Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber’s Note: This e-text includes characters that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode) text readers: œ (“oe” ligature) ā ē ī ō ū ȳ ǣ (vowels with macron or “long” mark) ǽ (æ with accent) ȝ (yogh) þ̷ þ̸ (thorn with line, typically abbreviating “that”) Most of these letters are rare and occur only in the quotations from Old English. If any of them do not display properly--in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter--or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. Book sizes such as 8^o (printed with superscript “o”) have been changed to 4to, 8vo, 12mo. In a few selections, italics were used to indicate missing words or letters. These have been shown with {braces}. Elsewhere, italics are shown conventionally with _lines_. Asterisks before book titles are in the original. Internal cross-references are almost always expressed as “see supra” or “see infra” with page number. In an e-text this may be interpreted as “scroll up” and “scroll down”, respectively. When a footnote does not include a translator’s name, it has been added in [[double brackets]]. The Tinker translation (final chapter in the main text) is the author’s own.] YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH ALBERT S. COOK, Editor XVI THE TRANSLATIONS OF BEOWULF A CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY by CHAUNCEY B. TINKER A Portion of a Thesis Presented to the Philosophical Faculty of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Originally Published 1903 PREFACE The following pages are designed to give a historical and critical account of all that has been done in the way of translating _Beowulf_ from the earliest attempts of Sharon Turner in 1805 down to the present time. As a corollary to this, it presents a history of the text of the poem to the time of the publication of Grein’s _Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie_ in 1859; for until the publication of this work every editor of the poem was also its translator. It is hoped that the essay may prove useful as a contribution to bibliography, and serve as a convenient reference book for those in search of information regarding the value of texts and translations of _Beowulf_.