Review of 'Beowulf: A Student Edition', by George Jack (original) (raw)
Current General Trends in Beowulf Studies
Literature Compass, 2007
This overview of late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century literary criticism charts the kinds of ongoing approaches diverse readers bring to the Old English masterpiece-approaches likely to be mainstays into the near future. The post-structuralist Beowulf has many faces: there is the archaic Beowulf, containing a dramatized social world from an anthropologically remote time and place; the feminist Beowulf, where the center of contention is over the marginality or not of female figures; the psychological Beowulf, replete with one dynamic or another of the unconscious or of the projected, monstrous Other, which in turn yields a monster-studies Beowulf. We also have the oral-traditional Beowulf with its political and ethnogenetic implications, the moral Beowulf, the comical Beowulf, and finally the dragon-inhabited Beowulf. Dozens of studies have been organized to illuminate these categories, while the survey ends on suggestions that the poem may in fact be formed deeply according to some arithmetical or geometrical scheme. By far among Old English poems Beowulf attracts the largest number of philological, metrical, textual, and literary-critical studies in any given year. One can hardly survey objectively the wealth of intelligent, provocative commentary in any discrete number of years, let alone in years characterized by upheavals in scholarly commentary. The curious reader should consult the annual bibliography published in the Old English Newsletter (OEN), with the Beowulf section's recent reviewers including Roy M. Liuzza, Susan E. Deskis, and Craig R. Davis. Also one should consult the extensive bibliographies of Victorian, modern, and contemporary scholarship accompanying A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (1997), along with Andy Orchard's A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003). My modest aim is this: a review of the literary-critical work I have found most influential in the past fifteen years or so, work likely to stimulate further study along the many lines reviewed below and thus become the key inspirers of Beowulf criticism into the near future. This review has two parts: an overview with brief mention of the work that seems most important, followed by more detailed accounts of numerous studies including many of those mentioned in the general overview. However, before proceeding further, I should note some recent publications in textual and metrical areas within my time constraints, as well as
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.
Beowulf and the margins of literacy
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 1974
A 3 a historian I take up the theme of Beowulf and its world with hesitation. The study of the poem must lie mainly with the literary scholars, because they alone have the time and expertise to master the complex problems it raises and the vast international literature devoted to it. It is noticeable, however, that in spite of generations of energy and ingenuity in pursuit of the real Beowulf, he and it are not in sight: not, that is, the subject of a scholarly consensus. There is no agreement as to the date of the poem ; there is even less agreement as to its author's intentions, let alone his identity or the places in which he might be found. In the last few years two scholars have written two different books on Beowulf, each of obvious distinction : Dr. Sisam and Dr. Goldsmith.2 So different, so absolutely contradictory, are their conclusions, it is difficult to believe they are writing about the same poem. Something must be seriously amiss when generations of scholarship can give us no basic facts that are undisputed outside the particular tradition or connection which discovered, I had almost said invented, them. It seems to me that historians are after all the one relevant group of scholars who have had little to say about Beowulf. Of all the Beowulf scholars only one of the great names was equally famous as historian, Hector Munro Chadwick. A good many of his points seem to me not to have been taken by his fellowstudents of literature simply because they were not altogether understood. Chadwick wrote out of a very informed and 1 I have taken some passages from another article " Beowulf and the Limits of Literature ", which appeared in New Blackfriars, lii (1971), by kind permission of the editor. Earlier versions of the paper were read to the Sixth Conference of Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan and the Medieval Seminar at Columbia University. I am particularly indebted to Professor Manning and his pupils for a stimulating discussion that greatly improved the paper.
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.
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.
The reception history of Beowulf
SELIM, 2020
This paper traces both the scholarly and popular reception of the Old English epic Beowulf from the publication of the first edition of the poem in 1815 to the most recent English novel based on it from 2019. Once the work was first made available to the scholarly community, numerous editions in various languages began to appear, the most recent being in English from 2008; once editions were published, Old English scholars around the world could translate the text into their native languages beginning with Danish in 1820. Translations, in their turn, made the poem available to a general audience, which responded to the poem through an array of media: music, art, poetry, prose fiction, plays, film, television, video games, comic books, and graphic novels. The enduring, widespread appeal of the poem remains great and universal.
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.
Beowulf and Its Significance in Anglo-Saxon England
Beowulf (Dr. Jamuel Yaw Asare), 2025
This paper examines Beowulf, the oldest surviving epic poem in Old English, as a cornerstone of English literary heritage. Composed in Anglo-Saxon England between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf reflects the cultural, religious, and historical dynamics of its time, despite its Scandinavian setting. Through an analysis of its historical context, themes, manuscript history, and enduring influence, this study explores how Beowulf illuminates the values and society of early England. The poem's blend of pagan and Christian elements, its portrayal of heroic ideals, and its survival through a single manuscript underscore its significance as both a literary masterpiece and a historical document.
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.
Beowulf I [translated by] Seamus Heaney.-1st ed. p. cm. Text in English and Old English.
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...
Review of 'Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England', by Craig R. Davis
Speculum, 1998
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