Thinking about Beowulf (review)

150 Reviews metre is rather perfunctory: the impressionistic treatment of postponed alliteration in certain off-verses in Rigspula and Volundarkvida lacks foundation in a comparison with kindred phenomena in Old English verse. The excursus on Vlundr and Cardillac is a definite excrescence. Finally comes a detailed set of notes on individual words and lines. These in themselves will constitute an education in comparative philology, mythology and literature, and much else, for anyone w h o reads them through. It would be impossible to list the many insights and resolutions of problems. I shall merely permit myself a few supplementary suggestions. The phrase 'berr ser i fjoBrum' (used of the corpse-bearing dragon in Voluspd 62) has a near counterpart in Exeter Book Riddle 27 ('mec wcegon/ fe3re'). The phrase 'hugdi at o r m u m ' in Rigspula v.28 could be compared with Byrhtno3's injunction to 'hycgan to handum' in The Battle of Maldon. Transposition of helmingar might explain the odd narrative sequence in Rigspula v.40. Dronke ignores the clear attestation of 'Hli3skjalf in Hallfre3r's lausavisa 6 (405). These, however, are minor points. The book ends with a full bibliography but lacks an index. Altogether, this is a brilliant discussion of thefiveprincipal poems. Dronke eloquently conveys their literary and mythological qualities, with a perhaps unrivalled empathy for their unfolding logic. Fittingly for such an important contribution, the production values in this book are uniformly excellent. The virtual absence of misprints and other micro-scale errors represents a triumph over extraordinarily recalcitrant materials. A m o n g the few blemishes I noticed are the apparent omission of a word before 'hung' (p. 56) and the substitution of 'traditional' for 'tradition' (120), 'amended' for 'emended' (p. 214), 'net' for 'neat' (p. 222), 'ellision' for 'elision' (p. 318), 'allliteration' for 'alliteration' (p. 296), longeur for longueur (p. 309), and Ni3adr for Ni3udr (p. 313). I look forward to the appearance of the final two volumes in this series. Russell Poole School of English and Media Studies Massey University Earl, James, W., Thinking about Beowulf, Stanford, Stanford University Pres 1994; paper; pp. x, 200; R.R.P. AUS$21.95. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press] This new edition of a text originally issued in 1994 is welcome as making widely available a volume which has brought contemporary critical theory to bear on Beowulf. In its present form the book contains six chapters and several 'introductions', but much of it had appeared earlier in some eight discrete papers, issued over some fifteen years, in such journals as PML4, Thought and Psychiatry. Each of the present chapters is concerned to explore Reviews 151 large issues of 'Anglo-Saxon history and culture' (p. viii), for 'the wider intellectual audience . . . [not just] Anglo-Saxonists, [but] . . . anthropologists, intellectual historians, psychoanalysts, students and other humanists' (p. ix). As the apposite title indicates, what is offered is a series of intellectual exercises in thinking about the poem, and not just in the traditional philological or historical fashion. Thus Earl—who knows well, and refers succinctly to, all the classic English-language Beowulfcritics, H. M . Chadwick, R. W. Chambers, E. V. K. Dobbie, J. R. R. Tolkien, Bruce Mitchell, H. Chickering, or T. A. Shippey—does not hesitate to bring to bear on the epic the ideas of Dumezil, De Vries, Foucault, Eco, Lacan, Ricoeur and other leaders of (post-) modern thought, as well as of a battery of Homeric scholars of the last fifty years and more. The resultant melange thus more than achieves its essential purpose of making availablefreshperspectives, not least because of its pervasive tone of eminently sensible good talk and of a North American freshness perhaps lost in southern England. As the last remarks indicate, Earl is concerned to speak to a millenial generation whose thought, he stresses, has m a n y of the ambiguous responses—to Christian religion, the hereafter, kinship and 'the necessity of evil'—which were in the minds of the poem's original audience, whenever and wherever they were. As he states at the outset, Earl is concerned with the (current) assumptions or idealisations brought to the text, and to expose i t to 'this modern...