John D. Niles, Professor Emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of California-Berkeley, has published eight monographs and numerous articles on Old English literature, as well as medieval literature and oral narrative more generally. Most Old English students and scholars probably first encounter Niles while reading the fourth edition of Klaeber's Beowulf, which he co-edited alongside R. D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork. Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings takes a step back from Old English literature to examine the examiners. The book also includes ten selections, excerpted or in full, from other scholars that illustrate the debates or themes from the chapters in which they appear. The result is a rigorous survey of Old English scholarship that could also serve as an introduction to the literature itself, complete with a small but high-quality anthology of criticism.
Niles splits the book into three major parts. The first, "Main Currents in Twentieth-Century Criticism," discusses Old English studies from the late nineteenth-century to 1975 and makes for an engrossing intellectual history. Niles identifies now-discredited ideas current in the earlier twentieth century, especially regarding allegedly repressed pagan themes in poems rife with Christian elements. These ideas are notorious today, but even veteran scholars of Old English may be surprised to see how far their predecessors took these errors: one scholar, writing in 1898, saw Beowulf as an allegory of the summer overcoming the winter. With these errors refuted, Niles shifts from chronological outline in the next two parts of the book and instead divides the parts into subtopics. From this point on, each chapter ends with one of the selections from other studies.
Part II, "Anglo-Saxon Lore and Learning," describes the scholarly quest to discover how the people of early medieval England saw themselves. Niles recounts controversies over the degree to which Old English speakers embraced Latin, the relative roles of orality and textuality in Old English culture, and the meaning of the heroic ethos. Part III, "Other Topics and Approaches," combines modern critical concerns, such as style, theme, genre, gender, and translation, with two more specific areas of scrutiny, namely saints' lives and Ælfric of Eynsham (a monk who wrote in Old English and Latin and lived roughly between 950 and 1010). One fact, in the Part II chapter "Literacy and Latinity," stood out for me: without a large-scale education or book distribution system, Old English speakers had to rely on Latin teachers to learn the formal grammar of their own language. Though this point is self-evident in retrospect, I have spent most of my time in Old English reading heroic and elegiac poetry, and without a good general survey such as Niles's book, even this obvious point would have escaped me. I am sure that other Old English scholars will come across similar valuable insights.
The book is a survey, not an argument, and Niles strives to make his readers understand how the critics themselves thought, without overloading his pages with opinion. Of course, the book calls itself a "guide," so some directing of the reader should be expected and, given Niles's good judgement, welcome. For example, he defends Francis P. Magoun's famous oral-formulaic theory against the charge that it is totalizing, drawing attention (on page 119) to a passage where Magoun acknowledges Cynewulf's skill with the written word. Niles also rightly condemns the ethnic nationalism of some nineteenth-century Old English scholars. Then there's the matter that Niles himself has advanced many influential arguments over the years. He does not ignore these in his thematic surveys, but he is careful to contextualize his voice as one among many.
The book functions well as a complete work, but the tight focus of each chapter lends these to being included as individual readings in course packs. Each chapter begins with a bibliographic reference for the book itself at the bottom of the page, so students can easily find the complete tome, if they want. In fact, instructors looking for course pack material will find plenty of inspiration with Niles's book, since it possesses a rich bibliography of venerable studies of Old English, and its own excerpts from those studies are often interventions in critical debates that would provide students with both an authoritative opinion and a good overview of the debate. An example of this is Donald K. Fry's article "The Memory of Cædmon," which concludes Niles's chapter on orality in Part II. Some of the selections from the criticism, though, will prove interesting even to well-read Old English scholars, since Niles has made efforts to include two studies that were not previously published in English. Ernst Leisi's article "Gold and Human Worth in Beowulf," newly translated from German by Niles and Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith for the Part II chapter "Heroic Tradition," demonstrates clearer insight on its (much-discussed) topic than any other study I have read. Another essay, written by Joshua Byron Smith and based on a version originally submitted to Niles in a graduate course, provides a fascinating exploration of Jorge Luis Borges's deep interest in Old English, and does a good job of concluding the final chapter of the book, "Translating, Editing, and Making It New." On the whole, Niles is judicious when editing the selections and excerpts: he maintains the original quotations and footnotes from his sources, but adds his own notes when subsequent studies have clarified an issue.
The only significant shortcoming to the book is that it spends comparatively less attention on readings that apply critical theories to Old English. It is not that Niles is dismissive of critical theory; he treats it with the same even-handedness as he does other approaches. It is simply that there is considerably less of it in the book. Old English studies may have been slower than other fields to adopt postmodernist, feminist, ecocritical, or Marxist interpretations, but that has changed in the recent past. Niles acknowledges this trajectory, but the book still leaves an impression that critical theory is more marginal in Old English studies than it currently is. There are two exceptions: a small section on "Indeterminacy and its Discontents" in the "Heroic Tradition" chapter examines postmodernism, and the chapter "Genre and Gender" looks at feminism. To be sure, Niles makes a good case for examining gender and genre alongside one another, noting, for example, an emphasis on women's voices in Old English elegy. But squeezing both topics into what is already one of the shorter chapters (at twenty-three pages, including the selection from the criticism) does leave a feeling of abridgement. Moreover, Old English scholars who are used to working with critical theory may notice that some of their favourite studies are missing from Niles's bibliography. I would have nominated The Postmodern Beowulf, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey, as worthy of inclusion, but it's not there. Of course, any time anyone makes a list of books, for any reason, others will quibble with it. My point is only that Niles does not mention many studies engaged with critical theory. That said, the criticism selection for "Genre and Gender" is one of the best in the book: a highly readable study by Lisa M. C. Weston on the how women's knowledge contributed to the metrical childbirth charms.
Another small complaint is the scholarship excerpt for "Textuality and Cultural Transformation," taken from an article by M. B. Parkes on the Parker manuscript of theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, is relatively technical, and its first half will appeal only to people well-versed in paleography. Niles advises readers to refer to a facsimile of the manuscript alongside their reading, and he does intervene with more explanation here than he does in other excerpts. Parkes's article is still valuable, and Niles no doubt includes it to emphasize that direct study of manuscripts is crucial to research in Old English. Still, this small part of the book stands out for being less accessible than the rest.
There are several other books (mentioned in Niles's bibliography) that accomplish the same goals as Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings. A New Critical History of Old English Literature (1986), by Stanley G. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, comes to mind, and of course there are numerous anthologies of criticism that can act as surveys. Nonetheless, Niles's book is helpful and readable enough to earn a place in the collection of every scholar of Old English.