4 Old English Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Scandinavia

Well over 80 percent of the work touching on Old English (OE) subjects and published in the Scandinavian languages appears in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the variety of topics that work addresses is vast, making the choosing of a methodology for discussing it complicated. Creating a fluent historical account of developments in the field from 1900 to 2023 is one possible approach, but that presupposes a coherence and continuity in the history that does not quite exist. Another approach, the one adopted here, I borrow from Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson’s A Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the End of 1972 (GR). The 6,550 items in that bibliography are arranged into three sections on general works on OE literature, OE poetry, and OE prose, with each section being broken down further into sub-categories. The following discussion is organized similarly, then by the rubrics supplied by GR, and then by country within those rubrics, which move from “Studies in Historical, Linguistic, and Cultural Subjects” to increasingly narrow topics until reaching the individual texts themselves. This chapter concerns OE literature generally, while chapters 5 and 6 below deal with Scandinavian approaches to and translations of Beowulf and chapter 7, with Scandinavian translations of OE literature other than Beowulf. A complete bibliography of contributions in the Scandinavian languages to OE studies is contained in appendices A and B of this book.