evidence 5, 34, 77-82, 100, 111, 132r 174-5n., 189, 192-3, 194, 198, 203, 209

Middle English 77, 79, 197, 199

Mildthryth, St., Life of 183

Mitchell, B. 8, 35, 63, 69-70, 75

Morsbach, L. 5, 188, 195

Müllenhoff, K. 3-4

Müller, P.E. 156

Murray, A.C. 20, 201

Neckel, G. 143

Neustria, Neustrians 84-5, 87, 90, 95-7, 99-100

Nowell, L. 23

Oakden, J.P. 77-8

Oda, bishop of Ramsbury 123

Offa I, king of Angeln 4-5, 102-3, 109, 128, 185, 187, 202

Offa II, king of Mercia (ca. 757-796) 5, 7, 102-3, 170, 185, 187, 197, 199, 202, 206-7

Ohlander, U. 63

Ohthere, Norwegian at court of King Alfred 106, 120, 128

Óláfr Haraldsson, king of Norway (ca. 1016-1028) 126-7, 130, 135-6

Óláfr, king of the Dublin Norse 121

Óláfr Tryggvason, king of Norway (ca. 995-1000) 134-5

Old English (OE) texts

– Alfredian translations 191-2

Bede 180

Handbook (Enchiridion) 107

Metres of Boethius 70, 74, 79-81, 180, 192-3, 210-11

Orosius 105-6, 110, 120, 128, 207

Paris Psalter 74-5

Pastoral Care 37, 185, verse preface and epilogue 79, 80, 81, 210

– Andreas 4, 36, 70, 74, 79-81, 153-4, 168, 176, 178, 179, 180, 199

– Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 20, 104-5, 116, 117, 118-19, 121, 128, 167, 197, 206, 211

– Ælfric, Catholic Homilies by 37, 191

Life of St. Oswald by 163-5

On the Old and New Testament by 199

– Battle of Brunanburh 80-81, 116-17, 123, 198, 209

– Battle of Maldon 4, 74, 79-80, 119, 124, 133, 139, 170, 178, 193-4, 198-9, 209

Bede’s Death Song 79-81, 139, 198-9, 208

Beowulf, references to lines:

16-17: 146

43: 190n.

49-50: 144

82-3: 147

111-14: 182

141: 190n.

161: 181n.

217-18: 176

325-6: 145

487-8: 151

535-6: 181n.

560-61: 176, 190n.

571-2: 146n.

600: 181 n.

611-12: 147

643-4: 146n.

658: 181n.

677-8: 148

729-30: 146n.

751-2: 146n.

776: 190n.

786-7: 146n.

822-3: 153

849: 190n.

879: 131n.

901-2: 177

922: 190

976-7: 146n., 190n.

994-6: 177

1011: 190n.

1080-85: 152

1104: 190n.

1111-12: 145

1202-14: 83n.

1207-8: 151, 175

1260-61: 146n., 147

32-3: 151

43-4: 151

64-5: 146n.

106-10: 183

133-4: 177

151-3: 149

214-15: 145

268-9: 149

426: 182

514-15: 147

550-51: 148

569-70: 151

572-3: 170n.

602: 177n.

640-41: 145

652-3: 145

662-5: 150-51

726-7: 176

740: 190n.

761: 182

783-8: 176

816-17: 177

837: 190n.

862-3: 146n.

893-5: 177

907: 190n.

963: 190n.

985: 176

1008: 175

1059-60: 146n.

1097: 190

1110-11: 177

1148-9: 149

1203: 190n.

1221-2: 147

1273-4: 146

1337: 181n.

1365-6: 177

1384-9: 171

1422-3: 176, 190n.

1446-7: 146n., 152

1502: 190n.

1518-19: 146n.

1542: 190n.

1554-5: 147

1604: 181n.

1644-5: 151-2

1662-3: 146

1689-93: 182

1696-7: 152

1713-14: 145

1746: 190n.

1789: 190n.

1813: 146n.

1881-2: 146n.

1889-90: 146n.

1931-62: 4, 6

1947-60: 6, 185

1965: 175

2057-8: 181 n.

2102: 190

2131: 190n.

2168: 190

2200-7: 17n., 27n.

2249-50: 146n.

2283-4: 144

2290: 190

2319-23: 174

2340-41: 148

2348-9: 177

2358: 176

2430: 181 n.

2482: 190n.

2501-8: 83n.

2511: 190n.

2535-7: 177

2573: 190n.

2670: 190n.

2692: 190n.

2754-5: 146n.

2837: 190n.

2911-21: 83n.

2921: 3

2969: 190n.

1363-4: 148

1382: 7, 189

1417-20: 148

1427-31: 176

1462-3: 146n.

1505: 190n.

1519-20: 147

1546-7: 151

1572: 175

1605-8: 176

1647-50: 177

1682: 147

1695-6: 146

1700-84: 180-81

1743-7: 181n.

1778-9: 151

1797: 206

1830-31: 68, 154

1887: 14

1896-7: 149

1939: 14

1955: 190n.

2049: 190n.

2072: 175

2125: 209

2156: 190n.

2200: 14, 190n

2237: 190n.

2253-4: 145

2286: 190n.

2319: 181n.

2333-6: 174

2347: 190n.

2354-68: 83n.

2392: 190n.

2440: 190n.

2492: 190n.

2503: 89

2517: 190n.

2567: 209

2594: 190n.

2685: 190n.

2736: 209

2802-8: 183-4

2890-91: 168

2917: 87

2940: 133 n.

3031-2: 145n.

3034: 175

3101: 190n.

3171: 209

3035: 190n.

3156-8: 184

3181-2: 161

– Blickling Homilies 37, 137, 181, 191

– Cædmon’s Hymn 79-81, 179-80, 198, 208

– Chronicle poems 4, 70, 78-80, 124, 194, 199n.; see also Battle of Brunanburh

– Christ and Satan 74

– Christ III 176, 178

– Cynewulf of Wessex, Charter of (Sawyer 262) 182

– Daniel 36, 70, 74, 79-80, 82, 189

– Deor 207

– Description of Durham 79-80

– Dream of the Rood 74, 178, 208, 210n.

– Elene 74, 79-81, 175, 177, 199

– Épinal and Erfurt Glosses 189

– Exodus 4, 36, 79-82, 189, 191

– Fates of the Apostles 79-80

– The Fight at Finnesburg 146, 167, 207

– Franks Casket 208n.

– Genesis A 4-5, 70, 74, 79-81, 147-8, 152, 178, 189-92

– Genesis B 74, 81, 193, 210

– Gloria I 191-2, 209

– Guthlac 74, 176, 178-9, 189

– Guthlac, OE prose version of Felix’s Life of 183

– Instructions for Christians 74

– Judgment Day II 74, 198-9

– Judith 19n., 23-5, 27-8, 30-32, 36, 70, 79-82, 189, 198-9, 210

– Juliana 79-80, 149, 153, 178, 199

– Kentish Glosses 37

– Leiden Riddle 70-81, 208

– Letter of Alexander to Aristotle 23-4, 30, 75

– Lindisfarne Gospels 37

– Lord’s Prayer II 70

– Martyrology 37

– Maxims I 173, 176

– Menologium 199n.

– Metres of Boethius: see Alfredian translations

– Metrical Charm 6 74

– Orosius: see Alfredian translations

– Paris Psalter: see Alfredian translations

– Pastoral Care: see Alfredian translations

– Phoenix 74

– Prudentius Glosses 74

– The Rime of King William 209

– Riddles 70, 74

– Saints’ Resting-Places 184

– St. Christopher homily 23-4, 30-31, 198

– Seasons for Fasting 199n.

– Solomon and Saturn 74, 199n., 210

– Thureth 199n.

– Vercelli homily 18 181

– Vespasian Psalter 37

– Waldere 167, 210

– Widsith 106, 190, 207

– Wonders of the East 7, 23-4, 30

– Wulfstan, Episcopus 173

Homilies 119

Old English words discussed

– bencþelu 124n., 135
binumini 189n.;
blodæ 208

– Caines (cames) 197
candel 197
cenlice 164
cnear 123
cristen 119

– danegeld 117

Dene 119, 122
dreng 124

– eafoð 177
ece Drihten 197
ellen 177
eodur (eodor) 150
eorl 123-4, 129n.

eotenas 197

– galgu 208
ge- 33n., 71
genumini (ginumni) 189n.

gigant 197
grið 124
gyd 134

– hea 13n.

heahan 191, 209
hild 177n.

hopian 198
hycgan 198

– lofgeornost 135

– mæl 132
mec 210-11
meca 210
merehengest 124n.

merewicinga 3
merewioingas 3, 47, 88, 201
metod 197
missan 132

– non 197

– oferhygd 74, 135n.

ofermægene 87n.

orcneas 197

– rodi 208

– sæmearh 124n.

-scaðen (-sceaðan) 12n.

Scedeland 108, 119, 125n.

Scedenig 125n., 207

Scylding 125
scyppend 197
sin 70
syððan 17n.

– tungl (tungol) 192-3

– þceodcyning 20, 129-30
þone (postposited) 133

– Unfer$ 50
untydras 197

– wala 203
waldend 33n., 210
wæghengest 124n.

wig 177n.

wundini 7, 11, 34, 48, 57, 189-90, 208
ylfe 197

Old Norse prose texts (for ON poetry see eddic, skaldic)

– Ágrip 114

– Egils saga 117

– Fagrskinna, collection of kings’ sagas ca. 1220 114

– Flateyjarbok, vellum codex from ca. 1394 114

– Heimskringla, collection of kings’ sagas ca. 1230 113-14

–Völsunga saga 156

Orosius, Historia adversum paganos: see OE texts, Alfredian translations

Osbern, Vita Dunstani 163

Oskytel, archbishop of York 123n.

Osthryth, wife of King Æthelred of Mercia 6

Oswald, St., king of Northumbria (ca. 634-642), Life of by Æclfric 164-6, 169

Oswald, St., bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York 123

Oswine, king of Deira (d. 651) 166-7

Life of 168

Óthinn: see Woden

Óttarr svarti, skald 126-7

Otto I, emperor 97

Outzen, N. 3

Paetzel, W. 141-4

Page, R.I. 200

Peltola, N. 68

Pepin of Heristal 85, 94

Pepin I, the Short, king of the Franks 88, 94

Pogatscher, A. 63

Pope, J.C. 10, 77

Ragnarr Lothbrók 127, 129

Ranisch, W. 144

Redwald, king of East Anglia 202, 205

Regino of Prürn, historian 98

Reibel, D.A. 72

Reynolds, R.L. 7

Richter, C. 5, 188-9

Ricsige, king in Northumbria 121

Robert I, marquis of Neustria, king of France 96-7, 99

Robert the Strong, marquis of Neustria 95-7

Robertian, dynastic name 95, 99

Røunning, F. 5

Rudolf of Fulda. Translatio s. Alexandri 91, 93

Ruthwell Cross 180, 208

Sarrazin, G. 5, 123n., 188

Sawyer, P. H. 120

Saxo Grammaticus, historian 126-7

Saxons, continental 83-7, 91-2, 97, 99, 193

Sæmundr Sigfússon, historian 114

Scandinavian content 3, 5-6, 7, 10, 20, 33, 101-9, 113, 119, 122-4, 129-37, 184, 194, 197, 200-1, 211

Schabram, H. 35, 74

Schaubert, E. von 33, 189, 201, 208

Scheinert, M. 69

Schücking, L.L. 3, 5-7, 102, 113, 122, 187, 200

Scragg, D.G. 181

Scyld Scefing 10, 103-10, 127-9, 136, 204

Scylding 20-21, 126-9

Seiffert, F. 5

Shearin, H.G. 71

Shippey, T.A. 143

Sievers, E. 74-5, 77, 81, 123n., 188, 192

Sigcfridus, bishop in Norway 115

Sighvatr Thórtharson, skald 114, 126-7, 135-7

Sihtric (Sigtryggr), Scandinavian king of York (d. 927) 117

Sisam, K. 7, 36, 103-4, 107-8, 110, 180, 188-91, 198-9, 208, 211
skaldic poetry 20, 114, 123-39, 180

Smith, A.H. 13

Smith, J. 161

Snorri Sturluson, historian 113-15

Stanley, E.G. 101, 173

Steinn Herdísarson, skald 126

Stenton, F.M. 107, 116

Sulpicius Severus, Life of St. Martin 168

Sutton Hoo 6, 7, 101-2, 136, 202-3

Sveinn Estrithsson, king of Denmark 126

Sveinn Forkbeard, king of Denmark 10

Svcinsson, E.Ó. 143, 154, 156

Sven Aggesen 126

Swanton, M.J. 210

Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths 91

Theodoricus, Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium 114

Theudebert I, king of the Franks 85-6, 88

Theuderic I, king of the Franks (see also Hugh Theodoric) 84-6, 88, 91

Thjóthólfr of Hvin, skald 129-30

Thórbjçrn hornklofi, skald 125

Thórfinnr munnr, skald 130

Thorkelin, G.J. 3, 5, 8, 123n.

Thórmóthr Bersason, skald 136

Thórthr Kolbeinsson, skald 126

Thuringians 84, 91-3

Tolkien, J.R.R. 161

Trautmann, M. 188

Uffingas 6
vikings 7, 10, 110, 113-39, 170, 184
de Vries. J. 143, 155

Wallingford implement 210
weak adjective: see linguistic criteria

Weibull, C. 125

Wenisch, F. 35, 74-5

Werner, K.F. 90

Westphalen, T. 12-13

Whitelock, D. 5-7, 84, 86-7, 101-2, 113, 120, 122-3, 183, 187-8, 194-5, 199

Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae Saxonicae 83, 91-3, 97-100, 133

Wiglaf, king of Mercia 5

Wilfrid, St. 162, 169 see also Eddius Stephanus

William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum 97, 115

Woden 104-5, 128, 131-3, 136, 206-7

Wolf, F. A. 3

Woolf, H.B. 69

Wormald, C.P. 8, 162, 166-7, 187-8, 201

Wrenn, C.L. 6-7, 11, 34, 189, 208

Wulfstan I, archbishop of York 121

Wulfstan II, bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York 119, 173-4

Wulfstan, navigator at court of King Alfred 106, 120

Zupitza, J. 12-13, 16

1 ‘Habemus enim hic irriguos fontes, unde religionis poëseosque notitia, et gentis nostrae rerum seculis III et IV gestarum series deduci possit,’ Grímur J. Thorkelin, De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV. Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglosaxonica ... (Copenhagen 1815) p. vii. There are three comprehensive bibliographies of Beowulf scholarship in print: Donald K. Fry, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburh: A Bibliography (Charlottesville, Va. 1969) [to 1967, alphabetically arranged by author]; Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the End of 1972 (Toronto 1980) pp. 125-97, esp. 137-63 [topically arranged]; Douglas D. Short, Beowulf Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography (New York 1980) [to 1978, selective to 1950; chronologically arranged].

2 ‘Es ist demnach ganz und gar kein Anschein, ja nicht einmal Möglichkeit, dass ein in seiner Art so vollendetes Meisterstück schon in früheren Zeiten hätte zu Stande gebracht werden können,’ Nicolaus Outzen, ‘Das angel-sächsische Gedicht Beowulf, als die Schätzbarste Urkunde des höchsten Alterthums von unserm Vaterlande,’ Kieler Blätter 3 (1816) 307-27, esp. p. 321.

3 N.F.S. Grundtvig, ‘Om Bjovulfs Drape,’ Dannevirke 2 (1817) 207-89

4 Joseph Bachlechner, ‘Die Merovinge in Beowulf,’ ZfdA 7 (1849) 524-6; L.L. Schücking, review of R.W. Chambers’ rev. ed. of A.J. Wyatt’s Beowulf, Englische Studien 55 (1921) 88-100; Alois Brandi, ‘Beowulf und die Merowinger’ in Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud (Minneapolis 1929) pp. 182-8

5 ‘[S]päter als Cädmon darf man den Beovulf jedesfalls nicht setzen, eher früher,’ Karl Müllenhoff, ‘Die innere Geschichte des Beovulfs,’ ZfdA 14 (1869) 193-244.

6 B.A.K. ten Brink, ‘Beowulf. ‘ Untersuchungen, Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte 62 (Strassburg 1888); R.C. Boer, Die altenglische Heldendichtung, I. Beowulf (Halle 1912); Walter A. Berendsohn, Zur Vorgeschichte des ‘Beowulf‘ (Copenhagen 1935); F.P. Magoun, ‘Béowulf B: A Folk-Poem on Béowulf’s Death’ in Early English and Norse Studies: Presented to Hugh Smith in Honour of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London 1963) pp. 127-40.

7 ‘[V]ielleicht aber wird auf die fragen, die hier berührt sind, nie eine ganz genügende antwort gefunden werden, obgleich ein genaueres philologisches studium der angelsächsischen poesie und sprache, das in ihre geschichte tiefer einzudringen strebt, erst beginnen soll,’ Müllenhoff, ‘Innere Geschichte’ pp. 243-4; A. Lichtenheld, ‘Das schwache Adjectiv im Ags.,’ ZfdA 16 (1873) 325-93; E.J. Groth, Composition und Alter der altenglischen [angelsächsischen] Exodus, (Göttingen diss.; Göttingen 1883); T.G. Foster, Judith: Studies in Metre, Language, and Style, with a View to Determining the Date of the Oldenglish Fragment and the Home of its Author, Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte 71 (Strassburg 1892); Adriaan J. Barnouw, Text-kritische Untersuchungen nach dem Gehrauch des bestimmten Artikels und des schwachen Adjectivs in der altenglischen Poesie (Leiden 1902); a thorough summary and evaluation of all the linguistic and metrical tests can be found in Ashley Crandell Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts, Medieval Academy Books 90 (Cambridge, Mass. 1980), upon which much of what is said here is based. A point made by Amos and brought out by others several times at the Toronto conference seems worth emphasizing. That Beowulf regularly alliterates palatal and velar g while the Battle of Maldon and other late tenth-century poems do not ‘is probably a valid chronological criterion.’ (See Amos, pp. 100-02, esp. 102.) If this is true, a date after the mid-tenth century is quite unlikely on metrical grounds alone. Somehow this point failed to appear in any of the papers which follow.

8 Lorenz Morsbach, ‘ Zur Datierung des Beowulfepos,’ Nachrichten von der königl. Gesellschaft der Wissen-schaften zu Göttingen, phil-hist. Klasse (1906) pp. 251-77; Carl Richter, Chronologische Studien zur angel-sächsische Literatur ... Studien zur englischen Philologie 33 (Halle 1910); Friedrich Seiffert, Die Behandlung der Wörter mit auslautenden ursprünglich silbischen Liquiden oder Nasalen und mit Kontractionsvokalen in der Genesis A und im Beowulf (Halle-Wittenberg diss.; Halle 1913); Gregor Sarrazin, Von Kädmon bis Kynewulf: Eine litterarhistorische Studie (Berlin 1913)

9 John Earle, The Deeds of Beowulf: An English Epic of the Eighth Century Done into Modern Prose (Oxford 1892) pp. lxxv-lxxxvii, esp. lxxxvi-lxxxvii; Frederick Rønning, Beovulfs-Kvadet: en literær-historisk undersøgelse (Copenhagen 1883); George Bond, ‘Links Between Beowulf and Mercian History,’ Studies in Philology 40 (1943) 481-93; Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) pp. 19-33 and passim

10 L.L. Schücking, ‘Wann entstand der Beowulf? Glossen, Zweifel, und Fragen,’ BGdSL 42 (1917) 347-410, and Beowulfs Rückkehr, Studien zur englischen Philologie 21 (Halle 1905); Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 8 (1977) 23-43, esp. 24-5

11 Felix Liebermann, ‘Ort und Zeit der Beowulfdichtung,’ Nachrichten von der königl. Gesellschaft der Wissen-schaften zu Göttingen, phil-hist. Klasse (1920) pp. 253-76; A.S. Cook, ‘The Possible Begetter of the Old English Beowulf and Widsith,’ Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 25 (1922) 281-346, esp. 317; William W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass. 1930 [repr.]) pp. 244-91, esp. 280; C.C. Batchelor, ‘The Style of Beowulf: A Study of the Composition of the Poem,’ Speculum 12 (1937) 330-42, esp. 333

12 Ritchie Girvan, Beowulf and the Seventh Century (London 1935; reissued 1971); Sune Lindqvist, ‘Sutton Hoo och Beowulf,’ Fornvännen 43 (1948) 94-110; trans. and ed. R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford, Antiquity 22 (1948) 131-40, esp. 140 from which I quote; C. L. Wrenn, ‘Sutton Hoo and Beowulf’ in Mélanges de linguistique et de philologie: Fernand Mossé in memoriam (Paris 1959) pp. 495-507; repr. in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, comp. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame 1963) pp. 311-30; John R. Clark Hall, trans., Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, rev. ed. with notes and intro. by C.L. Wrenn and preface by J.R.R. Tolkien (London 1950); Charles L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment (London 1953) pp. 32-7

13 Whitelock, Audience p. 25 and see above, n. 9; Kenneth Sisam, ‘Dialect Origins of the Earlier Old English Verse’ in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford 1953) pp. 119-39

14 Gösta Langenfelt, ‘Beowulf och Fornsverige: Ett försök till datering av den fornengelska hjältedikten,’ Ortnamnssàllskapets i Uppsala Årskrift (1961) pp. 35-55; ‘Tillägg till “Beowulf och Fornsverige ibid. (1962) pp. 37-8; R.L. Reynolds, ‘Note on Beowulf’s Date and Economic Social History,’ Studi in onore di Armando Sapori, 2 vols. (Milan 1957) I, 175-8; N.F. Blake, ‘The Dating of Old English Poetry’ in An English Miscellany Presented to W.S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee (Cape Town 1977) pp. 14-27. A further example is Edward Kolb’s 1965 note suggesting a ninth- or tenth-century date for the poem. Arguing the necessity for an emendation of ford to bord at line 568, he then sees an allusion to high viking ships. ‘Beowulf 568: An Emendation,’ English Studies 46 (1965) 322-3.

15 Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf, and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’ in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede ... ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford 1978) pp. 32-95; Whitney F. Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf: An Eighth-Century View (New Brunswick, N.J. 1978); Eric John, ‘Beowulf and the Margins of Literacy,’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 56 (1973-4) 388-422; Kevin Crossley-Holland, trans., Beowulf, with intro. by Bruce Mitchell (New York 1968) p. 5

* This article is a summary of the relevant palaeographical and codicological arguments in Kevin S. Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick, N.J. 1981). My initial investigation of BL MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV was made throughout April 1977. I carefully rechecked all palaeographical and codicological descriptions against the MS in March 1979, after my book was written. I am extremely grateful to the officials in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Library for giving me daily and unlimited access to the MS during these periods.

1 Prior to 1981, the only extensive description of the entire codex, BL MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV, was Max Förster’s Die Beowulf-Handschrift, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, phil-hist. Klasse 71 (Leipzig 1919). The few major studies of the part known as the Nowell Codex, which includes the Beowulf MS, are in Stanley I. Rypins, Three Old English Prose Texts in MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV, EETS 161 (London 1924) pp. vii-xxix; Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford 1953) pp. 61-96; and Kemp Malone, The Nowell Codex (British Museum Cotton Vitellius A. XV. Second MS), EEMF 12 (Copenhagen 1963). The only thorough palaeographical study of the Beowulf MS per se is Tilman Westphalen, Beowulf 3150-55: Textkritik und Editionsgeschichte (Munich 1967).

2 Most eds. are founded on Julius Zupitza’s facsimile, Beowulf: Autotypes of the Unique Cotton MS. Vitellius A. XV in the British Museum, with a Transliteration and Notes, EETS o.s. 77 (London 1882); 2nd ed., Containing a New Reproduction of the Manuscript with an Introductory Note by Norman Davis, EETS 245 (London 1959; repr. 1967). Indeed, though most editors have of course consulted the MS for specific readings, I know of no modern ed. founded on the MS itself. The facsimile achieved its special status not because scholars had been convinced that it was a uniformly reliable reproduction of the MS (it is not), but because Zupitza’s ‘transliteration’ is actually a convenient restoration, incorporating Thorkelin readings wherever the MS was defective. As Zupitza himself said, ‘The transliteration contains more than can be read in the Facsimile or even in the manuscript, inasmuch as it has been my endeavour to give the text as far as possible in that condition in which it stood in the manuscript a century ago’ (p. xviii). Thus by 1882, Zupitza had seemingly preempted the need to study the MS at first hand. Editors have neglected the Thorkelin transcripts for the same reason.

