London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv is both highly visible and invisible. This is, one could argue, despite the best efforts of editor Kevin Kiernan to be fair to the codex in his digital rendition of the whole. The Electronic Beowulf contains not only images, descriptions, and scholarly interpretation of Part II, the early eleventh-century Beowulf-manuscript or Nowell Codex, but also Part I, the twelfth-century Southwick Codex. For fifteen years, then, since the first edition of Electronic Beowulf, the whole book has been available for scrutiny – years prior to the manuscript's Open Access virtual rendition on the British Library Digitised Manuscripts website. My essay will concern Vitellius A. xv, but with a focus on Part I of the codex in order to draw attention to the interesting features of this book that deserve to be further studied.

As Cotton Vitellius A. xv now exists, its Table of Contents lists the following items (here with the British Library's foliation):

In this Table of Contents, as in the seventeenth-century list of texts at fol. 2r, what is now called the Southwick Codex (items i–iv) is obviously considered on a par with the Nowell Codex (items v–ix), both volumes part of the same, composite manuscript.