The preceding chapter should be understood not as seeking to replace one controlling narrative with another, but rather as offering an interpretation of several not-very-common compound nouns used of queens and angels in Old English poetry. It is no easier to generalize about the women of Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon England than it is about those of any place or time, and it is especially unwise to do so on the basis of words that occur so rarely.

In Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, Helen Damico looks at Wealhtheow's epithet friðusibb in light of a statement by the early twentieth-century Danish scholar Vilhelm Grønbech: