John M. Kemble, The Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf: The Travellers Song and the Battle of Finnesburh, 2nd ed. (London: William Pickering, 1835).
John M. Kemble, A Translation of hte Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf with a copious Glossary, Preface and Philological Notes (London: William Pickering, 1837).
First published in 1833, Kemble's is the second oldest edition of Beowulf after Thorkelin's published in 1815 (Kemble severely criticises Thorkelin's edition in the prefece. For details, see this page). It is dedicated to Jacob Grimm, with whom he had a scholarly correspondence between 1832 and 1852. It also includes the texts of Widsith, which he calls 'The Traveller's Song', and the Fight at Finnsburg. In modern editions, an Old English poem is printed line by line, and Beowulf usually consists of 3182 lines, while in earlier editions, it was often printed half-line by half-line as in this edition, which has 6359 half-lines.
The first edition was limited to 100 copies, but 'it was a happy limitation, as it left room for a new edition' (Earle, p. xx); the text of the first edition 'was an improvement on Thorkelin, but still very faulty' (Earle, p. xx). It was the first book in Kemble’s scholarly career, and attracted severe criticisms, one even writing that 'When much light had been thrown on the poem, Mr Kemble came and put all into darkness by publishing the mere text, loaded with German accents, without even common punctuation to guide the sense, or a word of translation or illustration' (quoted from Shippey and Haarder, p. 197).
In the preface to the first edition, whcih is kept, with minor modifications, as the preface to the first volume of the second edition, Kemble, basing himself chiefly on Old Norse literature, specifies the time and place in which main characters in the poem lived. He regards the poem as based essentially on history, and regards not only Hrothgar and Hygelac but also Beowulf the hero as historical figures, and concludes that he is 'of opinion that [Beowulf] was an Angle of Jutland or Sleswic, for he was the friend and brother-in-law of Hygelac, whose father Hreðel succeeded Offa on the Angle throne' (quoted from Shippey and Haarder, p. 192, with my square brackets; in the preface to the first volume of the second edition, 'brother-in-law' is changed to 'nephew' but the rest remains the same).
Yet by the time he published the second volume of the second edition, he realised that he had 'proceeded upon a basis essentially false' since the works he consulted 'treat mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history' (pp. i-ii). Thus in the preface to the second volume, he no longer regards the poem as based essentially on history but he writes that Scyld, Sceaf and Beowulf the Scylding (or Beow) are to be seen as mythic figures, and Beowulf the Wægmunding hero was created from his namesake in the lineage of the Scyldings, who he claims is in turn created from an unattested godlike figure of the same name (p. ix).
Kemble, a Cambridge man, criticised Oxford Anglo-Saxonists in a review of Benjamin Thorpe’s Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (1834) published in the April issue of Gentleman’s Magazine in 1834. Someone called I. J. angrily replied from Oxford and another person called T. W. severely criticised Kemble’s edition of Beowulf (briefly quoted above), to whom Kemble responded equally severely in a later issue of the same magazine, regarding the latter person as belonging to 'the modern Oxford school'. In the next year, an anonymous pamphlet entitled 'The Anglo-Saxon Meteor' was published, criticising Kemble in much the same way as the correspondence in Gentleman’s Magazine. Kemble found obvious lies in it and regarded it as a 'scandalous fabrication' (p. liv) 'cunningly circulated from Oxford, dated from Oxford, but printed in Holland' (p. liii). He came to think the author to be a Cambridge clergyman (Joseph Bosworth?, who lived in the Netherlands in those days (see this page); see also Shippey and Haarder, p. 223), and near the end of the preface to the second volume of his edition, he apologises to his 'fellow-labourers in Oxford', writing that 'they have the fullest apology from me for my error' (p. liv).
My copy belonged to the late Professor Eric G. Stanley (1923-2018), former Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, and is with his bookplate and occasional inscriptions.
For more details about Kemble’s edition, see J. Earle, The Deeds of Beowulf: An English Epic of the Eighth Century Done into Modern Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), pp. xix-xxv; and Chauncey B. Tinker, The Translations of Beowulf: A Critical Bibliography (New York: H. Holt, 1903), pp. 33-37. For further information about the correspondence between Kemble and his anonymous criticisers, see T. A. Shippey and A. Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 195-200.