1. Cf. ibid. 52–61 for Biblical proverbial background in general and for the two alternatives entertained below.
2. Sketched in Harris Joseph , ‘Die altenglische Heldendichtung,’ in Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft 6: Frühmittelalter Europäisches , ed. Klaus von See (Wiesbaden 1985) 237–76, esp. 246–47.
3. A possible further addition from Chaucer is ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan’ 41: ‘But al shal passe that men prose or ryme; / Take every man his turn, as for his tyme.’ A similar structure — general principle plus particular application — is evident here.
4. An example of the standard interpretation: Opland Jeff , Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry: A Study of the Traditions (New Haven 1980) 216; a little less traditional: Lee Alvin A. , The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven 1972) 166; probably the best that this reading has to offer: Shippey T. A. , Old English Verse (Hutchinson University Library; London 1972) esp. 78; and Grubl Emily D. , Studien zu den angelsächsischen Elegien (Marburg 1948) esp. 120. A new suggestion, independent of the literature cited here, comes from Jacobs Nicolas , ‘The Old English Heroic Tradition in the Light of Welsh Evidence,’ Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 2 (Winter 1981) 19–20, but the attempt to relate the Old English poem to the Welsh genre of dadolwch, ‘a type of poem designed to recover the favour of an offended patron’ (9 n. 2), is unconvincing. That there were such poems in Germanic oral literature is argued by the ‘head-ransoming’ praise-poems of Old Norse, but for Deor the comparison has little to recommend it; nor is it clear to me why ‘the closing lines [of Deor] must be taken as an interpolation, probably of the tenth century’ (19).
5. ‘Two Voices in Widsith,’;Weber;Mediaevalia,1980