The Origins Of Beowulf Studies In Textual Criticism And Literary History Leonard Neidorf by Leonard Neidorf instant download after payment.

Beowulf is preserved in a single manuscript written out around the year 1000, but there are many reasons to believe that the poem was composed several centuries before this particular act of manual reproduction. Most significantly, the meter of Beowulf reveals that the poet regularly observed distinctions of etymological length that became phonologically indistinct before 725 in Mercia. This dissertation gauges the explanatory power of the hypothesis that Beowulf was composed about three centuries before the production of the extant manuscript. The following studies test the hypothesis of archaic composition by determining whether it is able to accommodate independent forms of evidence drawn from the fields of linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history.
An examination of the lexicon of Beowulf reveals that it contains several words attested elsewhere only in archaic glosses and in poems probably composed during the eighth century. Beowulf appears to preserve vocabulary from an archaic lexical stratum, which was lost before the composition of ninth-century works. Investigation into the transmitted text of Beowulf in the extant manuscript yields numerous signs of the poem’s antiquity. The manuscript contains hundreds of transcription errors, many of which were induced by changes in language and culture that had taken place during the long interval between composition and reproduction. Dozens of corruptions in the transmitted text reflect scribal unfamiliarity with the heroes and peoples known to the Beowulf poet and the audience for which he composed. Inquiry into Anglo-Saxon literary history confirms that the legends involving the heroes and peoples in Beowulf circulated in England predominantly prior to the ninth century. A survey of the onomastic record, royal genealogies, and Anglo-Latin testimonia suggests that the legends in Beowulf arrived in England during the sixth century, circulated vigorously there during the seventh and eighth centuries, but ceased to be widely known during the ninth and tenth centuries. The studies in this dissertation demonstrate that the chronological implications of linguistic, text-critical, and literary-historical evidence uniformly support the hypothesis that Beowulf was composed around the year 700.