SOURCE: “Beowulf,” in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, edited by Eric Gerald Stanley, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1966, pp. 104-41.

[In the essay below, Stanley offers an overview of the poem's style and imagery, and attempts to discern the way in which Anglo-Saxons may have regarded Beowulf.]

We have no traditional approach to Beowulf.¹ We are entirely ignorant of the author's intentions except for what we may claim to be able to infer from the poem itself. Even the subject and the form of the poem are in doubt; words like epic and elegy are applied to it, epic because it is heroic, early and fairly long, and elegy because it commemorates and mourns men who were honoured in their generations and were the glory of their times. Some have seen the poem in its entirety as an exemplum in illustration of Hrothgar's great ‘sermon’ (lines 1700-84); others have held that the poem celebrates a dynasty of kings, gloriously founded by Beowulf son of Ecgtheow, a Wægmunding like his successor Wiglaf, whose nobility of purpose was, as the poet tells us (lines 2600f.), such that nothing could make him turn aside the claims of kinship.

We are ignorant of the reception the poem had among the Anglo-Saxons, how widely it was known or how highly it was regarded. Those modern readers who see in Beowulf the personification of the Anglo-Saxon heroic ideal must be surprised that, as far as our evidence goes, only a couple of Anglo-Saxons bore his name. There is some evidence that Beowulf may to some extent have served one other Old English poet, the poet of Andreas, as a model.

If we wish, we can compare Beowulf with other Old English poems. We may find that Beowulf is not only longer but also better than the others. That is not necessarily high praise; we may try to turn this relative praise into something more nearly absolute by protesting that the poem is the product of a great age, the age of Bede, an age which knew artistic achievements of the kind buried at Sutton Hoo, an age in which art and learning were united to produce great gospel books like the Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Museum, and the Codex Amiatinus, now at Florence. Even so, we cannot tell how good Beowulf was compared with the best works of that age. Is it not possible that at a time when the country was full of poems, no longer extant, of the stature of Paradise Lost, Beowulf (which happens to survive) had the standing roughly of Davenant's Gondibert or Cowley's Davideis? Or are we to believe that some special dispensation preserves the best of every age? That, surely, is a romantic superstition: from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, and after, Old English was not sufficiently understood for an Old English text to be preserved deliberately because of its literary merit.² And more particularly, the fire which on 23 October 1731 raged in the Cotton Library at Ashburnham House in Westminster is not likely to have held back from doing worse harm to MS Vitellius A xv, the Beowulf Manuscript, than to scorch its edges, merely because the first taste the fire got of the poem convinced it of the excellence of Beowulf as a work of literature.

The evidence of the Anglo-Saxons' own interest in the poem lies chiefly in the manuscript itself. It is of the late tenth or early eleventh century, a long time after the composition of the poem, which is usually thought to have taken place no later than the eighth century. Several copyings (probably made in different parts of England where different dialects of Old English were spoken) lie between the only extant manuscript and the author's original. Of course, we cannot be sure what in each case made them copy the poem; as far as the extant manuscript is concerned, however, it seems that a finer sense of its value as poetry was less to the fore than its associations with monsters. The manuscript contains also some prose texts. One of them is a life of the dog-headed St Christopher, in the course of which we learn that the saint was twelve fathoms tall—twelve cubits, or roughly eighteen feet, in the Latin source—and he is treated and behaves accordingly. Another text in the manuscript is about The Wonders of the East; the monsters there are so numerous and so varied that strangely tall men are among the lesser marvels.³ …

A third text in the manuscript, Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, has its monsters too; though it is disappointing to find that where the Old English text has a great battle between men and water monsters, nicras, the Latin source reads something like hippopotami for the Old English nicras.

Now a dragon and water monsters belong to the Beowulf story, and in England Beowulf's king, Hygelac of the Geats, was renowned because he was exceptionally tall. In a book, probably roughly contemporary with Beowulf, called Liber Monstrorum or De Monstris et de Belluis (‘Book of Monsters’ or ‘Of Monsters and Wild Beasts’) the following passage occurs:

And there are monsters of wonderful size; such as King Higlacus who ruled the Getæ and was killed by the Franks, whom from his twelfth year no horse could carry. His bones are preserved on an island in the Rhine, where it flows forth into the ocean, and are shown to those who come from afar as a miracle.⁴

It has been shown that the Liber Monstrorum is English in origin. It preserves a reasonably good form of Hygelac's name and a form of the name of his people, the Geats, not remembered otherwise (as far as our evidence goes) on the Continent at that time. It is not an unreasonable speculation to think it possible that the centre which produced the Liber Monstrorum would have been interested in the subject-matter of Beowulf; the direction of that interest runs parallel with that shown by those who put together (long after the composition of the poem⁵) the material in our Beowulf Manuscript. A dragon, monsters, strangely tall men, these excited the Anglo-Saxons and seem to have done so over a long period. Nothing more literary than that is needed to explain the preservation of the poem.

All this need not redound to the glory of Beowulf as a literary masterpiece. It might seem rather to confirm the most cynical opinions about the intolerably naive views of the Anglo-Saxons, who delighted in those parts of the poem of which many modern apologists are most ashamed, and that includes the dragon.

Dragons are a common occurrence in the Bible; and in the Vulgate the word draco comes not only on the numerous occasions when the Authorised Version has dragon, but also often when the Authorised Version has serpent. It is not difficult to find in the Bible confirmation for the view that the dragon (or the serpent) is in league with the devil. Revelation 20:2 makes the dragon one with the devil: ‘And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.’ The dragon in Beowulf, however, does not seem at all like that; it is very much more like the dragon of another book of the Bible, that of the story of Bel and the Dragon in the Book of Daniel.⁶ Daniel among the Babylonians has destroyed their brass and clay idol, Bel. Verses 23-7 tell the next event, an historical event:

And in that same place there was a great dragon, which they of Babylon worshipped. And the king said unto Daniel, Wilt thou also say that this is of brass? lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh; thou canst not say that he is no living god: therefore worship him. Then said Daniel unto the king, I will worship the Lord my God for he is the living God. But give me leave, O king, and I shall slay this dragon without sword or staff. The king said, I give thee leave. Then Daniel took pitch, and fat, and hair, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof: this he put in the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder: And Daniel said, Lo, these are the gods ye worship.

The dragon in Beowulf is more like that: lo, he liveth, he eateth and drinketh, and can be destroyed, by Daniel's trick or by the courage of men like Beowulf and Wiglaf—suitably protected by a flame-proof shield. And when dragons perish they may burst in sunder like that of Babylon or melt in their own heat like that slain by Sigemund (Beowulf 897). The dragon slain by Beowulf (as much as that slain by Daniel) is an evil adversary; but the words used by the poet to describe it, niðdraca (2273), se laða (2305), manscaða (2514), inwitgæst (2670), and the like, seem less definitely links with hell than the words used by the poet of the fiendish brood of Grendel and his mother. The killing of the dragon is described as a terrible exploit from which men who at other times bear themselves valiantly may shrink: their fear is of a real being, a monstrously powerful creature—mercifully rare on this earth.⁷

It seems inconceivable that the poet of Beowulf should have intended to sublimate his evil dragon into draconity, making what has reality in the Bible into something abstract or symbolic, something acceptable to a twentieth-century audience willing to swallow monsters only as myths or symbols. Moreover, however we ourselves may wish to read Beowulf, of one thing we can be pretty sure on the evidence of the manuscript: the Anglo-Saxons read the poem as an account of Beowulf the monster-slayer, and preserved it with other accounts of monsters.

Nevertheless, it would be a highly imperceptive reading of Beowulf which finds in it nothing except monster-slaying. We may not go all the way with Klaeber when he says, ‘The poet would not have selected so singular a fable if it had not been exceptionally well-suited to Christianisation’;⁸ yet that judgment points in the right direction. Most of us now think tales of monsters a low order of literature, unless redeemed in the handling. The poet of Beowulf handles his story with literary artistry; he has made the story rich with spirituality. That has led some modern critics to look away from the reality of the monsters, to make them be wholly the powers of darkness towards which they tend (and from which Grendel's race is derived).

It is worth considering at the very outset one clear example of the poet's great skill in handling the customary material of Old English verse. Jacob Grimm, writing of Old English poetry with particular reference to Elene, said:

The way in which battles and war, the favourite occupation of our antiquity, are described deserves our attention before all else. There is something glorious in every battle-scene. Wolf, eagle and raven with joyous cry go forward in the van of the army, scenting their prey.⁹

In Old English poetry the wolf, the eagle and the raven occur as satellites of battle some sixteen times in all. Wherever they come they convey the expectation of slaughter. The lean wolf leaves the forest for that, and the wings of eagle and raven, dark and glistening with dew, seem to reflect impending carnage. The Beowulf poet uses the same imagery at the end of the speech which near the end of the poem foretells the destruction of the Geatish nation now that Beowulf is dead:

                                                  Forðon sceall gar wesan
monig morgenceald                    mundum bewunden,
hæfen on handa,                    nalles hearpan sweg
wigend weccean,                    ac se wonna hrefn
fus ofer fægum                    fela reordian,
earne secgan,                    hu him æt æte speow,
þenden he wið wulf                    wæl reafode.

