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The Transmission of "Beowulf" - Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Hardcover)
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The Transmission of "Beowulf" - Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Hardcover)
Series: Myth and Poetics II
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of
Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In
The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological
questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf
the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially
did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much
time elapsed between composition and preservation? Neidorf answers
these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical
regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns
of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the
poem's transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features
that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems,
that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is
essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of
course, during the poem's written transmission, several hundred
scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in
the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language
history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf's analysis
reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and
modernize the text's orthography, but their unfamiliarity with
obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The
Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible
witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took
place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An
appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien's Beowulf: A Translation and
Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien's
general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his
position on various textual issues.
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