12 ‘Overlord of the M5’ : The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Illustrations vii
4. Contributors ix
5. Foreword xi
6. Acknowledgements xiii
7. Abbreviations xiv
8. Introduction 1
9. 1 From Heorot to Hollywood : Beowulf in its Third Millennium 13
10. 2 Priming the Poets : the Making of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader 31
11. 3 Owed to Both Sides : W.H. Auden’s Double Debt to the Literature of the North 51
12. 4 Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century : J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles 71
13. 5 ‘Wounded men and wounded trees’ : David Jones and the Anglo-Saxon Culture Tangle 89
14. 6 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne, and Anglo-Saxon Interlace 111
15. 7 BOOM: Seeing Beowulf in Pictures and Print 129
16. 8 Window in the Wall : Looking for Grand Opera in John Gardner’s Grendel 147
17. 9 Re-placing Masculinity : The DC Comics Beowulf Series and its Context, 1975–6 165
18. 10 P.D. James Reads Beowulf 183
19. 11 Ban Welondes : Wayland Smith in Popular Culture 201
20. 12 ‘Overlord of the M5’ : The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns 219
21. 13 The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes’s Elmet 237
22. 14 Resurrecting Saxon Things : Peter Reading, ‘species decline’, and Old English Poetry 255
23. Index 279