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.

Beowulf and the Varieties of Choice

Publications of the Modern Language Association of …, 1990

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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.