The Importance Of Burial Rituals In Beowulf

In this passage, they are describing the funerla procedure for the King, Beowulf 's father, Shield Sheafson. The reason why I chose this passage from Beowulf is because of the burial ritual itself. When I was in the process of annotating, A couple questions came to mind: Was this ritual only done for a specific social class? If so, what are the burial rituals for lower classes? And what was the Anglo- Saxon’s view on the “afterlife”? In this essay, I will be explaining the true historical connection between the burial in the epic poem, Beowulf, and actual burials performed during the time of the Anglo-Saxons. Annotating the passage, I uncovered small clues into the ancient world of the Anglo- Saxons. In the lines 36-40, Sheafson is buried with his gold. …show more content…
In this procedure, a large boat was built shortly before the burial. After the boat is buried, the body would be placed inside and around the body would lie all of the person’s riches including weapons, armour, field game equipment, and all of their gold. Again, necessities that would be used again in the afterlife. The reason why the deceased’s gold was burned with them was because when their heir’s become ruler of their kingdom, it’s their duty to earn their own gold, more gold meant more respect and courage because you would have to venture on quests to allow their collection to grow throughout the heir’s life. So gold was one of the most symbolic grave goods in the Anglo- Saxon period,you live and you die with your gold. After the boat was filled with the body and their belongings, it would be set on fire and sent out to sea or the boat would stay on land and burn to the ground. Sheafson received this burial procedure because he was royalty, he ruled the land of …., and he was a warrior, conquering towns to expand his