3 In addition to many of the articles in this volume, see Ashley Crandell Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts, Medieval Academy Books 90 (Cambridge, Mass. 1980); N.F. Blake, ‘The Dating of Old English Poetry’ in An English Miscellany Presented to W.S. Mackie ed. Brian S. Lee (London 1977) pp. 14-27; Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 8 (1977) 23-43; and J.D. Niles, ‘The Danes and the Date of Beowulf,’ a paper read at the meeting of the Medieval Association of the Pacific on 28 March 1980.

4 Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford 1957) pp. xvii, 281. Ker states that a date ‘at the beginning ... of the half-century would be expressed as s. x/xi’ (p. xx), the date he assigns the Beowulf MS.

5 The Chronicle for these years reads like a list of viking depredations; see Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. John Earle (1865), rev. Charles Plummer, I (Oxford 1892). Sveinn Forkbeard began tormenting England in 994, when he and Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway descended with a fleet of 94 warships, in what Frank M. Stenton has called ‘the most formidable invasion which England had experienced for half a century.’ Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1971) p. 378. Sveinn conquered England in 1014.

6 For the Norse genealogy from Scyld to Knut, see the Latin abstract of the Skjçldunga saga in Arngrimi Jonae opera, ed. Jakob Benediktsson (Copenhagen 1950) pp. 333-86; the well-known West-Saxon genealogy that includes Scyld does not, of course, list the later Danish kings, like Healfdene and Hrothgar. Obviously, II. 1-63 of Beowulf follow the Norse line. See Chronicle A s.a. 855, and The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Alistair Campbell (New York 1962) pp. 32-3. All references to an edited text of Beowulf are from Frederick Klaeber, Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Boston 1950).

7 ‘Preface to the 1966 Edition’ (New Haven 1966) pp. xxiv-xxxi. As Pope’s experience implies, there is a great difference between studying an ultraviolet photograph and studying the MS under ultraviolet light. Note that both Malone and Davis favour an ordinary photograph over an ultraviolet one for the last page of the MS (Nowell Codex p. 120, and Zupitza-Davis, Beowulf p. v), while both make use of A.H. Smith’s transcription (pp. 105-8, vii-xii), which Smith says he ‘derived from panchromatic and ultra-violet fluorescence photographs and the visual examination of fluorescence effects under the ultra-violet light.’ ‘The Photography of Manuscripts,’ London Mediæval Studies 1 (1938) 202.

8 See Nowell Codex p. 85, under fol. 182v. Like Zupitza, I adhere to the old foliation numbers still visible on the vellum leaves of the MS. For the many advantages of the MS foliation over the 1884 foliation Malone follows, see ‘The History and Construction of the Composite Codex’ in Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, pp. 65-169, esp. 71-110.

9 Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, 3rd ed. rev. W.F. Bolton (New York 1973) p. 130 n. As Zupitza says, letters covered by the paper mounting can normally be seen by holding the vellum to the light (Zupitza-Davis, Beowulf p. xix). In the case of wun/dmi on fol. 160v4-5, the d can now be seen in the new facsimiles because the paper that once covered it was trimmed. The m, too, is clear in the new facsimiles, though its first minim is distorted by shine-through.

10 Some of these features, to a large extent readily discernible by the naked eye in the MS but obscured by black-and-white facsimiles, can be reproduced in colour photographs. See, e.g., the colour facsimile of fol. 179r, the frontispiece of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. For other technological means that may yet produce better facsimiles of the Beowulf MS, see Applied Infrared Photography, Eastman Kodak Publication no. M-28 (Rochester, N.Y. 1977); and J.F. Benton, A.R. Gillespie, and J.M. Soha, ‘Digital Image-Processing Applied to the Photography of Manuscripts: With Examples Drawn from the Pincus MS. of Arnald of Villanova,’ Scriptorium 33 (1979)40-55.

11 Both Thorkelin transcripts confirm that the damage was not done by modern readers of the MS. See The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf, ed. Kemp Malone, EEMF 1 (Copenhagen 1951) pp. 1, 1a. As far as it goes, Humphrey Wanley’s transcript confirms this conclusion, for Wanley copied aldor[le]ase as aldor ... ase in 1705. Antiquae literaturae septentrionalis liber alter, seu Humphredi Wanleii librorum veterum septentrionalium ... catalogus historico-criticus ... (Oxford 1705), repr. English Linguistics: 1500-1800, 248 (Menston, England 1970) p. 219.

12 E.g. he emends -scaðan to -sceaðan on fol. 140vl4 and -ðeo to -ðeow on fol. 144r5, though the original spellings are not wrong, and indeed occur frequently in the first scribe’s section of the MS.

13 See n. 1.

14 Zupitza-Davis, Beowulf p. 102

15 The black-and-white facsimiles very inadequately represent the marked difference in texture and colouration, caused by the palimpsesting of fol. 179, between fols. 179 and 188. The apparent similarity between fols. 179v and 188r, the flesh side of the sheet, is especially misleading.

16 Textkritik pp. 41-109

17 Ibid. pp. 65-7

18 Ibid. p. 96

19 ‘Photography of Manuscripts’ p. 200

20 See Sisam, Studies p. 153. For the first modern grammar of late West-Saxon, or ‘the Classical Old English of about A.D. 1000,’ see Randolph Quirk and C.L. Wrenn, An Old English Grammar, 2nd ed. (London 1957; repr. 1979) p. vii.

21 The erasure made between hea and hord in 1. 5 left a filmy residue on the a of hea, thus proving that the erasure was made after the new text was copied on the folio. The erasures in these gaps on the recto were evidently made while the vellum was damp, for the skin in these areas is unusually rough, with a grey discolouration that becomes fluorescent under ultraviolet light.

22 The black-and-white facsimiles show the damage to the text on fol. 180v, but the MS shows that the first three lines were intentionally rubbed off. Both Thorkelin transcripts, moreover, confirm that the damage is not modern: Thorkelin’s copyist did not attempt to transcribe them (p. 67), while Thorkelin himself wrote in the margin of his copy, ‘Hie lacuna trium linearum sive 15 versuum incidit qui in autographo defuisse videntur et enim membrana, ex qua hoc apographum desumptum hie vacua est.’ (p. 104a).

23 In his review of Förster’s Beowulf-Handschrift, Wolfgang Keller suggested that the bad condition of fols. 179r and 198v could be explained by assuming that this part of the MS, containing the Dragon episode, was used separately, so that the two pages served as outside covers. The explanation ignored, however, the bad condition of fol. 179v. Beiblatt zur Anglia 34 (1923) 4-5.

24 The textual transition was first interpreted as a separate creation by Karl Müllenhoff in ‘Die innere Geschichte des Beovulfs,’ ZfdA 14 (1869) 193-244; a more recent version of the theory was propounded by F.P. Magoun, in ‘Béowulf A’: A Folk Variant,’ Arv: Tidskrift for Nordisk Folkminnesforskning 25 (1958) 95-101; and ‘Béowulf B: A Folk-Poem on Béowulf’s Death’ in Early English and Norse Studies: Presented to Hugh Smith in Honour of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London 1963) pp. 127-40. Though most scholars reject or ignore these ‘dissection’ theories, the essentially episodic structure has been obvious to many; compare, e.g., Klaeber’s description of the structure (Beowulf pp. ix-xii).

25 See Ker, Catalogue p. 282 and Westphalen, Textkritik pp. 69-82. As we have seen, Westphalen observed that the second scribe’s later script on fol. 179 had evolved into a slightly more modern style, more like the first scribe’s, and had perhaps been influenced by it (p. 82).

26 We must assume that the scribes themselves arranged the sheets of their respective gatherings, in view of their manifest disagreement over the aesthetics of sheet arrangement. The first scribe, through the prose texts and his part of Beowulf, consistently tries to obscure the contrast between hair and flesh sides, while the second scribe, through his part of Beowulf and the Judith fragment, consistently displays the contrast.

27 That this fusion was still perhaps in its early stages can be illustrated by the last seven lines on fol. 178v, immediately following Beowulf’s Homecoming and preceding the palimpsest. Klaeber’s ed. highlights how abruptly they lead to Beowulf’s kingship, the text on the palimpsest:

Eft þæt geiode

ufaran dogrum

hildehlæmmum,

syððan Hygelac læg,

ond Hear[dr]ede

hildemeceas

under bordhreoðan

to bonan wurdon,

ða hyne gesohtan

on sigeþeode

hearde hildfrecan,

Heaðo-Scilfingas,

niða genægdan

nefan Hererices –:

syððan ....

(ll. 2200-07a)

‘Again it came about in later days, in the crash of battle, after Hygelac lay dead, and battle-swords became the slayer of Heardred under his shield, when fierce warriors, the Battle-Scilfings, sought him out among his victorious kin, with force assailed the nephew of Hereric –: after ....’ Beowulf’s rule and the Dragon episode are not very well introduced by these lines, which seem to be leading to other events. Klaeber’s note, ‘2207. syððan is used, in a way, correlatively with syððan 2201,’ stresses rather than reduces the syntactic and textual leaps one must make in the middle of the half-line 2207a, from the end of fol. 178v to the beginning of the palimpsest.

28 Judith, too, was numbered after it was copied, but by someone other than the second scribe, as the distinct palaeographical style of the Xs proves. For a study of the implications of the number sequence in Judith, and of the way in which the Judith-fragment was added to the Nowell Codex in early modern times, see my Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript pp. 150-67. As Judith helps illustrate, the spaces the second scribe left for fitt numbers in his part of Beowulf have no bearing on the theory of a composite MS, since they could be filled by any number sequence, including seriatim numbering with unrelated texts.

1 Frederick Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. with 1st and 2nd supplements (Boston 1950) p. xciv, summarizing Eugen Einenkel, ‘Die englische Verbalnegation,’Anglia 35 (1911) 187-248, 401-424

2 Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 8 (1977) 42

3 Klaeber, Beowulf; Else von Schaubert, Heyne-Schückings Beowulf, 17th rev. ed. (Paderborn 1958-61); Elliott V.K. Dobbie, ed., Beowulf and Judith, ASPR 4 (New York 1953)

4 Such studies include phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and dialect studies. Examples might be E.G. Stanley on the waldend spellings, J.W.R. Lindemann on pre-verbal ge-, Bruce Mitchell’s syntactic studies, Hans Schabram on the ‘pride’ words, and Franz Wenisch on the Anglian dialect.

5 Among such studies are: Karl Kóhler, Der syntaktische Gebrauch des Infinitivs und Particips im Beowulf (Münster diss. 1886); Charles Davidson, ‘The Phonology of the Stressed Vowels in Beowulf,’ PMLA 6 (1891) 106-33; Lorenz Morsbach, ‘Zur Datierung des Beowulfepos,’ Nachrichten von der königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil-hist. Klasse (1906) pp. 251-77. Such studies can conveniently be located in the bibliographies of the standard eds. of the poem and in Donald K. Fry, Beowulf and the Fight at Finns-burh: A Bibliography (Charlottesville, Va. 1969).

6 Karl Luick, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache Pt. 1 (Leipzig 1914-21); Pt. 2, ed. Friedrich Wild and Herbert Koziol (Leipzig 1929-40); repr. with a word index by Richard Hamer (Stuttgart, Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass. 1964)

7 Alistair Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford 1959); Karl Brunner, Altenglische Grammatik nach der angelsächsischen Grammatik von Eduard Sievers, 3rd ed. (Tübingen 1965)

8 Beowulf pp. lxxi-lxxxi

9 Neil R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford 1957); T.A.M. Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule (Oxford 1971)

10 Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., ed. and Philip H. Smith, Jr., programmer, A Concordance to The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Ithaca, N.Y. 1978)

11 This concordance is now available on microfiche, with a companion printed volume giving a list of texts and index of editions. Ordering information can be obtained from the Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 1 Al, Canada.

12 Bruce Mitchell, A Guide to Old English, 2ns ed. (Oxford 1964)

13 Klaeber, Beowulf pp. xciv-xcv; Hans Schabram, Superbia: Studien zum altenglischen Wortschatz I (Munich 19 65); Franz Wenisch, Spezifisch anglisches Wortgut in den nordhumbrischen Interlinearglossierungen des Lukasevangeliums (Heidelberg 1079)

14 Catalogue p. 281

15 Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript,’ RES 10 (1934), repr. in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford 1953) p. 95

16 Klaeber, Beowulf p. lxxxviii

17 See the discussion of language in Ingvar Carlson, ed., The Pastoral Care Edited from British Museum MS. Cotton Otho B.II Pt. I, Stockholm Studies in English 34 (Stockholm 1975); Pt. 2, completed by Lars-G. Hallander et al., Stockholm Studies in English 48 (Stockholm 1978). See esp. Pt. 1, pp. 33-65.

* Forms where ea is followed by l or r + u have the diphthong from inflected forms where l or r is followed by consonantal w. Cpb. §209.

* See Sisam, Studies p. 43: ie for ea is found in a few SE texts, e.g. the 1lth-century Cambridge Psalter, written at Canterbury.

* This feature is discussed in detail by Charles L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment (London 1953) p. 18, with regard to dating.

1 J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English: The Dialectal and Metrical Survey (Manchester 1930) pp. 131-52. For Eduard Sievers’ system of Old English metre, see esp. ‘Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses,’ BGdSL 10 (1885) 209-314, and Altgermanische Metrik (Halle 1893).

2 John C. Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf ... rev. ed. (New Haven 1966) pp. 231-409

3 The Meter and Melody of Beowulf (Urbana, Illinois 1974)

4 The discussions that follow describe tendencies, metrical similarities, and metrical differences without always stating that the comparisons are based on the specific metrical features abstracted for this survey. Let this be understood. The focus on the structural contour of the normal line to the exclusion of other stylistic indicators – patterns of alliteration, for example, or proportions of hypermetric lines – is an attempt to give a coherent account of a feature that has not been traced before. It does not, of course, deny the relevance of these other indicators.

5 The samples are Genesis A 1-234 and 852-1358, Juliana 1-100, Andreas 1-200, and the first 100 lines of The Metres of Boethius.

6 A.N. Doane, Genesis A: A New Edition (Madison, Wisconsin 1978) p. 37

* The slightly different version of this paper offered to the Toronto conference was entitled ‘Hetware and Hugas in Beowulf: A Continental Perspective.’ It was first presented as a talk to the Oxford Medieval Society, 21 February 1980, and was prepared during my tenure of a Guggenheim Fellowship. I could not have undertaken the subject without the help of Roberta Frank.

1 Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Frederick Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston 1950) 11. 1202-14 (Frisians and Franks), 2354-68 (Frisians and Hetware), 2501-8 (Hugas and Frisians), 2911-21 (all four, as well as the dynastic name Merovingian)

2 Chatti and Chattuarii: Klaeber, Beowulf p. xxxix; Johannes Hoops, Kommentar zum Beowulf (Heidelberg 1932) p. 251 ; Ludwig Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Stämme bis zum Ausgang der Völkerwanderung II (Berlin 1915-18) pp. 361-2, 421-2, 447-8, 457-8, 500 with n. 3, 581. After establishing that the documented Chattuarii lived far from the medieval pagus Attoarius, Schmidt invents a fifth-century migration in order to link the people to the district. There is a briefer account in Schmidt’s 2nd ed., Die Westgermanen Pt. 2 (Munich 1940) pp. 359-60, 425-6.

Chauci: Rudolph Much, ‘Chauken’ in Johannes Hoops, Reallexicon der germanischen Altertumskunde I (Strassburg 1911-13) pp. 372-3, and ‘Franken’ in ibid. II (1913-15) p. 82; Martin Lintzel, ‘Zur Entstehungs-geschichte des sächsischen Stammes,’ Sachsen und Anhalt 3 (1927) 10-15. See also below, nn. 4 and 41.

3 Liber historiae Francorum 19, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SSrM II, 274-5; Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae 1.9, ed. Paul Hirsch, 5th ed. (Hannover 1935) pp. 10-11; Annales Quedlinburgenses in MGH SS II, 30-31.

4 Against the identification, Karl Müllenhoff, ‘Die austrasische Dietrichssage,’ ZfdA 6 (1848) 437-8; Schmidt, Gesch. der deut. Stämme II, 434 n. 1, as well as the 2nd ed., Die Westgermanen Pt. 1 (Munich 1938) p. 37. The improbability is effectively summed up by Raymond W. Chambers, ed., Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge 1912) p. 68 n. 2. There is an important refutation by Richard Loewe, in Indogermanische Forschungen, Beiblatt 14 (1903) 22, reviewing Rudolph Much, Germanische Stammeskunde (Leipzig 1900). See further below, n. 41.

5 Gregory of Tours, Historiae 3.3, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SSrM I, 2nd ed., p. 99. Gregory and other texts concerning Hygelac’s raid are included in most collections of Beowulf analogues. Also in original and translation in Francis Magoun, ‘Beowulf and King Hygelac in the Netherlands,’ English Studies 35 (1954) 193-204, and, after Magoun, in Godfrid Storms, ‘The Significance of Hygelac’s Raid,’ Nottingham Medieval Studies 14 (1970) 4-9.

6 LHF 19, as above, n. 3. The collections of analogues and Magoun (n. 5) translate vel as ‘and’; the alternative ‘or’ should not be disregarded.

7 As above, n. 1

8 Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) p. 45

9 The intro. of Krusch in MGH SSrM II, 215-16. A better account is given by Godefroid Kurth, ‘Étude critique sur le Liber historiae Francorum ’ in his Études franques (Paris 1919) I, 32-8, 58-65. Kurth showed that the two recensions of the LHF are by the same author (Krusch thought that the second was Austrasian), and he assembled impressive evidence for the place of composition.

10 LHF 41, ed. Krusch pp. 311-14; 31, pp. 292-3; 35, pp. 302-4; 36, pp. 304-6. There are more legends than these in the LHF.

11 Kurth, ‘Étude critique’ pp. 47-52, quote from 50.

12 Ibid. p. 49: because Thuringia no longer extended across the Rhine, LHF 5 says that Dispargum is on the right bank of the Rhine, whereas Gregory, Historiae 2.9 specified the left. – Kurth’s explanation for the Attoarii, p. 50.

13 MGH SS I, 6-7 (Annales s. Amandi, Tiliani, Petaviani), 323 (Ann. Mettenses), 343 (Ann. Fuldenses). The incident continued to be commemorated: Gesta ss. patrum Fontanellensis coenobii, ed. F. Lohier and J. Laporte, Société de l’histoire de Normandie 91 (Rouen-Paris 1936) p. 31; Ado of Vienne, Chronicon, in MGH SS II, 318. See also Theodor Breysig, Jahrbücher des fränkischen Reiches, 714-741 (Leipzig 1869) p. 15.

14 Compare Gregory, Historiae 3.3, ‘cum valido exercitu ac magno armorum apparatu’ (ed. Krusch-Levison p. 99), and LHF 19, ‘cum magno exercitu ’ (ed. Krusch p. 274). Gregory’s validus signifies strength and power, but not necessarily large numbers; in his sentence, the element of quantity is clearly carried over to the army’s equipment.

15 F.P. Magoun, ‘The Geography of Hygelac’s Raid on the Lands of the West Frisians and the Hætt-ware, ca. 530 A.D.,’ English Studies 34 (1953) 160-63. There is a more summary localization in Klaeber, Beowulf p. xxxix n. 2. Storms, ‘Significance ’ pp. 11-12, has no basis that I can see for placing Nijmegen in this pagus.

16 For the development of viking audacity, Lucien Musset, Les invasions II: Le second assaut contre l’Europe chrétienne, Nouvelle Clio 12 bis (Paris 1965) p. 127. Cf. Walther Vogel, Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich bis zum Gründung der Normandie (799-911), Heidelberger Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte 14 (Heidelberg 1906) pp. 65-79, 117: ninth-century attacks that reached upstream to Duurstede began with descents on the coast. Storms, ‘Significance’ pp. 12-13, estimates 150 miles and five days for the journey from the coast upstream, 100 miles and two days for the retreat.

17 Hydatius, Chronicon 171 and 194 (450s and 60s), ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH AA XI, 28, 31. The Herules attacked ‘in Lucensi litore’; withdrawing, they preyed on ‘Cantabriarum et Vardulliarum maritima loca.’ Fortunatus, Carmina 7.7, ed. Friedrich Leo, MGH AA IV, 159-61. The Saxons, who were the most experienced fifth-century sea raiders, are known to have once sent a force up the Loire as far as Angers, a major town: Gregory of Tours, Historiae 2.18.

18 Gregory: the Danes reach Gaul by ship, land, devastate one pagus; the king stays ashore ‘donee navis alto maris conpraehenderent, ipse deinceps secuturus.’ This seems to explain how the Franks intercepted the Danes ‘navali proelio.’ For the text of the Liber monstrorum see Raymond W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem ... 3rd ed. (Cambridge 1959) p. 4. It says only that Hygelac, king of the Getae, was killed by the Franks and that his bones lie on an island of the river Rhine ‘ubi in Oceanum prorumpit.’

19 Chambers, Introduction p. 3

20 Whitelock, Audience p. 41

21 Ibid. pp. 39-42; Chambers, as n. 19

22 Dæghrefn occurs only in Beowulf ll. 2501-8; he is specifically a ‘warrior of the Hugas.’ The continental form of the name, Dagaramnus, is attested in two Carolingian monastic texts from south Germany (Alamannia): Ernst Förstemann, Altdeutsches Namenbuch I: Personennamen, 2nd ed. (Bonn 1900) p. 394; MGH Libri confraternitatum II, 170 1. 29, 203 1. 4. Note that the normal practice of Asser, De rebus gestis Aelfredi is to Anglicize continental names. Adrien Bonjour, ‘The Problem of Dæghrefn,’ JEGP 51 (1952) 355-9, deals only with literary interpretation.

23 Ofermægene, trans. E. Talbot Donaldson as ‘stronger forces’; Klaeber, Beowulf p. xxxix speaks of an ‘unequal encounter.’ The word itself does not, of course, specify in what particular the inequality resided. The Franks might have shown greater valour, been more ably led, or even enjoyed a profusion of equipment. In context, however, understanding the poet to mean that they had the advantage of crude numbers seems the most likely possibility.

24 For the date, see Krusch in MGH SSrM II, 217. There is no full list of MSS of the LHF (often called Gesta regum Francorum and by other titles). Two of the thirty-odd MSS described by Krusch are in England, but BL Arundel 375 (s. IX) probably left the continent only in the seventeenth century, and Oxford CCC 82 contains Adhemar of Chabannes’ Chronicle (normally begun by a slightly abridged LHF) rather than the LHF itself (see MGH SSrL p. 40, correctly contradicting Krusch). It remains to be shown, therefore, whether the LHF penetrated England, and, if it did, when. Pending a full investigation, the assumption that, sooner or later, this popular text was known in England seems safer than the contrary hypothesis that it was confined to the continent. For suggestive circumstances, see J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The Franks and the English in the Ninth Century: Some Common Historical Interests’ (1949), repr. in his Early Medieval History (Oxford 1975) pp. 201-16; and M.B. Parkes, ‘The Palaeography of the Parker Manuscript of the Chronicle, Law and Sedulius, and Historiography at Winchester in the Late Ninth and Tenth Century,’ ASE 5 (1976) 149-71, esp. 163-6.

25 Whitelock, Audience pp. 26-30, 57-64, 99-105

26 Chambers, Introduction p. 104. Another casualty is the belief that Beowulf authenticates the equation Chattuarii-Hetware, as still maintained by R. Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung (Cologne 1961) pp. 533-4.

27 Klaeber, Beowulf p. cvii; Chambers, Introduction p. 487; Hoops, Kommentar p. 304 (‘The poem must have originated at a time when the name Merovingian for the Franks was still current among the neighboring peoples’); Storms, ‘Significance’ pp. 25-6. See also Alois Brandi, ‘Beowulf und die Merowinger,’ Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil-hist. Klasse (1929) no. 11, p. 211; Brandl’s main argument in this article is astonishingly misguided.

28 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (London 1962) pp. 231-3

29 Einhard, Vita Karoli 1, ed. Louis Halphen, 4th ed. (Paris 1938) p. 8; LHF 5, ed. Krusch p. 246

30 The Merovingian Chlothar I was the last surviving son of Clovis and sole ruler from 558 to 561 ; but the real second start for the dynasty came with Chlothar II, who, in 613, eliminated the rival branch of the family and inaugurated the most brilliant decades of Merovingian history.

31 W.C. Braat, ‘Les Vikings au pays de Frise,’ Annales de Normandie 4 (1954) 219-27, esp. 224-5. Vogel, Normannen p. 20: for vikings from Jutland and Christianafjord, Frisia and England were ‘das gegebene Ziel.’

