Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (review)

This revised paperback edition of Orchard's erudite, idiosyncratic and influential 1995 study of the Beowulf-manuscript is most welcome, not least because it makes a landmark study available to a wider audience. This corrected collection of six studies aims to 'consider the motivation and background to the compilation of the Beowulf-manuscript' (p. ix) through a wide-ranging consideration of shared themes, diction, and narrative structure of the texts contained in the Beowulf-manuscript: St Christopher; The Wonders of the East; The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle; Judith; and Beowulf.

The book's focus on the codex as a conceptually coherent whole is still a highly valid and useful contribution to the study of Beowulf, codicology, and monsters. Orchard's insistence that the centrality of the monstrous connects the items in this manuscript is supported by consideration of associated texts, the Liber monstrorum and the Old Norse Grettis saga. Orchard argues for a linking thread in the Beowulf-manuscript of 'how prodigious pride can make monsters of men' (p. 171). His nuanced study of the construction of the monstrous in the culture in which the manuscript was assembled takes account of Germanic, classical and scriptural influences, artfully disentangling its complex interconnections and resonances.

The publication of a revised edition is timely in view of the vigorous research thread of the monstrous element in medieval literary cultures since the publication of the original edition (e.g., T. S. Jones and D.A. Sprunger, eds, Marvels, Monsters and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations [Kalamazoo, 2002]; and K. E. Olsen and L. A. Houwen, eds, Monsters and the Monstrous in Medieval Northwest Europe [Leuven, 2001]). It is to be regretted, though, that Orchard has not engaged with material published since the publication of his study in an effort to update the book. The bibliography appears unchanged, but recent electronic research tools and the author's own Critical Companion to Beowulf are mentioned in the brief 'Preface to the Revised Edition'.

This revised edition is substantially identical to the original edition (Brewer, Cambridge). Like its predecessor, half this book is devoted to editions and translations of texts and sources in Old English and Latin. The revisions are minor, confined to little errors rather than any sort of overhaul. Pagination and the index, like the bibliography, appear to be unchanged. The revisions are so slight that libraries might not be inclined to add this edition to their collections, though the publication of a paperback version of this study allows it a greater chance of finding a well-deserved place on our own shelves.