Beowulf Research Paper

Earliest inhabitaion * England was inhabited from about 3000 BC * These the builders of Stonehenge were excellent astronomers, had extraordinary engineering skills and a complex social organization. * Celtic tribes invaded England around 700 BC * The celts Bronze weapons ensured their victory over the previous settlers. * The next invaders were the Romans. * They arrived in 43 AD and stayed for 400 years. * The Romans drove the Celts or Britons into Scotland and Wales and created an urban civilization; they built towns, roads,developed trade, took corn and tin from England. * When the Roman Empire began to come under attack from migrating Asian tribes, the English colony was abandoned. Anglo-Saxon England
(450-1066) 1. The Anglo-Saxon invaders * After the departure of the Romans, tribes from Germany called the Angles and * Saxons began to invade the now disorganized country. * The name "English" is derived From the first group. * Many of the Celts or Britons fled from the massacres to Brittany,this was named after them. * The newcomers established several kingdoms, which were organised on a tribal basis: that is to say, the free people held the land in common. * Life was mainly agricultural, herds of cattle constituted the main source of wealth, apart from plunder. * The warriors held a special position under the kings, whose crown Depended on military force; prisoners of war were enslaved. 2. The Danish and Viking invasions * From about 800 on Danish or Viking invaders began to plunder Ireland and France. * They started to invade northern and eastern England, attracted by the rich monasteries. * They gradually founded permanent settlements, building fortified towns from which they traded. * Under this threat to their rule, the Anglo-Saxon kings began to unite. * In the reign of King Alfred the Great (849-899), the Danes controlled nearly half of the country. He paid them huge sums of money (the "Danegeld") until he had won over the Anglo-Saxon rulers, and had learnt enough from the Danes to defeat them. * The English adopted the Viking iron axes which made it easier to cut down forests, winning land to use for agriculture. * The rulers began to build stone castles; towns grew up close to them because of the trade which the lord attracted. * With the beginning of centralised rule under the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kings, the status of the people began to change: in return for protection from the Vikings, they had to give up many of their freedoms, and were becoming increasingly dependent on their lords. * Tribal Anglo-Saxon England began to develop into a feudal society under the pressure of the wars against the Norsemen.
Anglo-Saxon literature * The language spoken by the people was a Germanic dialect which we call Old English. * Anglo-Saxon culture was mainly oral; poets entertained the kings, warriors and their families with tales of the ancestors' adventures and heroic deeds. * Only a fractionhas survived: about 30,000 lines of poetry in four manuscript collections. * There are also collections of laws, historical works, and translations from Greek and Latin intoEnglish. 1. Monks introduce writing * We would know nothing of Anglo-Saxon literature had England not been christianised during the Roman period. * In 597 St Augustine was sent from Rome to preach to the pagans of southern England; Irish missionaries began to work in the northern areas. * The priests were the only literate people in the country; their organisation was a European one, and they brought with them its international language, Latin, at the same time creating a large new vocabulary in English for church matters. * They introduced agricultural, engineering and medical skills as well as philosophical learning of the now vanished civilisations of Greece and Rome. * They founded monasteries which became centres of education. * They wrote and copied books, built in stone, developed crafts,traded - and took taxes. * The rulers of these monasteries, the abbots, and the bishops soon occupied a position at the top of the social pyramid. * They wrote down the laws of the kingdoms they lived in so as to record their rights and privileges. But the art of writing was also used to record pagan literature given a Christian veneer. 2. Beowulf * The greatest literary work that has survived is an epic poem of about 3000 lines called Beowulf. * It was probably composed in the eighth century and written down some 300 years later. It is the story of the heroic deeds of Germanic warriors in the fifth and sixth centuries. * The hero comes to the court of a Danish king and frees him from a terrible monster called Grendel, and then from Grendel's mother, an even more ferocious beast. * The second half deals with Beowulf's old age, when he is king and must defend his country against a fearsome dragon, which he manages to destroy, but dies in the process. * Alliteration is the basis of the verse: having a clear pattern of words beginning with the same sound was a great help for memorising, a vital consideration in communities where books were rare treasures. * Stories about monsters, horror and magic have remained popular to this day, but the perilous quality of life in those times must have made them seem quite realistic. * Most of the country was covered by dense forest and inhabited by wild animals; the only light people had in the long winter evenings came from flickering wick lamps; the evils of disease, malnutrition and war accompanied their short lives.
* The tales would have been popular with people of all ranks and ages and would have been told at village fairs by local storytellers as well as in the household of the kings by wandering scops or poets. * Perhaps it is a sign of progress that this lengthy tale is about the killing of dangerous monsters rather than the slaughtering of other tribes and the stealing of their women and cattle. * Beowulf is the only complete Anglo-Saxon heroic epic we know. * There are small fragments of two other poems (Finn and Waldhere) which may have been of similar length. * The chance that something as fragile as a parchment should survive over a thousand years is slight indeed. * The Beowulf manuscript was discovered by a seventeenth century scholar; it was nearly destroyed in a fire a hundred years later today it is safely housed in the British Museum. 3. Shorter Non-clerical poems * A few shorter poems by non-clerical authors give us a window into the Anglo-Saxon
world. * One called Widsith (traveller to distant lands) describes the virtues of rulers and heroes of all lands encountered by the poet on his wanderings through the world. * Most of the other poems are sorrowful: one describes the sadness of a ruined city (possibly Bath) * Four lament separation from a beloved wife or husband. * Two are laments by old men contrasting their present desolate condition with former happiness.
* We also have an entertaining collection of 96 Anglo-Saxon verse riddles, surprisingly uncensored by their clerical recorders. 4. Religious and historical writing * There is a good deal of religious verse: the monks used the popular pagan genre to instruct and win converts. * One re-telling of the story from Genesis about the fall of Lucifer and creation of hell must have been admired by listeners used to Beowulfian monsters and horror landscapes. * There are poems on the heroic exploits of the saints, and an account of Judith's killing of the tyrant Holofernes presenting her like a Celtic warrior queen. * Quite different is The Dream of the Rood in which the cross on which Christ was crucified tells the poet of its terrible duty. * Furthermore, there are important prose documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon period. * A monk called the Venerable Bede (673-735) compiled an Ecclesiastical History of the English Race. * It was written in Latin, and translated into English by King Alfred over a hundred years
later. * It gives a fascinating account of Bede's time, in which miracles and legends have their place next to battles, the death of a king, or the founding of a monastery. * The outstanding lay scholar of the period is King Alfred. * He was so appalled by the decline of learning after the Viking destruction of monasteries that he learnt Greek and Latin as a middle-aged man in order to translate important works into English, often adding passages of his own to explain or comment. * He hoped to make the freeborn youths of England literate in their own language. * Such an interest in culture was rare indeed in a military man. * He drew up laws for his kingdom. He commissioned the monasteries to keep records. * The monks compiled a prose work known as The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, which is a sort of national history, recording important events, the lives of famous abbots as well as storms, fires, famines and invasions. * Anglo-Saxon culture was greatly enriched through its assimilation of Christianity. * The churchmen were the main writers of literature, sometimes recording the works produced by lay people. There was narrative verse, which is either heroic or religious in nature, as well as religious, historical and legal prose.