3021-7¹⁰

In no other poem is an attempt made to establish a relationship between the beasts of battle: they are attendants of carnage operating singly though pursuing the same end. In Beowulf they are more than that: there is on the one hand the grim conversation between the birds, and on the other the cadaverous eating match. The purposeful combination of the beasts of battle expresses effectively the certainty that the Geats shall be extirpated:¹¹ the three will have much to tell of things to their liking.

Other poets may refer to the beasts of battle to convey lustily the impending downfall of an enemy; the poet of Beowulf invokes them when friends must fall. If, as may well be, the beasts of battle first had a place in poems exulting in the overthrow of an enemy, like that of the Danes in The Battle of Brunanburh (60-5) and of the Assyrians in Judith (204-12, 294-6), the formulas turn sour in the hands of the poet of Beowulf, who uses them to call up all that is most abhorrent to warriors. There is deliberate artistry in that.

It would be pleasant to think that the poet's art did not remain unrecognised in Anglo-Saxon times. There is, outside the context of the Beowulf Manuscript itself, only one point which might provide evidence of how the Anglo-Saxons themselves regarded the poem: there seems to be some connection between Beowulf and one other of the longer Old English poems, Andreas. Klaeber surveys the material in the introduction (pp. cx ff.) of his edition of Beowulf and so does Mr K. R. Brooks, the most recent editor of Andreas, in the introduction to his edition. Parallels have been adduced between Beowulf and Old English poems other than Andreas, but they seem less striking than those with Andreas, nothing that cannot be readily explained as arising from the fact that Beowulf and Andreas share their poetic traditions with other Old English poems.¹² Often traditional phrases were available to an Old English poet for subjects occurring frequently in traditional poetry. Some of the details which Andreas shares with Beowulf can be ascribed to that cause. For example, Heorot, the Danish hall in Beowulf (82), like the Temple of Jerusalem (Andreas 668), is described as heah ond horngeap. There are stræte stanfage in Andreas (1236) and stræt wæs stanfag in Beowulf (320). Such parallels do not provide evidence of indebtedness; after all, if ‘lofty and wide-gabled’ represents an ideal in a hall and if roads paved with stones in the Roman manner are an impressive sight it is not very surprising that two suitable and alliterating epithets should be used of a hall in a number of Old English poems and that stræt should come in collocation with stanfah in more places than one.

Nevertheless, when due allowance has been made for what may be derived independently from the common poetic heritage of the nation, there remain one or two parallels that do seem to be the result of one poet imitating the other. It should be possible to deduce from this special relationship between Beowulf and Andreas something that might help us to evaluate how Beowulf was regarded by at least one other Anglo-Saxon.

Perhaps the clearest of the parallels connecting Beowulf and Andreas are the words ealuscerwen (Beowulf 769) and meoduscerwen (Andreas 1526) and the opening lines of the two poems. The Beowulf poet's use of the word ealuscerwen almost certainly implies the image of Death's bitter cup.¹³ In his use of the word the image lies all in the word ealuscerwen itself. Literally ealu means ‘ale’ and meodu means ‘mead’, and scerwen probably means ‘dispensing’ or possibly ‘privation’ (though the meaning ‘privation’ would not fit the context of meoduscerwen in Andreas at all well). The words do not occur except here. In the Beowulf context ealuscerwen refers to disaster: ale is a bitter drink. When the poet of Andreas uses the word meoduscerwen he labours away at the image. He applies it to a sea-flood overwhelming a multitude. The bitterness implicit in the Beowulf image is made explicit in Andreas as a biter beorþegu (1533), ‘bitter beer-drinking’, and he further exploits the metaphor by a reference to a sorgbyrþen (1532), ‘brewing of sorrow’. Unfortunately for the image, when the Andreas poet was introducing the idea expressed by the Beowulf poet as ealuscerwen, he happened to be writing a second half-line, following a first half-line which used m-alliteration, myclade mereflod, ‘the sea-flood increased’; and so forgetting that mead (unlike the ale of ealuscerwen) is a sweet honey-drink quite unconnected with brewings of sorrow and bitter beer-drinking, he wrote meoduscerwen. If his use of that word is indebted to Beowulf it is clear that he bungled what he borrowed. A skilful versifier would have found no difficulty in producing a first half-line with vocalic alliteration to allow the use of the Beowulf word ealuscerwen in the second half-line: that word is presumed in the clumsy exploitation of the image in Andreas.

A comparison of the opening lines of Beowulf with those of Andreas reveals further similarities which it would be difficult to explain simply by reference to their common poetic inheritance:

Hwæt, we Gardena                    in geardagum,
þeodcyninga                    þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas                    ellen fremedon!

Beowulf 1-3

Hwæt, we gefrunan                    on fyrndagum
twelfe under tunglum                    tireadige hæleð,
þeodnes þegnas.                    No hira þrym alæg …

Andreas 1-3¹⁴

The opening word hwæt is common as the opening word of many Old English poems, and that both Beowulf and Andreas begin with the same word is of no special significance. The formula we (…) gefrunon is also a common one in Old English verse, but the two poets handle it quite differently. In the Beowulf opening the two verbs gefrunon and fremedon play no part in the alliteration of the lines in which they come. The complex alliterative scheme rests on nouns: Gar alliterates with gear, dena with dagum, both second elements of compounds; þeod alliterates with þrym, and the initial vowels of æþelingas and ellen alliterate. The sense requires Spear-Danes and days of yore, the glory of a nation's kings, princes and deeds of valour to be stressed. The metre requires those syllables to be stressed which are emphasised also by the sense, and the alliteration reinforces the stress. By its positioning, the subject we at the beginning of the clause and the verb gefrunon at the end, the phrase we … gefrunon frames the glory of the Spear-Danes' royal dynasty in days of yore, and leads on to the next clause. It is quite different in Andreas. His word-order is pedestrian; his statement merely asserts, first, the apostles' existence, secondly, their glory. Without in any way complicating the alliteration the poet tells us that he has heard tell of twelve glorious heroes under the stars in distant days, the Lord's retainers; the word þrym comes in the next sentence: their glory did not fail. The ingredients of the two openings are similar, but they have been used with differing degrees of skill. The devices available to Anglo-Saxon poets are used together in Beowulf to produce that harmony of sense and metre which it is possible for Old English poets to achieve if they know how to exploit the relative freedom of word-order permitted in verse. There is nothing wrong with Andreas—unless it is wrong for the opening of a poem to lack every distinction.

It is not always profitable to look for modern analogies and to transfer subjective judgments of poems of one age to poems of another. It is not possible to say how high in absolute terms Beowulf is to be rated, where it might be allowed to stand in relation to Paradise Lost, for example. Even so, it is perhaps possible to discern that the poet of Beowulf achieved something that was achieved also in the opening of Paradise Lost; and that the difference between the opening of Beowulf and that of Andreas (whatever its degree) is something of the kind of difference between the opening which begins ‘Of Man's first Disobedience’ and:

I sing the Man who Judah's Sceptre bore
In that right Hand which held the Crook
before;
Who from best Poet, best of Kings did grow;
The two chief Gifts Heav'n could
on Man bestow.

That is the opening of Cowley's Davideis. It was published earlier than Paradise Lost, so that there can be no question of Cowley's being indebted to Milton—and there is of course not much similarity. There is similarity between the opening of Beowulf and that of Andreas, and to assume indebtedness is a likelier explanation than any other that might explain the similarity.

The dating of Old English poems is tricky. Andreas is generally held to be later than Beowulf. The possibility that Andreas is imitated in Beowulf is unlikely; the fact that ealuscerwen fits its context in Beowulf well whereas meoduscerwen fits its context in Andreas badly may be regarded as sufficient evidence that (if there is indebtedness at all) the borrowing is from Beowulf into Andreas. It seems inconceivable also that the successfully ornate opening of Beowulf should owe anything to the indifferent opening of Andreas. There are, of course, instances of a better poet borrowing from a worse. Thus, Lord Lyttleton's line

Poured forth his unpremeditated strain

(from James Thomson's Castle of Indolence, Canto I, stanza lxviii) does seem to have contributed something to the opening stanza of Shelley's To a Skylark, written in 1820, nearly three-quarters of a century later:

                    That from heaven or near it
                                        Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

But the line from The Castle of Indolence is sufficiently competent for it to have jingled in Shelley's mind even if the possibility of conscious borrowing were to be ruled out by those who know about Shelley. It is difficult to believe that the mind of the Beowulf poet was chiming with memories of Andreas.

It seems likely, therefore, that one Old English poet, the poet of Andreas, drew on Beowulf. Can we base anything on such borrowing in our attempt to establish whether or not Beowulf was highly regarded by the Anglo-Saxons? A first reaction, to base nothing on what a poetical dunderhead like the poet of Andreas may happen to choose as his models, should probably be rejected as too hasty. An inferior versifier's critical acumen may well be better than his practice, not merely on account of the general principle that one need not be a hen to know if an egg is rotten, but rather on account of the particular principle that many who do not themselves excel in an art nevertheless make sensitive critics of other practitioners, their failure having given them better insight into what success is possible. There is something in the view that imitation implies admiration; the imitation of Beowulf in Andreas is testimony to the regard in which one Anglo-Saxon, whose own efforts made him a competent judge of what we now call Old English literature, seems to have held the poem. We have a right to show greater faith in him, for all his faults as a poet, than in the monster-mongers who preserved the poem. It is poor evidence of the original reception of the poem: we have no better evidence.

