Beowulf. The Tragedy of a Hero. A Reading

“All in all, Zeruneith’s study is a stimulating apology for Old English poetry in the modern world … A great strength of Zeruneith’s study is its contextualizing Beowulf within three literary traditions, one a primary source and the other two, secondary: OE with references to a wide range of texts such as ‘The Wife’s Lament,’ the Guthlac poems, ‘The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulstan,’ and Bede; Old Norse with references to a number of Eddic poems, Icelandic sagas, Snorri Sturluson, and Saxo Grammaticus; and classical with references to authors such as Aeschylus, Euripides, and Eumenides and texts such as the Odyssey. Zeruneith also refers to works by Tacitus, Boethius, St. Augustine, and Erich Neumann to help deepen our understanding of his compelling new reading of the poem.”

– Robert E. Bjork, Professor of English, Arizona State University