Literature in Ancient Era

Submitted to fulfill the assignment of Introduction to English Literature

PAPER

Arranged By

Group 2

Rana Sahira 2130104055

Rini Sri Muliani 2130104060
Yuliza 2130104078

Lecturer:
Yuliana Kasuma, S.S., M.Pd

ENGLISH TEACHING DEPARTMENT

TARBIYAH DAN TEACHER TRAINING FACULTY
UIN MAHMUD YUNUS BATUSANGKAR
2023
 PREFACE
The writers extends special thanks to the God for the blessing and grace for the
writers, so we can finish this paper on time, with the tittle “Literature in Ancient Era”.
Thanks to Madam Yuliani Kusuma as the English teacher for who always help her
students and give a lot of useful knowledge.
It is one of the assignments in English subject. It is composed of the explanation
Literature in Ancient Era. This is not a perfect model so the writers expects the critic and
suggestion in order to make it better.
Hopefully this paper can be used as a reference to learn about Literature in Ancient
Era.

Batusangkar, September 19th, 2023

The Writers

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 Table of Content
Preface....................................................................................................................................................i
Capther 1...............................................................................................................................................1
introduction...........................................................................................................................................1
Capther 2...............................................................................................................................................5
Theory and discussed............................................................................................................................5
Capther 3.............................................................................................................................................12
Closing................................................................................................................................................12
References...............................................................................................................................................

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 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of The Paper
The defining characteristic of Anglo-Saxon culture is its fusion of two contrasting
strains, the military culture of the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain in the fifth
century and the Mediterranean learning introduced by Christian missionaries from the
end of the sixth. With its emphasis on heroic legend, the native literature of the Anglo-
Saxon invaders reflected the martial basis of their society. The literate products of
Mediterranean learning are of a sort more familiar to us: prose predominates, and genres
are diverse, including sacred narratives, homilies, histories, annals, works of philosophy,
and many other sorts, some of purely liturgical, legal, or administrative use. In the
surviving literature of the Anglo-Saxons these two cultural strands are woven into a
single fabric, often in ways that seem startling to us. Nowhere is the tension between the
two deployed more effectively than in the preeminent work of Old English literature,
Beowulf, which tells of clearly ancient heroic deeds from a contemporized perspective,
attributing to the hero some of the qualities of a good Christian. This fusion of cultural
strains characterizes a variety of texts and artifacts, including saints’ lives recast in the
terms of heroic poetry; King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’Consolation of
Philosophy, into which Weland the smith of Germanic myth is introduced; the Old
English Orosius, in which the Germanic conquerors of the Roman Empire are portrayed
more sympathetically than in the Latin original; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which
contains passages in prose and verse that call to mind heroic legend; and the Franks (or
Auzon, or Clermont) Casket, a box of carved whalebone on which are depicted scenes
from early Germanic legend side by side with the adoration of the magi and the
destruction of Jerusalem by the soon-to-be Emperor Titus.

A hindrance to a concise description of Anglo-Saxon culture is the length of the

historical period, which lasted from the invasions of the fifth century beyond the arrival
of the Normans in 1066, as Old English texts continued to be copied for another century
and a half. Naturally the society underwent some profound changes over the course of
so many centuries; and yet the literature does not always reflect those changes,
especially the poetry, since it is steeped in tradition and often seems to reflect a long-
outmoded way of life. The culture that the invaders brought with them in the fifth
century certainly had much in common with that of the (mostly) Germanic tribes

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 described by Cornelius Tacitus in his Germania (ed. Winterbottom 1975, trans. Rives
1999), completed in AD 98. At times Tacitus is frankly moralizing, chastening his
fellow Romans by portraying the admirable qualities and customs of peoples they
considered barbaric; at other times he is disapproving of Germanic practices, and so we
need not assume that he has distorted the general outline of the societies he describes for
the sake of portraying the Germans uniformly as noble savages. Caution is advisable in
generalizing about the invaders of Britain from Tacitus’ account, as contact with Rome
was just beginning to produce in his day important changes among the Germans,
particularly in regard to the growth of private property and the rise of new kinds of
military organization and technology. But the comparison is nonetheless instructive,
especially in regard to Beowulf, which depicts a world that has more in common with
the tribal culture described by Tacitus than with Anglo-Saxon society of about 1000,
when the manuscript was copied.

