Features an introduction and a commentary that incorporates the scholarship on "Beowulf" that has appeared since 1950. This work includes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. It also addresses aids to pronunciation and advances in the study of the poem's language.

The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious. And in Craig Williamson's splendid new version, this often translated work may well have found its most compelling modern English interpreter. Williamson's Beowulf appears alongside his translations of many of the major works written by Anglo-Saxon poets, including the elegies "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer," the heroic "Battle of Maldon," the visionary "Dream of the Rood," the mysterious and heart-breaking "Wulf and Eadwacer," and a generous sampling of the Exeter Book riddles. Accompanied by a foreword by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and archaeology, and Williamson's introductions to the individual poems as well as his essay on translating Old English, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead hall to share an exile's lament or herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation. From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom, to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, the world becomes a place of rare wonder in Williamson's lines. Were his idiom not so modern, we might almost think the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing after a silence of a thousand years.

Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture. A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

A new examination of the little-studied phenomena of Direct Speech in Old English poetry. Some of the most celebrated passages of Old English poetry are speeches: Beowulf and Unferth's verbal contest, Hrothgar's words of advice, Satan's laments, Juliana's words of defiance, etc. Yet Direct Speech, as a stylistic device, has remained largely under-examined and under-theorized in studies of the corpus. As a consequence, many analyses are unduly influenced by anachronistic conceptions of Direct Speech, leading to problematic interpretations, not least concerning irony and implicit characterisation. This book uses linguistic theories to reassess the role of Direct Speech in Old English narrative poetry. Beowulf is given a great deal of attention, because it is amajor poem and because it is the focus of much of the existing scholarship on this subject, but it is examined in a broader poetic context: the poem belongs to a wider tradition and thus needs to be understood in that context. The texts examined include several major Old English narrative poems, in particular the two Genesis, Christ and Satan, Andreas, Elene, Juliana and Guthlac A. Elise Louviot is a Lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France) and a specialist of Old English poetry. Her research interests include orality, tradition, formulas and the linguistic expression of subjectivity.

Most Beowulf scholars have held either that the poems' minor episodes are more or less based on incidents in Scandinavian history or at least that they entail nothing of the fabulous or monstrous. Beowulf and the Illusion of History contends that, like the poem's Grendelkin episodes, certain minor episodes involve monsters and contain motifs of the "Bear's Son" folktale. In the Finn Episode the monsters are to be taken as physically present in the story as we have it, while in the mention of the hero's fight with Daeghrefn and perhaps in the accounts of the fight with Ongenbeow, the principal foes, though originally monsters, appear now more like ordinary humans. The inference permits the elucidation of passages hitherto obscure and indicates that the capability of the Beowulf poet as a "maker" is greater than has been thought. John F. Vickrey, is Professor of English, Emeritus, at Lehigh University.

Interpretations of Beowulf brings together over six decades of literary scholarship. Illustrating a variety of interpretative schools, the essays not only deal with most of the major issues of Beowulf criticism, including structure, style, genre, and theme, but also offer the sort of explanations of particular passages that are invaluable to a careful reading of a poem. This up-to-date collection of significant critical approaches fills a long-standing need for a companion volume for the study of the poem. Larger patterns in the history of Beowulf criticism are also traceable in the chronological order of the collection. The contributors are Theodore M. Andersson, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, Jane Chance, Laurence N. de Looze, Margaret E. Goldsmith, Stanley B. Greenfield, Joseph Harris, Edward B. Irving, Jr., John Leyerle, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., M. B. McNamee, S. J., Bertha S. Phillpotts, John C. Pope, Richard N. Ringler, Geoffrey R. Russom, T. A. Shippey, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Focuses specifically on the concept and role of islands in the medieval world. The main characteristic of an island is, of course, that of being isolated from the rest of the world; in geography by waters, in more abstract and symbolic meanings by other kinds of separating borders. Islands were the place 'on the other side', of difference, otherness and remoteness. As one of the articles in this volume puts it, islands are often depicted "as sites for extraordinary events and happenings".

This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literature Reinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studies Addresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and theme Embraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more

Vita mortuorum in memoria vivorum — volume 5 of the Beyond Language series is dedicated to the memory of Professor Jacek Fisiak, one of the titans in English historical linguistics in Poland and beyond. For over 40 years, he taught at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he established a stronghold of English studies in Europe. His efforts were appreciated with medals, awards, honorific titles, and mentoring positions amongst academic bodies. “The present In Memoriam volume undoubtedly counts among the all-encompassing and much-expected individual and collective acts of commemoration to recognize the authority of Professor Jacek Fisiak—the great scientist, the indefatigable Organizer, Manager and Mentor, relentless of any adversity or difficulty; the person whose countless contributions and merits in the history of Polish humanities – especially in the field of philological sciences and English studies in Poland – cannot be overestimated. […] On the one hand, the articles included in the volume yield a multidimensional testimony of the authors' scientific kinship with Professor Fisiak's broad scientific interests. On the other, they present a whole range of individual philological inquiries, starting from texts whose synthetic theoretical overtones prove the rich experience of their authors, through the articles of a more general nature, to prolegomena stimulating further in-depth scientific analyses. […]” (from the review by prof. Grzegorz Kleparski)_____TABLE OF CONTENTS_____Jacek Fisiak 1936–2019____ MENTOR in Academia: The Master in Title and Reality―by Joanna M. Esquibel____PART II. Old and Middle English Literature | Campbell’s “Art of Parallelism” in Old English Poetry: A Reappraisal―by Rory McTurk | The Question of Beowulf’s Relation to Fairy Tales Revisited―by Andrzej Wicher | Cornish Symptoms in the Old English Orosius―by Andrew Breeze | When a Lexical Borrowing Becomes an Ideological Tool: The Case of Saint Erkenwald―by Letizia Vezzosi | Medieval Multitasking: Hoccleve Translates Christine de Pizan and Imitates Chaucer, For Example his Binomials―by Hans Sauer | Mimetic Desires in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur―by Barbara Kowalik____PART III. Old and Middle English language and historical linguistics | Selected Elements of Language Change―by Aleksandra R. Knapik | For and Against Anglo-Frisian: The Linguistic Debate on the Matter―by Katarzyna Buczek | On Speech and Discourse Communities in the Viking Age―by Piotr P. Chruszczewski | East Anglia as an Old English and Middle English Dialect Area―by Peter Trudgill | Middle English Voiced Fricatives Revisited―by Piotr Gąsiorowski | From Where Did the Death of the English Inflection Come?―by Janusz Malak | On the Expansion of the Old Norse Root hap- in Middle English―by Rafał Molencki | So that in Clauses of Result and Purpose in Old English and Middle English―by Jerzy Nykie____PART IV. Adapting Earlier English for Modern Times | Adapting Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Drama for Theatre―by Magdalena Kizeweter, Anna Wojtyś | Medieval Modernism and the New Age Magazine: Creating Modernity While Turning to the Past―by Dominika Buchowska____PART V. Modern English, contrastive studies, and translation studies | Variation in the Use of the 3rd Person Singular Marker in American Private Letters from the mid-19th Century―by Radoslaw Dylewski, Magdalena Bator, Joanna Rabęda | The NAD Phonotactic Calculator: An Online Tool to Calculate Cluster Preferability Across Languages―by Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Dawid Pietrala | Event Construal in Some English Middle and Reflexive Constructions and Their Polish Counterparts―by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk | Problems in Studying Loan-Translations―by Alicja Witalisz | When do nouns control sentence stress placement?―by Aleksander Szwedek____PART VI. Notes on Contributors | Index