Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition

Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, edited by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles and published by the University of Toronto Press in 2008, is the standard scholarly critical edition of the Old English poem, descending from Friedrich Klaeber's original early twentieth century edition and thoroughly revised with updated textual notes, glossary and a survey of a century of Beowulf scholarship. Its strength is that standing: it is the edition specialists cite by default and the one against which translations are checked. Its limit is textual rather than religious, since Beowulf's references to pagan custom sit inside a poem transmitted and probably shaped by Christian scribes, so a claim about pre-Christian Germanic belief drawn from the poem needs to be read through that layered transmission rather than taken as a direct window onto pagan practice.