Electronic Beowulf 4.0

The third edition of Electronic Beowulf was an html application on DVD that used a Java applet and JavaScript. When first published, major internet browsers could run the html application on PCs and Macs. However, security problems with Java in Summer 2013 forced all major browsers to disable unsigned Java applets compiled with earlier versions of Java. As it was compiled in 2011, Electronic Beowulf 3.0 was then disabled.

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Madden also made many careful facsimiles of damaged sections of the manuscript, revealing what appeared to him the exact state of the manuscript in 1824, long before the leaves were inlaid in their protective frames.

When an interleaf contains a note, the O-button on the top menu will be green , and the drop-down menu is live. Click the arrows to open a drop-down menu and gain access to the interleaf or interleaves.

An 'Edition Search' under 'Apparatus' > 'Early Restorations' > 'Transcripts' includes in its results complete lists of later restorations.

Humphrey Wanley, who transcribed a few lines of the Beowulf manuscript at the end of the seventeenth century and published them in 1705, is the only source for a few lost letters. At the end of the eighteenth century, Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin and his hired scribe, probably James Matthews, a British Museum staff member, together saved about 2000 letters that were subsequently lost by fire damage as a consequence of the Cottonian Library fire in 1731. John J. Conybeare and Frederic Madden, in the early nineteenth century, produced two collations, which together help test the accuracy of the Thorkelin transcripts and of their own collations.

Note on the Text

Digital technology makes it possible to test the paleographical validity of conjectural restorations, to see if a proposed restoration actually fits in the manuscript space. Underlying the folio image is a completely restored text of the palimpsest, with the gaps filled in using the scribe's own letterforms from elsewhere on the folio. To access the digital restorations go to the top menu, click the drop-down folio menu, and choose 'Conjectural Restorations'. A window with an overlay image of the folio opens.

Here it must suffice to say that Julius Zupitza's "freshening-up" hypothesis to explain the highly complex condition of this folio has nothing in its favor. Editors and scholars must abandon it to understand important facts about the history of the text of Beowulf

The presence of the manuscript facsimile obviates the need for a strictly diplomatic transcription.

This is an electronic version of a chapter in Poetry, Place, and Gender: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honor of Helen Damico, edited by Catherine E. Karkov. Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2009), pp. 98-131. The black-and-white figures are replaced with color screenshots from the third edition of Electronic Beowulf.

In addition to tooltips like these in the textual notes there are also “transparencies” over some key folios, in particular the palimpsest, fol. 179 recto and verso, which allow the reader to study a conjectural restoration in the full context of its folio. The reader is alerted to the existence of one of these otherwise hidden overlays in two ways: (1) the textual note, where applicable, will include the statement, “See 'Conjectural Restoration';” and (2) the O-button on the top menu will be green:

A case in point is the obliterated text between syððan and þ on fol. 179r10. Any attempt at restoration is complicated by the fact that some of the ink traces, as conclusively shown by an overlay in Electronic Beowulf 4.0, come from an offset from the facing fol. 178v. Digital technology allows us to subtract these false leads and arrive at a more plausible restoration

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To see the locations of these readings, click the red rectangle on the menu:

Differences in line numbering should present no problems to readers who wish to use Electronic Beowulf 4.0 with another edition, because we have provided searchable cross-references in the Options menu. Simply choose “Traditional” in Options to search by traditional line numbers and to show them as tooltips in the margins.

For detailed instructions to all aspects of Electronic Beowulf 3.0, click on the online Index & Guide icon on the right side of the top menu. Once online, consult the comprehensive Index & Guide to the left for details of all features of the third edition of Electronic Beowulf.