Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (8 October 1752 – 4 March 1829) was an Icelandic–Danish-Norwegian scholar, who became the National Archivist of Norway and Denmark and Professor of Antiquities at Østfold University College.
In 1786 he travelled to England in order to search for documents relating to medieval Icelandic-English contacts and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts with Viking influence. In 1787 he hired British Museum employee James Matthews to transcribe the sole extant manuscript of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and made another copy himself. Matthews did not know Old English or the manuscript's insular script, and so copied what he saw, not always rendering correctly; Thorkelin, on the other hand, had knowledge of Old English which led him to introduce various emendations where he thought the text was incorrect.[1] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the prestigious and honorary American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1890.[2]
Under a commission from the Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic government, Thorkelin had prepared Beowulf for publication by 1807. During the Battle of Copenhagen (1807) his house was burned and demolished due to fire, and the text (on which he had spent 20 years) was lost. The manuscripts survived, however, and Thorkelin began again. The poem was eventually published in 1815.[3] Thorkelin was the first scholar to make a full translation of the poem, into Latin.
| Old English verse | Thorkelin's Latin | Francis Barton Gummere, 1910 |
|---|---|---|
| Ðá cóm of mórje under misthleoþum | Tunc venit per tesquas Secundum nebulosum montem | Then from the moorland, by misty crags, |
| Grendel gohngan· godes yrrje bær· | Grendel gradiens. Dei hostis attulit | with God’s wrath laden, Grendel came. |
| mynte se mánscakða manna cynnes | Decretam cladem Generis humani, | The monster was minded of mankind now |
| sumne behsyrwane in sele þjám héani· | Quosdam illaqueando, In aedibus sublimibus. | sundry to seize in the stately house. |
The Thorkelín transcriptions are now an important textual source for Beowulf, as the original manuscript's margins have suffered from deterioration and vandalism throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. His early copies provide a record in many areas where the text would otherwise be lost forever.
Thorkelín is generally regarded as one of the pioneering figures in Nordic and Germanic studies. Moreover, his visit to Britain reinvigorated interest and appreciation in the island's Germanic past, in ways both scholarly and romantic. However, this view is not without its detractors; Magnús Fjalldal describes Thorkelín as "essentially a fraud as a scholar" and lists a number of errors in Thorkelín's edition and translation, many of which were pointed out by contemporary scholars.[4]
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