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Reviewed by:
  • Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Howell D. Chickering, Allen J. Frantzen, and Robert. F. Yeager
  • Sara Burdorff
Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Howell D. Chickering, Allen J. Frantzen, and Robert. F. Yeager (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2014) 272 pp.

Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Howell Chickering, Allen J. Frantzen, and R. F. Yeager, is a collection of twenty-six essays addressing a wide range of pedagogical contexts and strategies for teaching the eponymous Anglo-Saxon poem. As the editors’ introduction suggests, the volume’s contents “include the work of established and new scholars,” and encompass a remarkable variety of perspectives on Beowulf as a classroom text (1). The volume is well organized to facilitate easy reference. It is divided first into two primary parts, the first of which “concerns materials every teacher requires, including editions, translations, handbooks, adaptations, and electronic and multimedia resources,” and the second of which “describe[s] approaches to these and other materials” (2).

The first main section, “Materials,” is likely to prove most valuable to instructors newly tasked with the teaching of Beowulf, in the process of selecting texts and assembling a syllabus. For those whose courses foreground the poem [End Page 349] in its original language, R. M. Liuzza’s essay on editions provides a thoughtful, measured consideration of several Old English options. Klaber’s Beowulf serves unsurprisingly as the benchmark edition; however, Liuzza also devotes equally insightful consideration to several other possibilities as well, carefully outlining and comparing the respective strengths of each. Chickering’s essay on translations of the poem offers a similarly balanced overview and assessment of several of the most commonly utilized versions; Scheil’s survey of handbooks and companion texts is equally thorough and instructive. In each case, the authors’ assessments are supported with specific details from the texts under consideration, and the overall effect is one of helpful comparison rather than proscription. Ultimately, each essay leaves plenty of room for each individual instructor to select the option best corresponding to his or her own particular pedagogical intentions.

Although it is included in the “Materials” section of the text, Acker’s essay on cinematic adaptations of Beowulf provides an excellent bridge from Materials to Models, offering not only an overview of the most popular recent filmic versions, but also a series of specific pedagogical strategies for the inclusion of film into discussions of Beowulf. Driver’s essay on Beowulf and new media provides a similarly dynamic transition from material to model, while Kiernan’s essay on electronic resources for Beowulf rounds out the Materials section, offering an insightful balance of practical advice—how one might help students navigate through the overwhelming plethora of (mis)information to locate genuinely valuable resources online—with mindfulness of why such efforts have become increasingly worthwhile.

The second section of the volume, “Approaches,” is further subdivided into “Course Models” and “Cultural Models,” each of which is further divided again according to particular pedagogical contexts. For example, the section on “Course Models” first offers three essays on teaching Beowulf in Old English, followed by four on teaching Beowulf in translation. The contextual specificity of these essays in particular likely means that they will not all appeal to any given reader. However, each author presents his or her particular approach with such care and attention to detail that anyone wishing to follow their examples in their own classroom could easily do so—and, moreover, even the reader to whom any given method might not necessarily appeal for emulation can nonetheless readily appreciate its particular pedagogical value. The same can also be said of the two essays on using Beowulf in writing courses: Gastle’s “Using Beowulf to Teach Argumentation,” and Quinn’s on the particular value of the poem in a creative-writing context.

The second major subsection of “Approaches,” designated “Cultural Models,” offers a wide range of essays, each of which takes as its starting point a different thematic or (inter)disciplinary perspective on the poem (e.g., heathenism, material culture, mythological archetypes, postcolonialism, etc.). Although these selections, like the ones before them, remain generally mindful of the pedagogical...

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