In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature across the European continent. Exploring this transnational reception of Old English offers a new perspective on the 19th-century foundations of Old English Studies. The EMERGENCE project is funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of €1.5 million to Thijs Porck for 5 years from 2024 (Grant . No. 101115867).

The 19th century as a foundational period for Old English Studies

When approaching Old English in the 21st century, it is impossible to deny the impact of 19th-century scholarship. When we refer to titles of such Old English poems as The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament, we are using titles bestowed on these texts by 19th-century scholars. Several standard editions of Old English texts were made in the 19th century or heavily rely on earlier, 19th-century editions. Lexicographical tools with a relevance for Old English, including Bosworth-Toller’s An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, A Thesaurus of Old English and the Oxford English Dictionary, also have their roots firmly in 19th-century philological practices. The way Old English is taught at university level still relies on paradigms and set texts that were introduced in the 19th century and interactions with Old English in popular culture often build on ideas about early medieval English identity, heroism, paganism and Christianity, first propagated by 19th-century scholars and artists. Such 19th-century engagements with Old English have often been connected to a desire to historically underpin a patriotic sense of Englishness or the perceived racial superiority of white Americans. Problematically, an important transnational dimension has been overlooked: the reception of Old English in continental Europe.

In the 19th century, German scholars dominated the study of the language and literature from early medieval England; the first editors and scholars of the Old English epic Beowulf were Danes; Old English texts were claimed as part of the Dutch literary canon in the Low Countries; some of the first ‘popular’ adaptations of Old English material appeared in French, Dutch, Danish and German; and non-Anglophone scholars discovered important Old English documents in archives all across the European continent. This multi-faceted European, transnational reception of Old English is the focus of the EMERGENCE project, which seeks to identify and analyze engagements with early medieval English across 19th-century Europe. The project, situated on the intersection of history of humanities and medievalism studies, is powered by a bibliographical and relational database and a multi-disciplinary, multilingual approach. It will reveal new, insightful materials, uncover intellectual networks and put forgotten protagonists in the limelight.

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Project 1: BaRD: Bibliographical and Relational Database of Old English in 19th-Century Europe

The EMERGENCE project will use a multifunctional database in order to trace how scholars and artists on the European Continent interacted with Old English language and literature. The database will enable researchers to track various key elements of the 19th-century reception of early medieval English, including which individuals were engaging with Old English, how they were connected to each other through networks and when and where they worked. This database will allow for the identification of hubs of activity and pinpoint when and where certain texts, methods or artistic appropriations were of particular interest among European authors, as well as showcase developments over time and place. The database will further allow researchers to identify relevant case studies for their individual projects and situate these within a broader context. This database will be powered by the Nodegoat platform.

Project 2: Charting Continental Contributions: Studying Old English in Continental Europe

Project 2 explores how Old English studies in 19th-century continental Europe participated in paradigm-shifting developments within the study of ancient texts. It was during this period that the study of Old English evolved from scholarly dilettantes interested in Old English for its relationship to local language, heritage and history to an autonomous academic, transnational discipline, with a notably important role for German scholars like the brothers Grimm and Julius Zupitza. Drawing on the BaRD-database, this project will identify all European scholars of Old English and explore their contributions to the study of Old English lexicography, linguistics, literature, metrics, dialectology and pedagogy, as well as the stories behind important discoveries of Old English documents in continental archives and institutions, including the Vercelli Book in Italy, the Leiden Riddle in the Netherlands and the Brussels Cross in Belgium.

Old English discovered in 19th-century Europe: Vercelli Book, Brussels Cross and Leiden Riddle

Project 3: Navigating Networks through Scholarly Correspondence: Epistolary Exchange of Knowledge on Early Medieval English

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes look at how scholars exchanged views, asked each other for opinions and even solved conflicts. Project 3 will first identify extant correspondence between scholars, institutions and artists that engaged with Old English in 19th-century Europe. Relevant metadata about these letters are next entered into the project’s database, which will then allow for the visualization and analysis of scholarly networks that contributed to the study of Old English, using Social Network Theory.

Project 4: Claiming Beowulf as a European Epic: Non-Anglophone Appropriations of an Old English Poem

Project 4 explores the influence of Romantic Nationalism on both scholarly and non-scholarly engagements with a single, but important text, Beowulf. The Old English epic Beowulf has invited critical and creative responses ever since it was first brought to attention in 1805. In the 19th century, the poem was claimed by various European nations: first the Danes , followed by the English, the Germans and the Dutch. While European scholarly interactions with Beowulf, esp. by Danish and German scholars, have received some attention, the more creative engagements with the epic by non-Anglophone poets, novelists and translators have gone largely unnoticed (even though some predate the earliest English-language adaptations). Project 4 will catalogue both scholarly and non-scholarly engagements with Beowulf and incorporate relevant metadata in the project’s database. Next, a representative selections of four categories of creative Beowulfiana (poems; historical novels and plays/operas; children’s literature; and translations) will be analysed through the lenses of Adaptation Theory and Translation Theory. Project 4 will also explore the interactions between artistic production, nationalism and scholarly investigation.

The Beowulf manuscript. its first edition by an Icelander/Dane, and one of the earliest children’s versions in German

Project 5: Cædmon, Cynewulf and the Continent: The Search for Anglo-Saxon Christianity in 19th-century Europe

Since the 16th century, religious concerns have motivated the study of Old English and its speakers. In the 19th century, scholars turned to the study of Old English literature in particular to find traces of pre-Christian, ‘Germanic’ religion, as discussed in Eric G. Stanley’s seminal work The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (1975). However, the 19th century also saw an increasing interest in intrinsically Christian literature, notably the poems attributed to Cædmon and Cynewulf. These engagements with Old English religious texts happened during “a revolutionary age” for Christianity in 19th-century Europe and the role of religion, therefore, deserves further scrutiny. What motivated European scholars to engage with Old English religious texts? How did religious concerns, alongside politics, literary interests and other motivational factors, shape their engagements with these Old English texts and vice versa? The PhD student in this project will answer these questions by exploring the lives, works and correspondence of a select number of scholars, including N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872; Danish preacher, poet and politician), Joseph Bosworth (1788-1876; English lexicographer and chaplain in Amsterdam and Rotterdam), Karl Wilhelm Bouterwek (1809-1869; German church historian and editor of Old English religious texts) and Christian Wilhelm Michael Grein (1825-1877; German editor of Old English prose and poetry).

Anglo-Saxon missionaries Willibrord and Willehad preaching to the Frisians and Drents (Georg Sturm, c. 1880)