Haarder Andreas - Beowulf the critical heritage

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance I have received from many quarters in the preparation of this book. My greatest debt is to Professor Andreas Haarder, as detailed in the Editorial Preface below; and after him, to the Leverhulme Foundation, which provided me with a grant to enable me to do the indispensable and time-consuming preliminary reading, in 19923. Professor Haarder and I are also grateful to the Kongelige Danske Akademi, which provided a grant to allow us to meet in England in 1985.

Several scholars have since helped me in various ways with various languages: Ingo Cornils, of Leeds, with German, both Hoch- and Platt-; Jim Binns, of York, with Latin; Lars Reuter SJ, of Saint Louis, with Danish; Adrian Walker, with Swedish. Rolf H.Bremmer jr, of Leiden, supplied the originals and prepared translations of items 26 and 44 from Dutch. The staff of several university libraries assisted me with finding old books, and checking increasingly difficult references: in particular Jeanne Goodhill of the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds; Ellen Aufenthie, Anne Barker and Ron Crown of the Pius XII Library of Saint Louis University; Jrgen Hjgaard Jrgensen, of the Odense University Library; Anita Wallace and Carol Johnson of the Library of the University of Minnesota. Gsli Sgurthsson of the University of Iceland traced many recondite references from the past. Catherine Barton, Rachel Lund and Mike Nagy in different ways helped me with the problems of transferring thought to text, and then to disk. For other assistance I have been again and again indebted to Carsten Kjr Andersen, Ted Andersson, Ian Baird, Bob Bjork, David Fairer, Jim Hall, Ben Hanraads, Christian Liebl, Anne Mattson, Hans Frede Nielsen, John Roberts, Kris Sneeringer and Andrew Wawn; while from its inception the project has built on D.K.Frys invaluable Bibliography of 1969. The project could not have been completed without the patience and encouragement of successive editors from Routledge, Athlone Presss successors in the Critical Heritage series, in particular Sophie Powell and Talia Rodgers; and I am especially grateful also for the very careful reading given in the final stages to a confusing typescript by Miranda Chaytor. None of the above is responsible, however, for any of the errors of omission and commission which I fear must remain in such a complex work of selection and translation.

I am grateful also to Dr Raymond A.Wiley and his publishers, Brill, for permission to reproduce the material in item 29; and to the editors and publishers of the following journals for permission to translate the items listed: Archiv fr dasStudium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen,