This manuscript-based third edition supersedes all previous versions of Electronic Beowulf. It is designed to meet the needs of general readers, who require a full, line by line, translation; of students, who want to understand the grammar and the meter and still have time in a semester to study and appreciate other important aspects of the poem; and of scholars, who want immediate access to a critical apparatus identifying the nearly 2000 eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, and manuscript-based conjectural restorations.

The facsimiles incorporate new, much higher resolution images of all 70 folios, over 130 ultraviolet images, and over 750 newly processed backlit images of the more than 1300 that reveal the hundreds of letters covered on the versos by the nineteenth-century restoration frames. The text is completely revised, based closely on and comprehensively illustrated by the single surviving manuscript of Beowulf. Recently contested readings are re-examined and in most cases confirmed by newly processed images. The glossary is completely revised, as well, and users now have instant access through tooltips to the definitions and grammar of every one of the 17,327 words in the text.

Getting Started

To start the program simply place the Electronic Beowulf 3.0 CD in your computer and, depending on the OS you are using, double-click the eBeo3-PC or eBeo3-Mac icon. You may also install the program on your PC or Mac by opening the installer folder and double-clicking the relevant icon for your PC or Mac. (If you wish to change the default browser, “Right-Click” on “Start.html” and “Open with...” your choice of browser.) After installation, the Electronic Beowulf 3.0 icon will appear on the Desktop. The default setting of the open program has the manuscript on the left and the edition on the right, but readers can easily rearrange this view to suit their own preferences.

The easiest way to start is simply to proceed through the manuscript using the Next and Previous navigation buttons on the top menu. Use the “Goto” button on the menu to choose a specific folio and the accompanying text will open as well; increase or decrease the size of the image at the “Fit Frame” panel. Other uses of the top menus are discussed below.

New features are designed to provide quick access to a very wide range of information that is normally difficult or tedious to consult: definitions, detailed parsing (including help with strong verbs), literal translations, an exhaustive glossary, lexical cross-referencing, metrical analyses for all verses, a critical apparatus, textual and explanatory notes, eighteenth-century restorations, editorial emendations, conjectural restorations, and ease of reference to manuscript images as well as to printed editions.

To help the user take easy advantage of these resources, we have provided in the upper-right corner of the edition an “Options” access point that opens a menu of options, described and illustrated in the guide below. You may keep the “Options” menu open for dynamic changes, or close the menu after you have made your selections by clicking on “Hide Options”.

A general reader may simply want to enable the interlinear translation by selecting the Translation option. Thereafter a literal translation of any line will appear whenever the mouse is held over that line. The translation strives to a fault to observe the word order of the Old English and to remind readers of the plethora of alliteration of the verse. The result pales beside the celebrated translations of Seamus Heaney and Roy Liuzza, of course, but should serve as a useful “trot” for unraveling the syntax for beginners and casual readers. It should also eliminate misunderstandings about how the edition interprets the text through its glossary.

A student will want more information about individual words, and probably prefer not to have the translation intrude on this level of study. In this case the student can remove the check mark beside Translation and check instead the button for Definition and Grammar. Then a definition and detailed morphological information will appear when the mouse is placed over any word in Beowulf.

The tooltip reveals that onfeng is third person singular, past tense indicative, of the verb, onfon, a class 7 strong verb. By double-clicking the word onfeng in the text or by selecting the button for Glossary, the student can open the full entry for onfon in the context of a comprehensive glossary of Beowulf.

The student will see from the cross-reference with fon that on- is a prefix, and by following the link to the base word will find that Beowulf uses six different verbs formed by prefixes with fon (befon, onfon, ðurhfon, wiðfon, ymbefon, and gefon). One can explore all of these related words and easily return to onfon and onfeng and the edition by following the links.

The verb gefon, class 7 strong, has an unusual infinitive form, a contraction. To understand its conjugation in the context of other strong class 7 verbs, one can click the class number to divide the Glossary window to provide other models of that class (to close this window, place the mouse on the divider and pull it down like a shade).

