Cynewulf: Basic Readings

by Robert E. Bjork (Editor), R.D. Fulk, Patrick W. Conner

Two original essays and 16 published since 1950 offer a comprehensive view of Cynewulf, his language, and his poetry. The collection contains important new statements on dates, provenance, and canon by R.D. Fulk and Patrick W. Conner, four influential essays that thoroughly explore Cynewulf's runic signature and poetic style, and major contributions to our understanding of the four signed poems of Cynewulf, "Fates of the Apostles, Christ II, Juliana, and Elene." Three essays are devoted to each of these poems, and the essays themselves exemplify a broad range of approaches to this highly elusive Anglo-Saxon poet. Representative essays include J.E. Cross, "Cynewulf's Traditions about the Apostles in The Fates of the Apostles," George Hardin Brown, "The Descent-Ascent Motif in "Christ II" of Cynewulf," Donald G. Bzdyl, "Juliana: Cynewulf's Dispeller of Delusion," Catharine A. Regan, "Evangelicism as the Informing Principle of Cynewulf's "Elene,"" and Dolores Warwick Frese, "The Art of Cynewulf's Runic Signatures."
The volume complements existing book-length treatments of the subject and will be welcome to scholars and students who need the foundations of Cynewulf scholarship at their fingertips. Index.

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Robert E. Bjork is Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1983 and where he was Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) from 1994 to 2018. He earned his B.A. from Pomona College in 1971, his M.A. from UCLA in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1979, also from UCLA. He was named Foundation Professor of English in 2009. His primary research areas are Old English poetry, modern Swedish literature, and biomedical writing; he has published 18 books and 26 peer-reviewed articles. His and R. D. Fulk's and John D. Niles's Klaeber's Beowulf (the 4th edition of Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg) was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2008. He is General Editor of the 4-volume The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, published in June, 2010, and his second volume of facing-page translations of Old English poems for Harvard University Press was published in the spring of 2014. He is currently working on a history of Scandinavian scholarship on Anglo-Saxon literature. He's past President of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a recipient of an NEH senior fellowship and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association (United Kingdom), and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. In addition, he also serves on the editorial boards of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press), Mediaevistik: Internationale Zeitschrift für Interdisziplinäre Mittelalterforschung (Peter Lang Verlag), and the University of Toronto Press's "Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Studies" series as well as on the International Advisory Boards of National Sun Yat-sen University Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Taiwan, and of the Medieval Centre, National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan.