ABSTRACT
According to this survey of his achievement, the significance for literary history of the Beowulf-author is exceptionally great. His religious disposition is incontestable. It has penetrated deep into his spiritual world, and he never tires of making it known with all eloquence. The Christianisation of the diction is planned and comprehensive and entails essential alterations of the action. He is a diligent verse-smith whose ambition it is to put an extensive literary epic in his mother tongue by the side of the ancients. His piety has not made him narrow-minded; rather, he brings a lively interest to the poems of his ancestors and to their life with all its habits and customs, including the heathen ones. We have him to thank for the preservation of a priceless wealth from Germanic antiquity. He was himself obviously so constrained by the content and form of these old traditions that he took over parts of them into his work almost without change. In this way ‘Beowulf’ became an exceptionally attractive mosaic made out of components from different times, life-cycles and stylistic forms.
