A date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars; the only certain dating pertains to the manuscript, which was produced between 9. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel.
After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated.
Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative.
, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.
Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland (Götaland in modern Sweden) and later becomes king of the Geats.
That is, assessment of: the dating of the poem and its implications for literary interpretation; genre (heroic, epic, or encyclopaedic), style and metre, structure, themes (heroism, kingship, feud, monstrosity, beliefs); major critical interpretations of the poem (Christian and/or pagan, consolation and celebration, implications of the poem for the study of gender in the early medieval world); and, finally, the cultural world of the Migration Age as represented in the poem.Roy Liuzza is an American scholar of Old English literature.A professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Liuzza is the former editor of the Old English Newsletter.Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England.Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the , and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings.