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Leonard Neidorf
Nanjing University
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All content following this page was uploaded by Leonard Neidorf on 19 April 2018.
Leonard Neidorf
To cite this article: Leonard Neidorf (2018) The Archetype of Beowulf, English Studies, 99:3,
229-242, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2018.1436284
Article views: 9
Of the great mass of books and articles written about Beowulf each year, a very small per-
centage is credited, disputed and elaborated in subsequent scholarship. While the impact
factor of the typical Beowulf article is often minimal, some select pieces manage to change
minds and generate an outpouring of assent, dissent and general comment. One of these
landmark publications is Michael Lapidge’s “The Archetype of Beowulf.” Drawing on
methods developed in classical scholarship, Lapidge endeavoured to reconstruct the
palaeographical characteristics of the script(s) in which Beowulf had been written before
two scribes copied its text into the sole extant manuscript around the year 1000.1 He
observed that five types of transliteration errors in the transmitted text—those involving
a and u, r and n, p and ƿ, c and t, d and ð—can be economically explained by hypothesis-
ing that the poem was first committed to parchment in Anglo-Saxon set minuscule script
prior to the year 750.2 This conjectured archetype possesses the right combination of
orthographic features and spelling practices needed to give rise to the transliteration
errors, which entered into the poem’s text on account of the difficulties that later
scribes experienced while copying from an archaic exemplar. C. L. Wrenn, Johan Gerritsen
and Peter Clemoes had previously suggested that certain scribal errors in the Beowulf
manuscript indicate that the poem existed in writing long before the year 1000, but the
case for an archaic archetype had never been so clearly and comprehensively made
before Lapidge’s landmark article.3
In the contentious world of Beowulf scholarship, where much is written and little is
believed, the number of scholars who have expressed credence in Lapidge’s argument is
impressive. Many scholars cite it as one of their principal reasons for regarding Beowulf
as an early composition, and for some scholars, it is the only work they deem necessary
to cite when discussing this subject.4 Of course, any argument that commands such wide-
spread assent in Beowulf studies will not go unopposed. Two critiques of Lapidge’s article
have emerged, the first from E. G. Stanley and the second from Roberta Frank, which
together raised a variety of piecemeal criticisms.5 Their objections went on to be system-
atically rebutted in two rejoinders from George Clark, who demonstrated that some were
levelled in error and the rest provide little reason to doubt Lapidge’s argument.6
A. N. Doane, meanwhile, elevated the credibility of Lapidge’s method when he discerned
a similar pattern of transliteration errors in Genesis A, a work that had long been conjec-
tured for independent reasons to be one of the earliest Old English poems.7 Whether posi-
tive or negative, the responses to Lapidge have one characteristic in common: they evaluate
his claims on the basis of the evidence adduced in his article. This is an understandable
practice, which would be unproblematic in most areas of medieval studies, but Beowulf
textual scholarship has advanced considerably since Lapidge’s article was published.
The intervening years have witnessed a deluge of publications, including wide-ranging
studies from R. D. Fulk, dozens of notes from Alfred Bammesberger and important
works of synthesis from Andy Orchard.8 The hitherto unpublished textual commentary
of J. R. R. Tolkien was also recently made available.9 But the most important development
by far was the publication of the fourth edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf (henceforth Klaeber
IV), which has become the standard text invariably cited in professional scholarship.10
When Lapidge wrote “The Archetype of Beowulf,” there was some uncertainty about
the standard text of the poem. Many scholars continued to cite from the third edition
of Klaeber’s Beowulf, but it was half a century old by then, and its authority in textual
matters had waned on account of the publication of many new editions of the poem in
the intervening decades, from the likes of E. V. K. Dobbie (1953), C. L. Wrenn (1953),
Else von Schaubert (1963), Howell Chickering (1977), George Jack (1994), Michael
Swanton (1997) and Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (1998).11 Writing at a time
when the throne was vacant, Lapidge prudently based his study not on any one edition
of Beowulf, but on the general consensus of the entire editorial tradition. That is to say,
the transliteration errors he adduced were limited to emendations that had been “accepted,
if not unanimously, at least by a great majority of editors.”12 Delimiting evidence accord-
ing to this criterion has the virtue of ensuring that scholars cannot reasonably doubt that
the errors are genuinely errors, but it runs the risk of omitting a great deal of relevant data.
