SOURCE: “Hero with Monsters,” in Kings, Beasts, and Heroes, Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 3-26.

In the essay below, Jones investigates the folklore motifs which support the epical and heroic nature of Beowulf.

The old english poem Beowulf is one of the most precious relics of the early literature of England, and justly prized for a number and variety of reasons. For a start it is unique, in that no other poem of its size and kind has survived either in Old English or in the other Germanic literary languages to which English is related. Had it somewhere in its manuscript history succumbed to those perils of age, neglect, and fire to which we know it has been exposed, we should be left to speculate whether in fact the poets of any branch of the Germanic people were capable of composing a long sustained poem on a theme drawn...