Dating Beowulf -- Scholars Continue the Debate
Questions Surrounding the Accurate Dating of Beowulf
Aug 28, 2009
On one end of the spectrum is the argument of J.R.R. Tolkien, who placed the creation of Beowulf sometime between the seventh and eighth centuries.
While most renowned, perhaps, for his works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was also a highly respected scholar of literature and language, with particular focus on the Anglo-Saxon language and the writings in that language, and his familiarity with and understanding of Beowulf are difficult to challenge even today.
In 1936, he presented a lecture entitled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, later published as an essay, and his arguments for the literary approach to analyzing the poem remain the starting point for modern Beowulf studies.
Arguments for the Early Dating
Tolkien’s assumption of a seventh or eighth-century dating of Beowulf was founded primarily on his own understanding of the era and what literature is extant from that era, as well as his knowledge as a scholar of the Old English language.
According to Beowulf scholar Frederick Klaeber, it is traditional to date Old English poems based on metrical structure and the syntax of the dialect used in the work. Based on the studies that have been done, Beowulf has traditionally fallen under an earlier dating.
Separating Manuscript and Poem
For decades, most literary scholars accepted the arguments of Tolkien and his successors about the early dating of Beowulf, but questions eventually began to arise, and new information offered another possibility.
The problem has largely been one of identifying the date of the poem’s composition, as well as the date of the manuscript on which the poem was written.
Testing indicates that the manuscript dates from the late tenth or early eleventh century, but the standard argument obviously placed the poem’s composition much earlier than this, with the idea that the poem was transcribed onto the current extant manuscript, and the original document was lost.
Known as the Cotton Vitellius A.X. manuscript, due to its labeling in the private library of 17th-century English baronet Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, this manuscript is recognized to date from around the year 1000 AD.
Arguments for a Later Date
In his book Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, however, English professor and Beowulf scholar Kevin Kiernan argues that the manuscript alone does not date from the year 1000 AD and that the poem itself should be ascribed to a later date than has been customarily accepted.
Kiernan argues that it is highly unlikely for the poem to have survived the Viking invasion of Britain during the ninth and tenth centuries.
What is more, Kiernan indicates that the linguistic tests typically used in dating Beowulf are faulty in that they do not take into account the wide variety of forms used in the poem – many of which do not fit the West Saxon dialect of the poem – as well as the potential for the writer’s deliberate use of certain archaic forms to make the poem appear to be older than it is. Kiernan concludes that an eleventh-century dating of Beowulf is both possible and viable.
The Poem and Perspective
The issue of when Beowulf was actually written might never be resolved with any certainty, and scholars will likely continue to side with one dating theory over another.
What might be more important, however, is the poem itself and the impact that it continues to have as a founding work of English literature.
Sources:
Chase, Colin. The Dating of Beowulf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Kiernan, Kevin. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
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