🔁 Episode 76 - Learning english with the poem "Beowulf"

I'm going to talk about a poem, a particular poem that most people have heard of but almost nobody has read.

A famous poem.

We don't know who wrote it.

The poem is called Beowulf.

I think someone made a film about it a few years ago, so you may know the story.

But anyway, it's a poem composed by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet.

Often we call him the Beowulf poet because he's famous for this.

It was written somewhere between the 8th and 11th century AD, but the events it describes in the 5th or 6th century, so a few hundred years before, There's a single copy of the manuscript left, which is in the British Library in London.

And it's written in Old English, which you can also call Anglo-Saxon, I think.

It's the language that was spoken in England before the Norman Conquest, which is when those horrible French people came across and invaded.

So it's a Germanic language, and it's the ancestor of modern English, but it's almost impossible to understand.

There are a few words you might recognize, but impossible, really.

Beowulf is an epic poem, a long narrative poem, which celebrates heroic deeds, usually of national or cultural importance.

It doesn't rhyme like a lot of other poems, but it has a kind of alliteration, but where they link up the first letters of words doesn't really matter.

It's set in Scandinavia, particularly in Denmark, the land of the Danes, and Gietland, which is southern Sweden, which is the land of the Geats.

So it's strange because it's an English poem about Scandinavian heroes.

And it's one of the most important works of all English literature, arguably the earliest major poem in the English language.

It tells you quite a lot about Anglo-Saxon culture and values, especially like heroism and loyalty and vengeance and fate, and quite a lot about the way society was structured.

And it blends pagan Germanic heroic traditions with Christian elements, because it was a period where these things were a bit missy.

For example, the monster in this poem called Grendel, it's a monster that's descended from Cain, Cain from the Bible.

It's quite interesting because Beowulf has had a lot of influence on later literature, especially J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a scholar of Old English, and he was inspired from it when he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

So since none of us can actually read it, unless we study for years, I'm going to tell you what happens in a very quick way.

So don't ask me how names are pronounced.

I'll do my best.