Many festschrifts begin with an introduction that contains personal anecdotes intended to shed light upon the private life and characteristics of the honorand. Were this volume to feature such an introduction, it would be a source of displeasure to our honorand, who has always preferred to let his work speak for itself and has never been comfortable with sentimental praise. The present introduction focuses on the scholarship of Robert D. Fulk not only because the editors believe he would prefer this, but also because there is no other kind of introduction that any of us could have written. One of the editors (Pascual) has never met the honorand in the flesh, while the other two editors have interacted with him in person at only a handful of conferences. Such limited interaction ensures that we are not working under the spell of personal charm or nostalgic affection. What gave impetus to this festschrift, rather, was deep admiration for Fulk's work and a shared conviction that he is the greatest Old English philologist to emerge during the twentieth century. That this conviction is not peculiar to the editors became apparent to us by the tremendous response we received when inviting scholars to contribute to this volume. The ability of this occasion to bring together the top philologists in the profession between the covers of one book is a sign of the respect that our honorand's work commands. Accordingly, one aim of this introduction is to present the rationale behind the widespread admiration that Fulk's scholarship has elicited.

The other aim of this introduction is to indicate how the contents of this volume reflect the themes and concerns that pervade the honorand’s work. One of the most impressive properties of Fulk's corpus is its patent mastery of a multitude of technical disciplines. If the aims of the following essays appear diverse, it is not an accident, but the consequence of honoring a scholar who has contributed to our knowledge of so many different aspects of Old English language and literature.

Old English metrics is a field that has attracted many brilliant minds over the past two centuries, yet in each century, there has been one preeminent scholar whose prolific contributions redefined the field. Eduard Sievers (1885, 1893) provided the foundation for modern metrical studies by explaining the apparently random fluctuation of syllables between lines of Old English poetry. He figured out that standard verses consist of precisely four metrical positions, with each position corresponding to a long stressed syllable, a resolved sequence of a short syllable and its successor, or a variable sequence of unstressed syllables. The discovery of the four-position principle opened the door for metrical investigation into the chronology of Old English poetry, since certain verses could now be seen to require the substitution of archaic forms in order to possess four positions: e.g., the verse transmitted as on flett gæð (Beo 2034b) must have contained the pre-contracted form *gæ-ið when it was composed. Metrists contemporary with Sievers perceived the possibility of deriving a relative chronology from the distribution of verses requiring archaic phonology for scansion, yet it was not until the appearance of R.D. Fulk's A History of Old English Meter (1992) that a comprehensive analysis of the data, informed by advances in Indo-European linguistics, became available. Fulk demonstrated that although the four-position principle obtained throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, language change altered the ability of poets to fill metrical positions with linguistic material. His magnum opus is the definitive exploration of the chronological insights afforded by Sieversian metrics.

Sievers’ discoveries also revolutionized the textual criticism of Old English poetry. The application of his metrical system revealed that a small percentage of transmitted verses failed to possess four metrical positions, while also failing to take the form of licensed exceptions (e.g., A3 and D* verses) to this rule. Textual critics have consequently sought to emend the relevant passages, proceeding under the assumption that unmetrical verses do not reflect the compositional tendencies of poets, but are instead the products of scribal corruption. Conservative editors, however, generally refrain from emending metri causa, and scholars opposed to emendation frequently contend that meter provides no reliable insights into a work's textual history. Suspicion of meter pervades the scholarly literature on editing Old English poetry, yet Fulk has critiqued this trend, suggesting that such suspicion is based more in faith than in reason.