The editorial tradition has been, after all, one dominated by a spirit of textual conserva-
tism, with many editors striving to discard the emendations of their predecessors.13 The
emergence of Klaeber IV as the authoritative standard places one in a position to reconsi-
der Lapidge’s claims on the basis of a different and arguably superior body of evidence.
The universal reliance upon this edition in professional scholarship suggests that the
5
Stanley, “Paleographical and Textual Deep Waters”; Frank.
6
Clark, “Date of Beowulf”; Clark, “Scandals in Toronto.”
7
Doane, ed., Genesis A, 37–41.
8
From Fulk, see “Six Cruces in Beowulf,” “Some Contested Readings,” “Some Emendations,” “Some Lexical Problems”; from
Bammesberger, see “Eight Notes,” “Hildeburh’s Son”; from Orchard, see Critical Companion, 12–56, “Reading Beowulf.”
9
Tolkien, 131–353.
10
Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds.
11
Dobbie; Wrenn, ed., Beowulf; von Schaubert; Chickering; Jack; Swanton; Mitchell and Robinson.
12
Lapidge, “Archetype of Beowulf,” 9. In assessing the editorial tradition, Lapidge relied on the work of Birte Kelly: see Kelly,
“Formative Stages: Part I” and “Formative Stages: Part II.”
13
The prevalence of textual conservatism among editors of Beowulf is discussed (and critiqued) by Lapidge in “Edition,
Emendation, and Reconstruction” and “On the Emendation”; it is also critiqued in Fulk, “Textual Criticism,” as well as
in Orchard, Critical Companion, 49–56. A more sanguine perspective on the rise of textual conservatism is expressed
in Stanley, “Unideal Principles.”
ENGLISH STUDIES 231
present author is not alone in believing that its judgment in textual matters is superior
overall to the judgment reflected in any other edition of the poem.14
The present article thus aims to update and, in certain respects, revise Lapidge’s argu-
ment about the archetype of Beowulf in the light of the readings adopted in Klaeber IV and
other recent developments in textual scholarship. Thanks in large part to the impetus that
Lapidge’s work gave to other scholars, we are now in a much better position to understand
the textual history of Beowulf, the duration of its transmission and the behaviour of the
scribes who copied it out. Current knowledge necessitates the reconsideration not of
every aspect of Lapidge’s argument, but of a few areas of particular importance. One of
these areas is the scribal confusion of the letters d and ð. Of the five kinds of transliteration
error Lapidge focused on, the confusion of d and ð carries the weightiest chronological
implications, since it suggests that a written text of Beowulf existed at a time when
Anglo-Saxon scribes used d to represent both the dental fricative and the alveolar stop.
The practice is evident, for example, in the word spelt mōdgidanc (=mōdgiðanc) in the
Northumbrian version of Cædmon’s Hymn, where d can be seen to serve both purposes.
By the middle of the eighth century, however, scribes ceased to use d in this manner and
came increasingly to use ð to represent the dental fricative. Recent studies of early glos-
saries and coin epigraphy from Annina Seiler and Philip A. Shaw confirm that well
before the end of the eighth century ð had completely displaced d as the letter for repre-
senting the dental fricative, while d came exclusively to represent the alveolar stop.15
Accordingly, if there are traces in the transmitted text of Beowulf of an archetype that
made use of d to represent both sounds, such residue provides firm reason to believe
that Beowulf existed in writing before the middle of the eighth century.
