Publisher's Synopsis
annotations Composed in the 8th century AD, Beowulf's Gesta is the oldest epic monument of Germanic literatures. It was discovered in 1705 and registered in a catalog of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as an epic of the wars between Danes and Swedes. This erroneous definition is due to the difficulties of poetic language; At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were scholars in England capable of understanding Anglo-Saxon prose, but not of deciphering a poem, written in the artificial language we have already considered. Attracted by the mention of the catalog, a Danish scholar, Thorkel
