Wylie P5 Team 1

The cultural conflict between the Greek and Roman era and the Anglo-Saxon era was more than just their beliefs on how to bury the dead. These two cultures conflicted the most in the area of religion. The Greeks and Romans believed in a multitude of gods that supposedly had chosen the fates of people from the day they were born. The Greeks and Romans didn’t make their own choices and live their own lives; they believed they had a life controlled by the gods. The Anglo-Saxons on the other hand, believed in living moral and lawful lives after their conversion to Christianity. Once they started believing in only one true God, who they believed watched over them and judged them during their lives, they started cleaning up their act and changing from the unorganized warring culture into an intelligent culture that produced literature. The main piece of Anglo-Saxon literature that reflects this cultural conflict is the poem Beowulf. In this poem, Beowulf lives his own life and does what he thinks is right and what he wants to do. He doesn’t believe in any destiny or fate, like in the Greek literature especially in Oedipus the King. In that story, Oedipus and his family believed wholeheartedly in their fate and lived by it their entire lives. If Oedipus and his family didn’t believe in their fate so much and lived their own lives, like Beowulf, the death and sorrow they experienced might have never happened. These two stories are prime examples if the cultural conflict between these two eras.