Beowulf: The Critical Heritage

by Tom Shippey (Editor ), Andreas Haarder (Editor)

Beowulf is the oldest and most complete epic poem in any non-Classical European language. Our only manuscript, written in Old English, dates from close to the year 1000. However, the poem remained effectively unknown even to scholars until the year 1815, when it was first published in Copenhagen.
This impressive volume selects over one hundred works of critical commentary from the vast body of scholarship on Beowulf - including English translations from German, Danish, Latin and Spanish - from the poem's first mention in 1705 to the Anglophone scholarship of the early twentieth century. Tom Shippey provides both a contextual introduction and a guide to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship which generated these Beowulf commentaries.
The book is a vital document for the study of one of the major texts of 'the Northern renaissance', in which completely unknown poems and even languages were brought to the attention first of the learned world and then of popular culture. It also acts as a valuable guide to the development of nationalist and racist sentiment, beginning romantically and ending with World War and attempted genocide.

Genres: Classics

612 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 1998

About the author

Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".

Shippey's education and academic career have in several ways retraced those of Tolkien: he attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, became a professional philologist, occupied Tolkien's professorial chair at the University of Leeds, and taught Old English at the University of Oxford to the syllabus that Tolkien had devised.

He has received three Mythopoeic Awards and a World Fantasy Award. He participated in the creation of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, assisting the dialect coaches. He featured as an expert medievalist in all three of the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of the trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy.

Also publishes as T.A. Shippey.

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A huge collection of essays, lectures, reviews and book extracts from the early period of Beowulf scholarship.

The collection covers the years 1700 to Tolkien's Beowulf lecture of 1936. Includes works by Wanley, Grundtvig, Thorkelín, The Grimm Brothers, Panzer, Heusler, Olrik and many many more. While not many would now agree with Panzer's Lieder Theory or Heuslerian theories of composition, it's nevertheless still interesting to read their ideas on Beowulf, plus Tom Shippey provides an excellent introduction which traces the early history of Beowulf scholarship.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult to know how to rate this book. On the one hand, it comprises a staggering amount of work on the part of Shippey and Haarder, not just in collecting the articles of previous critics, but in translating, editing, and arranging them. On the other, much of the criticism itself is of the very worst kind, where the data is not so much analyzed as manipulated, distorted, or simply made up. Perhaps it is only because I began my academic career as a scientist, but I find it offensive when critics cut out the bits of a poem they don't like simply because the decide it cannot be genuine. Without corroborating evidence, how can we know? Now Tolkien's frustration is more readily understandable. That said, knowing what has come before is always valuable, if only so that one can not repeat the errors of the past.