John Niles (scholar)

John D. Niles (born 1945) is an American scholar of medieval English literature best known for his work on ''Beowulf'' and the theory of oral literature.

Career

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his higher degrees (B.A. in English, 1967; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1972), Niles taught for an initial four years as Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. He then was invited to join the faculty of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for twenty-six years until taking early retirement. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for ten years in the Department of English, was named the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities, and was a Senior Fellow at the UW Institute for the Humanities. After his retirement from UW-Madison in 2011 he has remained active in research as Professor Emeritus at both UC Berkeley and UW-Madison.

Niles is the author of nine books on Old English literature and related topics. He has edited or co-edited another eight books, in addition to upwards of sixty scholarly articles and other publications. His first book, ''Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition'' (1983), ascribes the poem's strengths to its grounding in Germanic heroic legend and the oral traditions of alliterative verse cultivated in early medieval England.

During the 1980s he conducted fieldwork into singing and storytelling traditions in Scotland, particularly among Scottish Traveller groups, including the noted storyteller Duncan Williamson. This research led first to his book ''Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature'' (1997) which argues for storytelling as a defining characteristic of the human species, and later to his book ''Webspinner: Songs, Stories and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller'' (2022), a portrait of a single gifted tradition-bearer. In 2005 he taught a seminar at the Newberry Library, Chicago, on the early history of Old English studies. This became the kernel of his 2015 book ''The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901'',a sustained account of the evolution of the study of Old English literature, the Old English language, and the Anglo-Saxons from its beginnings to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901; and to his book ''Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism'' (2016), which carries the literary side of the investigation into the twenty-first century.

His researches into the archaeology and prehistory of early Northwest Europe led to the jointly-authored publication ''Beowulf and Lejre'' (2007), which centers on the prehistoric Danish site at the present-day hamlet of Lejre, Zealand, where much of the imagined action of the Old English poem ''Beowulf'' is set. Niles argues that the origins of the ''Beowulf'' story can be traced to the topography and legends associated with this monumental landscape.

His 2019 book ''God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry'' is the first integrative book-length critical study of the earliest anthology of English-language poetry, the Exeter Book, a late-tenth-century collection that includes such Old English poems as ''The Wanderer'' and ''The Seafarer''. Niles argues for the structural and thematic coherence of this anthology as a product of the late-tenth-century English Benedictine Reform.

''Klaeber's Beowulf'', 4th edition (2008), which Niles co-edited with Robert D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork, has been called "a triumph for a triumverate." ''Medical Writings from Early Medieval England, Volume I'' (2023), co-edited with Maria A. D'Aronco, has been characterized as "nothing short of a monumental feat."

In 2022, Niles was the honorand of a collection of articles, first published as a special issue of the journal ''Humanities'', and subsequently as the book ''Old English Poetry and Its Legacy''.

Selected publications

Monographs

* ''Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition'' (Harvard University Press, 1983). .
* ''Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature'' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). ,
* ''Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts'' (Brepols, 2006). .
* ''Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts'' (Brepols, 2007). .
* ''Beowulf and Lejre'' (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007) - with Tom Christensen and Marijane Osborn. .
* ''The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past'' (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). .
* ''Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings'' (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). .
* ''God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry'' (University of Exeter Press, 2019). .
* ''Webspinner: Songs, Stories and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller'' (University Press of Mississippi, 2022).

Edited collections

* ''Old English Literature in Context: Ten Essays'' (Boydell and Brewer, 1980). .
* ''A Beowulf Handbook'' (University of Nebraska Press, 1997) - with Robert E. Bjork. .
* ''Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity'' (University Press of Florida, 1997) - with Allen J. Frantzen. .
* ''Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition'', featuring Seamus Heaney's translation of the poem (W.W. Norton, 2007). .
* ''Klaeber’s Beowulf'', 4th edition (University of Toronto Press, 2008) - with R.D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork. .
* ''The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A.N. Doane'' (Brepols, 2011) - with Matthew T. Hussey. .
* ''Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination'' (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016) - with Stacy S. Klein and Jonathan Wilcox. .
* ''Medical Writings from Early Medieval England, Volume I: The Old English Herbal, Lacnunga, and Other Texts'', Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 81 (Harvard University Press, 2023) - with Maria A. D'Aronco. .

References

External links

Faculty page
at University of Wisconsin–Madison

Faculty page
at University of California, Berkeley

Living people
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
Anglo-Saxon studies scholars
1945 births
Brandeis University faculty
University of California, Berkeley faculty
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