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Jonathan B. Himes, The Old English Epic of Waldere (Newcasde upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). xv + 142 pp. ISBN 978-1-4438-0558-2. £34.99/ $58.99.
The Old English poem Waldere is extant in just two single-leaf fragments now in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, which together preserve only sixty lines of what must originally have been a much longer poem. Yet this text possesses an importance out of all proportion to the amount of it that survives, if only because it offers such a tantalizing glimpse of what the Old English epic tradition might once have contained beyond Beowulf. Unlike Beowulf, Waldere has analogues in a wide range of different medieval texts, including major landmarks in European literature such as the medieval Latin Waltharius, the Old Norse Liörekssaga and the Middle...