#Beowulf manuscript archive#

Then he rebound the framed leaves in a new cover. His bookbinder first traced the outline of each burnt leaf, cut out the center of the tracing except for a retaining edge of about 2mm, and pasted and taped the vellum leaf to the paper frame.

It remained in its burnt binding until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, undertook to restore these damaged manuscripts in his care. The unique copy of Beowulf is preserved in the Cottonian collection of manuscripts that suffered from a great fire in 1731. I would like to show you some of the ways in which an electronic Beowulf will provide better access to parts of the manuscript than studying the manuscript itself. Most of these images are now available on the Internet through anonymous ftp or Mosaic. In our first experiments in June with the camera and its dedicated hardware, we transmitted a half-dozen images by phone line from the Conservation Studio of the British Library to the Wenner Gren Imaging Laboratory at the University of Kentucky, where identical hardware was set up to receive the data. Three or four images - three or four letters or words if that is what we are scanning - will fill up an 88 MB hard disk, and we have found that no single image of this size can be processed in real time without at least 64 MB of RAM. The resulting images at this maximum resolution are enormous, about 21-25 MB, and tax the capabilities of the biggest machines. The equipment we are using to capture the images is the Roche/Kontron ProgRes 3012 digital camera, which can scan any text, from a letter or a word to an entire page, at 2000 x 3000 pixels in 24-bit color. My presentation today is the first public announcement of this project. Plans are already underway, for example, to digitize the late eighteenth-century Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, as well as the first collation of the manuscript with the editio princeps of the poem.

#Beowulf manuscript archive#

As this electronic archive grows, it will incorporate facsimiles of many other documents that help us restore parts of the manuscript that were lost or damaged by fire in the early eighteenth century. xv to readers in the British Library and at other selected sites. In the spring of 1993, we began as part of this initiative a big 'Electronic Beowulf' project, which will in its first manifestation make available in early 1994 a full-color electronic facsimile of Cotton Vitellius A. S part of its strategic objectives for the year 2000, the British Library has made a commitment to increase access to its collections by use of imaging and network technology. The Association of American University Presses, Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Kiernan SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING ON THE ELECTRONIC NETWORKS, 1993 Gateways, Gatekeepers, and Roles in the Information Omniverse However, neither of these theories have achieved a consensus of support and both should be cited with caution.The latest developments of the Electronic BEOWULF Project clickĭIGITAL PRESERVATION, RESTORATION, and DISSEMINATION ofīy Kevin S. The poem therefore was composed early in the Anglo-Saxon period. More recently, Lapidge 2000 argued that the errors made by both scribes in copying certain letters suggest that the poem was at one stage written in a type of script not used after c. Kiernan infers that Beowulf was composed during the reign of Cnut. Kiernan 1996 argues that the Beowulf portion of the Nowell Codex was originally a separate manuscript and that the second scribe was the author of the poem, with his authorial corrections visible on fol. In recent years, two studies of the manuscript have reached controversial conclusions. It is thought the manuscript was produced around the turn of the eleventh century. It is difficult to discern the principles by which the codex was arranged, which is basically, to quote Sisam, 'a collection in verse and prose of marvellous stories' (see Orchard 1995). The volume was the work of two scribes, who changed over halfway through Beowulf. However, it is likely that the following texts comprised a single volume: A fragment of a Life of St ChristopherĪll these texts are in Anglo-Saxon.

The manuscript was damaged in the Cotton fire of 1731, which makes its structure difficult to discern. In its modern form, the volume consists of several separate medieval manuscripts, which were very likely only bound together in the eighteenth century. It is known to critics as 'the Beowulf manuscript' or 'the Nowell codex'. The only copy of Beowulf to survive is found in the manuscript with the modern shelf-mark London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. The Beowulf Manuscript The Beowulf Manuscript