IN THIS MONOGRAPH I have sought to anatomize a prejudice which turned into a predilection. Some kind of chronological order has been followed, but I make no pretence that the deliberate selections presented here amount to a chapter in the history of the scholarship of Anglo-Saxon literature. In one view, however, the history of scholarship is a history of error, and looked at that way the search for paganism comes near the centre of any historical account of the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the last hundred and fifty years. In that period the unknown – as I think, the unknowable unknown – was so firmly used to explain the known that scholars felt no doubt in their methods or results.

That is no longer so. At a factual level the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism is, if conducted at all, no longer conducted naïvely; but some of the attitudes to literature and learning characteristic of those earlier scholars, who, like the Wife of Bath, were (mutatis mutandis) on the side of the elves rather than of the limiters, still prevail. Tracing to its origins the error on which these attitudes are based may perhaps help to eradicate them.