Beowulf - Kevin S. Kiernan (essay date 1981)
Kevin S. Kiernan (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: An Introduction to “Beowulf” and the “Beowulf” Manuscript, Rutgers University Press, 1981, pp. 3-12.
[In the essay below, Kiernan reviews historical and linguistic evidence which he contends indicates that Beowulf is contemporary with the extant manuscript.]
It may well be surprising that a study of Beowulf in conjunction with its unique ms represents a radical departure from all previous approaches to the poem. In fact, the Beowulf ms has scarcely been studied at all. It still holds a wealth of undiscovered paleographical and codicological evidence, which, under ordinary circumstances, textual scholars would have uncovered and weighed long ago, as a matter of course, for the purpose of founding a reliable text. This evidence has remained safely hidden away because most editors of the poem have relied on photographic fss of the ms, and, often enough, modern...
[The entire page is 4378 words long]
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