Beowulf: everything you wanted to know

Bess of Hardwick fell out spectacularly with Mary, Queen of Scots and was dumped in the Tower of London by Elizabeth I. Yet nothing could get in the way of this extraordinary social climber. In this episode, Tracy Borman tells Spencer Mizen about a woman who accrued vast wealth, ...  Show more

From Islam’s emergence in the early medieval period, Muslims have been deeply connected with the followers of another faith: Judaism. In conversation with James Osborne, historian Marc David Baer examines the long relationship between these two religions and their communities, tr ...  Show more

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Anglo-Saxon epic poem that transcends its time to shed light on psychological and spiritual truths that still ring true today.

Seamus Heaney’s deeply felt interpretation - widely a ...

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the epic poem Beowulf, one of the masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. Composed in the early Middle Ages by an anonymous poet, the work tells the story of a Scandinavian hero whose feats include battles with the fearsome monster Grendel and ...  Show more

Greetings!Welcome back to the podcast and let me introduce the heroic Beowulf! Beowulf is an epic poem that is one of the most important texts in old English (that's an English that was spoken thousands of years ago and sounds very different from what we speak today!)Monster aler ...  Show more

Whether it’s dismissed as little more than an old children’s story or a record of the moment when paganism gave way to Christianity, Beowulf has had a profound impact on the evolution of western storytelling and is one of the most important works of Old English literature. Learn ...  Show more