History of English Literature Lecture 2
The beginnings of English literature:the heroic age.
-the age of uncertainty  migrating memories and identities
-the pagan hero in the Christian context  Beowulf the man
-magic and otherness in Beowulf
Doom and gloom in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Texts about heroes exist since times immemorial
(Gilgamesh)
Early literature was in fact orature (transmitted via word)
1.Society and social relations:
a. Medieval social organisation -oratores (those who pray), bellatores (those who fight) and
laboratores(those who work)
b. How was literature created? First oral transmissions, only later recorded in writing (clergy
involved  monasteries as intellectual centres and the importance of monastic schools).
c.Literature for whom? Upper classes, clergy, aristocracy.
2.Styles and genres (types) of Old English literature:
a. Typical poetic tropes: alliteration, kenning (condensed metaphors, like hronrad, whale-road to
describe the sea, or sceadugenga, shadow-walker to describe monstrous Grendel), cariation
(repeated presentation of an idea with changing focuses)
b. Main types of texts:
-Poetry: elegiac (Christian existentialism), heroic, religious (saints' lives, poetic sermons, biblical
paraphrases);
-Gnomic(wisdom) texts (charms, poetic riddles, maxims, moral instructions);
-Historical prose (chronicles  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle);
-Legal texts (legal codices, wills etc,);
-Philosophical, religious and scientific
3.Where has Old English literature been preserved?
a. What is lost, what is left?
b. Manuscripts housed in monastic/cathedral libraries, much later (from 16th century) in private
libraries
c. The Exeter Book in Exeter cathedral ((Old English elegies, love poems, poetic riddles, religious
poems, gnomic text).
d. Robert Cotton's manuscript (Cotton Vitellius  Beowulf, Judith), now in British library. Almost
burned down in the fire of 1731.
e. Junius manuscript (now in Oxford)  Genesis, Christ and Satan, Exodus, daniel
f. The Vercielli Book (found in Italy)  a proof of how manuscripts travelled between monasteries
(Dream of the Rood, Fates of Apostles, Andreas)
4.The importance and universality of heroic tradition and heroic narratives-
an impo
6.Heroic culture and history:
Roman historian Tacitus (1st century AD) mentions the importance of the heroic tradition and the
importance of the heroic culture among the continental Germanic tribes. Heroic literature and the
heroic culture of the warrior society later giving rise to the culture of chivalry and knighthood.
Early poems recited as orature (orally) in communal places (halls, known as mead-halls) Possibly
similar to these examples
7.Intertectuality of Anglo-Saxon culture  Beowulf as an epic poem proving earlier cultural and
social links with the past on the continental
a. The source and origins, elements of magic and the world of fantasy.
b. Time of action (before 5th / 6th c) and time of written composition (10th / 11th c.) as different.
c. Style, diction and the mode of expression in Beowulf.
-Language and poetic tropes: kennings, variation, alliteration
-The setting and the visual atmosphere of the epic.
-onomatopoeic elements.
d. The run down of the main elements of plot (to follow)
e. The heroic idea as a didactic power in the poem
f. The world of the uncanny as a metaphor of the mysterious elemnt in human existence and a
metaphor of life as a struggle Beowulf's monster as signs (monster-demonstrate)
g. Old English fatalism and instability present in the idea of wyrd  fate
h. Christianity as clearly a later addition (by the scribe)
Palimpsest(ic) with a shadow of a former writing