When Lapidge made his case for the archaic dual-usage of d in the archetype of
Beowulf, he did so on the basis of seven manuscript readings where, according to editorial
consensus, d and ð (or þ) have been confused. In the edited text of Klaeber IV, however,
there are as many as fourteen instances of d/ð confusion:
Some comment is necessary to account for the presence of the seven readings that are here
added to the seven that Lapidge had adduced (1107a, 1278b, 1362b, 1837a, 1991a, 2064a,
2959b). Two readings (1331b, 3119a) appear to have been simply overlooked by Lapidge,
since a consensus of editors had already emended them. Three of the readings (414a, 976a,
1375a) were long subject to divergent editorial treatment, but the necessity of emendation
involving the alteration of d and ð has now been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt
in the text-critical scholarship of Fulk.16 The remaining two readings (1707a, 2965a) have
received divergent editorial treatment not so much because the authorial reading was in
doubt, but because the reading in the manuscript itself was disputed; more recent inves-
tigation, aided by technological advances, has cleared up the manuscript reading and the
correspondent need for emendation.17 In addition to the fourteen readings cited above,
note should be taken of three instances of d/ð confusion where the scribes corrected
their own errors:
In total, then, there appear to have been seventeen instances of d/ð confusion in the trans-
mitted text of Beowulf, three of which were corrected by the scribes, fourteen of which
were corrected by editors.18
This augmented figure both strengthens Lapidge’s argument and permits the detec-
tion of a previously unrecognised pattern. It is perhaps significant that in eleven of
the seventeen instances, the scribes transmitted ð (or þ) where d was required. What
this pattern suggests is that the scribes, working with an exemplar where d was fre-
quently used to represent both the dental fricative and alveolar stop, became vigilant
against this archaic practice and developed a tendency toward hypercorrection. In
other words, if the scribes were frequently altering d to ð while transcribing the
poem, the continual need to make this alteration would have primed them to make
the alteration erroneously. The plausibility of the scribes developing such a tendency
is elevated by the presence in the text of Beowulf of many hypercorrect forms, which evi-
dently result from the scribes mechanically altering readings in a manner that would
elsewhere have been consonant with their efforts to modernise and Saxonise the
archaic and Anglian forms of their exemplar. Hypercorrection is most clearly apparent
in readings where the presence of æ in place of e results in the transmission of a genuine
lexeme that deprives the text of sense in its immediate context: for example, preterite
wæs appearing in the manuscript where imperative wes is plainly required (407a; see
also 250b, 411b, 1171b, 2259a, 2819b, 3119a).19 What lies behind these errors is doubt-
less the frequent scribal alteration of Anglian e to West Saxon æ. The scribes grew so
accustomed to this alteration in the course of transmission that they erroneously con-
verted e to æ on at least seven occasions. The same tendency toward hypercorrection
16
See Fulk, “Some Emendations,” 162–4; Fulk, “Some Lexical Problems,” 146–7, 150–1; on l. 414a, see also Tolkien, 225.
17
See Fulk, “Some Contested Readings,” 196–7, 200.
18
Orchard, “Reading Beowulf,” 68–75, appears to have accidentally omitted l. 2028a from his list of scribal self-corrections;
this correction is reported, however, in Zupitza and noted in Fulk, “Some Emendations,” 163–4.
19
On this recurrent hypercorrection, see Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds, cxxx (“Language,” §2.1).
ENGLISH STUDIES 233
appears to be responsible for the many erroneous readings where ð (or þ) is written
instead of d.
Confronting the seventeen instances of d/ð confusion in the transmitted text of
Beowulf, scholars can account for this phenomenon in one of two ways: we can, with
Lapidge, explain all of these errors with a single hypothesis, by regarding the presence
of the overall pattern as the textual residue of an archaic archetype; or we can, with
Stanley, insist that each error is a meaningless accident, reflective merely of scribal care-
lessness, and that, consequently, no explanation for their collective presence is necessary.20
Augmenting the evidence adduced by Lapidge certainly tilts the scale of probability in his
favour, since it increases the explanatory power of his unitary hypothesis, while rendering
Stanley’s view more conjectural, insofar as adherents to his position must maintain that
the same meaningless accident took place seven additional times. Beyond this consider-
ation, it should be noted that there is one particular corruption that tells decisively
against Stanley’s view: the scribal alteration of authorial dēoð (1278b) into the manu-
script’s þeod. It is difficult to believe that scribal inattentiveness accounts for the alteration,
in a single word, of initial d into þ and terminal ð into d. What would appear to lie behind
this double corruption is an archaic archetype in which dēoð was spelt *deod. A later
scribe, wary of the use of d to represent both the dental fricative and the alveolar stop, evi-
dently processed *deod as ðeod, then replaced ð with þ, the letter more commonly used
when the dental fricative appears in word-initial position.21 Another way to account for
this corruption would be to posit that an intermediate copyist altered *deod into ðeod,
which was then respelled by a later scribe as þeod. What will not account for this extra-
ordinary error is the assumption that a scribe would read deoð in his exemplar and inat-
tentively rewrite it as þeod.
