There is a lingering notion among Beowulf scholars, despite Chauncey Tinker's effort to dispel it eighty years ago, that the Beowulf manuscript is slowly but inexorably crumbling away in its modern home in the British Library. The gloomy news for a general audience is that the manuscript, ‘charred at the edges by the fire’ that decimated the Cotton Library in 1731, ‘continues to deteriorate year by year’. A scholarly audience gets the same impression from Norman Davis, who gives us a reproduction of an old transliteration beside new photographs of the manuscript. He says, ‘Zupitza's transliteration … has permanent value as a record of what he could see in the manuscript in 1880–2’, a comment that certainly implies that Zupitza was able to see more in the manuscript a century ago than we can see today. In fact, with the aid of modern artificial lighting, notably fibre-optic and ultra-violet light, we can see far more in the manuscript today than Zupitza was able to see in 1882.