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List Price: $39.95 | | Publisher: University of Toronto Press
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Editorial Review:
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.
Klaebers Beowulf, Fourth Edition Reviews:
Only one problem 
2009-06-29 - I am satisfied with this book. The only criticism I have is that for the first 1000 lines or so, the text is messed up. Its as though they tried to print 2 pages on the same page. Other than that, I am thrilled with my copy.
great ... 
2008-10-20 - being recently retired, i decided to actually read all the books i only read parts of in my college days (meaning homer/s illiad & odyssey in greek & virgil/s aeneid in latin). after 9 years of latin and quite a few of greek, i thought my one semester of old english would get me thru beowulf pretty fast. i was *wrong*. it/s more complicated than that. klaeber/s edition (i have 2 copies, one i mark up, and one is pristine) has *almost* everything you need to translate it for yourself. while it strives for completion (and almost reaches it), you are still going to need clark hall & merrit/s dictionary, and a good grammar. this is one of the great books in any language. almost everything you ever wanted to know about the poem is here. hey, i may buy a *third* copy, just because it is *that* good !
At long last, more of the same
2008-06-18 - I have reduced to tatters two copies of Klaeber's third edition, a text I have literally lived with since 1977. This fourth edition, which I am now working my way through in preparation for teaching the poem in the coming academic year, is a worthy successor to the third.
The discussion of the manuscript and its hands is clear and balanced. The treatment of the analogues and sources may strike some as conservative, but appears to me exactly the line to take. The glossary - for which generations have students and their teachers have been profoundly grateful - has been enriched by reference to the half century or more of scholarship that has accumulated since the last revision.
I look forward to working through Beowulf 4 (with Beowulf 3) to see what Klaeber himself hoped to see - the ongoing recovery and elucidation of a noble text.
I think Klaeber himself would be pleased.
Although I believe he would have recalled that the Cotton emperors have among them the fascinating Cleopatra, p. xxvi footnote 5
