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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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8 completed. The next to the last is that of R. W. Chambers. This is not the American R. W. Chambers whose novels one’s suburban aunt is so fond of. This R. W. C. is a scholar at University College, London. I have translated from his text of the poem (Cambridge University Press, 1914); but now and then I have adopted the words with which some other editors have patched up the ragged spots. And I haven’t bothered to ask anybody’s permission, nor said anything about it in footnotes. Thus the sympathetic reader may be sure some reviewer will call me “unscholarly.” I won’t mind, so long as I help fireside lovers of Hector and Achilles and Odysseus to love too my old Germanic hero of the mighty grip-and so long as the teachers’ conventions recommend my little book for colleges and schools. If one wants to follow up the subject of Beowulf-wants to know more about this old poetry and these old legends-I suggest he look sometime at the following books: Chambers’ Introduction to Beowulf, Olrik’s The Heroic Legends of Denmark (translated from the Danish by my friend L. M. Hollander), Gummere’s The Oldest English Epic, Stjerna’s Essays on Questions Connected... with Beowulf (translated from the Swedish by J. R. C. Hall). And that he may understand my ideas about AngloSaxon versification, let him read my two monographs, published in “The University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature”: Beowulf and the Niebelungen Couplet, The Scansion of Middle English Alliterative Verse. For information on the old life and customs around the North Sea, let him read Williams’ Social Scandinavia in the Viking Age. |
