Robert E. Bjork – författare

The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages is a major new reference resource for all key aspects of European history, society, religion, and culture from 500 to 1500. Since neighbouring areas of Asia and North Africa impinged on and helped shape the civilization of the West, relevant aspects of the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic dynasties, and Asiatic peoples such as the Avars and the Mongols are included. It is designed both for medievalists, who need a detailed and reliable reference tool for their own research and teaching, and for non-specialists, who need an accessible guide to the study of the Middle Ages. All entries are written with both audiences in mind. Over 800 scholars, guided by an international advisory board of five and an international editorial board of 26, have written the over 5,000 entries, and these entries have been lavishly supplemented by more than 500 illustrations and 50 maps. Each entry contains a brief bibliography.Distinguishing this research resource are its balanced coverage of both the whole geographical extent of the European Middle Ages and sixteen major topics centrally important to the study of the period. Ten members of the editorial board have ensured ample coverage of geographical regions: France, Germany and Austria, Spain and Portugal, Italy, Sicily, and Latin Greece, the Low Countries, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, Scandinavia and Iceland, and Central and Eastern Europe. In addition sixteen members of the board have ensured similar coverage of major international topics: art and architecture, archaeology, science, medicine, technology, law, ecclesiastical history, intellectual history, philosophy, social and economic history, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages and literatures, Islam, Judaica, medieval Latin, and music and liturgy. There are also separate and substantial entries on women and children in each of the geographical areas represented and in Jewish and Islamic society.

The Cynewulf Reader is a collection of classic and original essays presenting a comprehensive view of the elusive Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, his language, and his work.

The twenty-five poems and eleven metrical charms in this Old English volume offer tantalizing insights into the mental landscape of the Anglo-Saxons. The Wanderer and The Seafarer famously combine philosophical consolation with introspection to achieve a spiritual understanding of life as a journey. The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, and Wulf and Eadwacer direct a subjective lyrical intensity on the perennial themes of love, separation, and the passion for vengeance. From suffering comes wisdom, and these poems find meaning in the loss of fortune and reputation, exile, and alienation. “Woe is wondrously clinging; clouds glide,” reads a stoic, matter-of-fact observation in Maxims II on nature’s indifference to human suffering. Another form of wisdom emerges in the form of folk remedies, such as charms to treat stabbing pain, cysts, childbirth, and nightmares of witch-riding caused by a dwarf. The enigmatic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn combine scholarly erudition and proverbial wisdom. Learning of all kinds is celebrated, including the meaning of individual runes in The Rune Poem and the catalog of legendary heroes in Widsith.This book is a welcome complement to the previously published DOML volume Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic.

The Old English poems attributed to Cynewulf, who flourished some time between the eighth and tenth centuries, are unusual because most vernacular poems in this period are anonymous. Other than the name, we have no biographical details of Cynewulf, not even the most basic facts of where or when he lived. Yet the poems themselves attest to a powerfully inventive imagination, deeply learned in Christian doctrine and traditional verse-craft.Runic letters spelling out the name Cynewulf appear in four poems: Christ II (or The Ascension), Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, and Elene. To these a fifth can be added, Guthlac B, because of similarities in style and vocabulary, but any signature (if one ever existed) has been lost because its ending lines are missing. What characterizes Cynewulf’s poetry? He reveals an expert control of structure as shown from the changes he makes to his Latin sources. He has a flair for extended similes and dramatic dialogue. In Christ II, for example, the major events in Christ’s life are portrayed as vigorous leaps. In Juliana the force of the saint’s rhetoric utterly confounds a demon sent to torment her.

Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

The most revered work composed in Old English, Beowulf is one of the landmarks of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, A Beowulf Handbook will be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

The most revered work composed in Old English, Beowulf is a landmark of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition and offers both a rapid survey of trends in the study of Beowulf and a more sustained exploration of selected problems. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of its contents followed by a chronology of the most important books and articles on the particular topic it treats. The book has been written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, from non-specialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf, to scholars at work on their own research, and students of Old English. This is a volume in the acclaimed series Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies, and will prove an indispensable guide for many years to come. The acclaimed and comprehensive 1988 edition of Beowulf edited by C. L. Wrenn and W. F. Bolton is also available in the series.

The Cynewulf Reader is a collection of classic and original essays presenting a comprehensive view of the elusive Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, his language, and his work.

Critics have traditionally treated the Old English poems about saints as individual, autonomous works, relating but little to one another except in a broadly generic way. Bjork challenges the traditional view with an examination of the major structural feature that all the poems share: direct discourse.Syntactical and rhetorical analyses of the five poems reveal a consistent use of spech in creating stylistic norms or ideals - stylistic icons - in spiritually perfect figures. In all the poems the speech of the saints in formal, rhetorical, and balanced, the stylistic analogue both of their immutable fith and of the Christ-saint figural connection. The speech of all other characters is measured against this standard; their ability or inability to meet the saintly ideal in language reflects their level of spiritual awareness.The consistency with which these patterns appear sheds new light on the conventions of Old English poetic hagiography.

Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have ensured its continued use in spite of the fact that the book has remained largely unaltered since 1936. The fourth edition has been prepared with the aim of updating the scholarship while preserving the aspects of Klaeber's work that have made it useful to students of literature, linguists, historians, folklorists, manuscript specialists, archaeologists, and theorists of culture.A revised Introduction and Commentary incorporates the vast store of scholarship on Beowulf that has appeared since 1950. It brings readers up to date on areas of scholarship that have been controversial since the last edition, including the construction of the unique manuscript and views on the poem's date and unity of composition. The lightly revised text incorporates the best textual criticism of the intervening years, and the expanded Commentary furnishes detailed bibliographic guidance to discussion of textual cruces, as well as to modern and contemporary critical concerns. Aids to pronunciation have been added to the text, and advances in the study of the poem's language are addressed throughout. Readers will find that the book remains recognizably Klaeber's work, but with altered and added features designed to render it as useful today as it has ever been.

An account of the Scandinavian contributions to the field of Old English studies from the eighteenth century onwards.The discipline of Old English Studies began in Scandinavia, not England, pioneered by the work of the great Danish scholar, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872) and continues to flourish in the languages of the region (including Finland). This book offers a history of Scandinavian scholarship, in Neo-Latin, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, as well as Finnish and Sámi, from 1733 to the present day. It surveys the major events and texts in the discipline, and evaluates translations of Beowulf and other Old English prose and verse texts. It argues that nationalism, aesthetics, and spirituality are the chief motivators for Old English studies in the Nordic countries; although Romantic nationalism was a first mover for Old English studies, the qualities Scandinavians now seek in Old English literature-that we all seek-are transnational, existential, spiritual, and human. The study concludes with complete bibliographies of contributions in the Scandinavian languages to Old English studies and of translations of Old English literature into the Scandinavian languages.This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.