SOURCE: “The Formulaic Style of Beowulf,” in Rereading “Beowulf”: An Introduction to the Poem, Its Background, and Its Style, edited by J. D. A. Ogilvy and Donald C. Baker, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, pp. 137-58.

In the following essay, Ogilvy surveys the formulaic methods used by Old English poets and examines the ways in which such methods—including the use of traditional epithets and phrases which probably originated in orally composed and transmitted poetry—are utilized in Beowulf.

The student of Old English poetry will no doubt have remarked the popularity during the past twenty years of “oral-formulaic” studies, especially among American scholars. Beginning with F. P. Magoun's famous article in 1953,¹ a growing body of scholarship has attempted to prove that much of Old English poetry, including Beowulf, was composed orally, extemporaneously, from the traditional stock of formulas with which the scop was provided in his word hoard...