The probability that d/ð confusion stems ultimately from scribal difficulty with an
archaic archetype, rather than from mere accident, is elevated by the recurrent presence
of another type of transliteration error with clear chronological significance, the confusion
of a and u. Such confusion would appear to result from the use of the cursive open-headed
a letterform in an antecedent manuscript of Beowulf. This letterform, common in eighth-
century manuscripts, remains in documentary usage until the middle of the ninth century,
but is exceedingly rare thereafter.22 Later scribes, unfamiliar with the open-headed a,
would naturally misread it as u. Lapidge adduced seven instances of a/u confusion in
the transmitted text. The edited text of Klaeber IV adds two further examples (1031b,
1068a) to those that Lapidge had cited:
20
See Stanley, “Paleographical and Textual Deep Waters,” 64–6. Some paleographical considerations militating against
Stanley’s interpretation, pertaining to the second scribe’s ductus, were noted in Clemoes, 33; cf. Clark, “Date of
Beowulf,” 682.
21
The common observation that scribes prefer to use þ in word-initial position is statistically substantiated in Shaw, 119,
n. 7.
22
See Clemoes, 32, n. 77; Lapidge, “Archetype of Beowulf,” 10–20.
234 L. NEIDORF
There is reason to believe, moreover, that confusion of a and u has occurred elsewhere in
the transmitted text. Although they do not emend in these instances, the editors of Klaeber
IV suspect a/u confusion in the manuscript’s sporu (986a), which should probably read
spora, as well as in eaforum (1710a), which should probably read eafora. The unintelligible
manuscript reading wundini, which is emended to wundnan (1382a), is understood by the
editors to represent a minim confusion of wundnū. The authorial form, wundnan, thus
appears to have been corrupted by an intermediate copyist into wundnū, which a later
scribe proceeded to corrupt into wundini. On the whole, then, there are as many as
twelve instances of a/u confusion discernible in the transmitted text of Beowulf. Augment-
ing the evidence adduced by Lapidge once again tilts the scale in his favour, since it is dif-
ficult to believe (with Stanley) that scribes should repeatedly commit the same accidental
error without any paleographical inducement to do so.
The explanatory power of the hypothesis that Beowulf had been committed to parch-
ment before the middle of the eighth century is elevated by its ability to account for a wide
array of other textual peculiarities in the extant manuscript. Because these peculiarities do
not pertain to the five types of transliteration error that Lapidge focused on, they were
naturally omitted from his study. But since this evidence bears directly on the validity
of the hypothesis of an archaic archetype, it commands attention in the present
context. Of particular interest are two readings that exhibit a superfluous u in the immedi-
ate environment of ƿ (which appears in the edited text as w): the manuscript’s guðreouƿ
(58a) and hlæƿū (2296b). The editors of Klaeber IV delete the final ū from the latter and
print the former as it stands, while acknowledging the peculiarity of the apparent ēou
triphthong it contains.23 What probably lies behind both of these aberrant readings is
an archetype that existed before the runic wynn character (ƿ) was regularly used to rep-
resent /w/. In the earliest texts, Anglo-Saxon scribes represented this sound with u or uu,
as can be seen, for example, in the spellings uard, uerc, uuldur, and uundra in Cædmon’s
Hymn or uuiurthit and uueorthae in Bede’s Death Song.24 Seiler’s recent study of the
archaic corpus demonstrates that ƿ became gradually more common in the second half
of the eighth century before it more or less completely displaced the earlier u or uu spel-
lings in the first half of the ninth century.25 Later scribes responsible for the transmission
of Beowulf, grown accustomed to altering u to ƿ, evidently generated guðreouƿ and hlæƿū
by mistakenly replacing uu spellings with ƿ plus u rather than ƿ alone. Their confusion
was likely conditioned by the fact that the uu sequence could be used in archaic texts
to represent /w/ alone (as in uueorthae) or /w/ plus /u/ (as in uuldur).
