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Home pages: The Greatest Literature of All Time
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ANONYMOUS author of Beowulf (700-1000) Perhaps the greatest and certainly the most prolific writer in history, Anonymous reached a creative peak in ancient times with some researchers even suggesting he was the real author of The Odyssey and other tales attributed to Homer. He made a great comeback in the Dark and Middle Ages, but occasionally new work by Anonymous has surfaced even in modern times.... "Anonymous" of course means "without a name" and is used when the author is not known—or sometimes, as in the case of Beowulf, when a story develops out of an oral tradition over generations with possibly many storytellers contributing to and revising the tale before it is finally written down and becomes literature. The tale of Beowulf takes place mainly in what we now call Sweden and Denmark, and may indeed have originated in that area. If so, it must passed with settlers into Britain, for it is on that isle that it is thought to have achieved its epic form. The oldest surviving manuscript of Beowulf in Old English dates from about 1000 C.E. but the epic poem was likely first recorded earlier and much of the story composed well before that. One bit of evidence for this is that the poem refers to the Christian God while retaining many pagan elements. The telling of the story is Christian while the characters and the storyline are obviously not—as if the poet were trying to understand a pagan story in Christian terms. This would tend to place the work at a certain time, from the mid-600s into the 700s, when the Anglo-Saxons in England were converted to Christianity but still remembered their pre-Christian past. Some scholars however prefer a date as late as 950 C.E. It has also been long debated whether Beowulf was for the main part composed by one or by several medieval poets in England. The argument for a single author holds that Beowulf is so different from other Old English poetry of the time that it must have been the work of a single creative, innovative mind. Scholars also contend over where in England lived the poet who first set down Beowulf in writing. Leading Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 700s with the sophistication to support such culture included Mercia, Northumbria or East Anglia. The poem is thought to have been later refined in Wessex. The author, or authors, of Beowulf then, was a creative genius practising his poetic craft in a cultured Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England around the seventh century or later. That's about all we know. Anonymous. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2002-2005 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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