After a distinguished career as a teacher, scholar, bibliographer and literary critic, Stanley Brian Greenfield, Professor of English at the University of Oregon, one of the founders of the annual Anglo-Saxon England and of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, died in 1987. He wrote primarily on Anglo-Saxon topics as well as later English poetry. He deeply explored the Old English poetic corpus, pointing out important meanings and qualities in insightful and sensitive readings. Hero and Exile brings together some of his most important essays, divided into three sections - Beowulfian Studies, The Old English Elegies and The Theme of Exile - attesting to his long and fruitful engagement with Old English literature.

In this restructured and greatly expanded version of Burton Raffel's out-of-print classic, Poems from the Old English, Raffel and co-editor Alexandra H. Olsen place the oldest English writings in a different perspective. Keeping the classroom teacher's needs foremost in mind, Raffel and Olsen organize the major old English poems (except Beowulf) and new prose selections so as to facilitate both reading and studying. A general introduction provides an up-to-date and detailed historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period, and concise introductions open the literature sections of the book and many of the translations.

R.M. Liuzza’s Broadview edition of Beowulf was published at almost exactly the same time as Seamus Heaney’s; in reviewing the two together in July 2000 for The New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode concluded that both translations were superior to their predecessors, and that it was impossible to choose between the two: “the less celebrated translator can be matched with the famous one,” he wrote, and “Liuzza’s book is in some respects more useful than Heaney’s.” Ever since, the Liuzza Beowulf has remained among the top sellers on the Broadview list. With this volume readers will now be able to enjoy a much broader selection of Old English poetry in translations by Liuzza. As the collection demonstrates, the range and diversity of the works that have survived is extraordinary—from heartbreaking sorrow to wide-eyed wonder, from the wisdom of old age to the hot blood of battle, and to the deepest and most poignant loneliness. There is breathless storytelling and ponderous cataloguing; there is fervent religious devotion and playful teasing. The poems translated here are meant to provide a sense of some of this range and diversity; in doing so they also offer significant portions of three of the important manuscripts of Old English poetry—the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Exeter Book.

In The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet, Leonard Neidorf explores the relationship between Beowulf and the legendary tradition that existed prior to its composition. The Beowulf poet inherited an amoral heroic tradition, which focused principally on heroes compelled by circumstances to commit horrendous deeds: fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands. Medieval Germanic poets relished the depiction of a hero's unyielding response to a cruel fate, but the Beowulf poet refused to construct an epic around this traditional plot. Focusing instead on a courteous and pious protagonist's fight against monsters, the poet creates a work that is deeply untraditional in both its plot and its values. In Beowulf, the kin-slayers and oath-breakers of antecedent tradition are confined to the background, while the poet fills the foreground with unconventional characters, who abstain from transgression, display courtly etiquette, and express monotheistic convictions. Comparing Beowulf with its medieval German and Scandinavian analogues, The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet argues that the poem's uniqueness reflects one poet's coherent plan for the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. In Beowulf, Neidorf discerns the presence of a singular mind at work in the combination and modification of heroic, folkloric, hagiographical, and historical materials. Rather than perceive Beowulf as an impersonally generated object, Neidorf argues that it should be read as the considered result of one poet's ambition to produce a morally edifying, theologically palatable, and historically plausible epic out of material that could not independently constitute such a poem.

From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, from the heart-rending lament of a lone castaway to the embodied speech of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, from the anxiety of Eve, who carries "a sumptuous secret in her hands / And a tempting truth hidden in her heart," to the trust of Noah who builds "a sea-floater, a wave-walking / Ocean-home with rooms for all creatures," the world of the Anglo-Saxon poets is a place of harshness, beauty, and wonder. Now for the first time, the entire Old English poetic corpus—including poems and fragments discovered only within the past fifty years—is rendered into modern strong-stress, alliterative verse in a masterful translation by Craig Williamson. Accompanied by an introduction by noted medievalist Tom Shippey on the literary scope and vision of these timeless poems and Williamson's own introductions to the individual works and his essay on translating Old English poetry, the texts transport us back to the medieval scriptorium or ancient mead-hall, to share a herdsman's recounting of the story of the world's creation or a people's sorrow at the death of a beloved king, to be present at the clash of battle or to puzzle over the sacred and profane answers to riddles posed over a thousand years ago. This is poetry as stunning in its vitality as it is true to its sources. Were Williamson's idiom not so modern, we might think that the Anglo-Saxon poets had taken up the lyre again and begun to sing once more.