1.Anglo-Saxon literature. Genre variety of Anglo-Saxon literature. Style and language peculiarities.

Anglo-Saxon literature (or Old English literature) encompasses literature written in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) during the 600-year Anglo-Saxon period of Britain, from the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

Some of the most important works from this period include the poem Beowulf, which has achieved national epic status in Britain. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of early English history. The poem Cædmon's Hymn from the 7th century is one of the oldest surviving written texts in English.

Anglo-Saxon literature has gone through different periods of research—in the 19th and early 20th centuries the focus was on the Germanic roots of English, later the literary merits were emphasized, and today the focus is upon paleography and the physical manuscripts themselves more generally: scholars debate such issues as dating, place of origin, authorship, and the connections between Anglo-Saxon culture and the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages.

2. Anglo-Saxon literature. “Beowulf”, its plot and composition, the peculiarities of the language. Anglo-Saxon verse, alliteration. Beowulf as the national hero.

Beowulf is an epic poem written in the Anglo-Saxon language which was composed in the eighth century and written down circa 1,000 by an anonymous bard. The poem is the oldest surviving epic in English literature.

Part history and part mythology, the long narrative poem, which was written in England, relates the story of a great Scandanavian fifth century warrior, Beowulf, a Geat (Swede) whose fame 'far flew the boast of him'.

The only surviving manuscript dates to around 1010. This manuscript fortunately survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII and a disastrous fire which destroyed the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631), a keen collector of old manuscripts. On 23 October, 1731, Cotton's home was engulfed in flames which destroyed or damaged a quarter of his library. Beowulf was rescued along with other manuscripts, but its edges were badly scorched. The manuscript is now contained in the British Library at London.

The story related in the poem occured in the late fifth century, during the century after the Anglo-Saxons had begun to arrive in England, and tells of how for many years a monster by the name of Grendel had terrorised the hall, Heorot, of the Danish king, Hrothgar and his wife Wealhþeow. The monster descends at at nightfall, while Hrothgar's court are sleeping, to feed on his retainers.

Beowulf sails from his home in Geatland to aid the Danes and suceeds in killing the monster, tearing its arm from its body, and is celebrated as a hero. However, Grendel's mother arrives determined to avenge her son's death and in an outburst of hellish wrath, kills one of Beowulf's warriors. After tracking her to her lair under an eerie lake, Beowulf defeats Grendel's mother with the sword Hrunting.

He returns home to his own people, where he eventually inherits his father's throne. Fifty years later, Beowulf sustains mortal wounds in a last conflict with a dragon. The funerals described near the beginning and at the end of the poem, have been confirmed by archaeological discoveries.

The poem is written in an alliterative verse, a style typical of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds of words, Anglo-Saxon poetry does not possess stanzic form or rhyme. The mother tongue from which Modern English descends, Anglo-Saxon, or Englisc as it was known to its speakers, is closely related to Old Frisian and appears like an entirely different language to Modern English speakers.