Amilcar A. Contreras C.

Universidad Latina de Panam

Branch of David
Subject: Panorama of English Literature
Professor: Eric Alejandro Bonilla Snchez

ID: 4-782-2452

Topic: Old English Language

Old English Language

Old English Language in

England

Old English or called AngloSaxon too. It is the earliest

historical form of the English
language, spoken in England.
Old English was developed
from a variety set of AngloFrisian or North Sea Germanic
dialects originally
spoken
by Germanic tribes traditionally
known as the Angles, Saxons,
and Jutes.
The AngloSaxons became dominant in
England,
their
language
replaced
the
languages
of Roman Britain. Old English
had four main dialects,
associated
with
particular Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms.

Who were the Anglo-Saxons?

The Anglo-Saxons were a

people who inhabited Great
Britain from the 5th century.
They comprised people from
Germanic tribes who migrated
to the island from continental
Europe, their descendants, and
indigenous British groups who
adopted some aspects of AngloSaxon culture and language.
The
Anglo-Saxon
period
denotes the period of British
history between about 450 and
1066,
after
their
initial
settlement and up until the
Norman Conquest.

What was the Norman conquest

of England?

It was the 11th-century invasion

and occupation of England by
an army of Norman, Breton, and
French soldiers led by Duke
William II of Normandy, later
styled
as
William
the
Conqueror.

Amilcar A. Contreras C.
ID: 4-782-2452

DETAILS ABOUT BEOWULF

The poems original audience must have shared this

mixed culture, one which readily responded to
references to an ancestral world and one which also
recognized the relevance of primitive heroism to a
Christian society. In a sense, a poem like Beowulf
mediates between a settled and an unsettled culture,
between one which enjoys the benefits of a stable,
ordered, agricultural society and one which relished the
restlessness of the wandering warrior hero.

It about the most important aspect of

Beowulf. It was long held that the most
substantial surviving Old English poem,
Beowulf,
was
a
pre-Christian
composition which had somehow been
tampered with by monastic scribes in
order to give it an acceptably Christian
frame of reference. The author was an
anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, referred
to by scholars as the "Beowulf poet".

BEOWULF

The poem ends in mourning and with

the heros ashes paganly interred in a
barrow surrounded by splendidly
wrought treasures of the kind that were
discovered at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in
1939. The last lines of Beowulf evoke a
pre-Christian spectacle, but the poems
insistent stress on mortality and on the
determining nature of word might
equally have conveyed to a Christian
audience a message of heroic
submission to the just commands of a
benevolent but almighty God.

Beowulf springs from a religious culture

which saw infinite mystery in the
natural world, and the world itself as if
hidden by a veil. It saw in nature a mass
of confused signs, portents, and
meanings. Although it may strike some
readers as casually episodic when
compared to the ostensibly tighter
narrative structures of Homer or Virgil,
the poem is in fact constructed around
three
encounters
with
the
otherworldly, with monsters who seem
to interrupt the narrative by literally
intruding themselves into accounts of
human celebration and community.