32 Klaeber, Beowulf p. xl; Magoun, ‘Geography’ p. 161; Chambers, Introduction p. 269

33 Chambers, loc. cit.

34 Hoops, Kommentar p. 267, to 1. 2503

35 Magoun, ‘Beowulf and King Hygelac’ p. 198. A similar view is implicitly espoused by René Derolez, ‘Cross-Channel Language Ties,’ ASE 3 (1974) 5 with n. 2 (citing work by M. Gysseling), in which the toponym Hugumarchi, generally invoked as evidence bolstering the identification Chauci-Hugas, is presented as documenting the subjection by the Frisians of a distinct, non-Chauci tribe of Hugas. It remains to be shown, however, that the toponym must refer to a tribe rather than to a magnate named Hugh.

36 For the text, see Franz Beyerle, ‘Das frühmittelalterliche Schulheft vom Ämterwesen,’ Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 69 (1952) 7. For discussion see also P.E. Schramm in ibid. 49 (1929) 167-77; George Baesecke, ibid. 55 (1935) 230-32; and Wallace-Hadrill, Long-Haired Kings pp. 217-18, whose sense of the date of this text I share.

37 MGH Diplomata Karolinorum I, 147: Charlemagne’s title from a surviving original of 775, ‘rex Francorum et Langobardorum nec non et patritius Romanorum.’ Under Louis the Pious, the main partes regni are listed as Austria, Niustria, Burgundia, Aquitania, Provincia, Italia: Formulae imperiales 29, ed. Karl Zeumer, MGH Formulae p. 308.

38 For an up-to-date presentation, see the map in K.F. Werner, ‘Heeresorganisation und Kriegsführung imdeutschen Königreich des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts,’ Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio 15 (1968) 828.

39 Werner, ‘Heeresorganisation’ pp. 792-8, 802-4; Edmund E. Stengel, Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisergedankens im Mittelalter (Cologne 1965) pp. 249-52; Heinz Löwe, ‘Kaisertum und Abendland in ottonisches und frühsalischen Zeit,’ Historische Zeitschrift 196 (1963) 535, 544-56; K.F. Werner, ‘Das hochmittelalterliche Imperium im politischen Bewustssein Frankreichs (10.-12. Jahrhundert),’ Historische Zeitschrift 200 (1965) 4-5, 10, 14-16. Further on regna, see Herwig Wolfram, ‘The Shaping of the Medieval Kingdom,’ Viator 1 (1970) 1-20, 2 (1971) 33-57; K.F. Werner, ‘Kingdom and Principality in Twelfth-Century France’ in The Medieval Nobility, ed. and trans. Timothy Reuter, Europe in the Middle Ages, Selected Studies 14 (Amsterdam 1979) pp. 243-90.

40 Marculf, Formulae 1.8, ‘omnis populus [in pago illo] commanentes, tam Franci, Romani, Burgundionis vel reliquas nationis’ (ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae p. 48). The Beowulf poet’s consciousness of what a multiplicity of gentes signified may be irreconcilable with an early date of composition, but I am not prepared to formulate an argument to this effect.

41 See above, nn. 2 and 4: Much and Lintzel for, Müllenhoff, Loewe, Chambers, and Schmidt against. Lintzel deserves most notice for his attempt to overcome the profound silence enveloping the Chauci after about 150 A.D.; allegedly, Claudian identified them as Franks (‘Entstehungsgeschichte’ p. 11). Lintzel omits that, in Claudian, Caucus is invariably trisyllabic (In Eutrop. 1.379; Cos. Stil. 1.225); in neither passage do the Chauci have to be Franks. For Claudian’s dependence on Tacitus for this information, see André Loyen, ‘L’ “Albis” chez Claudien et chez Sidoine Apollinaire,’ Revue des études latines 11 (1933) 203-11, 321-4, and Alan Cameron, Claudian (Oxford 1970) p. 346. See also, for appeals to archaeology, Martin Lintzel, ‘Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der alten Sachsen,’ Sachsen und Anhalt 13 (1937) 34-41, whose style of ‘tribal’ argumentation finds an admirable, comprehensive rebuttal in B.H. Slicher van Bath, ‘Dutch Tribal Problems,’ Speculum 24 (1949) 319-38. It was fanciful of Lintzel to claim that the development of Hugas out of Chauci is ‘unarguable.’ The derivation of the Franks from the Chauci was firmly denied by Erich Zollner, Geschichte der Franken bis zum Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts (Munich 1970) pp. 3-4, who, on the one hand, preferred to renounce an ethnic interpretation of Hugo/Hugas, but, on the other hand, tended to accept the traditional identification of Chauci-Hugas (see also below, n. 52). All the old arguments are aired with refinements by Wenskus, Stammesbildung pp. 526-35.

42 Helmut Beumann, ‘Historiographische Konzeption und politische Ziele Widukinds von Corvey,’ Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio 17 (1970) 857-61

43 Ed. Hirsch (above, n. 3) pp. 10-11, ‘Post haec moritur Huga rex Francorum nullumque alium heredem regni relinquens preter unicam filiam nomine Amalbergam, quae nupserat Irminfrido regi Thuringorum. Populus autem Francorum a seniore suo humane clementerque tractatus, pro gratiarum actione rependenda filium quem ex concubina genuit nomine Thiadricum ungunt sibi in regem.’ Widukind also uses the form Huga in reference to the tenth-century Robertian Hugh the Great; see below, n. 71.

44 Ibid. pp. 10-11, nn. 8 and 11; Helmut Beumann, Widukind von Korvei (Weimar 1950) p. 114 n. 8, ‘Gemeint ist Chlodwig.’ Neither Hirsch nor Beumann would maintain, I believe, that Widukind made a mistake. Beumann’s idea is rather that he was following a source embodying this error (Widukind p. 78). See further n. 51.

45 The only sensible methodology on this subject is exemplified by Bruno Krusch, ‘Die Übertragung des H. Alexander von Rom durch den Enkel Widukinds 851,’ Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil-hist. Klasse (1933) pp. 407-23. Heinz Lowe once affirmed that, ‘in spite of Krusch’s doubts, we should retain the fact that Widukind’s tale proceeds from Saxon popular tradition’; he invoked the names of recent scholars who shared his faith in Volksüberlieferung (Lintzel, L. Schmidt), but otherwise offered no proof: ‘Die Irminsul und die Religion der Sachsen,’ Deutsches Archiv 5 (1941) 8 n. 4. I hope it is widely agreed in 1980 that the faith that seemed so sturdy in 1941 offers a worse point of departure than Krusch’s rationalism.

46 For the historical Theuderic, his brothers, and the war with Irminfrid see Gregory of Tours, Historiae 2. 28, 3.1, 4, 7-8, ed. Krusch-Levison pp. 74, 97, 99-100, 103-6; for the historical Amalberga see Jordanes, Getica 299; Excerpta Valesiana 70; Procopius, Bellum Gothicum 1.12. 22; cf. Widukind, ed. Hirsch p. 10 n. 11. There is no contemporary evidence for a Frankish alliance with the Saxons. An energetically argued thesis of Martin Lintzel’s was that the tenth-century and later references to this alliance (Widukind and the Annals) document historical fact: ‘Entstehungsgeschichte’ pp. 17-21, and ‘Untersuchungen’ pp. 51-6. Krusch, ‘Übertragung’ pp. 407-9, showed the wishful thinking involved in such reasoning (‘Es widerspricht jedes kritischen Methode, aus einer Fabelei den handgreiflichen Unsinn zu streichen und etwa möglichen Angabe historisch zu verwerten’).

47 Mentioned, without reference to Widukind, by Klaeber, Beowulf p. 1x n. 1. Cf. Müllenhoff, ‘Dietrichssage’ p. 437.

48 ‘Die Quedlinburger Annalen,’ Sachsen und Anhalt 1 (1925) 124-5 (and repr. in the collected ed. of Holtzmann’s studies)

49 Ibid. pp. 92-9. Holtzmann establishes, against, e.g., Klaeber, loc. cit. n. 47, that the allegedly ‘spurious’ explanation involving a dux Hugo is not a late insertion but an integral part of the annals. His study supersedes Edward Schröder, ‘Die Heldensage in den Jahrbücher von Quedlinburg,’ ZfdA 41 (1897) 24-32.

50 MGH SS III, 30; cf. LHF 2-5, ed. Krusch pp. 242-6. Contrary to the LHF, the conquests of Clovis are dated to the reign of Marcian (450s).

The vernacular texts involving Hugdietrich begin with Wolfdietrich A, of the early thirteenth century. Ludwig Schmidt sensibly denied any connection between them and Merovingian history; Gesch. der deut. Stämme II, 482-3. Similarly, Chambers, Widsith p. 112. In a valuable debate with the relevant literature, Jan de Vries, ‘Die Sage von Wolfdietrich,’ Germanisch-romanisch Monatschrift 39, N.F. 8 (1958) 1-18, downplayed the Frankish links and sought to affirm an Ostrogothic basis for the legend; he followed N. Lukman, ‘Der historische Wolfdietrich,’ Classica et medievalia 3 (1940) 253-84, 4 (1941) 1-61, while rejecting most of Lukman’s historical connections. One promising possibility that de Vries did not consider is that the vernacular texts have no direct relation to the distant past and, instead, are inspired by Widukind and other historical narratives. As concerns the specific figure of Hugdietrich, no one takes into account the simplest explanation, namely, that the combination of Hugh with Theodoric was the Quedlinburg annalist’s way of reconciling Widukind’s legend (King Huga and his single bastard son) with the otherwise established facts of Merovingian history (Clovis and his three legitimate and one bastard sons). See also below, n. 54.

51 Annales Quedlinburgenses, MGH SS III, 31: ‘Eodem anno Hugo Theodoricus rex, Chlodovei regis filius ex concubina natus, cum patri successisset in regnum, ad electionem suam Irminfridum regem Thuringorum honorifice invitavit. Hugo Theodoricus iste dicitur, id est Francus, quia olim omnes Franci Hugones vocabantur a suo quondam duce Hugone.’

52 Chambers, Widsith pp. 113-14; Widukind, ed. Hirsch p. 10 n. 11; Beumann, Widukind pp. 78-80; Schmidt, Westgermanen p. 38. On the established place of an Iringlied among the lost Heldensage of Germanic antiquity, see Hermann Schneider, Germanische Heldensage II, pt. 2 [= Hermann Paul, ed., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie X/3] (Berlin-Leipzig 1934) pp. 138-41; Klaus von See, Germanische Heldensage (Frankfurt 1971) p. 168; on the relation of its hero to a name for the Milky Way, see Rudolf Meissner, ‘Iringer Weg,’ ZfdA 56 (1918-19) 77-98. Contrary to these and other proposals of the same kind, I know of no reason why Widukind should not have composed the tale of Irminfrid on the basis of Rudolf of Fulda and Gregory of Tours; this legend, embodying verisimilitude rather than truth, had an honourable and important part to play in his reconstruction of Saxon history. Zollner, Geschichte der Franken p. 3 n. 3, assumed that the Quedlinburg Annals proceeded from an interpolated version of Bede’s Chronicle, but such a version need not have been much older than the Annals themselves.

53 Krusch, ‘Übertragung’ pp. 410-23; lacks politeness, but his objections in a matter of this kind are far too weighty to be tacitly dismissed, as by Beumann, Widukind p. 78 n. 4, who names Krusch without reference to his article and endorses Lintzel without trace of misgivings.

54 Loc. cit. n. 51: ‘Qui quamvis nothus esset, a patre Chlodoveo propter sapientiam et fortitudinem sibi divinitus collatam caeteris filiis suis plus dilectus, suo iussu totiusque populi consensu inter fratres suos nobiles [named] aequalem regni partem suscepit.’ For the version of Widukind, see above, n. 43. The annalist’s new explanation arose from exactly the same exigency that led him to coin the name Hugh Theodoric (above, n. 50): a reconciliation of Widukind’s version with historical fact. Not surprisingly, the vernacular narratives involving Hugdietrich are much concerned with legitimacy of birth.

55 Isidore, Etymologiae 9.2.101, ‘Franci a quodam proprio duce vocari putantur.’ Cf. Fredegar, Chronicon 2.5, ‘electum a se regi Francione nomen, per quem Franci vocantur’; also a Dux Francio ruling over ‘provinciam Cantabriam... quam aliquando Franci possederant’ (4.33), a connection apparently based on Isidore’s statement, Etymologiae 9.2.110-111, that the Cantabrians were refugees from Troy, as pointed out by Arno Borst, Deutsches Archiv 22 (1966) 29 n. 72.

56 Eugène de Certain, ed., Les miracles de St. Benoît, Société de l’histoire de France (Paris 1858) p. 148, ‘Hugonides Rotbertus uxoriam inire copulam iamdudum mente tractans ... exercitum congregat ...’ The word was used again in the thirteenth century.

57 Diplomata, chartae ... ad res Gallo-Francicas spectantia, ed. J.M. Pardessus (Paris 1843-9) I, 215. This is the testament of Bishop Bertrand of Le Mans, copied in about 860 into the Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium. One copy of the Actus is in MS. Le Mans 224; the other, including only the closing parts of Bertrand’s will, is a seventeenth-century transcript of a lost MS by André Duchesne, BN, Collection Baluze, XLV. See my Le Mans Forgeries (Cambridge, Mass. 1966) pp. 263-4 (no. 12), 42-7, 145-7.

58 Fredegar, Chronicon 4.45; Vita s. Arnulfi 14, ‘Hugus quidam primatis procerum’ (MGH SSrM II, 144, 437-8). This man also occurs in the testament of Bishop Bertrand (he is surely not identical to the witness). See Rolf Sprandel, Der merowingische Adel und die Gebiete östlich des Rheins, Forschungen zur oberrheinischen Landesgeschichte 5 (Freiburg i/B 1957) p. 39. The lately published list of some 900 (very predominantly Germanic) names of tributaries of St. Martin’s at Tours, ca. 700, contains none approximating Hugh: Documents comptables de Saint-Martin de Tours à l’époque mérovingienne, ed. Pierre Gasnault (Paris 1975) pp. 87-92 (index nominum).

59 Gesta ss. patrum Fontan., ed. Lohier-Laporte pp. 37-43. Cf. Eugen Ewig, ‘Descriptio Franciae’ in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, ed. Wolfgang Braunfels (Düsseldorf 1965-7) I, 163. His father’s name was Drogo. For him as a saint, see Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina (Brussels 1898-1901) nos. 4032-3.

60 From 713 to 748; Pardessus, Diplomata, chartae II, 341, 406, 411-12, 441, 456, 462-3

61 Bernhard Simson, Jahrbücher der fränkischen Reiches unter Ludwig der Fromme I (Leipzig 1874) pp. 22-3, 127-8; K.F. Werner, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen bis um das Jahr 1000’ in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, ed. Wfgang Braunfels (Düsseldorf 1965-7) IV, 445 no. 17. His mother was Regina; his brother was Drogo, the eventual bishop of Metz, very important in the reign of Louis the Pious. For the association with bastardy, see Eugen Ewig, ‘Die fränkische Teilreiche im 7. Jahrhundert,’ Trierer Zeitschrift 22 (1954) 108 n. 84. Another instance would be the Hugh born to Lothair II and Waldrada. On the other hand, the first Arnulfingian Hugh was legitimate and so was his father, Drogo, whose name went to the second Hugh’s (bastard) brother. Something may be wrong with Ewig’s idea. Yet it is interesting that the context of ‘Hugh’ in Widukind and the Annals is one of bastardy (see above, nn. 50, 54). Heinz Löwe cannot have known about the first Hugh when he proposed that the second one was so called because Charlemagne was impressed by a (conjectured) Sagenkomplex that otherwise has no raison d’être: ‘Von Theoderich dem Grossen zu Karl dem Grossen,’ Deutsches Archiv 9 (1951-2) 393 n. 152.

62 A selection is easily located in Ulysse Chevalier, Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen âge: Bio-bibliographie I (Paris 1905) pp. 2191-221. E.g., the father-in-law of Lothair I was Count Hugh of Tours. Owing to the wide dispersal of the name Hugh, René Poupardin did not try to trace Carolingian counts who were so called: Le royaume de Provence sous les Carolingiens, BEHE 131 (Paris 1901) p. 380.

63 Ferdinand Lot, Les derniers Carolingiens (954-991), BEHE 87 (Paris 1891) p. 302 n. 6; Lot, Études sur le règne de Hugues Capet et la fin du Xe siècle, BEHE 147 (Paris 1903) pp. 317-20

64 On Robert, in brief, see Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France II Pt. 1 (Paris 1903) pp. 381-2; Jean Dhondt, Études sur la naissance des principautés en France, University of Ghent, Werken uitgegeven ... 102 (Bruges 1948) pp. 93-7.

65 Merovingian Neustria: Eugen Ewig, ‘Volkstum und Volksbewusstsein im Frankenreich des 7. Jahrhundert,’ Centro italiano ... Settimane di studio 5 (1958) 641-2. Carolingian: Dhondt, Naissance pp. 81-145; Peter Classen, ‘Die Verträge von Verdun und Coulaines 843 als politische Grundlagen des westfränkischen Reiches,’ Historische Zeitschrift 196 (1963) 5-6; Ewig, ‘Descriptio Franciae’ pp. 144-5. Neustria as Normandy: Walther Kienast, Der Herzogstitel in Frankreich und Deutschland (Munich 1968) p. 73 with n. 94. On the meaning of the word Neustria see below, n. 68.

66 Assignment to Charles the Bald: Classen, ‘Verträge’ p. 6; to Charles’s son: Dhondt, Naissance pp. 95-6; partition of 879: Lavisse, Histoire de France II Pt. 1, p. 391; about 898, note particularly the discussion of a passage of the Annales Vedastini by Dhondt, Naissance p. 163; on Hugh the Great see Flodoard, Annales s.a. 960, ed. Philippe Lauer (Paris 1906) p. 148 (four years after Hugh’s death; Flodoard refers to Hugh in life often as princeps, also as comes and as Albus, to distinguish him from the contemporary Hugh Niger of Burgundy). On the title princeps see Werner, ‘Heeresorganisation’ p. 798.

67 Distinction of Neustrians from Franks: see Abbo of St. Germain, De bello Parisiaco 2.447, ‘Francia laetatur, quamvis is [= Odo] Nustricus esset,’ ed. Henri Waquet (Paris 1942) p. 100. On this line, see Werner, ‘Kingdom and Principality’ p. 172. Important though Werner’s findings are, there is a disturbing contrast between the modern historian’s discovery of relationships and the lack of evidence of contemporary awareness (i.e., record or celebration) of these relations. If, as Werner points out, ‘one generation was enough to establish an “origin”,’ it follows that the more distant ancestries, which Werner is at pains to observe, can hardly have counted for much at the time. Cf. D.A. Bullough in English Historical Review 85 (1970) 73-82.

68 Franz Steinbach, ‘Austrien und Neustrien,’ Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 10 (1940) 222. The word is applied to one part of the Lombard kingdom in the laws of King Liutprand (710s and 20s): MGH Leges in folio IV, 108, 110, 113, 135. On its being primarily territorial, see Eugen Ewig, ‘Beobachtungen zur politisch-geo-graphischen Terminologie des fränkischen Grossreiches und des Teilreiche des 9. Jahrhunderts’ (1964), repr. in his Spätantikes und fränkischen Gallien, Francia Beihefte 3/1 (Munich 1976) p. 324. On the regional names see Classen, ‘Verträge’ pp. 5-6. See also Kienast, Herzogstitel pp. 11 n. 9 and 73 n. 94, which makes too little allowance for antiquated usage in Richer.

69 Hugh the Abbot was a Welf (i.e., from the family of Charles the Bald’s mother). For the two Hughs in Neustria see Dhondt, Naissance pp. 97-100, 130-35.

70 Lavisse, Histoire de France II Pt. 1, pp. 391-4; see also K.F. Werner, ‘Bedeutende Adelsfamilien im Reich Karls des Grossen’ in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, ed. Wolfgang Braunfels (Dusseldorf 196567) I, 139-40.

71 His career is fully documented in Philippe Lauer, Le règne de Louis IV d’Outremer, BEHE 127 (Paris 1900), and Lot, Derniers Carolingiens. The essentials are in Flodoard, Annales pp. 36, 63, 69, 112, 139, 143. On his ties with England see Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1971) pp. 345, 347. Stenton may be too literally accepting of William of Malmesbury. Widukind 1.30 and 3.5 refers to this Hugh as Huga (also as Hugo 1.31, 3.2, 3; his grandfather is called Oda, 1.29).

72 K. F. Werner, ‘Die literarische Vorbilder des Aimoin von Fleury’ in Medium aevum vivum: Festschrift für WaltherBulst, ed. H.R. Jauss and Dieter Schaller (Heidelberg 1960) pp. 96-7

73 William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum 2.128, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series 90 (London 188789) I, 139

74 Lot, Derniers Carolingiens pp. 303-6 (the Latin passage is from the eleventh-century Gesta Treverorum). See also Ewig, ‘Beobachtungen’ p. 360, whose statement about regnum Karoli is correct but does not, like Lot’s discussion, explain the future of the name.

75 For the details see Robert Parisot, Le royaume de Lorraine sous les Carolingiens (Paris 1898) pp. 747-50; Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Krause (Hannover 1890) pp. 75, 77, s.a. 842 and 855. See also Ewig, ‘Beobachtungen’pp. 354-6, 361-2.

76 J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘A Carolingian Renaissance Prince: The Emperor Charles the Bald,’ PBA 64 (1978) 179. The learned practice was to derive the eponymous ancestor from a tribal name; see František Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit: Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter (Cologne 1975) p. 79.

77 Gregory of Tours, Historiae 4.51; on this passage see Ewig, ‘Beobachtungen’ pp. 323-4.

78 Ewig,’Beobachtungen’ pp. 354-6

79 On the disintegration of Neustria see Dhondt, Naissance pp. 142-5; Jacques Boussard, ‘Les destinées de la Neustrie du IXe au Xle siècle,’ Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 11 (1968) 15-28.

80 It will not do to imagine that the Neustrians simply took to calling themselves ‘the Hughs’ during the regime of Hugh the Abbot. (Since no royal partition was involved, the normal mechanism for associating a regnum with its holder’s name could not operate.) An incentive was needed for invoking Hugh’s name. I suggest that the triggering circumstances occurred during the rebellion against Odo, the first non-Carolingian to become king of the West Franks; Odo’s brother Robert ruled Neustria. See Edouard Favre, Eudes, comte de Paris et roi de France (882-898), BEHE 99 (Paris 1893) pp. 149-93. The rebellion broke out in 893; there was a small opposition faction in Neustria (Favre, p. 155 n. 6); Hugh’s former abbey of St. Martin’s at Tours was awarded to the would-be kingmaker, Fulk, archbishop of Reims, when the revolt began and was only recovered by Robert in 896 (p. 186); although the rebellion was suppressed, Odo was unpopular in his last years for lack of energy against the vikings, against whom Hugh the Abbot had been exemplary (pp. 7-9, 192-3); after Odo’s death in 898 and the accession of the Carolingian Charles (the Simple to us), Robert was confirmed in his Neustrian dominion.

81 The idea drawn from the Annals that ‘Hugones’ was an ancient epic name of the Franks has been the standard conservative view of the matter, widely assumed to be a simple fact and espoused by everyone including those who reject any link to the Chauci: Müllenhoff, ‘Dietrichssage’ p. 437; Hoops, Kommentar p. 267; Schmidt, Gesch. der deut. Stämme II, 434 n. 1; Much, in Hoops, Reallexicon II, 82; Klaeber, Beowulf pp. xxxix-xl; etc. Instances where this is casually taken as fact: de Vries, ‘Sage von Wolfdietrich’ p. 17 (a sixth-century fact at that!); Werner, ‘Bedeutende Adelsfamilien’ pp. 116-17 (invoked as the reason for the ‘early’ appearance of the name Hugh among Frankish nobility).

82 Müllenhoff, ‘Dietrichssage’ p. 437

83 Cf. above, n. 16; I reduce Storms’s estimate without attributing accuracy or importance to the change.

84 On the hypothetical chronology of the name (893 as absolute terminus post quem) see above, n. 80.

85 Klaeber, Beowulf p. cvii

1 Audience (Oxford 1951) p. 28

2 A recent example is Eric John, ‘Beowulf and the Margins of Literacy,’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 56 (1973-4) 388-422, who stresses the apparent tenurial nature of landholding in the poem as an indication of early date. But, theories of early landholding apart, rewarding warriors with grants on a variety of terms is not a chronologically specific activity in Anglo-Saxon England, and when Beowulf is rewarded it is with a province, an ‘office,’ as John recognizes, so there is no need to invoke folcland, however one understands this term. While we can admit the premise that the poet would deal to a large extent in terms of his own social conceptions, these conceptions are affected by another aspect of the poem which must be taken into consideration: that from the outset Beowulf is consciously set in a faraway place, long ago, in geardagum. Such a setting is unlikely to produce a treatise on Anglo-Saxon institutions, and indeed society in Beowulf is not outlined with sufficient detail and comprehensiveness to enable historians to date the poem with assurance.

