Kemp Malone

Kemp Malone (March 14, 1889 in Minter City, Mississippi – October 13, 1971) was an American medievalist, etymologist, philologist, and specialist in Chaucer who was lecturer and then professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University from 1924 to 1956.[1]

Kemp Malone, 1889-1971

Born in an academic family, Kemp Malone graduated from Emory College as it then was in 1907, with the ambition of mastering all the languages that impinged upon the development of Middle English. He spent several years in Germany, Denmark and Iceland. When World War I broke out, he served two years in the United States Army and was discharged with the rank of captain.

Malone was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1945.[2] He served as president of the Modern Language Association, and other philological associations[3] and was etymology editor of the American College Dictionary, 1947. With Louise Pound and Arthur G. Kennedy, he founded the journal American Speech, "to present information about English in America in a form appealing to general readers".[4] He resisted the views of Old English poetry as products of a purely oral tradition. He contended that we must look to poets' individual elaboration of traditional structures: "A given poet was reckoned worthy if he handled with skill the stuff of which, by convention, poems must be made".[5]

His interests ranged from 10th-century manuscripts to the etymology of contemporary comic strip names. American speech, the English language, the historical Arthur (his suggestion was the Roman dux Lucius Artorius Castus),[6] Cædmon and Beowulf (he edited a facsimile of the Thorkelin transcripts, 1951), Deor - all were subjects among his hundreds of publications. He edited and translated a large corpus of medieval poetry: Widsith from the Exeter Book (1936). A sample of his production is a 1941 published book about old English poems, that were transferred into modern English alliterative verse.[7]

Rare books from his library, donated 1971 to Emory University, are part of the Ancient and Medieval History (MARBL) collection, held at Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University Libraries. The Kemp Malone library content were fully registered under Call number Z997.M35.[8]

His literary heritage (30 document boxes) were deposited in 1983 at Johns Hopkins University.[9]

The historian and biographer Dumas Malone was his younger brother.

References
  1. Bibliothèque nationale de France {BnF Data}. "Kemp Malone (1889-1971)".
  2. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2023-03-29.
  3. Pyles, Thomas (1972). "Kemp Malone". Language. Linguistic Society of America. 48 (2): 499–505. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 412151.
  4. Algeo, John (2009). The Origins and Development of the English Language (6 ed.). Cengage. p. 196. ISBN 9781428231450.
  5. Malone, Kemp (1948), "A given poet was reckoned worthy if he handled with skill the stuff of which, by convention, poems must be made", in Baugh, Albert C. (ed.), Chapter III. The old tradition: poetic form, A Literary History of England, vol. 1 (2 ed.), London: Routhledge & Kegan Paul, 1989, p. 31, ISBN 0-415-04557-6
  6. Christopher Snyder: Arthurian Origins. In: Norris J. Lacy (ed.): A History of Arthurian Scholarship. Boydell & Brewer, 2006, ISBN 9781843840695, pp. 1-19, in particular p. 3
  7. Malone, Kemp (1941), Ten Old English Poems put into Modern English alliterative verse, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, p. 49
  8. Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University Libraries, Call number Z997.M35, Kemp Malone Memorial Library, archived from the original on 2015-07-21, retrieved 2015-07-15
  9. Kemp Malone Papers Ms. 129. Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library. Johns Hopkins University (1987), Malone (Kemp) 1889-1971. Papers (1913-1975). Ms. 129, retrieved 2015-07-15

Further reading
  • Norman E. Eliason: Kemp Malone: 14 March 1889–13 October 1971. American Speech, volume 44, no. 3 (fall, 1969), pp. 163–165 (JSTOR)
  • Richard Macksey: Obituary: Kemp Malone: 1889–1971. MLN, volume 6, no. 6, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1971), p. 760 (JSTOR)
  • Thomas Pyles: Kemp Malone. Language, volume 48, no. 2 (June, 1972), pp. 499–505 (JSTOR)
  • R. W. Zandvoort: In Memoriam Kemp Malone. English Studies 53 (1972), pp. 87–88
  • Albert C. Baugh, Morton W. Bloomfield, Francis P. Magoun: Kemp Malone. Speculum 47 (1972), pp. 601–03.
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