The Interpretation of Old English Poems

This book is an effort to produce a 'handbook' for Old English critics and students, to indicate procedures that offer, in my judgment, the best hope for valid insights into the meaning of Old English poems. To this end it is both prescriptive and proscriptive, suggestive rather than definitive. Its strengths will have to be judged by its readers; its weaknesses are all too apparent to its author, and the epigraph is not without a certain ironic application to his own critical attempts. The interpretation of Old English poems — not poetry. One of my basic tenets is that some of the main streams of modern Old English criticism tend to detract from the special nature, the unique identity, of particular poems. This is not to deny a poem’s participation in the community and commonality of its Anglo-Saxon poetical and cultural heritage, but rather to draw attention, in crucial matters of interpretation, small and large, to the convergence of various kinds of poetic and extra-poetic elements in the immediate text, and to make that text speak to us across the years with the dignity and self-assurance of its individuality.