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
* 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
* 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