This important volume will be a must-read not only for the scholar of early English history and literature, but for all those who are interested in practical applications of the new technologies. It also offers a new Introduction in which the author describes the value of electronic study of Beowulf, and a new Appendix that lists all the letters and parts of letters revealed by backlighting. This volume reprints Kiernan's earlier study of the manuscript, in which he presented his novel conclusions about the date of Beowulf. Kiernan, one of the world's foremost Beowulf scholars, has studied the manuscript extensively with the most up-to-date methods, including fiber-optic backlighting and computer digitization. The poem is known only from a single manuscript, which is estimated to date from around 9751025. It has no title in the original document but has become known by the name of the story’s hero. The heroic Anglo-Saxon story survives to the world in one eleventh-century manuscript that was badly burned in 1731, and in two eighteenth-century transcriptions of the manuscripts. Beowulf is an Old English epic poem that survives in a single copy in the manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.The story of Beowulf and his hard-fought victory over the monster Grendel has captured the imagination of readers and listeners for a millennium. Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize?ĭante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated in a Remarkable Illuminated Medieval Manuscript (c. Seamus Heaney Reads His Exquisite Translation of Beowulf and His Memorable 1995 Nobel Lecture
BEOWULF MANUSCRIPT FREE
Learn more about the single manuscript that preserved the epic poem for posterity at the British Library’s website, and see it for yourself in their digital archive.įind Beowulf listed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. Read Tolkien’s famous essay on the poem here, and hear it read in its original language at our previous post. You can hear Heaney read his translation of the poem on Youtube. In Communal Creativity in the Making of the Beowulf Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that. Tolkien and poets like Heaney have done much to shape our appreciation for the ancient work, and we might say that without their interventions, it would not live, as Heaney writes, “in its own continuous present” but in a distant, unrecognizable past. Likewise the poem’s language, Old English, resembles no form of English we’ve encountered before. Nonetheless, though we may all know the general outlines of its hero’s contest with the monster Grendel and his mother, many of the cultural concepts from the world of Beowulf strike modern readers as totally alien. The poem survived long enough to be written down, then became known as great literature these many centuries later, because the rich poetic language and the compelling story it tells captivate us still. These scholarly debates may not interest the average reader much. Some scholars have suggested that the manuscript was made at the end of the 10th century, others in the early decades of the 11th, perhaps as late as the reign of King Cnut, who ruled England from 1016 until 1035.” The Beowulf manuscript itself is identified by name for the first time in an exchange of letters in 1700. The earliest surviving reference to the Nowell Codex was made about 1650, and the prior ownership of the codex before Nowell remains a mystery. Originally “passed down orally over many generations, and modified by each successive bard,” writes the British Library, Beowulf took this fixed form when “the existing copy was made at an unknown location in Anglo-Saxon England.” Not only is the location unknown, but the date as well: “its age has to be calculated by analyzing the scribes’ handwriting. The Beowulf manuscript is known as the Nowell Codex, gaining its name from the 16th-century owner and scholar Laurence Nowell. Now, the British Library’s digitization of that sole manuscript allows us to peel back the layers of canonization and see how the poem first entered a literary tradition. Its narrative elements may belong to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.” Though we’ve come to think of it as an essential work of English literature, Beowulf might have disappeared into the mists of history had not the only manuscript of the poem survived “more or less by chance.” The “unique copy,” writes Heaney, “( now in the British Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated and adapted, interpreted and taught, until it has become an acknowledged classic.”
Irish poet Seamus Heaney-whose work engaged with the ironies and complications of tribalism and nationalism-had a deep respect for Beowulf in the introduction to his translation of the poem, Heaney describes it as a tale “as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language.
0 kommentar(er)
