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[Note to on-line edition: Works Cited appear at the end of the Notes.--10/00]

Notes

1. By the "Klaeber consensus" I mean that text which emerges from the nineteenth century, from Grein, into the major editions of Holthausen, Klaeber, von Schauber, Dobbie, and Wrenn-Bolton. See Birte Kelly, "The Formative Stages of Beowulf Textual Scholarship: Part I," ASE, 11 (1982), 247-74; "Part II," ASE, 12 (1983), 239-75.
2. This date also eliminates other important works which might very well be considered as "recent," such as Edward B. Irving, A Reading of Beowulf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), and his pedagogical Introduction to Beowulf (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), and Betty S. Cox, Cruces of Beowulf (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1971); not to mention the still earlier Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
3. Bessinger's A Concordance to Beowulf (Ithaca: Cornel University Press) appeared in 1969.
4. Beowulf and the Appositive Style, p. 41, speaks of "a poet who wished to affirm the distance between Christian contemporaries and noble pagan ancestors while simultaneously poetizing a kind of cultural-linguistic fellowship between the two."
5. In a personal communication, Professor Robinson expressed some doubt about this classification. But it must stand until a distinction is made among Christianity, (Christian?) humanism, and paganism. On this score Cox, note 2, makes eminent sense: "I
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have consistently felt that if I had to isolate the theme of Beowulf assuming that there could be one principal theme I should say that it is how an ideal man should live, and how he should die.... It is a supremely humanistic poem," p. 162-3. These brief remarks, however, cannot do justice to Professor Robinson's essay.
6. One instance of over-extension can be seen in Robinson's application of the appositive style to explain lines 2428-40. He concludes that "freanwine and maeg bring out different aspects of the relationship between the two men," p. 20, i.e., the two brothers; whereas the sense of the passage is that one son brought the father to despair by accidentally killing the other son. The problem of interpretation arises from too narrow an interpretation of geswencan, which does not mean "to kill," but "to vex," here, "to bring to despair." Another instance is Robinson's insistence that the scop's song of creation could be pagan, p.34, in the face of very similar passages which are unquestionably Christian. The monotheistic, anthropomorphic Creator, in spite of scattered hints toward monotheism in the pagan tradition of the North, has a decided Christian ring to it.
7. Another pedagogical work which has been omitted is J. D. A. Ogilvy and Donald C. Baker, Reading Beowulf: An Introduction to the Poem (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). Books aimed at teaching, of course, tend to canonize convention. Cf. The Old English Newsletter, 18, 1 (Fall 1984), "Unfortunately, in their efforts to overcome the strangeness of the
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poem, Ogilvy and Baker end up rewriting it," p. 90.
8. Joseph F. Tuso, "The State of the Art: A Survey," in Approaches to Teaching Beowulf, pp. 33-9.
9. More About the Fight with the Dragon, p. 3. After completing this survey, I learned of M. J. Swanton's Crisis and Development in Germanic Society 700-800: Beowulf and the Burden of Kingship (Goppingen Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 333. Goppingen: Kummerle, 1982). From the review in the OENL, 18, 1 (Fall 1984), p. 91, I would place this work within the Klaeber consensus group. Nor have I commented upon T. A. Shippey's small Volume Beowulf, Studies in English Literature No. 70 (Southampton, England: Edward Arnold, 1978), a pedagogical work which tends to accommodate the poem through attitudinal adjustment and a strong sense of cultural and historical differences.
References

Books:

Jess B. Bessinger, A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

---, A Concordance to Beowulf (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969).

W. F. Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf, An Eighth-Century View (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1978).

A. G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959)

R. W. Chambers, Beowulf, An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, suppl. C. L. Wrenn, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1967).

Colin Chase, ed., The Dating of Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

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Books (Continued):

Helen Damico, Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

Betty S. Cox, Cruces of Beowulf (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1971).

John Gardner, The Construction of Christian Poetry in Old English (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979).

Margaret E. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London: The Athlone Press, University of London, 1970).

S.B. Greenfield and F.C. Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications of Old English Literature to the End of 1972 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1980).

Andreas Haarder, Beowulf, The Appeal of the Poem (Viborg: Aakademisk Forlag, 1975).

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D. F. Huppé, The Hero in the Earthly City, A Reading of Beowulf (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies: State University of New York at Binghamton Press, 1984).

Edward B. Irving, A Reading of Beowulf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

---, Introduction to Beowulf (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

Gwyn Jones, Kings, Beasts, and Heroes (London: Allen and Univ, 1972).

K. S. Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1981).

Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed., with 1st and 2nd suppls. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1950).

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Books (Continued):

W. W. Lawrence, Beowulf and the Epic Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1928).

Alvin A. Lee, The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

J. D. Niles, Beowulf, The Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983).

J. D. A. Ogilvy and D. C. Baker, Reading Beowulf: An Introduction to the Poem (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).

Martin Puvel, Beowulf and the Celtic Tradition (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1979).

F. C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of Tennessee

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Books (Continued):

Press, 1984).

D. B. Short, Beowulf Scholarship, An Annotated Bibliography (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1980).

Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

R. P. Tripp, Jr., More About the Fight with the Dragon, Beowulf 2208b-3182: Commentary, Edition, and Translation (Lanham, New York: University Press of America, 1983).

Tilman Westphalen, Beowulf 3150-55: Textkritik und Editiongeschichte (Munich: Fink. 1967).

David Williams, Cain and Beowulf, A Study in Secular Allegory (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

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Articles:

Allen Cabaniss, "Beowulf and the Liturgy," JEGP, 54 (1955), 195-201.

C. J. Donahue, "Beowulf and Christian Tradition: A Reconsideration from a Celtic Stance," Traditio, 21 (1965), 55-116.

---, "Social Function and Literary Value in Beowulf," in Harald Scholler, ed., The Epic in Medieval Society: Aesthetic and Moral Values (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1977), pp. 382-90.

M. B. McNamee, "Beowulf, A Christian Hero," in his Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), pp. 86-117.

---, "Beowulf An Allegory of Salvation?" JEGP, 59 (1960), 190-207.

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Articles (Continued):

L. E. Nicholson, "The Literal Meaning and Symbolic Structure of Beowulf," Classica and Medievalia, 25 (1964), 151-201.

Addendum:

M. J. Swanton, Crisis and Development in Germanic Society 700-800: Beowulf and the Burden of Kingship (Goppingen Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 333. Goppingen: Kurumerle, 1982).

T. A. Shippey, Beowulf, Studies in English Literature No. 70 (Southampton, England: Edward Arnold, 1978).

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