- Home
- Foundations
- literary criticism
- Beowulf by All
Beowulf by All
Community Translation and Workbook
Edited by Jean Abbott, Elaine Treharne and Mateusz Fafinski
Series: Foundations
208 Pages, Trim size: 6 x 9 in
- Paperback
- 9781641894715
- Published: June 2021
- Hardcover
- 9781641894708
- Published: June 2021
- eBook (PDF)
- 9781641894746
- Published: June 2021
This is a community translation of the earliest English epic poem. Beowulf tells the story of a mythical hero in northern Europe in, perhaps, the sixth century. Alongside his story, multiple other shorter narratives are told and many other voices are heard, making it a rich and varied account of the poet’s views of heroism, conflict, loyalty, and the human condition.
The poem is widely taught in schools and universities, and has been adapted, modernized, and translated dozens of times, but this is the first large-scale polyvocal translation.
Readers will encounter the voices of over two hundred individuals, woven together into a reading experience that is at once productively dissonant, yet strangely coherent in its extreme variation. We hope that it turns the common question "Why do we need yet another translation?" on its head, asking instead, "How can we hear from more translators?," and "How can previously unheard, or marginalized voices, find space, like this, in the world of Old English Studies?" With this in mind we invite a new generation of readers to try their own hand at translating Beowulf in the workbook space provided opposite this community translation.
It is often through the effort of translating that we see the reality of the original.
This book is available as Open Access.
Jean Abbott obtained her doctoral degree on Names and Naming in Early England from the Department of English at Stanford University in 2020. She has written on Beowulf, the Life of St Chad, on Richard Rolle, and on the Prayerbook of Elizabeth of York.
Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University, where she teaches medieval literature and manuscript studies, and directs Stanford Text Technologies. She has published over thirty books on medieval literature.
Mateusz Fafinski is a medievalist, digital humanist, and translator. His PhD thesis at Freie Universität Berlin focused on the uses of the material past in early medieval Britain. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Text Technologies and teaches medieval history at Freie Universität Berlin.