Religious vocabulary in "Beowulf": reconsidering the issue of the pre-Christian roots of the poem

The paper reconsiders a history of the discussion on the ‘heathen vs. Christian’ nature of Beowulf, briefly regarding the evolution of the English critical thought on the poem against its conventional readings in Russia. The main objective of the paper is to present a new method of solving the problem, that is, quantitative analysis of word usage in the poem. The words defined as religious vocabulary are those denoting ‘soul’. The analysis of variation in frequency of different words for ‘soul’ in Beowulf strongly indicates, first, that some of them were seen as more Christian than others; second, that Beowulf has two overlapping yet distinct traditions of word usage, of which the more intense one is almost certainly of pre-Christian origin.