London - The original text of Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf will soon be available for the first time in 150 years, it was announced yesterday. The ancient work has been put on CDRom in a painstaking seven-year project by the British Library, which owns the original manuscript. Publication of the new version marks the first time the work, which dates from the 11th Century, has been accessible to most scholars.
A translation of Beowulf won poet Seamus Heaney the Whitbread Book of the Year title last week. But even he had to work from imperfect transcriptions of the text and was unable to see the sections which are to be opened up when the CDRom is released on February 14th.