'Heroic’ isn’t a term the Anglo-Saxons used, rather it refers to a general type of poetry dealing with heroes, men who live by a code and put their lives at risk upholding said code while performing marvellous deeds. The heroic ethos in Old English literature is not just one thig, rather it’s a collection of related ideas and tendencies that together form a tapestry we call ‘heroism’. In this episode I want to look at the two main streams of heroism that we find in scholarship, namely secular heroism and Christian heroism.

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