West Virginia University Press is publishing Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England by Helen Damico, the 16th volume in its Medieval European Studies series.

R. M. Liuzza of the University of Toronto asserts that, “Damico makes an elegant and thought-provoking case for Beowulf as a political allegory of late Anglo-Saxon England.”

Kevin Kiernan, author of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript calls Beowulf and the Grendel-kin,”Thoroughly researched and cogently argued, Damico’s revolutionary thesis and supporting documents demand the attention of all serious students of�Beowulf.”

In�Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England,�Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the 11th century in Anglo-Danish England.

Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the�Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings.�

Given the poet’s compositional skill — widely relational and eclectic at its core — and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other 11th-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s compositional process.

Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade — compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character — to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative.�
Beowulf and the Grendel-kin�lays out the story of�Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of 11th-century Anglo-Saxon England.

Damico is professor emerita of English Medieval Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico, where she was twice selected as Outstanding Teacher and honored as UNM Presidential Teaching Fellow. She is a founder of its Institute for Medieval Studies, a recipient of the New Mexico Humanities Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Humanities, and a member of The Medieval Academy of America and recipient of its CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies. She is also an honorary member of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. She edited the three volumes of�Medieval Scholarship:�Biographical Essays in the Formation of a Discipline�and is the author of Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition.

To order this book, visit wvupress.com, phone (800) 621-2736, or visit a local bookstore.

2015/345pp/PB 978-1-938228-71-1 $49.99/ebook 978-1-938228-72-8: $ 27.99

-WVU-

af/2/11/15

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