6세기 북유럽을 배경으로 전개되는 베오울프(Beowulf)라는 영웅의 일대기를 그린 작가 미상의 대서사시로 저자 Francis Barton Gummere가 요즘 용어로 편집한 영문 원서이다.
Francis Barton Gummere(1855년 ~ 1919년)
Francis Barton Gummere (b. Burlington, New Jersey March 6, 1855 - d. Haverford, Pennsylvania May 30, 1919) was an influential scholar of folklore and ancient languages, a student of Francis James Child.
After a year teaching English at Harvard, Gummere spent five years as the headmaster of the Swain Free School in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1887 he became an English professor at Haverford, a position he held until his death on May 30, 1919. One of his best known ideas was his theory of communal composition of ballads, articulated in his 1911 book Democracy and Poetry. Gummere served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1905. Gummere was also a translator; his Beowulf was published in 1910 as part of the Harvard Classics series. In 1991 John Espey wrote of Gummere's Beowulf, "it remains the most successful attempt to render in modern English something similar to the alliterative pattern of the original", in a review of an audiobook version of Gummere's Beowulf by George Guidall. A graphic novel version of Beowulf by Gareth Hinds published in the 2000s uses Gummere's translation.
● 주요작품
- The Anglo-Saxon Metaphor, 1881
- A Handbook of Poetics, 1885
- Germanic Origins: A study in primitive culture, 1892
- Old English Ballads, 1894
- The Beginnings of Poetry, 1901
- The Popular Ballad, 1907
- The Oldest English Epic, 1909
- The Democracy of Poetry, 1911