Paper on Beowulf: must develop, must write, must finish

I'm trying to write a paper on anaphoric "don" in Beowulf. It's a little embarrassing the way my attention keeps circling around functions of the verb "to do" in English, but damn, it's such a great verb.

I'm at that familiar stage in paper writing in which I've itemized the instances of some pattern (in this case, 17 uses of "don"), I can make some descriptive generalizations, and I've found or collected most of the relevant secondary work, but no interesting argument or synthetic explanation is emerging. I'm on the verge of jettisoning this topic, but I've already done that once (puncutation of parenthetical phrases in the Beowulf manuscript-- total dead end, don't try it), and I don't have the time to play around with potential paper topics forever. There's also that sense of the crushing weight of previous scholarship on ANYTHING in the field of Old English, and anaphoric 'don' is something that, surprisingly, doesn't seem to have attracted a lot of attention. I can only find descriptive accounts of the use of 'don' in grammars and dictionaries, and of course there's a lot of interest from generative linguists in do-so substitution and verb-phrase anaphora in modern English, which itself hasn't trickled down to old-school philologists of Old English.

Here's what's come up so far: anaphoric 'don' shows up in a fairly restricted set of environments in Beowulf-- metrically (all but one case fall at end of b-line), syntactically (often paired with swa, nearly always with a shared subject), semantically (often co-occuring with adverbs of time, indicating repetition or continuity). Many instances also support quasi-gnomic statements or the judgments of the poet.