Anglo-Saxon Boom

The U.S. professor and the Danish publisher fell to talking about Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, a subject of deep interest to both. Kemp Malone, Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University, confessed that he was worried. The major manuscripts in his field, said he, were few, and they led a precarious existence. Many had been exposed to fire and bombardment, and might be again. It was time, said the professor, that these documents be protected, once and for all.

The publisher promptly agreed, and the conversation, held in 1948, led to an ambitious scheme.The Danish firm of Rosen-kilde & Bagger took on the task of photostating and photographing a whole series of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. They were to be printed in Denmark, distributed to Britain through George Allen & Unwin and to the U.S. through the Johns Hopkins Press. The firm then asked Winston S. Churchill to be the series' patron, hired top scholars to write special introductions. This week the first volume was ready--the famed Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf, edited by Johns Hopkins' Kemp Malone.

The Beowulf transcripts are solid proof of what the venture is about, for few valuable documents have ever had so many narrow escapes. Until 1786, the only copy of the poem was a 1000 A.D. manuscript which for years had lain a-moldering in the library of a 16th century English collector named Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. In 1700, Sir Robert's descendants turned his library over to the government, but in 1731, a good deal of it was destroyed by fire. Beowulf emerged scorched and seared --but still no one did anything to preserve what remained.

Icelandic Scholar Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin came to London after hearing about the manuscript by accident. Though he had no idea of its literary importance (he was looking for historical data), he dutifully copied it letter by letter. His copies found their way to the Great Royal Library of Denmark. They were among the few treasures to survive the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807.

After, next week, Beowulf scholars will not have to worry too much about the fate of the original, nor will they have to travel thousands of miles to pursue their studies of Thorkelin, whose mistakes in copying (e.g., 599 "d's" for "eth") will still take years to untangle. But Beowulf is only the opening salvo of the new Anglo-Saxon boom. Within the next few years, scholars all over the world will have reproductions of everything from St. Gregory's Pastoral Care to King Alfred's translation of Orosins' History of the World. Next volume on the list: an 8th century manuscript of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the original of which is now in the Leningrad Public Library, where Western scholars would have a hard time getting at it.

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