Building Background

The Time and Place Imagine a time when war bands from northern Europe regularly raided one another’s shores to loot and burn each other’s settlements; when great warriors feasted, drank, and bragged of their bloody conquests in huge mead halls— banquet halls named after the fermented honey (or mead) wine drunk there; when kings bestowed riches upon their bravest warriors to retain their allegiance; and when people believed in monsters and dragons. That time was the 6^th century—the period in which Beowulf, the oldest surviving English epic, is set.

The story of Beowulf is not set in England, however, nor are its characters English. The story takes place in Scandinavia, and it involves the Geats, a tribe from southern Sweden, and the Danes, a tribe from Denmark.

So, how did Beowulf come to be the first great literary work of England? Beginning in the 400s, Germanic peoples, later known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons, invaded and settled the territory that would become known as England. Wherever they went, stories like Beowulf went with them, passed on from one scop, or oral poet, to another and reshaped with each performance. Scholars believe that an Anglo-Saxon poet thoroughly versed in the scops’ stock of legends, historical accounts, and poetic devices wrote Beowulf sometime between the late 700s and 1000.

Literary Devices in Beowulf Anglo-Saxon scops relied on certain poetic devices to aid their memory and give their poems structure and impact. Some of these devices are described in the chart below.

Poetic Device	Definition	Example
alliteration	Beginning nearby words or stressed syllables with the same, usually consonant, sound.	miserable, mighty men tormented
caesura	An obvious pause in line of poetry. In Old English poetry, it usually comes near the middle of a line, with two stressed syllables before and two after, often allowing little or no “run-on” of meaning from the first half line to the second.	A prince of the Geats, // had killed Grendel.
kenning	A stock metaphorical phrase used instead of a simple noun to identify something with something it is not.	whale-road for sea life-house for body

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