1. Write down Beowulf's plot.

2. Explain the importance of language and how it was used.

3. Explain the concept of head-rhyme and exemplify. Mark the elements in the
examples quoted.
4. Explain what riddles were. Provide examples and find out another way of calling
them.
5. Provide examples of Old English Verse and Old English Prose. Explain
properly.
6. Looks for maps showing: a) Angles, Saxons and Jutes (Places of origin and their
settlements in Great Britain); b) the Roman Empire with Britannia included; c)
the Viking Invasions

1. Beowulf is essentially a warrior story. It tells of the hero who gives his name to
the poem and his struggle with a foul monster—half devil, half-man—called
Grendel, who has for a long time been raiding the banqueting-hall of King
Hrothgar’s warrior. Beowulf sails from Sweden and comes to the help of
Hrothgar. His fight with Grendel—and Grendel’s equally horrific mother—are
the subject of the poem.

2. Much of the strength and violence of Beowulf derive from the nature of Old
English itself. It was a language rich in consonants, fond of clustering its
consonants together, so that the mouth seems to perform a swift act of violence.
Compared with the softer languages of the East and South, Old English seems to
be a series of loud noises. And the violence of the language is emphasised in the
technique that the Old English poet employs.

3. Head-rhyme means making words begin with the same sound (this is sometimes
called alliteration, but alliteration really refers to words beginning with the same
letter, which is not always the same thing as beginning with the same sound).
Steap stanlitho–stige nearwe
The line is divided into two halves, and each half has two heavy stresses. Three
(sometimes four, occasionally two) of the stresses of the whole line are made
even more empathic by the use of head-rhyme.
The use of head-rhyme seems natural to English verse and it even plays a large
part in everyday English speech: hale and hearty; fat and forty; time and tide;
fit as a fiddle; a pig in a poke, etc.
4. The need to find words beginning with the same sound means often that a poet
has to call some quite common thing by an uncommon name, usually a name
that he himself invents for his immediate purpose. Thus the sea becomes the
swan’s way or the whale’s road or the sail-path. The Old English language was
well fitted for playing this sort of game, because its normal way of making new
words was to take two old words and join them together. Thus, as there was no
word for crucify, the form rod-fasten had to be made, meaning ‘to fix a tree’.
The word vertebra had not yet come into English, so ban-bring (bone-ring) had
to be used instead. A lot of Old English words thus have the quality of riddles—
‘guess what this is’—and it is not surprising that ridding was a favourite Old
English pursuit. Indeed, some of the loveliest of the shorter poems are called
riddles. There is one on a bull’s horn. The horn itself speaks, telling how it once
was the weapon of an armed warrior (the bull) but soon afterwards was
transformed into a cup, its bosom being filled with a maiden ‘adorned with
rings’. Finally it is borne on horseback, and it swells with the air from someone
else’s bosom. It has become a trumpet. The actual guessing—essence of a
riddle—is less important than the fanciful description of the object whose name,
of course, is never disclosed.
On the whole, riddles were a major literary genre in Anglo-Saxon England.
Another way of calling them could be guesses or conundrums.

5. Old English Verse: This poem composed by Caedmon is perhaps the first piece
of Christian literature to appear in Anglo-Saxon England, and it is especially
notable because, according to the Venerable Bede, it was divinely inspired.
Caedmon, a humble and unlearned man, tended the cattle of an abbey on the
Yorkshire coast. One night, at a feast, when songs were called for, he stole out
quietly, ashamed that he could contribute nothing to the amateur entertainment.
He lay down in the cold-shed and slept. In his sleep he heard a voice asking him
to sing. ‘I cannot sing,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I left the feast and came here.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said the mysterious voice, ‘you shall sing to me.’ ‘What shall I
sing?’ asked Caedmon. ‘Sing me the song Of Creation,’ was the answer. Then
Caedmon sang the following verses, verses he had never heard before:
Nu we sculan herian heofonrices weard,
Metodes mihte and his modgethone;
Weorc wuldorfaeder, swa he wundras gehwaes,
Ece dryhten, ord onstealde.
Those are the first four lines, and they can be translated as follows: ‘Now we
must praise the Guardian of the kingdom of heaven, the might of the Creator and
the thought of His mind; the work of the Father of men, as He, the Eternal Lord
formed the beginning of every wonder.’ If you look carefully at these lines you
would see that Old English is not a completely foreign language. Nu (still nu in
Scotland) has become now, mihte has become might; weorc has become work;
swa has become so; faeder has become father. Heofonric (heavenly kingdom)
suggests bishopric, which we still use to describe the ‘kingdom’ of a bishop.
Other words, of course, have died completely. Note the form of the poem: the
division of the line into two halves, the four stresses, the use of head-rhyme.
Some Old English verses dealt with war, like The Battle of Maldon:
Though shall be braver, the heart bolder,
Mightier the mood, as our might lessens.
There is larger body of verse on Christian themes, sometimes beautiful, but
generally duller than the pagan, warrior poems. There are two great poems—The
Seafarer and The Wanderer—whose resigned melancholy (the laments of men
without fixed abode) and powerful description of nature still speak strongly
through the strange words and the heavy-footed rhythms. Resigned melancholy
is a characteristic of much Old English verse: even when a poem is at its most
vigorous—dealing with war, storm, sea, the drinking-hall, the creation of the
world—we always seem to be aware of a certain undercurrent of sadness.
Perhaps this is a reflection of the English climate—the gray skies and the mist—
or perhaps it is something to do with the mere sound of English in its first
phase—heavy-footed, harsh, lacking in the tripping, gay quality of a language
like French or Italian. Or perhaps it is a quality added, in odd lines, or even
words, by the scribes in the monasteries—monks aware that this word is vanity,
that life is short, that things pass away and only God is real. But the sense of
melancholy is there all the time, part of the strange haunting music of Old
English poetry.
Old English prose: England was divided into three main kingdoms at the end of
the ninth century: Northumbria, the long thick neck of the country; Mercia, the
fat body; Wessex, the foot, stretching from the Thames to Land’s End. Of the
 three, Northumbria was the centre of learning, with its reach monasteries
crammed with manuscript books bound in gold and ornamented with precious
stones. Up to the middle of the ninth century, all the poetry of England was
recorded in the Northumbria dialect. The Danes invaded England and sacked
Northumbria. The monasteries were looted, the precious books were ripped to
pieces for their rich ornaments, the monks fled or were slaughtered. Now,
Wessex, the kingdom of Alfred the Great, became England’s cultural centre.
When Alfred came to the throne of Wessex he was not happy about the state of
learning he found there. But then was no time for improving it: the Danes were
savaging the country and Alfred’s task was to organise armies and beat back the
invader. In 878, when it looked as though the Danes would become masters of
England, Alfred defeated them in a series of decisive battles and then made a
treaty which confined their rule to the north. Now, in a peaceful kingdom, he
began to improve the state of education, founding colleges, importing teachers
from Europe, translating Latin books into West Saxon (or Wessex) English,
preserving the wealth of verse which had left its old home in Northumbria. So
now the dialect of English culture became a southern one.
Alfred, with helpers, translated much Latin into English (including the
Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede), and so showed English writers
how to handle foreign ideas. English had been mostly concerned with sheer
description: now it had to learn how to express abstractions.
For much of the later history of Anglo-Saxon times we are indebted to what is
known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—a record of the main happenings of the
country, kept by monks in seven successive monasteries, and covering the
period from the middle of the ninth century to 1154, when Henry II came to the
throne. This is the first history of a Germanic people, in some ways the first
newspaper, certainly the most solid and interesting piece of Old English prose
we possess.
6.
a)

b)
c)