Abstract
An enquiry into how a text of Beowulf could have reached the authors of Grettis saga in Iceland must begin by defining the date, provenance and political aim of the Beowulf manuscript in England in the early eleventh century. First the early English reputation, then the surviving manuscript, of the poem will be discussed here towards this end. As many as five surviving allusions to the legend and poem of Beowulf may be used to locate the transmission of this eponymous poem in Winchester and York and to suppose a knowledge of its leading characters in Durham. On this basis it may be deduced that the poem existed in more than one copy by the early eleventh century, and that a copy was preserved in a manuscript in an archive in Winchester from the time of King Æthelwulf (839–58). The corollary is that King Cnut Sweinsson (1016–35), having won England from Kings Æthelred II (978–1016) and Edmund II Ironside (1016), was introduced to Beowulf in Winchester in the first few years of his reign. Thereafter I shall argue that the poem's sole extant manuscript, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV, was copied near the heart of the former kingdom of Mercia, in Lichfield, in the year that followed his victory in 1016. My argument follows Kevin Kiernan's conclusion that the ‘Laurence Nowell’ who inscribed his name on the eponymous Nowell Codex in 1563 was not the antiquarian of that name but, rather, his cousin, the dean of this diocese in 1560–76. The lurid style of the manuscript's monsters, particularly in The Wonders of the East , along with that of a gold-glamorous heathen warlord in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle , will be read as evidence that Beowulf and the texts before it were commissioned for one of Cnut's commanders.
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