Anglo-saxon poetry. Pagan poetry content Introduction 3

ANGLO-SAXON POETRY. PAGAN POETRY
Content

Introduction 3
Chapter I. _ "Beowulf" - the largest monument of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry 5
1.1 The historical context of the creation of the poem "Beowulf" 5
1.2 Artistic features of the poem 9
Chapter II Good and Evil in Beowulf 16
2.1 Opposition between Good and Evil in the poem 16
2.2 The concept of goodness in the poem 19
2.3 Representations of evil in the poem 25
Conclusion 28
Bibleograhpy 29

Introduction

Anglo­-Saxon poetry holds great importance in both English literature and in the world as a whole and the “Beowulf ”is considered as the main work of this period which represents religious and cultural lifestyle of people at that time. Obviously, characters in any literary book are divided into two categories: good and evil. The perception of "good" and "evil" reflects not only the moral aspects of a person's life, but also testifies to a certain transformation of public consciousness that occurs in historical and cultural interaction(from political, external and internal to cultural ones).¹
The reflection of the perception of "good" and "evil" is presented, first of all, in the literary work of mankind and it is devoted to the study of various aspects of the life of a particular people in various historical eras.
In the period of the IX-X centuries are mostly represented by literary books that convey all the diversity of reality(conflicts, ceremonies, weather conditions), the heroic epic
The relevance of this work lies in the lack of knowledge of the moral values of the Anglo-Saxons in relation to the study of other spheres of life of the Scandinavian peoples.
The purpose of the course work is to study the ideas of "good" and "evil" among the Anglo-Saxons on the basis of the data contained in the epic " Beowulf ".
This coursework has identified these purposes:
1.Analyse of the main source on this topic, which is the Anglo-Saxon epic " Beowulf ", the ratio of Christian and pagan elements in it;
2.Characteristics of the Anglo-Saxons' ideas about "good" and "evil" in the early Middle Ages, on the example of the text of this poem.
3.The object of study is the Scandinavian epic " Beowulf ". The subject of study is good and evil, the Anglo-Saxons' ideas about them.
In the process of writing this course work, the following sources and literature were used. The main source is, as mentioned earlier, the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic " Beowulf ", written in the 10th century, translated by V. Tikhomirov, A. Korsun , Yu. Korneev, as well as notes by O. Smirnitskaya, M. Steblin-Kamensky and introductory article by A. Gurevich to it. I would also like to note the work of E.A. Melnikova "Sword and lyre. Anglo-Saxon society in history and epos". Besides, Alekseev Mikhail Pavlovich (1896 - 1981) wrote about medieval Anglo-Saxon literature - a Russian comparative literary critic, encyclopedic scientist, specialist in the field of foreign literatures (English, French, German, Spanish).