Critic: Alvin A. Lee

Source: The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry, Yale University Press, 1972, pp. 171-223

Criticism about: Anonymous (?-)

[Lee is a Canadian scholar who specializes in Old English poetry. In the following excerpt, he explains the thematic importance of the mythic elements in four major symbolic episodes in Beowulf.]

Beowulf is a poem about hell's possession of middle-earth. Within its overall tragic structure, the joys of the golden dryht ["noble lord"] and the actions of good kings and heroes are presented as capable of a splendid but precarious realization; the dominant vision, however, is of the defeat of man in the kingdoms of this world by the powers of darkness. (p. 171)

The Beowulf poet takes a tale of heroic action ... and subjects it to the kind of brooding, deliberative treatment illustrated in [Old English] elegiac lyrics. The result is a romance set inside a tragedy -- perhaps we could call it a "tragic romance" or even an "elegiac tragedy" -- serving the same Christian view of the fleeting nature of all man's earthly joys that we see throughout [Old English poetry]. But Beowulf, because of its sustained fusion of the elements of romance and tragedy, is different. Where the other poems either leave these two narrative structures, romance and tragedy, separate or with their interconnections only briefly traced (the emphasis normally being on the transcendental reality of heaven). Beowulf submits the world of the golden dryht of middle-earth to the prolonged reflections of a mind and sensibility apparently deeply attracted to that world but acutely aware of its doomed nature. (p. 172)

Beowulf is not about an individual as such but about a man of archetypal proportions, whose significance, in the broadest and deepest sense, is social. The poem is an imaginative vision of two kinds of human society, one symbolized by the gold-hall and banqueting and characterized by generosity, loyalty, and love, the other by monsters of darkness and bloodshed who prey on the ordered, light-filled world man desires and clings to. Despite the lyric overtones to the poet's presentation of his theme (that brooding, melancholy reflectiveness that every reader recognizes), Beowulf is not about a complex, individual character whose interior mental processes lead plausibly to certain actions and relations with other people. Beowulf does not have an ego, despite his boasting, and certainly has no discernible id; he is publicly conceived, all superego and controlled by the divine favor he bears. We do not know why, psychologically, Unferth behaves so oddly or what Hrothulf is thinking at any point. We learn a little more about what goes on in the mind of Hrothgar or Wealhtheow or the aged Beowulf (late in the poem) but only in terms of their functions in relation to God and to the kindred and dryht in whose social fabric their lives have meaning. They are all functionaries playing out their roles as long as wyrd ["destiny"] permits, not images of real people but exemplars of human types. (p. 173)

It is generally recognized, by Klaeber, for instance, that Beowulf is not, in any very consistent way, lineal in its organization. What is more, it gives little evidence of a concern on the part of the poet for plausible or realistic ordering of events according to a causal sequence. Rather, one event is associated with another -- past, present, or future -- because of symbolic or thematic appropriateness. The narrative is discontinuous; it does not in any representational way point out for each phenomenon mentioned its determining agents or antecedents. In fact many things happen in Beowulf, and in other Old English poems, that do not have causes in any phenomenal sense. Heaven and hell ... are too much involved. In more purely critical terms, to use Tolkien's expression, Beowulf is a product of "the mythical mode of imagination." This means that it works in implicitness of connections, in simultaneity of association, in narrative discontinuity. The images all point to the main ideas and the ideas are not time bound, not determined by orderly chronology. This kind of imagining makes unavoidable the use of metaphor, which means that the modern interpreter of Beowulf must be sensitive to poetic identities cunningly suggested in the associative imagery but not spelled out for the logical, skeptical mind. It means also, however, that he must not force identifications in ways uncongenial to the connections built up by the language of Beowulf itself or in a manner unsupported by the conventional metaphors observable in other Old English poems. (p. 174)

[One] can recognize four major myths or symbolic episodes [in Beowulf], each of which is concentrated at appropriate points in the narrative but also extends its effect, with varying emphases, throughout the whole poem. In the emergence of the Scylding dynasty, climaxed by the construction of Heorot, we have a cosmogonic myth explicitly connected by the poet with the Christian biblical account of the origins of the created world. This in turn is followed by the myth of the Fall and the beginnings of fratricide and crime, as the Grendel kin of the race of Cain begin to lay waste Hrothgar's hall Next comes the account of the advent of the hero and the myth of the heroic redeemer, and finally as the poem moves into its decisively tragic phase, we have the myth of the hero's death and the return to chaos.

