“ It has been a labour of love: for Finn, mutilated and corrupt, is yet the fine flower of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry. Full of rapid transitions and real poetic glow, the fight in Finn's beleaguered hall, lighted by the flash of swords and echoing with the din of combat, is one of the most vivid battle-pieces in any language—a theme too often worn threadbare by dull mechanical prentice-work in later Anglo-Saxon poetry, when unifying the scriptures became a devastating industry and the school of Cynewulf anticipated by some eight centuries the school of Boyd. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon poem last appeared in England in 1840; the Norwegian is only available in Vigfússon and Powell's Icelandic Prose Reader and Corpus Poeticum Boreale; the Icelandic has never before been published in this country.
The second part of this work contains the extant fragments of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry outside Beowulf and Widsith, which have been so admirably treated by Dr Chambers (Cambridge, 1912 and 1914) . Finn has, indeed. ”

“ How far it has been accomplished I cannot say: I can at least plead with Marryat's nurse in Mr Midshipman Easy that my book is 'such a little one.'
It cannot be claimed that the Runic poems are of any great literary value ”