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A BEOWULF HANDBOOK. Edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. x + 466. $65 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).
BEOWULF: A STUDENT EDITION. Edited by George Jack. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. x + 243. $14.95 (paper).
Just about thirty years ago Brigid Brophy, then a "phenom" of literary criticism, along with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, offered Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, headed by Beowulf. Indeed, on April 4, i 998, an editorial writer of the Chicago Tribune mused about the delectable prospect that Beowolf would no longer be a required text for high school reading, thanks to the new ethnic relevancy movement that would replace some great books in the curricula of some American school districts. One would guess that this later hope will suffer the same fate as the observations of Brophy et al., for the Beowulf industry really shows no sign of diminishing production. The recent appearance of a large handbook and a student's edition would confirm this sustained vigor, as does the increasing bibliography. For example, until its 1997 meeting, the Executive Committee of the Old English Division of the Modern Language Association consistently scheduled one of its three sessions on Beowulf for, as George Clark observed in support of the decision almost a decade earlier, Beowulf sessions would be a good draw for the OE Division because of Beowulf's status as a widely-taught classic. Clark proved to be right.
It is this same steady, if not growing, interest, not to mention the increasingly complex scholarly response, that implicitly generated the ambitious and wideranging handbook edited by Bjork and Niles. With sixteen other scholars Bjork and Niles offer eighteen chapters on various aspects of Beowulf, giving a sketch of scholarly trends and a focus on select or exemplary problems within the topic of the chapter. There is a relatively flexible formula at work: each chapter begins with a summary and an annotated chronology of the most important books and articles on the topic of the chapter. Then follows an extended discussion, which can amplify the points of the opening frame and move into the intricacies of the subject. Many of...