The technological complexities of this huge, distributed, electronic archive accumulating around the manuscript have begun to engage the theoretical and practical research interests of computer scientists, library and information scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians at the University of Kentucky. Because of its age, its broad cultural appeal, and the various damage it has sustained by erasure, fire, and restoration schemes, the Beowulf manuscript presents a number of interesting problems whose solutions will apply to many other fields. To make the electronic facsimile available to others in a useful and usable form, a team at Kentucky that calls itself GRENDL (Group for Research in Electronic ally Networked Digital Libraries) is developing software that hypertextually links all related images in the archive. A reader studying a given folio of Beowulf can now superimpose enhanced, back-lit, or ultraviolet images over covered or erased readings; bring in for comparison the corresponding pages from a transcript, a collation, an edition, a translation, or other popular portrayals; access an Old English glossary or a related archaeological find; or initiate a bibliographical search and retrieval of a related article. The program is obviously applicable to any text and the British Library plans to use it for other important documents in its incomparable collections.