I began with the assumption that the half-lines of Beowulfare ‘formulaic’, not in the sense that any particular half-line must have been traditional or a variant of a traditional verse, though many of them are, but rather in the sense that the alliteration, the metre and the syntax of the half-lines are interrelated in precise and predictable ways which form recurring patterns. This study has both confirmed and given new precision to that assumption. The half-lines are formulaic because they are the product of the poet's metrical grammar. The Beowulf-poet did not impose metre or alliteration on a phrase he wished to use, nor did he distort or rearrange the phrase in order to secure a particular metrical contour or alliterative pattern. He composed with the half-lines which his metrical grammar provided (even if the half-line was entirely his creation), and which came already marked for metre and alliteration. The exercise of his genius came in his choice or creation of half-lines which conformed to his metrical grammar and the way he linked them together.

Whether art is conservative or iconoclastic, all artists inherit a tradition which they interpret and express in their individual manners. I do not want to leave the impression, which I may have given, that the metrical grammar was some kind of invisible book of unchanging rules which the Beowulf-poet received from the tradition and over which he had no control.