ABSTRACT
OF this poem only the last three cantos have been preserved. Enough, however, is left to show that the complete work must have been one of the noblest in the whole range of Old English poetry. It clearly belongs to the culminating point of the Old Northumbrian literature, combining, as it does, the highest dramatic and constructive power with the utmost brilliance of language and metre. The text has been revised with the MS., which was slightly damaged in the great Cottonian fire. We are, therefore, obliged to rely on Thwaites's text for a letter here and there in the margin. The concluding lines of the poem, which seem originally to have been written cursively and indistinctly, are now nearly illegible.
