Beowulf and the Nowell Codex (c. 1000): Old English Epic

The Nowell Codex is the only surviving medieval manuscript of Beowulf, the longest and most celebrated poem in Old English. Copied in England around 975–1025 by two scribes, it survived the dissolution of the monasteries, a disastrous fire in 1731 and two centuries of neglect. Today it is kept in the British Library in London under the shelfmark Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, and every modern reading of Beowulf depends on it.

What the manuscript contains

The volume known as Cotton MS Vitellius A XV is really two separate books bound together in the seventeenth century. The first, the so-called Southwick Codex, dates from the twelfth century and has no connection with Beowulf. The second is the Nowell Codex.

The Nowell Codex contains five Old English texts: part of a life of Saint Christopher, “The Wonders of the East”, “The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle”, Beowulf and a poetic version of the biblical story of Judith. Most of these texts deal with monsters, marvels and distant lands, which has led some scholars to suggest that the collection was put together deliberately as a “book of monsters”.

Judith, the last text, is incomplete, and some scholars think it was added to the collection after it was first assembled. The manuscript itself is a modest working copy without illustrations or elaborate decoration, which makes its survival all the more remarkable.

Beowulf runs to 3,182 lines in modern editions. It tells how the hero Beowulf, from the Geats of southern Sweden, kills the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark, and how, fifty years later as king, he dies fighting a dragon.

The scribes and the date of the manuscript

The manuscript was written by two scribes. Scribe A copied the first part of Beowulf; Scribe B took over in the middle of a sentence at about line 1939 and finished the poem. The two hands are noticeably different, and Scribe B also corrected parts of Scribe A’s work, which suggests that he checked the copying. Their handwriting, an English script called Insular minuscule, places the copying around the turn of the first millennium. Most specialists date it to roughly 975–1025.

The American scholar Kevin Kiernan argued in 1981 that the manuscript was produced during the reign of Cnut the Great, after 1016, and that the poem itself might have been composed close to that time. His argument drew attention to signs of reworking in the manuscript, but most scholars have not accepted his late date for the poem’s composition.

The great debate over the poem’s date

The date of the poem is one of the oldest arguments in English studies. Proposed dates range from about 700 to about 1000. Supporters of an early date, in the age of Sutton Hoo and the Northumbrian monasteries, point to features of the poem’s metre and to the spelling of some names, which seem to reflect older forms of English. The detailed metrical studies of R. D. Fulk in the 1990s strengthened this case.

Supporters of a later date stress the absence of any earlier copy and the poem’s knowledge of Scandinavian legend, which some link to the Viking settlement of England. A middle position holds that the poem had a long life in oral and written form before the surviving copy was made. There is still no consensus, and modern editions usually describe the date as uncertain.

From the monasteries to Cotton’s library

Nothing is known about where the manuscript was kept in the Middle Ages. It reappears in 1563, when the antiquary Laurence Nowell wrote his name on its first page, which is why it now bears his name. Nowell was one of the first Elizabethans to study Old English seriously.

By the early seventeenth century the manuscript belonged to Sir Robert Cotton, whose great collection of medieval books later passed to the nation. Cotton’s librarians arranged his books in presses topped with busts of Roman emperors, which is why the volume is catalogued under “Vitellius”.

The Ashburnham House fire of 1731

On 23 October 1731 fire broke out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, where the Cotton library was then stored. Many manuscripts were destroyed and many more damaged. The volume containing Beowulf was rescued but scorched, and its edges became brittle.

Over the following decades, flakes from the burnt margins crumbled away, taking letters and words with them. In 1787 the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin had two transcripts made, one by a hired copyist and one in his own hand. Because these were made before further losses, they preserve readings that are now missing from the manuscript. Thorkelin published the first edition of the poem in Copenhagen in 1815.

In 1845 the British Museum mounted each leaf in a protective paper frame, which stopped the decay but covered some letters along the edges. Modern scholars have used ultraviolet light and digital imaging to recover readings hidden by the frames and the damage.

Key people

• Laurence Nowell (died c. 1570), antiquary, whose name gives the codex its modern title.
• Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), collector, whose library preserved the manuscript.
• Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), who made the 1787 transcripts and published the first edition.
• J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), whose 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” persuaded scholars to treat the poem as a work of art rather than only a historical source.

Myths and facts

Myth: Beowulf is a Viking poem. It is an English poem in Old English, though it is set in Scandinavia among Danes, Geats and Swedes of the fifth and sixth centuries.

Myth: the manuscript survived intact. The fire of 1731 and later crumbling cost many letters, and modern editions rely partly on the Thorkelin transcripts to fill the gaps.

Fact: some characters are historical. The Geatish king Hygelac is usually identified with a king whom Gregory of Tours records as killed while raiding Frankish territory in the early sixth century, probably in the 510s or 520s.

Legacy

Beowulf is now one of the most studied and translated poems in the English language. Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of 1999 won the Whitbread Book of the Year award, and the poem has inspired novels, films and opera. Its opening word, “Hwæt”, usually rendered “Listen” or “So”, has become one of the best-known words in Old English.

Beyond literature, the poem is valued by historians and archaeologists as a picture of the aristocratic world of early medieval northern Europe, with its feasting halls, gift-giving lords, ship burials and blood feuds. The ship burial described at the start of the poem is often compared with the real burial at Sutton Hoo.

The manuscript itself is a treasured object of the British Library and has been fully digitised, allowing anyone to study the scorched pages online.

Timeline

• c. 700–1000: Beowulf is composed (date disputed).
• c. 975–1025: The Nowell Codex is copied by two scribes.
• 1563: Laurence Nowell writes his name on the first page.
• Early 1600s: The manuscript enters Sir Robert Cotton’s library.
• 1731, 23 October: The Ashburnham House fire damages the manuscript.
• 1787: Thorkelin’s two transcripts are made.
• 1815: Thorkelin publishes the first printed edition.
• 1845: The leaves are mounted in paper frames.
• 1936: Tolkien delivers “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”.

Why it matters

A single fragile book carries the whole of Beowulf. Without the Nowell Codex, the greatest surviving work of early English poetry would be completely unknown, and its narrow escape from fire in 1731 shows how much of medieval literature has probably been lost.