Comps Briish Notes

British:

Anglo-Saxon: 450-1066
Medieval: 1066-1485
Renaissance: 1500-1660

•  Medieval/Renaissance
• Chivalric Code:
• tied to church for knights, about honor, courtly love (trying to woo women) It's all at these things inner conflict between these things. (Sir Gawain & the Green Knight)
• Beowulf/Sir Gawain
• Clash between Pagan and Christian imagery (culture)/language
• Grendel & mother supposedly decended from Cain
• Herot lik tower of Bahelsp
• Sir Gawain's shield: one side has a 5-pointed star (Pentangle represents his purity, a big symbol at the time), other side has virgin mary
• the church at time, trying to make itself seem bigger than it was, influencing lit.
• The wanderer - very reflective, pagan, depressing
• Beowulf - emphasis on patriarchal system, also on aging & ancestry 
• Beowulf - pagan, justice, killing the descendants of cain
• Fate admiration of Heroism in Battle, always express religious faith
• distinction between heroic code & chivalric code
• Beowulf heroic code - hero - want to die in glory (wants praise for himself), brave, adventure seeking, fearless, fate-defying, loyal, strong, battle smart
• 1850 - In Memoriam - written over 18 year time period, wrote it as a way to stay alive, not necessarily to get published
• Victorians 1832-1901
• Industrial revolution [science, research that was questionging Genesis (dinosaur bones, etc) before Darwin is published in 1850's - questioning bible, God, which]
• Genesis (not all Victorians, just Tennyson)
• In Memoriam - a lot of grief, denial, bargaining, and the poem and these feelings are cynical in the poem because that's how people grieve
• simple language, influenced by wordsworth
• Iambic pentameter
• Beautiful, simple, not sappy, accurately captures grief
• 54, middle section is the most important section
• also the 1st section and at the end
•  The meter rhyme needed to control the grief he was experiencing
• encompasses what the Victorian age was about
• Beowulf/Anglo-Saxon
• Heroic code people want to die in battle - Beowulf as he fights the dragon
• Heroic cycle
• Must go to underworld - the cave where Grendel's mother is, like a womb where a mother is, and reforms to the world "reborn"
• Also, Grendel has no father, so isn't bound by this patriarchal code/society
• Chivalry - Beowulf keeps all of the battles fair/bare hands to make with Grendel, using one of the mother's swords against her, etc)
• Oral tradition, tales.
• Beowulf=fatalism, fate - controlled world
• The Wanderer - 
• Elegiac mood, melancholy, loneliness of excile looking for a new lord (same feeling Beowulf would have experienced had Hrothgar not taken him in)
• Ship burial (of kings) - important, ownership of river
• Nature often inhospitable
• End scene in Beowulf important, Burning Beowulf, loneliness because of the loss of their lord & the pyre is a signal to the surrounding lands that the powerful lord is dead - they will soon be invaded.
• Denmark, Hrothgar is Lord, built Herot to show his gratuity to people, mead hall
• Grendel , monster "descended from Cain" comes 2 nights in a row to kill people
• depicted as unstopable, biblical farce
• The story spreads to Geats, Hrothgar had once done a favor for Beowulf's father, so Beowulf and 14 men leave to return favor, kill Grendel
• When they get there, tell many tales & grand speeches
• important to make a name for themselves, reputable