The Historiographic Dimensions of Beowulf

by Andrew Scheil, University of Minnesota

The 3182 lines of Old English alliterative verse beginning Hw¾t we gardena in geardagum found in the British Library manuscript Cotton Vitellius A.xv have always been endowed with a curious relationship to history. On the one hand, "Beowulf" (as the long poem has been titled since Kemble's 1833 edition) resists continued scholarly attempts to place it securely in a historical context. Date, authorship, and provenance remain the subject of continued vigorous exploration and debate; as a result, the text has in many ways remained isolated from the detailed New Historicist approach to literary texts that has marked the dominant enterprise of literary criticism for the past twenty-five years. With all due caveats, Beowulf cannot be placed with full scholarly consensus in any more specific spatial or temporal context than "Anglo-Saxon England." Thus the forms of contextualization available in the disciplines of Early Modern studies or Romanticism or the American Renaissance have been unavailable, more or less, to criticism of the poem. We wish to write the poem into history, but that desire remains unfulfilled.