SOURCE: An Introduction to “Beowulf” and the “Beowulf” Manuscript, Rutgers University Press, 1981, pp. 3-12.

In the essay below, Kiernan reviews historical and linguistic evidence which he contends indicates that Beowulf is contemporary with the extant manuscript.

It may well be surprising that a study of Beowulf in conjunction with its unique ms represents a radical departure from all previous approaches to the poem. In fact, the Beowulf ms has scarcely been studied at all. It still holds a wealth of undiscovered paleographical and codicological evidence, which, under ordinary circumstances, textual scholars would have uncovered and weighed long ago, as a matter of course, for the purpose of founding a reliable text. This evidence has remained safely hidden away because most editors of the poem have relied on photographic fss of the ms, and, often enough, modern transcriptions of the fss, rather than on the ms itself. Their tacit...