Beowulf is one of the most important poems in Old English and the first major poem in a European vernacular language. It dramatizes behaviour in a complex social world - a martial, aristocratic world that we often distort by imposing on it our own biases and values. In this cross-disciplinary study, John Hill looks at Beowulf from a comparative ethnological point of view.

He provides a thorough examination of the socio-cultural dimensions of the text and compares the social milieu of Beowulf to that of similarly organized cultures. Through examination of historical analogs in northern Europe and France, as well as past and present societies on the Pacific rim in Southeast Asia, a complex and extended society is uncovered and an astonishingly different Beowulf is illuminated.