John Niles (scholar)

This article is about the scholar of Old English. For other uses, see John Niles.

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. ^[1]

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) ^[2] 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. ^{[3] [4]} 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; ^{[5] [6]} 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. ^[7]

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. ^[8] 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. ^[9] Niles argues for the structural and thematic coherence of this anthology as a product of the late-tenth-century English Benedictine Reform. ^[10]

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." ^[11] 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." ^[12]

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). ISBN   0-674-06725-8.
• Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). ISBN   0-8122-3504-5,
• Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (Brepols, 2006). ISBN   2-503-51530-4.
• Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Brepols, 2007). ISBN   978-2-503-52080-3.
• Beowulf and Lejre (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007) - with Tom Christensen and Marijane Osborn. ISBN   978-0-86698-368-6.
• The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). ISBN   978-1-118-94332-8.
• Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). ISBN   978-0-631-22056-5.
• God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (University of Exeter Press, 2019). ISBN   978-1-905816-09-5.
• Webspinner: Songs, Stories and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). ISBN   978-1-4968-4158-2

Edited collections

• Old English Literature in Context: Ten Essays (Boydell and Brewer, 1980). ISBN   0-8476-6770-7.
• A Beowulf Handbook (University of Nebraska Press, 1997) - with Robert E. Bjork. ^{[13] [14]} ISBN   0-8032-1237-2.
• Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (University Press of Florida, 1997) - with Allen J. Frantzen. ISBN   0-8130-1532-4.
• Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, featuring Seamus Heaney's translation of the poem (W.W. Norton, 2007). ISBN   978-0-393-33010-6.
• Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edition (University of Toronto Press, 2008) - with R.D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork. ISBN   978-0-8020-9843-6.
• The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A.N. Doane (Brepols, 2011) - with Matthew T. Hussey. ISBN   978-2-503-53473-2.
• Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016) - with Stacy S. Klein and Jonathan Wilcox. ISBN   978-0-86698-512-3.
• 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. ISBN   978-0-674-29082-2.

References

1. Niles, John D. (1983). Beowulf : the poem and its tradition. Internet Archive. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0-674-06725-7.
2. Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2010. ISBN   9780812202953.
3. Shaw, John (2025-02-03). "Webspinner: Songs, stories, and reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller, by John D. Niles". Scottish Studies. 41: 131–134. doi: 10.2218/fmsj0978 . ISSN   2052-3629.
4. "Scottish Voices - Collection - UWDC - UW-Madison Libraries". search.library.wisc.edu. Retrieved 2025-04-07.
5. "The Idea Of Anglo–Saxon England 1066–1901 - Niles John D. | Libro Wiley-Blackwell 09/2026 - HOEPLI.it". www.hoepli.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2025-04-07.
6. Porck, Thijs (2016). "[Review of] J. D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901. Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past". doi:10.17613/vm1r-hh09.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
7. Niles, John D. (2016). Old English literature : a guide to criticism, with selected readings. Internet Archive. West Sussex ; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN   978-0-631-22056-5.
8. "RI OPAC: Authors". opac.regesta-imperii.de (in German). Retrieved 2025-04-07.
9. Matto, Michael (2020-06-20). "John D. Niles. 2019. God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, xv + 288 pp., 2 figures, £ 75.00". Anglia. 138 (2): 311–315. doi:10.1515/ang-2020-0027. ISSN   1865-8938.
10. Beechy, Tiffany (2020). "John D. Niles, God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry". Modern Philology. 118 (1): E4 –E7. doi:10.1086/709508. ISSN   0026-8232.
11. Shippey, Tom (2009). "Klaeber's <i>Beowulf</i> Eighty Years On: A Triumph for a Triumvirate". JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 108 (3): 360–376. doi:10.1353/egp.0.0068. ISSN   1945-662X.
12. Garner, Lori Ann (2025-01-01). ":Medical Writings from Early Medieval England". Speculum. 100 (1): 273–275. doi:10.1086/733404. ISSN   0038-7134.
13. Robinson, Fred C. (1999). "Rev. of Bjork & Niles (eds.), A Beowulf Handbook". Speculum . 74 (3): 696–98. doi:10.2307/2886769. JSTOR   2886769.
14. Williams, David J. (2000). "Rev. of Bjork & Niles (eds.), A Beowulf Handbook". The Yearbook of English Studies . 30 (Time and Narrative): 271–72. doi:10.2307/3509264. JSTOR   3509264.

External links

• Faculty page at University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Faculty page at University of California, Berkeley