The full glossary provides a wealth of information for casual readers, serious students, and scholars. By clicking any location, which for easy reference to the manuscript always provides folio number, folio line number and verse line number, the user is taken directly to that location in the text. To keep the full glossary handy but out of the way, shrink the window:

Students may also wish to study the meter of Beowulf. For the first time in any edition the Electronic Beowulf 3.0 provides comprehensive access to the scansion of all 6,368 (or in print editions 6,364) half-lines in the poem. By clicking the Meter option, the student may choose to have tooltips for any or all of the five different prevailing metrical theories.

Some metrists have highly empirical, untheoretical approaches with scores and even hundreds of types, while others have elegant abstract theories with relatively few types. Students will find that even the more abstract theories often display very different interpretations of the meter of individual lines.

Using the tooltips, readers will also learn to what extent different metrical theories invisibly emend a great multitude of manuscript readings by suppressing or adding syllables in their scansions. If they do not want to show metrical tooltips, students and scholars can still study all the statistics of each metrist in their respective lists or open the searchable “All Meter” window for comparative views of any or all lines.

All of the metrical systems accurately represent the vast majority of lines in Beowulf. Unlike all traditional print editions, however, Electronic Beowulf 3.0 does not accord extraordinary authority to normal meter to establish the text of Beowulf. With the cross-referencing system provided in Electronic Beowulf 3.0, readers can easily consult other editions for emendations based on one or another metrical theory. This edition bases its readings on the manuscript, even when it appears to go against what are considered by other editors inviolable rules of meter. For this reason, the line numbers in this edition often differ from the line numbers, and indeed the number of lines, in print editions.

These differences in line numbering, however, will present no problems to readers who wish to use Electronic Beowulf 3.0 with another edition, because we have provided searchable cross-references in the Options menu. Simply choose “Traditional” in Options to search by traditional line numbers and to show them as tooltips in the margins.

Choosing Critical Edition from the top of the Options menu opens many additional ways to access the manuscript evidence. This button releases the editorial markup that identifies Thorkelin restorations, as well as editorial emendations and conjectural restorations. Readings restored by 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:

A click of the mouse on any reading (in parentheses) supplied by Thorkelin A, by Thorkelin A and B together, or by Thorkelin B [in square brackets], opens the textual notes, many of which are illustrated by backlit or ultraviolet images, to that specific reading.

If one clicks on the illustration of any textual note, a larger image of that illustration with its textual note opens in a separate window. The size and resolution of these larger images are often suitable for serious research purposes. To approximate the same result using the manuscript itself, one would need fiber-optics and very powerful magnification, and even then there would be no apparent way to preserve all the results (there are over 1300 backlit images in Electronic Beowulf 3.0) to share with other scholars.

In addition to accessing textual notes in this manner from the apparatus embedded in the edition, one may also see on the manuscript page itself the places where special techniques, in particular 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. To see the locations of these readings, click the red rectangle on the menu:

Click any of the rectangles that appear on the folio to go to the illustrated Textual Notes.

For example, if one clicks on the first rectangle in the upper left, the notes beginning with this backlit image open.

As always, after clicking the small backlit image, the large illustration opens:

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.

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 3.0, come from an offset from the facing fol. 178v. Digital technology allows us to subtract these false leads and arrive at a more plausible restoration.

The editor of the most recent print edition restores [bemað] in this space with unusual confidence. A digital restoration of bemað using the scribe's own letters from the same page shows, rather surprisingly, 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], which well suits the context and happily observes everyone's metrical rules, perfectly fits the available space in the manuscript.

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 O-button 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 low-resolution 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.

Because of its critical importance to the textual history of Beowulf, there are full-page transparencies for the entire palimpsest of fol. 179 recto and verso. Readers may select specific areas of interest, as in this example, or they may view all conjectural reconstructions of each badly damaged page all together, without selecting a particular area.

No one, of course, should confuse conjectural restorations, even supported by the scribes' own letters, with the actual manuscript. Electronic Beowulf 3.0 tries to provide an image-based edition that continually leads its readers back to the written evidence from which all our interest in Beowulf ultimately comes.

In addition to the new features highlighted in this Guide, there are many other standard features from the previous versions of Electronic Beowulf, including broad and efficient Search facilities, which are indexed and described in detail at http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBeowulf/ThirdEdition.