Other vestiges of archaic orthography are preserved in the transmitted text of Beowulf
on account of the scribes’ inconsistent modernisation of earlier spellings. Sporadic inatten-
tiveness is the probable reason for the transmission of the lexeme normally spelt ecg- as ec-
23
Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds, 326 (“Textual Criticism,” §10).
24
For an edition of these poems with ample discussion of their language and orthography, see Smith.
25
Seiler, 156–61; cf. Hogg, §2.77.
ENGLISH STUDIES 235
on three occasions, in Ecþeow (263b), Ecþeowes (957b) and Eclāfes (980b). The likelihood
that the archetype made regular use of ec- spellings, which are characteristically employed
in eighth-century manuscripts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, is elevated by the appear-
ance in one instance of sec (2863a) in place of secg.26 That the scribes regarded the ec- spel-
ling as an archaism worth eliminating is made plain by the fact that, after committing
ecþeow (263b) to parchment, the scribe went back and inserted a g after ec- to bring it
into line with the manuscript’s orthographic norms. The scribes were evidently less per-
turbed by the archaic þeo spellings they encountered in their exemplar. In the poem’s
transmitted text, þeo forms appear almost as frequently as the later, analogical þeow
forms, with each attested approximately fifteen times. Metre indicates that the þeo
forms are authorial and that the poem was composed before the w in inflected forms of
þeo had been attached to the nominative case through analogy.27 Reasons to regard the
þeo spelling as an archaism include its overall rarity in the corpus of Old English and
its presence in some notably archaic contexts.28 There is also evidence that the scribes
sought to eliminate this spelling: when Scribe B reviewed the work of Scribe A, he
appended a ƿ to wealhþeo (612b), and when he went over his own work, Scribe B
added a ƿ to his own ongenþio (2961a).
Two decades before he disputed Lapidge’s claims concerning the archetype of Beowulf,
Stanley endeavoured to discredit the apparent chronological significance of textual archa-
isms in general by contending: “some single, odd, ancient-looking spelling provides no
firm basis for early dating”.29 It can readily be conceded that a single indicator of an
archaic written text of Beowulf would provide a weak foundation for credence in its exist-
ence. Yet the hypothesis of an archaic archetype is credited not for its ability to account for
one or two peculiar forms, but for its ability to account for a wide range of recurrent errors
and peculiarities in the poem’s transmitted text. If the text contained, for example, only
one or two confusions of a and u, their presence might well be dismissed as meaningless
accidents, reflective of a scribe’s momentary mental lapse. It is not reasonable, however, to
believe that a random accident should repeatedly generate the same outcome. Each of the
indicators of textual antiquity cited above is present more than once in the transmitted
text: there are fourteen instances of d/ð confusion; twelve instances of a/u confusion;
two instances of ƿ/uu confusion; three instances of ec spellings (plus sec); and fourteen
instances of þeo spellings. To these patterns, one could add many individual forms,
such as hrærg, which present peculiarities that may reflect their descent from an archaic
written text.30 The patterns discussed above are sufficient, however, to demand credence
in the hypothesis that Beowulf was committed to parchment before the middle of the
eighth century—a conclusion independently corroborated by much recent research into
the poem’s language and metre.31
26
On this spelling and its chronological significance, see Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds, 174, 258; Fulk, “Beowulf and Language
History,” 26; Hogg, §2.67, n. 1; Ström, 134, 167.
27
See Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds, 327–8 (“Textual Criticism,” §17).
28
See Fulk, “Beowulf and Language History,” 25–6.
29
Stanley, “Date of Beowulf,” 201.
