Chapter 4 - Dating of the Poem

Summary

THE QUESTION of Beowulf 's origins is usually addressed in a comparative philological and literary perspective, and only rarely from a historical and archaeological point of view. But as a comparative literary study presupposes what first has to be proved, namely that the poem was written by an Old English author, such an approach cannot be considered before the problem of the origins of the work has been thoroughly investigated.

Our next step, then, must be to consider what the linguistic, historical, and archaeological source material relating to the poem has to tell us.

Manuscript

The only preserved manuscript, written in Anglo-Saxon minuscule, is generally—and chiefly on palaeographic grounds—considered to have been produced by two scribes, some time around 1000–1010 (Fulk et al. 2009, xxv ff.).

There have been countless discussions about possible earlier manuscripts. For a long time, there has been significant agreement that the surviving manuscript was preceded by at least one older one. A view now embraced by many scholars, based on lexical, orthographic, palaeographic, and other criteria, is that the preserved text shows traces of at least one earlier manuscript from the period just before or after ad 700 (Neidorf 2014a).

Linguistic Dating

Given the premise that Beowulf was written by an Old English poet, efforts to date it have quite naturally focused on philological evidence.

The language of the poem is primarily Late West Saxon, the southern English dialect that was the leading literary language of England from the later part of the ninth century onwards. As has been mentioned, though, there are also archaic dialectal features that point back in time to the Anglian areas of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia.

A long-standing consensus that the poem was created in the eighth century, or just before or after that, evaporated at a conference in Toronto in 1980 (Chase 1981), marking the start of a long period in which many scholars, not least on literary grounds, advocated a later dating, often placing the poem in the late Viking Age (Davis 2006; North 2007; Frank 2007; Damico 2015). Beowulf has thus been dated to anything from 600 to 1100 (Drout et al. 2014).