Reviewed by: The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment ed. by Leonard Neidorf David A. Carlton The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, ed. Leonard Neidorf (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 262 pp. When was the epic Old English poem, Beowulf, originally composed? As Allen J. Frantzen correctly asserts in his conclusion to this volume, “arguments about the date of Beowulf are more impassioned than the question seems to merit,” and have, as editor Leonard Neidorf points out, “generated [more] speculation and scholarship” than almost any other subject in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies (Neidorf 1; Frantzen 235). While most scholars agree that the Beowulf manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A XV, is a product of the late tenth- or early eleventh-century, the antiquity of the poem itself remains a matter of heated debate. In both name and subject matter, Neidorf’s compilation serves largely as a response to the earlier “Dating of Beowulf” conference held at the University of Toronto in 1980, and its codification in The Dating of Beowulf (1981). This text for the first time called into question the early (seventh or eighth-century) dating of Beowulf that had been received as fact for decades. Perhaps more significantly, these Toronto proceedings questioned our ability to ever conclusively date Beowulf, subsequently producing a generation of Beowulf “agnostics.” Using the available evidence, this new collections of essays gauges the probability of an early Beowulf, and questions the intellectual honesty of Beowulf agnosticism. The Dating of Beowulf: a Reassessment features new papers from a variety of well known personalities in the world of Anglo-Saxon scholarship and its related fields—such as Tolkien studies and Germanic philology—on the subject of Beowulf’s date and the relative chronology of Old English literature as a whole. Neidorf argues in both his introduction and essay in this volume that the socio-historical milieu whence Beowulf emerged was likely one in which legendary figures such as “Hroðgar, Hroðulf, Ingeld, Ongenþeow, Eormenric, Breca, Offa, Hama, Finn, and Hnæf” remained in living memory (46). The potential chronological book-ends of such a period shape much of the debate throughout the book, and the evidence ultimately suggests a hard terminus ad quem sometime in the early ninth century AD. In his chapter on versification, Thomas E. Bredehoft mobilizes insular Anglo-Saxon and continental Germanic metrical evidence both to demonstrate the relative antiquity of Beowulf and to situate that antiquity sometime in the eighth century ad. Tom Shippey and Rafael J. Pascual, on the other hand, are primarily interested in the evolution of words and concepts in early medieval England. For example, Shippey argues that the metrically and situationally irregular eorl (man) at line 6 in Beowulf represents a corruption of the i-stem tribal name, Eorle (Latin Heruli) by a later scribe unfamiliar with the name, rather than the simple accusative plural eorlas (men) to which the word in question is usually amended (58–59). The importance of consigning objective authority to probability in the absence of certainty is a sentiment echoed by both Dennis Cronan and Megan E. Hartman in their respective chapters on the genealogical and metrical dimensions of Beowulf, and remains a prominent theme throughout the book. Likewise, R. D. Fulk’s chapter, “Beowulf and Language History,” examines the [End Page 225] linguistic evidence that can be gleaned from Beowulf itself, and ultimately concludes that agnosticism is intellectually unnecessary; the cumulative probability of archaisms in the poem suggest a date of composition around 725 ad. In a similar vein, Michael D.C. Drout’s chapter (written with the aid of Phoebe Boyd and Emily Bowman) deconstructs the many assumptions underlying “the [modern] dogma” of an “un-dateable” Beowulf (177). As Drout argues, these faulty presuppositions embody the “unexpected consequences of the [1981] Toronto volume,” which has haunted Anglo-Saxon scholarship for over thirty years (176). George Clark’s chapter on metrical archaisms and transliteration errors in the Beowulf manuscript echoes Drout’s contention that the 1980 Toronto conference was more the product of agenda-driven biases than objective deliberation, while papers by Joseph Harris, Thomas D. Hill, and Frederick M. Biggs directly interrogate the onomastic, religious, and historical evidence in—and surrounding...