See also Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf, and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy ’ in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede ... ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford 1978) pp. 32-95, who also generally presupposes an eighth-century date and places the poem in the context of the aristocratic nature of early English Christianity. On the other hand, for a recent survey of possible ninth- and tenth-century contexts, see Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 8 (1977) 23-43 at 23-4.

3 The phrase is from Professor Stanley’s preliminary conference statement: ‘It is methodologically unsound to begin with some idea of scholarly consensus of an early date: in medieval studies such consensus need be no more than a conspiracy of romantic hopes.’

4 See, e.g., Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings (London 1968) chs. 1 and 2, and E.O.G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London 1951) chs. 4 and 5. Cf. R.T. Farrell, ‘Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats,’ SBVS 18 (1972) 225-86.

5 See H. R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Archaeology and Beowulf’ in Beowulf and its Analogues, ed. G. Norman Garmons-way and Jacqueline Simpson (London 1968) pp. 350-60. Though certainly clear about the limitations of archaeology in this area, Davidson pays little attention to them here. Cf. John, arguing against an early tenth-century date: ‘The archaeological evidence certainly suggests a much earlier date, nearer the traditional date’ (‘Margins’ p. 392); and Wormald (‘Bede’ p. 94) who is in agreement. Both cite R.J. Cramp, ‘Beowulf and Archaeology,’ MArc 1 (1957) 57-77, repr. in The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Donald K. Fry (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1968) pp. 114-40. But what Cramp says is ‘today one would hesitate even more than Stjerne did [in 1912] to rely on archaeological evidence for dating Beowulf; gaps in the material evidence after the cessation of heathen burials are still too immense,’ p. 117, and ‘what archaeology brings to the poem is not yet a solution of its date; there is not a sufficient body of relevant evidence to do this,’ p. 140. A close reading of the evidence which she presents bears out these conclusions, as does her warning that references to early material may be accounted for by the poet’s historical sense or poetic convention.

6 Davidson, ‘Archaeology’ p. 350

7 Contrast Davidson’s remarks in ‘Archaeology,’ esp. pp. 356, 359, with her fuller treatment of the subject in The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford 1962) esp. pp. 31, 33, 166.

8 E.g. C. L. Wrenn, in Raymond W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem ... 3rd ed. (Cambridge 1959) pp. 515-16; Wormald, ‘Bede’ pp. 35, 54, 94.

9 Audience pp. 24ff. Arguments as to the Christianity of the poet get us nowhere. See below, n. 10.

10 Wormald (‘Bede’ p. 94) also feels that the ‘crusading’ atmosphere of viking-age England precludes the poem’s being composed there, not on account of Beowulf’s Scandinavian elements, but on account of its celebration of apparent heathens; but the crusaders, he believes, might be willing to listen to it. This seems to me an overly fine distinction. In any case, certain circles may have wished to create an atmosphere of implacable hostility, but many northern and southern Englishmen were apparently not up to the task (see below, n. 11). Interest in the heroic age, and genealogy, inevitably meant celebrating ‘heathens’ (though not heathenism) and this interest was well represented in Alfred’s court: Asser’s Life of King Alfred ... ed. William H. Stevenson (Oxford 1904; repr. 1959) §§22, 75, 76. Whether the so-called paradox of Christian and ‘pagan’ elements in Beowulf is best reconciled by the ‘liberal Christian,’ ‘Irish,’ or ‘drunkard and aristocratic’ solution (and these are not exclusive categories), each in some form is compatible with a relatively early or late date.

11 In general, see W.G. Angus, ‘Christianity as a Political Force in Northumbria in the Danish and Norse Periods’ in The Fourth Viking Congress, ed. Alan Small (Edinburgh 1965) pp. 141-65, esp. 146, 148-9, 155-63; and A.L. Binns, ‘The York Viking Kingdom: Relations Between Old English and Old Norse Culture,’ ibid. pp. 181-9.

12 Whitelock, Audience p. 58ff.; John Earle, The Deeds of Beowulf... (Oxford 1892) p. 1xxv ff. A relationship between Beowulf and the East Anglian Wuffing dynasty has also been suggested on the basis of the family’s supposed Swedish (Scylfing) origin: Rupert Bruce-Mitford, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology (London 1974) pp. 55-60, 258-9, and cf. the linguistic pyrotechnics of J.L.N. O’Loughlin, ‘Sutton Hoo - The Evidence of the Documents,’ MArc 8 (1964) 1-19. A Swedish origin for the dynasty is problematical. Cf. Farrell, ‘Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats’ pp. 280-82. Moreover there is certainly no demonstrable correspondence between Beowulf and East Anglian royal genealogy.

13 ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies,’ PBA 39 (1953) 287-346

14 Ibid. 314-22; Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. John Earle (1865), rev. Charles Plummer (Oxford 1892-9) I, 66-7; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation by Dorothy Whitelock with D.C. Douglas and S.I. Tucker (New Brunswick, N.J. 1962) p. 44; The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Alistair Campbell (London 1962) p. 33; Chambers, Introduction pp. 200-4.

15 Whitelock, A-S Chronicle pp. xxii, xxiv; Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1947) p. 682; Sisam, ‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 332

16 This is how Asser (§1) treats it because he begins with the birth of Alfred.

17 Sisam, ‘Royal Genealogies’ pp. 294 ff., 332

18 ‘Kingship, Genealogies, and Regnal Lists’ in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. Peter H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds 1977) pp. 72-104

19 King Alfred’s Orosius Pt. I, ed. Henry Sweet, EETS o.s. 79 (London 1883) pp. 15-21

20 Robert H. Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1952) II, 646-7

21 Alfred’s Orosius pp. 84-7

22 Sisam, ‘Royal Genealogies’ pp. 302ff., 330ff. Cf. also David Dumville, ‘The Anglian Collection of Royal Genealogies and Regnal Lists,’ ASE 5 (1976) 23-50.

23 Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard pp. xx, xiv

24 For Scef in Widsith, see eds. by Kemp Malone (Copenhagen 1962) and Raymond W. Chambers (Cambridge 1912). A tradition of the Lombards regarded their homeland as Scadanau, and Sisam (‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 344) sees a ‘Scandinavian’ locality as the common element behind the three Scefs. The Lombards themselves knew of no Scef so far as we know, and he is best seen as ‘English’ no matter where he is located.

25 Frank M. Stenton, Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Doris M. Stenton (Oxford 1970) p. 114; Sisam, ‘Royal Genealogies’ pp. 317, 320-21. In Campbell’s view (Chronicle of Æthelweard pp. xixff.) Æthelweard’s Chronicle source was a revision of A from the reign of Edward, which may or may not be the source for Æthelwulf’s pedigree.

26 ‘Athelstan Half-King and his Family,’ ASE 2 (1973) 115

27 Stevenson, Asser’s Life p. 153; Sisam, ‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 332 n. 5

28 ‘Royal Genealogies’ pp. 345-6

29 Sisam, reviving an old and plausible theory, would bring the poem into line with the genealogical material by supposing Beowulf I was originally Beo, and that a copyist, knowing the main hero of the poem was Beowulf, has made a hasty emendation. ‘Royal Genealogies’ pp. 339-40.

30 ‘Ipse Scef cum uno dromone aduectus est in insula oceani que dicitur Scani, armis circumdatus, eratque ualde recens puer, et ab incolis illius terrae ignotus. Attamen ab eis suscipitur, et ut familiarem diligenti animo eum custodierunt, et post in regem eligunt; de cuius prosapia ordinem trahit Aðulf rex.’ (Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard p. 33). Cf. Beowulf 1-52.

31 The other points of difference mentioned by Sisam (‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 317) are of no consequence: Æthelweard has Beo not Beowulf as Scyld’s son, but see n. 29; and has Tetuua not Healfdene as his grandson, but Scyld could be thought to have fathered any number of lines.

32 ‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 339; but cf. p. 345.

33 ‘It is, however, advisable to be cautious in postulating the existence of lays, when a story may be based on no more than an annotation to a genealogy. Such annotation is clearly the source of the story of Scyld Scefing, for we can see a version of it (though with Sceaf instead of Scyld for hero) in the genealogy of Æthelwulf of Wessex in Æthelweard. The beginning of Beowulf indeed shows affinity with the genealogical literature which was so popular in the early Old English period. The Beowulf poet made his epic spring from a genealogy; the Alfredian chroniclers made their chronicle do the same.’ ‘The Use in Beowulf of Earlier Heroic Verse’ in England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge 1971) p. 290.

34 ‘the eighteenth [father of Cerdic, Æthelwulf’s ancestor, was] Scyld, the nineteenth Scef. This Scef arrived in a ship etc.’

35 See Dumville, ‘Anglian Collection’ pp. 30-37.

36 Cf. Sisam’s remarks on the confusion about Bedwig Sceafing, ‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 315.

37 Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations’ p. 42, has already suggested the Offa reference might be a somewhat oblique acknowledgment of the West-Saxon appropriation of Mercian kingship, which would not be impossible under Athelstan, but the acknowledgment did not have to be oblique.

38 Asser, 29: ‘Alfred rex ... uxorem de Mercia, nobilem scilicet genere, filiam Æthelredi ... subarravit et duxit. Cuius feminae mater Eadburh nominabatur de regali genere Merciorum regis.’

39 F.T. Wainwright, Æthelflæd Lady of the Mercians’ in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies ... Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London 1959) pp. 53-69.

40 A-S England p. 335

41 Chronicle s.a. 924, 937, 957

42 On this and what follows, generally see Stenton, A-S England p. 341ff., esp. 344-8. While the evidence of names may not in individual cases establish descent with complete certainty, there is no reason to doubt the high proportion of Scandinavian officials under Athelstan.

43 Cartularium Saxonicum, ed. W. de G. Birch (London 1885) II, no. 648, and Stenton, A-S England p. 348 and n. 2

44 Cf. remarks by John (‘Margins’ p. 393) as to the ‘revival’ of Beowulf in the viking period as propaganda.

45 Chronicle s.a. 957

46 Asser, 22, 94, 56, 75, 76

47 A period of good relations with the north is one of Jacobs’ criteria (‘Anglo-Danish Relations’).

48 Interestingly, the closest parallel to the funeral is not Germanic and pagan, but Celtic and Christian. A.F. Cameron, ‘Saint Gildas and Scyld Scefing,’ NM 70 (1969) 240-46.

1 Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) pp. 24-5

2 Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, ed., Heimskringla, Íslenzk Fornrit 26-8 (Reykjavík 1941-51) I, 143-5

3 Finnur Jónsson, ed., Fagrskinna: Nóregs kononga tal (Copenhagen 1902-3) pp. 20-22

4 Gustav Storm, ed., Monumenta historica Norvegiæ (Christiania 1880) pp. 104-5

5 Storm, Monumenta p. 7

6 Finnur Jónsson, ed., Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sgum (Halle/Saale 1929) p. 5

7 [G. Vigfússon and C.R. Unger, eds.] Flateyjarbok (Christiania 1860-68) II, 521

8 Svend Ellehφj, Studier over den ældste norrφne historieskrivning, Bibliotheca Arnamagnaeana 26 (Copenhagen 1965) pp. 246-52

9 Aðalbjarnarson, Heimskringla III, 27

10 This dirge would presumably have been commissioned by Hákon’s widow who, according to some sources, was a pagan.

11 Willelmi Malmesburiensis monachi opera omnia, PL 179 (Paris 1855) col. 1722

12 Philippe Lauer, ed., Les annales de Flodoard (Paris 1905) pp. 63, 73

13 René Merlet, ed., La chronique de Nantes (Paris 1896) pp. 82-3, 88

14 William Stubbs, ed., De gestis regum Anglorum, Rolls Series 90 (London 1887-9) I, 144

15 Stubbs, De gestis I, 151, 155. Michael Lapidge has clarified the picture of William’s sources for Athelstan’s reign in ‘Some Latin Poems as Evidence for the Reign of Athelstan,’ASE 9 (1980) 61-98. I am grateful to Dr. Lapidge for giving me access to his article before publication.

16 Stubbs, De gestis I, 149

17 Alcuin had already described York as emporium terrae commune marisque. Among the evidences for the port’s flourishing state in late Anglian and viking times are a herring processing factory, an embankment to help unload ships, a variety of small finds that have parallels from Scandinavian sites connected with the Baltic trade, and, among most recent discoveries, bones from deep-sea fish and appropriate tackle. There are detailed discussions of the York material in K.M. Richardson, ‘Excavations in Hungate, York,’ Archaeological Journal 116 (1959) 56-65, 81-6; R.A. Hall, Viking Age York and the North, CBA Research Report 27 (London 1978).

18 Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1971) pp. 348-9. It is worth noting here that, while admitting the dearth of evidence, N. Lund has suggested that relations between the Danish vikings in England and the Danish king at home were equally distant, N. Lund and K. Hφrby, Samfundet i Vikingetid og Middelalder 800-1500 (Copenhagen 1980) p. 36.

19 Egill Skallagrimsson called Eirikr ‘brœðra sφkkvi’ in one of his lausavisur; ed. in E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry (Oxford 1976) pp. 22-3.

20 Brunanburh II. 32-4, 53-6

21 Sigurður Nordal, ed., Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar, Íslenzk Fornrit 2 (Reykjavík 1933) pp. 136-41

22 Nordal, Egils saga pp. 146-7

23 Lucien Musset and Fernand Mossé, Introduction à la Runologie (Paris 1965) pp. 383-7, 434

24 Colin Chase, ed., Two Alcuin Letter-Books, TMLT 5 (Toronto 1975) letters II, 1-4 and 10

25 ‘Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land’ Jeremiah 1:14; ‘I will bring evil from the north, and a great destruction ’ Jeremiah 4:6; ‘Behold, a people cometh from the north country; and a great nation shall be stirred up from the uttermost parts of the earth ... they are cruel, and show no mercy ’ Jeremiah 6:22-3

26 There are similar attitudes expressed in Alcuin’s poem De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii, MGH Poetarum Latinorum medii aevi I, 229-35

27 Chronicle A s.a. 855; E s.a. 883

28 William H. Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred ... (Oxford 1904; repr. 1959) p. 60

29 Stevenson, Asser’s Life pp. 28-31

30 For instance, the charters ed. W. de G. Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum (London 1885) nos. 533/4, 619, 815 (which includes ‘pagani’ in a list of nations ‘Angulsaxna and Norþhymbra, Paganorum, Brettonumque’); F.E. Harmer, ed., Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Cambridge 1914) nos. IX, XI.

31 Dorothy Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford 1957) pp. 263-4

32 Even this is not certain. The chronicler of the early eleventh-century entries of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, who used heroic and poetic vocabulary in describing the Danes’ exploits, seems to show a reluctant admiration for Sveinn’s ‘rancne here and unearhne,’ despite their savagery.

33 Peter H. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings, 2nd ed. (London 1971) pp. 202-3

34 Kenneth Cameron, The Significance of English Place-Names (London 1976) p. 18

35 ‘He ruled them all in accordance with his own honourable nature just like his own people, and loved and honoured them, and enriched them with money and rights,’ Stevenson, Asser’s Life p. 60.

36 Henry Sweet, ed., King Alfred’s Orosius Pt. I, EETS o.s. 79 (London 1883) pp. 17-20

37 Chronicle A s.a. 894, 901, 904, 905

38 Stenton, A-S England p. 252 n.

39 D.P. Kirby, ‘Northumbria in the Reign of Alfred the Great,’ Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland 11 (1958-65) 335-46

40 Birch, Cartularium nos. 658, 703. The latter does not mention that the land was bought from the pagans, but the name of the place, Amounderness, is a Norse one.

41 Chronicle BC s.a. 918

42 Capture of the Five Boroughs II. 8-11

43 Chronicle D s.a. 943

44 Chronicle DE s.a. 959. There is a similar sort of accusation, brought against an unknown man, in an undated private letter which clearly identifies heathen with Danish customs: Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents c.500-1042 (London 1968) no. 232. Cf. also Alcuin’s letter to Æthelred: Chase, Alcuin Letter-Books p. 55.

45 There could be added here a good deal of non-literary evidence to support the view that the English and the Danes did not form discrete communities opposed to each other in the later Anglo-Saxon period; for instance, the St. Edmund memorial coinage, issued a couple of decades after the martyrdom, by the settlers who had martyred Edmund; the use of the English language on objects of viking-style design, as the Sutton, Isle of Ely, brooch.

1 Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) pp. 24-5

2 Nicolas Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 8 (1977) 40

3 See J. Armitage Robinson, St. Oswald and the Church of Worcester, British Academy Supplemental Papers 5 (London 1919) 38-51. Oskytel, another kinsman of Oda, was the mid-tenth-century archbishop of York: less than eighty years after heathen invaders martyred Edmund, king of the East Angles, both archbishops of England were of Danish extraction.

4 Frederick Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Boston 1950) p. cxvii. The first editors of Beowulf believed that the poem was Scandinavian: Grimur J. Thorkelin subtitled his 1815 ed. Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglo-Saxonica. They differed, however, as to whether it was a 449 or 1016 import. John M. Kemble (2nd ed., 1835) surmised that Beowulf was ‘written in Angeln and brought hither by some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon chieftains who settled upon our shores’ (p. xx). Benjamin Thorpe (1855) decided that the poem was ‘not an original production of the Anglo-Saxon muse, but a metrical paraphrase of a heroic Saga composed in the south-west of Sweden ... and probably brought to this country during the sway of the Danish dynasty ’ (p. viii). In 1885, Gregor Sarrazin tried to demonstrate that Beowulf was derived from an ON original: ‘Der Schauplatz des ersten Beowulfliedes und die Heimat des Dichters,’ BGdSL 11 (1885) 159-183; ‘Altnordisches im Beowulfliede,’BGdSL 11 (1885) 528-41. Philological objections were raised by Eduard Sievers, ‘Die Heimat des Beowulfdichters,’ BGdSL 11 (1885) 354-62, and ‘Altnordisches im Beowulf,’ BGdSL 12 (1887) 168-200. Sarrazin’s translation theory informs his Beowulf-Studien: Ein Beit rag zur Geschichte altgermanischer Sage und Dichtung (Berlin 1888).

5 On eorlas Anlafes = Ólafr’s jarls, see John C. Pope, ed., Seven Old English Poems (Indianapolis 1966) p. 162 s.v. eorl (b), and Dietrich Hofmann, Nordisch-englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit, Bibliotheca Arna- magnæana 14 (Copenhagen 1955) p. 167. The first occurrence of OE eorl as a Norse title is in the Chronicle entry for 871, where it is found in apposition to Scandinavian personal names: Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. John Earle (1865), rev. Charles Plummer (Oxford 1892-9; reissued D. Whitelock, 1952) I, 70. See also L. L. Schücking, ‘Die Beowulfdatierung: Eine Replik,’ BGdSL. 47 (1923) 305.

6 The first Norse loanword in Maldon occurs in the viking messenger’s speech; the second, as a technical term. F.C. Robinson, ‘Some Aspects of the Maldon Poet’s Artistry,’JEGP 75 (1976) 25-8, detects additional Scandinavianisms in the viking’s speech.

7 Hofmann, Nordisch-englische Lehnbeziehungen pp. 45-6, accepting Whitelock’s pre-viking date for Beowulf. concludes that a tenth-century skald working in England must have borrowed the term bekkþili from OE poetry (but bencþelu occurs only in Beowulf 486, 1239). Suspected ‘Anglicisms’ in Norse verse that (if Beowulf is dated late) could be regarded as ‘Danicisms’ in the English poem include the pairs glaðir Ylfingar (Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, 49) and glæde Scyldingas (Beowulf 5 8); dis Skjoldunga (Helgakviða Hundings- bana 11, 51; Brot af Sigurðarkviðu 14) and ides Scyldinga (Beowulf 1168); þjóðskjoldungar (Ótarr svarti 295, 272, 139) and þeod-Scyldingas (Beowulf 1019). On the supposed Norse borrowing of an OE kenning-type for ship (Beowulf 208, 226, 1906), see Hofmann, pp. 80-81. The absence from Beowulf of the common kenning-type ‘seahorse’ = ship (e.g. Alfred’s merehengest, Cynewulf’s wæghengest, sæmearh) probably tells us more about the poet’s taste and sophistication than about his date (but see p. 180 below). In ON, ‘horse of the sea’ = ship seems to have been most popular in late (i.e., twelfth- and thirteenth-century), eddic, and Christian poetry, in verse that prized clarity, sincerity, and obviousness. On ship-kennings in ON poetry, see Rudolf Meissner, Die Kenningar der Skalden: Ein Beitrag zur skaldischen Poetik, Rheinische Beiträge und Hülfsbücher zur germanischen Philologie und Volkskunde 1 (Bonn and Leipzig 1921) pp. 208-22. Citations of eddic poetry in this paper refer to Gustav Neckel, ed., Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern, I, Text, 4th ed. rev. Hans Kuhn (Heidelberg 1962). The three numbers following a citation from skaldic verse give its location in the first vol. of each of the standard eds. in this sequence: 1. Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, ed. Finnur Jónsson, A. Tekst efter håndskrifterne (Copenhagen 1908); 2. The same, B. Rettet tekst (Copenhagen 1912); 3. Den norsk-isländska skaldediktningen, reviderad av Ernst A. Kock (Lund 1946).

8 On heroic names in Beowulf that do not correspond exactly to their ON equivalents (e.g. Eadgils/Athils; Waelsing/V lsungr), see Andreas Heusler, ‘Heldennamen in mehrfacher Lautgestalt,’ ZfdA 52 (1910) 97-107. The fact that Beowulf does not employ Sconeg as the OE Orosius does (King Alfred’s Orosius Pt. I, ed. Henry Sweet, EETS o.s. 79 [ London 1883 ] 19) or Skáney as skalds around 1000 do (75, 65, 40; 157, 149, 81; 250, 233, 121) but ‘retains’ Scedenig (1686) and Scedeland (19) as names for Scandinavia is often cited as evidence for the pre-Alfredian date of the poem (see Whitelock, Audience p. 26; Raymond W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem ... [Cambridge 1921] p. 323; Elliott V.K. Dobbie, ed., Beowulf and Judith, ASPR 4 [New York 1953] p. lvii). But a tenth-century Englishman, like his modern counterpart, no doubt distinguished between a single province within the Danish kingdom of his day (Sconeg, Swedish Skane, German Schonen) and the larger region in geardagum known from classical and early medieval sources as Scadinavia (Pliny, Naturalis historia XIII. 96), Scathanavia (Fredegar, Chronicon. ed. B. Krusch, MGH SSrM [1888] II. 65), Scadan, Scadanan, Scandenan (Origo gentis Langobardorum, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SSrL [1878] p. 2), or Scatenauge (Chronicon Gothanum, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SSrL [Hannover 1878] p. 8). OE, Scedenig, corresponding to Prim. Norse *Skaþin-awjo (or Scedeland, in the plural like Scandiae), could have survived into the tenth century and could reflect a ninth-century transposition into OE of ON *Skaðin-(Scedenig is to Skáney as Hrothgar to Hróarr or Hrothulf to Hrólfr: see Adolf Noreen, Geschichtc der nordi- schcn Sprachcn, 3rd rev. ed. [= Hermann Paul, ed., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie IV [Strassburg 1913] p. 108, on the sporadic disappearance in ON of ð before n. a process only partly completed by the end of the ninth century). Indeed, it is easier to explain the d in OE Scedenig as a later (*Skaðin-) rather than an earlier (*Skaþin-) borrowing from ON: see Erik Björkman, Namn och Bygd 6 (1918) 166. Similarly, the Beowulf poet, recreating a past, calls Hrothgar’s kingdom land Dena (242, 253, 1904) and not Denamearc (cf. Wedermearc ‘Geatland’ in Beowulf 298), a neologism that first appears in the OE Orosius (p. 19). See Josef Svennung, Scadinavia und Scandia, lateinische-nordische Namenstudien, Acta societatis litterarum humanio-rum regiae Upsaliensis 44 (Uppsala 1963).

9 For more on these methods and their limitations, see discussion and bibliography in E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry (Oxford 1976) pp. Ixvi-lxxiv, and Roberta Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry: The Dróltkvætt Stanza, Islandica 42 (Ithaca, N.Y. 1978) pp. 31-2.

10 Curt Weibull, ‘Om det svenska och det danska rikets uppkomst,’ Historisk Tidskrift för Skåneland 7 (1917-1921)351

11 Charles L. Wrenn, Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, 3rd ed. rev. W. F. Bolton (London 1973) p. 39, says that ‘the fact that the Geats are not heard of in history after about the middle of the sixth century corroborates the implication in 11. 2999ff. and 3015ff. of the complete overthrow of the Geats by the Swedes after the death of Beowulf.’ Arthur G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley 1959) p. 135, also speaks of ‘the downfall of the Danish and Geatish kingdoms,’ of ‘national catastrophes.’ On post-550 Geatish survival, see R.T. Farrell, ‘Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats,’ SBVS 18 (1972) 256-71.

