ENGL 2300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Epithet, Hybridity, Cotton Library
Document Summary
People prefer beowulf to caedmon"s hymm: caedmon"s hymm is shorter, only survived in paraphrase and is taken from the bible. Beowulf is an epic: epic"s were the most popular in the past. A lot of what we consider the norm of anglo-saxon grammar and vocabulary comes from beowulf, simply because people liked it. Hybridity of beowulf: very fragmentary, sort of absent to us. Composed sometime between the 8th to 10 century. Manuscript: only one surviving, can tell some things about it through chemical analysis of the ink. The text we have is incomplete, we will never know the whole thing. The original audience was removed from beowulf historically (just like us): the original audience of beowulf was reading about people that came hundreds of years before them. Poem is more concerned with endings (starts and ends with a funeral, shield and. Beowulf), but it is said to be an origin story.
