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The publication in 1815 of the first edition of Beowulf posed a pressing question that would resonate in antiquarian and philological circles throughout the nineteenth century: to whom does this monument of early Germanic literature belong? The Nibelungenlied would be claimed as the German national epic, the Cantar de Mío Cid was Spain's property, and the Song of Roland belonged to France, but did Beowulf belong to England? An Old English poem focusing on Danes, Geats, Swedes, and their interactions with Frisians, Franks, Wulfings, and other minor continental Germanic peoples did not look much like an English epic. Because Beowulf never mentions England and ostensibly fails to provide its homeland with a foundational myth, scholars who identified with the various peoples or places mentioned in the poem felt it was only right to claim it as an epic for their particular group. Indeed, T. A. Shippey observed in his magisterial survey of the poem's critical heritage that nineteenth-century scholarship brims with "attempts to annex or appropriate the poem, and make it personal, local or national property on which trespassers are not allowed."1 This impulse is evident even in the first edition of Beowulf, the subtitle of which describes it as "a Danish poem in the Anglo-Saxon dialect" [Poëma danicum dialecto anglo-saxonica].2 The editor responsible for this designation, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín, was an Icelander working for the Danish government, who came across the hitherto unknown poem while searching the British Library for manuscripts relevant to the history of Denmark.3
A territorial struggle over Beowulf broke out in the reviews of Thorkelín's edition. One reviewer, Nicolaus Outzen, rejected Danish claims to the poem and held that it originated in the Schleswig-Holstein area, the ancestral homeland of the Angles, where he also happened to be born. Outzen's interpretation amounted to a claim that the poem and the territory from which it came belonged ancestrally to the Germans rather than the Danes—a politically charged claim at the time, with sentiments anticipating the Austro-Prussian annexation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark in 1864.4 In the decades following Outzen's literary annexation, scholars with varying ethnic and national loyalties would go on to claim Beowulf for Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Frisia, and England, among other locales.5 Jacob Grimm...