The Riddle of Cotton Vitellius A. XV.

If the Homeric texts that survive to our time provide only brief glimpses into a long and uncertain past, at least the evidence permits reasonable hypotheses to be drawn about their probable recording and the first standard texts, as well as about some of the prime historical influences which those or related texts must have undergone. Such is not the case with the Beowulf poetry, which comes to us in a single copy and whose date and provenance remain objects of lively debate among paleographers and students of the poem.^[22] We know very little even about the circumstances under which such a poem might have been collected, copied, and transmitted; with no real chronology for the verse of this period outside of a few termini a quo ,^[23] scholars have estimated the "date" of this version of the poem at anywhere between the mid-eighth and early eleventh centuries. There was no Alexandrian Library to (theoretically) hone the textual tradition, no set of scholia to provide fodder for readings or textual emendation, and no Byzantine scholarship to keep interest in the poem alive. Beowulf surfaces as a unique text in the middle of the sixteenth century, and is treated as a poem rather than an archaeological or paleographical curiosity only well into the twentieth century.^[24] All in all, the story of the text reads more like an Anglo-Saxon riddle than a Homeric epic journey.

[21] Especially considering the phenomenon of medieval diglossia; see Stock 1983, 30-87.

[22] For the older conventional arguments, see Klaeber 1950, cvii-cxx. For a sense of the variety of modern opinion, see Chase 1981a.

[23] "The Battle of Maldon," for example, celebrates a historical battle fought on August 11, 991.

[24] Notwithstanding, for example, Thomas Jefferson's introduction of Old English into the curriculum of the University of Virginia in 1825 (see Hauer 1983), Jefferson's interest being primarily in the language and law of the Anglo-Saxons. Only with J.R.R. Tolkien's justly famous essay "Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics" (1936) did scholarly attention really turn toward the text as poetry.

The earliest identifiable owner of the manuscript, Laurence Nowell, dean of Lichfield and one of the first students of Anglo-Saxon, is also our earliest witness to the dated existence of the poem, and the date at which he signed his name was 1563. Shortly thereafter it came into the possession of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631), the noted antiquary whose library housed so many precious medieval manuscripts. The designation of the manuscript containing Beowulf as Cotton Vitellius A. xv. indicates its physical position in that library—in a case under the bust of the Roman emperor, on shelf A, fifteenth place. In 1731, one hundred years after Cotton's death, a fire at Ashburnham House, the location of the library at that time, destroyed much of the original collection. We are thus perhaps fortunate that the Beowulf text was merely singed at the top and sides. Over the years that followed, however, the originally relatively slight damage was worsened by handling of the now-brittle vellum leaves, and invaluable bits of the written record itself began to crumble away. Around 1870 authorities at the British Museum checked the process of deterioration by separating the manuscript book into single folios and installing a paper binding to protect the page edges.

Modern scholarship has benefited enormously from various transcripts made of parts of Cotton Vitellius A. xv. Even before the fire, Humphrey Wanley had recorded part of Beowulf , and Franciscus Junius had copied all of the accompanying fragmentary Judith that remained (Bodleian MS. Junius 105). But the most important transcripts for Beowulf scholarship are those made by the Icelander G. J. Thorkelin:^[25] two copies of the complete text written in 1787, about fifty years after the fire, when the manuscript was presumably in much better condition than it is now. The so-called A transcript was apparently made by a scribe whom Thorkelin hired for the purpose, and his errors and omissions reveal that the scribe was not well acquainted with the language in which he was working. Thorkelin himself wrote out the B transcript, however, and the professional knowledge of the philologist of Germanic languages shows through at every turn. Logically enough, this difference in preparation makes the A text usually more trustworthy than the more professional B text; since the amanuensis copied only what he could see with his untrained amateur's eye, he did not make educated guesses about emending crumbling words or filling lacunae.^[26] These two transcripts taken together provide an invaluable companion for editing Beowulf

From these materials—the unique text and its transcriptions—scholars have over the last two centuries established a poem epitomized in the edition of Friedrich Klaeber. We also have facsimiles by Zupitza ([1882] 1959) and Malone (1963) to use as evidence of the original manuscript contents, as well

[25] For the facsimile edition, see Malone 1963.

