Gli elementi paratestuali nel testimone cottoniano del Heliand

London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A VII, contains at ff. 5r-169v a Xth century copy of the Old Saxon poem on the life of Christ entitled Heliand. Both from a linguistic and a paleographic point of view this copy emerges among the manuscript tradition. This essay aims at analyzing paratextual elements characterizing the cottonian codex of the Heliand copied from an Anglo-Saxon scribe in southern England. The first part of the essay is dedicated to the examination of the problems concerning latin annotations written on the margin of some folios and of the numbering of the sections, called fits, in which the poem is divided. The second part of the essay is dedicated to the examination of the decorated initials of the codex especially from an aesthetic point of view: they can be attributed to a miniaturist who collaborated with the scribe. Other initials, without decoration but only partially ornated, were made by the scribe during the process of copying.