Klaeber's Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg

690 Pages·2008·5.502 MB·English

by  Frederick Klaeber, Robert D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles (eds.)

New Text

Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, Fourth Edition
Edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles

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 special-
ists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.
A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporate the vast store of
scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1936. 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 incor-
porates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the
expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to dis-
cussion 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 nd 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.

(Toronto Old English Series)

R.D. FULK is Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana
University.

ROBERT E. BJORK is a professor in the Department of English and director
of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona
State University.

JOHN D. NILES is Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities in the
Department of English at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Frederick Klaeber (1863–1954)
at the age of eighty.

Photo courtesy of Profs. Martin Lehnert† & Helen Damico.
KLAEBER’S
BEOWULF

AND THE FIGHT AT FINNSBURG

EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION, COMMENTARY
APPENDICES, GLOSSARY, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

BY

R.D. Fulk
Robert E. Bjork
John D. Niles

WITH A 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

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9843-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9567-1 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg edited by Friedrich Klaeber. Copyright ©
1950 by Houghton Mifin Company. Reproduced by special arrangement with
Houghton Mifin Company. All rights reserved.

_____________________________________________________________

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Beowulf. English
Klaeber’s Beowulf and The ght at Finnsburg / edited by R.D. Fulk,
Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles ; with a foreword by Helen Damico – 4th ed.

(Toronto Old English series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9843-6 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-8020-9567-1 (pbk.)

I. Fulk, R.D. (Robert Dennis) II. Bjork, Robert E., 1949– III. Klaeber, Fr.
(Friedrich), 1863–1954 IV. Niles, John D. V. Title. VI. Series.

PR1583.K53 2008 829'.3 C2007-906927-4
_____________________________________________________________

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the nancial assistance to its pub-
lishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.

University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the nancial assistance of
the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, in the publication of
this book.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the nancial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
CONTENTS

FRONTISPIECE: FREDERICK KLAEBER ii
FOREWORD BY HELEN DAMICO vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x
FIGURES AND MAPS xi
TABLE OF ABBREVIATIONS xviii

BEOWULF

INTRODUCTION xxiii

I. Summary of the Poem xxiii
II. Manuscript xxv
III. The World of Monsters and Myth xxxvi
IV The World of Humans li
V. Christian and Heroic Values lxvii
VI. Structure and Unity lxxix
VII. Method of Narration xcii
VIII. Mood, Tone, and Style cix
IX. Some Trends in Literary Criticism cxxii
X. Language and Poetic Form cxxix
XI. Date, Origins, Influences, Genre clxii
XII. The Present Edition clxxxviii

TEXT, WITH APPARATUS OF VARIANTS 1
COMMENTARY 110

THE FIGHT AT FINNSBURG

INTRODUCTION 273
PLATE OF HICKES’S EDITION 281
TEXT, WITH APPARATUS OF VARIANTS 283
COMMENTARY 286

APPENDICES

A. PARALLELS (ANALOGUES AND ILLUSTRATIVE PASSAGES) 291
B. INDEX OF REFERENCES TO EARLY GERMANIC CULTURE 316
C. TEXTUAL CRITICISM 321
D. THE TEXTS OF Waldere AND THE OLD HIGH GERMAN Hildebrandslied 337

GLOSSARY

GLOSSARY OF Beowulf AND The Fight at Finnsburg 343
PROPER NAMES 464

WORKS CITED 475
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FOREWORD

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ Klaeber said, giving voice to the disappointment he saw
rising up in the reporter’s face as he leafed through the book. The young man had ex-
pected something more monumental than the five-by-seven-and-a-half-inch text with
its dull, steel-blue cover; at least something in leather.1 Yet over the next eighty years,
this drab-looking text, Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, would become
the authoritative work governing Beowulfian scholarship. Congratulatory letters poured
into the University of Minnesota’s English Department from universities in Germany,
Sweden, and England, as well as the United States. At its release, Ferdinand Holt-
hausen from Kiel University remarked that it superseded all earlier editions, with its
systematic bibliography, voluminous glossary, and appendices of relevant Scandi-
navian and other Old English materials. From Yale, Albert S. Cook wrote Klaeber that
his Beowulf would honor ‘any of the illustrious names in Germanic scholarship. The
mere industry and breadth of knowledge you display are something to marvel at, not to
speak of the ingenuity, the judgment, and the good taste.’ Echoing Holthausen, R.W.
Chambers, the Quain Professor at University College, London, commented on the work
as ‘a most creditable opus transcending in merit all previous editions by modern
editors.’2
Yet by the time that this book was released in July 1922, Klaeber had already begun
work on revisions. In contrast to the first edition, whose preparation had taken fifteen
years, the second and third editions appeared in rapid succession in 1928 and 1936,
showing the same editorial care, precision, and thoroughness that had characterized the
first. The production and publication process, however, had become more complex.
After a thirty-eight-year tenure at the University of Minnesota, Klaeber had retired to
Berlin in 1931, and the majority of the work on the third edition was accomplished in
Germany. Writing from his home in Berlin-Zehlendorf West to Kemp Malone, Klaeber
apologetically reported that not as many changes of importance as he would have liked
had gone into the 1936 edition; too many alterations might have radically altered the
book’s appearance and have possibly deterred the publisher, D.C. Heath, from going
forward with the project.3 The extent of revisions apparently had been a topic of in-
terest to both men, for, in an earlier letter, Klaeber had lamented that Malone’s sugges-
tion for an overhaul of the entire book had not sat well with Heath and that a middle
course had been agreed upon.4 Yet, he assured Malone, the revisions that had been
made had brought the scholarship up to date to October 1933 (the date Klaeber had
mailed the final copy to Heath). He had expanded the front matter from 162 to 187
pages and the main portion from 412 to 444 pages. Heath had not only accepted the
revisions and gone forward with the project, but completely reset the text. The 1936
third edition was reissued in 1950 with supplements and a new cover.5
The value of the 1950 edition rested on its supplements. From 1933 forward, Klaeber
had been at work on the first supplement, which appeared in article form and in a new