The larger point to be drawn is that if the social conditions described in verse seem to
resemble more closely those of Tacitus’Germania than the complex society that
England had become by the tenth century, this may be taken as a reflection of the way
that the ancient traditions of verse archaize and rebuild on a heroic scale every variety of
matter they touch. This is true of native traditions like those of Beowulf, but also of
biblical narrative and saints’ lives, in which patriarchs and saints are recast as God’s
heroic champions, and Christ’s apostles play the role of his comitatus. This
transformative habit is in turn a reflection of the continually fruitful tension, mentioned
above as pervading Old English literature, between native and Mediterranean
influences. References in the literature show that the Anglo-Saxons were keenly aware
of both their past among the Germanic nations of the Continent and their present status
as the bulwark of Christian civilization among the unconverted nations of the north.
That they retained a sense of community with the rest of the Germanic world, even as
the form of English society grew ever more different from it, is shown in a variety of
ways, but most clearly in the fact that even as late as the dawn of the eleventh century,
heroic verse dealing with legends set in Scandinavia and on the Continent, like Beowulf,
with no explicit connection to England, continued to be copied into English
manuscripts.

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 Such case histories suggest that Anglo-Saxon women enjoyed opportunities of an
extraordinary nature by comparison with later eras. There is in fact evidence that their
institutional rights were not inconsiderable, as documented by Fell (1984: 56–9). The
payment of a dowry to the wife, observed by Tacitus among the Germans, is a fact of
Anglo-Saxon society. Called in Old English the morgen-gifu ‘morning-conveyance’, it
was usually a substantial amount, in some known cases amounting to five hundred or
more acres of land, and it became the possession of the woman herself, not of her male
kin, to dispose of as she pleased. Over and above this dowry a wife had other rights to
property, as a married couple’s estate was held jointly, and in the earliest laws, at least, a
woman might leave her husband and still retain half the property if the children
remained with her, much as in later Icelandic law. Women’s wills testify to the amount
of wealth they could accumulate and to their right to leave it to whichever inheritors
they pleased. Conditions naturally varied from place to place over such a lengthy period,
and it seems that women’s authority and their opportunities, especially in the Church,
declined at a rate inverse to that of the growth in the Church’s power in England (see
Dietrich 1979: 38, and Lees 1999: 133–7). Most of these rights were abrogated by the
Normans, since the feudal system they brought with them was predicated on land tenure
in exchange for military service, a system that disfavored women’s control of land.
There is thus justice in the conclusion of Doris Stenton that English women were in the
Anglo-Saxon period “more nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers
than at any other period before the modern age” (1957: 348). Such a conclusion
challenges certain preconceptions of mainstream gender theory, which, as Lees (1997:
152) remarks, are often founded on presentist assumptions.

Thus, as she observes, the study of Old English texts potentially has a singular
contribution to make to the larger realm of feminist studies– a contribution, however,
that is as yet almost entirely unrealized, as gender theory has rather dictated the nature
of Old English feminist criticism than benefited from Anglo-Saxonists’ awareness of
historical difference.

B. Purpose of The Paper

The purpose of this paper is :
1. To know the history of English literature
2. To know English literature in ancient era

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 3. To know example of English literature in ancient era

C. Problem Formulation
This text conducted to find any information about English literature in ancient era,
1. What is history of English literature?
2. What is English literature?
3. What is example of English literature in ancient era?

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 CHAPTER II
THEORY AND DISCUSSED