If we have little to go on in assessing the original reception of the poem, we have still our own judgment to tell us that in Beowulf certain details of poetic expression are put to better use than in other poems of the Old English period. In this kind of comparative analysis we cannot be sure that the details we single out for praise would, in fact, have been among things considered important by the Anglo-Saxons themselves.

The superior use made by the poet of Beowulf of the beasts of battle has been cited already as an example of the poet's special skill. The poet uses the traditional material of Old English verse with an aptness which makes it often seem the fresh product of his mind. His skill shows itself in his exploitation of the resources of the Old English poetic vocabulary, in his manipulation of complicated sentences, and in his use of the alliterative metre to convey his meaning effectively. These particulars are in the first place aspects of the poet's art of expression and therefore only less immediately aspects of what is being expressed. We have no means of knowing how these things were valued by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, and we may find that if we value these accomplishments of poetic expression highly and turn to them as criteria for judging the merits of Old English verse we may come to think less well of such pieces as The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, and The Later Genesis, however good these may be at communicating pathos and passion.

Comparison must occupy an important place in any analysis of the poetic art of Beowulf. But there is a limit to what can be subjected to comparison. This is especially true of Old English poetic vocabulary, the greatest glories of which may well be the coinages: they were created to fill a special need and cannot for that reason be compared. In the Beowulf passage which ends in the figure of the beasts of battle, for example, the word morgenceald (3022¹⁵) ‘morning-cold’ demonstrates what can be done with words in Old English verse. The adjective applies to the hand-gripped spear, and satisfactorily communicates the clammy fear of the Geatish warriors as they wake to their last battle. The substantival and adjectival compounds used by the Beowulf poet have often been singled out for their excellence.¹⁶ G. Storm's careful discussion of a small group of adjectives, including words like ‘lordless’, ‘joyless’, ‘soulless’, well illustrates the poet's skill with words. Thirty years before Storms's analysis of words ending in -leas Hoops discussed compounds beginning with ær-. He suggested convincingly that in words like ærgod (the first element of which means ‘previously’ and the second means ‘good’) the prefix ær- means ‘old and venerable’, so that the compound ærgod, for example, means ‘excellent as things were formerly’; it does not mean ‘formerly good, but not so good now’. Weohstan, Wiglaf's father—a most important personage if the poem should in any way be thought of as celebrating a dynasty—is described (line 2622) as ærfæder. The meaning of the word is ‘father, old and venerable’—not ‘a good old man but a little senile’ like Goodman Verges in Dogberry's eyes. The poet describes ancient treasure as ærgestreon, ærgeweorc, ærwela; and we know from descriptions of ancient treasure in Beowulf that it was admired for excellence, presumably because some of the skill that made the treasure in former times was not to be found among the poet's contemporaries. From the poet's use of the prefix ær- we can see his attitude to le temps perdu some part of which may be recalled as the hand touches the hilt of an ancient sword great in associations and glorious in workmanship (cf. 1677-98).

These are detailed points, and Beowulf is rich in such points. Compounds are a common occurrence in the poem. On average there is a compound every other line of the poem. This very high frequency is, of course, of some interest in itself. It would be of greater interest if we could tell which of them the poet coined. Klaeber, in the excellent glossary to his edition of the poem, indicates by means of a double dagger those words which do not occur outside the poem. It is likely enough that the poet made up many of these compounds, but we can never be sure that any particular compound which we think bears the stamp of his individuality, morgenceald for example, might not have been more widespread. Too much has been lost. In a few cases we know that a word only found in Beowulf must have had wider currency in English at one time. Thus the adjective niðhedig (3165), ‘hostile thinking’, only comes in Beowulf; but the cognate niðhugdig occurs in Old Saxon (Heliand 1056). Similarly the word nydgestealla (882), ‘companion in need’, occurs in Beowulf alone of extant Old English texts; but Old High German forms of the word (e.g. notgistallo, Otfrid's Evangelienbuch IV, xvi, 4) are not uncommon. It is best, therefore, not to praise the Beowulf poet's originality in coining words. We must content ourselves with praising that he used words aptly.

The way in which the poet manipulates complicated sentences distinguishes his work among Old English poets (though other Old English poems also contain long sentences). If we take the Beowulf Manuscript as our starting-point, the organisation of ideas can be discerned to some extent from the rudimentary punctuation and sporadic capitalisation, rudimentary and sporadic, that is, when compared with modern editions. Except for that, no help is given to the reader, who has to rely on his familiarity with the alliterative metre to guide him to correct metrical phrasing, and in Old English verse metrical phrases correspond to meaningful phrases. Since the poem is written continuously like prose (that is, not in lines of verse) it is obvious that the Anglo-Saxon readers of the manuscript must have been helped by the metre to a meaningful reading of the poem.

In selecting the passage which covers lines 864 to 886 for the following discussion the hope is that, though perhaps no individual passage can be called typical of Beowulf, nothing atypical will have been chosen. In Klaeber's edition the lines are printed as follows (ignoring the macrons and other diacritics he uses):

Hwilum heaþorofe                    hleapan leton,
on geflit faran                    fealwe mearas,
ðær him foldwegas                    fægere þuhton,
cystum cuðe.                    Hwilum cyninges þegn,
guma gilphlæden,                    gidda gemyndig,
se ðe ealfela                    ealdgesegena
worn gemunde,                    word oþer fand
soðe gebunden;                    secg eft ongan
sið Beowulfes                    snyttrum styrian,
ond on sped wrecan                    spel gerade,
wordum wrixlan;                    welhwylc gecwæð,
þæt he fram Sigemunde[s]                    secgan hyrde
ellendædum,                    uncuþes fela,
Wælsinges gewin,                    wide siðas,
þara þe gumena bearn                    gearwe ne wiston,
fæhðe ond fyrena,                    buton Fitela mid hine,
þonne he swulces hwæt                    secgan wolde,
eam his nefan,                    swa hie a wæron
æt niða gehwam                    nydgesteallan;
hæfdon ealfela                    eotena cynnes
sweordum gesæged.                    Sigemunde gesprong
æfter deaðdæge                    dom unlytel,
syþðan wiges heard …(17)

In the manuscript the following punctuation is used. Hwilum (864) is preceded by a punctuation mark and the word begins with a capital. There is a mark of punctuation after wiston (878), but the mark is less prominent than that preceding Hwilum (864) and fæhðe (879) has no initial capital. There is again a prominent mark of punctuation after gesteallan (882) and the next word, Hæfdon (883), begins with a capital. The next mark of punctuation, again prominent, comes after unlytel (885), and the next word, Syþðan (886), begins with a capital.

A comparison of the manuscript punctuation with Klaeber's shows that, though there is some correspondence, the manuscript punctuation is insufficient to enable a modern reader to grasp the meaning at the kind of speed needed for reading the poem to an audience. Yet there is nothing unusual about the punctuation of this passage or of the rest of the poem. It is not known if the punctuation of the manuscript goes back to the poet; there is no need to claim authorial authority for the punctuation for the present purpose, which is to consider how an Anglo-Saxon reader of the manuscript would have understood the text before him in spite of the sparseness of marks of punctuation, and how the author's characteristic style might be particularly well suited for the kind of reading which an Anglo-Saxon reader used to alliterative verse might have achieved.

An Anglo-Saxon reader of the poem had to rely on the metrical phrasing for a meaningful delivery. We may assume him to have been familiar with alliterative verse, and for that reason he can have had no difficulty in splitting up the text into the units we call half-lines and lines. The poet's syntax depends on the metre for its clarity, so that his art of discourse is poetic not only in his exploitation of the vocabulary available to him, but poetic also in the more prosaic virtue of clarity. This is not lowering the dignity of the word poetic: what is involved is the characteristic sentence paragraph of the Beowulf poet; that is, the poet depends on the metre for his ability to formulate his ideas at length and for his complexity of utterance.¹⁸ It may well be that those Old English prose writers, ælfric and Wulfstan among them, who at times wrote metrical prose, did so partly because they gained in clarity of expression, but mainly because metrical phrasing would more easily enable their readers to achieve meaningful delivery; however, the use to which metre is put in Old English prose has only an indirect bearing on the present discussion.

In all Old English verse, words which have the function of joining phrases or clauses or sentences (that is, metrically unstressed connectives) precede the first stressed syllable of the half-line in which they come. This is simply the result of the fact that the beginning of phrases, clauses and sentences must coincide with the beginning of metrical phrases: a break within a half-line is not tolerated. As in any other passage of Old English verse, the connectives, e.g. hwilum (867), buton (879), þonne (880), come in the initial dip of the half-line. Hwilum at line 864 is (or, at least, could be) stressed; that is borne out by the alliteration of the line, h-alliteration, in which Hwilum shares. The word does so also at line 2107, and at line 2020 it takes part in cross-alliteration. It follows that hwilum, though not always stressed, is stressable; and stressable particles when they are in fact not stressed must come in the first dip (i.e. unstressed position) of the clause.¹⁹ When, as at line 867 for example, the stressable particle (here hwilum) is a connective it must come in the dip which precedes the first stress of the clause.

