Abstract:
The longest and most accomplished poem to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf sits oddly in its ninth- or tenth-century moment. Its anonymous author appears to have been a literate monastic, immersed in the culture of text and textual authority established among the pre-literate Anglo-Saxons by missionaries dispatched by Pope Gregory the Great in 597. The Anglo-Saxons descended from Germanic pagans who’d arrived on the shores of the former Roman province of Britannia in the fifth and sixth centuries, at the close of a period known to modern historians as the Age of Migration, when all the tribes of northern Europe were pressed westward by the withdrawal of Roman authority and incursions of new populations from the east. We know little about daily life among the peoples of those stressed times, but it cannot have been easy. The triumph of one would have entailed another’s harrowing loss. The traumas suffered by these ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons coloured the psyches of their descendants for centuries after.
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