Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Beowulf and Language History
- 2 Germanic Legend, Scribal Errors, and Cultural Change
- 3 Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England
- 4 The Limits of Conservative Composition in Old English Poetry
- 5 The Date of Composition of Beowulf and the Evidence of Metrical Evolution
- 6 Beowulf and the Containment of Scyld in the West Saxon Royal Genealogy
- 7 History and Fiction in the Frisian Raid
- 8 ‘Give the People What They Want’: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy
- 9 A Note on the Other Heorot
- 10 Beowulf and Conversion History
- 11 Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts
- 12 Scandals in Toronto: Kaluza's Law and Transliteration Errors
- 13 Afterword: Beowulf and Everything Else
- Index
13 - Afterword: Beowulf and Everything Else
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Beowulf and Language History
- 2 Germanic Legend, Scribal Errors, and Cultural Change
- 3 Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England
- 4 The Limits of Conservative Composition in Old English Poetry
- 5 The Date of Composition of Beowulf and the Evidence of Metrical Evolution
- 6 Beowulf and the Containment of Scyld in the West Saxon Royal Genealogy
- 7 History and Fiction in the Frisian Raid
- 8 ‘Give the People What They Want’: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy
- 9 A Note on the Other Heorot
- 10 Beowulf and Conversion History
- 11 Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts
- 12 Scandals in Toronto: Kaluza's Law and Transliteration Errors
- 13 Afterword: Beowulf and Everything Else
- Index
Summary
Arguments about the date of Beowulf are more impassioned than the question seems to merit. Even so, the controversy has its uses. Beowulf is a great work, all agree, but it constitutes only a sliver of the poetic canon and is doubtless more important to Anglo-Saxon culture now than it was a thousand years ago. For all its glory, Beowulf provides no better an index to Anglo-Saxon poetry than Hamlet to Renaissance drama, which is to say that one can know both works well without knowing much about the corpus to which either belongs. It is to welcome and good effect, then, that several chapters in this volume link the date of Beowulf to the date of everything else, which, for purposes of this discussion, is the rest of Old English poetry.
At the Harvard conference, R.D. Fulk argued that the date of the poem's composition is less significant than the means used to hypothesize the date. The introduction to Fulk's Chapter 1 in this volume sums up an extended discussion regarding probability, proof, and linguistic evidence drawn from his History of Old English Meter. Fulk observes that the criteria for dating verse are not uniformly rigorous and that they have not been subjected to uniformly rigorous testing. Words can be counted and their forms analyzed, so that exceptions to linguistic and metrical criteria emerge quickly; in these cases, the relative probability of competing hypotheses can be readily gauged.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dating of BeowulfA Reassessment, pp. 235 - 248Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014