[26] This is not a universal principle, of course, since A could make errors of his own, especially with interpretation of minims. But when A omits a word or part-line altogether and B restores it in full, a careful editor will suspect the expert's intrusion.

as hundreds of proposals for repairing occasionally disturbed lexicon and syntax in the text.^[27] The emendations tend to enter the poem that we read and interpret relatively slowly; in fact, from time to time there have arisen among scholars movements to reverse the tide of emendation and to maintain original manuscript readings wherever possible.^[28] Behind questions of manuscript condition, transcription, and emendation, however, stands the seminal problem of the authority of the text as received. Unless we can gain some idea of exactly what Cotton Vitellius A. xv. offers us—and specifically with what authority it presents the poem—our decisions about consequent matters of editing and analysis will not be firmly grounded. And since the question of authority leads directly to dating, or early history, and to provenance, let us inquire first what can be discovered about the genesis of the text.

In an important sense, any attempt we might make to date the poem Beowulf would amount, in the words of David P. Henige (1964), to a "quest for a chimera." First and foremost, we are dealing with what is minimally an oral-derived text, a work that emerges from oral tradition along pathways we cannot now retrace and is intimately tied to that oral tradition, even if by the time our version of the poem was made the written word had become the sole textual medium.^[29] The formulaic phraseology and narrative multiformity typical of oral narrative composition comprise the very fabric of Beowulf ;^[30] although we may choose to insist on a literate editor or "author" for the surviving text of the poem, we cannot ignore its more than evident roots in an Anglo-Saxon tradition of tale-telling that arose and flourished without the aid of writing.^[31] This has been the most significant lesson of the excesses of the oral theory as propounded by Magoun ([1953] 1968), and equally of the intemperate reactions against that first statement. As described above in chapter 1, Beowulf need not answer all of the (tradition-dependent) criteria established by comparison with Serbo-Croatian and ancient Greek epic in order to be an oral traditional poem in a meaningful sense. Indeed, this greatest of surviving Old English poems may even have passed through one or more stages of composition or transmission that involved writing and still lay claim to oral traditional provenance. Once the critical dust has settled, the phraseology and narrative structure of the poem remain verifiably oral traditional, and we must confront that reality on its own terms.

[27] Especially noteworthy in this regard are the recent observations made by Kevin Kiernan (1981a) after a fresh examination of Cotton Vitellins A. xv.

[28] For a recent example, see Tripp 1983. In 1984 at the Modern Language Association, a panel entitled "Subtractive Rectification" pursued exactly this course.

[29] Cf. Renoir on oral structures even in later, written texts (e.g. 1976b, 1988); and we do not know that Beowulf is not yet closer to the oral tradition than any of the texts Renoir is examining.

[30] See the entries under "Old English" in Foley 1985; even Benson (1966) admits the formulaic structure of the poem.

[31] Consider the analyses of Niles (1983) and Opland (1980) on this point.

Studies in Homeric archaeology, for example, have illustrated how futile the quest for a uniform date for a traditional work must be: the assortment of weapons and armor in the Iliad , to offer a famous illustration, stems variously from Mycenaean through Dark Age times, with the individual elements in the armament never all current at any one time in history.^[32] Oral tradition does not recognize the anachronisms that result from our linear, non-recur-rent sense of history, any more than we would be content with tradition's customary interpretation of important societal events through pre-existent story-patterns.^[33] Thus it is that Beowulf's oral traditional character itself precludes our assigning a single date to the work; even had we been present at the (oral or written) composition of our Beowulf , we could not ascribe the poem to that very moment. The phraseology and narrative style that constitute the poetic medium, as well as the story of Beowulf that is its content, long predate that moment, and any attempt to compress the diachrony of the tale-telling tradition would amount to a falsification of the poem's structure, and therefore of its aesthetics.

