The Old English poem Andreas deserves a reading entirely on its own terms. For years we have been studying it in various distracting ways: as if it were a deliberate and feeble imitation of Beowulf (which it is not);¹ or trying to attach it to the Cynewulfian canon;² or taking it as a compendium of patristic lore (which hardly any Old English poems are);³ or we may see it as an example of an inherently inferior medieval genre, hagiographical romance; or (most often) as an embarrassing misapplication of the heroic style to the wrong subject. Clearly the poem invites us to make these classifications, but its own noteworthy achievements have been generally overlooked. We need a straightforward frontal attack by the critic: just what is this poem up to, line by line? The best guide in the process seems to me to be the Latin source, to which we have a fairly close approximation in the Recensio Casanatensis.⁴ Careful consultation of this source lets us see what forms the poet's imagination imposes on his given material and gives us the clearest idea of the kind of poet he is.