Course content

The unique manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which narrowly escaped the Cottonian fire of 1731, was written probably in the 1020s or 1030s, but it is a copy at several removes from the original. The date of the poem’s first composition – itself an idea that is not straightforward – is much disputed, proposals ranging from the seventh to even the eleventh centuries. The evidence and arguments involve source criticism and intellectual history, as well as literary methodology; notable here are nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century fixations on pagan Germanic origins. Beowulf is an heroic poem on epic scale (3182 lines), in the formulaic diction and alliterative metre of traditional Germanic oral poetry. Its characters and events are for the most part fictional, some supernatural, but they are placed in a semi-historical past, in Sweden and Denmark of the late fifth and early sixth centuries; some episodes may once have been independent oral compositions, though present scholarship tends to regard them as antiquarian fabrications. The poem as we have it, however, is the work of a literate and Christian age; it is heroic, certainly, and in part straightforward battle poetry, but it is also an elegy on the transience of earthly life. Implicitly it weighs the nobility of a pagan past against a Christian present, and whether its hero could be granted salvation, no man can say.

The course will attend to these and other aspects of the poem, and select passages will be studied in detail. Students will be expected to follow the text in the original language, if necessary with the help of a translation. They will be expected to have read the whole work, if only in translation, before teaching begins.

Learning outcome

  • You learn about Beowulf, as rehearsed above; consolidation in the study of Anglo-Saxon language; and how to use an academic library.

Admission

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Prerequisites

Recommended previous knowledge

ENG2154 – Old English, Introduction (discontinued). First-class comprehension of academic English, and capacity to follow detailed linguistic.

Overlapping courses

10 credits overlap with ENG2164 – The World of Beowulf (discontinued)

Teaching

Teaching: one class of two hours per week, for ten weeks.

Attendance is an obligatory class requirement (80%). Additional absences must be justified by documentation to the exam coordinator.

Access to teaching

A student who has completed compulsory instruction and coursework and has had