Carol Braun Pasternack, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). xii + 219 pp. ISBN 0-521-46149-4. 35.00 £.

The year 1995 was an exceptional one for Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England. five books were published, of which two were literary studies of Old English poetry. Peter Clemoes and Carol Braun Pasternack adopt radically different angles of approach, and yet, surprising as it may seem, they have the same goal: the identification of the informing tradition in a literature which is so culturally different from our own, and detailed analysis of how that tradition is given voice in poetry. The stimulation that each book provides is valuable in itself, but there is added excitement from their juxtaposition, precisely because the obvious differences of approach and the ostensible differences of subject converge on what is essentially the same teasing issue, the very nature of Old English poetic activity as generated and received.

Clemoes's massive study is the culmination of a lifetime's intense engagement with the literature of the Anglo-Saxons, a personal grappling with the way in which `language codified inheritance' (p. 124), whether within traditional verse narratives, such as Beowulf, or in vernacular Christian poems which, in giving voice to a new cultural heritage, realigned the resonating symbolic language to which the poets were...