Introduction to ANGLO SAXON HISTORY Adapted from lectures by Mr. Milton (http://www.teacherspayteachers.

com/Store/Mrmilton) and MaryEileen Young Old English: moder = mother, hond=hand, swearde=swordOver 80% of the words we use today come directly from Old English. ***Put Old English Translation on the Board The society of Beowulf is forged out of invasions and warfare between tribes. It was a hostile world and tribal society wasnt very permanent. It was great men, who by force or personality, kept things together. It was an age of individualismthat is, the person, the individual was what was important. However, durability depends on depersonalization--that is, on the establishment of institutions. To Anglo-Saxons war was something between a sport and a religiona way to profit, a path to glory, almost a moral obligation. The highest good in this society was public esteemthe lowest good, public disgrace. This was not an age when the commander of an army led his troops from behind. After Beowulf was written down we almost lost it. There was a fire in the building that it was in and someone had the good sense to run in and grab it. After that, people began to think maybe we should make a copy. Parts of the manuscript were burnedin fact, if you ever see a copy of the original youll notice char marks on it. Actually, weve lost parts of the story forever because they were destroyed in the fire. Some terms to keep in mind for Beowulf: (WRITE ON BOARD) Scops: poets or traveling bards who sang stories in a poetic form. Wyrd: fate. Why do things happen? Wyrd. Shakespeare played on this idea with the three weird sisters in Macbeth. A central question of that play was are the witches simply agents of fate, detailing what was going to happen, or were they something more evil and insidious, corrupting Macbeths very soul? Wergeld: Man price If you went to war or were in a drunken brawl or something and lets say I killed you then your family would say: you killed him, so we kill you. Or, you can pay us $25,000 and then we dont have to kill you. Everyone had a price basically and you paid because otherwise it became clear very early on that otherwise the killing would just never end. Everyone had a price they would pay to avoid revenge. Some literary terms you need to know: litotes, which is a sort of ironic understatement. Theres a scene in the Battle of Maldon where a man runs off screaming from battle and the narrator says: He cared not for battle.

Theres a scene in Beowulf, one of my favorite scenes, where Grendel the monster is just wrecking havoc, devouring all the warriors, and hes been doing this for 10 years as this demon who just breaks in and eats everybody and Beowulf says: News of Grendel reached me. Hard to ignore. Thats litotes. That news probably would have been hard to ignorOe and probably would have gotten out. So thats litotes. Well see a few more of those as we go through. Kenning: a poetic way of putting things; a short metaphoric description of a thing used in place of the things name. Its sort of hard to understand now because were used to using any words we want for a poem, but there used to be a poetic tradition that certain words were just considered too low to be included in a poem. We still do that now to an extent. In Beowulf we see it in things like they just dont say king, they say the ring giver, or another example, a really, really, beautiful one, is they call the sea the whale road. Theres another moment where someone is about to talk and instead of saying: opening his mouth they say unlocking his word horde. Theres hundreds of these in Beowulf. Modern kennings: gas-guzzler and head hunter One of the other things well notice in Beowulf that was characteristic of Old English is that instead of using rhyme and meter to hold things together as a poem and differentiates it from prose it that it uses alliteration, Old English poetry tended to tie things together by using consonants similar sounds at the beginning of words. The translation were reading captures some of that. Its useful when were starting Beowulf to realize that its not only not written in English, its not even about English people. So you have a poem not written in English, that doesnt have anything to do with the English and its considered the first great English literary text. The poem deals with the Danes and the Gaets. So we have this foreign language poem thats set in Scandanavia. Approximately 70% of Beowulf appear entirely or in part in other Anglo Saxon poetry. Scholars insist that all the phrases could be found elsewhere if all of the early Anglo-Saxon poetry had survived. In Old English, plagiarism did not existborrowed phrases were expected and accepted. The concept of turnitin.com would seem strange to the Anglo-Saxons. To its original audience Beowulf would have been an adventure story, a history lesson of its peopleits telling the story of real people from a few hundred years before. And its a conduct bookyou actually learned if you were a listener how to behave. It teaches you lessons about how to behave in your life. It teaches you about honor and braveryeven things like what the best way to respond to people who are challenging you. At this point in history, theres really nothing written down. Literature hadnt been invented yet. Manuscripts are extremely rare. So the poem was not only entertainment but education. The scop was an extremely important person in Old English society.

Beowulf is not the product of one person writing it. Its the cumulative process of many scops singing it over the years. So what we have is not the product of one author, but many, many people over hundreds of years. And there are some really interesting things the scops didlike adding Christianity Between the composition of Beowulf and the original events that Beowulf originated out of, Christianity appears. And one of the really fascinating things about Beowulf is you can see a struggle between the Christian scops and the pagan story they are telling. So at moments you will have people saying: The Almighty guided his sword which is kind of weird because obviously Beowulf couldnt care less. So they tried to Christianize this pagan story. They used it as a conversion tool. Beowulf started out as a celebration of a certain way of life. But what we have now is a poem that questions that way of life. It questions a pagan world. So the Christian scops got ahold of it and wrote it in such a way as to make the listener question if this is really the way we want to keep doing things. Any reference to God, Devil, hell or heaven is something thats been added. The Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity at the end of the sixth century. The action of the poem takes place around 500 A.D. Beowulf was not widely read until the 1800s, so its influence on English poetry and prose is almost non-existent. In fact, it wasnt until the early 1900s that it was regarded as a work of art. In fact, it wasnt until JRR Tolkien wrote a highly influential essay on the poem that it came to be regarded so highly. In fact, Lord of the Rings is heavily influenced by Beowulf.