Rather less attention has been paid to the later portion of Beowulf than to the earlier adventures; Grendel and his dam have, as it were, been more beloved of the commentators than has the dragon. There is every reason, however, why the fight with the dragon should receive careful attention. It is, despite some damaged and illegible passages, of great poetic beauty, with a dignity and a brooding atmosphere of impending fate which are quite its own. And it stands greatly in need of critical as well as of appreciative examination; for there is much which presents difficulty in the interpretation of the text, and in larger problems for the solution of which textual study is necessary.

It is a commonplace of literary history that no great outburst of poetic energy has been unattended by the lyric. Not only may we fairly say that its vitality is an index of the vitality of the deeper poetic energies, but we may add that it endures when other forms seem dormant or moribund, and that when it is wholly extinguished, true poetry is practically at an end. It would, therefore, seem that an examination of the lyric, and a definition of its peculiar qualities, would be likely to throw light on the nature of poetry itself. We all recognize lyrics when we see them, but we are also conscious that not every poem which wears the outward semblance of a lyric is essentially so; yet it is not always easy to give a precise and satisfactory statement of what constitutes the essence of the lyric form.

My chief business in this article is to study the characteristic details in Otherworld descriptions, to see how widely they are used, and to discover any constant traditions in the use. A great deal of work, already done in this field, has made the material accessible; and since my paper is only by way of being a preliminary sketch, I shall frequently use the summaries offered by previous scholars in the case of particular documents. In general, the material with which I shall work is very well known and scarcely subject to any dispute.

Mr. H. M. Chadwick departs from current views about the early settlers of Great Britain and challenges Bede's long-accepted classification of them as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He believes them to have been a homogeneous people, their dialectic differences having come about after the immigration and through political and geographical influences. He opposes the prevailing notion that the Anglo-Saxon organization at the time of the migration was “tribal,” and thinks that the invasion was accomplished by large organized bands, not by small groups of adventurers acting independently. The migration of the Angli Mr. Chadwick regards as exceptional. Although there was no external pressure, it was on a large scale and extended over a considerable space of time. And, he says, according to the constitution of military forces of the time, the warriors required to make up the forces of invasion were not all drawn from within the territories of the Angli, but came, many of them, from the surrounding regions.