Frederick Klaeber - Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg

Beowulf and The Fight At Finnsburg

Klaeber was fluent in a number of languages (Greek, Latin, French, Germanic, Old, Middle, and Modern English) and was thus asked by the University of Minnesota to create an English language edition of Beowulf in 1893. Klaeber spent three decades on the project, finally publishing the first edition, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, in 1922. The Finnesburg Fragment which he included is all that remains of another poem about an event alluded to in Beowulf. The second edition was published in 1928. The third edition was published in 1936; it was republished with a supplement in 1941, and then republished again with a second supplement in 1950. All of Klaeber's editions have included a substantial Introduction, discussing a range of different topics related to the poem, and a comprehensive Commentary section on particular aspects of the text, as well as an extensive glossary.

For many years, Klaeber was considered one of the world's leading Beowulf researchers, and his great work, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, became enormously important and influential on scholars and students of those poems. As Josephine Bloomfield observes:

Among the editions of Beowulf, Frederick Klaeber's remains the most important. A monumental project begun in 1893, published in 1922, and revised and supplemented up to 1950, it continues to be the central source used by graduate students for the study of the poem and by scholars and teachers as the basis of their translations.

In 2008, a new version prepared by an editorial team consisting of Robert Dennis Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles was published as the "fourth edition"; it retains much of Klaeber's third edition design and text, but also substantial alterations intended to update the work by taking into account scholarship on Beowulf published since 1950.