Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Beowulf and Language History
- 2 Germanic Legend, Scribal Errors, and Cultural Change
- 3 Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England
- 4 The Limits of Conservative Composition in Old English Poetry
- 5 The Date of Composition of Beowulf and the Evidence of Metrical Evolution
- 6 Beowulf and the Containment of Scyld in the West Saxon Royal Genealogy
- 7 History and Fiction in the Frisian Raid
- 8 ‘Give the People What They Want’: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy
- 9 A Note on the Other Heorot
- 10 Beowulf and Conversion History
- 11 Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts
- 12 Scandals in Toronto: Kaluza's Law and Transliteration Errors
- 13 Afterword: Beowulf and Everything Else
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Beowulf and Language History
- 2 Germanic Legend, Scribal Errors, and Cultural Change
- 3 Names in Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England
- 4 The Limits of Conservative Composition in Old English Poetry
- 5 The Date of Composition of Beowulf and the Evidence of Metrical Evolution
- 6 Beowulf and the Containment of Scyld in the West Saxon Royal Genealogy
- 7 History and Fiction in the Frisian Raid
- 8 ‘Give the People What They Want’: Historiography and Rhetorical History of the Dating of Beowulf Controversy
- 9 A Note on the Other Heorot
- 10 Beowulf and Conversion History
- 11 Material Monsters and Semantic Shifts
- 12 Scandals in Toronto: Kaluza's Law and Transliteration Errors
- 13 Afterword: Beowulf and Everything Else
- Index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dating of BeowulfA Reassessment, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014