Editions
Many editions of the Old English text of Beowulf have been published; this section lists the most influential.
The Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin made the first transcriptions of the Beowulf-manuscript in 1786, working as part of a Danish government historical research commission. He had a copy made by a professional copyist who knew no Old English (and was therefore in some ways more likely to make transcription errors, but in other ways more likely to copy exactly what he saw), and then made a copy himself. Since that time, the manuscript has crumbled further, making these transcripts prized witnesses to the text. While the recovery of at least 2000 letters can be attributed to them, their accuracy has been called into question,[c] and the extent to which the manuscript was actually more readable in Thorkelin's time is uncertain.[88] Thorkelin used these transcriptions as the basis for the first complete edition of Beowulf, in Latin.[89]
In 1922, Frederick Klaeber, a German philologist who worked at the University of Minnesota, published his edition of the poem, Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg;[90] it became the "central source used by graduate students for the study of the poem and by scholars and teachers as the basis of their translations."[91] The edition included an extensive glossary of Old English terms.[91] His third edition was published in 1936, with the last version in his lifetime being a revised reprint in 1950.[92] Klaeber's text was re-presented with new introductory material, notes, and glosses, in a fourth edition in 2008.[93]
Another widely used edition is Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's, published in 1953 in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series.[94] The British Library, meanwhile, took a prominent role in supporting Kevin Kiernan's Electronic Beowulf; the first edition appeared in 1999, and the fourth in 2014.[69]
Translations and adaptations
The tightly interwoven structure of Old English poetry makes translating Beowulf a severe technical challenge.[95] Despite this, a great number of translations and adaptations are available, in poetry and prose. Andy Orchard, in A Critical Companion to Beowulf, lists 33 "representative" translations in his bibliography,[96] while the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies published Marijane Osborn's annotated list of over 300 translations and adaptations in 2003.[89] Beowulf has been translated many times in verse and in prose, and adapted for stage and screen. By 2020, the Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem.[97] Beowulf has been translated into at least 38 other languages.[98][97]
In 1805, the historian Sharon Turner translated selected verses into modern English.[89] This was followed in 1814 by John Josias Conybeare who published an edition "in English paraphrase and Latin verse translation."[89] N. F. S. Grundtvig reviewed Thorkelin's edition in 1815 and created the first complete verse translation in Danish in 1820.[89] In 1837, John Mitchell Kemble created an important literal translation in English.[89] In 1895, William Morris and A. J. Wyatt published the ninth English translation.[89]
In 1909, Francis Barton Gummere's full translation in "English imitative metre" was published,[89] and was used as the text of Gareth Hinds's 2007 graphic novel based on Beowulf. In 1975, John Porter published the first complete verse translation of the poem entirely accompanied by facing-page Old English.[99] Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation of the poem (Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, called "Heaneywulf" by the Beowulf translator Howell Chickering and many others[100]) was both praised and criticised. The US publication was commissioned by W. W. Norton & Company, and was included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Many retellings of Beowulf for children appeared in the 20th century.[101][102]
In 2000 (2nd edition 2013), Liuzza published his own version of Beowulf in a parallel text with the Old English,[103] with his analysis of the poem's historical, oral, religious and linguistic contexts.[104] R. D. Fulk, of Indiana University, published a facing-page edition and translation of the entire Nowell Codex manuscript in 2010.[105] Hugh Magennis's 2011 Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse discusses the challenges and history of translating the poem,[95][106] as well as the question of how to approach its poetry,[107] and discusses several post-1950 verse translations,[108] paying special attention to those of Edwin Morgan,[109] Burton Raffel,[110] Michael J. Alexander,[111] and Seamus Heaney.[112] Translating Beowulf is one of the subjects of the 2012 publication Beowulf at Kalamazoo, containing a section with 10 essays on translation, and a section with 22 reviews of Heaney's translation, some of which compare Heaney's work with Liuzza's.[113] Tolkien's long-awaited prose translation (edited by his son Christopher) was published in 2014 as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. The book includes Tolkien's own retelling of the story of Beowulf in his tale Sellic Spell, but not his incomplete and unpublished verse translation.[114][115] The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley, was published in 2018. It relocates the action to a wealthy community in 20th century America and is told primarily from the point of view of Grendel's mother.[116] In 2020, Headley published a translation in which the opening "Hwæt!" is rendered "Bro!";[117] this translation subsequently won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.[118]
