The Anglo-Saxon Seminar: Beowulf

Instructor: Christina von Nolcken
Fridays, 2 pm-5pm, January 11, 2008 - March 14, 2008

Course Description
This seminar is for participants who have already completed at least one course in Old Englih. Its aim is to help them read Beowulf and familiarize them with some of the scholarly discussion that has accumulated around the poem. We will read the text primarily as edited by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), and we will draw on the Newberry Library's rich collection of early printed and facsimile editions to help us discuss textual and paleographical matters as well as aspects of the pom's scholarly and popular afterlife. We will define areas of scholarly discussion with the help of Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, eds., A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) and Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003); to help place the poem in a larger context of Germanic legend we will also look especially to material in Frederick Klaeber, ed. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 3rd ed. (Boston: D.C. Health, 1950); G.N. Garmonsway and Jacqueline Simpson, trans, Beowulf and its Analogues, 2nd ed. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980): and Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels and Analogues (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000).

Participants will define the topics of their final research papers early in the seminar, by reading as widely as possible in journals and books. Helpful bibliographical guides include Douglas D. Short, Beowulf Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1980), Robert J. Hasenfratz, Beowulf Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography 1979-1990 (New York, Garland, 1993), the Old English Newsletter, and the journal Anglo-Saxon England has topically-arranged annual bibliographies. R.M. Liuzza provides a useful introduction to the poem in his Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).