But the “younger” hand wrote first, and the older hand took over halfway through the manuscript, right in the middle of Beowulf. On paleographical grounds, the scripts of the first and second scribe could be dated up to fifty years apart. My mind also turned to my little ethel paper and thinking about the only manuscript of the poem, written by two scribes with two pointedly different styles of handwriting, The first scribe, who wrote the three ethels in the manuscript, was a generation younger than the second scribe. His reading, which drew upon the work of generations of feminist scholars before him opened my eyes to possibilities I am shocked I had never considered before, since they are so consistent with how I had already been reading the poem. Trilling, included a paper by Stephen Yeager who presented a thoughtful reading of Beowulf as a poem written potentially for women and potentially by a woman.
#BEOWULF MANUSCRIPT SERIES#
At the most recent Medieval Academy of America meeting, a series of panels on Feminist Approaches to Old English literature, organized by Robin Norris, Rebecca Stephenson, and Renée R. In teaching Beowulf I try to guide students to see the tragic triad of women-Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, and Grendel’s mother-whose suffering epitomizes the destructive nature of the violent culture they are caught in. I read Beowulf as similar to the majority of extant Old English poetry: deeply melancholic, explicitly Christian, and critical of the pre-Christian culture it presents. I no longer imagine reading Beowulf as a celebration of germanic pre-Christian culture. I love the poem more every time I read any portion of it, but my understanding of it has changed significantly. Since writing that paper over a decade ago I have read and reread and taught Beowulf many times. I no longer believe there is any justification for reading the rune in this way, and want to unambiguously distance myself from any perception of sympathetic beliefs. I could even imagine my 2004 reading of the rune in the Beowulf-manuscript being used to bolster such an appropriation: as if the eleventh-century scribe of the Beowulf-manuscript was trying to invoke an idealized germanic past. White supremacist narratives are obsessed with mythical fantasies of originary homelands, so the ancient germanic rune representing “home,” is not a surprising target. The ethel rune was actually incorporated into some WWII-era Nazi symbolism. White supremacists in Charlottesville, from The Public Medievalist Credit: Charles Butler Thanks to the ever increasing easy availability of digital facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, these peculiar features of manuscripts are easier to discover and share than they ever have been before.
![beowulf manuscript beowulf manuscript](http://www.paddletrips.net/beowulf/html/beorefs/manuscript-scribe12-172v-1604.jpg)
Seeing as everything we know about the poem Beowulf is dependent on this single manuscript witness, little details like this are surely worth noting, especially since this is not a widespread scribal abbreviation. In the case of the Beowulf manuscript ( London, British Library Cotton Vitellius A xv), the “interesting thing” is the use of the ethel rune ᛟ in place of the Old English word “ ethel” (“homeland”) three times in manuscript, all written by the first of the two scribes of the poem. I have only more recently come to realize how close this article is to my current and ongoing projects, which are primarily concerned with the reception of Hebrew during the early English period (700-1100) and how this reception is manifested in understudied manuscript materials. People have rarely talked about it before.There is an interesting thing in this manuscript (the “ Beowulf manuscript”).
![beowulf manuscript beowulf manuscript](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/63/b3/03/63b3036a0e070271813b2a920bd5a4d1--medieval-manuscript-british-library.jpg)
The central argument of the article is unproblematic and I hope useful for scholars of medieval manuscript materiality and Old English literature. I offer this post to make clear the problems with this article and suggest how I would change it. I am far more concerned about a type of argument I make in that paper which could be used to support white nationalist appropriation of medieval materials.
![beowulf manuscript beowulf manuscript](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/50/d3/8c/50d38cdcf609aed9d7c1065245b7b305--medieval-life-medieval-art.jpg)
But that feeling probably never goes away. At the same time, I can’t help feeling a embarrassed at my clunky, unpolished writing style. All this to say, this article is pretty special to me, so I’m glad people are reading it and getting something out of it. This short article was based on my very first conference presentation at the first Vagantes Conference at Harvard University in 2002, which itself grew out of my seminar paper for my Beowulf course I took with Antonette diPaolo (“Toni”) Healey during my MA at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2000. A few people have recently complimented me on my very first scholarly publication, “ Eþel-weard: The First Scribe of the Beowulf Manuscript,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 105 (2004): 177–186.