Abstract
Who is the Shaper in Beowulf? Is it wyrd, the fixed fate that shaped the pagan world of the Anglo-Saxons? Or is it the Christian God whose worship they adopted? As the story of Beowulf was told and retold through the centuries, it seems to have picked up the verbal vestiges of cultural change like a snowball rolling through time: so many pagan and Christian ideas exist side by side in the poem that critics have long argued whether it is essentially a pagan or a Christian work. Some insist that it is a pagan poem which Christian transcribers defaced with dogma; others contend that its pagan pronouncements are relics of a time its culture outgrew-the poetic equivalent of the human appendix. Neither view gives much credit to the poet's intentions and artistry. Is Beowulf, then, a literary fossil in which two opposing belief systems are frozen together, fascinating from the standpoint of cultural anthropology, but ultimately lacking a unified theme? Or does the poem contain a genuine synthesis of two world-views? I believe that the latter is true, and shall attempt to show how a striking pattern of handwords helped the Beowulf poet to establish that synthesis.
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