30
On this form as an indicator of textual antiquity, see Girvan, 14; Fulk, History of Old English Meter, §289. Some other poten-
tially archaic spellings are noted in Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds, cxlii (“Language,” §20.1).
31
See, for example, Bredehoft; Cronan, “Poetic Words”; Ecay and Pintzuk; Hartman; Lapidge, “Aspect of Old English”;
Neidorf, “Lexical Evidence”; Neidorf and Pascual; Pascual; Russom. These studies build upon the essential work of
Fulk, A History of Old English Meter, which laid the foundations for subsequent investigation into the chronology of
Old English poetry. See also Fulk, “Archaisms and Neologisms”; Fulk, “Beowulf and Language History.”
236 L. NEIDORF
The chain of reasoning behind the charge of interpolation is worth quoting in full, since
many links in this chain have weakened in the years since Lapidge published the article
under discussion. The weakening of just one of these links would render Lapidge’s position
difficult to maintain, but the rupture of all of them leaves one with little reason to believe
that Hrothgar’s speech contains an interpolation or that the text of Beowulf was substan-
tially recomposed in the course of transmission.
First, it must be noted that Lapidge’s views concerning the dating of vernacular homi-
lies are no longer credible. The assumption that the entire corpus of Old English prose was
composed during or after the reign of King Alfred has never been grounded in any par-
ticularly good evidence, yet it has been widely believed, and it forms the foundation of
Lapidge’s argument for interpolation. It is true that surviving prose works are preserved
predominantly in manuscripts from the tenth and eleventh centuries, but it would be a
grave error to conflate the period of preservation with the period of composition, as the
transmission of Old English poetry (or classical literature, etc.) teaches us. A series of
recent studies from Fulk have identified compelling linguistic reasons to believe that a
32
Lapidge, “Archetype of Beowulf,” 36–40; O’Brien O’Keeffe.
33
Lapidge, “Archetype of Beowulf,” 37; Liuzza, 292–3.
34
See Shippey, “Structure and Unity,” for a concise history of the scholarly effort to attribute portions of Beowulf to multiple
authors or scribes. As Shippey notes, this effort became rather marginal after Liedertheorie fell out of fashion and scholars
increasingly considered Beowulf the masterwork of a single great artist.
35
Lapidge, “Archetype of Beowulf,” 39.
ENGLISH STUDIES 237
substantial portion of the corpus of Old English prose was probably composed well before
the tenth century.36 Fulk observes that with rare exceptions, prose works known to have
been composed after c. 950 conform linguistically to the Late West Saxon literary standard,
but certain undated compositions—such as The Wonders of the East, Alexander’s Letter,
Bald’s Leechbook and many anonymous homilies—exhibit an array of Mercian forms
that are alien to verifiably late prose works. The Mercian prose corpus must therefore ante-
date the Benedictine Reform, and the probable period to which it belongs is not the first
half of the tenth century, but the century-long period of Mercian hegemony under Æthel-
bald (r. 716–57) and Offa (r. 757–96).37 Yet even if all the extant homilies were late com-
positions, their lateness would provide no reason to believe that vernacular preaching did
not exist until the tenth century. As Paul Cavill observes, there is evidence for preaching in
the vernacular from the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.38 If the influence of
such preaching is discernible in some passages in Beowulf, it tells us nothing about their
age or authenticity.