Under such conditions it is only fair to admit necessary uncertainty about the "date of Beowulf " and to shift the inquiry to firmer ground, that is, to the nature of our text of Beowulf and to its witness in Cotton Vitellius A. xv. Allowing for the undeniably oral traditional roots of the poem, we could comfortably place this text of the poem anywhere in the eighth or ninth century, or perhaps a bit later. While over the years critical opinion has ranged all the way from the fourth to the eleventh centuries (Chase 1981a), moving the text earlier than the eighth or later than the early tenth century entails special problems. One faces either the lack of an appropriate historical or social context or, alternatively, the necessity of explaining too many linguistic or political anachronisms.^[34]

If we are to gauge the provenance of the Beowulf document, however, we must construct a reasonable hypothesis to cover the most significant ascertainable facts. I start with the minimal assumption of an oral-derived poem—

[32] See, e.g., Snodgrass 1974; and on the linguistic parallel, M. Parry 1932.

[33] Cf. Lord (1970, 27-28): "There is no reason to suppose that the patterns of ancient Greek epic tradition began with the Trojan War. They seem already to have been long in operation by the time of Homer, whenever one may place him in time. Historical events cannot give to a pattern the intensity and force needed for it to survive all the changes of tradition. These changes are not the corruption of time, but the constant reinterpretation of succeeding generations and societies. Not corruption, but constant renewal and revivification. The patterns must be suprahistorical to have such force."

[34] If recent scholarship in this area makes anything clear, it must be that we should keep an open mind on the date of the extant Beowulf text. In The Dating of Beowulf (Chase 1981b), contributors' opinions range from John C. Pope's argument for the eighth century through Kiernan's preference for the eleventh (see also Kiernan 1981a, together with the responses of, e.g., Boyle [1981] and Chase [1982]). On the dependability of linguistic criteria for dating, see Amos 1980.

that is, a text of demonstrably oral traditional character—and therefore with the tradition that must have preceded and given birth to our text of Beowulf . This minimal assumption, backed up by an appreciable amount of scholarship, does not demand positing an "oral poem," but it does entail recognizing that the creation of our text was necessarily more a process than an event. For a start, then, like most reviewers I must doubt the likelihood of Kevin Kiernan's (1981b) explanation of the poem as coeval with the manuscript; in fact, I see no reason to contend that the first text was coeval with the manuscript. Earlier scholarship assumed as a paleographical commonplace that Cotton Vitellius A. xv. represents a copy some generations removed from the "archetype," and I find no incontrovertible proof suggesting that we should desert that position. Most importantly with respect to the eleventh-century dating, if we do accept the argument that Kiernan proposes, we in effect cut the poem off from its oral traditional provenance, and that would be a serious error—just as serious an error, one might add, as would be tacit acceptance of Magoun's first formulation of oral traditional art, a formulation that underestimated the aesthetic dimension of the poem. We need a hypothesis that allows the work both its undeniable roots and at least the possibility of memorial or written "polish."^[35]

Placing the origin of our text in the eighth to ninth centuries (or perhaps the very early tenth) violates none of the paleographical, historical, or linguistic data per se and permits us to view the artifact in its oral traditional context. I would designate the beginning of the eighth century, in fact, as a terminus a quo for the introduction of the Beowulf story into the written medium. After that point the making of a written Beowulf , whether by oral dictation or as an autograph, would be a logical, reasonable enterprise. And although, given that manuscript production was exclusively a monastic enterprise and therefore not as subject to the influence of the political situation as some have suggested, I do not place as much emphasis on historical as on other aspects of available evidence, it can be said that the times were not uniformly inhospitable to the production of what has been called a Danish poem. Copies almost certainly intervened between that first text and Cotton Vitellius A. xv. (in a moment we shall consider the implications of the hypothetical transmission process). But if we settle on the eighth century as the earliest possible dating of this text of the poem, with the added proviso that it had to have emerged before two and one-half centuries had passed, we shall not be far from the truth. Most importantly, we shall not lose contact with the poem's lifeblood, its tradition.^[36]

[35] Compare what was said above in relation to the Homeric poems about the inevitability of editorial "polishing" during the process of transmission.

