Chasing the Dragon

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n                Due to mix-ups in the drawing upnof family trees, and not helped by individuals in families being given the samenname, historians have confused and conflated two men, both called LaurencenNowell, from Read Hall in Lancashire. This confusion was not helped when thenDictionary of National Biography had only one entry for Laurence Nowell, whichnincluded details of the lives of the two Laurences. Alexander Nowell of ReadnHall married Grace Catherall from Mitton, and they had four sons: John,nLaurence, Charles and Thomas. The eldest, John, inherited Read Hall whennAlexander died, and he had a son, Roger, from his first marriage, and when henremarried after his wife died, he had four more sons and four daughters. 

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nOfnthese four sons, the second was called Laurence, and he went on to be anclergyman and Dean of Lichfield. His uncle Laurence (who was not his cousin, asnsome have written), was a historian, who revived interest in the Anglo-Saxonnlanguage and collected original manuscripts written in that language. One ofnthese, known as the Nowell Codex, contains the only known original manuscriptnof the Old English poem, Beowulf (the manuscript, later acquired by Sir RobertnCotton, is now in the British Museum, where it is catalogued as CottonnVitellius A xv – Cotton had classical busts on top of his library shelves, andnthis manuscript was the fifteenth book on the first shelf with the bust of thenRoman Emperor Vitellius over it). 

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nThe manuscript was damaged in a fire in thenlibrary on the night of October 23^rd 1731, when the edges of thenpages were badly scorched and the book was damaged when it was thrown out of anwindow to save it from the flames, and further damage occurred as the untreatednpages crumbled over time. There was a transcript made in 1787, on the order ofnIcelandic-Danish historian Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, who also made another copynand it is from these we can partially reconstruct the lost sections of thendamaged pages. 

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nIn 1879, after becoming Professor of Anglo-Saxon at CambridgenUniversity, W W Skeat proposed that the manuscript should be autotyped (a typenof photographic process) by the Early English Text Society, and the subsequentnbook, edited by Professor Julius Zupitza, was published in 1882. Zupitza usednThorkelin’s copy for his own transcription of the text. The earliestntranslation appeared in 1805, when Sharon Turner published his selection ofnverses, with other writers issuing translations of selections over the years;nThorkelín published a translation into Latin in 1825 – to very poor reviews,nand an English translation into prose by John Kemble in 1837. 

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nOne of the bestnis that by Nobel laureate ‘Famous’ Shamus Heaney (1999), which introducesnNorthern Irish turns of phrase into the poem, whilst retaining the overall feel ofnthe poem. If you only ever read one version of Beowulf, this is the one I’dnrecommend. 

nThe original Beowulf was written in about 1000 CE, although there isndispute among academics about the date, as there is about the poem itself. Somenthink it may be a transcription of an oral poem, written from severalnperformances by a scribe, while some think it is an original work written by anpoet or poets – there are two distinct hands in the text. It was written innEngland, in Old English, but describes events in Scandinavia, in Denmark andnGeatland (now southern Sweden). 

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nThe poem opens with the word Hwæt – which isnvariously translated as Listen, Attend or Lo! Some linguists, the eminent David Crystal among them, cite this as an example of the word ‘What’ being usednas a greeting – most famously in the ‘What ho!’ of Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P G Wodehouse.

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