Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of Chronicles.

I'm tremendously excited to bring you the start of this series.

It's one that I'm incredibly excited about because during this series we're going to go

through plays, we're going to talk about novels, we're going to talk about epic poems, as we'll be starting with today.

And I'm going to attempt to explore a whole range of different forms and themes from across the Western canon, really.

We're going to look at ancient Greek tragedies, ancient Greek comedies.

We're going to look at Renaissance Theatre.

We're going to look at Charles Dickens novels, Shakespeare,

or, as I chose for this particular episode, Beowulf. And of course, mine is the Tolkien

translation. What else did you expect? And the reason that I chose Beowulf is because

it's one of the most precious inheritances of the English people.

There are very few works of literature from the Anglo-Saxon period of English history that have really survived and managed to be passed down to us.

And Beowulf is one of those few exceptions.

And in fact, Baywolf itself very nearly suffered a similar fate to many others

that we probably don't know about and never can know, that have just simply been lost to time.

The Beowulf story in its original form was in the alliterative style of Old English,

early Germanic poetry, which meant that each line was split into two harbbs that had similar

phonetic weight, and Tolkien very cleverly once described this style as more masonry than music,

although I suspect that a particular reason for why it had this alliterative style was because

during the pagan years of the early Germanic and Nordic cultures, of course, all of their stories

were transferred orally through storytelling and through spoken word.

And in having words with that phonetic punch and with that particular structure, it was

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