12 See Gustav Binz, ‘Zeugnisse zur germanischen Sage in England,’ BGdSL 20 (1895) 141-223. The name Healfdene first appears in an English document around 930; Heorogar, Hrothgar, and Heoroweard never occur; and Halga, Hrethric, and Hrothmund are heard of only after the Danish settlement. In contrast, Heathobard names like Ingeld and Froda are early.

13 My ON lexicographical information comes from Johan Fritzner, Ordbog over det gamle norske Sprog I-III (Christiania 1883-96; repr. Oslo 1954), IV (supplement by Finn Hødnebø, Oslo 1972); Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. with supplement by William A. Craigie (Oxford 1957); Finnur Jónsson, Lexicon poeticum antiquae linguae septentrionalis... af Sveinbjörn Egilsson, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen 1931; repr. 1966); Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Leiden 1961). Sven Aggesen speaks about the Icelanders’ use of skjldungr in Brevis historia regum Dacie, ed. M. Cl. Gertz, Scriptores minores historiae Danicae medii aevi (Copenhagen 1917-22) I, 96-7; Saxo in Gesta Danorum, ed. Jørgen Olrik and Hans Ræder (Copenhagen 1931) p. 11.

14 Skjoldungr appears in two skaldic stanzas of doubtful authenticity assigned to the tenth century: Jórunn skaldmær (61, 54, 34) and the anonymous Oddmjór (177, 167, 90).

15 Historia de sancto Cuthberto in Symconis monachi opera omnia, ed. Thomas Arnold, Rolls Series 75 (London 1882) I, 196-214. On the date see Edmund Craster, ‘The Patrimony of St. Cuthbert,’ English Historical Review 69 (1954) 177-99.

16 Historia de sancto Cuthberto 7:10, 11, 12 (I, 200, 202)

17 The Scheldt etymology was proposed by Felix Liebermann, ‘Der Name Scaldi fur Dänen,’Archiv 148 (1925) 95, based on an entry in the Annals of Lindisfarne for 911: ‘Scaldi Rollo duce possident Normanniam.’ The equation Scaldis/Scheldt is made by G.H. Pertz, ed., Annales Lindisfarnenses, MGH SS 19 (Leipzig 1925; repr. of 1866 ed.) p. 506. Erik Björkman, ‘Two Derivations,’SBVS 7 (1912) 132-40, derived Scaldingi from OS/OLF *skalda, a vessel propelled by a punting pole. But Scaldingi almost certainly reflects a ninth-century ON form *skealdur or *skjaldur, an intermediate stage after fracture of Prim. Norse *skeldur but before the oumutation to skjldr (Skjldungr). Cf. skialti (i.e. skialdi), the dat. sg. of ‘shield’ on the Rök stone, Östergöt-land, ca. 900: Adolf Noreen, Altschwedische Grammatik (Halle 1904) p. 314; Andreas Heusler, Altisländisches Elementarbuch, 4th ed. (Heidelberg 1950) pp. 25-6. On Scaldingi = Scylding, see William H. Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred (Oxford 1904; repr. 1959) p. 218; A. L. Binns, ‘The York Viking Kingdom: Relations Between Old English and Old Norse Culture,’ The Fourth Viking Congress, ed. Alan Small (Edinburgh 1965) pp. 181-9; and Binns, The Viking Century in East Yorkshire (York 1963) pp. 49-50.

18 Alfred P. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850-880 (Oxford 1977) p. 12, charts the kings of Denmark from 800-1000, showing how Saxo grafted the line of Ragnarr Lothbrók onto a leading Danish dynasty. Skjoldunga saga, from around 1200 but now known chiefly through a Latin abstract, probably contained a similar sequence of kings from Skjoldr, son of Óthinn, to Gormr the Old. See Bjami Guðnason, Um Skjldungasögu (Reykjavik 1963) pp. 114-32, and Jakob Benediktsson, ‘Icelandic Traditions of the Scyldings,’SBVS 15 (1957-9) 48-66.

19 Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1971) p. 13, finds the Alfredian narrator’s comment ‘the strongest evidence for the northern origin of the Angles’ (Sweet, Alfred’s Orosius p. 19). The chronicler Æthelweard, working shortly after 975, is even more precise about a Danish homeland, reporting that English Anglia had its origin in ‘Anglia vetus’:The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Alistair Campbell (London 1962) p. 9.

20 Herbert Jankuhn argues for the Danish origin of the Angles in ‘Zur Frage nach der Urheimat der Angeln,’Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für schleswig-holsteinische Geschichte 70/71 (1943) 1-43; ‘Siedlungs- und Kultur-geschichte der Angeln vor ihrer Auswanderung nach England,’ Jahrbuch des angler Heimatvereins 14 (1950) 54-132; and ‘Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte Angelns in der Wikingerzeit,’Jahrbuch des angler Heimatvereins 16 (1952) 25-75. Contra, see O. Scheel, Die Heimat der Angeln, Schriften der wiss. Akademie des NSD-Dozentenbundes der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel (Kiel 1939).

21 Plummer, Saxon Chronicles Parallel I, 82-3 (s.a. 890); trans. Dorothy Whitelock with D.C. Douglas and S. I. Tucker, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation (London 1961) p. 53: ‘And the northern king, Guthrum, whose baptismal name was Athelstan, died. He was King Alfred’s godson, and he lived in East Anglia and was the first to settle that land.’

22 Kenneth Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies,’ PBA 39 (1953) 287-346

23 On the ascription of Æthelwulf’s pedigree to the ‘Alfredian’ annalist, see Sisam, ‘Royal Genealogies’ p. 332; Whitelock, A-S Chronicle pp. xxii, xxiv. On the writing of the Chronicle in the 890s, see Peter H. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings, 2nd ed. (London 1971) pp. 14-25. The occurrence of Æthelwulf’s pedigree in the first chapter of Asser’s De rebus gestis Aelfredi (Stevenson, Asser’s Life pp. 2-4), which was given its present shape by 893, provides a terminus ante quem.

24 See David Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies, and Regnal Lists’ in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. Peter H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds 1977) pp. 72-104, for a statement of the propagandist value of early medieval genealogies. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy ’ in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge 1968) p. 33, observes how chronicles are constantly changing and how they often serve ‘the same function that Malinowski claimed for myth; they act as “charters” of present social institutions rather than as faithful historical records of times past.’

25 Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard pp. xx, xxiv, lix-lx. Æthelweard introduces the names Balder (ON Baldr) and Withar (ON Vitharr), substitutes Iguuar (ON Ívarr) for lnwær and Guthrum for Godrum, and reports that viking leaders were known as eorlas and that Woden was a king who received divine honours after his death.

26 With Dane and Englishman now brothers, the falling out of Cain and Abel – the Beowulf poet’s paradigm for the kinslayings and civil wars that renew themselves throughout the poem – could be used to make a political point. Martin Biddle, ‘Excavations at Winchester 1965 Antiquaries’ Journal 46 (1966) 308-32, interprets a sculpture (perhaps part of a stone frieze) from Winchester Old Minster that seems to portray a scene from the Volsung legend (Sigemund and the wolf) as celebrating the common origin of the West-Saxon and Danish royal houses. Biddle would like the sculpture to belong to the reign of Knútr; but as Jacobs (‘Anglo-Danish Relations’ p. 40) observes, the slab - if contemporary with the rebuilding of the Old Minster (971-994) - is evidence for the period that probably preserved our poem.

27 See Smyth, Scandinavian Kings pp. 23-34.

28 Farrell, ‘Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats’ p. 253, charts Beowulf’s family connections.

29 Ynglingatal or ‘List of the Ynglingar’ is a difficult poem with numerous textual cruces. See esp. W. Åkerlund, Studier över Ynglingatal, Skrifter utg. av Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund 23 (Lund 1939); Walter Baetke, Yngvi und die Ynglingar: Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung über das nordische Sakralkonigtum, Sitzungsberichte der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, phil-hist. Klasse 109 (Leipzig 1964).

30 Thirteenth-century Norse accounts of the two kings’ diplomacy can be found in Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, ed., Heimskringla, Íslenzk Fornrit 26 (Reykjavik 1951) pp. 143-5, and Finnur Jónsson, ed., Fagrskinna, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur 30 (Copenhagen 1902-3) pp. 20-22.

31 þjóðkonungr designates Knútr (284, 263, 135), Óláfr (228, 217, 113; 242, 227, 118; 260, 242, 125; 268, 248, 128; 325, 300, 152), and Magnus (274, 253, 131; 338, 311, 158).

32 Charlemagne’s contemporary Gothfrith (800-810) seems to have been more than a petty or regional king, at least in the vocabulary of the Frankish annalists, but after his assassination the Danish kingdom seems to have been shared out among multiple rulers until the last half of the tenth century (with the possible exception of one brief period around 850-855). See discussion and bibliography in Horst Zettel, Das Bild der Normannen und der Normanneneinfalle in westfränkischen, ostfränkischen, und angelsächsischen Quellen des 8. bis II. Jahrhunderts (Munich 1977) pp. 69-84. On West-Saxon hegemonial tendencies during the first half of the tenth century, see E.E. Stengel, ‘Imperator und Imperium bei den Angelsachsen, ’Deutsches Archiv 16 (1960) 15-72; J.L. Nelson, ‘Inauguration Rituals ’ in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. Peter H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds 1977) pp. 68-70. In the 940s Archbishop Oda addresses ‘all peoples (gentes) everywhere subject ’ to the regale imperium of Athelstan’s brother Edmund: PL 133, col. 952.

33 Wrenn, Beowulf p. 47. But see William W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass. 1928) p. 321.

34 Heinz Hungerland, ‘Zeugnisse zur Volsungen- und Niflungen Sage aus der Skaldendichtung (8-16 Jahrhundert),’ Arkiv fôr nordisk filologi 20 (1904) 1-43, 105-42; Fr. Kauffmann, ‘Zur Geschichte der Sigfridsage,’ Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie 31 (1899) 5-23 (‘Man wird festhalten dürfen, dasses vor der mitte des 10. jahrhunderts im norden weder eine Sigurdsage noch Sigurdlieder gegeben hat,’ p. 8).

35 H.R. Ellis, ‘Sigurd in the Art of the Viking Age,’ Antiquity 16 (1942) 216-36; J.T. Lang, ‘Sigurd and Weland in Pre-Conquest Carving from Northern England,’ Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 48 (1976) 83-94

36 For information on the relationship between the two poems, see Edith Marold, ‘Das Walhallbild in denEiriksmál und den Hákonarmál,’ Mediaeval Scandinavia 5 (1972) 19-33; also Klaus von See, ‘Zwei eddische Preislieder: Eirlksmál und Hákonarmál’ in Festgahe für U. Pretzel (Berlin 1963) pp. 107-17. Both poems are in a metre (mixed fornyrðislag and ljóðaháttr) which does not differ radically from that of Beowulf: unlike skaldic verse in court metre (dróttkvætt), their diction is relatively straightforward: Eiríksmál has only a single kenning (sword storm = battle); the kennings of Hákonarmál are more numerous and evocative (e.g. wound fires = swords; cf. wound gates = gashes, Beowulf 1121).

37 The tradition that Hákon the Good had been fostered at the English court is a commonplace in Norse histories compiled in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Hákon’s nickname Aðalsteinsfóstri first occurs in Sighvatr Thórtharson’s Bersoglisvisur, a skaldic poem probably from the 1030s.

38 Neckel, Edda pp. 288-96. The date of Hyndluljóð is not known: Einar 01. Sveinsson, Íslenzkar bókmenntir Ifornöld (Reykjavik 1962) p. 351, places the poem between the late eleventh century and the end of the twelfth.

39 Beowulf 879: fæhðe ond fyrene. Heremod does not appear in Æthelweard’s version (ca. 975) of the West-Saxon royal pedigree (Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard pp. 33-4).

40 See Klaeber, Beowulf p. xli. Ursula Dronke, ‘Beowulf and Ragnark,’ SBVS 17 (1969) 322-5, points out that Beowulf contains human analogues for two additional mythological incidents recorded in Norse poetry.

41 Kormakr Qgmundarson (79, 69, 42). On the iconography of the Gosforth cross, see Knut Berg, ‘The Gosforth Cross,’Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 21 (1958) 27-43.

42 Campbell, Chronicle of Æthelweard p. 33

43 See Carol Clover, ‘The Germanic Context of the Unferþ Episode,’ Speculum 55 (1980) 444-68.

44 On the unusual form of the line see E.G. Stanley, ‘Some Observations on the A3 Lines in Beowulf’ in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving (Toronto 1974) p. 146.

45 See, e.g., Aage Kabell, ‘Unferth und die dänischen Biersitten,’ Arkiv för nordisk filologi 94 (1979) 31-41.

46 Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 3rd ed. [= Hermann Paul, ed., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie XII] (Berlin 1970) II, 52-4, 91-2, observes that the greatest number of place-names containing an Óthinn name come from the region in central Sweden occupied by the Gautar (OE Geatas). Also E.O.G. Turville-Petrc. Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia (London 1964) p. 66. The skald Sighvatr journeyed through Västergötland around 1018 and found that some of the natives still ‘feared Óthinn’s anger’ (234, 221, 115). Ailnoth of Canterbury as late as 1100 contrasted the Danes among whom he resided, the good Christians, with the Swedes and Geats who in times of trouble would drive out the new religion: Vitae sanctorum Danorum, ed. M. C1. Gertz (Copenhagen 1908-12) p. 83. See Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford 1965) p. 56.

47 Rerum Saxonicarum libri III, chs. 11-12. See Karl Hauck, ‘Lebensnormen und Kultmythen in germanischen Stammes- und Herrschergenealogien,’ Saeculum 6 (1955) 186-223. Hans Kuhn, ‘Gaut’ in Festschrift für Jost Trier zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Meisenheim/Glan 1954) pp. 417-33, compares the threat of Ongentheow in Beowulf 2940 (getan [ *gautian ]... on galgtreowum ‘to sacrifice [men] on the gallows’) with a boast by the mid-tenth-century skald Helgi trausti Óláfsson: guldum galga valdi Gauts tafn ‘I paid to the gallows-prince [Óthinn] Gautr’s sacrifice’ (99, 94, 55).

48 Robinson, ‘Aspects of theMaldon Poet’s Artistry’ pp. 25-8. In ‘Syntactical Glosses in Latin Manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon Provenance,’ Speculum 48 (1973) 443-75, Robinson demonstrates the Anglo-Saxons’ sensitivity to the strongly patterned word order of their language and, therefore, to deviations from normal syntax.

49 Alistair Campbell, ‘The Use inBeowulf of Earlier Heroic Verse’ in England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge 1971) p. 286, argues that this half-line type is evidence for the use in Beowulf of heroic lays on the Swedish-Geatish wars. Sarrazin, Beowulf-Studien p. 69, cited the same construction to show that the poem was a translation from Old Norse.

50 E.g., a postposited ‘that’ occurs on the stone from Istaby, Sweden, ca. 650, and on the whetstone from Strøm, Norway, ca. 600-650. The St. Paul’s gravestone reads: ‘Ginna and Toki had stone this (stin þensi) placed.’ The opposite order - e.g. þena kirk on the twelfth-century Pennington tympanum - is taken as proof of English influence or workmanship. See R. I. Page, ‘How Long did the Scandinavian Language Survive in England? ’ in England Before the Conquest... ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge 1971) pp. 165-81; K.M. Nielsen, ‘The Position of the Attribute in Danish Runic Inscriptions,’ Acta philologica Scandinavica 16 (1942-3) 227-9.

51 See Finnur Jónsson, Norsk-islandske kultur- og sprogforhold i 9. og 10. arh., Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, hist-filol. Meddelser, III.2 (Copenhagen 1921) p. 315.

52 See Roberta Frank, ‘Old Norse Memorial Eulogies and the Ending of Beowulf,’ Acta 6 (‘1979’ [1981 ] ) 1-19.

53 Jordanes (Getica pars. 256-8, ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH AA V (i) [Berlin 1882]) tells of horsemen at Attila’s funeral who proclaim his deeds, but Jordanes stresses the mourners’ gaiety: no one expresses apprehension, no one anticipates the end of the Huns. Hector’s funeral in the Iliad (ch. 24) is well provided with wailing women, among whom Andromache, like the Geatish woman in Beowulf, predicts captivity and humiliation for herself now that Troy’s protector is dead; but there is no formal praise of Hector, either before or after his cremation. For a general guide to the genre, see Claude Thiry, La plainte funèbre, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 30 (Turnhout 1978).

54 E.G. Stanley, ’Hæthenra Hyht in Beowulf in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon 1963) p. 148. See also M.P. Richards, ‘A Reexamination of Beowulf 11. 3180-3182,’ English Language Notes 10 (1973) 163-7.

55 Neckel, Edda p. 322 (Vlsunga saga, ch. 27). In a similar way, the word oferhygd, which in OE usually means blamable pride or mortal sin, in ON designates a desirable quality (ofrhugi ‘a daring man’;ofrhugr ‘high courage’). See Hans Schabram, Superbia: Studien zum altenglischen Wortschatz I (Munich 1965) pp. 39-40.

56 G.R. Russom, ‘A Germanic Concept of Nobility in The Gifts of Men and Beowulf’ Speculum 53 (1978) 1-15, after examining the close match between Gifts of Men and ON literature on the one hand, and Gifts and Beowulf on the other, concludes that the attitude towards aristocratic society and its pastimes is the same in both literatures. See also B.S. Phillpotts, ‘The Battle of Maldon: Some Danish Affinities,’ Modern Language Review 24 (1929) 172-90, who observed that many of the resemblances she noted between Maldon and the Danish Bjarkamál were shared by Beowulf; Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Ideal of Men Dying with their Lord in the Germania and in The Battle of Maldon,’ ASE 5 (1976) 63-81.

57 See n. 7.

58 On the frequency and exclusiveness of this skaldic metaphor, see Carol Clover, ‘Skaldic Sensibility,’Arkiv for nordisk filologi 93 (1978) 63-81; on the ‘myth’ supporting the kenning system, see Roberta Frank, ‘Snorri Sturluson and the Mead of Poetry ’ in Speculum Norrænum: Norse Studies in Memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Ursula Dronke, Guðrún Helgadóttir, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense 1980).

59 Ernst A. Kock, Notationes norrænætr: Anteckningar till Edda och Skaldediktning, Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, N.F. Avd. 1 (Lund 1923-44) §I 147, cites a parallel use of hylja ... ‘to bury.’ For bibliography on Anglian funerary customs and Bede’s abbess, see Klaeber, Beowulf p. 144, and Ferdinand Holthausen, ‘Das Verhüllen des Haupts bei Toten, ein angelsächsisch-nordischer Brauch,’ Englische Studien 54 (1920) 19-23.

60 Seen. 46. Whitelock noted (Audience p. 79) that the closest English parallels to the Beowulf poet’s outburst against Danes who returned to their old superstitious ways (11. 175-88) are post-viking. In addition to the Ælfric and Wulfstan passages, see the penalties imposed in the Edward/Guthrum treaty of 921 on those who abandon Christian for heathen customs: Felix Liebermann, ed.. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle 1903-16) I, 130-31. Mere conversion like that demanded by the Alfred/Guthrum treaty is not enough a half-century later: Athelstan’s treaty of Eamont (12 July 927) makes the suppression of idolatry a requirement. See Stenton, A-S England p. 336.

61 C.P. Wormald, ‘The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 27 (1977) p. 113, reasserts the traditional view that restricted literacy predominated throughout the whole early English period. New supporting evidence is marshalled by M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (London 1979) pp. 12-21.

62 The two main ‘fabulous’ elements of Beowulf (Grendel and his mother the merewif; the dragon) have numerous analogues in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic sagas of which the Sandhaugar episode in Grettis saga is only the best known. See George V. Smithers, The Making of Beowulf (Durham 1961). The usual assumption is that both Beowulf poet and saga author drew on two very similar stories, ultimately stemming from a single (presumably Anglian) prototype. See L. D. Benson, ‘The Originality ofBeowulf’ in The Interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice, Harvard English Studies 1 (Ithaca, N.Y. 1970) 25-8; P. A. Jorgensen, ‘Beowulf’s Swimming Contest with Breca: Old Norse Parallels,’ Folklore 89 (1978) 52-9, and ‘The Gift of the Useless Weapon in Beowulf and the Icelandic Sagas,’ Arkiv for nordisk filologi 94 (1979) 82-90.

63 The relationship between homily and poem has been explained by at least four different hypotheses: Richard Morris, ed., The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 (London 1874-80; repr. in 1 vol. 1967), claimed (p. vii) that the homily was a ‘direct reminiscence’ of the poem; Theodore Silverstein, ed., Visio sancti Pauli: The History of the Apocalypse, Together with Nine Texts, Studies and Documents 4 (London 1935), demonstrated that the homiletic passage was much closer to a ninth-century redaction of the Visio than it was to the OE poem and concluded that the Visio was a common source for both (p. 11); Carleton Brown, ‘Beowulf and the Blickling Homilies and Some Textual Notes,’ PMLA 53 (1938) 905-16, indicated that the description of the mere in Beowulf was independent and that the homily fused elements from both Visio and poem; R.L. Collins, ‘Beowulf and Blickling Homily XVI,’ an unpublished paper presented to the Modern Language Association in 1972, argued persuasively on the basis of specific verbal parallels that Beowulf was influenced by the homily and not vice-versa.

64 D.M. Wilson, ‘The Scandinavians in England’ in The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. David M. Wilson (London 1976) pp. 400-1

65 Recent scholarship tends to stress assimilation, the mutual tolerance and even attraction of the two peoples, and to support William of Malmesbury’s claim (De gestis regum Anglorum, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series 90 [London 1887-9] II, 125) that the English and Danes in Northumbria soon coalesced into one nation. See Binns, ‘York Viking Kingdom’ pp. 179-89; D.M. Wilson, ‘The Vikings’ Relationship with Christianity in Northern England,’ Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser. 30 (1967) 37-46, and ‘Scandinavian Settlement in the North and West of the British Isles: An Archaeological Point-of-View,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 26 (1976) 95-113. As for the south, the OE poem on the recovery of the five boroughs (942) indicates that at the very least the chronicler and his audience thought it conceivable that the Danish element in the Midlands would sympathize with English rather than Norse aspirations (see Jacobs, ‘Anglo-Danish Relations’pp. 39-40), while the Chronicle entry for 918 envisages Dane and Englishman joining forces against the Northerners (Plummer, Saxon Chronicles Parallel 1, 104). The earlier view that discerned ‘a racial cleavage’ in pre-Conquest England is eloquently put in F. M. Stenton, ‘The Danes in England,’ PBA 13 (1927) 203-46, repr. in Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Doris M. Stenton (Oxford 1970) at pp. 161-4.

66 The coins that Guthrum began to circulate as soon as he became king of East Anglia bore the Danish king’s new baptismal name, Athelstan; coins commemorating the slain English king Edmund were issued in Danish East Anglia as early as 890, twenty years after his martyrdom. See C.E. Blunt, ‘The St. Edmund Memorial Coinage,’ Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 31 (1969) 234-55. Inscriptions produced in areas of heavy Danish settlement for people with Scandinavian names are in OE, not ON: see Elisabeth Okasha, Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge 1971) pp. 41, 47, 88, 114-15, 126-7, 131. OE is found on ornaments showing a strong stylistic influence from Scandinavia, such as the Sutton, Isle of Ely, disc-brooch: Okasha pp. 116-17;David M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Ornamental Metalwork 700-1100 in the British Museum (London 1964) pp. 50, 86-8. On the settlers’ Anglophile tastes in stone sculpture see Binns, Viking Century pp. 181-9, and J.T. Lang, ‘The Sculptors of the Nunburnholme Cross,’ Archaeological Journal 133 (1977) 75-94, who traces a persistent Anglian conservatism, even in thoroughly Scandinavianized areas.

67 See J.T. Lang, ‘Continuity and Innovation in Anglo-Scandinavian Sculpture’ in Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age Sculpture and its Context: Papers from the Collingwood Symposium on Insular Sculpture from 800 to 1066, ed. James T. Lang, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 49 (Oxford 1978) 145-72; C.D. Morris, ‘Pre-Conquest Sculpture of the Tees Valley ‘MArc 20 (1976) 140-46.