Beowulf begins with a description of a lordless people and ends with another lordless people; the overall tonality is elegiac, and one of the major symbols of the poem's beginning, as of its conclusion, is the funeral of a great king. It is as if the poet had composed his work in the manner of a symbolist poem: starting with the effect he wanted, he then backtracked to the point from which we must begin to get that effect. From the dirgelike lament and ritualistic movements of Scyld's followers in the midst of the dynastic vision that introduces the poem, the Anglo-Saxon artist fills out and intensifies his pattern. At the same time, however, the aesthetic and thematic balance between the funerals of Scyld and Beowulf provides a very important contrast: Scyld's funeral is followed by an augmenting of the powers of his dynasty, but Beowulf's, so we are led to believe, is to be succeeded by social and political disintegration for the Geats. (pp. 177-78)

The motifs involved in [the description of the Scyldings in the beginning of the poem] are those of the golden dryht, the continual interchange of treasures, services, and protection being the very lifeblood of ... society. This interchange takes place vertically in the imaginative space of the poem, as well as horizontally, since it is God, the "Prince of life" (16) and "Ruler of glory" (17), who sends splendid lords one by one to show generosity and protection to the Scyldings.

Hrothgar, one of the three sons of the patriarchal Healfdane, is given success and honor in war, so that his retainers follow him eagerly and his troop prospers. At the zenith of his glory (64 ff.), Hrothgar decides to have built a might mead-hall, such as the sons of men have never heard of before, as a place for feasting and the giving of gifts. With the help of many peoples throughout middle-earth, "the greatest of halls" (78) towers up "high and horn-gabled" (82). Hrothgar does not forget his promises but puts the marvelous building into use as a place of communal joy where heroes drink mead while listening to the sound of the harp and to the voice of a scope singing about God's great original gift to men, the whole created world.

The imagery of the primordial Creation [is present here]: the wlitebeorhtne wang (93, plain radiantly beautiful) surrounded by water, the sun and the moon as lights for land dwellers, the branches and leaves ornamenting the regions of the earth, and all living creatures. In this account of the building and initiation of Heorot, the sense of ritual repetition by man of the work of heaven is, to me, unmistakable. The implication seems to be that the construction of the gold-hall, whose light is to shine over many lands, is a hierophantic act, a manifestation of the sacred in the world of men, metaphorically identifiable with the Creation of the world itself. For the Old English than the gift-throne is the center of the world; apart from it, he "wanders" in a life devoid of focus and meaning. The hall, the throne, and the good king can all be seen as images of the divine power that gives protection and significance to human life. Heorot is a sacred enclosure, thought of as towering upward, to ensure communication with the heavenly gift-throne and the Prince of life. It is one of several examples in Old English poems of halls built by God's champions, like those of the patriarchal princes in Genesis, for example, whose archetype is the celestial dryht that endures in oternum ["eternally"]. Heorot, like the others, is paradisal in symbolic import. Hrothgar, whose name appears to mean "glory spear" or "spear of triumph" or possibly "spear of joy", is, like the heavenly Dryhten, a lord of victories. As with God's Creation in Genesis so here, Hrothgar's mighty creation comes after triumph over the chaos of internecine war. Again as in heaven in numerous Old English poems (for example, The Dream of the Rood, 139-141), the condition of dream (joy) is symbolized by banqueting in the hall. Like Adam and Eve in the guesthall of Eden, the Danes, so the poet tells us, immediately after the Song of Creation, "lived in joy, blessed" ("Swa ða drihtguman dreamum lifdon / eadiglice ...," 99-100a). Still innocent of the feond on helle (fiend, or enemy in hell) who lurks without, they slept after the banquet given by their lord, not knowing "sorrow, the misery of men" ("Fand þa ðar inne aþelinga gedriht / swefan after symble: sorge ne cyðon, / wonsceaft wera").

