His translation of The Romance of the Rosedelves right into allegory. With Troilus and Criseyde, he gives us a good, old-fashioned romance. Chaucer was the master of an amazing array of genres. And thank goodness for that, because what a poet he was. Maybe it was that whole serving-the-country-yawnfest that allowed his compelling inner life time to flourish. That's right: this famed wordsmith held down a series of what we might think of as boring, bureaucratic government jobs. Instead, what made him popular among his peers and honored by the royal court was his life as a dedicated civil servant. Strangely enough, Chaucer was not particularly known for his poetry when he was alive-even though we now think of him as the go-to poet of medieval England. And heritage included customs like gift-giving and song-making, which, frankly, are two of our favorite things. The Anglo-Saxons shared a cultural background with these folks. Keep in mind that the tribes we see in Beowulf aren't Anglo-Saxons themselves they're Danish or Scandinavian. One interesting thing about the story is how it shows the Anglo-Saxons (who wrote the text) looking back into their past, at Scandinavians and Norse culture. Many scholars have mined Beowulf as a sort of treasure trove for exploring Anglo-Saxon society and culture. What makes him particularly heroic, do you think? What do we expect from our action heroes now? (You might want to consider characters from The Avengers or The Amazing Spider-Man.) How does the Anglo-Saxon view of heroism differ from our current one? In what ways is it the same? As such, he obviously had some manly traits. Chew on Thisīeowulf is the first epic hero of English literature. And we get heaping servings of all these elements in this epic tale. Not only does it give us an entertaining example of the earliest form of English, it also gives us a peek into what the Anglo-Saxon culture considered important: loyalty, generous kings, and manly heroes. And it's not just any little story, either Beowulf is counted right up there as one of the VITs-Very Important Texts. This text is one of the oldest full-fledged bits o' lit in English (Old English, that is). He's the one who helped enriched your, and our, life. If you enjoyed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey or the film version of Beowulf, you should give a little nod of thanks to this unknown poet-guy. And it's not so old or outmoded that it's completely irrelevant to the 21st century. Beowulf is one of the major classics of English literature. So, he had some serious religious learning in him.īut no matter who the writing-down-dude was, we just want to say: thanks. Why? Well, the poem gives us a hodge-podge mixture of paganism (from the Scandinavian culture the poem describes) and Christianity. The guy who finally recorded it for posterity (and yes-it probably was a guy, since that's just the way things went during the medieval period) might have been a monk. People think that happened sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries. This whole out-loud tradition probably continued for hundreds of years before Beowulf was written down. And if you're feeling particularly Old English-y, those dudes doing the reciting were called scops. It's likely that Beowulfactually had a number of authors, and that the tale was part of Anglo-Saxon oral tradition.Īnd if Beowulf was the kind of tale bards used to tell around campfires before they sang "Kumbaya"-or whatever the heck it was they sang in the Middle Ages-then either short episodes of this story or bigger chunks were recited out loud. Nice name, huh? Unfortunately, this is the best we can do, since we know virtually nothing about the person who first wrote down this foundational Old English epic.
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