In this article, I re-examine the three runes used within the manuscript text of Beowulf to argue that the runes are purposeful additions to the text that interact with and enrich the reader's experience of the narrative. The runes mark passages in which the poem considers the nature of the literary and its relationship to an amorphous mythic Germanic past. Readers encountering Beowulf in the context of Cotton Vitellius A XV become implicit participants in the poem's internal project of recovering, recuperating and reinterpreting the past.
ARTICLE HISTORYWithin the manuscript text of Beowulf, the rune for eþel, ᛟ, replaces the word eþel three times: lines 520b, 913a and 1702a. 1 These three runes fall within the portion of the poem written by Scribe A, and they are the only runes within the text. 2 Most editions of the poem, including the standard scholarly edition, Klaeber's Beowulf, 4th edition, treat ᛟ as a scribal abbreviation, and expand it in accordance with their stated editorial practices, although Klaeber 4 does note the presence of the runes in the on-page apparatus. 3 Expanding the rune, however, implicitly assumes that it is only an abbreviation, i.e., the character is not carrying any additional content and thus it can be expanded with minimal loss. I argue that this is not the case, and that the runic eþels in fact serve a powerful narrative function: the runes mark passages in which Beowulf's character is reinterpreted in light of an imagined Germanic past. Each of the runic passages-Unferth's challenge, a scop's song and Hrothgar's "sermon"-contains a reassessment of Beowulf's reputation by the Danes, and each of these passages is also a moment in which Beowulf is working at the level of the meta-literary. 4 It is within these passages 1 ᛟ occurs in the manuscript on BL 143v (520b), BL 152v (913a) and BL 170r (1702a). References to the manuscript will use the foliation of the British Library's Digitized Manuscripts Collection for Cotton Vitellius A XV in the format BL + folio number. 2 Fulk, Bjork and Niles, eds, xxvi-xxvii, Scribe A's portion of the Nowell Codex includes the Old English homily on Saint Christopher, The Marvels of the East, Alexander's Letter to Aristotle and Beowulf to scyran in l. 1939b. Scribe B starts writing at l. 1939b, finishes Beowulf and writes Judith. 3 See Fleming, 185-6, for a survey of how the editors of various Beowulf editions handle the rune, from Thorkelin through Mitchell and Robinson's 1998 edition of the poem. 4 The reassessment of Beowulf's character in these passages coincides with three successive "arrivals" among the Danes-as hero untested by the Danes, as monster-slayer after the dispatching of Grendel and as the one who brought the feud between the Grendelkin and the Danes to an end. Over the course of these arrivals, Beowulf becomes increasingly more familiar to the people of Heorot. See Hill for an in-depth discussion of Beowulf's anxiety with the arrival of potentially threatening foreigners.
