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Alvin A. Lee, Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: 'Beowulf' as Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). xi + 280 pp. ISBN 0-8020-4378-X. L37.50
Many themes in this book will be familiar to readers of Alvin A. Lee's earlier work, particularly The Guest-Hall of Eden (1972), `Old English poetry, medieval exegesis, and modern criticism' (1975), and, missing from the bibliography (the documentation throughout is dishearteningly sparse), `Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: Beowulf and "first-phase" language', English Studies in Canada, 19 (1993), 201-8. Beowulf is primarily a romance since its `protagonist is superior ... in degree to other human beings and their environment' (p. 14); its polysemous quality can be understood through 'a correlation of patristic exegetical perspectives with twentieth-century critical ones' (p. 146); and it `is in an...