Acknowledgments
This book had its gestation in and has been through various stages of development since about 1993, when John D. Niles and the Old English Colloquium at UC Berkeley invited me to give a paper for their conference on Anglo-Saxonism scheduled for March 1994. I thank Jack for that invitation and for his and Allen J. Frantzen’s including a more fully developed version of my paper in their Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (1997). Several other individuals and institutions have supported my work on this book since my initial foray into the field it explores. I thank especially Liselotte Larsen, librarian of Grundtvig-Biblioteket at Vartov in Copenhagen, for helping me track down several references both in person and via email, Professor Emeritus James Massengale, UCLA, for help with Grundtvig’s music, Sven H. Rossel, Universität Wien, and Maria-Claudia Tomany, St. Cloud State University, for scrutinizing parts of the text and offering a number of helpful suggestions for improving the translations in my chapter on the OE Phoenix, and Anders Christensen of Dansk Folkemindesamling in Copenhagen for help in identifying the sources for Grundtvig’s melodies. A number of other friends and colleagues have come to my aid in various ways along the way: James Neel, Michael McVeigh, Clive Tolley, Simon Keynes, Vibeke Vasbo, Keld Zeruneith, Suzanne Brøgger, Johan Elsness, Catherine Saucier, Zachary Bush, Erik Hansen, Stephen Laker, John Ole Askedal, Mari-Liisa Varila, Rob Lloyd Jones, Johan Sandberg McGuinne, John Rydahl, Gitte Skov, Þóra Björnsson, Leena Saarinen, Andy Orchard, Marijane Osborn, Tom Shippey, and Caroline Palmer. The Interlibrary Loan department of the Hayden Library at Arizona State University has given me invaluable support at all stages of my work.
In addition to the above, I must thank the Manchester Cluster for Anglo-Saxon Studies; the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge; and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University; all had me give talks on the project in 1997 when I was a visiting scholar at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and I benefited from feedback in all three settings. The Manchester Cluster for Anglo-Saxon Studies also invited me back to talk about Grundtvig’s work on Brunanburh and his Phoenix ballads for the Fifth G. L. Brook Symposium in 2001, and the Medieval Research Colloquium, University of California, Davis, had me present on Grundtvig’s edition of the OE Phoenix itself in 2001 as well. In 2006, I gave the plenary address on aspects of the project for the annual meeting of the Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, delivered the biannual Fell-Benedikz Lecture, University of Nottingham, on “Ballads, Brunanburh, and Grundtvig’s Beowulf,” and gave the plenary address on Grundtvig’s translations from OE for the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. In 2008, I delivered the plenary address on N. F. S. Grundtvig’s appropriations of OE literature for the annual meeting of MEMESAK (the Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea) at Yonsei University. Finally, in 2009 and 2016 respectively, I presented papers on Scandinavia and Old English Studies at the Burdick-Vary Symposium, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University. All these public presentations of my ideas have helped give them focus.
To help me focus them even more, two institutions granted me funding for this project and two others (Klaeber’s Beowulf [Toronto, 2008] and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages [Oxford, 2010]): the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I was in residence from 2004 to 2005, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded me a Senior Fellowship for the years 2006–07. More recently, Arizona State University granted me sabbatical leaves in 2012 and 2019 to conduct research on this and other scholarly endeavors, and funds from the ASU Foundation made possible the indexing and the open access publication of this volume. My gratitude goes to all four institutions.
Portions of this book have appeared earlier in different form, and I wish to thank the original publishers for permission to revise for inclusion here the essays they published: the University Press of Florida for “Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies” in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (1997), pp. 111–32 (see chapter 1); and the University of Toronto Press for “N. F. S. Grundtvig’s 1840 Edition of the Old English Phoenix: A Vision of a Vision of Paradise” in Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Mark Amodio, eds., Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. (2003), pp. 217–39 (see chapter 3).