Copenhagen, Court of King Christian VII, 1786: The royal archivist Grim Johnson Thorkelin goes to London on a research expedition. Thorkelin is an Icelander whose native tongue is closer to the language of the Vikings than is Copenhagen’s “modern” Danish. He is going to London to search old archives, looking for anything pertaining to the period of Danish rule in England.
There was not yet any British Museum per se, but there are collections that have been donated to the government. When King Henry VIII ordered monasteries to be looted, destroyed, and sold in the mid-16th century, some of the wealthy men living nearby were able to purchase monastic libraries before they could be burned. When the new owners opened these manuscripts, many were shocked at how incomprehensible the words were. Nobody had previously stopped to think about the rate of language change, but now it was borne in on them that recent history might soon be lost. And so these men became antiquaries, collecting everything old that they could find.
First, Thorkelin sat down with a list made by Humphrey Wanley around 1700. Wanley was a former draper’s apprentice who had educated himself by copying old books until he was among the leading antiquarian scholars of his time. Wanley was tasked with cataloging the book collections that had been donated to the government. He opened every scroll and book, trying to see what was in each one, making a master list. Thorkelin’s attention was caught by one item’s description: Anglo-Saxon poetry, a description of the wars of Beowulf, a Danish prince, against the Swedes.
The collection that contained what we know as Beowulf came from Sir Robert Cotton, a leading collector whose teacher and mentor had been born right around the time that the monasteries were broken up. Using his teacher’s guidance, Cotton had collected all of the very old books he could buy from their original rescuers. He kept them in his Shropshire home’s large library, where the room was lined with heavy bookcases. On top of every bookcase was a bust of a Roman emperor: this matters because these emperors were used to map the library’s contents.
The manuscript we’re interested in was on Emperor Vitellius’ shelf. It was the fifteenth book on the top shelf, so when Wanley catalogued it, it was called Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Cotton Augustus II.106 was a copy of the Magna Carta from 1215, while Nero A.x contained “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Julius A.x was a book of martyrs, while Domitian A.viii was a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Cotton Vitellius A.xv had two manuscripts bound together, and each one had multiple books in it. The second collection is known as the Nowell Codex, after Laurence Nowell, an early antiquarian collector. Could Nowell have been the one who rescued the codex from destruction? Probably not, since he was about eight years old in 1538, when the sacking of monasteries began. But we have no record of an earlier collector, and he probably paid someone to bind together these works: The Life of St. Christopher, Wonders of the East, A Letter of Aristotle to Alexander, Beowulf, and Judith. There are other copies of most of these works, but only in the Nowell Codex do we find Beowulf.
Grim Johnson Thorkelin found the Nowell Codex in parlous condition. In 1731, the house storing Cotton’s donated collection caught fire. Men pushed the bookcases out the windows, but some manuscripts had already begun to smolder. They caught fire at the back, so the outer edges of many pages were charred, but most of the library was saved, including the Nowell Codex. Fifty years of storage had passed since that charring. Thorkelin carefully turned pages that were faded, smudged by smoke, and crumbling.
Working with a scribe, Thorkelin created two transcriptions of the letters on each page, now known as Thorkelin A and B. Each copy had some errors, but they could compare the copies and fix most errors. Leaving Cotton Vitellius A.xv in the nascent British Museum, Thorkelin returned to Copenhagen with his copies. There, he began getting “Beowulf” set in type. Yet one more disaster loomed: during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain decided to destroy Denmark’s navy at anchor in Copenhagen harbor. Some of the artillery fired from British ships sailed too far and struck the town, and as luck would have it, Thorkelin’s house caught fire. Only the original hand copies A and B were saved. Thorkelin started over, and in 1815, he finally published a printed copy.
For a long time, Thorkelin’s printed manuscript was the only full poem that translators could consult, since the original Nowell Codex was in such a fragile condition. Only in recent years has the British Museum made high-quality photographs of each page, making the digital images available to scholars. Professor Kevin Kiernan of the University of Kentucky made the actual physical manuscript his chief subject of study, and he also has the digital MS posted. I’ll talk more about his studies later.