The name Heorot can be explained not only in terms of naturalistic imagery to do with stag antlers on the gables of the hall, or even as a symbol of royalty like that on the Sutton Hoo standard, but also in terms of scriptural association. If we recall the psalmist's use (Ps. 42) of the analogy of the hart or stag thirsting for healing streams and the human soul in its desire for God, and if we remember that we are told later in Beowulf by the king of Heorot that the "hart strong in his antlers" will give up his life rather than enter the hellish mere (1368-1372), the possibility emerges that Hrothgar's mighty hall is imagined primarily as the earthly dwelling place of the human soul, both communal and individual. Where the mere, the poem's antithetical image for Heorot, is loathsome and terrible and infested with monsters, Heorot is described as "the most famous of buildings under heaven" (309-310a), "the bright dwelling of brave men." As a communal symbol of an ideal earthly dryht, the newly created hall is in paradisal harmony with heaven. The question of whether Hrothgar's hall in the midst of the conventional "plain" (225) has an individual reference as well as a communal one may be partially answered by [comparing the] use of the ideal-hall motif in Guthlac A (742). There, when the saint has triumphed in war over his enemies, his barrow, the dwelling of his newly perfected soul, is a sele niwe (new hall, dwelling) standing in the protection of God in the midst of a "victory plain," a very succinct correlation of the two major metaphors for Paradise in the Old English poetic mythology.

But Heorot is a fated image, existing in a double aspect. Even at the moment of its first towering upward, the poet speaks of the "fierce heat and hostile flame" that wait for it and of the "sword-hate" between son-in-law and father-in-law that will spring up because of bitter enmity (82b-85). So also, the description of the Danes living in a state of blessedness is interrupted by the first mention of Grendel and the race of Cain (99 ff.). Heorot and the world of the golden dryht exist as a splendid ideal, as wlitige (beautiful, fair), throughout the poem, but as earthly images they are also doomed, in the mind of a Christian poet, to become unclone or polluted and thus to fall into the necessity of being "cleansed."

In the poet's use of the myth of the Fall and the origin of fratricide, he often specifically connects the Grendel kin with hell, which should make it easy to recognize the metaphorical structure barely concealed beneath the relatively slight surface realism of the poem. On one level of meaning, Beowulf can best be understood as a reworking of the same war between heaven and hell that emerges in its undisplaced mythical form in Christ and Satan and other poems. As in the Christian mythology, where demonic powers are assumed to have taken possession of the world shortly after the Creation, so in Beowulf a monster comes out of the mere and possesses the poem's imago mundi ["world picture"], Heorot. This necessitates a war between a heaven-sent champion and the monster, a war in which the champion's victory is a "cleansing" and a preliminary defeat of the feond ["fiend"] on the earthly level, as in Christ's victory on the rood. But, again as in the Christian story, the deliverer's victory in the world must be extended and consolidated by a further triumphant battle in the very depths from which the demonic attacks have come. Whether the hell referred to in Beowulf is from Teutonic myth or from Christian myth or, more plausibly, from a mixture of both does not alter the fact that the images of bondage, darkness, endless pain, joyless exile, fire, ice, wind, storm, and enmity against mankind, images associated with the monsters and their haunts, are the same ones found over and over again in the Old English poetic accounts of man apart from God. Nor does the fact that Grendel and his mother seem in some ways to be trolls from a different legendary background diminish the connotations they draw from Christian symbolism; it means only that they have this additional extension, as compared with a less poetically complex demon like the one tormenting Cynewulf's Juliana. (pp. 178-82)

Perhaps most important of all Grendel's demonic connotations is his association with Cain. Early in the poem when Grendel is first named and connected with the archetypal fratricide, the reader is confronted with a pattern highly suggestive in its possibilities for adaptation to tales of bloodthirsty feuding in Germanic society. The poet of Maxims I tells how, after the earth swallowed Abel's blood, Cain's criminal hatred did not die out in the world but spread, with ever-increasing malice, until it was known to all peoples. Men throughout the earth became busy with the "strife of weapons" and devised the hostile sword, so that shields, spears, swords, and helmets have ever since had to be ready for conflict. By his murderous action, the gnomic poet seems to be saying, Cain set the pattern in which all men are caught. This traditional view of Cain and Abel, elaborated at length in Book 15 of Augustine's De civitate Dei -- in terms of the unending conflict throughout history of the society of carnal man, or Cain, and the society of the elect, or Abel -- is also given a poetic use in Genesis A, apparently in an attempt to show the special significance for the poet's own period in history of fratricide and conflict among mankind. All strife and human misery are depicted metaphorically as the branches of the demonic tree which sprang up from Abel's spilled blood. The crime of Cain is linked with the guilt of Eve, and both are associated with wyrd, indicating that it is only in the fallen world that "cruelly destructive fate" holds sway. Cain's exile, depicted in the same formula as Adam's exile earlier, leads inevitably to an intensified enmity between Cain's descendants and God, this warfare culminating finally in the Deluge. (pp. 184-85)

