Beowulf brings back very traumatic memories of taking old English as a minor in university. We spent the first semester during bits of surviving poems and ballads to learn the language and then the entire second semester on Beowulf. There were only about 10 people in the class and the prof was this 4 foot tyrant who would walk in point at someone and say "read" you then had to read a line and translate it, and keep going until she called on someone else.

The only upside to it was my spelling got a lot better after understanding all of the old anglosaxon roots and vowel shifts that English has gone through over the centuries.

---splitimage