This collection focuses on the legacy of Old English poetry and includes new interpretations of works such as Exeter Book Riddle 5, which provides an enduring legacy of social critique crafted through humor
the three manuscripts that contain the Solomon and Saturn dialogues, which reveal a shift in the use of poetry over time
Fates of the Apostles in which a previously unseen eighth rune is semiotically operative along with Cynewulf's signature
The Wife's Lament, in which the cave occupied by the wife has its archeological antecedents in early medieval rock-cut buildings
The Ruin, in which both the poem's text and the silent spaces of wyrd's traces are inscribed upon the material manuscript
the history of the reception of the riddles, which is instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century
tears and weeping in the whole corpus of Old English literature
and Beowulf, in which the figures of the stag and wolf play an important role in the thematic design of the poem but have not been examined before. The reprint is prefaced with a detailed account of the scholarly contributions to Old English studies by John D. Niles.