Overview

Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as ""a work of the greatest imaginative vitality"": how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the ""mind-forg'd manacles"" of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context.

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9781641893916

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Reviews

"Andrew Scheil’s Beowulf: A Poem is the kind of book that fans of the poem have long needed. Beyond the other specialties and disciplines that inevitably enter and overwhelm its orbit—the Vikings, linguistics, archaeology, Tolkien—Scheil wants us to value Beowulf as poetry first and foremost. Schell reminds us that if the poem is off-putting to many of us now, it was probably seen as strange even in its own time. -- Tim Miller * Medieval World: Culture and Conflict 10 (2024): 56 * Andrew Scheil makes a passionate case for the relevance of Beowulf to modern readers. At the heart of his thesis is his claim that Beowulf is a ""deeply humanist work"" (p. 30), profoundly concerned with doubt, contingency, and tragedy. [...] In modern usage, ‘humanism’ often denotes a human-centric vision of the world ""and a rejection of theistic religion and the supernatural in favor of secular and naturalistic views of humanity and the universe"" (OED 5.b.). It is therefore difficult to reconcile Scheil’s vision of a ""humanist"" Beowulf with the monotheism of the poem’s narrator and characters, who consistently express their belief in a divine being (Metod) who made the world (ll. 90–98) and who rules over all throughout time (ll. 1056b–57), governing the fates of men (ll. 2525b–27a) while changing the seasons (ll. 1608b–11) and continually performing miracles (ll. 930b–31), and who will judge the righteous and the damned (ll. 180b–88). However, by zooming in on moments when these beliefs seem to falter as characters are confronted with overwhelming or surprising events, Scheil skillfully reminds us of the poem’s complexity and ambiguity. -- Francis Leneghan * Arthuriana 33, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 189–91 *"

Andrew Scheil’s Beowulf: A Poem is the kind of book that fans of the poem have long needed. Beyond the other specialties and disciplines that inevitably enter and overwhelm its orbit—the Vikings, linguistics, archaeology, Tolkien—Scheil wants us to value Beowulf as poetry first and foremost. Schell reminds us that if the poem is off-putting to many of us now, it was probably seen as strange even in its own time. -- Tim Miller * Medieval World: Culture and Conflict 10 (2024): 56 *

Author Information

Andrew Scheil is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (2004) and Babylon Under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth (2016).

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