Francis Peabody Magoun - Scholarly Career

Scholarly Career

Upon his return to the United States, he was appointed instructor in Comparative Literature at Harvard (1919); during this period he completed his Ph.D. in philology at Harvard University with his 1923 dissertation, The gest of Alexander: Two middle English alliterative fragments, Alexander A and Alexander B, translated from a J2-recension of the Historia de Preliis.

At Harvard, he was made Instructor of English, and proceeded through the academic ranks thereafter (Professor of Comparative Literature, 1937; Professor of English, 1951). His tweedy figure was familiar on campus; he was rumored to have no office, and it was said he could only be spoken to while walking.

He was distinguished by a longstanding interest in popular antiquities. Along with Alexander Haggerty Krappe, he was the first scholarly translator of the folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm into English. But he was also developing a theoretical and methodological framework for his eclectic interests. David Bynum, in his history of English studies at Harvard, affirms Magoun's importance as a link between the pioneering work of George Lyman Kittredge in folklore and ethnomusicology (as they related to literary history) and the work of Milman Parry; Magoun took inspiration from Parry and Lord's field observation of the oral poetry of the guslars of Serbia (which they had compared to the Homeric poems), and extended their methods to the study of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The 1953 article on Beowulf, "The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," published in Speculum, was of particular importance in the view of Albert Lord (for whom Magoun served as dissertation advisor; he was also one of Walter Ong's teachers). Magoun argued that written Anglo-Saxon poetry was essentially a transcription of traditional oral performance, and furthermore, heavily imbued with pre-Christian ideas and values. The position has implications for how Anglo-Saxon poetry should be approached for purposes of literary criticism. His ideas sparked ongoing controversy among medievalists, with some accepting his view, others arguing for a written poetry inspired by traditional idiom and methods (and a complex layering of Christian and pre-Christian influences), and still others insisting that the entire Anglo-Saxon corpus consists of individually authored, written texts with an exclusively Christian matrix of belief. The essay has been anthologized many times.

In late middle age, he undertook to learn the Finnish language in order to explore another area of oral tradition, and exercised considerable influence upon Finnish studies; contemporaries remember the growing library of Finnish texts in his house on Reservoir Street. His 1963 prose translation of the Kalevala remains a standard, and he was awarded the Finnish Order of the Lion of Finland in 1964 for his contributions to the study of Finnish culture.

He retired from Harvard in 1961, and he was honored at the close of his career with a well-regarded Festschrift: Franciplegius; medieval and linguistic studies in honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., edited by Jess B. Bessinger and Robert Payson Creed.

In a legend circulating among medievalists, Magoun is said to have been the model for the character Mr. Magoo. However, there is no evidence that artist Hubley knew the scholar.