TW O AUTHORS REPLY I would like to assure John Ferns (who reviewed my book on Margaret Laurence and who objected to my high opinion of her work) that I do not use lightly the adjective “great” as in “great fiction.” The last time I used this descriptive phrase was in connection with Patrick White’s fiction. My book on White was written between 1968 and 1971, and was published in 1972. White’s work was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Prior to the award, the majority of Australian critics were not enthusiastic about the fiction of the writer who proved to be the first Australian to win this prize. There is a word for Professor Ferns’s attitude, and it is colonial. I define the latter, in part, as the deeply rooted conviction that the best in literature and art is somewhere else, usually in the capital of the imperial power whose ways of seeing have formed the colonial mind. Professor Ferns has few if any quarrels with my close criticsm, indeed his comments here are often generous. What sticks in his craw is the valuejudgement that a Canadian writer — any Canadian — should be called great. I am familiar with Northrop Frye’s edict, that value-judgements do not belong in criticism, and with George Woodcock’s neat side-stepping of the issue, in his article comparing Laurence with Tolstoi. In our daily work, however, such as choosing whose writings shall be studied by our students, whose work deserves scholarly attention (not to mention scholarly funding), we do and must make value-judgements; Frye is unrealistic on this point. I have spent thirty-five years studying the “best” (by critical consensus) liter ature in England, Ireland, America, Europe, and (in the last 14 years) Canada. With the sensibilities and critical intelligence thus formed, I am happy to welcome Canadian novelists such as Laurence, Wiebe, Davies, poets such as Roberts, Pratt, Klein, Bimey, etc., etc. into the international group of excellent writers whose works are treasured for their beauty as well as for what they tell us of the societies they depict. Pa tr icia m o r l e y / Concordia University In a review of my book Beowulf and Celtic Tradition in English Studies in Canada (vol. ix, September 1983), Professor Alvin Lee thinks me wrong “in one major point in the chapter on Beowulf and Irish battle rage.” He says: “ Puhvel goes on to claim that nowhere else in Anglo-Saxon literature do we find Beowulf’s kind of deliberate, calculating rage. But that is very much the way the heroine Judith is presented as she prepares to decapitate the 379 Assyrian monster Holofernes (see g2ff. and 22off.) and it also parallels closely Byrtnoth’s state (yrre and anrad) in line 44 of the Battle of Maldon” (370). Lee’s initial statement is inaccurate and thus misleading. I do not see Beowulf displaying “deliberate, calculating rage,” which suggests a psycho logical synthesis of fury and determination; on the contrary, I find the attribution of rage to the stolid hero to be psychologically incongruous and suspect it to be the result of “a somewhat superficially superimposed influ ence” (53) of the Irish motif of the pre-battle fury of heroes. Further, Lee’s claim of parallels to Beowulf seems to me erroneous. Where as Beowulf is described as being in a state of intense anger prior to facing two monstrous enemies in mortal combat, Judith articulates her feelings in prayer to God before decapitating an unconscious man (a general, not a monster, as Lee claims) and asks Him to have mercy on her. Her second reference to her state of mind, “Gewrec nu, mihtig Drythen . .. J>set me ys¡5us torne on mode, / hate on hreSre mlnum” (92ff.) has in the past indeed been seen by some as reflecting anger, what with the dual meaning of torn — “grief” or “anger” (or similar emotions) — but it seems that she is instead continuing to voice her bitter sorrow stressed a few lines earlier — Learie ys me nu 3a heorte onhaeted and hige geomor, / swySe mid sorgum gedrefed” (86fL). After all, she prays to God for vengeance — and...