Though there are exceptions,²⁰ the vast majority of clusters of three or more unstressed syllables come in the position between the last stress of a half-line and the first stress of the following half-line. Not more than one unstressed syllable may end a half-line (except insofar as an additional unstressed syllable may be required for resolution of the last stressed syllable of the half-line). It follows that an Old English reader who comes upon a cluster of syllables consisting of words (or parts of words) which are unstressable and particles which are occasionally stressed will recognise that he is very probably at the beginning of a clause, even though he is reading a manuscript which, by modern standards, is insufficiently punctuated and not split up into lines and half-lines of verse.

Unstressed syllables in clusters may be regarded as signals to tell the reader how the construction of the sentence continues. The dip at the beginning of a half-line is a signalising position, especially clear when it is used in excess of the minimum requirements of the metre.²¹ All this applies to all Old English verse. There is every reason for thinking that the poets knew what syntactical advantages were to be derived from the regularity of metre.

The method of composition in Beowulf is usually additive and annexive. That is not to say that the poet simply tacks phrase to phrase without premeditation. Though sentences in which the subordinate clauses precede their main clause are not very common in the poem there are enough of them (examples occur at lines 1368-72 and 1822-30) to show that the poet's complexity of utterance is premeditated. Other examples of complex sentence structure include the embedding of one clause within another, as occurs, for instance, at lines 867-71, where (however we may relate word oðer fand/soðe gebunden to what precedes it) the relative clause se ðe ealfela ealdgesegena/worn gemunde comes between cyninges þegn, the subject, and its verb. Other examples are to be found at lines 731b, 1613b, 1831b, and 2855b. Nevertheless the commonest shape of long sentences in the poem begins with the main clause, and clauses and phrases are added and annexed one after the other.

Correlatives enable Old English poets to construct their very long sentences. Modern editors not infrequently punctuate passages containing a pair of correlatives as two separate sentences, each beginning with a correlative. An example is provided by Klaeber's punctuation of lines 864ff., where he has two sentences each beginning with Hwilum. Modern writers on the whole prefer a set of logically connected short sentences to a single long sentence containing them all, and Klaeber's punctuation accords well with their practice. His punctuation is unexceptionable, as long as we remember that the reference of the correlative at each of its two occurrences is not identical: at its first occurrence the reference of hwilum is forward, at its second occurrence it refers back. The meaning of hwilum at its first occurrence is ‘at certain times (which are to be given)’, at its second occurrence ‘at other times (than those already named)’. When the word first occurs the reader or listener cannot know if there is going to be another occurrence of the word; for hwilum does exist in constructions other than correlative constructions (just as ‘at certain times’ does). An Anglo-Saxon reader or listener would know the way in which the word hwilum could be used. The first occurrence would alert him for any second occurrence. At both occurrences here the word comes at the beginning of the clause, in the dip at line 867 and in what could be the dip (if we knew more about the rules of double-alliteration involving particles) at line 864. The initial dip of a clause is a signalising position. At line 916, fifty-odd lines away from the first occurrence of hwilum the word comes again, also in the signalising position:

Hwilum flitende                    fealwe stræte
mearum mæton.

There is good reason for thinking that hwilum here (though Klaeber makes it begin a new paragraph) refers back to the two earlier occurrences of the word. They introduce related ideas (though the use of hwilum at line 916 is not strictly correlative)—and we cannot call the whole passage from lines 864 to 917 one single sentence, because the passage consists of an organism greater than is covered by our concept of a sentence, a concept for practical purposes defined by practical rules of permissible punctuation. By utilising the initial dips of clauses, occupying them with connectives—hwilum, for example—the poet is able to embark on a complex idea, extending it over one sentence or two or more, without losing lucidity, even if (as in the case of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts) the punctuation is only rudimentary.

The device of variation acts in the same direction, though not at such length. Variation, as usually defined, is prosodically of stressed units only: it does not include personal pronouns, for example. In the passage under discussion the subject cyninges þegn (867) is varied by guma gilphlæden (868), which adds to the description of the king's retainer, and is varied further by secg (871), which continues the idea, lucidly enabling the reader to follow the sense of the passage without the help of punctuation; and secg is taken up by the pronoun he (875), though that is not strictly ‘variation’.

There is more to the sentence than that. The word gemyndig (868) is echoed paronomastically by gemunde (870); the adjective gilphlæden is varied and made explicit by gidda gemyndig (868), and the word gidda dependent on gemyndig is varied by ealfela ealdgesegena/worn (869f.) dependent on gemunde. Whatever it may mean, the phrase word oþer fand (870) is answered across Klaeber's semi-colon by wordum (874); wordum, a dative plural used adverbially, goes with the infinitive wrixlan, and is parallel to snyttrum (872) which goes with the infinitive styrian. It would not be difficult to go on: there is more to the passage; and almost every passage in the poem can be analysed in this way. Of course, it is not likely that the original audience would have apprehended these interweavings at a first hearing. Their effect is twofold: these interweavings enable the poet to proceed in an additive and annexive progress, which is far from simple and can nevertheless be understood; and they give to his verse a peculiar density of texture, only rarely found in Old English verse outside Beowulf.

It is pleasing to trace in the totality of the poem the patterns which we discern in a small part of it. Conversely, it is pleasing to find in a short passage of the poem the patterns which seem to underlie the structure of the poem as a whole. Professor J. R. R. Tolkien has said that ‘Beowulf is indeed the most successful Old English poem because in it the elements, language, metre, theme, structure, are all most nearly in harmony’.²² But the overall pattern which he selects in illustration of this statement is balance: that is, the static principle which to his mind governs the total structure of the poem as much as it governs the individual lines with their ‘opposition between two halves of roughly equivalent phonetic weight, and significant content, which are more often rhythmically contrasted than similar’.²³ There are many ways of regarding the poem. If there is a balance either in the smaller units or in the total structure of the poem it is perceived only on looking back. As the poem advances, as it is read or heard, it is surely a continuum: the listening ear strains for what is to come. The adding of bit to bit in that continuum and the diversity of the means by which the continuity is attained provide evidence of the poet's art.

The passage under discussion is a good example of the poet's skill in sentence structure. It is also an excellent example of how he uses an additive and annexive method of progression for a much larger unit. The general statement of what the king's retainer does (867-77), with its specific statement (868-71) about the traditional nature of what he sings, is followed by a statement (871-4) that Beowulf is the subject still in the account of Sigemund the dragon-slayer and his fame; and that Beowulf is still the subject of the song even when it proceeds to speak of Heremod, the Saul-like king of the Danes, is made clear when at line 913 the singer reverts to Beowulf.²⁴ The modern reader (waylaid and beset by linguistic difficulties and background notes of exceptional length) thinks the transitions sudden. The forward-listening members of the original audience, told at the beginning of the song that it is of Beowulf, make the connection and apprehend the unity. It is of great importance for an understanding of how the poem compares with other Old English poems to realise that it is unusual in Old English verse other than Beowulf to attempt such long organisms. In Beowulf the attempt is successful because the poet exploits all the devices of Old English versification (including the syntax peculiar to Old English verse) to prepare the listener for long units and to give them clarity.

Twice in the course of Beowulf the poet gives expression to a poetic ideal, once in the passage some aspects of which have been discussed already, lines 867-74, and once at lines 2105-14. The former is a difficult passage: we are not sure what is meant by the two half-lines word oþer fand/soðe gebunden; but its beginning is clear. The other passage, lines 2105-14 is easier:

Þær wæs gidd ond gleo;                    gomela
Scilding,
felafricgende                    feorran rehte;
hwilum hildedeor                    hearpan wynne,
gomenwudu grette,                    hwilum gyd awræc
soð ond sarlic,                    hwilum syllic spell
rehte æfter rihte                    rumheort cyning;
hwilum eft ongan                    eldo gebunden,
gomel guðwiga                    gioguðe cwiðan,
hildestrengo;                    hreðer inne weoll,
þonne he wintrum frod                    worn gemunde.(25)

A comparison of these two passages shows that they have much in common. The singer tells a wondrous tale, syllic spell, true and sad, soð and sarlic. And in both passages the emphasis is on the memory. In the first passage the phrase soðe gebunden may refer to the technicality of alliteration, ‘truly linked’; on the other hand, soð ond sarlic of the second passage may lead us to prefer the translation ‘bound in truth’ for soðe gebunden. The phrase æfter rihte in the second passage should probably be regarded as a vague statement, meaning ‘according to what is right’, rather than a specific reference to accurate alliteration. The best explanation of the words wordum wrixlan does seem to be²⁶ to regard it as a reference to the ‘weaving of words’ in the rhetorical devices of variation, specifically, and paronomasia, more generally.

There is good reason for taking the two passages together, for they both refer to the same occasion. The first is the poet's account of the festivities at Heorot after Beowulf's defeat of Grendel, the second is Beowulf's own account to Hygelac, his king, of what is presumably a later stage of the same festivities. It is an ideal picture of a society deeply rooted in its traditions, recalling past events to provide fit comparison for present deeds of glory.

