BEOWULF (ENGLISH) (original) (raw)
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...
Beowulf By All Community Translation and
2021
I contributed lines 436-450. Edited by: Abbott, Jean Abbott, Elaine Treharne, and Mateusz Fafinski "Beowulf By All is the first ever community translation of the poem known as Beowulf, and is published here for the first time in workbook form as Beowulf By All: Community Translation and Workbook in order to provide space and an added incentive for readers to assemble their own working translations alongside this one." https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50261
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.
Beowulf: A Folktale and History of Anglo-Saxon Life and Civilization
Beowulf gives us a vivid, realistic and factual picture of the Germanic life and manner. A vista of the social and cultural background of the first half of Six Century opens before our eyes when we read this epic. To say in brief, Beowulf is an experiment on Anglo-Saxon human conduct, an exhibition of Anglo-Saxon human motives. Beowulf is a fusion of folk-tale and history. Beowulf seems to have been a historical personage, nephew of Hygelac, the Chochilaicus whom Gregory of Tours mentions as raiding the Frisian shore, and slain by its defenders. Beowulf was present at the battle and avenged his "lord's death-Hygelac died in 520. Beowulf placed Hygelac's son on the throne and after his death reigned fifty years. This brings the historic Beowulf up to about 570.
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.
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.