A. The History of English Literature

(Mark. J, 2020) Literature (from the Latin Littera meaning ‘letters’ and referring to an
acquaintance with the written word) is the written work of a specific culture, sub-
culture, religion, philosophy or the study of such written work which may appear in
poetry or in prose. Literature, in the west, originated in the southern Mesopotamia region
of Sumer (c. 3200) in the city of Uruk and flourished in Egypt, later in Greece (the
written word having been imported there from the Phoenicians) and from there,
to Rome. Writing seems to have originated independently in China from divination
practices and also independently in Mesoamerica and elsewhere.
Literature encompasses forms such as poetry, drama, prose, folklore, epic tale,
personal narrative, poetry, history, biography, satire, philosophical dialogues, essays,
legends and myths, among others. Plato’s Dialogues, while not the first to combine
philosophical themes with dramatic form, were the first to make drama work in the cause
of philosophical inquiry. Later writers drew on these earlier works for inspiration
(as Virgil did in composing his Aeneid, based on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, between 30-
18 BCE) and this tradition of borrowing lasted until the time of Shakespeare (1564-1616
CE) and continues in the present day
(Micahel, 2000)Writing is the language of literature. As in other countries, human
settlement in Britain predated recorded history by several millennia, and English poetry
predated writing by several generations. The first poetry that might be referred to as
"English" were songs that would have been heard aboard ships traveling across the
choppy waters to the "Saxon Shore" in order to capture Britannia.

The first author of literature in the world, known by name, was the high-priestess
of Ur, Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) who wrote hymns in praise of
the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Much of the early literature from Mesopotamia concerns
the activities of the gods but, in time, humans came to be featured as the main characters
in such poems as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and Lugalbanda and Mount
Hurrum (c.2600-2000 BCE). For the purposes of study, Literature is divided into the
categories of fiction or non-fiction today but these are often arbitrary decisions as ancient
literature, as understood by those who wrote the tales down, as well as those who heard

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 them spoken or sung pre-literacy, was not understood in the same way as it is in the
modern-day.

English literature, which had flourished for four centuries, was dethroned at the
Norman Conquest in 1066, and for some generations it was not well recorded. The
English continued to write in Latin after 1066, just as they had done before the Conquest,
but they now also used French. In locations like Medehamstead Abbey (present-day
Peterborough), where the monks maintained The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle until 1152,
English was still written. There isn't a lot of English writing that dates back to the
century after the Conquest, but the language of the Peterborough Chronicle has changed,
signaling a new era. An adjective from Renaissance Latin known as "Anglo-Saxon" (AS)
is used to describe both the people and the language of pre-Conquest England. The fact
that the people were English and their writing is English literature should not be
diminished by the present academic tradition of labeling the people Anglo-Saxons and
their language Old English.

The oldest English literature was in Old English which is the earliest form of English
and is a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects. The history of English Literature is spread over
different eras including Old English or Anglo Saxon, The Renaissance, Victorian Era,
Modern Era, Postmodern era, amongst others.

Periods of English Literature:

Old English (Anglo-Saxon Period) 450–1066

Middle English Period 1066-1500
The Renaissance 1500-1600
The Neoclassical Period 1600-1785
The Romantic Period 1785-1832
The Victorian Age 1832-1901
The Edwardian Period 1901-1914
The Georgian Period 1910-1936
The Modern Period Early 20th century
The Postmodern Period Mid-20th century

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 B. English Literature in Ancient Era
(Micahel, 2000) The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were three distinct groups of people that
eventually united to form the English. The Jutes were brought into Kent in 449 to protect
the British kingdom against the Saxons and Picts, according to St. Bede's account in his
Latin work Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, 731). By 600 or thereabouts, the Jutes, along with the Saxons and the Angles,
had conquered the majority of Britain. Celtic Britons who rejected this fled to Wales and
Cornwall in the west. Welsh is a name meaning "foreigners" in the Germanic language of
the new rulers of Britain. According to Bede, there were m; ore Britons who lived in
what is now Strathclyde beyond the northern moors, where the Picts also dwelt.

Ancient English Literature Figures:

1) King Alfred
He was a pioneer in translating their works from Latin into English in
the 9th century. The first book to be translated was “Pastoral Care” by Pope
Gregory. Then King Alfred translated "Eclesiastical History of English
People" by Bede. King Alfred also asked to record important events that
occurred and this record was continued until 200 years after King Alfred died.
This record is called the "Anglo-Saxons Chronicle" which is an early English
prose. Then the literary works "Universal History and Geography" by Orosius
and "Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius.
2) Aldhelm (650-709)
He was a student of Abbot Haderian who was a priest from Africa.
Then also studied with Theodore who was a Greek priest. In writing his
literary, Aldhelm used a lot of figurative language such as figure of speech,
metaphor, allusion, and so on. For example, the golden necklace of virtues, the
white jewels of merit, the purple flowers of modesty, the swanlike whiteness
of old age, the opening of the gate of dumb silence, the shining lamps of
chastity in which the oil of modesty burns.
3) Venerable Bede (672-735)
Bede is a prose writer from Northumbria. He was the best Christian
theologian and historian of his time. He was known for studying European
cultural heritage. His best work of his time was Ecclesiastical History. This
book discussed the problem of conversion (religious conversion) and the

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 power competition between Rome and Ireland which was finally won by the
Roman church.