The crux word oðer fand (870) has sometimes been interpreted in contradistinction to ealdgesegen (869); that is, ‘he composed new words’ in contradistinction to ‘he remembered a great multitude of old traditions’. That view is not accepted by Professor Else von Schaubert in her edition of the poem, and the reasons of syntax which led her to reject it (and which led Klaeber to follow her in the second supplement (p. 466f.) of his edition) seem convincing. In any case, there is nothing that might lead one to the view that old traditions in new words represents an ideal among the Anglo-Saxons; and, even if it were possible to parallel in Old English the meaning ‘new’ for oþer, that alone would make one doubt the interpretation. This is the value of Professor F. P. Magoun's application to Old English poetry of the theories relating to preliterate poetic composition, and this, as Professor C. L. Wrenn has shown,²⁷ is one important aspect of the miracle of Cædmon: that Old English had only one form of poetic utterance; it was aristocratic and traditional whatever the subject and whatever the mood. According to Bede, Cædmon was the first in England to take Christian themes as subjects for that traditional poetry. Since traditional diction is as much a part of the definition of Old English verse as the use of regular rhythms and the use of regular alliteration, Christ, Lucifer, the saints and the Patriarchs appear as Germanic liege-lords with their retainers. That is the reason for the Germanisation of the Orient, as Heusler called it. The audience expected what they were used to, and the poet supplied it: there was no other way of telling in verse of the deeds of men.

So far we have considered the means of poetic expression and the use made of them by the poet of Beowulf. The passage selected for closer analysis contains a statement of the poet's ideal in poetry, the singing of a song about deeds performed that day. The singer in Heorot is the poet's fiction, part of his picture of the society of the past. Before we consider that picture as a whole we must take issue with the application to Beowulf of theories which may help to explain some of the characteristics of oral poetry such as is found in the Balkans. That poetry makes use of a stock of formulas traditionally associated with it. Old English verse, like the verse of related Germanic tribes, for example the Old Saxons, is formulaic. Formulas found again and again in different Old English poems, a seemingly unique phrase found in the same or a very similar form in some other poem, all confirm that Old English poets draw not merely on an ancient hoard of poetic words, but also on an ancient hoard of whole poetic phrases when they wish to give expression to something already expressed in a set formula. No doubt, very often the availability of a formula will influence poets to make use of it.

As we have seen, in descriptions of battles poets introduce in traditional terms something on the beasts of battle. The traditional formulaic element is available for a very wide range of ideas, at times for an absence of ideas, as when they introduce some tag like heard under helme, ‘strong under his helmet’, to describe—very vaguely—some hero, or under heofones hwealf, ‘under the arch of heaven’, to localise—very vaguely—some action. The origin of the use of such phrases may well lie in the characteristics of oral poetry, the product of an extemporising singer. This has been the opinion of scholars for a long time. It is sufficient to quote A. F. C. Vilmar's view of a hundred and twenty years ago:

These formulas, which rest as much on ancient tradition as they characterise oral tradition, create the refreshing impression that what we are concerned with here is nothing invented, nothing artificial or fictive, no mere book-learning, but rather a living tale which wholly fills the teller and stands at all times at his command.²⁸

Vilmar distinguishes the traditional origin of the formulas of Germanic verse, and their connection with oral poetry, from the impression given by their use. That is an important distinction to be borne in mind when we come to Beowulf; that poem survives in written form only: whether we think it the work of an extemporising poet or of a man who composes pen in hand depends on our response to the impression made on us by the poem.

Professor F. P. Magoun's discussion²⁹ of oral-formulaic versification has deepened our understanding of the kind of poetry that underlies the Old English poetry surviving in such manuscripts as have been preserved. To understand the use of tags and set phrases, whole half-lines of verse used repeatedly, it is useful to know about some kinds of preliterate composition. But we should not necessarily assume that what applies to the poetry of a genuinely preliterate society has an immediate and direct bearing on the elaborately literate poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. When we come to Beowulf, I agree with Professor Kemp Malone: ‘The Beowulf poet was no minstrel, strumming a harp and composing verse as he strummed.’³⁰ Though the devices of sense and sound, variation and paronomasia, could in themselves be explained as the vehicles of an associative imagination working extempore, when they come, as in Beowulf, in combination with the careful exploitation of every aspect of what was available to an Old English poet, it seems more likely that this highly wrought poem is the product of a lettered poet, or at least of a slow, non-extemporising poet.

In his analysis of Old English verse Professor Magoun has made crucial use of the example of Cædmon.³¹ It may be worth considering Cædmon again to see if we are really presented by Bede with ‘the case history of an Anglo-Saxon oral singer’ in the sense in which Magoun and his school interpret that phrase. We have the authority of Bede for the fact that Cædmon was illiterate. Except for the nine lines of his Hymn none of his poems survives. Even so, we know from Bede's account that he recited his orally composed verses to his teachers who acted as scribes. We are told also that they were long poems. However, nothing in Bede's account suggests that Cædmon composed extempore before an audience; nothing suggests even that he composed harp in hand; nothing suggests that he composed long poems other than bit by bit. Bede's famous phrase that Cædmon composing was like a clean beast ruminating, quasi mundum animal ruminando, calls to mind slow and deliberate, many-stomached digestion, remouthing again and again the same material. This does not support Magoun: not even the case of Cædmon, the illiterate neat-herd. We have no account of how the Beowulf poet went about his work. Nevertheless, the product of his art, with its sophisticated interweaving of devices, and the mechanics of elaborate, long, sentence-like structures composed with metrical precision, all aptly matching a subtle and complex set of ideas, makes one doubt that Beowulf should have been the work of an oral singer.

Magoun makes a distinction between good and bad oral verse, by saying that ‘a good singer is one able to make better use of the common fund of formulas than the indifferent or poor singer’.³² This is obvious enough: the putting together is part of the art. Aptness and organisation make suitable criteria for judging a poem. More recently a disciple of Magoun's, writing ‘On the Possibility of Criticizing Old English Poetry’, has told us,

Our praise is misplaced when we would offer it to the poet for the wording of a verse or line, as much misplaced as if we should praise Yeats for inventing the words of his poems.³³

This seems misguided. The wording is not the same as the words. There is a degree of contrivance and invention in putting together words and phrases from the hoard of oral formulas. There is invention in the use of compounds, and we can judge that invention by the criteria of aptness and organisation. We are not in a position to know which individual phrase or compound is new, but we are in a position to detect good use made of traditional language. In Beowulf good use is made of it; in Andreas less so. Regardless of whether the technique of composition is fully extempore, or slow composition refined by revision, or even written composition painfully corrected, putting together words from the customary poetic vocabulary of the nation, making use of customary compounds and phrases can lead to good poetry or bad.

As we have seen, the Beowulf poet himself twice gives expression to a poetic ideal: the creative activity of the singers thought by him worth the attention of heroes in Heorot consists in the memory of ancient strife recalled in language that lies beyond the tickle of novelty. These idealised singers belong to the glorious past, to which oral poetry also belonged.

The poet does not advert to this ideal simpliciter, but uses the scop's song to bring out also certain ulteriors, perhaps the crimes of Sigemund (879), perhaps the hopes men had of Heremod (909-13). The Beowulf poet is sophisticated: his art cannot be identified with the scop's. The scop sings extempore a song in praise of Beowulf. So the poet imagines him as he peoples the heroic past; but that in no way implies that he, like his creature, Hrothgar's singer, also sings extempore.³⁴

When we consider the Beowulf poet's treatment of Hrothgar's scop we should perhaps distinguish two phases in the use of formulaic poetry: the oral and the written. The oral stage, that of the scop in Heorot, is well described by Magoun. It is fully extempore; the minstrel as he stands before his audience composes with the use of ready-made formulas. Sometimes he introduces old tags, virtually meaningless; much of the time he describes traditional happenings, battles or feasting for example, in traditional words and phrases. Sometimes a minstrel working in the oral-formulaic tradition coined a phrase, for every phrase must have been new before it grew old, and one man can coin a multitude of phrases for use by himself at first and later for use by others in admiring imitation. Nevertheless, tradition is tenacious and change slow in that kind of literature; and in any case we have no means of knowing what is new.

Much has been said of the singers, and less of the audience. For a hearer (as for a reader) there are many ways of feeling pleasure in poetry; but, at one level of appreciation at least, a great part of the pleasure seems to lie in pleasurable recognition of the expected and pleasurable surprise at the unexpected. An audience used to formulaic verse is presumably conditioned to feeling pleasure in recognition of the familiar.³⁵ It is characteristic of the secondary stage in the use of formulaic poetry that it still draws on the formulas descended from the primary, the extemporising stage of poetic composition, partly because there is no other conception of poetry and partly because the audience demands the traditional. The Christian poetry of the Anglo-Saxons may well have been written to supply a audience's craving for what they had always had.

Gregory the Great wrote for the guidance of St Augustine that well-constructed pagan temples in England should not be destroyed but dedicated to the glory of Christ, so that the nation, seeing their temples preserved, might gather with a new spirit more familiarly in the places to which they were accustomed. In the extant Anglo-Saxon verse we see the customary poetic formulas of the nation deliberately, artificially even, put to a new use. Tags like heard under helme ‘strong under his helmet’, ecg wæs iren ‘its blade was of iron’, maðma mænigeo ‘a multitude of treasures’, serve as reminders of an old order, and as such have new meaning. In origin they may have been the hums and haws of hesitating poetic extemporisation: in their new context they have become living tokens of a heroic past which the Christian present still wears among its ornaments.

