Beowulf - The Tragedy of a Hero: A Reading [Hardcover]

Beowulf may be the most important work in Old English literature, but the poem takes place in Denmark and southern Sweden. And it is Denmark where the poem was first published, and where some of the earliest literary criticism of the work saw the light of day. All in all, Zeruneith's study is a stimulating apology for Old English poetry in the modern world A great strength of Zeruneith's study is its contextualizing Beowulf within three literary traditions, one a primary source and the other two, secondary: OE with references to a wide range of texts such as 'The Wife's Lament,' the Guthlac poems, 'The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulstan,' and Bede; Old Norse with references to a number of Eddic poems, Icelandic sagas, Snorri Sturluson, and Saxo Grammaticus; and classical with references to authors such as Aeschylus, Euripides, and Eumenides and texts such as the Odyssey. Zeruneith also refers to works by Tacitus, Boethius, St. Augustine, and Erich Neumann to help deepen our understanding of his compelling new reading of the poem. Robert E. Bjork, Professor of English at Arizona State University