There can be no tragedy in literature without a sense of glory or happiness or fulfilled ambition potentially within human grasp, a glory shown finally not to be obtainable, or, if it is obtained temporarily, not capable of being preserved. As the Beowulf poet brings his hero to work on behalf of Heorot in its ideal aspect, he demonstrates his realization of this fact of tragedy. His particular poetic version of the myth of the heroic redeemer has an overall tragic shape, as it combines with the myth of Fall and fratricide, but the tragic effect is possible only because Heorot in its ideal form remains as an image of what once was and what still might be, however precariously, if pride, envy, avarice, and murder could be controlled. It is to the restoration and realization of this potential Paradise -- what I have been calling the golden dryht of middle-earth -- that Beowulf bends his efforts in Part 1 of the poem. (pp. 196-97)

Beowulf's advent into the ruined dryhtsele ["retainer's hall"], as Hrothgar immediately perceives, is through the grace of God (381 ff.). As Hrothgar also knows, it is only God who "can easily restrain the mad destroyer from his deeds" (478b-479). It is as if the divine favor forfeited when Heorot fell, twelve years before, is now about to be restored. Hrothgar is an aged Adam waiting for grace and deliverance, and Wealhtheow, trying to provide for her sons a life free of crime and bloodshed, is a latter-day Germanic Eve trying to repair the ravages begun at the fateful banquet long ago in the archetypal guest-hall of Eden. In line with his elegiac rather than homiletic theme, however, the poet is careful not to censure Hrothgar and Wealhtheow but to emphasize the fateful nature of the conflict in which they are caught and to show them ready and eager to receive God's new and necessary gift to them, in the form of the hero's deeds. The underplaying of a theme of guilt in the handling of Hrothgar and Wealhtheow is analogous to the treatment of the Fall of man in Genesis B.... Beowulf, as the deliverer of the ruined dryht of the Scylding Adam is, by symbolic association, the second Adam who now comes to do battle on behalf of those who have fallen into the clutches of the fiend.

In the account of the hero's journey from Geatland, his arrival in Denmark, and his subsequent actions in restoring Hrothgar's kingdom, we see once again how in Old English poetry the myth of heroic deliverance or redemption exploits the myth of Creation for much of its imaginative significance. (p. 198)

Not since the poet has described the Song of Creation a hundred lines earlier has there been this sense of exuberant and purposive action. It is as if the heavy sense of time as duration -- fela missera, singale soce (many half-years, continual conflict) -- into which Heorot has been plunged, is now in the process of being abolished in favor of an earlier sacred time when divine favor for Denmark was directly evident. It is also as if the experience of time only as duration brings the peril of forgetting what is fundamental, that existence itself is given by God, with the result that the Danes who now do not know the true God have fallen into devil worship. One is reminded, too, by the account of this sea voyage, of the importance in Old English poetry of the boat as a symbol of the way heroic man takes part in reenacting the divine acts of Creation and redemption. (p. 199)

Marked by God's wrath (711) and "deprived of joys" (721), Grendel is defeated by heaven's champion in a ferocious wrestling match, after which, mortally wounded and singing a song of defeat, he goes, the "prisoner of hell" (788), to seek the company of devils (808). Rejoicing in his night's work (827), the hero places the hand, arm, and shoulder of this rebel against God beneath the vaulted roof of the "cleansed" (825) hall. The next day the "mar-peace" Unferth lapses into silence, the battered Heorot is redecorated by many willing hands, gold tapestries are hung, banqueting is resumed, and again a cup is passed, giving a markedly sacramental sense of unity in one socially cohesive body. (p. 201)

