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Marijane Osborn Professor of English

Ph.D. Stanford University, 1969
M.A. Stanford University, 1965
B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 1962

Selected Awards and Fellowships

• American Screenwriters' Guild Award, 1970
• Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Edinburgh, 1975
• Three Fulbright Fellowships to Iceland, 1978-79 and 1983-84
• Phi Beta Kappa NCA Teaching Excellence Award, 2004

Marijane Osborn specializes in Old English studies, with an emphases on Beowulf and attention also to Old Norse texts. In addition to several books and many articles related to runes and poetry of this earlier period, and a few articles on late medieval texts plus a book each on metrical romance and Chaucer (see below), she has published on various more modern writers form St. John of the Cross to C.S. Lewis and D.H. Lawrence. Her particular interest in the relationship of landscape to literature may be enjoyed in the books Landscape of Desire and Beowulf: A Likeness, and her interest in the effect of reference to "actual things" in literature may be seen in her book Beowulf: A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North.

Professor Osborn has taught or held fellowships for formal research at the Universities of Oxford, Syracuse, Columbia, Lancaster (England), Edinburgh, Belfast (Queen's), Alaska, Hawaii, Iceland, and UC Davis.

Publication Spotlight

Time and the Astrolabe in The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe" was the first treatise on a scientific instrument in English. The beautiful medieval instrument called and astrolabe ("star-catcher") was used to determine latitude and time by the sun and stars. In Time and the Astrolabe Osborn argues that, despite decades of scholarly arguments to the contrary, Chaucer cared about geographical location and astronomy and did not make mistakes about either of these matters. In fact, many problems in The Canterbury Tales can be solved by considering them "astrolabically."

Publications (selected)

• Rune Games (with Stella Longland). London: Penguin, 1982.
• Beowulf: A Verse Translation with Treasures from the Ancient North. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
• Beowulf: A Guide to Study. Los Angeles: Pentangle Press, 1986.
• Beowulf: A Likeness (with Randolph Swearer and Raymond Oliver). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
• Futhorc (art book with art by Brynja Baldursdóttir and text by Marijane Osborn). Reykjavik: Oddi, 1992.
• Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World (with Gillian Overing). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
• Romancing the Goddess: Three Middle English Romances About Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
• Time and the Astrolabe in the Canterbury Tales. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Translations, Versions, and Adaptations of Beowulf and "Finnsburg" PDF or Doc. (If you have trouble opening the PDF file then click here. Select your operating system in step one)

Email: mjosborn@ucdavis.edu