Beowulf in Teejop

Abstract

Although the center of early medieval English studies in the United States was on the east coast (where Thomas Jefferson successfully advocated for the teaching of Old English as part of the essential mission of the University of Virginia), the first American translation of the poem was completed at the University of Wisconsin, on the lakeshores of Teejop. Indeed, the poem’s first translation project was steeped in white settler colonialism, which shouldn’t be a complete surprise, if we recognize the poem’s appreciation in North America was always part of a complex network of investments in white Anglo-Saxonism and stolen land.