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Thursday 19 March 2015

Beowulf and Bollocks

Beowulf is the best known example of Old English literature. We are told that, much like the works of Shakespeare, the piece stood out against other works of the same era because the creativity in its language. Linguistics and language in general are not my strong points, so I won’t attempt a pretentious analysis, but an excellent edition of the Radio 4 programme “In Our Time” explained that there were numerous phrases and words that were unique to the poem. Suffice to say that I will take the learned expert’s word for this fact for the time being. It made me think about the power of words. (listen to the radio show/podcast here)