As a tribute to the superb teaching and exemplary literary criticism of this eminent Yale scholar, the majority of these essays deal with thematic, textual, and prosodic issues in Old English poetry, seven of them providing a valuable reassessment of some of the perennial problems of Beowulf criticism: the implications of its metaphysical and social systems as well as its rhetorical and imagistic structures; and especially the recurrent need for a careful re-examination of the text and a return to the manuscript evidence.
