![]() The story is both an epic, following its eponymous hero’s great battles, and a tragedy. It tells the story of how Beowulf, a Geatish warrior (from present day Sweden), saves the Danish kingdom ruled by Hrothgar from the monster Grendel. The Nowell Codex did not escape, leaving the Beowulf manuscript permanently damaged, evident in the charred and blackened edges visible on the manuscript.ĭespite being one of the first pieces of literature in Old English, the precursor to modern English, the story is set in 6th century Scandinavia. Sadly, and somewhat ironically, in 1731 a fire broke out at Ashburnham House leading many of the collection to be heavily damaged or even destroyed. It was originally stored in Essex House in London, before the location was designated a fire risk and the whole collection was moved to Ashburnham House, now a part of Westminster School. After his death, the collection was passed on through his family, eventually to his grandson who bequeathed the whole collection to the nation. The manuscript was part of the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, a collector of manuscripts, who made these available for consultation through the Cotton Library. One thing which you might note is the quite considerable damage to the edges of many of the pages. The Nowell Codex is currently held at the British Library and is fully digitised and available to view online (see the resources at the end of this article). The poem is primarily in the West Saxon dialect of Old English, but there are examples of other dialects present in the text which suggest a history of oral transmission. The only extant manuscript containing a written Beowulf is the Nowell Codex, which is estimated to have been produced around 1000 CE from analysis of the scribal hand. It is considered likely that the story was composed sometime in the 7th to 8th century, in Mercia or Northumberland, and then transmitted orally until it was eventually recorded in the form we have today. Surprisingly, for such a well-known and oft-studied poem, it is still uncertain exactly when Beowulf was first written. Whereas previous scholars had mined Beowulf for its perceived wealth of historical information about, as Professor Archibald Strong, 1920s Beowulf scholar, put it: ‘the picture of a whole civilisation’, Tolkien presented it as pure poetry, cementing its place in the canon of English literature. This lecture is often considered one of the most important and transformative in the study of Beowulf, arguing for it to be considered through the lens of literary as opposed to historical analysis. ![]() In 1936, JRR Tolkien gave a lecture entitled ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture presented to the British Academy. The poem survives in one single manuscript source and its author is unknown. It is one of the earliest, and certainly the longest, examples of literature in English, shining a light onto the lost literary culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Beowulf is an Old English poem of over 3000 lines, set over the life and battles of its eponymous hero.
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