I have corresponded with eight of the authors whose work is featured on this site, and at least four of them have linked to my website from their own. So far the only person who has complained has been the son of a man whose drawings I had posted, and after receiving his email I removed the drawings immediately.

I have not purchased the rights to any of this material, and when I correspond with the authors I do not ask for permission to publish their work here. I realize that some of them have sold their copyright to their publishers, but I have not asked for reprint permission from any of the publishers either. I also realize that none of the authors have granted me any special rights by the mere fact of corresponding with me about my site, or complementing me on what I have done here.

Although it is fairly likely that I have gone beyond "fair use" in what I have done here, I am still hoping that no-one will mind the limited copying I have done. I think it helps that this is not a commercial site, that there are no pop-ups or ads of any kind, and that I provide clear attribution and links to buying the books whenever possible. But if anyone objects to being included here then I will remove their material from this site.

The most serious problem I am causing the authors might be my inclusion of high quality manuscript images from Kevin Kiernan's Electronic Beowulf CD, or high resolution images of selected pages from Gareth Hinds's comic books. Those authors might wonder whether people will be less inclined to purchase images from them if they are available on this site. For now, however, Kevin and Gareth seem to appreciate the exposure they are getting here (several thousand people have seen the images who might not have otherwise seen them) and so they have generously (albeit informally) allowed me to use their material here. I am hoping that when people see examples of the high quality images of the manuscript which Professor Kiernan has on his CD that those people will be more likely to be willing to spend $150 to buy a copy of the CD in order to investigate the manuscript further.

I realize that this explanation might not satisfy everyone. Some people might suggest that it would have been common courtesy for me to contact each author first. I can only tell you that it can be very difficult to find the mailing or electronic address of someone who wrote a Beowulf translation many years ago. Sometimes it can even be difficult to find contact information for the author of a very recent translation. I think it is also possible that some authors might be reluctant to correspond with me in case doing so would imply that they have given me permission to publish their work, something which they might in fact not mind, but would still not want to officially sanction (especially if they have sold their copyright to their publisher). I reiterate that I will quickly remove any material that any of the authors do not want included on my site, or change the attribution for the material to more clearly indicate its original source. In the past four years, however, none of the original authors have ever complained, except for the son of a man who drew some of the images I featured on one of my pages. I removed the images right away.