The Four Funerals in Beowulf: and the Structure of the Poem. By Gale R. Owen-Crocker. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 264. $69.95.

Three of the four funerals in Beowulf are evident enough, if not completely unmistakable: The poem's first editor did not recognize the first of them, and nor did six of his seven reviewers. Nevertheless, we can now see Scyld's funeral at the start, Beowulf's at the end, and the cremation of the casualties of Finnsburg approximately one-third of the way through. To this list Gale Owen-Crocker now adds what is usually called "the Lay of the Last Survivor" approximately two-thirds of the way through, an account of the burial of treasure, but one which in some way involves the death also of the burier. If this is allowed to make four, then one has on the one hand a strange variety of funeral rites in the poem to compare with archaeological evidence; and on the other, a certain symmetry which may be regarded as a clue to the poem's organizing principle.

T. A. Shippey
Saint Louis University