The aim of Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon is to recreate as fully as possible for modern readers the original force of the poetic language of Beowulf. Alvin Lee makes use of a wide, archetypal literary context for Beowulf to provide illuminating parallels and contrasts with poems and fictions from other times and places. He demonstrates how the poem's symbolic system reveals itself through the metaphorical workings of the Old English words, patterns of...