Tom Shippey

Klaeber's Beowulf Eighty Years On: A Triumph for a Triumvirate

Klaeber’s Beowulf, and the Fight at Finnsburg. Edited with Introduction, Commentary, Appendices, Glossary and Bibliography by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, with Foreword by Helen Damico. Fourth Edition Based on the Third Edition with First and Second Supplements, of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, Edited by Fr. Klaeber. Toronto Old English Series, 21. University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. cxc + 498, 9 plates, 2 maps.

THE CASE OF BEOWULF

100 (cloth);

The Road to Middle-Earth

39.95 (paper).

J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

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.