The first author of literature in the world, known by name, was the high-priestess
of Ur, Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) who wrote hymns in praise of
the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Much of the early literature from Mesopotamia concerns
the activities of the gods but, in time, humans came to be featured as the main characters
in such poems as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and Lugalbanda and Mount
Hurrum (c.2600-2000 BCE). For the purposes of study, Literature is divided into the
categories of fiction or non-fiction today but these are often arbitrary decisions as ancient
literature, as understood by those who wrote the tales down, as well as those who heard
them spoken or sung pre-literacy, was not understood in the same way as it is in the
modern-day.

The first English poetry that we are aware of are those written by Caedmon after 670
and Bede between 673 and 735. Manuscripts (MSS) of their works became difficult to
read and were rarely read between the Middle Ages and Queen Victoria's reign. The
Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were illiterate: their orally-composed verses were not
written unless they formed part of runic inscriptions. The Britons passed on neither
literacy nor faith to their conquerors. The English learned to write only after they had
been converted to Christ by missionaries sent from Rome in 597. Strictly, there is no Old
English writing that is not Christian, since the only literates were clerics.

The first known English poet is Aldhelm (c. 640-709). King Alfred thought Aldhelm
unequalled in any age in his ability to compose poetry in his native tongue. There is a
tradition that Aldhelm stood on a bridge leading to Malmesbury, improvising English
verses to the harp in Border to attract his straying flock. Aldhelm's English verse is lost;
his surviving Latin writings are exceedingly sophisticated. Aldhelm (c. 640-709), the
monastic founder of Malmesbury, Frome and Bradford-on-Avon, was the star pupil of
Hadrian’s school at Canterbury, and became Bishop of Sherborne. His younger
contemporary Bede wrote that Aldhelm was ‘most learned in all respects, for he had a
brilliant style, and was remarkable for both sacred and liberal erudition’. Aldhelm’s
brilliance is painfully clear, even through the dark glass of translation

Bede is one of the five early English poets whose names are known: Aldhelm, Bede,
Cædmon, Alfred - two saints, a cowman and a king - and Cynewulf, who signed his

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 poems but is otherwise unknown. Oral composition was not meant to be written. A poem
was a social act, like telling a story today, not a thing which belonged to its performer.
For a Saxon to write down his vernacular poems would be like having personal
anecdotes privately printed, whereas to write Latin was to participate in the lasting
conversation of learned Europe. Bede’s works survive in manuscripts across Europe and
in Russia. The modern way of dating years AD - Anno Domini, ‘the Year of Our Lord’ -
was established, if not devised, by Bede. Bede employed this system in his History,
instead of dating by the regnal years peculiar to each English kingdom as was the custom
at the time. His example led to its general adoption. Bede is the only English writer
mentioned by Dante, and the first whose works have been read in every generation since
they were written. The first writer of whom this is true is Chaucer.

Cædmon was the first to use English oral composition to turn sacred story into verse;
the English liked verse. Bede presents the calling of this unlearned man to compose
biblical poetry as a miraculous means for bringing the good news to the English. He tells
us that Cædmon was a farmhand at the abbey at Whitby, which was presided over by St
Hilda (d.680), an old man ignorant of poetry.

Most early works were written in the poetical metre which the writer had heard
repeated over time and, therefore, the dating of such pieces as the Enuma Elish or
the Odyssey is difficult in that they were finally recorded in writing many years after
their oral composition. The great value which modern-day readers and critics place on
‘originality’ in literature was unknown to ancient people. The very idea of according a
work of the imagination of an individual with any degree of respect would never have
occurred to anyone of the ancient world. Stories were re-tellings of the feats of great
heroes, of the gods, the goddesses, or of creation, as in Hesiod and Homer.

