The Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf (Copenhagen, Royal Library, N.K.S. 512 and 513 4°) are useful for a number of purposes. Two of these involve Beowulf itself: they offer a number of readings lost from its unique manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv) and they afford an insight into the genesis of its first printed edition (Thorkelin's) published, after many vicissitudes, in Copenhagen in 1815. For reasons that will become clear, these purposes should be kept well apart. The present study, accordingly, will concern itself with the first of them only, and will investigate the contribution made by the two transcripts to our knowledge of the manuscript as it was at two points of time in 1787 (more than half a century after the fire of 1731) when the two transcripts purport to have been made. With respect to the second transcript, Thorkelin B, for the most part a line-for-line and page-for-page copy written by Thorkelin himself in his English copperplate hand, this date has been queried, but no satisfactory evidence has been produced and it is not evident where any can now be found. As the dates appear, however, to have been recorded at least a quarter-century after the event, they need not necessarily be trusted wholly in either case. It is certain that in adding the date 1787 to another transcript Thorkelin was a year out; it may thus merely represent a memory of an intensive spell of copying. We shall see below that the first transcript, Thorkelin A, made by an amanuensis in an imitation of the manuscript's Insular script, suggests that there may not have been so very much time between it and Thorkelin B.