Ebook: A Concordance to "Beowulf"

Edited by J. B. Bessinger, Jr. Programmed by Philip H. Smith, Jr.

In the course of a larger project now approaching completion — the production by computer of an exhaustive concordance to the corpus of Old English verse — the makers of the present book recalled with increasing sympathy the Preface to Albert S. Cook's 'A Concordance to Beowulf' (Halle, 1911):

This concordance to 'Beowulf' was prepared some years ago, as the first instalment of a projected concordance to the complete extant remains of Old English poetry. As that larger compilation has not in the mean time been made, there seems no sufficient reason for longer withholding from publication a book which ought to prove useful to those who seriously occupy themselves with this remarkable poem.

For what the news may be worth, our full concordance is farther along than was Cook's in 1911. Keypunching, magnetic taping, and automatic concording in a trial printed format have been completed for all six volumes of the 'Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records', edited by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York, 1931-1953). The makers of this raw concordance (which exists now in four elephantine folios totaling 3,500 pages) are the better prepared to undertake its final processing, and to avoid meanwhile the repetition of certain memorable dangers, follies, and expenses, because the General Editor and Supervisory Committee of the Cornell Concordances kindly agreed to the interim production of a fragment of the whole, a trial concordance to 'Beowulf' alone. New machines and techniques were being tested and modified as we worked; thanks to the unnerving productivity of electronic data-processing machines, we frequently had to contemplate larger masses of data than we could control; and at one important juncture, we needed to decide in advance of final publication the value of a totally new kind of Old English poetic index.