Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

MY AIM IN writing this book has been to try to answer the question of the provenance of Beowulf, that is to say, where and when the poem was originally composed.

Such an undertaking may seem superfluous, given that there is not the slightest disagreement on this point and that the poem has been the subject of two hundred years of intensive research. In the end, though, a view that has no basis in either a thorough primary investigation or a recurring discussion of the subject is a challenge that is impossible to resist.

The one existing manuscript of Beowulf very narrowly escaped the devastating fire that ravaged the Cotton Library at Ashburnham House in Westminster, London, on 23 October 1731, apparently by being thrown out of a window at the last minute. As the wall behind the bookcase in which the manuscript was kept had started to burn, most of its leaves are badly scorched along their outer edges. The manuscript has been very fragile ever since, and has been restored on several occasions since the middle of the nineteenth century, one of them very recent (Harrison 2009). After the fire it was transferred to the British Museum, but it has now belonged for many years to the British Library.

The precarious history of the only preserved manuscript of the poem gives us cause for reflection:

If the Beowulf manuscript had been destroyed […] no one could guess that a poem of such a quality had once existed. There could be no compelling reason to believe that any Germanic people had developed the art of secular heroic poetry to epic proportions, or if it had, that such an epic would deviate so sharply from the classical tradition as well as from most current aesthetic norms. (Niles 1983a, 249)

Today, Beowulf may seem to be one of a kind, but in the world in which it was once created, it might perhaps have been no more unique than a star in the heavens.

The metre of the poem corresponds to an archaic, common Germanic fornyrðislag. Roughly the same metre is found in the Heliand and the Hildebrandslied and in early eddic poetry, and can be made out in some Scandinavian runic inscriptions from the Migration Period.

The basic story of the poem is well known. It consists of three main parts, the first of which is linked to the second, which is in turn linked to the third.