Abstract
Many Old English personal names contain heroic elements—terms for warfare, weapons, and ferocious animals—while the same heroic diction features prominently in Old English poetry. Despite much recent onomastic research, the parallel between heroic names and heroic poetry has remained largely unexamined. This article considers this parallel, assessing the significance of heroic name themes in Beowulf: the approximately eighty-eight personal names in Beowulf are categorized by lexical field and then compared to non-onomastic poetic diction in the poem as it occurs in both compounds and simplices. The close correspondence found between the two, as well with the name themes of the names of persons recorded in the PASE database and the name lists of the Durham Liber Vitae (DLV), suggests that names and poetry are facets of a single heroic tradition. The persistence of heroic name themes is also evidence that a mutually nourishing relation obtained between poetic composition and naming conventions throughout the Old English period. Rather than functioning as semantically empty markers or as descriptive compounds, Old English personal names signify poetically, metonymically invoking the heroic tradition.
