Introduction

The Beowulf manuscript is in the curious position of being both heavily studied and rather undervalued. The sole surviving witness to the longest and finest work of Old English poetry, it is also a small, late, and imperfect copy which was furthermore significantly damaged by fire in 1731. Containing four other texts along with the famous poem, the Nowell Codex has more to tell us, and deserves closer attention. It is – so it seems to me – a creative and ambitious project undertaken in the vernacular by an eleventh-century community. Yet almost all previous engagements have been more interested in critiquing its preservation of Beowulf than in the manuscript as a whole, and most have examined only parts of the artefact with the intention of making targeted sug- gestions. In the present study, my hope is both to engage with the manuscript on its own terms, and to use it to consider what the reproduction of texts can tell us about the function of literature in late Anglo-Saxon England. The most significant work on the manuscript is that by Kevin Kiernan, whose landmark volume, which focuses on the presentation of Beowulf, was first published over thirty years ago.1 Numerous scholars have looked at how effectively (or not) the two scribes who worked on the manuscript presented the poem, primarily with the intention of assessing which of them was more accurate.2 A very significant amount of work – far more than can be repre- sented in a study of this kind – has been done on Beowulf as a text, with some response to its manuscript representation and potential meanings or value in late Anglo-Saxon England.3 The manuscript is, though, often regarded as a late

1 Kiernan, ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript. For a balanced review of the controversy thereby generated see Orchard, Companion, p. 20. 2 Bernhard ten Brink, ‘Beowulf’: Untersuchungen, Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Culturgeschichte der germanischen Völker 62 (Strasburg, 1888); Charles Davidson, ‘Differ- ences Between the Scribes of Beowulf’, Modern Language Notes 5.2 (1890), 43–45; Charles McClumpha, ‘Differences Between the Scribes of Beowulf’, Modern Language Notes 5.4 (1890), 123; Charles Davidson, ‘Differences Between the Scribes of Beowulf’, Modern Lan- guage Notes 5.6 (1890), 189–190; Hulbert, ‘B-Scribe’; Klegraf, ‘Faithful Copying’; Senra, ‘Scribal Writing Habits’; Kiernan, ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript; Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ‘The Nowell Codex and the Poem of Beowulf’, The Dating of ‘Beowulf’, ed. Colin Chase (Toronto, 1997), 23–32. 3 A full Beowulf bibliography 1990–2012 edited by Kevin Kiernan is available at , last accessed 13/5/16; see also Kevin Kiernan, ed., with Ionut Emil Iacob, programming, The Electronic ‘Beowulf’ 4.0: Fourth Edition, online at , online since 2015, last accessed 13/5/16. See also Orchard, Com- panion, and Bjork and Niles, Handbook. Full surveys of early scholarship are in Birte Kelly’s

2 Introduction and debased record of the poem and most studies are consequently uninter- ested in its representation therein other than to work past its errors towards an earlier incarnation.4 Relatively few analyses, then, have considered why the poem might have inspired reproduction in the late Anglo-Saxon period or what it has to tell us about scribal approaches.5 The texts other than Beowulf have been studied both in their own right and in comparison with the longer

‘The Formative Stages of Beowulf Textual Scholarship Parts i and ii’, ase 11 and 12 (1982 and 1983), 247–274 and 239–275 respectively. More recent book-length studies on various aspects of the poem are Helen Damico, ‘Beowulf’ and the Grendelkin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh- Century England, Medieval European Studies 16 (Morgantown, wv, 2015); Leonard Neidorf, ed., The Dating of ‘Beowulf’: A Reassessment (Cambridge, 2014); Peter Baker, Honour, Exchange, and Violence in ‘Beowulf’, Anglo-Saxon Studies 20 (Cambridge, 2013); Nick olas Haydock and Edward Risden, ‘Beowulf’ on Film: Adaptations and Variations (London, 2013). Studies that engage with the poem in its manuscript include Mark Faulkner, ‘Teaching Beowulf in its Manuscript Context’, Teaching ‘Beowulf’ in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Howell Chickering, Allen J. Frantzen and R.F. Yeager, mrts 449 (Tempe, az, 2014), 169–175; Andy Orchard, ‘Read- ing Beowulf Now and Then’, Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 12 (2003–04), 49–81; Orchard, Companion; Kevin Kiernan, ‘The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf-Manuscript’, Dating, ed. Chase (1997), 9–22; Orchard, Pride and Prodigies; Kiernan, ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript; Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Compilation of the Be- owulf Manuscript’, Studies in the History of Old English Literature, ed. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford, 1953), 65–96. 4 For example, Bjork and Niles’ Handbook does not have manuscript studies as one of its eighteen chapters though the scribes’ efforts are noted at several points; for a recent study of scribal competence see Leonard Neidorf, ‘Scribal Errors of Proper Names in the Beowulf Manuscript’, ase 42 (2013), 249–269. On scribal (in)competence more generally, see Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Authority of Old English Poetical Manuscripts’, Studies, ed. Sisam (1953), 29–44; first printed in res 22 (1946), 257–268. Most recently, all of the chapters in Neidorf, Reas- sessment, regard the poem as early and the manuscript as a poor copy by scribes who barely understood what they were working on, although Thomas A. Bredehoft does note that the poem must have been read in the later period, ‘The Date of Composition of Beowulf and the Evidence of Metrical Evolution’, Reassessment, ed. Neidorf (2014), 97–111, at p. 98. 5 On why Beowulf might have mattered in the late Anglo-Saxon period, see (with strongly divergent views) Damico, ‘Beowulf’ and the Grendelkin; Leonard Neidorf, ‘vii Æthelred and the Genesis of the Beowulf Manuscript’, Philological Quarterly 89 (2010), 119–140. On Beowulf as an example of scribal approaches, see R.D. Fulk, ‘The Origin of the Numbered Sections in Beowulf and in Other Old English Poems’, ase 35 (2006), 91–109; Damian Flem- ing, ‘Ethel-weard: The First Scribe of the Beowulf ms’, nm 105 (2004), 177–186; A.N. Doane, ‘Beowulf and Scribal Performance’, Unlocking the Wordhord: Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr., eds. Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (London, 2003), 62–75; Senra, ‘Scribal Writing Habits’; Kiernan, ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript; Klegraf, ‘Faithful Copying’.