Scribble, Scribal, & Other things

The facsimile of the Old English Hexateuch that I'm using for the style of my Beowulf project is on a CD that came with the book,  The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton MS. Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England, by Benjamin C. Withers.

For the text of Beowulf in Old English I'm using  Beowulf – Bilingual Edition, by Seamus Heaney.

Basic information on the Hexateuch:
11^th Century Anglo-Saxon
330 x 220 mm  (12.99 x 8.66 in)
38 lines of text per folio
 ~ 3 mm line height

The editors of the 1974 print facsimile of the Hexateuch, C.R. Dodwell and Peter Clemoes, indentified five stages of completion of the illustrations in the manuscript.Withers describes these various stages and identifies groupings in his book on pages 26 and 27.  They are as follows:

Stage 1: The artist sketched the outlines of his composition in dry pointing (folio 149v - 159v)
Stage 2: The artist painted solid blocks of color as needed on draperies, animals, architecture, and frames (folio 143r-149r)
Stage 3: The artist outlined heads, arms, bodies, swords, frames, etc using red ink (folio 101-127v)
Stage 4: The artist adds details to the face such as eyes, nose, and mouth (folio 78-100v)
Stage 5: The artist completes the drapery, defining folds and contours. (folios 2r - 76v)

For Grendel, I'm planning on using a humanoid monster that's found in LIBER VITÆ: the Register and Martyrology of Newminster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester, written about 1016-1020. The image below can be found here.

LIBER VITÆ is part of the British Library's Catalog of Illuminated Manuscripts and can be found here.

Isaac