Prefixed Leaves

The three leaves that Cotton prefixed to his new compilation of the Southwick and Nowell codices in Cotton Vitellius A. xv have caused havoc in the foliation.

What was once the first prefixed leaf is now fol. 37v of Royal MS 13 D. i*, a reconstructed psalter from pastedowns, flyleaves, and binding strips. The fire-damage shows that it was placed in the codex sideways, with the verso on the outside, and with its left margin at the top.

What is now the first prefixed leaf is Cotton's Table of Contents, which does not mention Beowulf in the blank space left for the seventh item. (The verso is an inverted palimpsest of an unidentified Latin text.)

Manuscript Foliation

The MS foliation does not count these prefixed leaves in the foliation, beginning with the first page of the Southwick Codex and numbering sequentially through the Nowell Codex. Some folios were out of place, including two from Beowulf (fols. 131 and 197) when this foliation was written in ink in the upper right corners of the vellum leaves.

Two new numbers, 147A131 and 189A197, correct the MS foliation by recording the former misplacement (131 and 197) and relocating the leaves in the rest of the foliation 147A (before 147) and 189A (before 189).

1884 Re-numbering

In 1884, to detect any changes in codices thereafter, the British Museum instituted a new numbering that counts the three prefixed leaves of Cotton Vitellius A. xv. The first prefixed leaf was subsequently removed in 1913.

Here one can see the MS number 129 in the upper corner of the manuscript, and the BL number 132 in the upper corner of the paper frame.

However, since the BL numbering was supplied in pencil after Zupitza published the facsimile in 1882, modern editors of Beowulf continue to use the foliation written on the manuscript leaves.

It is neither easy nor useful to abandon the manuscript foliation for the 1884 BL numbering, because the manuscript foliation, in addition to appearing in print in the editions and in ink on the Beowulf manuscript, also appears throughout Thorkelin A and the Madden collation, and is the only foliation cited by Conybeare.

The BL numbering is two numbers ahead of the MS foliation for the first two folios, three ahead for the next fifteen, eighteen numbers ahead for the next folio, three numbers ahead for the next forty-two folios, five numbers behind the next folio, four numbers ahead of the next eight folios, and three numbers ahead of the final Beowulf folio.

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