women in the poem, contextualizing it within Ger-
manic culture. Power relations are an important con-
cept here as well. Other recent scholarship has
undertaken phenomenological and/or psychoanalytic
approaches with varying degrees of success. More
adroit, perhaps, are new anthropological approaches,
which look at the “Germanic” Beowulf as a construct.
Other important approaches have examined the poem
as a performed text rather than an object to be read
and studied. All of these views prove the endurance of
what is often called the fi rst English epic.
See also BEOWULF-POET, OLD NORSE/ICELANDIC EDDAS
AND SAGAS.
FURTHER READING
Bjork, Robert E., and John D. Niles, eds. A Beowulf Hand-
book. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Damico, Helen. Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tra-
dition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
Hill, John M. The Cultural World in Beowulf. Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1995.
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson, eds. “Beowulf”: An
Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts. Rev. ed. Oxford: Black-
well, 2006.
Niles, John D. Beowulf: The Poem and its Tradition. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Overing, Gillian R. Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1990.
Shippey, T. A., and Andreas Haarder, eds. Beowulf: The
Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1998.
Shaun F. D. Hughes
BEOWULF-POET The Beowulf-poet is the an-
onymous author of the English EPIC BEOWULF. The
question of authorship of the poem Beowulf is to a sig-
nifi cant degree also connected with the vexed ques-
tions of date, audience, and provenance. However, a
few issues may be outlined.
The fi rst set of issues involves asking whether the
poet is a single writer or whether the poem is the result
of multiple composers. Criticism of the poem has vac-
illated to a great degree between these two views. At
the beginning of modern Beowulf criticism, many
attempted to locate a specifi c poet or at least a tradition
in which that poet worked. Such attempts were based
on the belief that the poem was written not long after
the death of Hygelac (ca. 521) and that it was written
during a time of high learning in Anglo-Saxon Eng-
land. Thus, an author who lived sometime in the sec-
ond half of the seventh century was suggested, whether
Caedmon or one of his companions north of the Hum-
ber; someone in Theodore’s Canterbury; or ALDHELM of
Malmesbury, south of the river. In reaction against this
view, there is what has come to be called the ballad
theory—that is, the poem was not composed by a sin-
gle person but rather, like a ballad or oral epic, was
composed, retold, added to, and subtracted from in
every performance until someone wrote down a per-
formance, perhaps at the instigation of a king, lord, or
other nobleman.
The result of these two competing theories was a
synthesis of them. There was an “author,” but at the
end of a long process of oral composition. This author
gave the poem its current shape and Christian overlay.
Other theorists suggested a reviser of a Danish original,
and there are similar attempts to mediate between the
two poles of interpretation.
Since 1900, some form of a single-author theory has
held the majority of the fi eld. The question then turns
on whether the poet was a Christian skaldic (Scandina-
vian) singer of tales, and so probably a layperson, or,
rather, a learned cleric steeped in both Christian and
pre-Christian traditions. However, the Christian ele-
ments in the poem, as well as the fact that throughout
the Anglo-Saxon period the best opportunities for writ-
ing occurred in the context of the cloister, strongly sug-
gest a clerical environment. Further, many have pointed
out the familiarity the poet seems to have with Chris-
tian Latin sources, further indicating a clerical author.
See also ANGLO-SAXON POETRY, COTTON VITELLIUS
A.XV.
FURTHER READING
Bjork, Robert E., and John D. Niles, eds. A Beowulf Hand-
book Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson, eds. Beowulf: An
Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts. Oxford: Blackwell Pub-
lishing, 1998.
Orchard, Andy. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2003.
Larry Swain80 BEOWULF-POET