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  • Klaeber's BeowulfEighty Years On: A Triumph for a Triumvirate
  • Tom Shippey
Klaeber's Beowulf, and the Fight at Finnsburg. Edited with Introduction, Commentary, Appendices, Glossary and Bibliography by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, with Foreword by Helen Damico. Fourth EditionBased on the Third Edition with First and Second Supplements, of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, Edited by Fr. Klaeber. Toronto Old English Series, 21. University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. cxc + 498, 9 plates, 2 maps. $100 (cloth); $39.95 (paper).

For eighty years Friedrich Klaeber's edition of Beowulfhas been, as Helen Damico says in her illuminating "Foreword" to the new "Fourth Edition," "the authoritative work governing Beowulfian scholarship" (p. vii), 1and one used not only by scholars but also by generations of students. This reviewer well remembers turning up for his first-ever seminar on Beowulfholding a copy of C. L. Wrenn's (much cheaper) edition, to be greeted by Professor Dorothy Whitelock with a disapproving look and the words, "Can't you get hold of a Klaeber?" Modern scholarship, one may say, was nursed from the outset on the 1950 third edition with supplements, and many developed opinions probably have their seed in some possibly forgotten note, gloss, or editorial decision in its 650+ close-set and typo-free pages.

There are many reasons for its enduring success, but the first of them may well be the unequalled thoroughness of the "Glossary." It is not quite true that Klaeber glossed and gave all line-references for every single word in the poem, for when it came to ondhe contented himself with merely observing that it occurred 311 times, though he noted separately the three occasions where it was spelled out and not given as an abbreviation; the entry for the preposition on(373 times) meanwhile takes up two columns and separates use with the accusative from use with the dative, as well as offering several different possible translations, and giving [End Page 360](with line-numbers) thirteen "semi adj[ectival] phrases," these again sub-divided into "predic[ative]" and "attrib[utive], appos[itive]." If you did not know what these scholarly terms meant, you could work it out by looking at Klaeber's examples and observing the difference between them. Every word, and every crux, most of them much more difficult than onand ond,has received careful thought; cross-reference is made to similar compounds, in Beowulfand other Old English works; analogues are given from cognate languages; there are six different sigils to show whether a word is only used in poetry, is only used in Beowulf,is only used elsewhere in prose, etc.; and much else. The "Glossary" must have a claim to be the most information-packed 140 pages in the history of literary scholarship, at least. It is no wonder that the commonest phrase in use in any Beowulfclass is likely to be, "let's see what Klaeber says"; and having looked at the "Glossary," one can then turn to his 110 pages of "Notes," equally thorough and lucid, even more discursive.

Nevertheless, even the 1950 edition cannot help showing its age, naturally enough in the "Bibliography," but also in the 110+ pages of "Introduction." As Helen Damico points out, Klaeber's Beowulfis essentially a work of the 1920s, or even the 1910s. Klaeber was born in 1863, left Germany for the University of Minnesota as a young man in the 1890s, and brought out his first edition of the poem in 1922, having started work on it fifteen years earlier. The second and third editions appeared in 1928 and 1936, after which he added only supplements, mostly bibliographical, in 1941 and 1944, these all brought together in the 1950 re-issue of the third edition which has remained standard ever since. One has to say that for Klaeber to keep working at all, in his seventies and eighties and in the circumstances recorded by Damico, was a remarkable achievement. He had returned to Berlin from Minnesota in 1931, and was then dependent on his American colleagues for scholarly materials, and soon for even more vital support...

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