Beowulf (review)

Reviews 169 assured that students will not be frightened off by an overtly feminist polemic. This text should be extremely useful in courses on Western civilization, medieval social history, and women's history, as well as for anyone wanting a well written overview of the world of the medieval peasantry. Kathleen Troup History Department University ofWaikato Beowulf, with relevant shorter texts, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998; paper; pp. xii, 318; 1 map, 22 b/ w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$45.00; ISBN 0631172262. [Distributed in Australia by Allen and Unwin.] This new edition comprises the following sections: One, an introducti covering the manuscript, date and place of composition, language, structure, style, tone, metre, subject matter, and the editors' two personal views of the poem; Two, text, apparatus, and notes; Three, an account of the editorial process; Four, the background, covering genealogies, the Swedish-Geatish wars, archaeology (contributed by Leslie Webster), related Old English poems, and other documents; Five, bibliography and glossary; and Six, an appendix on the punctuation of Old English poetry. The editors' principal objective is to make the poem accessible to a first-time reader with some competence in Old English. The subtitle 'A student edition' would have been added, had it not been pre-empted by George Jack's edition. Conversely, an annotation on R. W. Chambers' Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem indicates what the edit are trying to avoid: 'Scholarly, detailed, voluminous. To be used cautiously for reference only by beginners, w h o should avoid becoming bogged down in controversies of secondary importance'. H o w far do Mitchell and Robinson avoid this pitfall? Their presentation undoubtedly includes m u c h detail that will fascinate true devotees but irritate less committed readers. The inclusion of instructions on how to construe is pedagogically sound, yet in practice these instructions need more of a step by step approach, with simpler passages and fewer 170 Reviews ancillary remarks. Throughout, the editors' vast learning provides a valuable role model to the student, yet the emphasis on individual scholars threatens to occlude the broader issues being canvassed. Some prolix drafting could well have been curtailed, starting with the section onfitts. Succinct and effective is the annotation on the text proper, focusing almost exclusively upon key syntactic and text-critical points. The editors cheerfully snip through notorious Gordian knots rather than fill the page with notes and conjectures, after the style of Klaeber or Wrenn. They also quietly (and commendably) ignore a few famous red herrings, such as 'wundini golde' (1382). Unfortunately, 'ealuscerwen' was not so easily side-lined. The approach is empirical and wary of speculation. This laudable determination to take nothing for granted emerges on their title page: '3182 lines of alliterative verse beginning Hwset we gardena in geardagum. Printed often, since Kemble (1833)[,] under the title BEOWULF.' In their choice of 'documents bearing on Beowulf, they eschew excess enthusiasm concerning Grettis saga and 'Bear's Son' analogues, justifiably assailed by Magnus Fjalldal in his recent The Long Arm ofCoincidence. The Frustrated Connecti between Beowulf and Grettis saga (University of Toronto Press, 1998). Kevin Kiernan's hypotheses are likewise circumspectly skirted, although with due recognition of his work on the manuscript. Claims for allegory and other literary-critical hypotheses are left entirely unmentioned. At the same time, the edition embodies valuable new insights, for instance the reading of the puzzling line 31 as 'leof land fruma lange ahte', long had the leader ruled the beloved land'. Some other suggestions, such as the ingenious conjecture *saendep =sn3edep for sendep in line 600, may also find favour, although they are not fully developed in the present volume. The discussion of structure, while performing ritual genuflections to Tolkien, more interestingly invokes a concept of 'barbaric' aesthetic (presumably drawing on observations by John D. Niles). The term, as used here, does however require further explanation if it is not to mislead an uninitiated reader. Leslie Webster contributes a compact and thoughtprovoking review of analogues from material culture, some of them recent finds, while making clear that the text cannot be treated as a mere repository of data. The glossary is very full...