Alex Fung
Kevin Kusayanagi
Eric Horng
Joel Sunabe
Team #2
Cultural conflict, a disagreement between cultural beliefs and values by different sides, is an inevitable and a natural process to separate one group from another. The Anglo-Saxons and the Greeks both have different views on death. Anglo-Saxons believed that death is a common and a way of life instead of a fact of life and allow the bodies to be burned above ground while
the Greeks believed that the bodies should be buried underground. Though there are many
differences between the two cultures, Anglo-Saxons inherited a trait of violence from the ancient
Greek culture. The Anglo-Saxon literature reflected on the Anglo-Saxon culture, which was
influenced heavily by the ancient Greek culture. One of the ancient Anglo-Saxon
poetries, “Beowulf,” can represent the cultural conflict between the Anglo-Saxons and the
Greeks. Towards the end of the story, the Greats granted Beowulf’s wishes and granted him a
pyre. This was not usual in the ancient Greek traditions. In addition, only one God was
mentioned in the story Beowulf. This reflects on the cultural conflicts more on the Anglo-Saxon
beliefs and traditions rather than the old and ancient Greek religion. The ways on how the Anglo-Saxons and the ancient Greeks treated the dead bodies reflected on their religions. Comparing to the Anglo-Saxon only worshipping one God, the ancient Greeks worshipped many Gods such as Apollo and Athena, which were mentioned during the last synthesis question. As a result, the
Anglo-Saxon became more Christian towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon era.
We find it interesting that this response focuses on the violence of the Anglo-Saxons--and furthermore that they think it was inherited from the Greeks. We had not considered that this violent culture had come from the Greeks (though it is somewhat unlikely that it did). We also fund it interesting that this synthesis focuses on the physical rituals--we did not know that the A-S people were so different than the Greeks with regard to their actual tangible practices. We suppose that this is significant because there are so many possible things to focus on (we focused on more abstract differences) and this group chose something that we were unaware of.
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