Customer Reviews

A Beowulf Handbook

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4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

"A Beowulf Handbook"--edited by professors Bjork and Niles--is an open door to a genuine treasure-mound. The volumes many scholarly writers describe the origin and chronology of, as far as I can tell, every important branch of "Beowulf" critical thought. Three centuries of interpretive battles rage between these covers. The index and bibliographies are a joy and, by themselves, worth the price of admission.

This Beowulf Handbook disappointed me at first sight, for various aesthetic reasons. First, the printing quality: the text appears set in a 1990's-style laser-printout font (probably Times New Roman...) with thick, somewhat fuzzy letters as a result, making the text look like a xeroxed lecture-note handout. And there are no colour pictures, only 13 b/w drawings, all lumped together at the end of the book outside of the text part which they should illustrate. For such a high-prized book, and 35 USD for a paperback college textbook of 359 ugly pages IS expensive, you would expect the publisher to have put much more labour of love into the production -especially of a work in the humanities where you expect readers to have above-average sensibilities to aesthetic values.....
That said, this compendium is a very systematic treatment of the main questions that you need to address when studying Beowulf, as the chapter titles show: here I have to write them out myself since that lousy publisher, Universiy of Nebraska Press, even failed to activate Amazon's great "Look inside this book" feature which normally allows you to see the Contents page for yourself.
1. Introduction: Beowulf, Truth and Meaning.
2. Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences.
3. Textual Criticism (by veteran Germanist Robert D Fulk).
4. Prosody.
5. Diction, Variation, the Formula.
6. Rhethoric and Style.
7. Sources and Analogues.
8. Structure and Unity.
9. Christian and Pagan Elements.
10. Digressions and Episodes.
11. Myth and History.
12. Symbolism and Allegory.
13. Social milieu.
14. The Hero and the Theme.
15. Beowulf and Archaeology.
16. Gender Roles.
17. Beowulf and Contemporary Critical Theory.
18. Translations, Versions, Illustrations.
List of Abbreviations.
Works Cited (pp.377-431 so this is a LONG section).

An innovative and helpful innovation in this book is that each chapter begins with a very short summary, 8-10 lines at most, followed by a section entitled Chronology (usually 1-2 pages long): this is a list where each line starts with a year, and then states (again very shortly, 1-2 lines), what was written about Beowulf that year. An example from chapter 9, Christian and pagan elements:

"1986: Karl Schneider argues at length that the poem is camouflaged paganism with only a deceptive Christian overlay."
"1988: Charles Dahlberg reasserts strongly the Augustinian interpretation of the poem".

Most students will be thankful to the authors for compiling these brief tabulations, literally saving thousands of them from having to wade through dozens of pages of German or other outlandish texts ! You can follow the waves and trends in research on Beowulf as they evolved over time almost at an eyeglance. And they do refer to European works in other languages than English, which is alas becoming a rarity among English-speaking scholars today. These features alone are, I was tempted to write "almost worth the price of the book" as the saying goes, but again I have to refer to my first paragraph above where I outlined why I think it is really too expensive for the graphic product that it is, despite its obvious virtues.
This is not a poor work and so perhaps for what it offers inside could be a 4-star work but I definitely have to deduct a star for the poor typographical craftmanship combined with the hefty price asked for it. This is why I only gave it 3 stars. But I am still glad that I now own this book.

Any serious scholar of Beowulf needs to read this book, and most should consider owning it as well. It is an incredible bibliographical resource, with strong contributions from many of the best Anglo-Saxonists.