Beowulf

Before the poem's audience ever sees Beowulf fight Grendel, it hears Unferth, one of King Hrothgar's own retainers, try to discredit him. Unferth recalls a boyhood swimming contest against a man named Breca, claiming Beowulf lost it and predicting he will lose against Grendel in the same way. Beowulf's own account, given immediately after in his own words, does not match Unferth's telling: the two young men swam together for five nights, not the seven Unferth claims, each carrying a sword and wearing armor for the sea's dangers, matched stroke for stroke until rough currents finally drove them apart. Sea monsters found Beowulf alone in the deep water that followed, dragging at him repeatedly through the night, and by the time dawn separated him from the last of them he had killed nine of the creatures with his own sword. Beowulf turns the story directly back on his accuser, observing that Unferth has no comparable feat of his own to his name, and pointedly recalling that Unferth is known in the hall as the man who killed his own brothers, the gravest charge Anglo-Saxon custom could level at anyone. The exchange, boast against boast, ends not in violence but in laughter, the whole hall's mood lifted by Beowulf's confidence before Grendel has even appeared.

Every modern edition of Beowulf, including the Klaeber edition this atlas already cites as its standard scholarly apparatus, descends from a single physical object: one manuscript, copied by two scribes around the turn of the first millennium and bound into what scholars now call the Nowell Codex, after its earliest known owner, the sixteenth century scholar Laurence Nowell. The manuscript later entered the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, shelved under a bust of the Roman emperor Vitellius, which is why it is still catalogued as Cotton Vitellius A.xv. In 1731, a fire tore through Ashburnham House in Westminster, where the Cotton collection was then housed; the codex survived the fire itself, but its edges were charred, and pages already brittle from age continued to crumble at their damaged margins for decades afterward, taking small amounts of text with them each time the manuscript was handled before conservators intervened. Scholarly debate over when the poem was first composed, as opposed to when this single copy was written down, still runs from as early as the eighth century to as late as the eleventh, close to the copying itself, and the linguistic evidence usually cited to date it has been directly challenged in recent scholarship. What is certain is narrower and more dramatic: had that 1731 fire burned a few inches further, the whole poem, not just its margins, would have been lost.