Second, the validity of O’Brien O’Keeffe’s theory of scribal participation has progress-
ively been diminished by more detailed studies of the Old English poems that survive in
multiple manuscript copies. Her theory was erected upon the interpretation of variant
readings in parallel texts as indications that scribes read formulaically and freely recom-
posed Old English poems while transmitting them.39 This interpretation of the data
now appears rather improbable in the light of Peter R. Orton’s more comprehensive
assessment of the variants, which he convincingly explains as signs of incomprehension
and alienation rather than active participation.40 A decisive blow to O’Brien O’Keeffe’s
theory, moreover, has been delivered by the revelation that several of the parallel texts
thought to provide the firmest support for theories of scribal participation—such as
Soul and Body I and II and Daniel and Azarias—actually owe their textual variants to
causes entirely unrelated to scribal practice. Orton demonstrated that a separate poet,
who composed lines 127–66 in Soul and Body I (which is not present in Soul and Body
II), was involved in the transmission of this work, while Paul G. Remley demonstrated
that codicological damage in antecedent Daniel manuscripts, as well as the poet respon-
sible for Azarias, must have generated the peculiar divergences found in these texts.41
Remley concludes, accordingly, that the variant readings in Daniel and Azarias “can no
longer be regarded as evidence for the standard practice of Anglo-Saxon scribes”.42
With these exceptional cases eliminated, the variant readings in parallel texts suggest
little more than that scribes occasionally trivialised what they transmitted.43 Furthermore,
36
See Fulk, “Anglian Dialect Features”; Fulk, “Anglian Features”; Fulk, “Localizing and Dating.” These studies build upon the
significant, but much overlooked, arguments concerning the Mercian prose tradition propounded in Vleeskruyer, 38–71.
37
See Fulk, “Localizing and Dating,” 71–8; pace Bately, “Old English Prose.”
38
Cavill, 37, n. 52. His remarks are levelled in objection to Lapidge, “Archetype of Beowulf,” 39.
39
O’Brien O’Keeffe has not been alone in interpreting textual variation in this manner. Positions similar to her own are
adopted in Doane, “Ethnography of Scribal Writing”; Liuzza; Pasternack.
40
Orton, Transmission of Old English Poetry; for prior critiques of O’Brien O’Keeffe’s interpretation of textual variants, see
Moffat, “Anglo-Saxon Scribes”; O’Donnell.
41
Orton, Transmission of Old English Poetry; Orton, “Disunity ”; cf. Moffat, ed., Old English Soul and Body, 41–4; Remley.
42
Remley, 136.
43
Cf. Orton’s conclusion concerning the generation of variant readings in the parallel texts (Transmission of Old English
Poetry, 28):
Most are satisfactorily explained on the assumption that a scribe has mistaken a legitimate but unfamiliar form in
his exemplar for an error and has changed it into a word he knows … against the idea that these represent
238 L. NEIDORF
the recognition that textual variation cannot uniformly be attributed to scribes collaterally
renders Liuzza’s statistics meaningless, though there are many other reasons to reject his
attempted quantification.44 In short, there is no reason to presume that scribes would have
substantially recomposed the text of Beowulf in the course of its transmission.
Third, the ongoing detection of linguistic regularities in Beowulf has materialised com-
pelling reasons to believe that scribes have not substantially recomposed the poem and
that, consequently, the extant manuscript essentially preserves the work that one author
committed to parchment in the first half of the eighth century. If scribes rewrote one-
fifth of the poem, we should not expect it to exhibit a wide array of linguistic features
that characterise its text and distinguish it from the rest of the poetic corpus. And yet
Beowulf contains more metrical archaisms than any other poem, with its exceptionally
high incidence of verses exhibiting non-parasiting and non-contraction, as well as its
unparalleled adherence to Kaluza’s law.45 These archaisms are not limited to one
portion of the poem, but appear in it from beginning to end, alongside lexical and seman-
tic archaisms in the form of obsolete vocabulary and words preserving their etymological
meanings.46 Beowulf is also distinguished from the rest of the poetic corpus by its idiosyn-
cratic usage of siþðan and þā, not to mention its consistent deployment of the weak adjec-
tive in constructions without a determiner.47 Other minor syntactic features, ranging from
the strict observance of Kuhn’s laws to the preference for combining sē and þe when intro-
ducing relative clauses, renders the language of Beowulf both unique and internally con-
sistent.48 It is difficult to believe that scribes could have recomposed one-fifth of the
poem’s lines without obliterating its archaisms and introducing neologisms. Many of
the linguistic regularities in Beowulf, such as the use of the weak adjective without a deter-
miner, could have been eliminated without disturbing the poem’s sense or metre, yet the
scribes evidently refrained from tampering with the text in this way. Although they modi-
fied its spellings and introduced many mechanical errors, the scribes appear to have trans-
mitted the text of this eighth-century poem without substantially altering its structural
features.
