Introduction to Medieval Literature: Old English, Middle English and Historical Context

All right, so welcome to the wild and crazy world of medieval literature. Um, we got, you know, we got dragons, we got King Arthur, we got knights, I got some more dragons. It's pretty awesome. Um, I don't know about you, like, I played with that Lego castle constantly, and I would, like, design booby traps that were kind of, like, you know, dumping stuff on people coming through the portcullis. Like, I was obsessed with this stuff, and you should be too, and you should get yourself really excited. Think about all that stuff. Get yourself really excited, and that should help you get through what's kind of, can be frustrating, but also rewarding, uh, medieval literature. All right, so we're going to start, naturally, with the early Middle Ages, and this basically starts from right about when, like, when the Romans clear out in about 400 AD. Um, and the Romans have been hanging out there since, like, I don't know, 50 AD or so, and there's actually a lot of stuff in Britain that's got, you know, that's Roman stuff. Like, there's this town called Bath, and it's actually named after a Roman bath that was there, and actually still is there. You can still go and look at it. It's kind of cool, um, and that's, that's the Romans. So yeah, so they clear out, again, around, like, you know, 400 AD, and there's kind of a period of chaos, and, like, figuring out who should be in charge of stuff. Um, and then we get the Normans come in, and they, they're invading from France, and that's William the Conqueror is the guy who's associated with them, and he comes in, and he, he conquers. Um, you can kind of remember him, because he conquers things, and, um, and this kind of scoots us along into what's known as the High Middle Ages. Um, it's not, you know, it's not that kind of high. It's just, it's just high, like, like, the big ones. I don't know, the late ones, and, um, and, and that's kind of all the stuff that you might have seen, like, in Robin Hood. Like, you know, like, King John and Richard the Lionheart's off of the Crusades. I mean, they weren't animals, but they, they were real, um, and that's, that's kind of that period. That's around, you know, 1150, 1215, like, that kind of time. Um, and then we kind of head into when you got the Black Plague, the Black Death around 1350, and that was like, you know, I think you probably have heard of that, you know, tons of people died, um, stuff got crazy. Like, there were these doctors that would go around with beaks on their nose to keep out the vapors. Like, it was, it was weird stuff, um, and then a little bit, you know, kind of around that time, a little bit after, um, they're fighting the Hundred Years' War in, in France, and that lasts for about a hundred years. Um, that's 1337 to 1453, and, and then we're kind of moving out of the Middle Ages in 1485. The Tudors take the throne, um, and then we're kind of on our way into the Renaissance, and that's the end of the Middle Ages, um, and you should, uh, can I advocate this? Watch the Tudors, you know, don't believe it, but watch it. Um, anyway, side note, but, uh, so now, it's now we've kind of laid out sort of the basic sweep, and that was a lot of stuff we covered in, for like a long period of time, kind of laid out the general sweep of things. Um, it's time to figure out, you know, who was writing, and what were they writing, and there were a lot of people writing, and they wrote a lot, um, but there actually weren't, you know, per capita, there weren't a lot of people actually writing, I suppose, because not a lot of people were literate, um, and that's actually, in a lot of cases, you know, like people associated with the church, they could read, um, people who were kind of, you know, high born could probably read, um, but most things, you know, they couldn't really survive, a lot of sort of oral tradition type things couldn't really survive unless, you know, someone who was literate wrote them down, um, and that's actually what's the case, and the first kind of piece of medieval lit we're going to talk about is called Caedmon's Hymn, and it's the earliest recorded poem in old English, um, old English is just, you know, it's got English in it, but you aren't going to be able to read it if you try, it's super old, obviously, from the name, um, and it's pretty far removed from modern English, it's a foreign language, basically, to us, um, but yeah, so Caedmon himself, he was illiterate, so he was, this was sort of composed, you know, in an oral kind of way, and it had, it got written down by a guy named the Venerable Bede, um, in around this, you know, around the 7th century, um, AD, and, and he wrote it down in Latin, and so that's the reason why we have it is because this, you know, literate guy wrote it down, and just kind of a few things about, about it is, um, it's composed in something that's called a literative verse, which is kind of an interesting thing, it's like instead of rhyming, basically, in order to structure the poetry, what they do is they have a bunch of the words in the same, in a given line, start with the same letter, so, I mean, you've probably heard of alliteration, right, like the, the angry alligator ate Andy, like it's basically that, but in, in poetry, and again, it's sort of instead of a rhyme structure, they have this alliterative structure, um, and each, each line in this hymn, it's also got a, it's also got a caesura, which is basically just a break in the middle of the line, so a long, a pause in the middle of each, of each line, um, and, you know, the, the hymn, it, like modern hymns, it was just, it was about praising God, so that's Caban's Hymn, um, so moving right along, next, we've got Beowulf, which we'll have a whole lesson on, but, um, we're gonna give a little, you know, brief overview now, and, you know, Caban's Hymn, we know that the guy named Caban wrote it, because that's what we call it, but Beowulf, we don't actually know who wrote it, so it's, it's anonymous, we, we don't, don't know the dude who wrote Beowulf, um, it's actually, you know, it's quite similar in some ways to Caban's Hymn, um, a lot of old English poetry does that alliterative verse and caesura thing, um, but it's also really, really long, so that's, it's quite different in that respect, um, and it's actually, it's, it's called an epic, that's, that's the sort of classification of Beowulf, um, and it's about a guy named Beowulf who goes to help out this guy named Frothgar, who's the king of the Danes, so that's just, kind of, Denmark, basically, but a long time ago, um, and Beowulf comes, he kills Grendel, who's been terrorizing their mead hall, oh, not the mead hall, it's like where they hang out and drink, um, and then, and then Beowulf's, no, sorry, Grendel's mom comes and, like, takes revenge, and Beowulf goes and kills her, and he goes home and becomes king of his people, and ends up fighting a dragon, and then he dies, kind of, a noble hero's death, um, and that, this, that's sort of a very brief summary of Beowulf, um, and, but there's kind of, an interesting thing about Beowulf, there's sort of a lot of debate about whether it was, you know, passed down in the oral tradition for a while, and then written down, or whether it was sort of written down about when it was composed, so we don't really know, like, it could have, it was written down around, you know, 1000 AD, could have been composed as early as the 18th century.