ABSTRACT
The epic occupies a significant position in the Western literary canon as both a repository of cultural values and a form of ancestral dialogue. Surviving for over three millennia, it has been recontextualised countless times – from its origins in ancient Greece and Babylon, to twentieth-century reworkings of the form such as Derek Walcott’s postcolonial text Omeros . This chapter examines two English epics: the anonymous Anglo-Saxon narrative Beowulf and John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece, Paradise Lost . Both works underline the Janus-like character of epic form, at once celebrating a mythical golden age while simultaneously prescribing a belief system for the future.
