Background reading: Lacey & Danziger's The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium

The Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf is considered the foundational text for all poetry afterwards written in English. Composed in England sometime between 800 and 1000 A.D., it draws on the Norse myths associated with a Scandinavian prince who saves the Danes from the man-eating monster Grendel, who later has to fight and destroy Grendel's mother, and who as a much older hero dies after a struggle with a treasure-laden dragon. The relative simplicity of the story contrasts with the complexity of the poetry and the anonymous poet's brilliant depiction of a twilight Northern world, no longer pagan but not yet quite Christian. Beowulf foreshadows every tragic hero to come, just as Grendel is the ancestor of every half-man/half-monster from Caliban through the latest Stephen King horror tale.

Participants in the seminar explored Beowulf in the highly praised Heaney translation, heard some of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon as well as a dramatic reading in modern English, and met scholars who are specialists in literature, early medieval history, and Viking exploration. Participants were invited to consider the epic not only as a masterpiece in itself but as one of the major achievements of a North Atlantic culture that stretched from the Baltic to the shores of Vinland in North America.