A Concordance to Beowulf
Scholars Online Educational Resources
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About This Site

This is a minimal concordance without any morphological analysis, providing each form of each word in the context of its line. The text is taken from the Oxford site; it has been modified to normalize orthography in a few places. I prepared it because a fairly cursory search online showed nothing like it that was complete, and I wanted to have this information available for my own research. If it duplicates someone else’s efforts, I apologize.

The concordance was generated by mechanical means (who would do it by hand nowadays?) using a sequence of grep functions with Bare Bones’ BBEdit program. There are a few peculiarities in consequence. There may be an occasional bit that got by indexed oddly, due (almost certainly) to deficiencies in my own regular expression formation, though I tried to eliminate them by scrutinizing the resultant files by hand.

Perhaps more interestingly, I’m not sure what the conventions are for words repeated in a given line, but this concordance will give each a separate entry. Accordingly you may find two identical lines in a row, though it is unlikely.

Finally, some will surely find the size of the text rather small. This is because (for my purposes, at least) a critical function of such a concordance view is to provide a synoptic view of a lot of material rather than to set it out extensively for easy reading. Those who find it just too small, however, can enlarge the view by the conventional means (Command-+ on a Mac or Control-+ on a Windows machine). I have tried it with various magnifications and found that it seems to work reasonably well.

I am willing to share the code that created this, trivial though it is (only about four grep calls, applied iteratively, and a sort); I am also willing to entertain suggestions for emendations or revisions, provided they are presented civilly — feel free to write to me at [mcmenomy] [at] [dorthonion] [dot] [com].