While the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it, in the historic allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of BeowulfŠ Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the center and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of Beowulf is undeniably weighty.
W.P. Ker, The Dark Ages, pp. 252-53.
