‘Weapons’ in Beowulf: an analysis of the nominal compounds and an evaluation of the poet's use of them

Abstract

The nominal compound and the correlative genitive combination occupy a major position in the vocabulary of Old Germanic poetry; a poet composing in any of the several languages was free to draw upon the basic stock of Primitive Germanic or West Germanic compounds or, because then as now the Germanic languages were compounding languages, to create his own compounds according to his need or skill. But, despite all the volumes that have been written about the morphology, relationships and classification of the compounds, both in Common Germanic and in the several languages, we still do not fully comprehend the nature, the semantic types, the full meanings of individual compounds or, above all, the uses to which the various poets put their compounds for informative and aesthetic purposes.