Projects change under our hands. An early outline reminds me that what I had in mind when I began work on this book was a semiotics of conflict in Beowulf, starting from the conceit that the practice of violence is structured like a language, an exchange of blows or a feud like a dialogue. That book still seems worth writing, but I am almost certainly not the one to do it.

What the project has become, instead, is a study of a social and economic system, here called the Economy of Honour, organized around the possession of treasure as a sign of one's prowess in battle and the overlapping and conventional roles of various participants in this system. That the heroic warrior of early medieval narrative operates in such a system is far from a new idea; further, the concepts of honour and gift-exchange that are the foundation of this book have informed studies, many of them cited here, in a wide variety of disciplines. This book's contribution is to define the Beowulfian Economy of Honour, perhaps more precisely than has been done before, and, applying that definition, to test several critical positions and reread a number of scenes and characters. Another aim has been to claim a place of importance for Beowulf in the ongoing scholarly discussion of violence in the literature of the Middle Ages.