Electronic Beowulf

The British Library holds the only known manuscript of "Beowulf", the earliest surviving long poem in English, or indeed in any early European language. Dating from the early eleventh century, this unique manuscript is undoubtedly one of the Library's greatest treasures. The Electronic Beowulf proje [...]
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The British Library holds the only known manuscript of "Beowulf", the earliest surviving long poem in English, or indeed in any early European language. Dating from the early eleventh century, this unique manuscript is undoubtedly one of the Library's greatest treasures. The Electronic Beowulf project began in 1993 when Professor Kevin Kiernan, the world's leading authority on the history of the "Beowulf" manuscript, made use of new technologies to present a completely new view of the sources for his edition of the "Beowulf" text. Following on from the publication of the original research editions of "Electronic Beowulf" in 1999 and 2003, the British Library is delighted to announce a new edition and a newly updated version of the CD-ROM, created for students and all those interested in exploring this iconic manuscript in greater depth. "Electronic Beowulf, Third Edition" encompasses a huge database of digital images of "Beowulf", including well over two thousand lost or hidden readings restored by the earliest transcripts and collations, as well as by the modern technologies of ultraviolet, fibre-optics, and digital imaging.The new student edition includes all of the features of the third revised and updated research edition, but provides additional strategies specifically designed to help students learn the language, the grammar, and the metre of the poem, and to make individual discoveries with new, more powerful, search options. Each word in the student edition is linked to the glossary, which contains complete manuscript-line and verse-line locations, as well as definitions. Students may set their own options to study the meter of each half-line of verse, based on the analyses of the major theories, view a line-by-line translation, or get quick definitions or grammatical notes. New search interfaces give easy access to all aspects of the edition with cross-references to the lineation of print editions. The reader may choose to study the manuscript and edition together, in a variety of user-chosen desktop arrangements, or examine the manuscript or the edition separately. In addition to the image-based electronic edition of "Beowulf", the reader has access to complete electronic facsimiles of the composite codex, BL MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, and its constituent parts, the Southwick Codex and the Nowell Codex; to the indispensable eighteenth-century transcripts by G.J. Thorkelin and his hired scribe, and to the two nineteenth-century collations by J.J. Conybeare and Sir Frederic Madden, both of which feature copies of Thorkelin's 1815 first edition of "Beowulf".