Roberta Frank's presidential address (“A Scandal in Toronto”) at the 2007 annual meeting of the Medieval Academy in Toronto, Canada, sparkled with wit, and imaginatively linked the search for the true date of Beowulf with an entertaining fable based on Conan Doyle's creation of a bumbling Dr Watson as straight man to the brilliant Sherlock Holmes. Turning Doyle upside down, Frank made Holmes – representing the “early daters” – the bumbler and Watson the true sleuth, carefully rebutting, almost in spite of himself, the Holmes-like conjectures of the “early daters.” Now published in Speculum, the address has lost none of its wit, but has gained an impressive set of notes documenting much of the history of the controversy over the date of the poem. Frank's comments on that scholarship sometimes seem rather tilted toward a late dating, as when she quotes Bjork and Obermeier as recommending “a cautious and necessary incertitude,” but that phrase concludes their discussion of the date, author, and audience of the poem. Frank subsequently notes that Bjork and Obermeier take Fulk's metrical arguments as “seemingly the most reliable test” for dating the poem. She does not quote the last sentence in Bjork and Obermeier's discussion of the date of Beowulf – “Advocates of a late Beowulf, however, must contend with the apparent absence of Scandinavian loan words in the poem, the presence of exclusively English forms of personal names, and Kaluza's law.”