This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval studies, Dating Beowulf playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. The volume argues for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice-versa, offering a riposte to antifeminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, literary theorists, students of Old English literature and medieval scholars alike. To this end, the essays embody a range of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to actor-network theory.

Examinations of the date of Beowulf have tremendous significance for Anglo-Saxon culture in general.

A seminal collection of studies on the date of Beowulf, now back in print, that overturned previous scholarship and raised much new information.

Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition and preservation? Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem’s transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems, that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of course, during the poem’s written transmission, several hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf’s analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and modernize the text’s orthography, but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien’s general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

This is a complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. In this book, the specific roles of selcted individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed.

This is a complete guide to the text and context of the most famous Old English poem. In this book, the specific roles of selcted individual characters, both major and minor, are assessed.

Although Bridgette and Duncan were able to escape the Otherworld, their adventure is only just beginning! As the chaos of Arthur's return reaches London, an artifact at the British Museum is stolen. But is it Arthur who's interested in the relic... or someone, or something, new?