Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin
Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín was an Icelandic 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 Danish-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; on the other hand, Thorkelin's knowledge of Old English led him to introduce various emendations where he thought the text was incorrect. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the prestigious and honorary American [Academy of Arts and Sciences] in 1790.
Under a commission from the Danish government, Thorkelin had prepared Beowulf for publication by 1807. During the Battle of Copenhagen his house was burned and demolished due to fire, and the text was lost. The manuscripts survived, however, and Thorkelin began again. The poem was eventually published in 1815. Thorkelin was the first scholar to make a full translation of the poem, into Latin.
The Thorkelin 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.
Thorkelin 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 Thorkelin as "essentially a fraud as a scholar" and lists a number of errors in Thorkelin's edition and translation, many of which were pointed out by contemporary scholars.