Beowulf Context and Background
Beowulf is an epic Old English poem about the heroic deeds of a famous Scandinavian warrior king called Beowulf. The poem is believed to have been written in England between the 8th and 11th centuries by a monk. It is one of the few pieces of Old English Poetry that has survived the ages, and Beowulf represents a tenth of the total that remains. This is one of the critical reasons why Beowulf is difficult to place in any kind of historical context. The little Old English poetry that exists shares several features with Beowulf, like the conflict between the value systems of ancient Northern Europe and Christianity. The people that became the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain from Northern regions of Europe and brought along their pagan Gods which enforced an ethical code of the warrior upon its people, with designated roles for the king, the thanes, and the women. However, by the time Beowulf was put down to paper, a vast majority of the Anglo-Saxons had converted to Christianity. The society at the time must have experienced a confusing transition as they attempted to reconcile the teachings of their cultures with the teachings of Christ. This tension between these value systems is repeatedly communicated in the epic and is shared by the other poems of this time. In the context of Beowulf, this tension can be seen as a reflection of the conflict that the author experiences between these two value systems.
It is known that Beowulf was an epic that had existed orally long before a poet put it to paper. The Anglo-Saxons were known to be familiar with Latin, and it is thus hypothesized that the author of Beowulf may have been familiar with Aeneid because of their similarity in scope and the larger themes of Heroic epics. Scholars believe that monasteries of the time were some of the few places of learning, and thus the poet could well have been a monk from England.
Beowulf is recognized as a work of art, and an artifact of old England, but it hadn’t been so until the 19th century. For several years there was but one volume of the epic that had mostly been ignored by scholars until the 1900s when an interest in the epic was renewed. However, Beowulf’s present status can be ascribed to a phenomenal literary paper by J.R.R. Tolkien that recognized Beowulf as an extraordinary piece of art. He later went on to garner global fame by authoring the book series titled Lord of the Rings. Tolkien suggested that it would be more appropriate to consider Beowulf as an elegy rather than an epic. An Elegy is a poem of mourning, and the melancholic tone of Beowulf suggests it could rightly be categorized as an Elegy. This air of mourning is evident from the beginning of the poem as the prologue is a description of the funeral for Sheafson. Furthermore, the ending sequence of the poem also emphasizes the melancholic tone through Beowulf’s funeral.