A long time ago Adolf Ebert wrote of the Anglo-Saxons:

The quick acceptance and ready assimilation of the civilisation of Latin Christianity, assimilation moreover which soon turned into prolific learned activity in Latin, was not merely a consequence of the great talent of this Germanic nation: it presupposes a higher degree of indigenous refinement. This refinement, of course, was not of a scholarly nature; but rather a refinement of disposition, a refinement of the affections, and a refinement of the imagination.³⁶

It would perhaps be too fanciful to say that Gregory sensed this refinement when he saw the English slave-boys for sale in Rome, and took to punning on angels and Angles. We know, however, that he thought their outward appearance so full of grace that he lamented the darkness of their souls; and he must have thought them capable of responding to missionary efforts. The conversion of the English became the object of his special zeal; he laboured to fill the minds and altars of the nation with a different spirit; he condemned in them only that they were pagan. It is not likely that when the English neophytes looked back they would condemn and despise the past which had nurtured them and given them a mind to apprehend the new faith. Their past did not lack nobility, and when they came to sing of God and his saints they turned to the past to furnish them with the means of expression. In the vernacular they had no other means.

It goes deeper than that. When the Anglo-Saxons turned to their language to express their thoughts they would have found, if they had been capable of such Humboldtian reasoning, that it had been at work already, and had shaped not merely their thoughts but also the mode of perception that underlay them. There is a statement of Wilhelm von Humboldt's which seems highly pertinent to the study of Old English literature:

Since languages, or at least their constituent parts …, are transmitted by one age to the next, and since we can speak of incipient languages only by going right outside the range of our experience, it follows that the relationship in which the past stands to the present reaches down into the uttermost depths of all that shapes the present.³⁷

We delude ourselves if we believe that we can catch a nation in its infancy and hear its first babblings. When in the fifth century the Anglo-Saxon tribes left their Continental homes they brought with them a group of closely related, ancient dialects including the tribes' poetic word-hoard, their oral-formulaic stockpile. Centuries earlier, Tacitus, writing of the Germanic tribes in general, refers to song as the vehicle of their tribal memory, that is, of their history. We have evidence that some memory of the origin of the nation in northern lands was preserved, and survived to be recorded in definite form by Bede and in the genealogies of the English royal dynasties.

Beowulf, both as a young man and as king, is represented as embodying the traditional ideals of the nation. The language in which this ideal is expounded is the traditional diction in the traditional metre of the English. Of course, the poem owes a great deal to Christianity, but it does not owe everything to Christianity; the language in which the ideal is expressed and the mode of perception by means of which the Anglo-Saxons were able to grasp the ideals of the new faith, relating them to their indigenous ideals, go back to the pagan past.

In the passage we have been considering (lines 864-915) the ideal seems absolute. Beowulf has triumphed against an evil being, has deserved the gratitude of a good and wise king, and his merit calls forth a song of praise from a panegyrist filled with the memory of ancient traditions. The poet presents the scop to us as singing the hero's praise in the traditional manner in the traditional poetic medium. Secg eft ongan/sið Beowulfes snyttrum styrian (871-2), we are told; surely, we may expect something about Beowulf himself. Instead we get the ideal which is embodied in Beowulf expressed in terms of Sigemund and Heremod. The relevance of Sigemund, the dragon-slayer, is not made explicit, it is too obvious to need explanation; but how love fell to Beowulf whereas iniquity took possession of Heremod is clearly stated. It would be going too far to claim that a traditionalist, such as the Beowulf poet imagines Hrothgar's minstrel to be, could only have praised Beowulf by borrowing some of the actual words which belong to the praise of men like Sigemund or to the dispraise of men like Heremod. All that we have the right to claim is that the merit of Beowulf, however it might have been expressed, could only have been perceived in terms which had their application to earlier heroes. There is a special directness in the Beowulf poet's adduction of Sigemund and Heremod. The poet's associative habit of mind working in the same direction as his annexive syntax, which is in part based on the devices of the alliterative metre, leads him to take for granted the transitions. Without expressing the transitions he puts down directly the whole of the circumstances of a comparable or contrasting personage or situation. Other poets might have stripped the parallel of some of the words in which it is expressed and taken them over for their own use. The poet of Beowulf takes over the parallel whole, perhaps because he is conscious that he perceives the hero of his poem at this point as being all that, in descriptions known to him, made Sigemund glorious and all that Heremod was not.

A number of the passages in the poem referred to by critics of Beowulf as ‘digressions and episodes’ owe their place to the poet's habit of mind. Far from being intrusions or excrescences they are the result of his directness of expression. The sorrow to be experienced by Wealhtheow, Hrothgar's queen, who presumably lives to see the treacherous enmity of Hrothulf to her poor sons, is expressed, not by telling us proleptically how she suffered, but how her parallel, Hildeburh suffered when her son and brother and later her lord were slain (lines 1063-1191). The poet makes it appear by his use of Hildeburh's manifold sorrows that she is the locus classicus of a queen's suffering in intestine strife. There is, of course, a strong element of foreboding in all this: as Hildeburh mourned, so shall Wealhtheow. The poet shapes his account of the wars between Finn (Hildeburh's husband) on the one hand and Hnæf (Hildeburh's brother) and Hengest (who succeeds Hnæf) on the other to bring out to the full the misery of Hildeburh.

At the first appearance of Hygd, Hygelac's young and gracious queen, she is described chiefly by the device which the poet had used when he drew on the evil Heremod to expound the virtues of Beowulf. The mind of Modthryth, the untamed shrew, was disgraced by every opposite of Hygd's many graces (lines 1925-62, especially 1929-43). Here, as in the case of Heremod, the transition is abrupt, the connection is not made explicit, so that some of the best critics of the poem suspect (unnecessarily, it seems to me) a gap.³⁸ Once again, the abruptness is the result of the directness with which the poet habitually lays the past under contribution to set forth the present: his mode of perception of the present is as much part of his heritage as the language in which he expresses it. It has been suggested³⁹ that the reference in this passage to Offa, the legendary king of Angle, may be in the nature of a compliment to Offa of Mercia, his historical descendant. Offa of Angle is praised in a very similar way in the Old English poem Widsith. If, as seems very likely, this is the correct analysis of why Offa of Angle is twice praised in Old English verse, it follows that two Old English poets at least, and Offa of Mercia too if he understood their praise, were accustomed to direct reference to the glorious past for an exposition of the present; those not very close kinsmen of the then reigning king of Mercia who gave the new-born Offa his name must have looked back similarly (as royal families do in name-giving). In Beowulf, however, this is not just an occasional device for a graceful compliment: the poem is about the past and is furnished with instances drawn from the past.

It is not to be inferred from all this that the Beowulf poet, going to his nation's word-hoard, has come away with something equivalent to the Elgin Marbles, where his fellow poets were content to pick up bits and pieces the size of acanthus leaves or vine-leaf scrolls. Whatever the poet of Beowulf takes over, little units and large ones, he moulds and modulates to suit his specific purpose. In the same way as he makes apt use of the smaller units and organises them well, so he does not leave the larger units strewn about unhewn and unaltered in his work like a scatter of erratic boulders.

We know, merely through the poet's choice of subject, that he resembles the ideal minstrel whom he presents to us on two occasions in this, that he too delights in the exercise of a well-stored memory deeply imbued with traditions, enshrined also in some of the genealogies of the Anglo-Saxons by which their kings appear as descendants of Scyld. The genealogies contain some of the Danish names in the poem: Beow,⁴⁰ Scyld, Sceaf, and Heremod. It seems likely that before these names, all appearing as ancestors of Woden, were incorporated in the genealogies, Woden must have been euhemerised (as he is explicitly in the Chronicle of æthelweard, almost certainly a member of the West Saxon royal house living in the tenth century). This act of euhemerisation is clear evidence that members of the royal families took these genealogies seriously, even in Christian times. The extension of the genealogies beyond Woden, though presumably quite unhistorical, shows that they wished to associate these figures, of whom they knew (Beowulf is witness to that), with their own royal dynasties. Beowulf could well have been written late enough for at least some of the Danes mentioned in the poem to have been regarded by the poet and his audience as ancestors of Anglo-Saxon kings in England.⁴¹

It is likely that the rulers who knew of their ancient descent were stirred by the memory of glorious deeds of those men from whom they were descended. The use to which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts Offa's genealogy in the annal for the year of his accession (in 757) seems to indicate a deliberate exploitation of the list of kings going back to Woden as contributing to the glorification of Offa. If, as is natural, Anglo-Saxon rulers delighted in the ancient nobility of their dynasty their retainers must have been aware of these traditions also. The beginning of the poem with its piece of Danish history is relevant to England, to English kings and therefore to their retainers, as much as the Trojan origins of the British dynasty relevantly introduce poems, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, on British themes.

There is evidence that there was in Anglo-Saxon England a considerable knowledge of the legends of the Germanic heroic age. Interest in these legends is not likely to have been swiftly reduced when Christianity came, and the poet of Beowulf was able to rely on his audience's familiarity with the ancient traditions to such an extent that he introduced allusive references and not fully coherent accounts of feuds, apparently without needing to fear that he would not be understood. The Finn Episode (lines 1063-1159) could not be understood by an audience not already familiar with the facts; perhaps the original audience was familiar with these events because (if the Hengest of the Episode was identified with the Hengest of the Anglo-Saxon Settlement) the feud was held to belong to proto-Kentish history.⁴² The wars between the Geats and the Swedes are not told by the poet in chronological sequence, but allusively and selectively. In lines 2177-89 praise of Beowulf and a reference to his ignominious youth encloses an allusion to Heremod, who had been trusted in his youth: change came to both of them. The allusion is missed by anyone who fails to seize on Heremod as one pattern of evil in a king.

