Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts
Elizabeth Marshall, "Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts "
English | ISBN: 1843846403 | 2022 | 240 pages | PDF | 19 MB
English | ISBN: 1843846403 | 2022 | 240 pages | PDF | 19 MB
The best-known wolves of Old English literature are the Beasts of Battle, alongside ravens and eagles as ravenous heralds of doom who haunt the battlefield in the hope of fresh meat plucked from still-warm bodies. Yet to reduce these animals to mere corpse-scavengers is to deny that they are frequently imbued with a variety of far more nuanced meanings elsewhere in the corpus.
Two such meanings are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and human outlaws. Tracing the history of these associations and the evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in early medieval England, this book provides new, animal-centric readings of
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