English Literature / Unit 3 ENL 0207 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Beowulf: The Poem and Its Manuscript
Captions available
The idea
Beowulf survives in a single manuscript from around the year one thousand, scorched in a fire in seventeen forty-one. It runs over three thousand alliterative lines in a West Saxon dialect, though its action is set in what are now Denmark and Sweden. No record of Beowulf himself exists.
In practice
One burned manuscript, three thousand lines.
Where people slip
English poem, Scandinavian setting.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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