Essay on Beowulf

Beowulf is the story of dual ordeal and external battle with vicious opponents and an internal battle with human tendencies of pride, greed,cowardice, betrayal, and revenge. Beowulf is the earliest extant heroic poem in any modern European language. The poem has come down through the centuries in a single manuscript, which was damaged and almost destroyed in the 1731 fire in the Cotton Library. Although the manuscript dates from the tenth century, the poem was probably composed in the eighth century and deals with sixth century events, before the migration of the Germanic tribes to Britain.

The poem was composed and executed verbally. Old English bards, or scops, most expected started by piecing simultaneously customary short pieces of music, called heroic lays; they then step-by-step supplemented to that groundwork until the verse increased to its present size. The verse form is the standard Old English isochronic in that each line contains four stresses; there is a strong caesura in the middle of the lines, and the resultant half lines are bound together by alliteration. Although little Old English rhymes endures, Beowulf's cleaned verse and reflective, allusive development put forward that it is part of a affluent poetic tradition.

Besides having unusual literary merit, Beowulf also provides information about and insight into the social, political, and ethical systems of Anglo-Saxon culture (Greenblatt, 336). There is a strong emphasis on courage in battle, fidelity to one's word, and loyalty to kinsmen. This is a violent but highly principled society in which struggle is everywhere and honor is everything. The hero, bound by family ties, by his own word, and by a strict code of revenge, is surrounded by his comitatus, his band of devoted comrades in arms. Judeo-Christian elements enter into the poem and into the society, but these aspects of the ...