The Dating of Beowulf

by Colin Chase (Editor)

The date of Beowulf , debated for almost a century, is a small question with large consequences. Does the poem provide us with an accurate if idealized view of early Germanic culture? Or is it rather a creature of nostalgia and imagination, born of the desire of a later age to create for itself a glorious past? If we cannot decide when, between the 5th and 11th centuries, the poem was composed, we cannot distinguish what elements in Beowulf belong properly to the history of material culture, to the history of myth and legend, to political history, or to the development of the English literary imagination. This book represents both individual and concerted attempts to deal with this important question, and presents one of the most important inconclusions in the study of Old English. The contributors raise so many doubts, turn up so much new and disturbing information, dismantle so many long-accepted scholarly constructs that Beowulf studies will never be the henceforth every discussion of the poem and its period will begin with reference to this volume.

230 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 1997

Reviews

[M.J. Fiori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bear with me as I finish a Beowulf-themed paper from fall semester, 2009. Update, 2011: I never wrote the paper, but thanks to this book (among others) I can say I have a kick-ass annotated bibliography under my belt and now know more about the provenance of Beowulf (the poem and the sole existent manuscript housing it) than any layman ever really needs to know.

The task at hand was to zero in on a single key focus of Beowulf criticism, and I chose the the aspect of dating the text, which has basically been the most controversial since the early 1980s, when Kevin Kiernan scandalously insisted that the text and the poem both dated from the early 11th century. Up until Kiernan came on the scene, the era most generally accepted in scholarship was around the 8th-10th centuries. Most of the essays in this volume argue that the poem's provenance was 9th or 10th century; Kiernan's essay, the kernel of his ground-breaking and thoroughly exhaustive Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, is also included.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

The collected essays from the 1980 conference on the Dating of Beowulf held in Toronto. Contributions come from Roberta frank, Eric Stanley, Kevin Kiernan and many more. All present differing views on the date of composition of the Beowulf poem. Excellent.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard one to rate. If you know the Anglo Saxon language and are well versed in their history and you are are a scholar in poetic theory this book gets five stars. Most of us are not. It still has much to offer the bright and curious reader if only because it opens up multiple new ideas about how history is discovered or modified or lost, about the "dark" ages of Briton, about the evolution of language and the birth of a new tongue out of the old one to name a few. The book is not an easy read and some of it requires more background knowledge than I will ever aquire. Still, I think sometimes it is good to get in over your head and swim about a little lost and see the world from another view point.