 friends welcome to this video and welcome to a brand new series. So this video series as you must have guessed from the title is going to be about history of British literature. Because of the change in syllabus 70% questions are directly asked from British literature and I want that nobody who is sitting for this exam should miss out on all these ages, should miss out on what to study and what to skip. Because even if you are not enrolled in any coachings institute or you are not referring to terms of books it is important for you to know the basics. So this video series is very special, I was thinking about making this video series since a long time but because of corona I think that now you guys have a lot of free time at your home so this is the right time where I should start this series so that you can get the maximum benefit out of it and this t-shirt if you can see was saved in like in my cupboard since a long time but I decided that I would only be wearing this t-shirt on the first you know day of this video. So when I would be shooting the first video in this series I would be using this t-shirt so here I am with this brand new t-shirt and brand new video but before that I would just like you to understand that how you need to make use of this video series. This is a video series which is going to run for months and in this entire video series I am going to take you through each and every age of British literature I am going to take you through all the important historic and political milestones all the important writers poets dramatists everybody. So I want you to sit with a pen and paper when you start watching any of this video in this series also make sure you watch this in continuation it's not just a video it is a video which is linked so you have to be aware of when I am posting a video and you watch it in sequence so that it chronologically gets inside your brain. The writers that I am going to talk about in this series is already listed free of course on my website arpathakarva.com so if you are beginning your UGC night English preparation make sure you check out the list and you see which are the writers which you have not yet covered okay so without any further delay let's jump right into the topic and let's look at the first stage which is old English literature. Now let us first look at the original British nation and see how it came into being. So let me tell you very clearly that there were some original inhabitants living in this place Britain from 55 BC and these people were called Brythons and that is how the name Britain came into being. So the original inhabitants were living there since 55 BC they were known as Brythons they continued to live there till 410 AD. Now in 410 AD a Germanic group came into Britain and invaded this place and this Germanic group consisted of three tribes Angles Saxons and Jutes because Jutes were less in population so the major chunk were Angles and Saxons okay and because Angles were the dominant ones that is why today we know Britain a part of Britain as England which came from the word Angle land so Angles who were inhabiting this place from 410 AD gave the name England. Now these three tribes they came they invaded Britain and they started living together with Brythons. Now this Angles Saxon period is predominantly stretching for 600 years 410 AD to 1066 AD so this period of 600 years these Angles Saxons and Jutes were living together with the original inhabitants Brythons. Now what is this old English? Old English is basically a combination of the original language spoken by Brythons and the language spoken by these Germanic tribes Angles Saxons and Jutes so if you club these two languages it became what we know today as Old English. Now that we have looked at the historic side it's time to look at the literary characteristics of this age. Now it's very sad to tell but the fact is that even in this 600 years no good or remarkable piece of literature was written. Why so? Because this period is known as dark ages this was a time when England was at constant war with so many invaders coming in so if you go to my online course series you will find that I have discussed an invasion called Viking invasion. Now these Vikings who were very cruel people they killed so many people they invaded in Britain and people were really terrified of them so what happened that during this period people were so much at war that they didn't have enough time to pen down something remarkable no scientific advancement was made. Another reason why good literature is not there for this period is because of lack of printing press printing press was not there so even if writers would have pen down something important something remarkable we don't have it saved we just have certain fragments which I'm going to talk about in the next section but majority of the works have been lost in the oral transmission so make sure you know the background you know the reason why something was happening in some age there's no point mugging it up always understand the reason behind it and then you would never have to mug anything up it is automatically going to stay in your brain forever. Now if you look at the literature that we have today from the Anglo-Saxon period you would find that they belong to either of the two categories either they are literature related to heroism. Heroic poetry was very popular number two they might be related to Christian ideals so basically what happened was as I've explained before there were two kinds of people living in Britain during this period one were the original people who were Brithons and the second one were the invaders Angles and Saxons and Jutes together they are known as Germanic tribes now if you look at the Germanic tribes they were pagan people they didn't believe in God so they were talking about heroism in their poetry so all the poetry that were written by the original Anglo-Saxon periods they were talking about heroism about knights there was a very significant poetry which I'm sure you would have heard Beowulf now the beauty about this poem is that we don't know the author neither we were aware of the name so the manuscript when it was found people started reading it and then just because the main character's name is Beowulf they gave the name Beowulf to the entire poem though the name was not written in the manuscript now Beowulf is basically a story about this great warrior he meets a monster called Grandel and Beowulf defeats the monster Grandel then Beowulf meets monsters mother Grandel's mother and then he has a war with Grandel's mother also and basically it is showing how heroic he is and how he's trying to save his country from these monsters now this is one kind of poetry which is known as heroic poetry another kind of poetry that you will find in old English literature is the Christian poetry or religious poetry these poetry's were written by the original Brythons now Brythons as we know were people who were originally living in Britain now these were Christians because during fifth century there was a man called Saint Augustine who tried to convert entire Europe into Christianity so because he was trying to spread Christianity even the original Brythons they converted into Christianity and they started believe in Jesus Christ so they were writing a poetry on Christian idols and mostly cross was something which was very dominant in their poetry so the images of cross were very dominant and one such poetry is dream of the rude now if you look at the manuscripts mostly poetry's are found in different manuscript one important manuscript that you must remember is extra book now this extra book comprises of 131 poetry's and some significant ones are wanderer seafarer all these poetry's are basically talking about normal day-to-day life problems and challenges faced by people originally living there this was a time when even prose started being created in Britain and the person who was a pioneer in prose writing was King Alfred we are going to talk about King Alfred in many more things in detail and major poets like Kade Min Bade and major literary terms like Kennings in detail in our online course because of restriction of the video I would not be able to explain everything to you if you're looking for detailed course complete list of writers and works created in Anglo-Saxon or any other period of British literature or world literature you can go to my website arpitakarwa.com and check out the online course so with that note I take your leave make sure you subscribe our channel so that you don't miss my next video on the middle English literature and of course you have to follow me on social media so that you don't miss out on any important UGC net exam updates with that note I take your leave that's it for this video lecture we'll meet soon in the next video lecture till the time we meet next happy learning keep loving literature and stay tuned to arpitakarwa.com