Book excerpt: Professor Mandel examines four Old English elegies--The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, and The Wife's Lament--from a point of view that combines rhetorical analysis (the contrastive collocation of words, phrases, and ideas) with a penetrating reading of the text. He points to new relationships among the parts of these poems and shows how they can be read in ways different from those currently accepted by the community of scholars. These «alternative readings» of Old English poetry will greatly modify the perception of all students and scholars interested in Anglo-Saxon life and culture.