The Monsters and the Animals: Theriocentric Beowulfs

Adapting an orally performed poem of uncertain date, transmitted in a fragile, fire-damaged thousand-year-old manuscript, to the needs and interests of children and general readers from the Victorian era onward seems a dizzying high-wire act, bridging a temporal abyss while juggling multiple themes, literary forms, and audience ethos. But as the chapters in this volume amply show, the cultural afterlife of Beowulf has proven the poem to be unusually nimble, flexible, and highly responsive to movements and trends in morals, ideologies, and aesthetics. In part, this relative ease of adaptation springs from the fact that Beowulf was unknown to all