The unique manuscript of the _Beowulf_ is preserved in the Cottonian
Library of the British Museum. It is contained in the folio designated
Cotton Vitellius A. xv, where it occurs ninth in order, filling the
folios numbered 129a to 198b, inclusive.
The first recorded notice of the MS. is to be found in Wanley’s Catalog
of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (Oxford, 1705), Volume III of Hickes’s
_Thesaurus_. The poem is thus described:--
‘Tractatus nobilissimus Poeticè scriptus. Præfationis hoc est
initium.’
The first nineteen lines follow, transcribed with a few errors.
‘Initium autem primi Capitis sic se habet.’
Lines 53-73, transcribed with a few errors.
‘In hoc libro, qui Poeseos Anglo-Saxonicæ egregium est exemplum,
descripta videntur bella quæ Beowulfus quidam Danus, ex Regio
Scyldingorum stirpe Ortus, gessit contra Sueciæ Regulos.’ Page
218, col. b, and 219, col. a.
No further notice was taken of the MS. until 1786, when Thorkelin[1]
made two transcripts of it.
In 1731 there occurred a disastrous fire which destroyed a number of the
Cottonian MSS. The Beowulf MS. suffered at this time, its edges being
scorched and its pages shriveled. As a result, the edges have chipped
away, and some of the readings have been lost. It does not appear,
however, that these losses are of so great importance as the remarks of
some prominent Old English scholars might lead us to suspect. Their
remarks give the impression that the injury which the MS. received in
the fire accounts for practically all of the illegible lines. That this
is not so may be seen by comparing the Wanley transcript with the
Zupitza _Autotypes_. Writing in 1705, before the Cotton fire, Wanley
found two illegible words at line 15--illegible because of fading and
rubbing. Of exactly the same nature appear to be the injuries at lines
2220 ff., the celebrated passage which is nearly, if not quite,
unintelligible. It would therefore be a safe assumption that such
injuries as these happened to the MS. before it became a part of the
volume, Vitellius A. xv. The injuries due to scorching and burning are
seldom of the first importance.
This point is worth noting. Each succeeding scholar who transcribed the
MS., eager to recommend his work, dwelt upon the rapid deterioration of
the parchment, and the reliability of his own readings as exact
reproductions of what he himself had seen in the MS. before it reached
its present ruinous state. The result of this was that the emendations
of the editor were sometimes accepted by scholars and translators as the
authoritative readings of the MS., when in reality they were nothing but
gratuitous additions. This is especially true of Thorpe[2], and the
false readings which he introduced were never got rid of until the
Zupitza _Autotypes_ brought to light the sins of the various editors of
the poem. These statements regarding text and MS. will be developed in
the following sections of the paper[3].
[Footnote 1: See infra, p. 16.] [[Thorkelin]]
[Footnote 2: See infra, p. 49.] [[Thorpe]]
[Footnote 3: See infra on Thorkelin, p. 19; Conybeare, p. 29;
Kemble, p. 34; Thorpe, p. 51; Arnold, p. 72.]