Product Description: A senior scholar writing here at the height of his powers and bringing experience and insight to an important topic... the second chapter is one of the best short, general introductions to the artistry of the poem I have read...A dizzying and engaging narrative...read more

Product Description: Compares clinical case studies with the powerful emotional meaning behind the symbols of the hall, the monsters, the reassures, and the final battle, and shows how a detailed study of Beowulf uncovers problems facing both ancient and modern humanity.

Product Description: The best-known literary achievement of Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf is a poem concerned with monsters and heroes, treasure and transience, feuds and fidelity. Composed sometime between 500 and 1000 C.E. and surviving in a single manuscript, it is at once immediately accessible and forever mysterious...read more

Product Description: This book examines violence in its social setting, and especially as an essential element in the heroic system of exchange (sometimes called the Economy of Honour). It situates Beowulf in a northern European culture where violence was not stigmatized as evidence of a breakdown in social order but rather was seen as a reasonable way to get things done; where kings and their retainers saw themselves above all as warriors whose chief occupation was the pursuit of honour; and where most successful kings were those perceived as most predatory...read more

Product Description: Chamber's introduction to Beowulf is the most comprehensive study of the whole problem of this remarkable Anglo-Saxon manuscript. The original edition, published in 1921, began with a summary of the views held by previous writers on historical and non-historical elements in the poem, its date, origin and structure; this was followed by a collection of the Latin and Scandinavian documents furnishing parallels for various episodes and a detailed discussion of the Fight at Finnsberg and the relation of the Finn-episode in Beowulf and the relevance of archaeological finds...read more

Product Description: Of unknown authorship, Beowulf is an Old English epic poem which incites contentious debate and has been endlessly interpreted over the centuries. This Reader's Guide provides a much-needed overview of the large body of Beowulf criticism, moving from eighteenth-century reactions to twenty-first-century responses...read more