d to rid the kingdom of this monster and thus follows her back to her lair beneath the murky mountain water. There, his strength failing him, he slays his foe and returns to Heorot with the head of the monster. Beowulf is rewarded with land and titles and returns home to his uncle's court in triumph and eventually rules for fifty years as king of his homeland. A dragon then begins to slaughter the countryside, and Beowulf must confront it. In a final climactic encounter, he manages to slay the dragon, but also meets his death and enters the legends of his people as a warrior of unparalleled honor. Of course, that easily brings to mind the basic formula for any epic: a strong character battles ferocious beasts and saves a people from destruction. But the poem was more than simply a new window placed in an old frame. It possessed a legendary strength unique to the Anglo-Saxon people. Translator Seamus Heaney said, "...it arrives from somewhere beyond the known borne of our experience, and having fulfilled its purpose...it passes once more into the beyond."3 There is something in the poem beyond the textual and factual-something almost magical. As one begins the poem, they are almost immediately met with the overtones of the wyrd-a pagan "fate" that preaches "unknowable but certain" consequences.
             From the moment Beowulf advances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by the rock-wall, the reader knows he is one of those "marked by fate." The poetry is imbued with a strong intuition of wyrd hovering close, "unknowable but certain," and yet, because it is imagined within a consciousness which has learned to expect that the soul will find an ultimate home "among the steadfast ones," this primal human emotion has been transmuted into something less "zero at the bone," more metaphysically tempered.4
             While it might be difficult to truly comprehend the aura and feeling of, for example, Greek myths and their respective...