Thinking about Beowulf Book

Bringing contemporary critical theory to bear on Beowulf, the author explores the literary originality of a poem often treated as oral and traditional. He grounds his work in three axioms about Beowulf. First, the poem cannot be dated with certainty and does not portray any historical society. Second, the epic, a long narrative poem of the heroic age, is not necessarily a traditional oral genre. And third, there is no reason to believe that Beowulf was anything more than a fictitious hero invented by the poet. These are not researches into Beowulf in the usual sense. Rather, they are exercises in thinking about the poem. Each chapter introduces elementary issues in Anglo-Saxon history and culture, then explores their relations to the text and to the reader.