SOURCE: “The Marriage of Traditions in Beowulf: Secular Symbolism and Religious Allegory,” in The Mode and Meaning of “Beowulf,” The Athlone Press, 1970, pp. 60-96.

In the essay that follows, Goldsmith examines the ways in which the influence of Christianity accounted for a shift in the function of heroic poetry and altered the meaning of the secular symbols traditionally used in heroic poetry generally, and in Beowulf in particular.

My attention has so far been given to the Christian climate of thought revealed in writings made in religious centres in early Anglo-Saxon England. It is now time to consider what kinds of poetic expression and what theories of the nature of poetry could have been at the disposal of the maker of Beowulf, and how far these were compatible with the attitudes inculcated in the Latin learning of the schools.

It must be admitted from the start that all...