# What do you think about the two Beowulfs?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-two-beowulfs/1006928>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Tags:** middle-earth, books-writing-myths\
**Created:** [September 7, 2024, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-two-beowulfs/1006928 "2024-09-07T22:20:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2024, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-two-beowulfs/1006928/21 "2024-09-10T02:09:25Z")

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> [@Chronos](#):
>
> I can understand copies being rare when making one required a team of bored monks, but three hundred years after Gutenberg?

There was little demand for reprinting old books in a language that no one could read. I don’t remember when Anglo-Saxon texts started to be studied, but it is more recent than I expected. Besides destruction by fire, many old texts were scraped off the pages, so the pages could be reused.

Knowledge of Anglo-Saxon was on the edge of oblivion. Other minor languages from that era are virtually unattested.

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**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2024, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-two-beowulfs/1006928/22 "2024-09-10T04:08:25Z")

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Gothic, for example, is known almost entirely from two books, both translations of the Bible, a total of less than 400 pages. And Wikipedia says it is “the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus”. That’s considered sizeable in this context.

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**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2024, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-two-beowulfs/1006928/23 "2024-09-10T04:12:41Z")

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Also, until the mid 20th century, the poem was viewed chiefly as a historical artifact, of interest only to medieval historians. The idea that it could be appreciated as a work of literature was championed by Tolkien, and he’s often said to have single-handedly founded modern Beowulf criticism.

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**Author:** ![Moonrise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moonrise/32/14764_2.png) [@Moonrise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moonrise)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2024, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-two-beowulfs/1006928/24 "2024-09-10T11:28:24Z")

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> [@markn\_1](#):
>
> Gothic, for example, is known almost entirely from two books, both translations of the Bible, a total of less than 400 pages. And Wikipedia says it is “the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus”. That’s considered sizeable in this context.

What’s more Gothic is absolutely central to our understanding of the history of the whole Germanic sub-group, and to a lesser extent of the Indo-European language family. A clear case of “size doesn’t matter”.

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