Research project

Claiming Beowulf as a European Epic: Non-Anglophone Appropriations of an Old English Poem

How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

Duration: 2024 - 2028
Contact: Suzanne Klare
Funding: European Research Council (ERC)

In nineteenth-century Europe, philology was entangled in the romantic nationalist drive to create distinct national identities. The idea was that by studying the medieval past, a people could reconnect to their ancient character, as it had supposedly been passed down for centuries. The 1815 publication of the Old English poem Beowulf was motivated by this urge: to create a national identity for Denmark, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin created an edition and translation of the poem to serve as Denmark’s national epic. Thorkelin’s claim was immediately challenged; in the discourse that ensued, other scholars from Germany, Denmark, England and the Low Countries would attempt to claim the poem as their own national heritage. For much of the century, the great quantity and quality of German scholarship enabled the acceptance of Beowulf as an Ur-German poem. This changed in the late nineteenth century, as established theories that had heretofore been accepted as fact began to be rejected: Beowulf was beginning to be seen as English.

An underexplored facet of nineteenth-century engagements with Beowulf is the large number of adaptations and translations of the poem that would have made non-Anglophone audiences aware of the text and dictated its meaning. Academic interpretations and analyses of the poem have received ample attention, but popular (re)imaginings have not been given the same consideration. My project will analyze non-Anglophone translations and adaptations of Beowulf and consider how these texts influenced the reception of the Old English poem outside the academic sphere. This research will contribute to the overarching project EMERGENCE: Early Medieval English in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

My research explores:

what choices translators made, and how these choices influenced the reception of Beowulf;

which story elements adapters of Beowulf included and excluded in their adaptations, and whether these changes reflect (nationalist) agendas;

how contemporary events influenced the framing of these translations and adaptations in prefaces and supplementary material;

what narrative was being created about the early middle ages through the retelling of Beowulf.

I will analyze a number of case studies through the lenses of adaptation and translation theory. I concentrate on the translations that were most widely read, and thus had the biggest impact on the popular understanding of Beowulf. In the realm of adaptation, I make a distinction between adult-oriented adaptation and family/children-oriented adaptation, and will see how these categories differ in the representation of early medieval Europe.

Related research

Main project: Early Medieval English in 19th-Century Europe (EMERGENCE)

Subprojects: