Beowulf

The most famous and beautiful of all surviving Old English poems tells of the heroic deeds of Beowulf, a warrior and leader of the Geats, who travels to the land of the Danes to fight the monster Grendel and his lake-dwelling mother. After these epic encounters, he returns to his own land where he eventually becomes king and rules wisely. Yet fate is inescapable, and Beowulf must battle a third foe – the dragon.

Composed at some point between the mid-7th and late-10th centuries AD, Beowulf drew on an oral tradition that had been in existence for centuries, one with close connections to the Icelandic sagas. This was a warrior culture in which kings rewarded courage and loyalty with gifts of gold, where blood feuds were common, and the threat of invasion or raids was never far away – indeed many of the characters in Beowulf correspond to historical Scandinavian kings. Yet the world the poet evoked was already in the past; Christianity was changing both culture and literature. What we have is thus unique: a mingling of the pagan past and the Christian present.

That the poem has come down to us at all is almost miraculous. It survived only in a manuscript produced in about 1000 AD, its brittle pages damaged by handling, fire and water, and not even copied until the 1780s. Such is the frail foundation of a work now seen as part of the bedrock of English literature and history – revealing a glimpse of the specifically Anglo-Saxon world that vanished with the Norman Conquest.

Literatura Estrangeira