The story of English literature traditionally begins with beowulf a long anymous poem  in 3200 lines about adventures taking place in Danemark  Gaetland and Sweden the countries where the early anglo Saxons came from. The poem is written in old English it tells the deeds of Beowulf a Scandinavian hero.

The poem’s subject matter derives from the Icelandic and Scandinavian sagas that is tales and legends which were probably inspired by ancient historical events. The descriptions if the fights are rich and so is characterization. The metre was based on a pattern of stressed and alliterated words.

In anglo saxon times old English poetry like Beowulf was composed orally by bards or as anglo saxon called them scops.

After the Norman conquest  English literature did not produce anything until about the year 1200. In the thirteenth century the nobility favoured the French from of the romance an anonymous long narrative poem telling the heroic adventures if the Noble knights and including intricate love stories and all sorts of wonders.

A book written in Latin about 1130 the historia regum brittanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth had an enormous influence on English and French literature. It became the source of the cycle of legends dealing with king Arthur, The Arthurian cycle describes the heroic life and deeds of king Arthurand his knights, who used to banquet at the round table.

From the norman invasion to 1350 the language underwent significant changes. French and English amalgamated. There were several varieties of English in different areas of the islands but the dialect spoken in London, oxford and Cambridge.

Chaucer was the son of a wealthy wine merchant in London and spent most of his life as a civil servant in the courts of Edward third and Richard the second.

The Canterbury Tales, his main work, were begun in about 1387. Chaucer probably borrowed the device for stringing together a collection of stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron.

The story tellers in the Canterbury Tales represent various classes of English society of the later middle ages: military, the clergy the middle class  the trades.

Chaucer is often to as the father of English poetry because of the several metrical innovations he introduced.

Other narrative famous poems of the time were written in different English dialects. For example sir Gawain and the green knight,  an Arthurian romance, and piers plowman, a religious allegory.

At the end of the fourteenth century poetry  was no longer anonymous. Anonymity continued only for those poetic works which originated among the common people or derived  from oral tradition.