Beowulf - Analisi in inglese

Beowulf is the oldest surviving epic poem written in Old English, although why a poem with a Scandinavian hero exists in Old English is a mystery. Maybe it was an elergy for a king, a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead, written in 7th century by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, referred by scholars as the "Beowulf poet". The poem was originally oral and untitled, but around the 19th century began to be called by the name of the Scandinavian hero, Beowulf. The menestrels, man who had to sung poems, stories and elergy in the halls of the kinkgs often accompained by an harp, used to use devices to memorize better and faster the poem as:

-the caesura, break that divided in two halves each line
-the kenning, a very simple methapor made up of a compound metaphor
-the alliteration, the repetition of the same consonant sound in a line
-the stress of the words
-the rhyme, the repetition of the same sound at the end of two lines
-the enjambement: a line that doesn’t stop with a puntuaction but continues in the next line
-the division in two parts of the text.
It was written down in the 11th century and it describes a warrior society based on the loyalty between king and his warriors, who defended him in return of gold, food, treasures…we can considerate Beowulf an epic poem because it is a long narrative poetical composition which narrates of a glorious past and the brave deeds of Beowulf, the hero, with an elaborate language and a lot of references to mythical elements as monsters and dragons.