text, should provide an alphabetical glossary, and should furnish a due amount of help in difficult passages and no more. This need I have attempted to supply. I have of course made abundant use of the labours of my predecessors. The debt of an editor of “Beowulf” to the glossaries of Grein and Heyne is necessarily great. At the same time nothing has been accepted on mere authority. A glance at the glossary will suffice to show that it is no translation from the German. Of the text, in the same way, every line, every stop, almost every word, has been carefully considered. The genealogical tables and the index of proper names give, in a concise form, information that in many cases has hitherto had to be sought from various sources.[1]
The Manuscript. The excellent edition, with autotypes and transliteration of every folio of the MS., prepared for the Early English Text Society by Prof. Zupitza, is almost of equal authority with the MS. itself, and is therefore quite invaluable to the editor, the autotypes being above criticism. Upon these the present work is based. The transliteration of a few lines here will serve to show some of the more marked characteristics of the unique extant MS. (Cott. Vitellius A. xv. in the British Museum), and to make apparent how far and in what particulars, besides those indicated in the foot-notes, the edited text differs from the MS.:—
- ↑ For details connected with the literary history of the poem, the student is referred to Ten Brink’s Early English Literature (Bell); Morley’s English Writers, Vol. I. (Cassell); Brooke’s Early English Literature, Vol. I. (Macmillan); and Ten Brink’s monograph in Quellen und Forschungen, LXII. Complete bibliographies are given in Wülcker’s Grundriss (1885), and Garnett’s Translation of Beowulf (1892).
