Most Recent (2022-3)
Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (2022)
This short book argues, against the modern consensus derived from Tolkien almost ninety years ago, that Beowulf in fact gives rather a good picture of Scandinavia in the sixth century, now clarified and corroborated by a great deal of recent archaeology: which Tolkien, of course, could not have known.
Beowulf: Translation and Commentary (2023)
This is now out in a revised and expanded edition, to which I have added translations of three fragmentary heroic poems in Old English and Old High German. See uppsalabooks.com.
Earliest on Old English (1972-8)
Old English Verse (1972)
This is a survey of the surviving corpus of poems in Old English, and was unusual at the time for applying conventional critical methods to poems hitherto regarded as alien, needing cultural explanation rather than literary appreciation.
Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (1970)
My 1972 survey made me realise that the most common sub-genre of Old English poetry had been largely ignored. This consists of short poems of advice, given by a wise father-figure whom I dubbed ‘the Ancient Sage’. I translated and commented on ten of these.
Beowulf (1978)
Another short book, on a very familiar topic. I began my making a list of the topics generally considered – pagan vs. Christian, fatalism, critique of heroism, etc. all cultural issues – and decided to bypass them, concentrating instead on what had made the poem so embarrassing for modern critics, and on its surprising complexity, both structurally and verbally.
Beowulf (Japanese)
More on Old English (1998, 2014)
Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (1998)
This consists of a 70-page account of the way criticism of the poem developed from 1700 to 1936, followed by 127 excerpts from critical studies: many if not most of these were translated from German, Danish, or other languages.
The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous (2006)
An edited volume, with chapters from various scholars on traditional accounts of dwarves, giants, dragons, trolls, werewolves, Grendel, wise women, and shape-changers. My own contributions were a Foreword on Grimm, an Afterword, and the chapter on elves.
Vikings
Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (2018)
This is not a “history of the vikings”, as some thought, but an attempt to recover their mindset: as shown in the many climactic death-scenes in sagas (of which I picked out ten, set in eras from the sixth century to the eleventh), and also the pervasive (as I term it) Bad Sense Of Humour. Not all academics appreciated the latter.