[36] Compare Pope's (1981, 195) remarks on this point, made as part of his argument for an eighth-century date: "I cannot imagine that the author himself did not have a long period of apprenticeship in the art of poetry before composing such a masterpiece. It would not be surprising if he had acquired most of his skill by oral composition. Certainly he had mastered a style well suited to oral delivery. As a pure Conjecture I would suggest that the oral poets of the seventh century were largely responsible for the growth of the style and the story, and for pointing the way, in courtly and sometimes monastic surroundings, for the remarkable adjustment of Christian beliefs and pagan story that Beowulf represents and the Icelandic poems and sagas (greatly to our present satisfaction) so conspicuously lack."

Manuscript Authority

Since we have even fewer clues to the transmission of Beowulf than to that of the Homeric poems, and since we are describing a work whose most essential style and content owe so much to a precedent and perhaps contemporary oral tradition, it will be impossible to build much of a case for manuscript authority on grounds acceptable to modern textual criticism. As we have seen, neither an original date for execution of the poem nor a chronicle of its transmission can be established. To these realities we must add the fact that, as Kenneth Sisam ([1946] 1953) has pointed out, the Old English poetic manuscripts generally give us little reason for confidence in their authority. He notes (p. 36) that

ample evidence from other sources confirms that copyists of Old English texts were not expected to reproduce their originals letter for letter, as they were when copying Latin and especially Biblical texts. Modernization of forms in the course of transmission was allowed and even required by the use for which Old English work were intended, and the practice was obviously dangerous for the wording.

Indeed, one cannot account for errors and changes by ascribing them to visual or aural mistakes, he continues, and "as compared with the variants in classical texts, they show a laxity in reproduction and an aimlessness in variation which are more in keeping with the oral transmission of verse" (p. 34).

An illustration of this last tendency (phrased perhaps too negatively, or at least literarily, by Sisam) may help to clarify the point. One of the few Old English poems to survive in two versions, "Soul and Body," exists in an incomplete Vercelli Book copy of 166 lines (usually called "I") and an ostensibly complete Exeter Book version of 121 lines ("II"). That these two texts are somehow related to a single poem is obvious: in addition to similar overall content, they share a large number of repeated or formulaically related lines.^[37] What is more, even the formulaic modifications occur at metrically predictable spots, with substitutions of words following prosodic rules.^[38] Further, most of the "unique" lines, those not shared by the two texts as we

[37] See Alison Jones's two articles on "Soul and Body" (1966, 1969), as well as the ASPR Exeter Book version, which marks repetitions and equivalents.

[38] We may also observe that the fourth stressed position in a line, the one stress that almost never participates in the alliterative pattern, is the most common locus for modification. Since it is not constrained by alliteration, this position can most easily tolerate the substitution of a synonym.

have them, echo against the larger referent of the Anglo-Saxon corpus as a whole, so that both texts are essentially traditional. What we seem to have in "Soul and Body" I and II, then, amounts to two versions of what was once a single poem, with each version having taken an idiosyncratic textual form best explained as a substantive traditional variant. While it is possible and even likely that these two texts diverged in part through individual histories of manuscript transmission, we should also admit the not exclusive possibility that memorial transmission in an oral context accounted for their formulaic resemblance.

Thus it is that the term manuscript authority really constitutes a misnomer in reference to the Old English documents. In addition to the many spelling changes and other typical scribal modifications, the editor and critic must consider the feature of formulaic, and perhaps memorial, transmission as well.^[39] Whether such a medium was used both for the shorter, more memorizable poems and for the longer works like Beowulf is a question we cannot answer with certainty, a problem in genre-dependence that we do not have the evidence to solve.^[40] But in assessing the authority of our received text of Beowulf , it is well to keep in mind that what Sisam has called "a laxity in reproduction and an aimlessness in variation" may be signs that the most important manuscript record for Old English poetry—like its Homeric counterpart essentially an oral palimpsest—was the memory.^[41]

