我对贝奥武夫的理解

盎格鲁撒克逊人最早的诗歌，像许多其他民族一样，起源于人们的集体努力，通常是在劳动或休息的时候。然后这些故事以历史或传说或同期事件为基础，在歌唱和其他场合，主要是为了娱乐而口头和经常演唱。随着部落社会的瓦解和阶级划分的出现，这些流行故事的专业叙述者或歌手出现了。由于盎格鲁撒克逊人早期的这些流行叙事最初是在口头传统中存在的，很少有人以书面形式流传下来，所以贝奥武夫可能是这一时期几乎全部保留下来的唯一一首重要的单曲。

Abstract: As the national epic of the Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf has its own characteristics in writing, language, style, etc.

Key word: Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon, poem, epic.

The earliest poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, like that of many other peoples, originated from the collective efforts of the people, usually while they were working or resting from their labors. Then these stories based on history or legend or contemporaneous events would be narrated orally and often sung, during festivities and other occasions, chiefly for entertainment. Some of the more interesting of these narratives would pass from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, and as they were told by different singers at different times, additions or deletions were introduced in the successive rehandlings of the oral tradition of each epic. With the disintegration of tribal society and the appearance of class divisions, professional narrators or singers of these popular stories emerged. Because these popular narratives of the Anglo-Saxons in the earliest times existed originally in oral tradition and few of them seemed to have been handed down in written form, Beowulf is possibly the only important single poem of this kind preserved to this day more or less in its entirety and has generally been considered the most monumental work in English poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period.
Except for occasional digressions when the hero recalls past events or when some gleeman sings a tale, Beowulf as a poem centers on the narration of the exploits of the heroic figure Beowulf, including his adventures with Grendel and his mother in Denmark and with the dragon in the land of the Geats. In other words, it is a long verse narrative on the theme of "arms and the man" and as such belongs to the tradition of a national epic in European literature that can be traced back to Homer's "Iliad" and Vergil's "Aeneid".

Note:
A History of English Literature (Volume 1) 商务印书馆 陈嘉 著