Porque Leer Bewolf ( Inglés)

Beowulf, the rousing Old English poem of man and monster, has been a classroom classic for generations. Its own survival as a text is nearly as epic as the story it tells. Beowulf’s presence among us reminds us upon what slender threads our knowledge of the past depends.

Only through a series of extraordinary escapes has Beowulf come down to us. In the late 900s, two anonymous scribes wrote the story on parchment using West Saxon, a Germanic dialect dominant for literary composition in England at the time. Known among scholars as the Cotton Vitellius A.XV, the Beowulf manuscript is modest, measuring only about five by eight inches, and without any illumination. Compared to the three other extant codices containing Old English poetry, Cotton Vitellius A.XV seems rough-hewn, almost journeyman work.

Beowulf was bound together with four other works in Old English: three in prose (The Passion of St. Christopher, The Wonders of the East, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle), and Judith, a poem. Judith and Beowulf are composed in the unrhymed, four-beat alliterative style characteristic of Old English poetry and are among the earliest wholly vernacular works in the English canon.

Why these five works were considered of a piece ten centuries ago is one of the mysteries surrounding Beowulf, although the presence of monsters in each suggests that perhaps this was the common thread. It may be this everlasting human interest in monster stories that initiated Beowulf’s survival.

The whereabouts of the manuscript during the five hundred years after it was written is unknown. We hear of it in 1563, when the Dean of Litchfield, Lawrence Nowell, owned it at least long enough to write his name and the date on the first page. Very likely Nowell saved the manuscript and Beowulf from destruction when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and broke up their libraries. From Nowell, again via unknown ways, the manuscript found its way into the famous library of the Elizabethan physician and antiquary Sir Robert Cotton. (It was Cotton’s practice to catalogue his manuscripts according to the busts of Roman emperors standing over his bookshelves; hence the manuscript’s name.) After Cotton’s death, his collection was eventually recognized as a national treasure, and came under the protection of the Crown.

Today Beowulf rests safely in the British Library in London, along with what remains of Cotton’s books. Miraculously, one might say. In 1731, the Cottonian Library caught fire and much of the collection was destroyed. The codex containing Beowulf was scorched. Its pages, made brittle by the fire, continue to crumble. Fortunately, in the early nineteenth century Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, a linguist and antiquary from Iceland, made two transcriptions. Thorkelin’s copies preserved evidence of now missing or faded words.

If our possession today of the manuscript containing Beowulf is a story of good luck and mystery, the tale of the poem’s making -- as much as we can piece together -- seems similar. A variety of evidence suggests that Beowulf began as an oral poem, passed by singers of one generation to the next. It’s a good guess Beowulf would have disappeared along with those singers themselves if someone had not caused the poem to be written down around A.D. 1000.

No one knows who “wrote” Beowulf. Like all early oral poetry, it had as many authors as singers who performed it. The singers may have performed it when warriors gathered in meadhalls to celebrate their prowess at gatherings like those described in Beowulf. In fact, it is from this poem that we derive many of the details for our reconstructions of Anglo- Saxon social life.

Scholars speculate that the poem may be been shaped by a singer who recited the poem while a scribe took it down or possibly by the two scribes in whose handwriting Beowulf has reached us. Did the scribes of Cotton Vitellius A.XV copy their version of Beowulf from another manuscript, or did they rely on ear and memory? Alas, they left us no description of their practice and no clues as to how the poem came into their hands.

Perhaps settling upon an author might be easier if we could be sure when, where, or why the poem was composed. But with Beowulf, even these basic facts are uncertain. Beowulf himself seems to have been entirely fictional. There is only one historically verifiable moment in the poem, but this at least gives us an earliest date for that portion. Beowulf tells us that Hygelac, lord of the Geats, died in battle against the Frisians. This event is corroborated by the Frankish historian Gregory of Tours (d. 594), who notes in his chronicle that in the year 521 a “Chlochilaichus” (Latinized “Hygelac”) was killed in a raid on Frisia.

Proposing that Beowulf was composed in the sixth century raises more questions than it answers. Where was it being told, and how did the poem change, as it passed from singer to singer for five hundred years before it was written down in the manuscript we have? Why did people continue to listen to it and keep it alive?

Archaic

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