Electronic Beowulf @ 21

Andrew Prescott

Page from the UK Web Archive snapshot of the British Library’s first web service, Portico,

18 April 1995

The British Library’s Initiatives for Access programme

Electronic Beowulf pages on the British Library website, 18 April 1995

The Kontron ProgRes 3012

Beowulf manuscript, folio 179 recto, under plain and

under ultra-violet light

British Library MS Cotton Otho B. x, fol. 13(54v)r

Early eleventh-century collection of mostly saints' lives by the monk Ælfric, severely damaged in the fire at Ashburnham House in 1731

Image prepared by Kevin

Kiernan to accompany a

1995 article on Electronic

Beowulf for ‘Computers in

Libraries’, including images of Thorkelin

transcripts and some of the first ‘hidden letter’

shots

Splash screen from Electronic Beowulf 1.0 (1999)

Electronic Beowulf 1.0 (1999), running under the now defunct Netscape 4

Hidden letters revealed by fibre optic backlighting, and recorded with

detailed textual notes (from Electronic Beowulf 3.0)

Reading under ultra-violet light from folio 157 verso of the Beowulf

manuscript (shown in Electronic Beowulf 3.0)

Conybeare’s 1817 collation (left) and Madden’s 1824 collation (right), showing Madden’s tracing of the first lines of Beowulf, viewed in Electronic

Beowulf 3.0

Edition and glossary (displayed in Electronic Beowulf 2.0)

Image Based XML (IBX) tool

Splash screen from Electronic Beowulf 3.0 (2011)

Electronic Beowulf 3.0: mouseover access to translation and metrics tool

Metrics tool in Electronic Beowulf 3.0

Testing conjectural restorations with Electronic Beowulf: the usual restoration of this word on Folio 179r, bemað, is too wide for the space in

the manuscript, but beget fits neatly

Benedictional of St Æthelwold, as presented in British Library ‘Digitised Manuscripts’ web resource:

www.bl.uk/manuscripts/

William Schipper, 'Dry-Point Compilation Notes in the Benedictional of St

Æthelwold', British Library Journal, 20 (1994), 17-34

The dry point note ‘In’ is not visible in this recent digitisation of f. 27v of the Benedictional of St

Æthelwold. It is more clearly visible in the 1910 photographic facsimile.

Recent British Library digitisation of Cotton MS. Vitellius A.xv: www.bl.uk/manuscripts

Experimental online access to Electronic Beowulf 3.0, 2013. The eventual full online version will require substantial re-engineering

to replace the present Java interface.

To get further information about the development of online access to Electronic Beowulf, join the e-

mail list at: jiscmail.ac.uk/EBEOWULF

Kevin Kiernan demonstrates Electronic Beowulf