Anglo-Saxon & Beowulf Background

Background

  • 700-800 A.D.

  • No original references to God, later added Christianity by Monks

  • A hero was brave, generous towards people, loyal

  • 3,182 lines of Beowulf from 30,000 lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry

  • Setting: Denmark and Sweden

  • Author: unknown or written by monks

  • Composed in the 7th or 8th century

  • Oldest surviving English poem

Culture

  • Belief in fate (Wyrd)

  • Accumulated treasures amount to success: more treasure, more successes

  • Fame and fortune sought after

  • Loyalty to one’s leader was crucial

  • Importance to pagan, Germanic, and Christian ideals whose lives were often hard and uncertain

  • Fierce, hardy, warrior based culture

  • Strength, courage, leadership were important abilities/qualities

  • Boisterous, yet elaborately ritualized customs of the mead-hall

  • Expected for the hero to boast

Ideals & Codes of Conduct

  • Good defeats evil

  • Wergild - restitution for murder, expect revenge from victim’s relavtives

  • Boasts must be backed with actions

  • Fate is in control

  • Fair fights are the only honorable fights

Epic Poem

  • Long poem that recounts a hero’s adventure

  • Elevated language

  • Does not sermonize (no lesson to be learned)

  • Invokes a muse (inspiration)

  • Begins in media res (middle of things)

  • Mysterious origins, super powers, vulnerability, rite of passage

The Epic Hero

  • Actions consist of responses to catastrophic situations, usually supernatural occurances

  • Code of conduct forces him to challenge any threat to society

  • Destiny discovered in a series of episodes punctuated by violent incidents interspersed with idyllic descriptions

Elements

  • Chant-like effect of the four-beat line

  • Alliteration

  • Caesura - pause or break in a line of poetry

  • Kenning - metaphorical phrase used instead of name (battle blade)

  • Epithet - description name to characterize something

  • Hyperbole

Title

  • Anglo-Saxon, Beo means bright and noble

  • Wulf means wolf

  • Beowulf means bright or noble wolf

  • Other sources say Beo means bear

Dating Beowulf

  • 521 A.D. - death of Hygelac

  • 680 A.D. - apperance of alliterative verses

  • 835 A.D. - the Danish started raiding other areas; after this poets considered them heros

  • This version was likely composed between 680 - 835 A.D., may have been set earlier

Poetry

  • Alliterative verse

  • Kennings

Terms

  • Thane - a warrior

  • Mead-hall - hall where the lord and warriors slept, ate, held ceremonies, etc.

  • Wyrd - fate (appears a lot throughout poem while having Christian references to God’s will)

Main Characters

  • Beowulf

    • hero

    • Geat (southern Sweden)

    • nephew of Higlac (King at story’s start)

    • sails to Denmark to help Hrothgar

  • Hrothgar

    • Danish King

    • bulids Herot (banquet hall) for his men

    • tormented by Grendal for 12 years

    • loses many men to Grendal

    • joyless before Beowulf’s arrival

  • Grendal

    • demon, fiend

    • haunts the moors (swampy lands)

    • descendant of Cain (the man in the bible who killed his brother Abel

    • feasts on 30 men the night of the 1st attack

  • Grendal’s Mother

    • she-wolf

    • lives under the lake

    • challenges Hrothgar when he kills one of her best men

  • Fire Dragon

    • lives in Beowulf’s kingdom

    • wakes when thief steals a cup

    • guards treasure