Which American scholar edited the influential 1922 edition Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg?

Frederick Klaeber edited the influential 1922 edition Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg.

Klaeber was a German-born philologist who became a leading professor of Old and Middle English at the University of Minnesota. He began working on the edition in 1893 and spent roughly three decades preparing its text, introduction, notes, glossary, bibliography, and appendices before the first edition appeared in 1922.

The volume joined Beowulf with the surviving Finnesburg Fragment, a short piece concerning an episode also alluded to in Beowulf. Klaeber’s edition became a foundation for modern teaching and scholarship because it combined a carefully edited Old English text with extensive commentary and explanatory material.

The work was revised in 1928 and 1936, with supplements published in 1941 and 1950. A fourth edition appeared in 2008, prepared by Robert D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, while retaining much of Klaeber’s structure. The title is therefore still encountered in the modern form Klaeber’s Beowulf, even when the edition is not the original 1922 printing.