The Heroic Age Issue 4 Winter 2001

Next Issue Highlights

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Anthropological Approaches to Beowulf

John M. Hill, Issue Editor.

This issue focuses on the greatest of Old English poems, Beowulf, from anthropologically-inspired or else inflected points of view. Among them, the contributors discuss kinship patterns, the roles of queens, the functions of women, the telling of stories, the nature of feud, the modelling of warrior behavior, the ethnopsychology of host-guest relationships and the implications of the poem for a theory of ethnogenesis among the Anglo-Saxons. The contributions include three essays reprinted from a special issue of Philological Quarterly and five newly published here in Heroic Age.

The three to be reprinted are Stephen O. Gloseki's "Beowulf and the Wills: Traces of Totemism?" Marijane Osborn's "'The Wealth They Left Us:' Two Women Author Themselves Through Others Lives In Beowulf," and David Day's "Hwanan sio faehth aras: Defining the Feud in Beowulf." These are joined by Dorothy Porter's "The Social Centrality of Women in Beowulf," Tom Shippey's "Wicked Queens and Cousin Strategies in Beowulf and Elsewhere," Carolyn Anderson's "'Gaest, Gender, and Kin in Beowulf: Consumption of the Boundaries," Alexander M. Bruce's "An Education in the Mead-Hall: Beowulf's Lessons for Young Warriors," and Craig R. Davis' "Redundant Ethnogenesis in Beowulf." The whole is a comprehensive gathering that explores the poem's central social drama from key cultural, historical and thematic points of view.

This issue is anticipated to be published in June 2001.