Alliterative verse: 8th - 14th century

Beowulf: 8th - 10th century

The story of English literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon settlers. Beowulf stands at its head. The poem of Beowulf, amounting to 3218 lines, is the first and the greatest surviving work of early Germanic literature. The story tells of fantastic fights against fierce dragons, but it is set in an authentic historical context of Scandinavia in the 6th century. The language is Old English - the dialect of the Angles and Saxons, who invade England from northern Germany and Scandinavia during the 5th and 6th century AD. It is incomprehensible to a reader familiar only with modern English.

Mingled with the original pagan material of the epic is a thread of Christian commentary and imagery. This blend, matching the experience of the Anglo-Saxons in England, gives likely clues to the poem's date.

The poem is known from just one manuscript, dating from the 10th century and now in the British Library, but it is thought to have been probably written down for the first time in the 8th century - after the usual process of change and accretion in an oral tradition. By that time the Anglo-Saxon kings of England are Christian. A great archaeological discovery of the 20th century - the Sutton Hoo ship burial - vividly reflects a period when pagan and Christian elements coexist, as in Beowulf. The ship's contents belong to a king of the mid-7th century. It is to lords of his kind, and their successors, that Beowulf in its surviving form is likely to have been recited.

Alliterative verse: 8th - 14th century

The most significant turning point, from about 1100, is the development of Middle English - differing from Old English in the addition of a French vocabulary after the Norman conquest. French and Germanic influences subsequently compete for the mainstream role in English literature.

The French poetic tradition inclines to lines of a regular metrical length, usually linked by rhyme into couplets or stanzas. German poetry depends more on rhythm and stress, with repeated consonants (alliteration) to bind the phrases. Elegant or subtle rhymes have a courtly flavour. The hammer blows of alliteration are a type of verbal athleticism more likely to draw applause in a hall full of warriors.

Both traditions achieve a magnificent flowering in England in the late 14th century, towards the end of the Middle English period. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain are masterpieces which look back to Old English. By contrast Chaucer, a poet of the court, ushers in a new era of English literature.

The Nibelungenlied: 12th century

The shared memories of the Nordic people, first written down in Iceland literature, have been recited and sung wherever Germanic tribes have settled - including the central lands of Germany itself. In the southeast of this region, in modern Austria, the legends about the fall of Burgundy to the Huns achieve their fullest and most influential expression in a version of the late 12th century.

This is the great German epic poem known as the Nibelungenlied ('Song of the Nibelungs'). The first half of the Nibelungenlied is essentially the story written down two centuries earlier in Iceland's Elder Edda, involving Siegfried and Brunhild as tragic hero and heroine. Additional elements, recorded also in the Icelandic Völsunga Saga, involve the dragon Fafnir, guardian of a golden treasure and a magic ring, and the eventual sinking of the treasure in the Rhine.

Troilus and Criseyde: 1385

Chaucer's first masterpiece is his subtle account of the wooing of Criseyde by Troilus, with the active encouragement of Criseyde's uncle Pandarus. The tender joys of their love affair are followed by Criseyde's betrayal and Troilus's death in battle.

Chaucer adapts to his own purposes the more conventionally dramatic account of this legendary affair written some fifty years earlier by Boccaccio (probably read by Chaucer when on a mission to Florence in 1373). His own very long poem (8239 lines) is written in the early 1380s and is complete by 1385.

Chaucer's tone is delicate, subtle, oblique - though this does not prevent him from introducing and gently satirising many vivid details of life at court, as he guides the reader through the long psychological intrigue by which Pandarus eventually delivers Troilus into Criseyde's bed.

The charm and detail of the poem, giving an intimate glimpse of a courtly world, is akin to the delightful miniatures which illustrate books of hours of this period in the style known as International Gothic. Yet this delicacy is only one side of Chaucer's abundant talent - as he soon proves in The Canterbury Tales.

Reports:

Decameron by Boccaccio

 

Beowulf: 8th - 10th century

The story of English literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon settlers. Beowulf stands at its head. The poem of Beowulf, amounting to 3218 lines, is the first and the greatest surviving work of early Germanic literature. The story tells of fantastic fights against fierce dragons, but it is set in an authentic historical context of Scandinavia in the 6th century. The language is Old English - the dialect of the Angles and Saxons, who invade England from northern Germany and Scandinavia during the 5th and 6th century AD. It is incomprehensible to a reader familiar only with modern English.

Mingled with the original pagan material of the epic is a thread of Christian commentary and imagery. This blend, matching the experience of the Anglo-Saxons in England, gives likely clues to the poem's date.

The poem is known from just one manuscript, dating from the 10th century and now in the British Library, but it is thought to have been probably written down for the first time in the 8th century - after the usual process of change and accretion in an oral tradition. By that time the Anglo-Saxon kings of England are Christian. A great archaeological discovery of the 20th century - the Sutton Hoo ship burial - vividly reflects a period when pagan and Christian elements coexist, as in Beowulf. The ship's contents belong to a king of the mid-7th century. It is to lords of his kind, and their successors, that Beowulf in its surviving form is likely to have been recited.

Alliterative verse: 8th - 14th century

The most significant turning point, from about 1100, is the development of Middle English - differing from Old English in the addition of a French vocabulary after the Norman conquest. French and Germanic influences subsequently compete for the mainstream role in English literature.

The French poetic tradition inclines to lines of a regular metrical length, usually linked by rhyme into couplets or stanzas. German poetry depends more on rhythm and stress, with repeated consonants (alliteration) to bind the phrases. Elegant or subtle rhymes have a courtly flavour. The hammer blows of alliteration are a type of verbal athleticism more likely to draw applause in a hall full of warriors.

Both traditions achieve a magnificent flowering in England in the late 14th century, towards the end of the Middle English period. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain are masterpieces which look back to Old English. By contrast Chaucer, a poet of the court, ushers in a new era of English literature.