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The formative stages of Beowulf textual scholarship: part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Birte Kelly
Birte Kelly
Affiliation:
Radlett, Hertfordshire
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Extract

Probably it is generally recognized that present-day apprehension of the text of Beowulf owes a great deal to scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century, for most editions carry numerous textual notes attributing readings to authorities such as Grundtvig, Kemble, Thorpe and Grein. But often realization of the debt remains only vague. Much of the achievement of the first editors is, in fact, difficult to define, because it consisted in a gradual development of editorial standards and practices through the solution of many individual problems of word and line division, the establishment of numerous particular sentence structures and the identification of a number of proper names. The readings which editors have felt obliged to supply in order to restore those lost because of damage to the manuscript or to repair scribal errors or omissions can, however, be identified and quantified, and analysis shows that well over half of all such readings adopted by editors from 1950 onwards had been proposed by 1857. It is therefore the nature and significance of the readings supplied by that date which this article aims at demonstrating.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 11 , December 1982 , pp. 247 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 I should like to thank Professor E. G. Stanley, who was my supervisor, for his guidance when I first collected the material for my London University doctoral thesis from which this article arises; and Professor P. A. M. Clemoes, who kindly read my draft and offered much constructive criticism and help in organizing the lists. Any errors which remain are, of course, entirely my own.

2 For details of this and the other works mentioned here, see below, in the list of abbreviations.

3 Grein's edition has 3183 lines instead of the now generally accepted 3182. Without direct access to the manuscript he was unable to determine the number of lines on the most damaged pages: thus lines 3154–5 in Klaeber's edition had become three lines in Grein's edition. Similarly there is a section between lines 2218 and 2230 where Grein's line numbers do not coincide with those of current editions. Otherwise they correspond exactly, making cross references easy. This is not so in the case of either Kemble's edition or Thorpe's. They both use short lines, but it is not possible to divide a line number in either edition by two to find the corresponding line in one of the current editions. The total number of lines in Kemble's edition is 6359 and in Thorpe's 6347.

4 See Grundtvig's translation, p. xxxiii.

5 See Copenhagen, Det kongelige Bibliotek, Grundtvig-Arkivet, fasc. 307. Grundtvig's edited, handwritten edition of the poem appears to have been based on Thorkelin's edition and transcripts with some reference to J. J. Conybeare's notes published in 1826 (see below). Subsequent additions include numerous collation notes in the margin with the signature O or Or (= Originalen) as well as some references to B. Thorpe's edition of 1855.

6 See also Malone, Kemp, ‘Conybeare and Thorkelin’, ES 49 (1968), i–xiGoogle Scholar, and Bolton, W. F., ‘The Conybeare Copy of Thorkelin’, ES 55 (1974), 97–107.Google Scholar

7 For evidence of Kemble's second collation, see his ‘Notes to Beowulf’, London, British Library, Add. 36551.Google Scholar

8 See Westphalen, Tilman, Beowulf 3150–55: Textkritik und Editionsgeschichte (Munich, 1967), pp. 109–24.Google Scholar

9 For details of these editions, see below, in the list of abbreviations.

10 See Hoops, Johannes, ‘Grundsatzliches zur Textkritik des Beowulf’, Beowulfstudien (Heidelberg, 1932), pp. 1–13Google Scholar My time-limits exclude Beowulf with the Finnsburg Fragment, ed. Wyatt, A. J. and Chambers, rev. R. W. (Cambridge, 1914)Google Scholar; the inclusion of this edition would, however, make very little difference to the statistics in part II, since it is another product of the conservative school.