The legendary Teutonic superman Beowulf would seem to have a counterpart today in the teenagers' culture hero James Bond, secret agent 007…. [An] essential similarity exists both in general framework of the narrative and in plot details of the two bodies of work.

Elements common to traditional hero-romances are present, of course, in both the Beowulf epic and the Bond novels: improbable adventures, heroic ideal of brave leader and loyal followers, concept of the hero as representative of good, pagan culture with overlay of Christianity, and absence of romantic love. But in addition to these general correspondences, interesting similarities in detail strengthen the strange parallelism found in the careers of these two supermen. Fleming's last novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, provides a particularly startling set of comparisons with Beowulf and should, perhaps, be scrutinized at this time despite the possibility of Anglo-Saxon scholars' accusations of irreverence and...