Beowulf in the Original, so to speak

Beowulf is an early poem out of a lost world. In a very important way, that was already true in turn-of-the-millennium Wessex. By the time the Nowell Codex was produced around 1000 AD, written Old English itself was probably a somewhat more "artificial" language than it had been in the pre-Alfredian period. The language of Old English verse in particular was rather removed from anybody's everyday…