1 Interview by Gerald Regan, Minneapolis Daily, 29 April 1926.
2 Minnesota Daily, 9 December 1922.
3 Klaeber to Kemp Malone, 1 May 1936. Klaeber’s letters to Malone, from which excerpts are
given here, are housed in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Others of Klaeber’s
personal letters are in the University of Minnesota Archives.
4 Klaeber to Kemp Malone, 5 July 1934.
5 In a letter to Heinrich Ch. Matthes (one of the many reviewers of the third edition), Klaeber
remarked that the 1950 third edition with first and second supplements was in large part a version
of the 1936 edition; the opinions he had expressed concerning the text had not substantially changed.
viii FOREWORD
printing by Heath,1 in the difficult political climate of 1941. The second supplement,
too, initially published in article form in 1944,2 came at the height of the hostilities
between Germany and the United States. With understated propriety, Klaeber an-
nounced in a footnote to his 1944 article that, upon completion of that research, his
house in Berlin-Zehlendorf West had been destroyed by an American bomb.3 After the
bombing, Klaeber and his wife fled Berlin, setting up residence in his wife’s modest
house in Bad Kösen, a small town in eastern Germany on the way to Naumberg, in
what was to become the Russian zone. Here Klaeber continued work on the second
supplement despite the destruction of his library.
From the time of his retirement to Germany in 1931, Klaeber’s American colleagues
had provided him with scholarly materials for ready reference, an exchange of corres-
pondence that terminated with the start of the Second World War. At the first oppor-
tunity after the reopening of the international mail service in 1945, Klaeber reached out
to his American colleagues through the United States Civil Administration Division in
Berlin.4 At no time did Klaeber have so much need of the support of his colleagues as
he did in the dark days of the late 1940s in Russian-occupied Bad Kösen. From 1945
on, Klaeber depended on the grace and generosity of colleagues from the West —
Kemp Malone and Joseph W. Beach, being only two of some fifteen — to send
materials on Beowulfian and Old English scholarly activity that had taken place during
the early forties. The scholarly work in Old English in Germany, what there was of it,
he lamented, was in the hands of elderly men like himself.5 With systematized regu-
larity, books, pamphlets, and periodicals streamed in from Malone at Johns Hopkins
and from Beach and other colleagues at the University of Minnesota.6 His own books
and journals burned, his irreplaceable notes and references in ashes, partially paralyzed
and in poverty, Klaeber completed his second supplement to the 1950 edition while
bedridden in the second floor of Berbigstrasse 3, hoping that perhaps his work ‘would
outlive him.’
In a ninetieth-birthday tribute to Klaeber, Martin Lehnert described the 1950 third
edition as the ‘Beowulf-Bible of International Studies.’ It exemplified the precision and
high standards of Germanic scholarship and was a tribute to the exacting instruction
that had characterized the educational system of Germany during the period of
Klaeber’s education. The work, unsurpassed in its knowledge and judgment, formed
and would continue to form the foundation for Beowulfian research and scholarship.7
Beowulfian scholarship produced in the more than half a century since the publication
of the 1950 edition is a fulfillment of Lehnert’s prediction. Many library shelves could
be furnished with responses to and developments of the three main issues of Beo-
wulfian scholarship Klaeber felt he had ‘settled’ (his word) — single over multiple

1 ‘A Few Recent Additions to Beowulf Bibliography and Notes,’ Beibl. 52 (1941) 135–7;
Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, third edition with supplement (Boston, 1941).
2 ‘Some Further Additions on Beowulf Bibliography and Notes,’ Beibl. 54/55 (1944) 274–80.
3 For a discussion on the probable dates of the bombing, see my article ‘“My Professor of Anglo-
Saxon was Frederick Klaeber”: Minnesota and Beyond,’ in The Preservation and Transmission of
AS Culture, ed. P. Szarmach and J. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, 1997) 73–98, esp. 90, 98 n.¯36.
4 Roger H. Wells, Civil Administration Division, Office of Military Government for Germany,
to Joseph W. Beach, Chair of the Department of English, 3 July 1946: ‘She [a certain Fräulein
Stollfuss] reports that the Klaebers are in bad shape — in fact, starving. I doubt if they will be able
to live through another winter without help.’ University of Minnesota Archives.
5 Klaeber to Kemp Malone, 8 June 1946.
6 See my article ‘Klaeber’s Last Years: Letters from Bad Koesen,’ OEN 22.2 (1989) 41–5. For
some eight years, Klaeber’s Minnesota colleagues also sent food and clothing to the Klaebers and,
in fact, were responsible for their survival.
7 ‘Friedrich Klaeber zum 90. Geburtstag am 1. Oktober 1953,’ Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Ameri-
kanistik 2 (1953) 122–8 (at 124). In this piece, Professor Lehnert quotes from an address by Profes-
sor Dr. Wilhelm Horn, who had been Klaeber’s friend and colleague in Berlin and Lehnert’s teacher.