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I have two purposes in writing this paper: First, I want to shed light on this great work by exploring what can be called its metaphorical system, the network of imaginative associations through which its meaning finds expression. To my knowledge, this has not yet been done.1 Hence, the poem has yet to be presented as a poem, or as a poetical “contraption” (W. H. Auden's word), to the world of literary criticism. Second, I want to use my analysis of figurative language to illuminate what might be termed the psychodynamics of the civilizing process as they emerge in northern Europe just before the beginning of the Christian era. Beowulf touches on, or engages, a variety of issues with which psychoanalysis has always been centrally concerned: the relationship of the group to the leader and of the leader to the group, the role of the Oedipus complex in the development of patriarchal culture, the hero as father and the hero as son, the interrelated problems of patricide, matricide, and fratricide, the manner in which preoedipal conflict in the areas of narcissism and aggression can precipitate regressive behaviors that threaten the well-being of both individual and society, and finally, the nature of the literary object and the purposes to which it may be put. That so many of the psyche's major struggles and so many of psychoanaly-sis's concerns can be clearly focused through an exploration of this ancient epic is a testimony to the power and the richness of its imaginal core.
I would not want to suggest in all of this, however, that substantial psycholiterary studies of Beowulf do not exist. Indeed, James Earl's (1983) recent essay on the poem is of enormous value in helping us to grasp a variety of significant items — literary, psychological, and historical. In Earl's view, an “aristocratic warrior class