68 Peter Clemoes, ‘Late Old English Poetry ‘ in Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis Concordia, ed. David Parsons (London 1975) p. 104

69 See Richard Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England (London 1980).

70 Wilson, ‘Scandinavians in England’p. 400

* I am grateful to my former colleague, Professor Alan J. Bliss, and to my former pupil, Kevin Stevens, both of University College, Dublin, for valuable discussions of much of the subject matter of this paper. I am particularly grateful to Kevin Stevens who, at weekly meetings during the academic years of 1976-8, helped me with the preliminary work of locating and classifying most of the parallel expressions in Beowulf. Only a small proportion of this work, indeed, is reflected in this paper. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Leeds, Professor T. A. Shippey, Peter Meredith, and Peter Orton, for help and encouragement, and in particular to Peter Orton for much learned advice and detailed information.

1 In English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis and C.L. Wrenn (London 1962) pp. 13-26; see pp. 13 and 20.

2 See Walther Paetzel, Die Variationen in der altgermanischen Allitterationspoesie, Palæstra 48 (Berlin 1913) pp. 3-4.

3 See Arthur G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley 1959) pp. 40, 274. Brodeur seems to regard ‘identity of meaning’ as characteristic of variation, and ‘identity of structure’ as characteristic of parallelism.

4 See D.G. Calder, ‘The Study of Style in Old English Poetry: A Historical Introduction’ in Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. Daniel G. Calder (Berkeley 1979) pp. 1-65 at 35.

5 Paetzel, Variationen p. 4

6 Ibid. pp. 12-24

7 Ibid. pp. 214-16

8 See R.F. Leslie, ‘Analysis of Stylistic Devices and Effects in Anglo-Saxon Literature’ in Stil- und Formprob-leme in der Literatur, ed. Paul Böckman (Heidelberg 1959) pp. 129-36. Quoted here from Martin Stevens and Jerome Mandel, eds., Old English Literature: Twenty-Two Analytical Essays (Lincoln, Nebraska 1968) pp. 73-81 at 77.

9 See Kemp Malone, ‘Plurilinear Units in Old English Poetry,’ RES 19 (1943) 201-4, esp. 201-2 and 203.

10 Paetzel, Variationen p. 178

11 See further Jon Helgason, ‘Norges og Islands digtning’ in Litteraturhistorie B: Norge og Island, Nordisk Kultur VIII: B, ed. Sigurður Nordal (Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen 1953) pp. 3-179 at 14.

12 ‘Study of Style’ pp. 38-9

13 ‘Stylistic Devices’ p. 77

14 See further Einar Ó1. Sveinsson, Ìslenzkar bόkmenntir í fornöld (Reykjavik 1962) esp. pp. 105-22.

15 ‘Plurilinear Units’ pp. 202-3

16 See Gustav Neckel, Beiträge zur Eddaforschung mit Exkursen zur Heldensage (Dortmund 1908) p. 23.

17 Ibid. p. 39

18 Jan de Vries, ‘Over de dateering der þrymskviða,’ Tijdschrift voor nederlandsche Taal- en Letterkunde 47 (1928) 251-322, esp. 254-5; Peter Hallberg, ‘Om þrymskviða,’ Arkiv för nordisk filologi 69 (1954) 51-77, esp. 54-5.

19 Thomas A. Shippey, Old English Verse (London 1972) p. 13

20 See Sveinsson, Ìslenzkar bókmenntir pp. 228-9, and his chapter headings ‘Eldri goðakvæði,’ ‘Ungleg goðakvæði,’ ‘Eldri hetjukvæði,’ ‘Unglegri hetjukvæði.’

21 As listed in Paetzel, Variationen pp. 66-72

22 Norræn fornkvæði: Islandsk samling af folkelige oltidsdigte om nordens guder og heroer, almindelig kaldet Sæmundar Edda hins fróða (Christiania 1867) is the ed. used in this paper. For Bugge’s rejection of Forspjallsljoð from the corpus, see his pp. XLVI-VIII.

23 Eddica Minora: Dichtungen eddischer Art aus den Fornaldarsögur und anderen Prosawirken (Dortmund 1903)

24 ‘Epic Style’p. 20

25 In this paper the solidus / separates consecutive half-lines or verses of OE poetry, and consecutive vísuorð of ON-Icelandic poetry. Round brackets enclose words which do not participate in the parallels or variations exemplified. Quotations from Beowulf and Finnsburg in this paper are from Frederick Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Boston 1950). Quotations from other OE poems are given as Campbell quotes them, occasionally in a slightly adapted form.

26 If it were, then the parallel in question would be an example of the summarizing parallel (Type 5) or the expanded parallel (Type 6), depending on whether the simplex word constituted its second or first element respectively. See further the discussion of Types 5 and 6 below.

27 ‘An age was destined for me, a life laid down.’

28 ‘Here is mead brewed for Baldr, shining supplies of drink.’

29 See, however, Paetzel, Variationen pp. 20-21 ; he finds the linking by a conjunction of elements in a variation acceptable in sentence-variation, but not in word-variation.

30 Variationen p. 68

31 ‘The ring-adorned metal, the sharp iron.’

32 ‘Oaths sworn, vows accomplished.’

33 ‘Towering waves, roaring sea.’

34 ‘Beautiful ornaments, fine rings.’

35 ‘Early did one man call to the other, brother to brother.’

36 ‘The treasure-keeper, battle-ruler.’

37 ‘Misshapen, hard-hearted.’

38 See Beowulf 303 la, 3032a (ēodon unblīðe ... wollentēare). The one other instance in Beowulf of a balanced parallel consisting of compound adjectives is at 11. 1586a, 1587a.

39 ‘You will lay low the tough, valiant sons of Hundingr.’

40 ‘The warlike man, the inviolate warrior.’ For the interpretation here of varr as verr see Ursula Dronke, ed., The Poetic Edda: Volume I, Heroic Poems (Oxford 1969) p. 167 (n.) and cf. Bugge, Edda p. 322, strophe 28 n. On gunnhelgi see Dronke p. 175.

41 ‘Epic Style ‘ p. 21

42 Ibid. p. 21

43 ‘The sons of Arngrímr, pernicious offspring.’

44 See Beowulf 16b-l7a; 64b-65a; 571a, 572a; 643a, 644a; 729a, 730a; 751b-52a; 786a, 787a; 796a, 797a; 862a, 863a; 976a, 977a; 1059a, 1060a; 1260a, 1261a; 1446a, 1447a; 1462a, 1463a; 1518b, 1519a; 1813a-b; 1881a (goldwlanc), 1882a; 1889b-90a; 2249b-50a; 2754b-55a. This is not claimed to be an exhaustive list.

45 ‘Inherited regions, ancient dwellings.’

46 ‘In giantesses, in an evil woman.’

47 See Heusler and Ranisch, Eddica Minora p. 99, 6a n.

48 ‘Epic Style’ p. 21

49 ‘The great king, the heir of Gjúki.’

50 ‘Swift keels, stags of the mast-rings.’

51 ‘Gods and goddesses, all divine powers.’

52 ‘The old giant will sink, your father will be doomed to die.’

53 See Charles L. Wrenn, ed.. Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, 3rd ed. rev. W.F. Bolton (London 1973) p. 155, 1. 1520 textual n.

54 ‘He paid and gave gold to the retinue; the hero spared not the blood-bespattered treasure-hoard.’ On the difficulties involved in arriving at this interpretation of the second sentence, see, however, Bugge, Edda p. 180, strophe 9 n.; the entry blóðrekinn in Finnur J6nsson, ed., Lexicon poeticum antiquae linguae septentrionalis ... af Sveinbjörn Egilsson, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen 1931); and the entry hodd in William A. Craigie, ed., An Icelandic-English Dictionary ... by Richard Cleasby ... and ... Gudbrand Vigfusson ... 2nd ed. (Oxford 1957).

55 ‘(If you) were to see your brother’s bloody wound, were to bind his gory wounds.’

56 ‘... than the bright day, than the rays of the sun.’

57 ‘Epic Style ‘ p. 21

58 ‘Awake, maid of maidens, awake, my woman-friend, Hyndla (my) sister.’

59 ‘There Niðhöggr sucked dead corpses, the wolf tore men.’

60 Variationen p. 17

61 ‘Great king, kinsman.’

62 See Craigie, Dictionary p. xxxii.

63 ‘Epic Style’ p. 21

64 ‘When Herþjófr tricked Haraldr, betrayed in time of truce a man unequal to himself.’

65 Paetzel, Variationen pp. 12-13

66 Ibid. pp. 14-15

67 Ibid p. 71

68 See, for instance, Sigurðarkviða hin skamma 15, 1, 3, Brynhildr... vm borin Bvdla, listed by Paetzel, Variationen p. 66.

69 To judge, that is, from the entries eodor and eodur in Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., ed. and Philip H. Smith, Jr., programmer, A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Ithaca, N.Y. 1978).

70 ‘Epic Style’ pp. 20-21

71 ‘Often, not seldom.’

72 ‘Babies, heirs.’

73 ‘Skaði, fair bride of gods.’

74 ‘A messenger ... a knowledgeable (or well-known) man.’

75 It can mean either ‘An escort of men ... of valiant warriors,’ or ‘A journey undertaken by men ... by valiant warriors.’

76 ‘In front of the sun ... the shining god.’

77 ‘Frost-giants, sons of Suttungi.’99 See Sveinsson, ibid., p. 229, and Heusler and Ranisch, Eddica Minora p. IV.

78 ‘Sheath-irons, sword-blades.’

79 ‘King Hringr ... noblest of rulers beneath the skull of Ymir (i.e. the sky).’

80 ‘Epic Style’p. 21

81 ‘He caused Hálfdan, the valiant king, to sink to the ground.’

82 ‘Epic Style ‘ p. 22

83 The other two are at Fáfnismál 29, 4, 6 and at Eddica Minora XVIII F, 4, 3, 7.

84 ‘But less gold will gleam on your limbs - no property of Menja - when you come to visit me.’ The translation given here of nęit Menio god is derived from the information given under neinn and góð in Hans Kuhn’s glossary to Gustav Neckel’s ed. of the poetic Edda: Neckel, ed., Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern, II: Kurzes Wörterbuch von Hans Kuhn, 3rd rev. ed. (Heidelberg 1968).

85 ‘Epic Style’p. 22

86 ‘... trod down with white and black steeds on a highway, with grey, smooth-paced horses of the Goths.’

87 ‘Epic Style ‘ p. 22

88 Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles (Oxford 1961) p. 160 (s.v. sæl)

89 ‘I know of an up-standing ash-tree - its name is Yggdrasill - a tall tree.’

90 ‘Epic Style ‘ p. 16

91 See above, n. 14.

92 He in fact gives a separate chapter, ‘Truarbarátta,’ pp. 315-37, to Lokasenna and Völuspá, both of which he regards as dating from the period of transition from paganism to Christianity. The separate treatment given to these poems is one of the points criticized in Bjarni Guðnason’s review of Sveinsson in Skirnir 137 (1963) 182-7; see p. 184.

93 See the chapter ‘Aldur’ in Sveinsson, Íslenzkar bόkmenntir pp. 203-29.

94 See Sveinsson, ibid. p. 208, and the reference given there.

95 Ibid. p. 211. Attempts to date þrymskvða among the later poems of the eddic corpus are referred to in n. 18 above.

96 Sveinsson is careful not to take this date – that of the official conversion of Iceland - as too rigid a dividing line between the pagan and Christian periods. See Sveinsson, ibid. p. 215.

97 Ibid. p. 217, n. 3

98 Ibid. pp. 219-20, and 202, n. 1

99 See Sveinsson, ibid., p. 229, and Heusler and Ranisch, Eddica Minora p. IV.

100 For discussions of attempts to date Rígsfjula, þrymskviða, and parts of Hávamēl later than Sveinsson would, see Guðnason’s review of Sveinsson (n. 92 above) and Stefán Einarsson’s review in Scandinavica 3 (1964) 63-4; and the reviews of Klaus von See’s book, Die Gestalt der Hávamál (Frankfurt/Main 1972), by G.Turville-Petre inSBVS 18 (1973) 387-9 and R.I. Page in Scandinavica 13 (1974) 61-3.

101 See Sveinsson, Íslenzkar bókmenntir p. 229.

102 Ibid. p. 225

103 Ibid. p. 413

104 See Helgason, ‘Norges og Islands digtning’ pp. 99-100.

105 See Sveinsson, Íslenzkar bókmenntir pp. 459-62.

106 See Heusler and Ranisch, Eddica Minora p. CV, n. i.

107 Paetzel, Variationen pp. 158-60, gives the percentage of variation in each poem in relation to the total no. of lines in the poem, whereas I give only the percentage of variation in each of the two groups in relation to the total no. of vísuorð) in the group.

108 Variationen pp. 158-60

109 See Sveinsson, Ìslenzkar bókmenntir p. 229.

110 Ibid. pp. 405, 228-9

111 ‘Epic Style ‘ pp. 20-21

112 See Sveinsson, Ìslenzkar bókmenntir p. 492.

1 E.g. William P. Ker, Epic and Romance (London 1908); William W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass. 1928); Kemp Malone in A Literary History of England (New York 1948), esp. pp. 92-4; Norman Garmonsway, ‘Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes’ in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger and Robert P. Creed (New York 1965) pp. 139-146.

2 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Monsters and the Critics,’ PBA 22 (1936) 245-95; John Leyerle, ‘Beowulf, the Hero and the King,’ Medium Ævum 34 (1965) 89-102; Eamon Carrigan, ‘Structure and Thematic Development in Beowulf,’ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 66 (1967) 1 ff.; John Halverson, ‘The World of Beowulf,’ ELH 36 (1969) 593-608; Margaret Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London 1970); H. Berger, Jr. and H.M. Leicester, Jr., ‘Social Structure as Doom’ in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. (Toronto 1974) pp. 37-79; James Smith, ‘Beowulf I,’ English 25 (1976) 203-29 and ‘Beowulf II,’ English 26 (1977) 3-22. I have reviewed these critical positions at a little more length in the Beowulf section of the annual ‘Year’s Work in Old English Studies’ published by the Old English Newsletter, vols. 8-13, and in A Glance Backward, ed. Rowland L. Collins, OEN Subsidia 2 (Binghamton, N.Y. 1979) esp. pp. 14-15.

3 ‘Bede, Beowulf, and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy ‘ in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede ... ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford 1978) pp. 32-95. See p. 36 for the reference to a ‘zone of silence,’ a phrase adapted from A. Momigliano, ‘Pagan and Christian Historiography’ in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford 1963) p. 96.

4 Clinton E. Albertson, Anglo-Saxon Saints and Heroes (New York 1967). E.g., Wilfrid’s division of his goods is treated as follows, p. 158 n. 127: ‘Dispensing gold to his followers as his life approaches its grand close, Wilfrid might for all the world be living out a scene from the typical heroic poetry of his people. Even in the Anglo-Saxon biblical poems the Old Testament patriarchs are transformed into Germanic heroes, noble “earls,” distributing treasure to their comitatus (e.g. Genesis, vv. 1181 ff.). And there is a deeper, darker level of similarity that neither Wilfrid nor Eddius is aware of. Gold hoards in Teutonic literature are won by blood and they bring tragedy in their wake. The Nibelung hoard was fated (see discussion by De Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, pp. 54 ff., 66 ff.). The treasure that dying Beowulf won for his people brought them no rescue from their fate (see Quirk’s discussion of the fatal-gold theme in Beowulf, in Early English and Norse Studies, edited by A. Brown and P. Foote [London, 1963], pp. 165ff.). Gold hoards were always guarded symbolically by the evil dragon, and even though the Christian cross may have driven him away for a time, the ancient curse still bided its time. Such wealth as Wilfrid’s surely helped bring on the malady which was soon to destroy Anglo-Saxon monasticism. The Golden Age nourished its own seed of doom.’ All of this in spite of the fact that Wilfrid fairly carefully follows ecclesiastical tradition as described, e.g., by Gregory in his letter to Augustine of Canterbury (HE I, 27), setting up four portions, one for the poor, a second for the repair of churches, a third for the clergy of the diocese, and the fourth for the bishop’s own household for entertainment and hospitality.

5 Wormald’s argument is that because he was an oblate ‘Bede’s personal history cut him off from contemporary society and its values, and buried him, from boyhood, in a world of books.’ (p. 62). This, together with his single-minded sense of mission, explains his silence concerning the aristocratic culture visible in Beowulf. Much of what Wormald says is sensitive and interesting, but the parallels between Beowulf and eighth-century hagiography are forced and unconvincing (see esp. p. 56). If anything, the Athanasian Antony has more not less of the monstrous than Felix’s Guthlac. The choice of a barrow for his hermitage is exactly parallel to Antony’s choice of a tomb for his first retreat, and there is no indication that he expected, or found, either dragon or treasure there. Wormald cites Dorothy Whitelock’s Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) in support of the notion that there are ‘suggestive parallels between Beowulf and the eighth-century Life of the Mercian royal saint, Guthlac.’ Prof. Whitelock’s argument was that ‘it is not only in works close to 700 that parallels to Beowulf can be found.’ (Audience, p. 81). I would agree but do not find the parallels very striking in either period, esp. for this aristocratic soldier turned hermit.

6 I am currently assembling material for such a history.

7 Walter W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints III, EETS O.S. 94 (London 1890; repr. with EETS 114 as vol. II, 1966) pp. 124-43; also in Geoffrey I. Needham, ed., Ælfric: Lives of Three English Saints, MOEL (London 1966) pp. 27-42

8 William H. Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred... (Oxford 1904). Here and elsewhere I accept Dorothy Whitelock’s justification of Stevenson’s opinion that Asser is genuine and that he wrote the life when he said he did, in 893. For convenience I have included the dates, particularly of the Latin lives and when it has seemed useful. Though the date of Asser’s AIfred is disputed, most are not. See Dorothy Whitelock, The Genuine Asser: The Stenton Lecture, 1967 (University of Reading 1968); for a contrary view, see Vivian Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (London 1964) pp. 88-128.

9 MGH Epistolae IV, 183

10 HE 111, 1: ‘Quo post occisionem fratris Eanfridi superueniente cum paruo exercitu, sed fide Christi munito, infandus Brettonum dux cum immensis illis copiis, quibus nihil resistere posse iactabat, interemtus est in loco, qui lingua Anglorum Denisesburna, id est Riuus Denisi, uocatur.’ The text is that of Bertram Colgrave and R. A.B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford 1969).

11 Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives II, 126

12 HE III, 9: ‘Quo conpleto annorum curriculo occisus est, commisso graui proelio, ab eadem pagana gente paganoque rege Merciorum, a quo et prodecessor eius Eduini peremtus fuerat, in loco qui lingua Anglorum nuncupatur Maserfelth, anno aetatis suae xxxviii, die quinto mensis Augusti.’

13 Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives II, 134

14 HE III, 12: ‘Vulgatum est autem, et in consuetudinem prouerbii uersum, quod etiam inter uerba orationis uitam finierit; namque cum armis et hostibus circumseptus iamiamque uideret se esse perimendum, orauit pro animabus exercitus sui. Vnde dicunt in prouerbio: “Deus miserere animabus, dixit Osuald cadens in terram.” ‘

15 Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives II, 134, 136

16 In ‘Beowulf, Bede, and St. Oswine: The Hero’s Pride in Old English Hagiography,’ lecture delivered to the annual symposium, Scarborough College, Ontario, February 1979

17 HE III, 14: ‘diuertitque ipse cum uno tantum milite sibi fidissimo, nomine Tondheri, celandus in domum comitis Hunualdi, quem etiam ipsum sibi amicissimum autumabat. Sed heu! pro dolor! longe aliter erat; nam ab eodem comite proditum eum Osuiu cum praefato ipsius milite per praefectum suum Ediluinum detestanda omnibus morte interfecit.’

18 HE III, 15-17

19 HE 111, 24

20 Contained in BL MS. Cotton Julius A.X, fols. 2-9, and ed. James Raine, Miscellanea biographica, Publications of the Surtees Society 8 (London and Edinburgh 1838) pp. 1-17.

21 ‘Tuleruntque beatum oswinum propinqui et fautores eius quia infra annos erat et etatis imbecillitas et facul-tatis tenuitas patris mortem uindicare non permittebat.’ The text has been transcribed from a microfilm copy of the MS, though it has also been compared with Raine’s ed. BL Julius A.X, fol. 3r; Raine p. 2.

22 ‘Sanctissimus autem rex Oswinus, uidens suos cum aduersariis unanimiter uolentes non solum contendere uerum etiam pro suo rege paratos occumbere, uoluens in animo discriminis horrendum facinus, seque solum homicidii hinc inde passim committendi in causa esse, suis potius quam sibi parcendo pie consulens, sic eos alloquitur:

“Congratulor, quidem, o fidissimi principes et strenuissimi milites, uestre militie et probitati, et gratias ago bone erga me uestre uoluntati. Sed absit a me ut mei solius causa belli discrimen periculose quidem omnes incurratis, qui me quamquam iure dominum, pauperem tamen et exulem, regem uobis constituistis. Malo itaque, sicut hactenus, ubi ubi cum paucis uel solus exulare. Immo potius diligo mori, quam uos tot et tales mei solius causa contingat quoquomodo periclitari.” BL Julius A.X, fol. 7r; Raine pp. 7-8.

23 ‘O rex insignis, O regis nomine dignus, nobis indignis, petimus, esto benignus. Numquid nos ignauos aut degeneres aliquando repperisti, an apparuimus alicubi in conflictu bellico tardiores? Hostium profecto cuneos securi persepe penetrauimus. Liceat ergo nobis cum hostibus instantis certaminis inire conflictum, et in ore gladii peruerse etatis rimari uiscera ferro. Si fortasse nobis in pugna sinistre cesserit, melius est nobis mori in bello quam apud uulgus domini desertores in prouerbio cantitari.’ BL Julius A.X, fol. 7v; Raine p. 8.

24 Bertram Colgrave, ed., Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge 1940) p. 72: ‘Omitto namque quomodo in castris contra hostem cum exercitu sedens ... auctus est sicut Danihel.’

25 Bertram Colgrave, ed., Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge 1956); cf. B.P. Kurtz, ‘From St. Antony to St. Guthlac,’ University of California Publications in Modern Philology 12 (1926) 103-46

26 Bertram Colgrave, ed., The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge 1927) ch. XIII

27 Ibid. p. 28: ‘Dominus enim pro paucis pugnavit; sicut iam Gedeon Domini iussu cum ccc viris bellatorum Madianitum cxx milia uno impetu occidit, ita et isti sodales sancti pontificis nostri bene armati, viriles animo, pauci numero - erant enim cxx viri in numero Mosaicae aetatis - inito consilio et pacto, ut nullus ab alio in fugam terga verteret, sed aut mortem cum laude aut vitam cum triumpho, quod Deo utrumque facile est, habere mererentur.’

28 W. Levison, ed., Vitae sancti Bonifatii archiepiscopi Moguntini, MGH SS (Hannover and Leipzig 1965) pp. 49-50: ‘Cessate, pueri, a conflictu pugnaeque deponite bellum, quoniam scripturae testimonio veraciter erudimur at ne malum pro malo, sed etiam bonum pro malis reddamus. Iam enim diu optatus adest dies et spontaneum resolutionis nostrae tempus inminet. Confortamini igitur in Domino et permissionis suae gratiam gratanter sufferte ... gaudete in Domino et spei vestrae ancoram in Deum figite ....’

29 MGH Poetae Latini aevi Carolini I, 175: ‘The Almighty did not permit Edwin’s death to go unavenged, but saw to it that the king’s nephew Oswald became the ruler.’

30 Alistair Campbell, ed., Æthelwulf: De abbatibus (Oxford 1967) 11. 62-4: ‘Inspired with great devotion, he abandoned a sterile military service, to serve his whole life long the great Lord who rules all ages.’

31 Ibid. 1.71: ‘earned possession of a heavenly shield.’ Phrases such as these, or like the description of Guthlac girding himself with ‘the arms of the spirit’ etc. have been urged as meaningful parallels with heroic culture. I think that such diction indicates that martial, heroic values had a strong resonance in the period. At the same time, such expressions also define the values involved as belonging to a counter-culture rather than to the writer’s own, much as a popular preacher’s reference to ‘getting high on the Lord’ both recognizes and rejects important aspirations of his intended listeners.

32 Current corroboration for my analysis of the delicate balance between heroic values and Christian piety in both Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon culture of Alfred’s day can be found in J.D. A. Ogilvy’s ‘Beowulf, Alfred, and Christianity’ in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes... ed. Wesley M. Stevens and Margot H. King (Collegeville, Minn. 1979) I, 59-66, an article I saw only after the present study had been completed. Both the Beowulf poet and King Alfred translating Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy express the clear opinion that human courage can alter the decree of wyrd, even regarding death: ‘Ond men magon begitan Purh Pone freodom swa hwæt swa hi willað, buton deað hi ne magon forcerran; ac hi hine magon mid godum weorcum gelettan Pæt he lator cymð; ge furfrum oð oreldo hi hine hwilum gelettað ‘ (Walter J. Sedgefield, ed., King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae [Oxford 1899; repr. Darmstadt 1968] p. 142), a passage which puts into philosophical language what the Beowulf poet expresses in verse at 11. 572-3, ‘Wyrd oft nereð / unfægne eorl ponne his ellen deah.’ See Ogilvy pp. 60-61.

