ABSTRACT
Contemporary ecocriticism sees landscape, and our ecosystems, in constant flux, in contrast to earlier literary analysis, which typically understood the places across which textual characters move as ‘setting.’ Setting is understood to constitute an unchanging background for the actions and emotions of the characters. If setting changes, non-ecocritical literary analysis understands this as occurring in response to the actions of a human ‘character’ or in metaphorical reflection of a character's spiritual or emotional state. Locations described in several Old English poems – Heorot and the dragon's barrow in Beowulf, the Tower of Babel in Genesis A, and the crumbling structure(s) of The Ruin – are anything but static, and this mutability is in some cases described in terms of non-human forces. The sea in the Old English Exodus, discussed with these other ruins because it is transformed in the poem into a stone fortification, is another very changeable environment. All of these texts concern people and events far in England's past and, other than The Ruin, also geographically remote.
