Beowulf

Harold Bloom's anthology gathers the most significant twentieth-century critical essays on Beowulf into one place, backed by his Sterling Professor credentials and Chelsea House's institutional series. The limitation is built into the format: this is reprinted scholarship, not original analysis, and Bloom's editorial voice can crowd out the diversity of contributors. For a literature or medieval studies course it is a reliable reference; general readers have no reason to pick this over a good annotated translation.