Universidad Latina de Panam

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

Amilcar A. Contreras C.
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 Anglo-Saxon 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.

DETAILS ABOUT BEOWULF

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

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

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
whopoem
seem
to ininterrupt
The
ends
mourningthe
and
narrative
by literally
with
the heros
ashesintruding
paganly
themselves
accounts
of
interred
in a into
barrow
surrounded
human
celebration
and
by
splendidly
wrought treasures
community.
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.