‘Hwǣr is wuldor ϸīn?’: Traditional Poetic Diction and the Alien Text in the Old English Andreas

The Old English poem Andreas has traditionally been considered inferior to other texts such as Beowulf, owing to its apparent borrowing of phraseology. This paper argues that verbal parallels are part of the poet’s assimilative composition technique and re-evaluates the place of Andreas in the corpus of Old English poetry.