5
Scandinavian Approaches to Beowulf
The Scandinavians first approached
Beowulf and other Old English (OE) literature through Romantic Nationalism, as we saw in chapter 1, and with greater complexity with Grundtvig and his vision of Denmark’s place, and his own, in world history in chapter 2. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), the first editor of the poem who introduced it to the world, was primarily motivated by nationalism when he ventured to England to find as many Danish and Norwegian manuscripts as possible and happened upon the poem in the late 1780s – although there is some credible evidence that he knew about it beforehand
1 Fjalldal, “To Fall by Ambition,” p. 323. – and was the first to do so. He was born and raised in Iceland and continued his education in Denmark, where he earned degrees from the University of Copenhagen in philosophy (1774) and law (1776), produced a number of editions and translations of Old Norse (ON) texts, and became secretary to the Arnamagnaean Commission in 1777, assistant keeper in the Royal Privy Archives in 1780, and “professor extraordinarius” in 1783, which virtually assured him an eventual chair in philosophy at the university.
2 Wolf, “Thorkelin and Rask,” pp. 114–15. The six years he spent in the libraries of England, Scotland, and Ireland assured him a place in the history of
Beowulf studies.
After “happening” upon
Beowulf, Thorkelin commissioned a transcription of the poem in 1787 and then produced another himself between 1789 and 1791, the year he was appointed keeper of the Royal Privy Archives upon the death of his predecessor. Those transcripts have enabled subsequent editors of
Beowulf to reconstruct much of a manuscript that was disintegrating, having been damaged by fire in 1731, and have thus been highly praised as essential documents in the history of the study of the poem.
3 Bjork, “Thorkelin’s Preface,” pp. 291–92. Kevin Kiernan has thoroughly analyzed those transcripts and included them in his indispensable
Electronic Beowulf project along with numerous other documents, including his essay on Thorkelin’s discovery of the
Beowulf manuscript.
4 Kiernan, The Electonic Beowulf. Thorkelin’s first edition and Latin translation of
Beowulf, however, were universally excoriated. Grundtvig led the charge against Thorkelin’s sloppy work; John Josias Conybeare followed suit, listing hundreds of mistakes in both the edition and translation; and John M. Kemble, the second editor of the poem in 1833, mercilessly drove the final nail into the coffin: “not five lines of Thorkelin’s edition can be found in succession, in which some gross fault either in the transcript or the translation, does not betray the editor’s utter ignorance of the Anglo-Saxon language.”
5 Bjork, “Thorkelin’s Preface,” p. 291. See Haarder, Beowulf, for a discussion of reviews of Thorkelin’s edition, and Hall, “The First Two Editions of Beowulf,” for a reassessment of it. “[S]uch,” as Jorge Luis Borges observed, “is the singular story of Thorkelin and his ill-fated passion.”
6 Borges, “Thorkelin y el Beowulf,” p. 469.After the ignominious publication of Thorkelin’s edition and the numerous condemnatory reactions to it, interest in the poem burgeoned in multiple cultures, first among the learned and then the unlearned and in a wide range of media.
7 See Bjork, “Reception History of Beowulf.” In Scandinavia among the learned, interest tended to settle into three sometimes overlapping categories: cultural and historical; literary interpretations; and translations. Translations will be dealt with in the next chapter.