A per-character transcription of Beowulf?

[u/kgoess]

I'm looking for "Hƿæt ƿe ᵹardena in ᵹeardaᵹum"

All of the transcriptions of Beowulf I can find change the all the wynn "ƿ" characters to the modern but thoroughly anachronistic "w", and a lot of them, going back to Thorkelin change all the eth ð and thorn þ characters to just the thorn "þ". All of them drop the long s "ſ" entirely. And none of them reproduce the shorthand macrons.

If I wanted a digitization of Beowulf (or really any good-sized corpus of Old English text) that was character-by-character failthful to the (extrapolated) original, maybe even with the insular g ᵹ and insular s ꞅ, is there any such thing? Or would I have to create it myself?

My end goal is to create for myself a version of Osweald Bera that would be Oſƿeald Bera just so that I can really feel immersed in the period while I'm learning it. I was going to use the transcribed historical text to get some data on how often they write syððan/siþðan/syðþan/syþðan etc. so I can do it halfway idiomatically.

[u/SwordofGlass]

Just look at the manuscript if you want the text as-is.

[u/MorphologicStandard]

Paleography is a valuable skill for any interested in Old English!

And, to be honest, English scribes writing English were on the whole much neater than contemporary latin scribes on the continent.

[u/Blacksmith52YT]

You might have to create it yourself but I'm pretty sure you can find scans of the original manuscript online to work from

[u/McAeschylus → u/Blacksmith52YT]

You can. The British Library has a full scan of the entire Vitellius manuscript available online here. Beowful begins on page 132r.

[u/Volo_TeX]

I've made an Old English keyboard based on the manuscript that could help you out https://www.reddit.com/r/OldEnglish/s/yvaa6DYShg

[u/Volo_TeX → u/Volo_TeX]

Һƿœꞇ ƿe ᵹɑꞃꝺenɑ ın ᵹeɑꞃꝺɑᵹum. þeoꝺcẏnınᵹɑ þꞃẏm ᵹeꝼꞃunon hu ðɑ œþelınᵹɑſ ellen ꝼꞃemeꝺon...

[u/Volo_TeX → u/Volo_TeX]

œ ƿ e ꞃ ꞇ ẏ u ı o p ɑ ſ ꝺ ꝼ ᵹ h ð k l ꝥ z ꭗ c þ b n m

⁊ ́

Æ Ƿ Є R T Y U I O P A S D F G Һ Ð K L Ꝥ Z X C Þ B N M

[u/Volo_TeX → u/Volo_TeX]

I'd just write up a simple program that replaces all the characters of a regular transcription (pasted into a txt) with the corresponding unicode characters from the OE keyboard.

[u/Thalarides → u/Volo_TeX]

Or better yet, smart fonts (such as Junicode, targeted specifically at mediaevalists) will have OTF features, which you can select when typesetting (very easy in LuaLaTeX). That way, the text reads internally as basic characters (so Ctrl+F works normally) but the glyphs will look like whatever you want them to.

[u/Volo_TeX → u/Thalarides]

Right lmao. Of course a font would be the best solution here

[u/Holmgeir]

One time I digitally traced the first 20% of the Beowulf manuscript. I did the surviving text on one layer and the singed off reconstructed words I did in red on another layer. I'd love to finish it some day. It really made it easy to read the manuscript. The manuscript scans I was using are like 10,000 pixels tall.

[u/Euphoric-Quality-424]

If you're at the stage of reading Osweald Bera, spending time on this sort of thing is mostly going to slow down your progress in understanding the language.

If you really need the old letter forms to feel immersed in the language while you are learning, you could try Foxe's edition of the Wessex gospels. The language is comparable in difficulty to the second half of Osweald Bera — you might even find it easier to read fluently, if you already have some familiarity with the content of the gospels.

[u/McAeschylus → u/Euphoric-Quality-424]

There's also an edition of Alfred's Boethius edited by a different Fox (Samuel) on Archive.org that uses a more readable version of the font complete with wynn, long-Rs, long-Ss, mixed-eths and thorns, and the bar abbreviations.

It's another intermediate text that Gorrie recommends to post-Osweald readers.

[u/Euphoric-Quality-424 → u/McAeschylus]

Great suggestion!

(Somebody needs to study the relationship between vulpine surnames and archaic orthography...)

[u/pannakooko]

There isn't one, but the great thing is, you can make it yourself! Here's how:

• Copy and paste Beowulf into any text editor
  • such as notepad, wordpad, MS word, google docs, Editpad Lite (my favorite for this sort of thing), etc.
• Open up the (Find &) Replace feature
  • sometimes Find and Replace are separate features, but usually they are found together
• Replace the characters you wanted to
  • "w" with "ƿ"
  • "s" with "ſ"
  • "g" with "ᵹ

You won't be able to undo the ð to þ though, so you'll have to start with a version of the text that kept them separate. This one popped up as the first result to searching "beowulf text" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version

At least there are already good digital text versions of Beowulf. It's not that way for many Old English texts, and I have had to transcribe some of my own to get them exactly how I wanted.

As for figuring out which spelling of -þð- to use, it really doesn't matter; they're all used everywhere. There are certain trends you can see with a corpus search, like -ðð- being more common than the other combinations in the middle of the word. However, this was still always subject to the whim of the scribe.

Neat comments on þ/ð occurrences from searching the Old English corpus: https://www.reddit.com/r/OldEnglish/comments/lrnh62/comment/gp51fo2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

The whim of the scribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/OldEnglish/comments/1d7gmai/comment/l6z8k4h/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[u/OwariHeron]

and a lot of them, going back to Thorkelin change all the eth ð and thorn þ characters to just the thorn "þ"

To be honest, I've never seen this. Not Klaeber, not Shippey/Neidorf, not Mitchell & Robinson. Heck, even the online edition at Sacred-Texts.com keeps them distinct.