Electronic Beowulf would not be here in a fifth edition after thirty-four years without the continued endorsement of the British Library and the unflagging institutional support of the University of Kentucky.
At the British Library we owe particular thanks to Dr Claire Breay, MBE, Head of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts, and Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator. I wish to thank Dr Breay for independently confirming that the writing grids in the second scribe's part of Beowulf are measurably longer than those used by the same scribe in Judith. At the University of Kentucky we are indebted to the help and encouragement of Dr Ana Franco-Watkins, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Adrianne Gilley, Executive Assistant, Scott Bradley, Assistant Dean for Communications and Technical Solutions, and Jonathan Milby, IT Infrastructure Director; Information Technology and the dedicated staff of its Help Desk; Computer Science professor emeritus Jerzy Jaromczyk; and Ms Cindy Parker of Young Library.
Research-quality images of Frederic Madden's collation of the Beowulf manuscript with G. J. Thorkelin's 1815 first edition are a major enhancement to the fifth edition. Madden's collation is preserved in Houghton *28286.24.3 in the Houghton Library at Harvard. We are deeply obliged to Leslie Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Houghton Library, for authorizing the digitizing, and to Mary Haegert, Digitization Coordinator, and Marouen Jedoui, Houghton Library, for so quickly and efficiently providing this invaluable resource.
Other enhancements to the fifth edition include the opening historiated B of Beowulf and Wiglaf fighting the dragon by Ellie Guinnip. As in previous editions, the dragon fight on these screens is inspired by the historiated R in Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms 168:4v, from the Cîteaux Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great. Ellie is also responsible for the elegant and efficient user interface of the new GUIDE, but not for any shortcomings in the editor's revised text with hundreds of new illustrations. Geoffrey Russom has kindly contributed his latest metrical types for the Meter statistics accessed through the new Discovery button. The editor also thanks Thomas Cable for helpful discussions of the meter under his system.
I am grateful to Emily Thornbury, Chair of Medieval Studies at Yale, for the opportunity to present a preview of the fifth edition to medievalists while I was visiting fellow at Yale. I have enduring appreciation for Andrew Prescott and the late Paul Szarmach, who in 1991 asked me to prepare a digital facsimile of the Beowulf manuscript. Andrew, then curator of manuscripts at the British Library and the person in charge of their Initiatives for Access programme, facilitated my expansive ideas for an image-based electronic edition. I have benefitted from his wise advice, generosity of spirit, and valued friendship ever since.
My friend and colleague Ionut Emil Iacob, professor of Mathematical Sciences at Georgia Southern University and the software engineer of Electronic Beowulf, began working on this project as a research assistant at the University of Kentucky in 2001. The success of Electronic Beowulf in four revised editions is owing to his dedicated insistence on continuing to maintain and update the software after I retired in 2005. Since then, we have published three major revisions, including this fifth edition.
For Aïdine, my children, and my grandchildren.
KTSK, St. Simons Island and New Haven, 2026
While we were preparing the first free online edition of Electronic Beowulf, Andrew Prescott set up accounts for us with the UK's JiscMail Service. This facility made it easy for readers to contact and interact with us. They helped us locate problems on the different browsers and made valuable suggestions for improving the interface. In addition to many anonymous readers, the JiscMail contributors deserving warm thanks for excellent observations include Elizabeth Howard, Roberto Rosselli del Turco, Tony Harris, Dave Wilton, Courtney Campbell, Nicole Guenther Discenza, and Alison Killilea.
We owe special thanks to the British Library for allowing and indeed encouraging us to present images of the manuscript online for free. We are grateful to the British Library officials who supported us, notably Dr Claire Breay, MBE, Head of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts, Dr Adam Farquahar, former Head of Digital Scholarship, and Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library, who announced the launch of the fourth edition on the British Library Digital Scholarship Blog on 13 October 2015, four days after the launch.
As ever, I must thank the University of Kentucky for steadfastly maintaining the Electronic Beowulf website over the years since its inception in 1992. Mark Kornbluh, Dean of Arts & Sciences, and his staff were especially helpful and accommodating. The University of Kentucky Information Technology Services is always responsive, and a special thank you is due Computer Science professor Jerzy Jaromczyk for serving as liaison with UKIT.
KTSK, St. Simons Island, December 2015
Published on DVD by British Library Publications in 2011, Electronic Beowulf 3.0 was a major revision of the earlier editions,
including enhanced, higher resolution imagery, a thoroughly revised glossary, and an Options menu giving users better access through
tooltips to definitions, grammar, translation, glossary, meter, traditional and experimental line numbers, as well as to the critical edition
with its textual notes.
The most important acknowledgments for this version must go to the many users—friends, colleagues, strangers, and reviewers—who helped
identify intractable problems caused by the underlying Java runtime program. Emil Iacob, the software engineer, addressed these issues
with version 3.1.
However, by Summer 2013 these underlying problems forced all major browsers to disable unsigned Java applets compiled
with earlier versions of Java. A signed applet was not the solution. Iacob provided a temporary fix with an installer, allowing owners
of the DVD to install the program on personal computers. The experience led us to decide to move the program onto the Internet with free
online international access in the fourth edition of Electronic Beowulf (4.0).
