It's just past midnight as I write this, a little over a month since my last update here. Allow me to apologize for the gap. Trying to...

It is no exaggeration to say that Tolkien's "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" is the single most significant and influential essay...

One of the pleasures of working on a text as well-studied as Beowulf is that the body of scholarship has had time to grow and change over...

A little-known fact about me: I started college as a math and computer science major, not an English major. I wanted to work in video...

A confession. I am no theory head. The finer details of what makes structuralism structuralism, or how phenomenology works, or what have...

I'll save my thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf for another post dedicated to the translation itself. Instead, I want to...

It's been a good day. I was given a copy of Eaters of the Dead, and I've read through the frame narrative's introduction. Michael...

One of the more interesting quirks of the Beowulf films is the tendency to try and make the monsters sympathetic. Or, if not sympathetic,...

Rounding out the trio of articles that most clearly question the monstrosity of Grendel's Mother, it's interesting to note the...

Since the last annotation I put up was of Signe Carlson's "The Monsters of Beowulf," it seemed appropriate to continue along the path she...

One of the things that got me interested in Old English was studying Middle English. I wanted to see what came before, to go back to the...