Ebook: Beowulf

Any text, prose or poetry, carries much more information within it than its creator realized or intended. What was implicit knowledge for the poet and his Anglo-Saxon audience may need to be made explicit for us, and the possibility that one's judgements are ethnocentric has always to be reckoned with. Just the same, many of the poet's beliefs and prejudices are downright familiar, and others respond to analysis. The essential caveat is that the framework within which judgements are made needs to be set up before fine literary details are filled in. Good readers have probably always done this, consciously or unconsciously; bad readers have approached the poem already burdened with their own hypothetical 'Scyldingids'.