When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world like this
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monster and the Critics
An Old English epic poem; one of the most major ones we have from the period. Set in the same era as Arthur1, it follows the hero Beowulf through several adventures in the ancestral homelands of the early English.
It’s the prominent base of the playtest campaign A Wind Age, A Wolf Age I ran.
Footnotes
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Which means… ↩