SOURCE: “Beowulf,” in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, edited by Eric Gerald Stanley, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1966, pp. 104-41.

In the essay below, Stanley offers an overview of the poem's style and imagery, and attempts to discern the way in which Anglo-Saxons may have regarded Beowulf.

We have no traditional approach to Beowulf.¹ We are entirely ignorant of the author's intentions except for what we may claim to be able to infer from the poem itself. Even the subject and the form of the poem are in doubt; words like epic and elegy are applied to it, epic because it is heroic, early and fairly long, and elegy because it commemorates and mourns men who were honoured in their generations and were the glory of their times. Some have seen the poem in its entirety as an exemplum in illustration of Hrothgar's great ‘sermon...