The Dating of Beowulf

Richard W. Parker is an associate professor and chair of the Classics
Department at Brock University in St. Catharines.

One must commiserate with students of Anglo-Saxon literature: not only
are the author and the place of origin of the greatest monument of Old
English obscure, but even its date cannot be pinpointed within less than
a 300-year span. The ebb and flow of scholarly discourse has gradually
nudged the temporal parameters of the debate out of the period now
called “late antiquity.” A particularly strong nudge was provided by
Dorothy Whitelock’s The Audience of Beowulf (1951). A generation later
the studies contained in The Dating of Beowulf were an attempt to
re-examine yet again the problem of the poem’s date.

This book is a collection of learned papers delivered at a conference
held in Toronto in April 1980. An edited version of the collection was
completed by June 1981 (it was apparently accessible to scholars) and is
now published with the addition of a valuable afterword by Nicholas Howe
(the editor having died in 1984). On balance, the collection contributes
to the impetus toward a later date.

Written by scholars for scholars, the studies will be beyond the ken of
all but a few undergraduates. The particular virtues of the collection,
which will be a valuable reference for scholars, are the deep erudition
and the diversity of approach. It commences with a section on the
history of the controversy to 1980 (C. Chase); it continues with studies
on the manuscript (K.S. Kiernan, L.E. Boyle), language (A. Cameron et
al.), metrics (T. Cable), datable anachronisms (W. Goffart), history
(A.C. Murray, R.L. Page), comparative literature (R. Frank, R. McTurk,
C. Chase), style (P. Clemoes), a pair of synthetic studies (J.C. Pope,
E.G. Stanley); and ends with Howe’s afterword and an index. The
quality overall is consistently high, but the essays by Kiernan, Frank,
and Murray and Page are particularly persuasive. The attacks on the
notion of Dane and Anglo-Saxon facing off across a boundary line ring
true, and anthropological studies increasingly show that interactions
between cultures are highly complex. For now the trend is clear: “our
emotional commitment to an early date” is yielding.