33 Stevenson, Asser’s Life p. 50: ‘Eodem anno [884] Ælfred, Angulsaxonum rex, classem suam de Cantia, plenam bellatoribus, in Orientales Anglos dirigens, praedandi causa, transmisit.’

34 Ibid. pp. 12-14

1 Hans Kuhn, ‘Zur Wortstellung und -betonung im Altgermanischen’ BGdSL 57 (1933) 1-109

2 I am most grateful to Dr. G.P. Cubbin, Dr. H.R.E. Davidson, Dr. D.N. Dumville, Dr. S.D. Keynes, Dr. D.W. Rollason, and Dr. D.G. Scragg for help on particular points.

3 ‘Two Old English Poetic Phrases Insufficiently Understood for Literary Criticism: þing gehegan and seonoþ gehegan’ in Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. Daniel G. Calder (Berkeley 1979) pp. 67-90 at 78-80

4 My quotations from poems other than Beowulfare from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records; those from Beowulf are from Klaeber’s 3rd ed. (Boston 1950).

5 Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann (Halle 1903-16) I, 477 (Episc. 4)

6 For an analysis of the constraints operating on the Beowulf poet’s placing of a past participle which is combined with an auxiliary verb, see Alan Bliss, ‘Auxiliary and Verbal in Beowulf,’ ASE 9 (1980) 157-82. In each of my two examples the poet has chosen to start at the beginning of an a verse a clause containing an auxiliary and a past participle and to head this clause with a metrically disyllabic auxiliary (i.e. one consisting of two syllables of which the first is long). In these conditions (as Bliss points out, p. 162) he was comparatively free to place his past participle where he pleased in relation to a subject and an object. In both our cases he has chosen final position. Metrically too he was free of any binding constraint, whether (as Bliss states, p. 180) his participle was metrically disyllabic (as defined above) – both befangen and forgrunden have, in fact, this value – or monosyllabic (i.e. consisting of two short syllables, so that there might be resolution); more often than not (see Bliss, p. 162) he chose the end of a verse (either a or b). In both the cases in question he has followed this normal preference. The different psychological effects of our two past participles are therefore not a matter of clause structure or of metre, and would not be imposed on the poet if they were; they are produced by two contrasting ways of associating other stressed words with a past participle – in the one case positioning them around it and in the other before it.

7 E.g. in the third stanza of a hymn by Bede on the six days of creation and the six ages of the world: ‘creator ... lampauit orbem lumine’ (Bedae venerabilis opera, pt. IV, Opera rhythmica, ed. J. Fraipont, Corpus Christianorum, series Latina 122 [Turnhout 1955] p. 407)

8 Cf. my ‘Action in Beowulf and Our Perception of It’ in Old English Poetry ... ed. Daniel G. Calder (Berkeley 1979) pp. 147-68 at 156.

9 Cf. ibid. pp. 149-51.

10 According to the MS (though not all editors) Grendel is se ellengæst when resenting the happiness of the inhabitants of Heorot (86a-89a), but he does not show ellen when encountering Beowulf.

11 LI. 602a, 902a, and 2349a

12 Hild (901-2a); wig (2348-9a)

13 This part of the Vercelli Book poem, of course, has no counterpart on the Ruthwell Cross. Nor has efstan elne mycle (34a). Nor does there seem ever to have been enough space on the Cross for emod elne mycle (60a).

14 Ch. 50 of Vita sancti Guthlaci auctore felice, written by 749. For text and trans, of the relevant passage, see Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge 1956) pp. 156-9

15 For some of the devices used in this poem, see J. L. Rosier, ‘Death and Transfiguration: Guthlac B’ in Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. James L. Rosier (The Hague 1970) pp. 82-92. The new ed. of this poem in The Guthlac Poems in the Exeter Book, ed. Jane Roberts (Oxford 1979), has not yet become available to me at the time of writing.

16 The extant verses are just the opening of a song, for Cædmon added more to them the next morning before reciting the whole to Abbess Hild. The record of these particular verses was an emblem of a divine act; writing them down owed nothing to any idea of a complete song as a text.

17 For this dating, see Dorothy Whitelock, ‘The Old English Bede,’ PBA 48 (1962) 57-90.

18 ‘his [i.e. Cædmon’s] lareowas æt his mue wreoton ond leornodon’ [Bede, ‘doctores suos uicissim auditores sui faciebat’], The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Thomas Miller, EETS o.s. 95, 96, 110, 111 (London 1890-98)1, 346 11.4-5

19 ‘Cynewulf and his Poetry’ in Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford 1953) pp. 1-28 at 1-7

20 Cf. Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’ in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede ... ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford 1978) pp. 32-95, esp. 54-5.

21 Seomade ond syrede (161a), ‘Wit fcaet gecwaedon cnihtwesende / ond gebeotedon’ (535-6a), hafa nu ond geheald (658a), wanode ond wyrde (1337a), mana swa ond myndga (2057a), hatode ond hynde (2319a), and heald mec ond hæfde (2430a). Verbs that do not jointly express a single idea are coupled in swefe ond snedeþ [MS sendeþ] (600a), and once verbs are coupled to point a distinction: wiston ond ne wendon (1604a).

22 For a study of them in a selection of OE prose, see Inna Koskenniemi, Repetitive Word Pairs in Old and Early Middle English Prose (Turku 1968).

23 I intend to present my arguments to this effect in a separate study.

24 None is included in Koskenniemi’s selection.

25 D.G. Scragg, ‘The Compilation of the Vercelli Book,’ ASE 2 (1973) 189-207 at 205. The four homilies form group Db in Celia Sisam’s analysis (The Vercelli Book, EEMF 19 [Copenhagen 1976] pp. 42-3).

26 Geweox ond gewridode, The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, ed. Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 (London 1874-80; repr. in 1 vol. 1967) p. 199 1. 2. Another instance of the coupling of these verbs in prose – weox ond wridode – is in the letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle in the Beowulf MS (Three Old English Prose Texts ... ed. Stanley I. Rypins, EETS o.s. 161 (London 1924) p. 12 1.7). On the probably ninth-century Anglian (perhaps East Mercian) composition of this letter, see Sisam, Studies pp. 83-93 esp. 89.

27 I see no evidence compelling us to think that there was any direct link between the wording of the description in Beowulf and the wording of the homily itself.

28 See, e.g., Scragg, ‘The Corpus of Vernacular Homilies and Prose Saints’ Lives before Ælfric,’ ASE 8 (1979) 223-77 at 265 n. 2.

29 The St. Michael homily begins, ‘Men a leofestan, manaþ us ond myngaþ ...’ (Morris, Blickling Homilies p. 197 1. 1). Blickling homily XIV (extant only in the Blickling MS) begins, ‘Men þa leofestan, her us manaþ) ond mynegaþ)...’ (ibid. p. 161 1. 1). Blickling homily X (also unique except that the second half is combined with Ælfric material in a homily in CCCC 198) contains ic myngige ond manige (ibid. p. 1091. 11). Blickling XIV and X, like the St. Michael homily, could be early. ‘Mana swa ond myndga mæla gehwylce / sarum wordum.’ (Beowulf 2057-8a), referring to incitement of a young Heathobard by the eald æscwiga, may have carried an ironic echo of sermonizing.

30 Cf. Beowulf 1743b-47. The letter is no. 73 in Michael Tangl’s ed., S. Bonifatii et Lullii epistolae, MGH Epistolae selectae 1 (Berlin 1916; repr. 1955). It is translated as item 177 in English Historical Documents c. 500-1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd ed. (London 1979), from which I quote.

A vernacular homily in the Vercelli Book and in the margins of CCCC 41 (in handwriting of the first half or middle of the eleventh century) ends with a passage warning us against the devil’s bow of pride (ofermetto), with which he daily tries to shoot at us arrows of such sins as greed (gytsung) and anger (yrre), and urging us to use the shields God has provided for warding off these onslaughts. The homily is no. IV in Max Förster’s ed. (Die Vercelli-Homilien: I.-VIII. Homilie, Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Prosa 12 [Hamburg 1932; repr. Darmstadt 1964]) and the passage in question is 11. 340-80. What significance it might have as dating evidence is hard to say. For one thing, it is not certainly an original part of the homily.

31 The charter is Kemble’s no. 115 and Birch’s no. 200. It is translated as item 70 in Whitelock’s Documents, from which I quote.

32 For the most recent discussion, see Ruth Mellinkoff, ‘Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf: Part I, Noachic Tradition,’ ASE 8 (1979) 143-62.

33 For a survey of this tradition, see Ruth Mellinkoff, ‘Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf: Part II, Post-Diluvian Survival,’ ASE 9 (1980) 183-97.

34 S.C. Bandy, ‘Cain, Grendel, and the Giants of Beowulf,’ Papers on language and Literature 9 (1973) 235-49 at 240

35 Colgrave, Felix’s Life p. 106 1.11

36 Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) p. 80

37 Die angelsächsische Prosa-Leben des hi, Guthlac, ed. Paul Gonser (Heidelberg 1909) p. 133. This phrase, so far as I know, does not occur elsewhere in OE. It may be a loan trans, of the well-attested Old Irish maicc báis, ‘descendants of death.’ For examples and discussion of this Irish formula, and for many parallel formations which guarantee that it represents native Irish usage, see the Royal Irish Academy Dictionary of the Irish Language, ed. E.G. Quin (Dublin 1913-76) M cols. 5-8 esp. 6-7. A Celtic Latin caique, filius mortis, is applied to a parricide in the early-ninth-century Historia Brittonum. The phrase does not seem to occur in late Latin or patristic times.

38 MS altered from cames

39 This is discussed by D.W. Rollason in ch. 4 of his forthcoming book, The Mildrith Legend: A Study in Early Medieval Hagiography in England.

40 See ibid. ch. 3.

41 See The Poems of Blathmac son of Cú Brettan, ed. and trans. James Carney (London 1964).

42 For the latest published account, see H. M. Taylor, St. Wystan’s Church Repton: A Guide and History (1979), and for the latest published analysis of the architectural evidence, see H. M. Taylor, Repton Studies 2: The Anglo-Saxon Crypt and Church (Cambridge 1979). We cannot, of course, take it for granted that this memorial site was chosen because of its conspicuousness, for there had been a monastery at Repton since at least the last years of the seventh century (when the young Guthlac entered it), but the conspicuousness was certainly part of the effect.

43 Die Heiligen Englands, ed. Felix Liebermann (Hannover 1889) pp. 9-19

44 For a full discussion, see D.W. Rollason, ‘Lists of Saints’ Resting-Places in Anglo-Saxon England,’ ASE 7 (1978) 61-93.

45 Liebermann, Heiligen, sect. 16

46 The letter is no. 16 in Alcuini epistolae, ed. Ernst Dümmler, Epistolae Karolini aevi II, MGH Epistolae IV (Berlin 1895). It is translated as item 193 in Whitelock’s Documents, from which I quote.

47 Asser’s Life of King Alfred ... ed. William H. Stevenson (Oxford 1904; repr. 1959) ch. 22. The deficiency is attributed to ‘indigna suorum parentum et nutritorum incuria.’

48 In the prose preface to his trans, of Gregory’s Cura pastoralis: King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. Henry Sweet, EETS o.s. 45 and 50 (London 1871-2) p. 7 11. 16-17

49 Ibid. 11. 8-13

50 Stevenson, Asser’s Life ch. 23

1 The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951; corrected ed. 1958) p. 86; but it is clear that she was inclined towards a date within the eighth century.

2 Professor Whitelock’s plea for consideration of all the English kingdoms was strongly reinforced by Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford 1953; corrected repr. 1962) pp. 132-9.

3 Sisam, seconding this suggestion, added, ‘It is a safer inference that Mercia had a share in the transmission of Beowulf and the moulding of it into its extant form.’ Studies p. 135.

4 L.L. Schücking, ‘Wann entstand der Beowulf? Glossen, Zweifel, und Fragen,’ BGdSL 42 (1917) 347-410, esp. 399-410.

5 In Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede ... ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford 1978) pp. 32-95. On the date of Beowulf see p. 73 n. 21, and pp. 94-5.

6 A critical survey of these and other tests and the complicated problems involved in their application has been made by Ashley Crandell Amos. It was my privilege to read the preliminary form of her study, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts, Medieval Academy Books 90 (Cambridge, Mass. 1980), shortly after its acceptance as a Yale dissertation in 1976. What I have to say about the tests has been strongly influenced by this valuable study, though it must not be assumed that she would agree with my opinions.

7 A. Lichtenheld, ‘Das schwache Adjectiv im Ags.’ ZfdA 16 (1873) 325-93. Adriaan J. Barnouw, Textkritische Untersuchungen nach dem Gebrauch des bestimmten Artikels und des schwachen Adjectivs in der altenglischen Poesie (Leiden 1902).

8 Eduard Sievers, ‘Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses,’ BGdSL 10 (1885) 209-314, 451-515 (esp. 459-94); Altgermanische Metrik (Halle 1893). Moritz Trautmann, Kynewulf der Bischof und Dichter (Bonn 1898). (Trautmann depends on his own ‘four-accent’ theory of OE verse instead of Sievers’ but comes to virtually the same conclusions about metrical irregularities. For his theory see his article in Beiblatt zur Anglia 5 [1895] 87-96, and the review of Kaluza’s theory in the same vol., pp. 131-6.) Lorenz Morsbach, ‘Zur Datierung des Beowulfepos,’ Nachrichten von der königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil-hist. Klasse (1906) pp. 251-77. (Morsbach’s dating of the disappearance of u after long monosyllables at about 700, which would preclude an earlier date for most OE poetry including Beowulf, has been much disputed.) Gregor Sarrazin, ‘Zur Chronologie und Verfasserfrage angelsächsischer Dichtungen,’ Englische Studien 38 (1907) 144-95. Carl Richter, Chronologische Studien zur angelsächsischen Literatur ... Studien zur englischen Philologie 33 (Halle 1910).

9 ‘Cynewulf and his Poetry,’ The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, read 8 March 1933, PBA 18 (1932) 303-31; separately printed (London 1933); repr. in Studies, pp. 1-28, where the quotation is on pp. 6-7.

10 A different kind of evidence, that of vocabulary, was brought forward on behalf of the antiquity of Genesis A and Beowulf by Robert J. Menner, ‘The Date and Dialect of Genesis A 852-2936 (Part III),’ Anglia 70 (1952) 285-94. Although Menner was attacking the opinion of Sievers, reached in his last years by the notoriously unreliable methods of his Schallanalyse, that this portion of Genesis A (what follows Genesis B in MS. Junius 11) had been composed in Alfred’s time, and was taking the early date of Beowulf for granted, he stressed the degree to which Genesis A and Beowulf shared a vocabulary that appeared more archaic than that of most of the other poems.

11 Charles L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment (London 1953; 2nd rev. ed. 1958) pp. 35-6

12 Ibid. p. 34

13 Johannes Hoops, Kommentar zum Beowulf (Heidelberg 1932) p. 166. Among the forms he quotes are Épinal 104 binumini 100 ginumni, Erfurt 100 genumini. J.D. Pheifer, Old English Glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary (Oxford 1974) p. 7, gives Erfurt 100 as .enumini.

14 Studies p. 136 n. 1, in a ch. repr. from RES 22 (1946) 257 ff.

15 By my count, the fourteen weak forms, in Klaeber’s ed., are in 11. 141, 561, 849 (-on), 1104, 1423, 1746, 2102, 2290, 2347, 2440, 2482, 2492, and the temporal ni(o)wan stefne. 1789 and 2594. (Where the sense is dative rather than instrumental, strong -um far outnumbers weak -an.)

16 Weak forms, with comparatives, or in temporal expressions combining forman, nyhstan, hindeman with sie or (once) dogore, occur in 11. 740, 1011, 1203, 2049, 2286, 2511, 2517, 2573, and 2969. Strong -e occurs in 776, 837, 1955, 2131, 2156, 2670, 2685, 2837, and by emendation in 3101, ore [sie].

17 In Genesis A (Krapp’s ed., ASPR 1), I count eight examples of weak -an (11. 1379, 1484, 1555, 1886, 2298, 2732, 2858, and 2866) besides the necessarily weak selran in 95. Strong -e occurs where it is optional eleven times (11. 44, 58, 947, 1102, 1575, 1958, 1963 [where the ungrammatical and senseless side worulde should read side werode], 1965, 2093, 2523-4 [fyre ... steape], and 2909-10 [hlude... stefne]), besides twelve times where it is obligatory (11. 57, 197, 854, 1173, 1534, 1765-6 [fromcynne... þine], 1805, 1878, 1917, 2395, 2630, and 2727). There are two examples of strong dative -um (11. 60 and 2362) and one of the strong feminine -re (tohtan niwre 914), which can be either dative or instrumental. Difference in MS traditions may account for some of the differences between Beowulf and Genesis A. In plural instrumental phrases Genesis A uses -um exclusively for both adjective and noun. Beowulf usually has -um for the adjective but occasionally -an (11. 963, 977, 1502, 1505, 1542, and 2692) besides the regularly weak -an of Iæssan (43), ærran (907, 2237, 3035) and ufaran (2200, 2392).

18 See below E.G. Stanley, ‘The Date of Beowulf: Some Doubts and No Conclusions,’ p. 209 and n. 73. I wish to emphasize that the following remarks apply only to the inflections of heah, not of other words subject to contraction. Could confusion with certain inflections of hean ‘low’ have encouraged late OE insistence on disyllabic heahan, etc.?

19 Klaeber lists all the examples in his 3rd ed. (Boston 1950) pp. 274-5.

20 For Ælfric, see the examples quoted in the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary under heah and my glossary in Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection II, EETS o.s. 260 (London 1968). The spelling heagan in Benjamin Thorpe’s ed. of the Catholic Homilies (London 1844-6) I, 166/18, from the MS in the Cambridge University Library, Gg. 3.28, appears in MS. Royal 7 C.XII on fol. 57r, 1. 11. See the facsimile, Æfric’s First Series of Catholic Homilies, ed. Norman Eliason and Peter Clemoes, EEMF 13 (Copenhagen 1966). There are a few examples in Napier’s Wulfstan, including some from homilies not by Wulfstan and Wulfstan’s own version of Ælfric’s De falsis diis (Arthur S. Napier, ed., Wulfstan ... Homilien [Berlin 1883; repr. 1967] p. 107/5; Dorothy Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan [Oxford 1957] p. 223/70). There are a few examples in the metrical psalms of the Paris Psalter, but the metrical laxity of the psalms makes it hard to be sure what forms the translator intended. For the various spellings of the word in the poems see A Concordance to The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., programmed Philip H. Smith, Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y. 1978).

21 Walter J. Sedgefield, ed., King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius De consolatione philosophiae (Oxford 1899) p. 14, 1. 16. The metrical version (p. 157) does not contain the word, but contracted forms appear elsewhere in the part of the text that depends on the tenth-century MS. Cotton Otho A. VI

22 See esp. Sisam, Studies pp. 293-7. Perhaps the strongest reason for doubting Alfred’s authorship of the Metres is the gross misunderstanding about Bootes, Metre 28.28-31, which seems to have arisen from an ambiguous linking of Bootes and Saturn in the prose version. (See Kurt Otten, König Alfreds Boethius [Tübingen 1964] p. 140. Otten himself seems a little confused about the late setting and early rising of the constellation, and it may be that Alfred was not given to stargazing.)

23 BL MS. Cotton Otho A. VI Portions destroyed by the fire of 1731 are supplied by the editors from Junius’ copy in Bodleian MS. 12. Some spellings that appear to be Kentish are probably of scribal origin.

24 The quotations are from Krapp’s ed., ASPR 5. What the unwary might take for an outrageous choice of an alliterating word in Metre 29.70 (hit ponne he wile, heofona waldend) actually involves, not the pronoun hit, but, as shown by the context and the prose version’s gehyt, a West-Saxon syncopated form of hyde ’hides.’ The verse exhibits crossed alliteration on both h and w and is metrically acceptable even if we accept wile instead of the subjunctive wille.

25 For examples in Beowulf see Klaeber’s 3rd ed., p. 276.

26 These examples would appear to challenge some of the conclusions of Winfred P. Lehmann in his article ‘Post-Consonantal I m n r and Metrical Practice in the Beowulf’ in Nordica et Anglica: Studies in Honour of Stefán Einarsson, ed. Allan H. Orrick (The Hague 1968) pp. 148-67.

27 Frederick Klaeber, ed., The Later Genesis and Other Old English and Old Saxon Texts... (Heidelberg 1913). Benno J. Timmer, commenting on 1. 300 (The Later Genesis [Oxford 1948] p. 102), argued that the poem is too late for uncontracted forms and that the verses containing hean and near are correct with monosyllabic readings, but he overlooks the fact that these are hypermetric verses and would usually end like type A. The other two verses, with onfon and bun, which he did not comment on, would certainly be more regular with uncontracted readings (types A and C respectively).

28 E.B. Irving, Jr., ‘The Heroic Style in The Battle of Maldon,’ Studies in Philology 58 (1961) 457-67

29 See above, n. 8, and Alistair Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford 1959) paragraphs 345 and 394.

1 Neil R. Ker. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford 1957) no. 216

2 Bruce Dickins and R.M. Wilson, Early Middle English Texts (Cambridge 1951) no. III

3 John Earle, A Hand-Book to the Land-Charters, and Other Saxonic Documents (Oxford 1888) group XV

4 Cf. E.G. Stanley, ‘The Date of La3amon’s Brut,’ Notes and Queries 213 (1968) 85-8, and ‘La3amon’s Antiquarian Sentiments,’ Medium Ævum 38 (1969) 23-7; but cf. also P.J. Frankis, ‘Lajamon’s English Sources’ in J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca and London 1979) pp. 64-75, where La3amon is thought to have drawn on Ælfric on the basis of what Emerson Brown Jr. calls ‘some rather tenuous parallels,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer, New Chaucer Society (University of Oklahoma Press 1980) p. 205.

5 Cf. Ritchie Girvan, Beowulf and the Seventh Century (London 1935; republished 1971) pp. 24-5; and Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford 1951) pp. 4-6. Cf. also below, pp. 199-200 and nn. 21 and 20.

6 See Frederick Klaeber, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf,’ Anglia 35 (1911-12) 111-36, 249-70, 453-82; 36 (1912) 169-99.

7 ‘Hansard’ 34 (1819) 1051; also [W.S. Hathaway] The Speeches of... William Pitt in the House of Commons (London 1806) III, 421 (7 June 1799)

8 ‘Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 8 (‘1977’ [1978]) 23-43

9 Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford 1953) pp. 61-96

10 See Franz Dietrich, ‘Hycgan und hopian,’ ZfdA 9 (1853) 214-22.

11 See Howard Meroney, ‘The Early History of down as an Adverb,’ JEGP 44 (1945) 378-86.

12 See E.V. Gordon, ed., The Battle of Maldon (London 1937) 1. 32 n.; A.J. Bliss, The Metre of Beowulf, rev. ed. (Oxford 1967) § 117.

13 Cf. Alistair Campbell, ed., The Battle of Brunanburh (London 1938) pp. 37-8, where the poem is described as ‘by far the longest and best of these artificial poems’ and is related to Scandinavian and continental Germanic verse of the age.

14 For an account of the ethos of the poem together with very full bibliographical footnotes pointing to other studies of value, see F.C. Robinson, ‘God, Death, and Loyalty in The Battle of Maldon’ in J.R.R. Tolkien ... Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca and London 1979) 76-98.

15 But not always: see Bliss, Metre of Beowulf §117; the whole of Bliss’s ch. 16 is important for an understanding of late OE prosody. His views on co-alliterating verbs, however, do not facilitate comparison of verse of different periods (cf. §26 on ‘non-functional alliteration’ summarizing what he thinks of verbal alliteration).

16 Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur [= Hermann Paul, ed., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, 2nd ed., II/l] (Strassburg 1908) p. 1032 (§40)

17 See Ker, Catalogue p. xv.

18 In Elliott V.K. Dobbie, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR 6 (New York 1942), Maldon, the Chronicle poems, Durham, probably Solomon and Saturn, Menologium, poems in CCCC MS. 201, poems in MS. Junius 121 including the Fragments of Psalms (which, of course, go with the metrical psalms of the Paris Psalter [ed. George P. Krapp in ASPR 5 (New York 1932)]), probably the Kentish poems of Cotton MS. Vespasian D.VI, Gloria II, Thureth, Seasons for Fasting (which goes with Instructions for Christians [ed. J.L. Rosier, Anglia 82 (1964) 4-22 and 84 (1966) 74; and cf. Roland Torkar, ‘Textkritische Anmerkungen zum altenglischen Gedicht Instructions for Christians,’ Anglia 89 (1971) 164-77]), Epilogue to MS. CCCC 41, and probably some of the charms.

