AngloSaxon England History Literature Literary Devices Beowulf PreAngloSaxon

Anglo-Saxon England History Literature & Literary Devices Beowulf

Pre-Anglo-Saxon History • • • Shared language and customs Britain: Britons Ireland: Gaels Scotland: Pics Literature and History: Oral Tradition

Pre-Anglo-Saxon History Romans: Conquered Britain, but not Ireland or Scotland Introduced: Latin, Law, Cities, Roads, Written Scholarship, Christianity Eventually had to leave to protect their borders closer to home. Since they protected the Britons, without the Romans, the Britons were targets of new invaders…

Anglo-Saxon History 449 -1066 Germanic Tribes: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians Kin/Kinship Reintroduced Paganism Wyrd (fate) Christianity: returned strongly around 597 Vikings 790 s Norman Conquest: 1066 Started 200 years of French rule in England

Anglo-Saxon Literature & Literary Devices • Oral Tradition • Photocopiers of the day – Religious Texts - the Bible – Local Lore • Epic: long, narrative poem about a hero • Alliteration: The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds, or any vowel sounds in successive or closely related syllables • Alliterative Verse: Germanic/Celtic in origin; poetic structure based on a patterned repetition of initial sounds in a line of poetry • Caesura: a pause/break in a line of poetry

Anglo-Saxon Literature & Literary Devices • Stock Epithets: Epithet is an adjective used to point out a characteristic of a person or thing. • Stock implies that the same word or phrase is repeatedly used to describe the same thing through a narrative. • Kennings: descriptive phrase used as a synonym for a simple noun • Examples: • “the bent-necked wood, ” “the ringed prow, ” “the foamynecked, ” “the sea-wood” for ship • “the swan-road, ” “the whale-road” for sea

The Beowulf Manuscript Housed in the British Library

Old English versus Modern English