The correspondences between the names in the Scylding genealogy at the beginning of Beowulf and three names in the upper reaches of the genealogy of Æthelwulf in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Beaw, Sceldwa and Sceaf, frequently appear in arguments for a late dating of Beowulf. But these arguments overlook many aspects of Æthelwulf's genealogy that disrupt their case for a late dating. As H. Munro Chadwick pointed out over a century ago, the forms Sceldwa and Beaw found in the Chronicle for Scyld and Beow are not West Saxon spellings, and the -wa suffix of Sceldwa and Tætwa suggests that these forms may be archaic. Thus spelling alone indicates that these names were probably copied from an older, non-West Saxon text. Furthermore, the very presence of these names in the royal pedigree is puzzling. On one level the presence of Scyld is easy to explain: Scyld and the Scyldings were famous in heroic legend, and his inclusion in Æthelwulf's pedigree provides reflected glory for the West Saxon dynasty and implies genealogical, political and cultural connections between the West Saxons and the Danes that could be useful for Alfred and his heirs to foster. But on another level his inclusion is rather surprising: according to genealogical conventions, the presence of Scyld implies that the West Saxon royal family is a cadet branch of the Scylding dynasty, and is thus potentially subordinate to Scandinavian rulers in England claiming direct descent from Scyld.

Since the date of the Beowulf manuscript is widely agreed upon, the very question which prompts this volume (and the conference it derives from, and even the 1980 conference with its 1981 proceedings volume) must assume that the date of the poem may not be the same as the date of the manuscript. It is certain that there must have been a moment of first inscription for the poem, and that the time and place of that moment remains a central point of interest for students of the poem. In this essay, I will bring new evidence to bear on this venerable question, and my argument shall be that Beowulf is metrically conservative according to a variety of independent metrical criteria. Further, I will suggest that that conservatism is so varied and consistent as to strongly indicate that the original version of Beowulf must be placed among the very earliest of the longer narrative Old English poems that survive, probably in the eighth century.

Of course, it remains true, I believe, that the moment of inscription is only one of the moments of interest which might engage modern scholars of the poem. As I argued in Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse, our focus on authorship (and on moments of authorship) may sometimes cause us to lose sight of what can be gained by also considering audience, and I proposed there two later audiences for Beowulf, one located at Alfred's Wessex court in the late ninth century, and another, sometime around the turn of the eleventh century, perhaps in Canterbury, represented most clearly by the author of Maldon.

As the introduction to this collection makes clear, the various forms of linguistic and metrical evidence bearing on the dating of Beowulf point to a date of composition fairly early in the Anglo-Saxon period. In his article for The Dating of Beowulf in 1980, Thomas Cable proposed a rough guide to the metrical dating of poems using the incidence of type C, D, and E verses, which decline in frequency over the Anglo-Saxon period. Cable's criterion places Beowulf toward the beginning of a relative chronology. Since then, much additional metrical and linguistic evidence has been gathered that places Beowulf in the early to mid-eighth century. R.D. Fulk's A History of Old English Meter is the most substantial work of this kind, for it examines the presence of archaic metrical features through-out the corpus of Old English poetry and finds that Beowulf is by far the most archaic poem. Since that work, other scholars have written articles on individual metrical or linguistic features of the poetic corpus, which have corroborated the conclusions that Fulk so carefully reached.

Some scholars, however, remain dubious about the reliability of this type of evidence. At this point, the force of linguistic scholarship is too formidable to be undermined by the doubts raised by E.G. Stanley, who urged that the poem should not be dated by means of sundry linguistic oddities that could well be scribal error or just a few bad lines.

From the publication of the poem's editio princeps in 1815 to the emergence of the present collection two centuries later, few topics in Anglo-Saxon studies have generated as much speculation and scholarship as the dating of Beowulf. Marshaling disparate forms of evidence and argumentation, scholars have assigned dates to Beowulf that range from the seventh to the eleventh century. Various individuals have been unpersuasively identified as the author of Beowulf and dozens of kings, clerics, and contexts have been associated with the poem's genesis. Scholarship on the dating of Beowulf is markedly uneven in quality: alongside sober and thoughtful argumentation, there has been a great deal of improbable hypothesizing about the author of the poem or the milieu in which it was composed. Awareness of the qualitative differences in the scholarly literature is tacitly registered in the relative frequency with which publications are cited, but these differences have rarely received explicit discussion. This introduction to the dating of Beowulf controversy examines the changing standards of evidence, methodology, and argumentation that have attended this topic, particularly in the past thirty years. The dating of Beowulf has not been a static or monolithic subject, but has undergone considerable change in the disputes it connotes and the practices it encompasses. In the following account, emphasis will be given to the reasons for prevailing opinions rather than to the multiplicity of opinions as such.