19 See S.J. Crawford, The Old English Version of the Heptateuch ... EETS o.s. 160 (London 1922) p. 48.

20 Audience pp. 63-4

21 See above, n. 5. The book was republished in 1971 with a new chapter, ‘Sutton-Hoo and the Background to the Poem’ by Rupert Bruce-Mitford, who says: ‘The chapter does not set out to give a balanced treatment of Beowulf and Archaeology, nor to take up a position upon the difficult, perhaps insoluble, question of the poem’s date and provenance, although it naturally stresses the significance of Sutton Hoo in these connection (pp. 85-6). For the possible date of Sutton Hoo and its bearing on dating Beowulf see below, pp. 202-5.

22 Published Southampton 1973

23 Cf. F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1971) pp. 260-62. For the text of the treaty see Felix Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle 1898-1916) 1, 126-9.

24 ‘Wann entstand der Beowulf? Glossen, Zweifel, und Fragen,’ BGdSL 42 (1917) 347-410; and cf. ‘Die Beowu datierung: Eine Replik,’ BGdSL 47 (1923) 293-311.

25 Except in the following paragraph, and in what I say (pp. 202-5) about Sutton Hoo and Beowulf, a subject not examined at length in the course of the Toronto Conference, as well as in reporting objections raised to my view on hawking in Beowulf (see p. 205), I have left this contribution substantially as I had thought it out originally in 1979.

26 For the fact that the Geats of history were not extirpated, see Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford 1965) pp. 54-9; cf. R.T. Farrell. ‘Beowulf, Swedes, and Geats,’ SBVS 18 (1972) 257-71.

27 The form is clear in the facsimiles; thus Julius Zupitza, Beowulf: Autotypes of the Unique Cotton MS. ... 2nd ed. Containing... an Introductory Note by Norman Davis, EETS 245 (London 1959) p. 134 1. 2921, and cf. the eds.

28 Cf. the convenient compilation of such material in Frederick Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Boston 1936) p. lxxxii.

29 Heyne-Schückings Beowulf 2. Teil: Kommentar, 17th rev. ed. (Paderborn 1961) pp. 159-61, esp. ad finem

30 In Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda to the Supplement by T. Northcote Toller to An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of Joseph Bosworth (Oxford 1972) p. 47

31 Contrast R.W. Chambers (and A.J. Wyatt), ed., Beowulf with the Finnsburg Fragment (Cambridge 1914 and later repr.) pp. 69-70,1. 1382 n., and Johannes Hoops’s note on the line in Kommentar zum Beowulf (Heidelberg 1932) p. 166, with Schaubert’s Kommentar p. 94, and esp. among the references given by her, with Sisam. Studies (1953) p. 36 and n. Cf. below, p. 208 and nn. 64-5.

32 ‘Bede, Beowulf, and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’ in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England: Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede ... ed. Robert T. Farrell, British Archaeological Reports 46 (Oxford 1978) pp. 42-95

33 P. 64. Literary contrivance is insufficiently regarded also by Eric John, ‘Beowulf and the Margins of Literacy,’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 56(1974) 388-422.

34 Dr. Michael Lapidge’s contribution to the Toronto Conference, ‘Beowulf, Aldhelm, and Wessex,’ sought to connect the composition of the poem with Wessex of the age of Aldhelm, and valuably added to what is known about the Liber monstrorum.

35 See above, pp. 199-200 and n. 20.

36 See the standard account by Rupert Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial I (London 1975) pp. 716-17.

37 Many studies are relevant, among them: D. Elizabeth Martin-Clarke, Culture in Early Anglo-Saxon England (Baltimore 1947) pp. 70-72. and again, ‘Significant Objects at Sutton Hoo’ in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (H.M. Chadwick Memorial Studies), ed. Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge 1950) pp. 107-119, R. J. Cramp, Beowulf and Archaeology,’ MArc 1 (1957) 57-77, an excellent caution to those hoping to bring together Anglo-Saxon archaeology and OE literature; C.L. Wrenn, ‘Recent Work on Beowulf to 1958: Ch. I, Sutton Hoo and Beowulf’ in R.W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, 3rd ed. (Cambridge 1959) pp. 514-23, and cf. his ‘Sutton Hoo and Beowulf’ in Mélanges de linguistique et de philologie: Fernand Mossé in memoriam (Paris 1959) pp. 495-507, repr. in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, comp. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame 1963) pp. 311-30; H.R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Archaeology and Beowulf’ in G. Norman Garmonsway and Jacqueline Simpson, Beowulf and its Analogues (London 1968) pp. 350-60.

38 Esp. Sune Lindqvist (trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford), ‘Sutton Hoo and Beowulf,’ Antiquity 22 (1948) 131-40. Other studies include (esp. on the genealogies) J.L.N. O’Loughlin, ‘Sutton Hoo – The Evidence of the Documents,’ MArc 8 (1964) 1-19. Rupert Bruce-Mitford’s important paper, ‘The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: Recent Theories and Comments on General Interpretation,’ Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 25 (1949) 1-78, includes a highly relevant section on the Swedish problem pp. 43-72.

39 See Rupert Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo II (London 1978) pp. 158 and 203, and cf. his Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology (London 1974) pp. 210-13.

40 See Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo I, 446 and 470, II, 180 – it is far from certain if the Sutton Hoo textile remains include tapestry fragments at all; but cf. Wrenn in Chambers, Introduction p. 519, where some relationship of the description in the poem and Sutton Hoo is implied.

41 J.B. Bessinger, ‘Beowulf and the Harp at Sutton Hoo,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 27 (1957) 148-68, esp. 154-6 where plosives and strumming on the harp are connected as the basis for some theory of when accompaniment on the harp comes in. R. and M. Bruce-Mitford, ‘The Sutton Hoo Lyre, Beowulf, and the Origins of the Frame Harp,’ Antiquity 44 (1970) 7-13 give the theoretical foundations for the current reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo hearpe. John C. Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf... (New Haven 1942 [and rev. ed. 1966]) pp. 88-95 is a sensitive account of how musical accompaniment may have been used with OE verse, but is independent of the Sutton Hoo instrument.

42 See now Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo I, 692-8. Significant studies include Kenneth Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies,’ PBA 39 (1953) 287-346; F.M. Stenton, ‘The East Anglian Kings of the Seventh Century’ in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies ... Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London 1959) pp. 43-52; and O’Loughlin, ‘Sutton Hoo.’

43 Derek Allen, ‘The Sutton Hoo Finds IV. The Coins,’ British Museum Quarterly (1939) 126-8 states clearly that the coins of Sutton Hoo are not datable exactly; his dating underlies all discussion till the 1960s, and is in conflict with early theories attaching the ship-burial to Redwald, even when his death was given a slightly later date than is thought right now, ca. 624 or 625. Among superseded views that led to a date too late for the burial to be associated with Redwald, one by John Allan, in a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries in January 1946 (see Rupert Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Provisional Guide [ London 1947] p. 46), identified one Sutton Hoo coin with a Merovingian coin then dated as of 628-38.

44 See now Bruce-Mitford, Sutton Hoo I, 578-88, esp. 605-78. A clear account of the methods and considerations that led to the redating of Merovingian coins is given in D.M. Metcalf, J.M. Merrick, and L. K. Hamblin, Studies in the Composition of Early Medieval Coins, Minerva Numismatic Handbooks 3 (Newcastle upon Tyne 1968). The interpretation of analyses of the composition of early medieval coins yields very interesting results in connection with the great reduction in the fineness of the coinage of the reign of Dagobert I (whose dates are given most recently as 622-38). Cf. also Rupert Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Handbook (London 1968) p. 48, when there was less agreement than there is now (see the 3rd ed. 1979, p. 87).

45 Handbook, 3rd ed. (London 1979) pp. 89-91. A recent summary of the currently accepted views on the date of the Sutton Hoo coins is that in G. Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and its Germanic Background (Oxford 1980) pp. 30-33.

46 ‘The Purpose of the Sutton Hoo Coins,’ Antiquity 44 (1970) 14-18

47 For Redwald’s double worship see Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford 1969) p. 191 (II.15). According to T. D. Kendrick, ‘The Sutton Hoo Finds,’ British Museum Quarterly 13 (1939) 114, ‘Professor H.M. Chadwick was the first to make the suggestion with which we are now familiar, that we may have nothing less than the memorial and possessions of the only likely person of the age, Redwald, King of East Anglia, who became Bretwalda (High King) of England in 616 and died probably before 626.’ Redwald was the consensus of archaeologists as early as the report of the treasure-trove inquest in The Times of 15 August 1939, 9/1-2, a mere fortnight or so after most of the discovery was made. Chadwick published his views more fully in ‘The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial VIII. Who Was He?’ Antiquity 14 (1940) 76-87.

48 Sec Hoops, Kommentar p. 246 (1. 2263 n.). Klaeber, Beowulf p. 210 (11. 2263-4 n.) refers to earlier discussion; esp. A.S. Cook, ‘The Date of the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Crosses,’ Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 17 (1912) 275-83. Also see F. Roeder in Johannes Hoops, Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde II (Strassburg 1913) s.v. Falkenbeize §§13-16, the information of which is presented by K. Lindner in revised form in the new ed. of the Reallexikon 2/1 (Berlin 1973) s.v. Beizjagd §6.

Knut Stjerna, Essays on Questions Connected with the Old English Poem of Beowulf, trans. and ed. J. R. Clark Hall, Viking Club Publications, extra ser. 3 (Coventry 1912) p. 36 concerns himself with Sweden and hawking there in the early period; but the poet’s basis in reality is England rather than the Scandinavia of his subject-matter, as has been suggested, e.g., in connection with what looks like a Roman road (at 1. 320a); cf. Charles L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment (London 1953), glossary s.v. stānfāh – M. Osborn, ‘Laying the Roman Ghost of Beowulf 320 and 725,’ NM 70 (1969) 246-55 follows sound archaeological opinion in thinking on fāgne flōr (725a) is not likely to refer to a tessellated hall-floor of Roman origin, but seems less well-supported in denying connection with Roman roads in England to the wording Strit wæs stānfāh.

49 As Klaeber, Beowulf p. 394, glossary s.v. sē (at the very end) points out, the def. art./dem. pron. alliterates seven times in the poem, four times with ‘day,’ once with ‘night,’ every time the presumption must be that the use is strongly deictic. But not all are agreed that at 1. 1797b the sense is unequivocally ‘on that distant day long ago’; P.G. Thomas, ‘Further Notes on Beowulf,’ Modern Language Review 22 (1927) 72 prefers ‘on such a day,’ i.e. ‘on that special, but not necessarily distant, day.’ Each interpretation has had followers more recently; I prefer the sense of distant and long ago, because the emphasis of the context at 1. 1797 is on what is customary rather than on what is exceptional, and custom goes better with ancient ways in ancient times than with unique occasions.

50 LI. 175-88. For some possible – if perhaps extreme – implications of that passage, see E.G. Stanley, ‘Hœthenra Hyht in Beowulf’ in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon 1963) pp. 136-51.

51 For Scandinavian paganism in late Anglo-Saxon England, see: Ernst A. Philippson, Germanisches Heidentum bei den Angelsachsen, Kölner anglistische Arbeiten 4 (Leipzig 1929) (who carefully distinguishes Scandinavian from English forms of names); W. Bonser, ‘Survivals of Paganism in Anglo-Saxon England,’ Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society 56 (1932) 37-70 (where Scandinavian paganism in England is not kept sufficiently apart from indigenous Anglo-Saxon paganism); for paganism in English place-names see M. Gelling, ‘Further Thoughts on Pagan Place-Names’ in Otium et Negotium: Studies... Presented to Olof von Feilitzen, ed. F. Sandgren (Stockholm 1973) pp. 109-28; her nn. 2-4 and 8 refer to other important studies.

52 Cf. L. L. Schücking, ‘Das Königsideal im Beowulf,’ Modern Humanities Research Association Bulletin 3, no. 8 (1929) 143-54 and Englische Studien 67 (1932) 1-14, trans, as ‘The Ideal of Kingship in Beowulf’ in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame 1963) pp. 35-49.

53 LI. 18 and 53. Discussions of the confusion of the names are referred to by Klaeber, Beowulf p. xxvi n. 6, and Schaubert, Kommentar p. 17 11. 18f. n. For metrical implications see Bliss, Metre of Beowulf §64 and Pope, Rhythm of Beowulf p. 365 (D27).

54 At the Toronto Conference Dr. A.C. Murray’s paper was devoted to the genealogies. For the standard discussions see above, n. 42.

55 Chambers, Introduction pp. 68-86 sets out the problem clearly, as do most of the standard eds. and commentaries, as well as Sisam in ‘Royal Genealogies.’

56 Offa and Cynewulf both became kings in 757; Cynewulf reigned till 786, Offa till 796.

57 See Alistair Campbell, ed., The Chronicle of Æthelweard (London 1962) pp. 7 and 9.

58 The form at 1. 1686a is, of course, dat. sg.

59 See, e.g., Adolf Noreen, Geschichte der nordischen Sprachen, 3rd rev. ed. [= Hermann Paul, ed., Grundriss der germanischen Philologie IV] (Strassburg 1913) §85.9a; but cf. Hjalmar Lindroth, ‘Är Skåne de gamles Scadinavia?’ Namn och Bygd 3 (1915) 10-28 on the etymological connection between the two names.

60 ‘Heldennamen in mehrfacher Lautgestalt,’ ZfdA 52 (1910) 97-107, repr. in Kleine Schriften (Berlin 1969) II, 546-54

61 Cf. Chambers, Introduction pp. 286-7.

62 Cf. Chambers, loc. cit., and his Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge 1912) p. 199.

63 The connection between Horend, Hjarrandi, and Heorrenda has been discussed often, e.g. Friedrich Panzer, Hilde-Gudrun (Halle 1901) pp. 310-12. For the Middle High German text see Ernst Martin, Kudrun, (Zacher’s) Germanistische Handbibliothek 2 (Halle 1872) pp. 86-103; see also Kemp Malone, Deor, 4th ed. (London 1966) p. 39.

64 Wrenn, Beowulf pp. 34-5; cf. Zupitza-Davis, Beowulf p. 65, and Kemp Malone, ed., The Nowell Codex ... EEMF 12 (Copenhagen 1963) p. 68 who reads dini (i.e. wun/dini). See also above, n. 31.

65 Kommentar p. 94 (1. 1382 n.)

66 Sisam’s note on the problem (see above, n. 31) was first published in the subsection ‘On the Authority of Old English Poetical Manuscripts’ of his ‘Notes on Old English Poetry,’ RES 22 (1946) 263 n.

67 See A.S.C. Ross, ‘The Linguistic Evidence for the Date of the “Ruthwell Cross”,’ Modern Language Review 28 (1933) 145-55; F. Saxl, ‘The Ruthwell Cross’ in England and the Mediterranean Tradition, ed. Fritz Saxl and R. Wittkower (Oxford 1945) pp. 1-19.

68 See R.I. Page, ‘Language and Dating in Old English Inscriptions,’ Anglia 77 (1959) 385-408; and E. Mercer, ‘The Ruthwell and Bewcastle Crosses,’ Antiquity 38 (1964) 268-76. Cook, ‘Ruthwell and Bewcastle Crosses’ (see above, n. 48) concluded that the crosses were of a very late date, and has not won agreement; but W.G. Collingwood, Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (London 1927) p. 119 dated the Ruthwell Cross ‘rather late in the eighth century’ – a date similar to that now accepted. Both linguistic and art-historical considerations are conveniently discussed in the intro. of Michael Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood (Manchester 1970).

69 That does not apply to the much-discussed runic spelling flodu of the Franks Casket; see the standard discussion by R.I. Page, An Introduction to English Runes (London 1973) pp. 176-7, and cf. E.G. Stanley, ‘The Oldest English Poetry Now Extant,’ Poetica (Tokyo) 2 (1974) 3. The Franks Casket is a clear example of an inscription of early date with both North Germanic and Christian Latin subjects, e.g. Egil and the Magi and the Destruction of Jerusalem, suggestive of a civilization not far distant from that which many readers of Beowulf think lies behind that poem. But Egil was familiar enough to a later English enigmatist for him to enshrine a form of his name in a rebus in the Harley Psalter of the early years of the second quarter of the eleventh century – cf. E.G. Stanley, ‘Geoweortha: Once Held in High Esteem’ in J.R.R. Tolkien ... Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca and London 1979) pp. 107-8.

70 See George P. Krapp and E.V.K. Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, ASPR 3 (New York 1936) Riddle 35.

71 The evidence is given by Klaeber, Beowulf p. 278 n. 2: both 2299a and 1889a are often emended away; 1980b is well discussed by Schaubert, Kommentar p. 118, and see also Elliott V.K. Dobbie, ed., Beowulf and Judith, ASPR 4 (New York 1953) p. 218.

72 The evidence is given by Klaeber, Beowulf p. 278 §17.

73 Professor John C. Pope suggested in discussion at Toronto that the form hea(h)an is a special case: the decontraction is introduced even in late OE to avoid confusion with hean ‘abject.’ (At Gloria I, 27a, however, such confusion is not likely.)

74 See A. Lichtenheld, ‘Das schwache Adjectiv im Ags.,’ ZfdA 16 (1873) 325-93, and Adriaan J. Barnouw, Textkritische Untersuchungen nach dem Gebrauch des bestimmten Artikels und des schwachen Adjectivs in der altenglischen Poesie (Leiden 1902). Barnouw’s elaborate work suffers from his failure to remove from the listings cases where -an could be a late OE development of -um in the dat. sg. and pl. of adjectives, i.e. a phonological development in reduced stress and not a significant morphological feature. Lichtenheld in his account had given separate consideration to instrumentals.

75 Carl Richter, Chronologische Studien zur angelsächsischen Literatur ,,, Studien zur englischen Philologie 33 (Halle 1910) pp. 90 and 97 on Genesis B and Judith comes to acceptable results, but his methodology is no longer acceptable; cf. also E.G. Stanley, ‘Studies in the Prosaic Vocabulary of Old English Verse,’ NM 72 (1971) 389-90.

76 Cf. Richter, Chronologische Studien p. 98; and see René L.M. Derolez, Runica Manuscripta: The English Tradition, Rijksuniversiteit te Gent Faculteit van de Wijsbegerte en Letteren 118 (Bruges 1954) pp. 419-21.

77 See Derolez, Runica Manuscripta pp. 399-401.

78 Cf. the eds. of the poem, by Frederick Norman (London 1933) pp. 6-7, and by Arne Zettersten (Manchester 1979) p. 12.

79 See Alistair Campbell, ed., The Tollemache Orosius... EEMF 3 (Copenhagen 1953) pp. 16-17; and Ker, Catalogue nos. 39 and 133.

80 The Alfred Jewel (Oxford 1901) pp. 18-21. See Dobbie, A-S Minor Poems p. 110 1. 13.

The connection of the Alfred Jewel with the king is an ancient orthodoxy. The name and the splendour of the Jewel are suggestive, but, of course, not conclusive. Fairly recently David M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Ornamental Metalwork... (London 1964) p. 6 n. tries to give weight to doubts in the connection, but he does so without sufficient attention to the linguistic evidence in West-Saxon texts of poetic mec and heht.

81 Dream of the Rood p. 66 n.

82 It is said to be of the tenth or eleventh century; see Elisabeth Okasha, Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge 1971) no. 118. (Another inscription [with mec used twice] is referred to by Swanton in his note. For the details, see Wilson, A-S Metalwork p. 141 [no. 30]. The use of mec is significant as a prosopopoetic use, but if the provenance is correctly given in the Sloane catalogue as Lancashire the use of mec for me would be normal in the dialect, unlike the use of mec in the Berkshire inscription, which is significantly poetic.)

83 Studies pp. 120-21

84 Sisam, Studies p. 95

1 The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York 1981), pp. 259-60.

2 This afterword does not survey the debate that has flourished since the publication of The Dating of Beowulf. It would be foolish to attempt such a survey after the searching essay by Roy Michael Liuzza, On the Dating of Beowulf,’ in Beowulf: Basic Readings, ed. Peter S. Baker (New York 1995), 281-302. My debt to Liuzza’s essay will be apparent to anyone who has read it. That arguments about dating Beowulf remain lively is abundantly clear from items summarized in the most recent issue (as I write) of The Year’s Work in Old English Studies; see the Old English Newsletter 28 (1995), pp. 22-3; 42-4. I should also acknowledge my debt to John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor (Princeton: 1994). My thanks as well to Roberta Frank, first for inviting me to write this afterword, and then for engaging in a sustained conversation on what it means to do Old English studies today.

3 This point is nicely illustrated by the fact that a recent collection of essays on Cynewulf offers only two previously unpublished pieces, both of which centre on questions of dating. See Robert E. Bjork, ed., Cynewulf: Basic Readings (New York 1996), pp. 3-55, for pieces by R.D. Fulk and Patrick W. Conner. See, similarly, Jonathon Wilcox, ‘The Battle of Maldon and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 979-1016: A Winning Combination,’ Proceedings of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 3 (1995), pp. 31-50.

4 For the oral formulaicists’ resistance to literacy as a form of ‘ethnographic pastoral,’ see James L. Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’ in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James L. Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1986), pp. 98-121.

5 Colin Chase addresses this matter in his Opinions on the Date of Beowulf, 1815-1980’ pp. 3-4 of this volume.

6 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ PBA 22 (1936), pp. 245-95.

7 Roberta Frank, ‘Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf; p. 123 of this volume.

8 Kevin S. Kiernan, ‘The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript,’ pp. 9-21 of this volume; see also his Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick, N.J. 1981; rprt. with Foreword by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Ann Arbor 1996); and ‘The Legacy of Wiglaf: Saving a Wounded Beowulf; in Beowulf: Basic Readings, ed. Baker, pp. 195-218.

9 Carol Braun Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge 1995), p. 200.

10 Kiernan, ‘The Eleventh-Century Origin,’ p. 20 of this volume.

11 Liuzza, ‘On the Dating of Beowulf; p. 283.

12 For a recent study that works with language and metre to argue an early date for Beowulf, see R.D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia 1992), especially pp. 348-92. For the relation between manuscript study and a late date for Beowulf, see the studies cited in n. 8 above. See also Angus Cameron et al., ‘A Reconsideration of the Language of Beowulf; pp. 33-75 of this volume; and Thomas Cable, ‘Metrical Style as Evidence for the Date of Beowulf; pp. 77-82 of this volume.

13 On these issues, see further Alexander Callander Murray, ‘Beowulf, the Danish Invasions, and Royal Genealogy,’ PP- 101-11 of this volume.

14 Stanley B. Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature (New York 1965), p. 82; Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York 1986), p. 136. At the conclusion of this quotation, Greenfield and Calder add a note citing The Dating of Beowulf. I follow Liuzza in making this comparison.

15 Nicholas Howe, ‘Historicist Approaches’ in Reading Old English Texts, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge 1997), pp. 79-100.

16 For a valuable counter-argument to this assumption, see Colin Chase, ‘Saints’ Lives, Royal Lives, and the Date of Beowulf,’ pp. 161-71 of this volume, especially p. 168.

17 Liuzza, On the Dating of Beowulf p. 295. For fundamental discussions on the relations between formalism and historicism, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore 1978), especially chapter 4; and Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca 1989).

18 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York 1988), p. v.

19 In this regard, it is salutary to reread Ashley Crandall Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts (Cambridge, Mass. 1980) for its cautionary tales about scholars who claimed to have found the key to dating Old English poetic texts. For a recent news report on such a scholar, see John Dugdale, ‘Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?’ The New Yorker, 23 & 30 December 1996, pp. 50-2. This account of David Howlett’s dating of Beowulf in the Alfredian period appears in a special issue of The New Yorker devoted to fiction.

20 Alain Renoir, ‘Old English Formulas and Themes as Tools for Contextual Interpretation,’ in Phyllis Rugg Brown, et al., éd., Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature: Essays in Honour of Stanley B. Green field (Toronto 1986), 65-79, at p. 68. One might note, somewhat sceptically, that Renoir’s critical approach in this essay certainly sits better with an early than a late date for Beowulf. In that sense, his claim to not know the date of the poem should not be taken as meaning that he had no opinion (implicit, in this case, I would suggest) about the matter. For my use of Renoir as a defensive maneouver, see Migration and Myth-making in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven 1989), p. 177, n. 38. If I were writing that note today, I would be more hesitant to quote Renoir though I would still refrain from offering a date for Beowulf.