Critical Edition

The line numbering in Electronic Beowulf 5.0 follows traditional numbering to facilitate comparison with other editions. Missing lines and experimental reformatting of the "hypermetrical" verses are now discussed in the editorial notes to those lines.

Wanley Restorations

Choosing Critical Edition from the Discovery menu opens many ways to access the manuscript evidence. This choice releases the editorial markup identifying restorations and emendations. The earliest restorations come from two transcriptions covering forty lines from the beginning of Beowulf, which Humfrey Wanley made at the end of the seventeenth century.

Because he made his transcriptions before the Cotton Library fire of 1731, Wanley is the sole source of the reading medo at fol. 130v1 (line 69a). To see textual notes of any restoration or emendation in the Critical Edition, simply click the mouse inside their (parentheses) or [square brackets]. See Wanley for more information about about his transcriptions and his knowledge of Beowulf and Old English in general.

Thorkelin Restorations

The same process releases the editorial markup identifying Thorkelin restorations, as well as editorial emendations and conjectural restorations. Readings restored by James Matthews (Thorkelin A) are in parentheses, those by Thorkelin B are in square brackets, while editorial emendations and conjectural emendations are in square brackets with italics. For example, the reading gigantas in the critical edition is marked gi[ga](ntas) to show that only B provides evidence for -ga-, but that A or AB attest to -ntas:

When using the Critical Edition, a click of the mouse within (parentheses) or [square brackets] opens the textual notes, many of which are illustrated by backlit or ultraviolet images, to that specific reading.

Backlit and Ultraviolet

In Electronic Beowulf 5.0, there is visual evidence of over 1300 backlit images to share with readers.

In addition to accessing textual notes by clicking inside parentheses and square brackets in the Critical Edition, one can also see the places requiring textual notes on the manuscript page itself. Click the on the top menu bar to reveal these places.

Click any of the rectangles that appear on the folio to go to the illustrated Textual Notes. In many cases, special techniques, particularly fiber-optic backlighting, provide images of readings covered by the paper frames of the nineteenth-century restoration binding, or magnify shrunken, damaged letters, or make visible with ultraviolet an erased text.

In this case, if one clicks on the rectangles in the top line, notes beginning with backlit images open.

As always, after clicking a small backlit image, a large illustration suitable for close scrutiny opens:

Editorial Emendations & Conjectural Restorations

The same quick access to textual notes for Thorkelin restorations applies to editorial emendations and conjectural restorations, which are marked in the critical edition by [italics] within square brackets. The notes themselves identify these readings as either editorial emendations, that is, changes to the manuscript readings, or conjectural restorations, readings that for one reason or another (usually fire damage) were lost to the manuscript. These notes also alert the reader to whether the emendation or restoration is customary to most editions or new to this one.

The new editorial emendations and conjectural restorations supplement or challenge, previous editorial changes that have become ingrained in modern editions. Anglo-Saxon readers of this manuscript did not have access to any modern changes and perhaps devised different solutions each time they encountered problems that demanded emendations. Modern readers should feel free to do the same. The conjectural restorations of Electronic Beowulf 5.0 are informed guesses that try to fill gaps in paleographically and linguistically plausible ways.

Testing Conjectures

One of the most valuable and perhaps revolutionary aspects of image-based electronic editing of medieval manuscripts is that it permits more accurate evaluation of conjectural restorations of lost text. Before the digital age, conservative editors like Klaeber, who intended to restore damaged readings based on manuscript evidence, printed reconstructions they thought actually fit in the manuscript. Their editions in this respect were meant to conserve the manuscript record. Digital imaging makes it possible for editors to examine the validity of their decisions.

A case in point is the obliterated text between syððan and þ on fol. 179r10. Any attempt at restoration is complicated by the fact that some of the ink traces, as conclusively shown by an overlay in Electronic Beowulf 5.0, come from an offset from the facing verso of fol. 178.

Digital technology allows us to subtract or ignore these false leads and arrive at a more plausible restoration. However, the offset itself shows that the mysterious condition of fol. 179 was particularly receptive to such staining.

Klaeber and the editors of the fourth edition confidently restore [bemað], a word not elsewhere used in Beowulf.

A digital restoration of [bemað] using the scribe's own letters from the same page shows that it cannot fit in the space in the manuscript. The extra-wide letters m and ð take up so much room that the cross-stroke of ð ends up crossing the following þ.

The same method shows that the conjectural restoration [beget], "to get, obtain, seek out, seize, lay hold of," which well suits the context, perfectly fits the available space in the manuscript. Oblique forms of begitan are used frequently in Beowulf, including on this folio (begeaton 2249), and beget is again used as a variant of begeat (line 2872).

In addition to tooltips like these in the textual notes there are also “transparencies” over some key folios, in particular the palimpsest, fol. 179 recto and verso, which allow the reader to study a conjectural restoration in the full context of its folio. The reader is alerted to the existence of one of these otherwise hidden overlays in two ways: (1) the textual note, where applicable, will include the statement, “See 'Conjectural Restoration';” and (2) the -button next to the on the top menu will be green:

To gain access to the conjectural restoration in the context of the entire folio the user engages the drop-down menu with the mouse and makes a selection, in this case a choice between a possible and an impossible restoration of the upper-left burnt corner of fol. 180v. The selection opens an interactive window, which allows the user by means of a slider and other tools to examine the conjectural reconstruction.

Here the reconstruction shows that a time-honored reading, swiðe ondrædað, is about three letters too wide for the measurable gap; the two undoubted restorations from the pre-fire Thorkelin transcripts in lines 2 and 3 establish the margin, which is also observable and extensible from the bottom of the page.

A conjectural restoration with the same meaning and meter that fits the space in the manuscript is swiðe drædað.