The Roman Occupation

2. The Roman Occupation 55 B.C. – A.D. 409

7. Anglo Saxon Invasion A.D. 449

9. The Spread of Christianity A.D. 400 – A.D. 699

11. The Norman Invasion 1066

12. The British Legacy

14. The Spirit of the Celts

15. The Druids

16. Celtic Myths, Heroes and Heroines

20. Anglo Saxon Values: • Honor courage over a long life • Honor community (“chief” or king, feasting, storytelling, music) • Fate ( how a man reacts to fact gives honor or shame) • Physical strength over intelligence • Loyalty to “chief” or king above all

21. The Epic Hero Beowulf is ancient England’s hero, but he is also an archetype, or perfect example, of an epic hero. In other times, in other cultures, the hero has taken the shape of King Arthur or Gilgamesh (see page 48), or Sundiata or Joan of Arc. In modern America the hero may be a real person, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or a fictional character, like Shane in the western novel of the same name. The hero archetype in Beowulf is the dragon slayer, representing a besieged community facing evil forces that lurk in the cold darkness. Grendel, the monster lurking in the depths of the lagoon, may represent all of those threatening forces. Beowulf, like all epic heroes, possesses superior physical strength and supremely ethical standards. He embodies the highest ideals of Anglo-Saxon culture. In his quest he must defeat monsters that embody dark, destructive powers. At the end of the quest, he is glorified by the people he has saved.

22. KENNINGIn Anglo-Saxon poetry, a metaphorical phrase or compound word used to name a person, place, thing, or event indirectly.Beowulf (Collection 1) includes the kennings “whale-road” for the sea and “shepherd of evil” for Grendel. See page 42. See also Epithet. MOTIFIn literature, a word, a character, an object, an image, a metaphor, or an idea that recurs in a work or in several works. The rose is a motif that runs through many love poems. Beowulf (Collection 1) contains many of the traditional motifs associated with heroic literature from all over the world, including a hero who does great deeds in battle or undertakes an extraordinary journey and a supernatural or fantastic being that takes part in the action. These motifs, along with others common to heroic literature, also appear in epics such as the Iliad (Collection 1) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (Collection 3). A motif almost always bears an important relationship to the theme of a work of literature.

23. EPITHETAn adjective or other descriptive phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place, or thing. Phrases such as “Peter the Great,”“Richard the Lion-Hearted,” and “America the Beautiful” are epithets. Homer created so many descriptive epithets in his Iliad (Collection 1) and Odyssey that his name has been permanently associated with a type of epithet. The Homeric epithet consists of a compound adjective that is regularly used to modify a particular noun. Famous examples are “the winedark sea,”“the gray-eyed goddess Athena,” and the “rosy-fingered dawn.”

24. EPICA long narrative poem that relates the great deeds of a larger-than-life hero who embodies the values of a particular society. Most epics include elements of myth, legend, folklore, and history. Their tone is serious and their language grand. Most epic heroes undertake quests to achieve something of tremendous value to themselves or their society. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad (Collection 1) and Virgil’s Aeneid are the best-known epics in the Western tradition. The two most important English epics are the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (Collection 1) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Collection 3). Many epics share standard characteristics and formulas known as epic conventions, which the oral poets drew upon to help them recall the stories they were recounting and which the writers of literary epics draw upon to establish the epic quality of their poems. The conventions include: an invocation, or formal plea for aid, to a deity or some other spiritual power; action that begins in medias res(literally “in the middle of things”) and then flashes back to events that take place before the narrative’s current time setting; epicsimiles, or elaborately extended comparisons relating heroic events to simple, everyday events; a consistently predictable metrical structure; and stock epithets, or descriptive adjectives or phrases used repeatedly with—or in place of—a noun or proper name.

25. ALLITERATIONThe repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close to one another. Alliteration occurs most often at the beginning of words, as in “rough and ready.” But consonants within words sometimes alliterate, as in “baby blue.” The echoes that alliteration creates can increase a poem’s rhythmic and musical effects and make its lines especially memorable. In this line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 (page 280), the w sounds emphasize the melancholy tone: Alliteration is an essential feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry; in most lines, two or three of the four stressed syllables alliterate.

26. Versification: Beowulf, like all Old English poetry, is written in alliterative verse, a verse form that uses alliteration as one of the major organizing principles of a poetic line. While Shakespeare's poetry, often written in iambic pentameter, uses a syllabic meter (we count the number of syllables), Old English alliterative verse uses an accentual meter of four stressed beats and an undetermined number of unstressed beats per line. A typical Old English alliterative line consists of two half-lines separated by a strong pause known as a caesura. The third stress of a line always alliterates with either the first and/or the second stress, and the fourth stress never alliterates. In Old English alliterative verse, any vowel can alliterate with any other vowel. (Rhyme is so rare in Old English poetry that the one poem that does rhyme is known as "The Riming Poem.")

27. Compounding: Old English poetry makes extensive use of compounding, the combining of two words to make a new word. An example is feorhseoc, literally "life-sick" (feorh = life, seoc = sick), which can be translated as mortally wounded. A more common example can be found in the first line of Beowulf: Gar-Dena, literally "Spear-Danes" (gar = spear, Dena = Danes). Compounding may be done to meet the needs of the alliterative meter, as part of a formula, or to make a new word.