With the defeat of Grendel, the Cain spirit is only temporarily quelled. Grendel's mother (1251 ff.), in strict adherence to the destructive principles of blood-feuding, rises out of the mere to wreak grisly vengeance on Heorot, taking back to the underwater hall with her the head of Æschere and the hand of Grendel. Plunged again into profound gloom, Hrothgar describes (1345 ff.) to Beowulf what is known of the mere, that source of apparently unending hostility to his world of Heorot. At this point in the poem the myth of heroic deliverance, so far confined to the cleansing of middle-earth, is expanded to include the hellish source of evil itself, and the hero realizes that he must go "beneath the headlands" (1360) to eradicate the still-active demonic powers. Grendel's mere, although only a few miles from Heorot (1361-1362), is the opposite pole from Heorot in the poem's imaginative space. Like the splendid hall, it is primarily an image of this world, a complex symbol of all those things in nature and in human society that human desire most rejects set against the ideal aspirations embodied in the gold-hall. But also like Heorot, indeed like most images of Old English poetry, the wider significance or supernatural reference of the mere exists on the level of myth or symbolic metaphor. Unlike Heorot, however, which at certain points is the paradisal guest-hall and at others the ruined hall of the fallen world, the mere as a poetic image has no doubleness or ambivalence in its meaning. In its entirety it is demonic.

The overall tragic vision in Beowulf -- of a "fleeting" world caught in time as duration, in which human longings to return to the paradisal guest-hall are constantly frustrated -- is clear. Similarly, the connections of the monster-infested world in Beowulf with the conventional Old English poetic vision of the ruined or fallen world are numerous. The mere is the poem's most complete concentration of fallen-world motifs as they merge, ostensibly on the level of middle-earth, with the imagery of hell. In several ways the underwater reced (building) or niðsele (hostile hall), inhabited by the healðegn (hall-thane) Grendel and his mother, is a grotesque parody of Heorot in its ideal aspect. Its location beneath the headlands and turbid waters, rather than in the midst of the "plain," its demonic light antithetical to the radiance of the gold-hall, its hoarded treasure (1557, 1613), its cannibalistic banqueting, its weird kinship loyalties, its total absence of dream, and its inveterate hostility to the harp music and loyalties of the fraternal dryht -- in all these things it is a perversion of Heorot. The precise extent to which its character as a demonic dryht envelops Heorot -- the making dark of the hall, the prevention of gift dispensing, banqueting, and music, and the symbolically implicit undermining of Hrothgar's sibbegedriht (387, 729, peaceful troop, band of kinsmen) by the spirit of Cain through the persons of Unferth and Hrothulf -- is the measure of the fall or ruin of Hrothgar's world. The climactic detail of the mere's conquest of Heorot is the devil worship, the honoring by the Danes of those same demonic powers that are destroying them (175 ff.).

In terms of nature imagery, the mere, in a detailed way, is a perversion of the ideal order of Creation. Located out in the fens or moors beyond the plain surrounding the hall, it is a mist-shrouded wilderness (103-104, 162, 450, 710, 764, 820, 1265, 1348, 1405). We are told in Christ and Satan and in Guthlac A and B that some demons live in remote places of middle-earth and from there launch their attacks on men; this is precisely what the Grendel kin do. Encircling rocks, frost-covered trees, and the twisted roots of a "joyless wood" show the mere's wastel and setting to be the direct antithesis of the sunny, blossoming groves of the earthly Paradise described in detail in The Phoenix and more briefly in other poems. The motif of chaotic, treacherous water, beside which the "hart strong in its horns" (1369) will die rather than plunge in, connects with the Physiologus idea of the deaðsele (death-hall) of damnation being located at the bottom of the treacherous whale's domain, that hall of the dryht of hell to which Eleusius' dryht is plunged in Juliana. (pp. 202-05)

The Beowulf poet's sense of the fleeting or mutable character of everything in middle-earth inevitably extends in Part 2 to the person of the hero. In Part 1, as a figure of vitality and superabundance, as the heroic vehicle of divine grace, Beowulf was enabled to abolish that destructive time as duration into which Heorot -- this poem's main imago mundi --had fallen and to restore the hall to its original freshness and radiance: "the hall rose high above him, vaulted and shining with gold; inside, the guest slept..." (1799b-1800). The twelve years of bondage to Grendel were in a sense canceled in favor of that sacred time contemporary with Creation, and Hrothgar appropriately gave twelve symbolic treasures to his deliverer at the end of the twelve years of misery. Now in Part 2, as the central organization of images takes on the shape of the myth of the hero's death and the return to chaos, we find that time and yldo (age) have worn the hero and his kingdom. Hrothgar was described by Beowulf as "a peerless king, altogether blameless" (1885b-1886a), defeated only because of that age which toward the end of his fifty-year reign took from him the joys of power. Now Beowulf, also an exemplary king, is first threatened and then destroyed by a fifty-foot serpent, also at the end of a fifty-year reign. The tragedy of Hrothgar's life, only temporarily relieved by Beowulf's deeds, has now become the hero's own, but no heaven-sent champion appears who can act effectively on his behalf.