As the poet's ideal minstrel relates Beowulf's merit, gained from present exploits in Denmark, to the merit of past figures, Sigemund and Heremod, so the poet analyses a Christian ideal, appropriate to the English audience for whom he is writing, in terms of an ideal figure of the past: Beowulf. The language which he uses, the traditional poetic vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons, with many formulas expected by the audience to whom no other language seemed fit for poetry, has led the poet to seek his material outside Christian story in the Germanic traditions to which his language had had its first, its most direct application. His habit of mind which finds expression in an annexive syntax, such as goes well with the alliterative metre, is associative. He does not always make explicit how his associations are linked to his main theme, no more than the minstrel does in Heorot who fails to make explicit why in singing the praise of Beowulf he should recall what he heard tell of Sigemund's exploits and the tyranny of Heremod.

The excellence of the poem is in large measure due to the concord between the poet's mode of thinking and his mode of expression. An associative imagination works well in annexive syntax: each is the cause of the other's excellence. At the same time, he is good with the smaller units, the words and formulas which all Anglo-Saxon poets had to handle. Perhaps there is a deeper reason why Beowulf is satisfactory. The Christian poet chose to write of the Germanic past. His ideal king is Beowulf the monster-slayer, whom he compared, not with Daniel, but with Sigemund, and contrasted, not with Saul, but with Heremod.

His success lies in that choice. The elements of Old English poetic diction, the words and the traditional phrases feel at home in the world which they first celebrated in song.⁴³ Old English poetic diction is retrospective: it looks back to the civilisation that gave it shape and which in turn it helped to shape. Heusler⁴⁴ said rightly of the Germanisation in Old English verse of Genesis and of Exodus, of the legends of St Andrew and of St Helena's Invention of the Cross, of Christ even (of whom The Dream of the Rood (lines 39-41) reports ‘that the young hero armed himself, strong and fierce of mind he mounted the high gallows, brave in the sight of many’), that all this Germanisation was not taken seriously. But the language of his poetry is something a poet must feel serious about. The Germanisation of biblical narrative is a good device only where its spirit can be accepted as part of a fuller transformation. In the account of the Crucifixion in The Dream of the Rood the ideal raised by the Germanising language clashes with the idea of the Crucifixion.

There are good things in Old English verse, in the Elegies especially, but also in some of the saints' lives, the second part of Guthlac, for example; but it is difficult to see how the inapposite application of the Germanic battle-style to Christian themes could ever have called forth critical praise. The beginning of Andreas reads in rough translation:

Lo, we heard tell of twelve in far-off days under the stars, glorious heroes, the Lord's retainers. Their glory did not fail in warfare, whenever banners clashed … They were men famous on earth, eager leaders of nations, men active in the army, warriors renowned whenever in the field of assault buckler and hand defended the helmet on the plain of destiny.

Here is a poet who can do the big bow-wow like any man going. But he was writing of those twelve whom Christ ordained with the words, ‘Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves’ (Matthew 10:16).

The Beowulf poet avoided that mistake.

So far we have been less concerned with what the Beowulf poet says than with how he says it. The poem is obviously about the past. In Professor Tolkien's words:

When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.⁴⁵

The sadness of the poem lies in that. But there is glory in it too, such as is proper to a noble society presented as an ideal. Beowulf himself is of heroic stature. His strength and valour, made manifest in every exploit, his wisdom, his regard for the etiquette of an aristocratic society, his long victorious reign, the assurance of his speeches and the nobility of his intentions, all these are the proper ingredients of heroism; and that the heroic ideal embodied in Beowulf goes deeper still follows from his loyalty to Hygelac, his king, and to Heardred, Hygelac's son (2373-9), from his mildness, praised by his survivors (3180-2), and from the speech, modestly expressed, in which, surveying a world of deceit and murderous perfidy, he finds himself at the end of his days unperjured and guiltless of the blood of kinsmen (2736-43). He is the ideal ruler of a society held together by bonds of love and service. Though less fashionable now as a theme for literature, strength is emphasised in the poem and is gloried in. Beowulf brought strength to Hrothgar, the aged king of the Danes, bowed down with care for his people; and with strength he survived the proud Frisian raid in which Hygelac was slain; with strength also he kept the Swedes out of the land of the Geats.

It seems as if the poet's intended audience looked back to the nation's past (as adumbrated in the royal genealogies), and took pleasure in it. The poet gratifies his audience's idealising love of the Germanic past. The opening of the poem by means of its specific references to the ancestors of kings in England plays on an audience's memory of the past. There is in the poem a strong element of regret for a noble order which will never come back.

I have said elsewhere⁴⁶ that it seems to me that, though the poet presents the heroic ideal of his people lovingly, he presents it as ultimately unavailing and therefore not worth ambition. Perhaps there is a hint even that Beowulf, being a pagan too eager in the hour of his death for posthumous fame and the sight of gold—what else can pagans think about when they die?—will not, for all his virtues, be saved from everlasting damnation in hell. Once the modern reader feels that hint he ceases to read the poem simply as the Germanic heroic ideal presented elegiacally. What is implied is that the poet is aware of the fact that the pagan heroic ideal stands in conflict with the ascetic ideal of Christianity, as it was known in the English monasteries of the poet's time. By the standards of that higher ideal the heroic ideal is insufficient. The poet, however, nowhere states unambiguously (except at lines 175-88) that the pagan ideal he presents is insufficient, and some readers will be reluctant to read the poem in that way (especially if they first delete lines 175-88 as an interpolation).

We have no means of telling who the poet's first audience was: perhaps in some royal hall, where the lord and his men still delighted in the ancient nobility of the dynasty; or perhaps in some monastery to which a king retired, as we know King Sigeberht of East Anglia did when he gave up his throne in the second quarter of the seventh century, and as King Ethelred of Mercia did in 704, and Ceolwulf of Northumbria in 737, and Eadberht of Northumbria in 758. Kings like these proved by their abdication that they thought the pagan glory of pledging in the hall, of victory in the field, of treasure-giving and of loyalty to an earthly throne, a vain ideal. A poet might have written a poem like Beowulf for one of many courts, to teach a king wisdom, or for some monastery whose refectory contained a man descended from a line of Spear-Danes and not contemptuous of that ancestry. It is only a guess; but that is the kind of original audience that would have heard Beowulf with understanding.

Notes

1. I wish to thank Professors Randolph Quirk and Geoffrey Shepherd for reading this essay in typescript, and for their help and criticism.

2. Two pieces of evidence, neither of them conclusive, that Old English verse may have ceased to be fully understood as early as the twelfth century are Simeon of Durham's misunderstanding of Bede's Death Song (cf. M. Förster, Archiv 135 (1917), 282-4) and a possible misunderstanding of The Battle of Maldon in the Liber Eliensis (cf. Camden Society, 3rd Series, 92 (1962), 134f., footnotes). Cf. also K. Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf, 1965, pp. 70f.

3. ‘There are dragons born which are a hundred and fifty feet long. They are as big as great stone pillars. On account of the size of those dragons no man can easily travel into that land.’ EETS os 161, 59.

4. Quoted from Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf, p. 46. Professor Whitelock's discussion of the relationship between the Liber Monstrorum and Beowulf is of fundamental importance in this connection.

5. See the important discussion by Kenneth Sisam, ‘The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript’, in Studies, 1953.

6. In the Authorised Version the story is relegated to the Apocrypha, for excellent textual reasons.

7. Cf. W. W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition, p. 207; T. M. Gang, RES ns 3 (1952), 6ff.; K. Sisam, RES ns 9 (1958), 128-40, and also his The Structure of Beowulf, 1965, p. 25.

8. Anglia 36 (1912), 195.

9. Andreas und Elene, 1840, p. xxvii. For recent discussions of the beasts of battle, considered from widely different points of view, see F. P. Magoun, Jr., Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 56 (1955), 81-90, E. G. Stanley, Anglia 73 (1956), 442f., A Bonjour, PMLA 72 (1957), 563-73 (and Twelve Beowulf Papers, 1962, ch. X). For Grimm's discussion see E. G. Stanley, Notes and Queries 209 (1964), 244.

10. ‘Therefore many a morning-cold spear must be gripped, raised by the hand; not the sound of the harp shall awaken the warriors, but the black raven, eager in pursuit of doomed men, shall speak of many things, tell the eagle how he prospered at the feast when in competition with the wolf he despoiled the slain.’ R. Quirk (in Early English and Norse Studies Presented to Hugh Smith, 1963, p. 166) also selects this passage (3014-27) to demonstrate the excellence of Beowulf: ‘We see here the use of incongruous collocations to form a critical undercurrent of a kind which notably enriches Beowulf from time to time and which is prominent among the features making it a great poem.’

11. For a different view, see K. Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf, 1965, pp. 54-9.

12. Cf. A. F. C. Vilmar, Deutsche Altertümer im Heliand, etc., Marburg 1845, ‘Epische form’ (pp. 3ff. of the edition of 1862); and, more recently, F. P. Magoun, Jr., Spec. 28 (1953), 446-67. See also H. Schabram, ‘Andreas und Beowulf’, Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft 34 (1965), 201-18.

