Recovering our lost heritage

Review of Mitchell, B. 'An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England', Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, xx, 424 pp., £12.99. and Davidson, H.E. 'The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe', London, Routledge, 1993, vii, 181 pp., £45.00 cloth, £12.99 paper. These two volumes are part of the current wave of books attempting to keep available in sensible format the Germanic and Old English background, for, as the first scholar stresses, "Old English should have a part in every university English syllabus and in the library of every reader of English literature." (p. viii) ... This survey is even more comprehensive than Mitchell's earlier efforts to give in the one book both overview perspectives and such sensible bibliographic references as will enable the curious and determined to get fairly quickly to authoritative scholarship.