Literary Devices
This device gives human qualities to something nonhuman, like Death speaking in Everyman.
What is personification?
The term for a compound, creative expression like “whale-road” for sea.
What is a kenning?
This missionary helped convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.
Who is St. Augustine of Canterbury?
Chaucer earned this nickname for his lasting influence on English literature.
What is the “Father of English Literature”?
This wizard saves Arthur's life during his battle with Pellinore.
Who is Merlin?
This device tells a story in which characters and events represent larger ideas, as in Everyman.
What is allegory?
This collection of Old English poems and riddles is one of the most important surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.
What is the Exeter Book?
This type of medieval play taught a moral or religious lesson through characters who represent abstract ideas, as in Everyman.
What is a morality play?
This section of The Canterbury Tales introduces the pilgrims and describes their personalities and social classes.
What is the General Prologue?
This is the name of the legendary sword Arthur receives after the battle with Pellinore.
What is Excalibur?
This device reveals what a character is like through actions, such as Arthur's courage in his fight with Pellinore.
What is characterization?
Grendel is said to be descended from this biblical figure, showing Christian influence in the poem.
Who is Cain?
The Anglo-Saxon term for a professional poet who performed stories orally.
What is a scop?
In The Pardoner's Tale, the three men set out to find and kill this personified figure.
Who/what is Death?
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain hides this magical item instead of exchanging it with Bertilak.
What is the green girdle (belt)?
This device uses descriptive language to help the reader picture, hear, or feel something.
What is imagery?
This is what Beowulf refuses to use in his fight with Grendel, choosing to rely on strength alone.
What are weapons?
Name one of the four chivalric values a knight was expected to uphold.
What is courage, honor, loyalty, or generosity?
This one-word moral sums up The Pardoner's Tale.
What is greed?
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in this form, not prose.
What is verse?
This device gives hints about what will happen later in a story.
What is foreshadowing?
This poetic tradition focuses on loss, exile, loneliness, and the passing of time.
What is the elegiac tradition?
This belief held that an uncontrollable force shaped the course of a person's life in Anglo-Saxon culture.
What is fate (wyrd)?
Name one pilgrim from the General Prologue besides the Knight.
Who is the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller, the Prioress, the Squire, the Parson, or the Plowman?
This is the lesson Gawain learns after discovering Bertilak is the Green Knight.
What is that no one is perfect, and people should take responsibility for their mistakes?