Dorothy Whitelock

First page of the fire-damaged Beowulf manuscript in the British Library. 'Nowell Codex', Cotton Vitellius A.x.v. 129 r.

Dorothy Whitelock, (11 November 1901 – 14 August 1982) was an English historian. From 1957 to 1969, she was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge. Her best-known work is English Historical Documents, vol. I: c. 500-1042, which she edited. It is a compilation of translated sources, with introductions.

Her other works include The Beginnings of English Society (1952), After Bede (1960), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – A Revised Translation (1961), The Audience of Beowulf (1951), and Genuine Asser (1967), in which she argued against V. H. Galbraith's assertion that Asser's Life of King Alfred was a forgery by Leofric.

Early life

Whitelock was born in Leeds to Edward Whitelock and his second wife Emmeline Dawson. Edward died in 1903 but despite financial struggles, Dorothy Whitelock was able to attend the Leeds Girls' High School. She gained a First in Part I and a Second in Part II.

Academic career Whitelock went on to postgraduate work, as Marion Kennedy Student at Newnham (1924–26), Cambridge University Scandinavian Student at Uppsala (1927–29), and the first woman to receive the Allen Scholarship at Cambridge (1929–30). These labours led to her first book, her 1930 translation and commentary on thirty-nine Anglo-Saxon wills. In the same year, she became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (she was later elected to its council from 1945 to 1948). In 1945, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries.

Notwithstanding these successes, Whitelock found herself frustrated by a male-dominated academy which often favoured male scholars at the expense of talented female academics. In 1945, following her failure to secure a professorship at the University of Liverpool, Whitelock applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth professorship of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, a chair that had been vacated by J. R. R. Tolkien. She was unsuccessful; Tolkien himself had voted against her. In the face of such opposition she was tempted to abandon the academy altogether but her close friends, the leading Anglo-Saxon historians Sir Frank Stenton and his wife Doris, addressed a series of supportive letters to her, encouraging her to persevere. A key part of her work was lobbying for Oxford's women's colleges to have the same status as men's, finally achieved only in 1959. In 1957, Whitelock returned to Cambridge, where she had begun her career, succeeding Bruce Dickins as Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (in which capacity she supervised Simon Keynes, who himself was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor between 1999 and 2018). Under her direction, the 'Department of Anglo-Saxon and Kindred Studies' relocated in 1967 from the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology to the Faculty of English and became the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. A photograph of her hangs on the wall there.

Whitelock was appointed CBE in the 1964 Birthday Honours. but continued to publish scholarship and serve the academic community, chairing the Sylloge Committee from 1967 to 1978 and elected a President of the English Place Name Society from 1967 to 1979. In her later years she lived with her sister. She had strokes in 1980 and 1981, and died on 14 August 1982.