Beowulf 73: "Public Land, " Germanic Egalitarianism, and Nineteenth-Century Philology

Stefan Jurasinski, Ohio University, Zanesville

In Beowulf we are told that upon the completion of Heorot, king Hrothgar intended to distribute to young and old all that God had given him with two exceptions: he could not give the "folk-share" (folcscare) and the lives of men (feorum gumena). This passage has vexed Beowulf scholarship since the beginning of modern textual editing in the nineteenth century. Beowulf 73 seems to have no parallels in Old English prose or verse, and for this reason a number of scholars have assumed the line to be defective. Arguments for corrective emendation begin in 1889, with Richard Heinzel's proposal that the line should be changed (ungrammatically) to "bú tú folcscare ond feorum gumena" (both to his own people and to strangers). As late as 1953, Norman Eliason proposed the less conjectural emendation of the line to "buton folcscare ond feorm gumena."