The present chapter takes us back to Beowulf itself, presenting a discussion of its poetry and poetics in the historical context of the larger tradition to which the poem belongs. Having briefly explored key poetic features of Beowulf in general terms, it will go on to focus on two specific illustrative passages from the poem (lines 1–11 and 867b–74). In subsequent chapters we will be considering the responses of modern verse translators to the features covered in this chapter and we will also be looking at versions of the illustrative passages in some translations.

Aspects of the Poetry and Poetics of Beowulf

Beowulf is viewed in the modern criticism of Old English poetry, as it has developed in the last seventy years or so, as a work of great artistry, originality and depth. It is ‘solid and dazzling’, in Seamus Heaney's memorable phrase, as critics continue to demonstrate through close study. It is also, however, a work of a highly traditional kind, participating at all levels in what has insightfully been referred to as ‘the aesthetics of the familiar’. It stems from the oral culture of the Anglo-Saxons and their continental ancestors: it is traditional in its metrical and syntactic structures, its ‘word-hoard’ of poetic vocabulary and its formulaic patterns of phrasing; and it is traditional too in the themes that it deals with and in the value-system that motivates its action.