Fr. Klaeber's Beowulf, 4th edition, edited by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (2008): “Sidelights on” [:] “’Klaeber’s’ Beowulf.” An extended review essay. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Friedrich Klaeber's "Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg", first published in 1922, has perhaps been best known through its third, supplemented edition of 1950. Its magisterial presentation of essays on numerous facets of the poem and its study, as well as a long-standard edition of the text itself accompanied by copious notes and glossaries, has exercised a powerful influence on scholars and students of the poem for most of the last century. Much of what kept Klaeber's work relevant stemmed from his extensive labors of revision and expansion, but in the sixty years since Klaeber's death, Beowulf scholarship has grown considerably while Klaeber's Beowulf had perforce stood still—until, at long last, the appearance of this new, fourth edition in 2008. In it, while Klaeber's general design and much of his own text remain intact, the new editors have changed much—mostly adding—to bring the work up to date. In general, the changes generally come across as appropriate and in keeping with Klaeber's life-long endeavors to maintain maximum value, relevance, and currency to students of the poem in a manageable, book-sized package. If it sometimes struggles to be as all-encompassing as earlier editions, this is perhaps principally because the work's vision has begun to exceed the practical carrying capacity of the physical book's form. While readers interested in particular aspects of the poem's study may find minor matters in this new edition over which to trouble themselves, this should not distract from the undoubted value of this new revision of Klaeber's Beowulf, which represents a substantial victory in the difficult task of maintaining a classic work's modern utility as a general introduction to, and edition of, this great poem. Any question as to whether it should remain a premier resource for students and scholars may be safely answered in the affirmative—for it both upholds and expands on Klaeber's own aims.
A Critical Companion to Beowulf and Old English Literature
Lulu Press, 2017
This book is the end result of my extensive researches carried out on and into the lone survivor of a genre of Old English long epics, Beowulf—a painstakingly laborious, yet pleasurable task through the journey of which I discovered, unearthed, gleaned, and absorbed a great wealth of previously-unknown-to-me information about Old English Literature in general and Beowulf in particular.
The Beowulf manuscript reconsidered: Reading Beowulf in late Anglo-Saxon England
Literator, 2003
This article defines a hypothetical late Anglo-Saxon audience: a multi-layered Christian community with competing ideologies, dialects and mythologies. It discusses how that audience might have received the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The immediate textual context of the poem constitutes an intertextual microcosm for Beowulf. The five texts in the codex provide interesting clues to the common concerns, conflicts and interests of its audience. The organizing principle for the grouping of this disparate mixture of Christian and secular texts with Beowulf was not a sense of canonicity or the collating of monuments with an aesthetic autonomy from cultural conditions or social production. They were part of the so-called “popular culture” and provide one key to the “meanings” that interested the late Anglo-Saxon audience, who would delight in the poet=s alliteration, rhythms, word-play, irony and understatement, descriptions, aphorisms and evocation of loss and transience. The poem provided...
editing the nation's memory, 2008
The poem Beowulf proved to be, from its first publication, a contested site for nationalist scholarship. Though written in Old English, it dealt exclusively with Scandinavia and its nearest neighbours. Was the poem, then, in essence a poema danicum, as its first editor called it? Or did it emanate from the disputed borderland of Schleswig, where Low German speakers were still in the nineteenth century under Danish rule? Interpretation of the poem was affected at every level by nationalist sympathies, but even more by sub-national and supra-national sentiments expressed by scholars of divided loyalties, including pro-German Schleswigers, pro-Danish Icelanders, and Englishmen such as Stephens and Kemble (respectively pro-Danish and pro-German, but outstripping all others in intemperate chauvinism). The poem's early politicisation continues to affect scholarship to the present day.
Locating 'Beowulf' in Literary History
Exemplaria, 1993
What work did the poem 'Beowulf' do in its own time? This paper attempts to reconstruct a social context within which the making of a poem of this character makes sense. The story is traced over a period of some few hundred years, with 'Beowulf' approached as a response to changes that affected a complex society during a period of major transformation. A point of special interest is the poet's depiction of the Danes, seen as an indication that the poem in its present form post-dates the first Viking Age. This essay was reworked as chapter 1 (pp. 13-58) of my book 'Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts' (2007). Here it appeared along with a 'footnote' on 'Recent Work on Mythmaking and Ethnogenesis' and a query relating to the 'Geatas' of Beowulf.
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" Seventy-Five Years Later
Mythlore, 2011
Scholar Guest of Honor speech, Mythcon 42. A discussion of the continuing influence of Tolkien's famed Beowulf essay on its seventy-fifth anniversary. Shows how the essay both opened up and limited later Beowulf scholarship, and draws some interesting parallels with the current state of Tolkien scholarship. Along the way, questions the wisdom of believing everything an author says about his own work, and asserts the value of familiarity with critical history.