The Old English poem Beowulf, dating from the late seventh or early eighth century, offers a textual encounter with the dynamic culture of early medieval England. Highlighting the theology of the early English church, the poem reveals a deep reverence of God as Creator and an acute awareness of God’s ongoing governance of creation through the unfolding of his will in daily life. The spiritual battle between good and evil is a paradigm through which the Beowulf-poet sees reality, and the Beowulfian imagination is evidently a thoroughly biblical one, given the poem’s many scriptural allusions and parallels. Textual analysis reveals that Beowulf is not the product of a primitive “Dark Ages,” but the sophisticated output of an intellectually advanced monastic milieu. Beowulf contributes to a wider corpus of early Old English religious poems which form the roots of English theological and literary tradition.
In this talk, Jasmine Jones provided a close-reading analysis of Beowulf in the original Old English, illuminating the two main topics of cultural encounter in the poem: religion and Germanic-heroic culture.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University with Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the series Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