KTSK, St. Simons Island, Summer 2011
This upgraded version is most indebted to my research assistant, Ionut Emil Iacob, who reprogrammed the Electronic Beowulf to run on the newer Mac and PC platforms and in the ever-changing browsers. It now works on Mac OSX with Netscape 7.1 and Safari 1.0 (as well as with Netscape 4.* on Mac Classic). On PCs using Windows NT4, 2000, ME, XP, Electronic Beowulf 2.0 works with all Netscape browsers from 4.* to the current 7.1, as well as with Internet Explorer 5.* to the current 6.
Iacob designed the new software architecture to facilitate online updates, so owners of the CDs can in the future download upgrades as the browsers change. Iacob also modified the Search facilities to link results from searches of the edition and the transcript to images of the corresponding folios. He and my research assistant, Chengdong Li, also improved the Glossary interface to let users find without scrolling through the glossary. I am grateful to the students in my Beowulf seminar and especially to Demorah Hayes and Robert Callen for finding mistakes in the glossary and the texts. Dorothy Carr Porter, the program coordinator of Research in Computing for Humanities, helped me revise the online Guide and the Help facility, and updated the Bibliography through Spring 2003.
The depiction of Beowulf and Wiglaf fighting the dragon is by Dana Bart, inspired by the famous historiated R in Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms 168:4v, from the Cîteaux Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great.
I of course remain deeply indebted to all the people who worked on the first version of the Electronic Beowulf, as well as to my wife, Aïdine, who has helped me on this project and in my life in countless ways.
KTSK, St. Simons Island, August 2003
It is impossible to imagine an electronic edition without the true collaboration of many people with different skills.
Andrew Prescott, curator in the Department of Manuscripts in The British Library, and Paul Szarmach, now director of the
Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, first conceived the idea of a complete electronic edition and then asked
me to prepare it. As the 1882 facsimile edition attests, the Department of Manuscripts in The British Library has for
over a century and a half encouraged work that would make the Beowulf manuscript accessible to the world.
The people most closely involved with the start of the Electronic Beowulf project in 1993 were David Hart and Charles
Fischer of the University of Kentucky, John Bennett, an outside technical consultant, and from the British Library, David
French and Ann Gilbert of Collections and Preservation, and above all, Andrew Prescott.
Institutional support at the British Library and the University of Kentucky has been strong and sustaining throughout
the project. I am particularly indebted to Alice Prochaska, Michael Alexander, and David Way at the British Library,
and to Paul Willis, Eugene Williams, David Watt, FitzGerald Bramwell, Elisabeth Zinser, Richard Evans, David Durant,
and President Charles Wethington at the University of Kentucky, and Robert Hemenway, now chancellor at Kansas University.
Special thanks are due John Connolly, director of the Center for Computational Sciences at Kentucky, for providing
research assistants in computer science over the course of the project.
There were many other people who helped in important ways at what always seemed critical times. I owe a special debt to
my former student, Dani Shupe, who helped me through many experimental stages of the project. Other people who gave much
needed advice or assistance at just the right time are Steven Nissen, Anthony Parker, Paul Eakin, Ken Kubota, Alexander
Sokhin, Ashley Coutinho, Praveen Devulapalli, Todd Rutland, Matt Giesselman, JoAnn Lomax, Aaron Mansfield; the members
of my Old English and Beowulf courses, who cheerfully found mistakes in early versions; a long line of forgiving system
administrators; Kathy Hamperian, Trish Smith, Rene Hales, Robert Tannenbaum, Mark Denomme, Amir Sadr, Charles Bynaker,
Allan Hetzel, Robert Crovo, Brent Seales; and a great many colleagues at other universities and institutions,
including Peter Baker, Carl Berkhout, Patrick Conner, Helen Damico, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Mary Richards,
Antonette DiPaolo Healey, Susan Hockey, Marilyn Deegan, Peter Robinson, Seamus Ross, Richard Ekman, Michael Pidd,
Michael Fraser, Catherine Fet, Kimberly DeCamp—I really need a collaborator to help keep track of all my collaborators.
For permission to digitize both Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf, N.k.S. 512 and 513, I must thank Birgitte Possing, Keeper
of Manuscripts, and the Royal Library of Denmark. Whitney Bolton generously donated to the British Library John J.
Conybeare's 1817 collation of the Beowulf manuscript with Thorkelin's edition when we asked to digitize it for the Electronic
Beowulf. Leslie Morris, Curator of Manuscripts, kindly allowed us to digitize over several years Sir Frederic Madden's 1824
collation, shelfmark 28286.24.3*, which is reproduced here by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. I am
grateful, too, to William Comstock, David Remington, and Stephanie Mitchell of the new Digital Imaging Group at Harvard for
expertly supplying missing images at the eleventh hour of the project. I had the time and means to undertake such a
time-consuming and expensive project through generous grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, and the IBM Corporation.
My greatest debt of all is to the team whose names appear on the cover with mine. At the British Library Andrew Prescott,
the prime mover, and David French, who patiently set up hundreds of shots for fiber-optic backlighting; and at the University
of Kentucky, Cheng Jiun Yuan, who accomplished the ingenious programming for such a difficult and eccentric project; Elizabeth
Solopova, who figured out how SGML markup could accomplish the wide range of searches the material demanded; Michael Ellis,
who devised an efficient linked and layered HTML glossary; and Linda Cantara, who fortunately joined us in time to get
everything organized and to serve as production manager in the closing months of the project. I dedicate the Electronic Beowulf
to one team member whose name is not on the cover: my wife, Aïdine.
KTSK, Lexington, KY, November 1999