Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber

504 Pages·1929·20.88 MB·English, German

by  Kemp Malone, Martin B. Ruud (eds.)

STUDIES IN ENGLISH PHILOLOGY
FREDERICK KLAEBER
STUDIES IN
ENGLISH PHILOLOGY
A MISCELLANY IN HONOR OF
FREDERICK KLAEBER
EDITED BY
KEMP MALONE
Johns Hopkins University
AND
MARTIN B. RUUD
University of Minnesota
MINNEAPOLIS
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MCMXXIX
COPYRIGHT 1929 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
FREDERICK KLAEBER
ON HIS
SIXTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY
WHICH MARKS ALSO THE COMPLETION OF
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF SERVICE
IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
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FOREWORD
Thirty-five years ago Professor Frederick Klaeber, at the
invitation of Dr. George Edwin MacLean, then head of the De-
partment of English, took up his work at the University of
Minnesota. The institution to which he came, fresh from his
doctorate at Berlin, was small and all but unknown, certainly
unknown beyond the limits of the Northwest. Professor Klaeber
himself had never heard of it, and when he turned to his Kon-
versationslexikon he came away little wiser. There was some-
thing there about Minnesota, less about Minneapolis, of the
University nothing beyond the briefest mention.
Since then the University of Minnesota has flourished in all
material ways; and as he gazes upon the old campus, now so
utterly changed, Professor Klaeber must frequently rub his
eyes. Perhaps he has not always approved, though he is too
wise and too catholic to condemn unthinkingly, and those who
know him are aware how sensitive he is, for all his seeming de-
tachment, to the multifarious American world about him and
its needs. At all events, he has never allowed the bewildering
complexity of a state university to trouble him, still less to dis-
tract him from that work to which a generation ago he set his
hand. He might doubt, indeed, the value of this or that new
discipline that forced its way into the curriculum and even
threatened to crowd out the ancient liberal arts; but he could
never dogmatize about it. The only thing he could be sure of
was that he found in his own studies that intense satisfaction
which is the last reward of the scholar.
To generation after generation of Minnesota men and
women Professor Klaeber has exemplified the genius of scholar-
ship—devotion, patience, accuracy, and, more than all else, that
light of the imagination by which all the disparate materials
that it assembles are given life and meaning. No doubt many
[vii]
FOREWORD
have passed by not understanding, though not many, we think,
without respect, but those who have come under his influence
have learned what scholarship means. If the University of
Minnesota has contributed something to philological learning,
it is not least because he showed her students the way. And
even more is it true that if the University counts for something
in the world of her peers, it is in no small measure because
Frederick Klaeber lived and worked in her halls.
The University gratefully acknowledges her debt, and she
has wished through the publication of this volume to do him
honor on his anniversary. That the feelings of the University
of Minnesota toward her distinguished teacher are shared by
scholars everywhere, the number and variety of the articles here
printed are evidence. They may serve to remind us of the words
of the HdvamQl—words, we think, no less appropriate to Profes-
sor Klaeber than to that other great scholar, Ivar Aasen, on
whose bauta they have been carved:
Deyr fe,
deyja frsendr,
deyr sjalfr et sama.
En orjjsdrr deyr aldrege
hveims ser goj?an getr.
KEMP MALONE
MARTIN B. RUUD
MINNEAPOLIS
July 1929
[ viii ]