to me that the Christian elements in Beowulf are so integrated into the work as to be largely inseparable. While it is possible that some of the Christian references in the poem are expanded due to "scribal editing" during the production of successive manuscripts, it is the original author who is responsible for the vast majority of those references. Here the poet produced a work that takes pride in his Germanic heritage and explains that while the ancestors of legend may have been unsaved heathens, they were good men all the same....
