Frederick J. Klaeber was a Germanphilologist who was Professor of Old and Middle English at the University of Minnesota. His edition of the poem Beowulf, published as Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, is considered a classic work of Beowulf scholarship; it has been in print continuously since 1922 and is now in its fourth edition.
Biography
Klaeber was born in Beetzendorf, Kingdom of Prussia to Hermann and Luise Klaeber. He received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1892. He was invited to join the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor of English Philology. He was Professor of English and Comparative Philology from 1898 to 1931. In 1902 he married Charlotte Wahn. Klaeber retired from Minnesota in 1931 and returned to Berlin, where he continued to work on what would become the 1936 third edition of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. During World War II, his house in Berlin was destroyed, including his books, articles, and notes; he and his wife fled to her house in Bad Kösen, where he continued work on what would be published as the second supplement to the third edition of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. During this time, because he no longer had his library and paper was scarce, he depended greatly on colleagues and friends in the US. Toward the end of his life, Klaeber was bedridden, impoverished, and partially paralyzed but continued his scholarly work nevertheless. He died in 1954.
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg
Klaeber was fluent in a number of languages and was thus asked by the University of Minnesota to create an English language edition of Beowulf in 1893. Klaeber spent three decades on the project, finally publishing the first edition, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, in 1922. The Finnesburg Fragment which he included is all that remains of another poem about an event alluded to in Beowulf. The second edition was published in 1928. The third edition was published in 1936; it was republished with a supplement in 1941, and then republished again with a second supplement in 1950. All of Klaeber's editions have included a substantial Introduction, discussing a range of different topics related to the poem, and a comprehensive Commentary section on particular aspects of the text, as well as an extensive glossary. For many years, Klaeber was considered one of the world's leading Beowulf researchers, and his great work, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, became enormously important and influential on scholars and students of those poems. As Josephine Bloomfield observes: In 2008, a new version prepared by an editorial team consisting ofRobert Dennis Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles was published as the "fourth edition"; it retains much of Klaeber's third edition design and text, but also substantial alterations intended to update the work by taking into account scholarship on Beowulf published since 1950.
