Editing Beowulf (section)

=== Editions ===
Many editions of the Old English text of ''Beowulf'' have been published; this section lists the most influential.

The Icelandic scholar [[Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin]] made the first transcriptions of the ''Beowulf''-manuscript in 1786, working as part of a Danish government historical research commission. He had a copy made by a professional copyist who knew no Old English (and was therefore in some ways more likely to make transcription errors, but in other ways more likely to copy exactly what he saw), and then made a copy himself. Since that time, the manuscript has crumbled further, making these transcripts prized witnesses to the text. While the recovery of at least 2000 letters can be attributed to them, their accuracy has been called into question,{{refn|group="lower-alpha"|For instance, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker in ''The Translations of Beowulf'',<ref name="chaucey">{{cite book |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25942 |publisher=Gutenberg |first=Chauncey Brewster |last=Tinker |title=The Translations of Beowulf |year=1903}}</ref> a comprehensive survey of 19th-century translations and editions of ''Beowulf''.}} and the extent to which the manuscript was actually more readable in Thorkelin's time is uncertain.<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Malone |editor-first=Kemp |title=The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf in Facsimile |series=Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile |volume=1 |publisher=Rosenkilde and Bagger |year=1951}}</ref> Thorkelin used these transcriptions as the basis for the first complete edition of ''Beowulf'', in Latin.<ref name="translationhistory"/>

In 1922, [[Frederick Klaeber]], a German philologist who worked at the University of Minnesota, published his edition of the poem, ''[[Frederick Klaeber#Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg|Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg]]'';<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Klaeber |editor-first=Frederick |editor-link=Frederick Klaeber |title=Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg |url=https://archive.org/details/cu31924059417794/page/n7/mode/2up |publisher=Heath |year=1922}}</ref> it became the "central source used by graduate students for the study of the poem and by scholars and teachers as the basis of their translations."<ref name="Bloomfield 1999"/> The edition included an extensive glossary of Old English terms.<ref name="Bloomfield 1999">{{cite journal |url=http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_language_quarterly/v060/60.2bloomfield.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151004105406/http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_language_quarterly/v060/60.2bloomfield.pdf |archive-date=4 October 2015 |url-status=live |last =Bloomfield |first=Josephine |title=Benevolent Authoritarianism in Klaeber's Beowulf: An Editorial Translation of Kingship |journal=Modern Language Quarterly |volume=60 |issue=2 |pages=129–159 |date=June 1999 |doi=10.1215/00267929-60-2-129 |s2cid =161287730}}</ref> His third edition was published in 1936, with the last version in his lifetime being a revised reprint in 1950.<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Klaeber |editor-first=Frederick |editor-link=Frederick Klaeber |title=Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg |url=https://archive.org/details/beowulffightatfi0003unse_k3g4/page/n7/mode/2up |edition=3rd |publisher=Heath |year=1950|isbn=9780669212129 }}</ref> Klaeber's text was re-presented with new introductory material, notes, and glosses, in a fourth edition in 2008.<ref>{{cite book |editor1-last=Fulk |editor1-first=Robert D. |editor2-last=Bjork |editor2-first=Robert E. |editor3-last=Niles |editor3-first=John D. |title=Klaeber's Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg |edition=4th |publisher=University of Toronto Press |year=2008}}</ref>

Another widely used edition is [[Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie]]'s, published in 1953 in the [[Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records]] series.<ref>{{cite book |last=Dobbie |first=Elliott van Kirk |author-link=Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie |title=Beowulf and Judish |url=http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 |series=Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records |publisher=Routledge & Kegan Paul|volume=4 |year=1953}}</ref> The British Library, meanwhile, took a prominent role in supporting [[Kevin Kiernan (scholar)|Kevin Kiernan]]'s ''[[Kevin Kiernan (scholar)#Electronic Beowulf|Electronic Beowulf]]''; the first edition appeared in 1999, and the fourth in 2014.<ref name="KiernanE"/>