Multi-cultural Education

Beowulf , written in Old English sometime before the tenth century A.D., describes the adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century. A rich fabric of fact and fancy, Beowulf is the oldest surviving epic in British literature.Beowulf exists in only one manuscript. This copy survived both the wholesale destruction of religious artifacts during the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII and a disastrous fire which destroyed the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631).The poem still bears the scars of the fire.The Beowulf manuscript is now housed in the British Library, London.

When did "English Literature" begin? Any answer to that question must be problematic. There are no "English" characters in Beowulf, and English scholars and authors had no knowledge of the poem before it was discovered and edited in the nineteenth century. Although written in the language called "Anglo-Saxon," the poem was claimed by Danish and German scholars as their earliest national epic before it came to be thought of as an "Old English" poem.

The literary culture of the Middle Ages was far more international than national and was divided more by lines of class and audience than by language. Latin was the language of the Church and of learning. After the eleventh century, French became the dominant language of  European literary culture.

But the legendary King Arthur was an international figure. Stories about him and his knights originated in Celtic poems and tales and were adapted and greatly expanded in Latin chronicles and French romances even before Arthur became an English hero.

Chaucer was certainly familiar with poetry that had its roots in the Old English period. But when he began writing in the 1360s and 1370s, he turned directly to French and Italian models as well as to classical poets (especially Ovid). Nevertheless, Chaucer and his contemporaries  are heirs to classical and medieval cultures that had been evolving for many centuries.

"Beowulf" demonstrates the kinship of the Anglo-Saxon poem with the versification and literature of other early branches of the Germanic language group.

The Middle Ages was a period of enormous historical, social, and linguistic change.In literary terms, the period can be divided into the Anglo-Saxon period (c. 450-1066), the Anglo-Norman period (1066- c. 1200), and the period of Middle English literature (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). Linguistic and cultural changes in Britain were accelerated by the Norman Conquest in 1066, when words from French began to enter the English vocabulary. Christian writers like the Beowulf poet looked back on their pagan ancestors with a mixture of admiration and sympathy. The world of Old English poetry is often elegiac. 

Four languages co-existed in the realm of Anglo-Norman England:  Latin, French, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. The second half of the fourteenth century saw the flowering of Middle English literature in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and the Gawain poet. Near the close of the period, Sir Thomas Malory gave the definitive form in English to the legend of King Arthur and his knights.

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – October 25, 1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat courtier, and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars with being the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.^[1] The Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English. Although the tales are considered to be his magnum opus(great work), some believe the structure of the tales are indebted to the works of The Decameron which Chaucer is said to have read on an earlier visit to Italy.