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The Review of English Studies 2004 55(222):641-661; doi:10.1093/res/55.222.641
© 2004 by Oxford University Press
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The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and The ‘Feud’ of Hengest

Stefan Jurasinski

Ohio University–Zanesville

This article demonstrates that nineteenth-century views of blood vengeance and its status as a characteristically Germanic institution have engendered an exaggeratedemphasis in scholarship on Beowulf on the duty of vengeance, and ultimately left us with a distorted view of the Finn Episode's legal situation. For several decades, knowledge of the bloodfeud has been the principal tool by which scholarship has attempted to understand the difficulties of this episode. The article argues that such an approach was necessitated solely by the dominant preoccupations of Germanist scholarship, and that there is little evidence within the text that the events described in the episode can usefully be discussed as feuding behaviour.


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