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Many people, probably too many, vaguely remember the epic poem Beowulf as a dreaded high school reading list requirement without looking at the times in which the poem was first composed or  what the poem itself represents.

So, let’s take a quick detour in time and land ourselves back in mid-sixth century Europe.  To put in bluntly, we’ve just land in the darkest period of what we now call the Dark Ages.  Most people date the fall of the Roman Empire at 410 AD when Alaric the Goth sacked Rome, but don’t kid yourself. The traditions and laws of Rome sputtered along for some time even after the sacking of the capital. But by around 550 AD, even those last vestiges of civilization had been wiped clean by the wandering Germanic tribe.

And what this meant for people in Western Europe wasn’t very good. With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the peace it imposed, commerce vanished and technical knowledge faded away. From a somewhat industrialized society, Europe collapsed back to little more than a subsistence farming economy. Population levels plummeted amid constant warfare and life expectancy was probably not much more than 25 years.  With no government, laws were defined by the sword. I’m always bemused by people who call themselves anarchists because this is what anarchy actually looks like.

But just when you’d think things couldn’t get any worse, then came the great catastrophe: the Plague of Justinian in 541-542 AD. Like the Black Death that swept Europe nearly a 1000 years later in 1348, this epidemic hit right when Europe’s population was already weakened by hunger. Although we have no way of accurately knowing, historians think this form of the Black Death killed between a quarter and a half of the population within a year. An estimated 25 million people perished.

And somewhere around 550 most likely, amid what people could have been excused for believing was pretty much the end of the world, a poet somewhere in Scandinavia sat down and composed Beowulf. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much a testament to the human spirit.

How the poem, which was passed down by oral tradition, got to Anglo-Saxon England is not very clear. Personally, I think it was probably brought to England during the Viking invasions which kicked off with the sacking of Lindisfarne Monastery in 793 AD.  The Anglo-Saxons apparently liked the poem because at some time between 793 AD and the 11^th century, someone wrote the poem down in the Anglo-Saxon language. In doing so, the English poet also bastardized the pagan poem by laying over it a veneer of Christianity.

Only one copy of the poem survived to our times and even that was nearly lost when the library the manuscript was stored in burned down in 1718.

But back to our high school student who, when hearing all this, says, yeah, well, but the poem still sucks. If asked why, he’d point out the language sounds fairly tortured to our ear, the story is pretty much total BS, and, hell, the plot has more holes than Swiss cheese.  To which, a historian might note, nothing’s perfect and you have to start somewhere.

And that’s what the poem does.  It’s the earliest form of the art that eventually came to be known as literature.  Sure, the Iliad and the Odyssey  predate Beowulf by a couple of thousand years, but the chance that some Germanic harpist in a mead hall in the lands of the Geats knew these tales is a comfortable zero.  In addition, while the Vikings, who were preoccupied with rape, drunkenness, and murder, didn’t deliver much when it came to civilization other than acting as real life boogie men, the one art form they did excel at was the sagas, which are really nothing other than novels in a different form.  But these sagas came later, most likely in the tenth and early eleventh century, or about 400 years after the creation of Beowulf.

So, the next time you pick up a Tom Clancy book or thumb through a Ken Follett novel, you can thank some unknown poet in the northern mists for the pleasure.