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. Anyone with version 1.0 can now upgrade to 2.0 for free by going to http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/eBeowulf/ and downloading the latest update. 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 a word 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.
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.
KSK, 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 well over a century 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.
KSK, November 1999