2249 18 HARVARD COLLEGE FEB 8 1889 LIBRARY Prof. J. J. Whild. BOU (The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.) PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. IN this edition I have endeavoured to remove some of the blunders which disfigured its predecessor, but many, I fear, have escaped my notice. Some parts have been entirely rewritten, and the passages formerly omitted as obscure or uninteresting have been inserted. Such as it is, the translation is now complete. A few notes have been added; and the introduction has been materially altered and, I hope, improved. The Anglo-Saxon diphthong ca is so liable to mispronunciation when reproduced in modern English, that I have thought it better to strike out the e in such names as Healfdene, etc. Halfdene is at any rate nearer the true form than Heelfdene, as he ran some risk of being called. The lines of the original poem are given at the top of each page. vi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. An autotype of a page of the manuscript (on a reduced scale) faces the title-page of this volume. It contains lines 1354-1377 (see p. 65), and reads thus in Heyne's edition of 1873: næfne he was mára ponne ænig man óðer hafelan [hýdan]. Nis pæt heóru stóv: láð gewidru óð fæt lyft drysmað INTRODUCTION. IN the beginning of the last century Humphrey Wanley, who was employed by the great AngloSaxon scholar Hickes to make a catalogue of all the Anglo-Saxon MSS. to be found in the kingdom, discovered in the library of Sir Robert Cotton a volume containing, with other things, a 'tractatus nobilissimus poetice scriptus '-the poem of Beowulf. This is the only MS. of the poem in existence, and it is now with the rest of the Cottonian MSS. in the British Museum. It is a parchment codex, written probably in the tenth century, the transcript of a work composed at a much earlier date. It was injured by a fire which in 1731 consumed a part of the Cottonian Library, but the damage done, though irretrievable, happily does not go far. After this mishap it slumbered undisturbed until |