ABSTRACT

Earle’s ninety-page ‘Introduction’ to his translation The Deeds of Beowulf: An English Epic of the Eighth Century done into Modern Prose, Oxford 1892, begins with the usual long recap of scholarship (pp. ix-liii), and resumé of the contents (liii-lxxv). The recap is marked by guarded hostility towards Müllenhoff, and welcome and unusual credit given to Grein and Grundtvig, emender though the latter was. Pages lxxv-c consist of Part III, ‘My Theory of the Origin of the Beowulf’, in seven sections, amplifying Earle’s view announced in 1885, item 95 above. Section 1 sees ‘a clue to the secret history of the poem’ in its ‘Monitory passages’; section 2 notes the correspondences of Beowulf 1925-62 with ‘The Mercian genealogy’; section 3 investigates ‘Hygelac and his realm’. Pp. lxxviii-lxxxiii.