Customer Reviews

Rereading Beowulf (Middle Ages Series)

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Edward Irving, late professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, taught Beowulf and was also particularly known for his courses in the art of poetry. This book reflects an admirable and altogether too rare capacity in academic circles: the ability to change one's mind. Add to this Irving's readable prose style dealing with his changing and deepening set of interpretations arising out of a steady career of teaching the text, and you have a more than usually engaging study of the most important poem in Old English.

Rereading Beowulf is a turn-about from his earlier A Reading of Beowulf (1968), as new understandings of the oral nature of the epic permeated scholarship on the poem. In the preface to the later book, Irving observes, "What used to seem like troublesome flaws in a remarkable poem ... now seem merely structural features of this kind of early poetry, features that are now open not only to our understanding but also to our fresh appreciation." Indeed, as he points out in The Approach to Heorot, the first of the book's four substantial chapters, an unsuspecting reader may be less than impressed by what sometimes gets marketed as a poem of heroic marvels. "If we judge Beowulf by novelistic standards, it shows us a cast of ornately dressed and stuffed (or stuffy) mannequins, always ready to restate the obvious, acting out rituals as obscure as they are strenuous."

Throughout the other three chapters -- Characters and Kings, Style and Story, and The Hall As Image and Character -- Irving queries, speculates and teases out layers of meaning and significance that let us read deeply and pleasurably along with him. His accessible observations on specific passages and larger symbolism like that of the Hall help the reader make sense of the mountains of criticism written about Beowulf, as well as arguing lucidly for his own position within the ongoing conversation.