Beowulf: A Poem
ISBN: 978-1641893916 ARC Humanities Press | Past Imperfect, 2022 $17.95 (paperback)
Andrew Schell'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—Schell 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. Quoting another scholar, he highlights that “there is no satisfactory model in antecedent western literature… no medieval poem— in Latin or the vernacular—composed before ca. 1100 that bears any resemblance to Beowulf either in its structure or in its narrative discourse.” At the same time, beyond the set pieces we all know, is also built around “a complex body of other allusive tales and legends… told, partially told, or simply referred to,” that the poet that emerges from Schell's pages, then, is less about Monster-Slaying than about storytelling and memory.
