The Art of Beowulf

During the twenty years that have passed since the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's famous lecture, "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics" interest in "Beowulf" as a work of art has increased gratifyingly, and many fine papers have made distinguished contributions to our understanding of the poem as poetry and as heroic narrative. It is scarcely too much to say that Tolkien has given a new and significant direction to literary scholarship. Much more, however, remains to be done: we have still no systematic and sensitive appraisal of the poem later than Walter Morris Hart's "Ballad and Epic", no thorough examination of the poet's gifts and powers, of the effects for which he strove and the means he used to achieve them. More than enough remains to occupy a generation of scholars. It is my hope that this book may serve as a kind of prolegomenon to such study. It makes no claim to completeness or finality; it contributes only the convictions and impressions which have been borne in upon me in the course of forty years of study of the poem. I have tried to supply sufficient evidence to support my conviction that "Beowulf" is the work of a great artist, a work carefully planned and organized, excellent in form and structure, and composed with a sense of style unique in the poet's age. It will appear that I regard the work as composed in writing, and the author as trained in the art of the scop and educated as a cleric. In him the best of pagan antiquity and of the Christian culture of his time had fused; and we have in his work an achievement unequaled in English poetry before Chaucer.