Beowulf

Description

Any text, prose or poetry, carries much more information within it than its creator realized or intended. What was implicit knowledge for the poet and his Anglo-Saxon audience may need to be made explicit for us, and the possibility that one's judgements are ethnocentric has always to be reckoned with. Just the same, many of the poet's beliefs and prejudices are downright familiar, and others respond to analysis. The essential caveat is that the framework within which judgements are made needs to be set up before fine literary details are filled in. Good readers have probably always done this, consciously or unconsciously; bad readers have approached the poem already burdened with their own hypothetical 'Scyldingids'. 1. INTRODUCTION 7 2. THE WORLD OF THE POEM 12 Words and meaning 12 Characters and emotions 15 Money, worth, prestige 18 Swords, halls, and symbols 21 Allusion and reality 24 3. THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM 28 Balance and interlace 28 The implications of digression 29 The ironic image 34 Performatives and perceptions 38 The heathens and the monsters 41 4. POETRY AND ITS FUNCTIONS 45 Compounds, variations, formulas 45 Fragmentation and control 48 Stasis, pleonasm, cumulation 51 The gnomic voice 55 5. AFTERWORD 59 FURTHER READING 62 INDEX 63