As the preceding paragraphs demonstrate, many recent developments in philological
scholarship reduce the credibility of Lapidge’s suggestions concerning the transmission
of Beowulf after it assumed textual form. Yet even without these developments, Lapidge’s
postulated textual history should not have seemed very plausible in the context where it
was first propounded, appearing as it did after a meticulous catalogue of transliteration
errors in the poem’s transmitted text. Lapidge used these errors persuasively to reconstruct
characteristics of the archetype of Beowulf, but he failed to recognise that their presence
tells strongly against the “recently-acquired understanding of scribal refashioning” that
informed editorial decisions on the part of transcribers is the fact that the new readings do not, generally speaking,
suit the general context at all well; there seems to have been a concern to produce a recognizable word, but the
substitutions show only a very local (i.e. word-bounded) awareness of the sense.
44
See Fulk, “On Argumentation,” 16–23, for an exposition of errors of fact and reasoning involved in Liuzza’s attempted
quantification.
45
These metrical archaisms receive their fullest treatment in Fulk, History of Old English Meter; see also Neidorf and Pascual.
46
For discussion of lexical and semantic archaisms in Beowulf, see Cronan, “Poetic Words”; Cronan, “Poetic Meanings”;
Robinson, 55–7; Neidorf, “Lexical Evidence”; Pascual; Shippey, “Old English Poetry,” 173–5.
47
On siþðan and þā, see Bately, “Linguistic Evidence”; Fulk, “Old English þa”; Shippey, “Old English Poetry,” 177. On the
weak adjective, see Yoon; Fulk, “Archaisms and Neologisms,” 273–4.
48
See Sundquist; Kuhn; Ecay and Pintzuk.
ENGLISH STUDIES 239
he embraces. That is to say, the scribes who committed or preserved so many translitera-
tion errors—which deprive the text of sense, metre and alliteration—plainly were not par-
ticipating in the transmission of the poem in the manner envisioned by O’Brien
O’Keeffe.49 These scribes were copying text as text, transcribing individual words
without processing them as part of a poetic narrative. It is difficult to believe that one
of these scribes, after mechanically introducing or reproducing numerous corruptions
that render the text nonsensical or unmetrical, should suddenly tune in while transcribing
Hrothgar’s speech and spontaneously insert seven lines that are metrically sound and
make excellent sense in their immediate context. There is nothing in the parallel texts
of Old English poems preserved in multiple manuscripts to elevate the plausibility of
this scenario. The parallel texts reveal that scribes occasionally interpolated an extra þā,
sē or þe, not seven additional lines of unobjectionable poetry.
The textual history of Beowulf appears in the final analysis to have been far less eventful
than has often been imagined. Transliteration errors and archaic spellings indicate that the
poem had assumed textual form before the middle of the eighth century, at a time when d
was used to represent the dental fricative and the alveolar stop, when the open-headed a let-
terform was used in cursive scripts, when u and uu were used instead of ƿ, and when ec and
þeo were used instead of ecg and þeow (inter alia). The antiquity of Beowulf suggested by the
textual residue of its archaic archetype is corroborated by the demonstration than the poem’s
language is more archaic, with respect to phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and seman-
tics, than the language of works known to have been composed during the ninth, tenth and
eleventh centuries.50 The preservation of linguistic and metrical archaisms throughout the
entirety of Beowulf suggests, in turn, that once the poem was committed to parchment, its
structural features were not substantially altered. At least one intermediate copy probably
intervened between the archetype and the extant manuscript,51 but none of the copyists
involved in the poem’s transmission appear to have substantially recomposed its text.
Though it is riddled with mechanical errors and its spellings have been extensively moder-
nised and Saxonised, the text transmitted in the extant manuscript of Beowulf remains essen-
tially the work that one poet composed several centuries earlier. The poem is not the product
of collaboration between its author and a union of scribes, nor is it a heterogeneous accretion
of passages of varying antiquity and authority—it is the work of one archaic poet, preserved
thanks to the effort of manual labourers who mechanically reproduced its text.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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