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.

Essays bringing out the crucial importance of philology for understanding Old English texts.

Some stories are considered make-believe while others are considered "real." The question that one must ask is, "What is real?". The conflicts that characters face in all tales are real enough. The choices they make and the outcomes that occur are certainly real. Choices are often contingent upon the current conflicts being faced, and that is undoubtedly real. Jack faced a giant who wanted to eat him while King Arthur faced Saxons who simply wanted to eat. Who is real and

This volume develops G. R. Russom's contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom's ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.

New essays reappraising the history of the book, manuscripts, and texts.

The most original and ground-breaking work on Beowulf in several decades, this book uses “lexomic” methods that blend computer-assisted statistical analysis with traditional approaches to reveal new and surprising information about the construction and sources of the greatest surviving Old English poem. Techniques of cluster analysis identify patterns of vocabulary distribution that indicate robust similarities and differences among segments of the poem. The correlation of these patterns with knowledge gained from source-study, philological analysis, and neglected previous scholarship sheds new light on the material of which Beowulf was made and the way it was composed. The implications of this investigation for the dating, structure, and cultural context of Beowulf will overturn the current scholarly consensus and significantly improve our understanding of the poem, its nature, and origins.

The Old English epic poem Beowulf has an established reputation as a canonical text. And yet the original poem has remained inaccessible to all but experienced scholars of Old English. This book aims to present the poem to readers who want to know what makes it such a remarkable work of art, and why it is of such cultural significance. Most readers will only have encountered Beowulf through one of its many translations or adaptations; others have had to take on this unique survivor from a past era as a challenging translation exercise, part of their academic study of the poem. This book sidesteps scholarly debates about the poem's unknowns – its date, provenance or author – and focusses instead on its poetic artistry, its interleaving of heroic pasts and Christian present, and its poet's extraordinary breadth of reference, from biblical history to Old Norse myth. But the strange intricacies of Old English metre and poetic language are explained, and the poet's evocation of the ethics and material world of an imagined pre-Viking Scandinavia is explored. Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero follows the story of the poem through its many interwoven voices from different times and places, and the poem emerges as a work of reflective beauty, its human characters full of touching pathos and wisdom, its notorious monsters still speaking to our own societies' abiding insecurities. The final section, on post-medieval responses to Beowulf, shows how the poem has been taken up as a European cultural icon. This book restores its status as a literary masterpiece.

Beowulf may be the most important work in Old English literature, but the poem takes place in Denmark and southern Sweden. And it is Denmark where the poem was first published, and where some of the earliest literary criticism of the work saw the light of day.

Making the Middle Ages is a series of monographs, and occasionally of collections, which aims to open up the rapidly growing and relatively newly recognised field of 'medievalism' - the post-medieval construction of the Middle Ages in scholarship and the arts - to a readership of academics, graduate students and, in the case of some volumes, undergraduates or the general reader. The series is devoted to scholarship in the cultural influence of the Middle Ages on England, mainland Europe, and North America from the sixteenth century to the present day. It focuses on two perspectives of medievalism: (i) Mediavistik, the origins and history of medieval studies, both inside and outside the academy; and (ii) Mediavismus, the creation and recreation of the Middle Ages in post-medieval art, history, literature and popular culture. This collection of essays examines the 'Grimmian Revolution', the paradigm shift in the humanities that came with the publication of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik. In doing so, it honours T. A. Shippey, who has been a leading figure in reconsidering the contributions of the Old Philology and its impact on the humanities, particularly the rediscovery of the ancient languages and literatures of Northern Europe; the role this has played in the creation of national and regional identities; the attempts to extend the methods of cmoparative philology to comparative mythology; and the collection of folktales, folk-ballads, and the development of folkloristics. The sixteen essays in this collection focus on the impact made by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philology in the fields of medieval studies and language studies, and in the construction of Northern European national identities, mythologies, and folklore. Book jacket.

InhaltFrederik Kortlandt: The Origin of the Vestjysk St(c)dHarry Perridon: How old is the Vestjysk St(c)dWolfgang Beck: Neues zur Runeninschrift auf dem Goldbrakteaten Schonen II CDietrich Schrr: Zu Z. 50 des HiltibrantliedesValentine A. Pakis: The Literary Status of Muspilli in the History of Scholarship: Two Peculiar TrendsKenny Louwen: Zur Lesart und Hybriditnt der altniederlnndischen FederprobeJeremy Bergerson: Observations on a, o in unstressed Syllables in Middle DutchLudo Jongen: The Emperor, the Saint and the Poet. For whom did Heinrich von Veldeke write the Sint-Servaaslegende?Martin Baisch: Gahmuret und Belakane. Textkritik und InterpretationAndreas Wutz: Der doppelte Loys - ein Vergleich der KAnigsgestalt in Wolframs von Eschenbach Willehalm mit der altfranzAsischen Vorlage AliscansAlbrecht Classen: Objects of Memory as Hermeneutic Media in Medieval German Literature. Hartmann von Aues Gregorius, Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival, Thring von Ringoltingens Melusine, and FortunatusRasma Lazda-Cazers: Landscape as Other in the Livlnndische ReimchronikEdward G. Fichtner: The Trojanerkrieg and the Composition of Ulrich Fetrers Buch der AbenteuerRianne Mus: 'Ik han mynen heren sen, des mach ik wol der warheyt gen. Die 'Thomasszene im Wienhnuser OsterspielfragmentEllen Baler und Ernst Hellgardt: Die Freckenhorster Heberolle - eine Fnlschung? (Verbesserte Fassung)"