I am not concerned in this paper to talk about Beowulf for its own sake. I want to take Beowulf as an example of a more general point that seems worth making about literature and in particular about literary studies. It is a point I cannot make directly because if I expressed it in a series of propositions I should be misunderstood. I want to take a number of questions raised by Beowulf, some of which have been discussed in their own right by a series of scholars and with some of which I shall have to take issue: I am not, however, concerned with this or that interpretation of the poem but much more with pointing out certain difficulties in the way of understanding it that do not seem resolvable by conventional methods. I do not believe that these problems are confined to Beowulf but that they are part of the necessary business of understanding any literary work. The difference lies in this: Beowulf is a marginal work from the frontiers of literacy and the beginnings of English society, unlike the works most of us get worked up about which are much more central to our language and our way of life. We must beware of committing what the late R. G. Collingwood called the fallacy of precarious margins—that is arguing from marginal cases as though they were central, but it does seem that marginal situations—as the late Ludwig Wittgenstein has so brilliantly shown—have a power to point to things we take for granted without questioning in more central, more ‘normal’ situations.