The Art and Thought of the ‘Beowulf’ Poet

The author explores the relationship between the Old English poem Beowulf and what can be reconstructed of the heroic legends its poet had inherited as part of an oral tradition first brought to Britain by migrants from Jutland and northern Germany during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The emergent early medieval English kingdoms converted to Roman Christianity in the seventh century, after which many of these alliterative oral histories continued to be performed in royal courts and monasteries. Neidorf sees the Christian poet responding thoughtfully to these archaic poetic narratives as an opportunity to imagine a new kind of hero, one different from those who were part of that old legendary world and who might comport better with his own religious convictions and courtly values. The Beowulf poet pushes back against what Neidorf calls the “amoral” (p. 2) or “transgressive” (p. 51) behavior of the older protagonists, the “feuds...