Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburgh

Rating:
Summary: Ian Myles Slater on: The Old Standard
Review: Except for what seems to be a bright red and gold cover, instead of the brown-on-brown with which I am familiar, the Houghton Mifflin printings seem identical to the D.C. Heath edition of 1950, which added a new layer of supplements to the 1941 supplements of the 1936 revision of a work originally published in 1922, and first revised in 1928. It is in many ways THE edition in English of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poem of monsters, heroes, feuds, and wars in a pagan Scandinavia imagined in Christian England.

Despite also being in many ways very antiquated -- essentially a summing-up of the first century of Beowulf-studies -- Friedrich Klaeber's edition is still a model, a monument against which other editions can be measured. Almost two hundred pages of front-matter (not included in the Amazon description) cover essential facts about the manuscript, the language, the meter, and possible historical elements, and, rather reluctantly, the "supernatural"; followed by a carefully categorized bibliography. (A formidable project even today, and it was carried out in the age of manual typewriters and file-cards.) Klaeber's discussion assumes a basic knowledge of Old English; which, for those who may think of Shakespeare or the King James Bible as being in "old English," refers to a form of the language which looks a whole lot more like German than anything you are used to.

The text of "Beowulf," meticulously edited, with diacritical marks and punctuation, follows; this is now outdated, particularly by the 1990s "Electronic Beowulf" project, which recovered manuscript readings lost to view since a nineteenth-century conservation effort, but is still worth close attention. Klaeber was an acute assessor of the available evidence. A valuable Commentary follows the text, offering interpretations, and explaining Klaeber's decisions.

The related "Fight at Finnsburg" fragment is given a similar treatment, smaller in proportion to its brevity. (Tolkien's posthumously-published "Finn and Hengest," edited by Alan Bliss, brings together the fragment and the related digresssion in "Beowulf," with even more detailed commentary, and, in my opinion, a very plausible interpretation.)

Appendices supply some parallel texts, references on "Antiquities" (what would now be called archeology, and sociological speculation), a discussion of grammatical and metrical issues related to textual problems, and the texts of several related shorter poems: the fragments of the lost epic "Waldere," the lyric "Deor," excerpts from the catalogue of hero-stories in "Widsith, and the Old High German "Hildebrandslied" (the actual extant example of continental German heroic poetry). These are convenient, although mainly for following Klaeber's cross-references.

There follow splendid glossaries for Beowulf and the Finnsburg Fragment, which amount in themselves to grammatical commentaries and something close to a concordance, listing appearances in the text. Nothing quite like them exists, although modern lexicographic and concordance projects are replacing them on an even larger scale; the whole of Old English verse. Finally, there are the Supplements, including further emendations to the texts, and additional bibliography.

As Tolkien noted in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936), the only thing missing is the poetry. That is something you will have to appreciate on your own -- or at least without Klaeber's guidance. But the modern reading of the poem AS a poem is built on the labors Klaeber codified and made available in English. A whole body of work has emerged since 1936, with Tolkien leading the way; except for some generous acknowledgments in the Supplements, Klaeber came too early to make use of any of it.

Klaeber's edition served students (like me) and scholars well for most of the twentieth century. It still deserves a place on the shelf of a serious Beowulfian, as it was the point of departure for serious scholarship for seventy years. Disagreements with Klaeber's text were noteworthy, agreement with his reading a matter of course. True, Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's "Beowulf and Judith" in the "Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records" series (Volume IV, 1953) had more detail on the histories of suggested readings, and digested a decade and a half of additional critical literature. But to make it fully useful, I had to refer to Klaeber constantly -- my copy of ASPR IV still has the penciled cross-references.

As an introduction to the Old English text, however, the combination of age and price now clearly suggest alternatives to Klaeber's work.

George Jack's "Beowulf: A Student Edition" (1994), at about 250 pages, is the "lean and mean" version. I suspect that it works best in a formal course, with supplementary readings. "Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts" (1998), edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, is the most recent contender to replace Klaeber, and in everything but time-depth of its coverage of Beowulf studies seems a worthy successor, if not quite so comprehensive. It goes head-to-head with the fifth edition of "Beowulf: With the Finnesburg Fragment," edited by C.L. Wrenn and Michael Bolton (1997), the earlier versions of which were Klaeber's main competition for a couple of decades.

For the less ambitious, or those with Klaeber (or one of the other scholarly editions) at hand, there are a variety of less technical versions, some offering newer approaches, which I have found useful or enjoyable. Chickering's "Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition" (1977) has a readable translation facing the Old English text, and a first-rate commentary dealing largely with literary, rather than linguistic and textual, problems. Although reprintings do not seem to contain corrections of the annoying typographical errors, these are fairly few.

"Beowulf: A New Verse Translation: Bilingual Edition," a form of Seamus Heaney's celebrated recent translation, published in 2001, includes the Old English text he worked from (Wrenn and Bolton, 1988). Although not the very latest treatment of the Old English, it is more up-to-date than Chickering's. The translation is impressive as literature; less so as a close reading of the original.

And Penguin Classics includes an Old English text of "Beowulf," edited by Michael Alexander (1995) -- not to be confused with his verse translation for the same publisher -- which I have reviewed separately; this had the use of Jack's text, among others. It has facing-page line-by-line glosses, instead of a continuous translation, or a dictionary-style glossary; an interesting experiment.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent, though old-fashioned, scholarly edition
Review: Klaeber is, of course, the standard edition for American Beowulf scholars. Since every Anglo-Saxonist owns a copy there is no need to review the book for them. However, non-Anglo-Saxonists should know that this edition is printed in Old English and does not contain a translation. There is a translation by Chickering. Also, Penguin currently publishes an edition of Beowulf that features Old English text and a translation.

Rating:
Summary: The standard edition for American Beowulf Scholars
Review: Klaeber is, of course, the standard edition for American Beowulf scholars. Since every Anglo-Saxonist owns a copy there is no need to review the book for them. However, non-Anglo-Saxonists should know that this edition is printed in Old English and does not contain a translation. There is a translation by Chickering. Also, Penguin currently publishes an edition of Beowulf that features Old English text and a translation.

Rating:
Summary: A "must" for readers of Old English literature
Review: This book is so essential for serious readers of Beowulf it hardly needs a review: anyone who reads Old English should own this book. It contains the complete Old English text and also includes the Finnsburg Fragment. The introduction is excellent, the footnotes extensive and the glossary exhaustive.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent, though old-fashioned, scholarly edition
Review: This truly is a superb edition of Beowulf. Especially convenient for me was the full analytic glossary: being able to look up other instances of words I came across was a great aid in learning the vocabulary and understanding the poem. The only unfortunate thing is the age of the book: it's over fifty years old and there has been much interesting Beowulf-scholarship since then. But still, an essential book for anyone interested in the poem.