So great was the respect for what today would be called ‘non-fiction’, that Geoffrey of
Monmouth (1100-1155 CE) claimed his famous History of the Kings of Briton (which he
largely made up) was actually a translation from an earlier text he had ‘discovered’ and
Sir Thomas Malory (1405-1471 CE) famed as the author of the Morte D’Arthur, denied
any original contributions to the work he compiled from earlier authors, even though
today it is clear that he added much to the source material he drew from.

One of the earliest known literary works is the Sumerian/Babylonian Epic of

Gilgamesh from c. 2150 BCE which deals with themes of heroism, pride, nationality,

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 friendship, disappointment, death, and the quest for eternal life. Whether what happened
in the tale of Gilgamesh ‘actually happened’ was immaterial to the writer and to the
listener. What mattered was what the audience was able to take away from the tale.

C. Example of English Literature in Ancient Era

The Pyramid Texts of Egypt, also considered literature, tell of the journey of
the soul to the afterlife in the Field of Reeds and these works, unlike Mesopotamian
Naru Literature, presented the subject as truth. Egyptian religious culture was based
on the reality of an afterlife and the role the gods played in one’s eternal journey, of
which one’s life on earth was only one part. Homer’s Iliad recounts the famous ten-
year war between the Greeks and the Trojans while his Odyssey tells of the great hero
Odysseus’s journey back home after the war to his beloved wife Penelope of Ithaca
and this, like the other works mentioned, reinforced cultural values without a concern
for what may or may not have happened concerning the war with Troy.
The story told in the biblical Book of Exodus (1446 BCE) is considered
historical truth by many today, but originally could have been meant to be interpreted
as liberation from bondage in a spiritual sense as it was written to empower the
worshipers of Yahweh, encouraged them to resist the temptations of the indigenous
peoples of Canaan, and elevated the audience’s perception of themselves as a chosen
people of an all-powerful god.
The Song of Songs (c. 950 BCE) from the Hebrew scripture of the Tanakh,
immortalizes the passionate love between a man and a woman (interpreted by
Christians, much later, as the relationship between Christ and the church, though no
such interpretation is supported by the original text) and the sacred aspect of such a
relationship. The Indian epic Mahabharata (c.800-400 BCE) relates the birth of a
nation while the Ramayana (c. 200 BCE) tells the tale of the great Rama’s rescue of
his abducted wife Sita from the evil Ravna. The works found in the Assyrian King
Asurbanipal’s library (647-627 BCE) record the heroic deeds of the gods, goddesses
and the struggles and triumphs of heroic kings of ancient Mesopotamia such as
Enmerkar, Lugalbanda, and Gilgamesh. Scholar Samuel Noah Kramer points out that
the early Sumerian works – and, indeed, Sumerian culture as a whole – resonates in
the modern day on many levels and is especially apparent in literature. Kramer writes.
It is still apparent in a Mosaic law and a Solomonic proverb, in the tears of Job
and a Jerusalem lament, in the sad tale of the dying man-god, in a Hesiodic

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 cosmogony and a Hindu myth, in an Aesopic fable and a Euclidean theorem, in a
zodiacal sign and a heraldic design (Simpson, W. K, 2003).

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 CHAPTER III
CLOSING
A. Conclusion
Most early works were written in the poetical metre which the writer had
heard repeated over time and, therefore, the dating of such pieces as the Enuma
Elish or the Odyssey is difficult in that they were finally recorded in writing many
years after their oral composition. The great value which modern-day readers and
critics place on ‘originality’ in literature was unknown to ancient people. The very
idea of according a work of the imagination of an individual with any degree of
respect would never have occurred to anyone of the ancient world. Stories were re-
tellings of the feats of great heroes, of the gods, the goddesses, or of creation, as in
Hesiod and Homer.

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13
 Bibliography
Black, J. , et. al. (2005). The Literature of Ancient Sumer. Oxford University Press.

Micahel, A. (2000). A History of English Literature. London: MACMILLAN PRESS LTD.

Simpson, W. K. (2003). The Literature of Ancient Egypt. Yale : Yale University Press.
https://leverageedu.com/blog/history-of-english-literature/
https://brewminate.com/a-brief-overview-of-ancient-literature/

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