The Audience of "Beowulf"

The three lectures that follow were delivered at the invitation of the University of London in the Senate House in January and February 1950. They make no claim to be an exhaustive study of "Beowulf", but merely consider some of its problems from a particular approach. This has necessitated the repeating of much that has often been said before, and no attempt is made to refer to previous writers on matters which are now universally accepted, for this could hardly have been done without writing much of the history of "Beowulf" scholarship in footnote form. In order to keep the footnotes within reasonable bounds I have confined them to references to original authorities, or to studies on the topics with which I have been specifically concerned.