Stopford Brooke is a figure largely overlooked by scholarship concerned with the history of the discipline of Old English Studies. This is hardly surprising; such work usually concerns itself with tracing a teleological narrative of material and intellectual discoveries, problem solving, and the advancement of knowledge about Anglo-Saxon literary culture, as it is assumed to have actually existed, from a position of relative naivety and ignorance, to the present state of understanding. As with all discipline histories, literary, Anglo-Saxon or otherwise, that present state of understanding tends to be seen as both the vindication and the summative bequest of the past’s cumulative process of interrogating its own roots and histories. Consequently only those contributions which aid that forward progress towards our current basis of knowledge for the past tend to find themselves written into such narratives. Brooke did not make such contributions. He did not discover new manuscript materials, edit previously unedited texts, propose new solutions to difficult cruces, make new developments in the theory of Old English metre, identify sources or analogues, or hit upon a new law governing Germanic sound shifts. In short he made no philological advance of the kind now viewed as a rung in the ladder of progress by which we have reached our present vantage point on Anglo-Saxon literary culture, and which would have justified his place in the story of the rise of Anglo-Saxon Studies.

Yet as a literary historian, Brooke’s role not only in transmitting knowledge of Old English literary culture to Victorian Britain, but also in shaping that knowledge into narratives with wide reach and influence, was of critical importance to the place that Old English occupied in general literary culture during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Arguably Brooke played a significant role in shaping tastes for, and expectations of, Old English literature, and poetry in particular: tastes and expectations which had an important effect on the construction of a twentieth-century canon of Old English, and which still condition our views of this poetry.