The Art and Thought of the "Beowulf" Poet

In The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet, Leonard Neidorf explores the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition, which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In Beowulf, the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic convictions.

Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and Scandinavian analogues, The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. In Beowulf, Neidorf discerns the presence of a singular mind at work in the combination and modification of heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object, Neidorf argues that it should be read as the considered result of one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that could not independently constitute such a poem.

Leonard Neidorf is Professor of English at Nanjing University and the author of The Transmission of Beowulf.

This book seeks to understand what makes Beowulf so unlike the kind of narrative that it is, paradoxically, so frequently considered to epitomize: the heroic legends of Germanic-speaking Europe in the Migration Age. This is a book on Beowulf well worth reading.

Neidorf (Nanjing Univ., China) offers a refreshingly original approach to the Old English epic poem Beowulf. The author is convincing and thorough in making his arguments, which he presents in three concise chapters. In the first chapter, he contextualizes Beowulf within the larger tradition of Scandinavian and Germanic literature and explores marked departures that distinguish it.

Marijane Osborn, UC Davis, translator of Beowulf: A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North:

Leonard Neidorf brilliantly illustrates how the Beowulf poet, defying a tradition of amoral heroism under pressure from Fate, imagines a world inhabited both by monsters and by principled people of a kind never previously seen in an ancient epic. This book about a poet's revisionist world-making from shards of previous history and myth should fascinate anyone interested in the crafting of legend.

Tom Shippey, Saint Louis University, author of The Road to Middle-Earth:

This is an excellent book. Ambitious, concise, and written with particular clarity,The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet is set to make a major impact on Beowulf studies. Leonard Neidorf persuasively advances an original understanding of not only the poem but the intentions of its author, who was attempting to morally renovate the heroic-legendary tradition.

Geoffrey Russom, Brown University, author of The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry:

This important book will be consulted by a wide range of scholars and students interested in Beowulf and in Old English literature. Leonard Neidorf's impeccable readings of the poem's remarkable variety of textual detail are informed by his widely acknowledged philological expertise, which this book makes accessible to readers interested in the poem from a literary or cultural perspective.