I am stupid pls educate me. Were they actually poems?
Others have discussed meter and rhythm, but Beowulf is also alliterative which is why it doesn’t rhyme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse#Old_English_poetic_forms
Little off topic: Paradise Lost is more recent us (~350 years), than Beowulf is to Paradise Lost (~700 years)
The don’t rhyme very much, but maybe they did in their original languages.
They often did rhyme in their original languages, yeah though your mileage may vary on the cultural standard for what constitutes rhyming. Sometimes words only rhyme in certain dialects. Sometimes these poems didn’t rhyme, but instead exhibited similar features like consonance (same consonant sounds) or assonance (same vowel sounds) or alliteration (same starting sounds). You could be sure that there were certainly some kind of aesthetic choices going on with the words, even if it wasn’t end-of-line rhyming.
Also the rhymes aren’t always end-line rhymes, but can sometimes be found at the beginnings and middles of lines.
They do have rhythm, though.
Yes, they maintain (mostly) consistent meters throughout. Iliad was dactylic hexameter in the original Greek, I’ve been told.
That would be so exhausting to read lmao. Imagine if Das Capital was an insanely long poem.
Imagine if Das Capital was an insanely long poem.
There once was a coat from Berlin,
twas worth ten yards of linen.
From whence was its worth?
It didn’t come from the cloth,
It came from hard work and spinnin.
Beowulf (like a lot of epics) was originally an oral tradition and thus was originally recited as verse because it’s easier to memorise that way.
When it was finally written down, it retained the verse structure, which is all you really need to classify a written work as a poem.
Idk about Paradise Lost, never read it.
back then, people were just really fucking stupid, and didn’t understand the difference between prose and poetry (does it rhyme???). but the works were called poems, and by convention, the descriptions have stuck w/ us ever since.