Implications for Comparative Analysis

At first sight the Homeric and Old English documents may seem quite comparable, both preserving a dead-language poetry about whose history we have little hard information. But there the resemblance ends. The Beowulf manuscript is a unicum ; we cannot collate it with other texts, attempt stemmata, weigh precious bits of historical information, or even solve the minimal problem of the likely date and provenartec of the poem it encodes. Much more so than even the Homeric poems, the work we call Beowulf is severed from its origins and history by its very uniqueness and lack of ascertainable background. The text can be dated, I have argued, most easily to the period A.C. 700-950, but that assignment does us little good in the face of so many missing facts. Our poem may have descended through one or a dozen scribal reformulations, some more exacting (in our modern sense) than others; it may have experienced, in part or in whole, a memorial transmission that altered its original form considerably. The plain truth is that, unless dramatic new

[39] Compare the reconstructions of the memorial process in Fry 1974, 1981; Lord 1986c.

[40] See chapter 1 above and Foley 1983b.

[41] It is worth adding here that the tradition-dependent nature of Old English prosody would have allowed more variation than would the Homeric hexameter; see further chapters 4 and 6 below.

evidence emerges, we shall never know how far removed from its originative traditional composition this version stands.

As we did with the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey , let us consider first the negative conclusions to be drawn from these remarks. First, since the Homeric and Old English manuscript records remain mysterious and idiosyncratic, no scholar interested in precise and sensible analysis can feel justified in quantitative comparison of these two remnants of two great traditions. The documents to be analyzed are vastly different not only in tradition (and therefore in language, prosody, phraseology, and even narrative structure) but also, and most basically, in their very physical make-up. If we cannot establish the primary oral nature of these texts, and if further we cannot certify that the items we are proposing to compare are truly comparable, then how is it possible to draw meaningful conclusions about, for example, formulaic density? The documents cannot be forced into a single category, any more than the languages or prosodies involved can be forced into absolute comparability.

But there are also positive conclusions to be drawn. Just as re-examination of the textual history of the Homeric poems indicates that the Iliad and Odyssey were but the epitome of an oral tradition that continued in some form well beyond their Panhellenic apotheosis, so the relative isolation of the Beowulf manuscript need not mean abandoning the search for poetic context. Although Beowulf , like the Iliad and Odyssey , must not without further proof be termed oral in the unambiguous sense that the Serbo-Croatian material collected by Parry and Lord is oral, neither can it be denied the designation oral-derived .^[42] Over the past thirty-five to forty years a great deal of evidence has accumulated indicating that Beowulf and other Old English poems show the oral traditional features of formulaic phraseology and thematic structure, and no one would argue today that the poem's roots are not planted firmly in an Anglo-Saxon oral tradition. Exactly how far (if at all) Beowulf is removed from primary oral tradition is a question we cannot settle, but neither should we "throw the baby out with the bathwater" by ignoring the poem's indisputable oral-derived character. Once that minimal and justifiable assumption is made and accepted, the way is clear to invoke the remainder of the Old English poetic canon as a context (with proper calibration) and to begin to describe the meaning of traditional elements in Beowulf by reference to their recurrence in other oral-derived poems.^[43] While we should be careful to acknowledge genre-dependence in this endeavor, and while the comparisons made within

[42] Although I prefer the connotations of Burton Raffel's term oral-connected (1986), since it emphasizes continuity rather than discontinuity, I maintain oral-derived in order to stress the difference between texts that are obviously and verifiably oral and those which exhibit oral traditional features but cannot be proven on other grounds to be primary oral texts.

[43] Or to expand the context beyond the Old English poetic canon to other Germanic and non-Germanic traditional poems; see, e.g., Renoir 1979b, 1981b, 1986.

the Old English canon cannot be (by definition) comparisons of parallel works from a primary oral tradition, this method of searching the oral-derived wordhoard for information about its constituents takes into account the more-than-literary relationships among surviving works. In short, what we lack in conventional literary-historical background about the document we call Beowulf can be in part replaced by the poem's most natural context—what has survived of its poetic tradition.