There is no escape from the ruins of time in this elegiac tragedy, for the basis of the tragic vision is being in time. Even as we move through the poem's romance, through its myths of creation and heroic deliverance, we are constantly made aware that death and human defeat in middle-earth are what give tragic shape and form to the lives of the Scyldings. It is death that defines the life of Scyld, of Beow, of Heorogar, and, finally, of Hrothgar. Now, in the account of the end of Beowulf's londagas (loan-days, fleeting days), again it is death that defines the shape of the heroic life. Throughout Part 2 the poet carefully establishes a sense of imminent and nearly total disaster, a disaster partly realized by the end of the action. But the catastrophe described is not apocalyptic, as in the Old English Doomsday poems. In these latter, time as duration is brought to an end, history is abolished, and what is pure and faithful within God's Creation is taken back into eternity. But Beowulf does not show an end of the world, a Ragnarok or Doomsday. It shows the defeat of heroic effort in the world of time. At the very end of the narrative the Geats are still struggling against time; they build a great barrow on the headland called Hronesnos (the Headland of the Whale) that will keep alive for other seafarers the memory of their king. Within the barrow lie an ancient, useless treasure and the ashes of the hero. Outside, twelve horsemen, warriors bold in battle, sons of chieftains, circle around, uttering an ancient lament. Beowulf has died, haunted by the memory of those marvelous times when he displayed in almost godlike manner his greatest powers; Hrothgar earlier was forced to admit defeat at the hands of Grendel but also looked back nostalgically, in geardagum (in former days), to a time when he subdued all enemies of the Danes and doled out treasures in almost godlike manner. It is fundamental to the elegiac nature of the poem that the acts of strength, of superabundance, and of creativity are constantly pushed back into that legendary earlier and better time indicated by the hoary phrase in geardagum. (pp. 211-12)

The point of time in Geatish history at which Beowulf dies signals an imminent end for the Geats as a unified dryht society. It is true that Beowulf leaves behind him Wiglaf as the endelaf (last remnant) of his people, placing the young hero in somewhat the same position as that of the lone survivor in the elegy, but the social disintegration is now so far advanced that there is, so far as we are told in the poem, little hope for Geatland in the fact that Wiglaf remains. (p. 213)

[Beowulf], like Heorot, becomes simply a memory. The close alignment of aged hero and dragon in Part 2 is the poem's decisive reminder that in the tragic vision even the most heroic form, perhaps most especially the heroic form, is defeated by the elemental facts of existence in time. The world that remains after Beowulf has died contains two sorts of people, cowards and outlaws, on the one hand, and those faithful to dryht loyalties (Wiglaf, the weeping woman, and the circling horsemen), on the other. By this point we have been shown the impact of heroic energy on the world of the fallen dryht and have been shown also that in such a world it is heroic energy that is destroyed while the fallen creation continues in time. The golden dryht of middle-earth and the youthful Beowulf are poetic images of the kind of joy and reality the holeð ["warriors"] want, but the irony of the tragic vision decrees that life is not shaped according to human desires. The poet, with the quiet assurance of great artistry, follows his account of the roaring flames and raging winds of Beowulf's cremation with a description of the disposal of physical things: the hero's ashes are sealed in a great barrow; the rings, necklaces, and armor of the ancient treasure are returned to the earth, hidden again and useless to men. Twelve riders circle the mound, ritually containing the grief of the Geats: they eulogize the greatness and glory of their dead king, and they mourn his passing. The closing scene expresses a pronounced tragic sense of confinement, of the putting into dark places of all that is splendid in this world. It shows the stilling of heroic energy. (p. 223)

Source:  Alvin A. Lee, "Heorot and the Guest-Hall of Eden: Symbolic Metaphor and the Design of Beowulf," in his The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry, Yale University Press, 1972, pp. 171-223.

Source Database:  Literature Resource Center