Robinson’s classic study asserts that theappositive style of Beowulf helps the poet communicate his Christian vision of paganlife. By alerting the audience to both the older and the newer meanings of words, thepoet was able to resolve the fundamental tension which pervades his narration ofancient heroic deeds.Robinson describes Beowulf ’s major themes and the grammatical and stylisticaspects of its appositive strategies. He then considers the poet’s use of the semanticallystratified vocabulary of Old English poetry to accommodate a party Christian andpartly pre-Christian perspective on the events being narrated. The analysis drawsattention to the ways in which modern editors and lexicographers have obscured stylisticaspects of the poem by imposing upon it various modern conventions.Appositional techniques, Robinson shows, serve not only the poet’s major themesbut also his narrative purposes. A grasp of the fundamental role played by the appositivestyle in Beowulf gives the reader new ways of understanding some of the epic’s familiarpassages. The new foreword addresses the reception this book has had and examinesrecent scholarship in the ongoing interest in this amazing poem.