13. See G. V. Smithers, English and Germanic Studies 4 (1952), 67-75.

14. See p. 137 below for a translation.

15. See p. 109 above.

16. An excellent account of the diction of Beowulf is provided by A. G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf, 1959, ch. I. See also G. Storms in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, 1963, pp. 171-86, and J. Hoops, Beowulfstudien, 1932, pp. 20-24. Among earlier studies, O. Krackow, Die Nominalcomposita als Kunstmittel im altenglischen Epos, 1903, is still useful.

17. ‘At times men famed in battle made their bay horses gallop, run races where paths seemed suitable, known for their excellence. At times the king's retainer, a man filled with high rhetoric, with the memory of songs, who remembered a multitudinous wealth of ancient traditions, came upon other words (?) bound in truth (?). The man did then tell with art the exploit of Beowulf, set forth with happy skill a well-told tale, weaving words; he said all that he heard tell of Sigemund's deeds of valour, much of things unknown, the Wælsing's strife, distant exploits, of such things, hostility and crimes, as the sons of men knew little of, had Fitela not been with him whenever he wished to tell something of such a matter, uncle to nephew, friends in need as they were at all times in every enmity. They had laid low a numerous race of giants with their swords. No little glory came to Sigemund after his hour of death when bold in battle. …’

18. See A. Campbell's important ‘The Old English Epic Style’, in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien, 1962, especially in this connection pp. 19f.

19. See H. Kuhn, Beiträge 57 (1933), 1-109 (summarised in English by D. Slay, TPS 1952, 1-14).

20. Cf. E. Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik, 1893, §82; an example of an exceptionally long multisyllabic medial dip (given by Sievers) is sealde þam þe he wolde (Beowulf 3055).

21. Cf. J. Ries, Die Wortstellung im Beowulf, 1907, pp. 72-5, who rightly insists on the similarity of verse and prose in this respect. The difference lies in the greater regularity and, therefore, predictability of verse. For a discussion, not always convincing, of the style and syntax of Beowulf, cf. S. O. Andrew, Syntax and Style in Old English, 1940, and the same author's Postscript on Beowulf, 1948. The earlier book is especially good on co-ordinate clauses in Beowulf; ch. VIII (on asyndetic co-ordinate clauses) deals with an important aspect of the additive style of Beowulf, a characteristic uncommon elsewhere in Old English verse, as Andrew notes.

22. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, 1936, p. 31 (PBA 22 (1936), 273).

23. Tolkien, loc. cit.

24. See J. Hoops, Beowulfstudien, 1932, pp. 52-5.

25. ‘There was singing and revelry: the aged Scylding, a man of wide learning, told of far-off things; at times the man brave in battle touched his joyful, pleasure-giving harp of wood; at times he set forth a song true and sad; at times the magnanimous king told a wondrous story according to what is right; at other times the aged warrior, in the grip of years, did lament his youth, his strength in battle; his heart within him was moved whenever he, old in years, recalled a multitude of memories.’

26. But cf. the use of the phrase at line 366 (and elsewhere in verse), where the meaning is quite unspecifically ‘to converse’.

27. ‘The Poetry of Cædmon’, PBA 33 (1946).

28. Op. cit., 1862 ed., p. 5.

29. Spec. 28 (1953), 446-67.

30. ESts. 41 (1960), 5 (quoted by A. Bonjour, Twelve Beowulf Papers, 1962, p. 149). See also A. G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf, 1959, ch. I.

31. F. P. Magoun, Jr., ‘Bede's Story of Cædman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer’, Spec. 30 (1955), 49-63.

32. Op. cit., p. 447.

33. R. P. Creed, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 3 (1961), 98.

34. For a different view, cf. R. P. Creed, Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, 1963, pp. 44-52.

35. Cf. in this connection R. Quirk's important paper ‘Poetic language and Old English metre’ in Early English and Norse Studies Presented to Hugh Smith, 1963, pp. 150-71.

36. Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur des Mittelalters im Abendlande, III (1887), p. 3.

37. Sprachphilosophische Werke, ed. H. Steinthal, 1883, p. 225.

38. Among others, K. Sisam, Studies, p. 41 (reprinting RES 22 (1946), 266); D. Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf, 1951, pp. 58ff.; E. von Schaubert (in the Kommentar to her edition (1961), pp. 114f.) has a fuller list of critics who suspect a gap here.

39. By D. Whitelock, loc. cit.

40. For the view that the name Beowulf at lines 18 and 53 is probably an error for Beow see A. J. Bliss, The Metre of Beowulf, 1958, p. 58, as well as the editions.

41. For a comprehensive and fundamental account of the genealogies, see K. Sisam, PBA 39 (1953), 287-348.

42. Cf. K. Sisam, Studies, p. 136.

43. F. P. Magoun (in Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of A. C. Baugh, ed. by MacEdward Leach, 1961, pp. 280-2) suggests that the merits, which, he claims, all readers of Old English poetry see in The Battle of Maldon, are grounded on the harmony of subject matter and diction in that poem.

44. Die altgermanische Heldendichtung, 1926, p. 140:

45. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, pp. 35f. (277f.).

46. Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. by Stanley B. Greenfield, 1963, pp. 136-51.

Select Bibliography

Extensive bibliographies are to be found in Klaeber's edition of the poem and in Chambers's Beowulf: An Introduction. The following list of books and articles has therefore been kept very brief. Most of what is included must be regarded as indispensable for an understanding of the aspect of the poem under which it is listed.

The Manuscript

K. Malone, The Nowell Codex, EEMF XII, 1963.

J. Zupitza and N. Davis, Beowulf Reproduced in Facsimile, EETS 245 (1959).

Max Förster, ‘Die Beowulf-Handschrift’, Berichte der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 71 (1919).

K. Sisam, Studies, 61-96, 288-90.

Editions

F. Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. with supplements, 1951.

E. V. K. Dobbie, Beowulf and Judith, ASPR IV, New York 1953 (London 1954).

E. v. Schaubert, Beowulf, 17th ed., 1958-9.

C. L. Wrenn, Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, 2nd ed., 1958.

Translations

J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, new edition by C. L. Wrenn, with Prefatory Remarks by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1950.

E. Morgan, Beowulf: A Verse Translation, 1952 (paperback 1962).

Important books on the poem

R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, 3rd ed. with a supplement by C. L. Wrenn, 1959.

D. Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf, 1951.

A. G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf, 1959.

The Metre of Beowulf

E. Sievers, Beiträge 10 (1884), 209-314, 451-545.

J. C. Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf, 1942.

A. J. Bliss, The Metre of Beowulf, 2nd ed., 1962.

There is a useful Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. by L. E. Nicholson, 1963, which includes some various pieces of early and recent criticism; other pieces, including the full text of Margaret E. Goldsmith's ‘The Christian Perspective in Beowulf’ are to be found in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. by S. B. Greenfield, 1963. Stanley B. Greenfield's A Critical History of Old English Literature, New York 1965, surveys some older and more recent Beowulf scholarship in a chapter devoted to ‘Secular Heroic Poetry’. Kenneth Sisam's The Structure of Beowulf, Oxford 1965, is referred to in footnotes added in proof.

Abbreviations

Anglia Beiblatt: Beiblatt zur Anglia

Archiv: Archiv für des Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

ASPR: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, edited by G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie

Beiträge: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur

BM Add.: British Museum Additional Manuscript

BN: Bibliothèque Nationale

CCC: Corpus Christi College

CCCC: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Chadwick Mem. Sts.: The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (H. M. Chadwick Memorial Studies), edited by Sir Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins, Cambridge 1950

CL: Comparative Literature

EEMF: Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, edited by B. Colgrave, Kemp Malone and K. Schibsbye

EETS: Early English Text Society

EETS os: Early English Text Society, Original Series

EETS es: Early English Text Society, Extra Series

EHD: English Historical Documents, edited by D. C. Douglas

EHR: English Historical Review

EIC: Essays in Criticism

ESts.: English Studies

Grein-Wülker, Prosa: Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, edited by Ch. W. M. Grein, R. P. Wülker, et al.

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

JTS: Journal of Theological Studies

Ker, N. R., Catalogue: Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, by N. R. Ker, Oxford 1957

Mæ: Medium ævum

Med. & Ren. Sts.: Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Methuen's OE. Lib.: Methuen's Old English Library, edited by A. H. Smith and F. Norman

Migne, PL: J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina

Migne, PG: J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca

MLN: Modern Language Notes

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

MLR: Modern Language Review

MP: Modern Philology

PBA: Proceedings of the British Academy

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

Polity: Wulfstan's Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical (edited by K. Jost in Swiss Studies in English, vol. 47)

PQ: Philological Quarterly

Q & F: Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Culturgeschichte der germanischen Völker

RES: Review of English Studies

RES ns: Review of English Studies, New Series

Rolls Series: Rerum Britannicarum Medii ævi Scriptores or Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages

Sisam, K., Studies: Studies in the History of Old English Literature, by K. Sisam, Oxford 1953

SP: Studies in Philology

Spec.: Speculum

TPS: Transactions of the Philological Society

Trad.: Traditio

Wanley, Catalogue: Antiquæ Literaturæ Septentrionalis Liber Alter seu Humphredi Wanleii Librorum Vett. Septentrionalium, qui in Angliæ Bibliothecis extant … Catalogus Historico-Criticus, Oxford 1705

YSE: Yale Studies in English