The diet and digestion of allegory in Andreas

As a narrative poem, Andreas usually suffers from comparison with Beowulf. Stanley, for example, writes that the Andreas poet ‘can do the big bow-wow like any man going’, but also that the versified saint's legend is to Beowulf roughly as Cowley's Davideis is to Paradise Lost. Such comparisons are of long standing, and the reasons for them are apparent. Further, the common emphasis in both poems on the language of war and seafaring and the similarities in the larger patterns of their plots – both heroes cleanse foreign lands – imply a degree of dependence. Despite our knowledge, therefore, of Andreas's Greek and Latin sources and of the traditional character of Old English poetic diction, most readers would agree generally, I suppose, with Brodeur's observation that the Andreas poet was familiar with Beowulf and sometimes reproduced its phrasing.