If in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England there are strong motifs of fatalism about life in this world and a sense of its transience, there is the equally persistent belief that this life prepares one for a more enduring life. At the end of The Seafarer, the speaker declares that wyrd ('what happens') and meotud (God as the ordainer of what happens) are more powerful than anyone's gehygd ('mind', 'thought') and concludes:

This present, worldly life is passing, but there is hope for a more stable and enduring life. The content of this hope and the forms it took are the subject of this chapter. We shall consider first the major thrust of early medieval eschatology, its focus upon the last judgement and the kingdom of God which the judgement will initiate. Then we may review the lesser motif of expectations concerning the state of the soul between the time of death and the day of judgement.

If a modern English traveller could suddenly be transported back a thousand years into an Anglo-Saxon church, he would be astonished at the differences between that and the churches with which he is familiar today: here, the atmosphere inside most churches is one of calm and beatific silence; there, the prevailing atmosphere would be one of tumult and squalor, the church packed day and night with crowds of diseased and penitent persons seeking release from their sufferings through the intercession of the saint whose shrine they were besieging. A memorable picture of such tumult is given by Lantfred, a foreign monk at Winchester in the 970s, who, describing the miracles performed through the agency of St Swithun - then recently discovered and recently translated - shows us the inside of the Old Minster crammed with persons afflicted with appalling physical deformities, festering wounds, blind, paralytic, deaf, dumb, mutilated indescribably by the just process of the law or by self-imposed penitential torture, all clustered around the shrine of St Swithun, lying there day and night moaning in pain and praying aloud for deliverance from their suffering. On occasion, Lantfred reports, the church's precincts were so plugged with diseased persons that they had periodically to be cleared to make way for the clergy. Whereas today such appalling sights of disease, deformity and suffering are hidden from sight in sanitized hospitals, a thousand years ago they were on full view, every day of the year, in every church which had a saint deemed to be capable of performing a miraculous cure.

Beowulfis generally held to be the first great narrative poem in the English language. This heroic tale, 3,182 lines in length, is about a man and his people in north European lands during the period when Germanic precursors of the English were still migrating to Britain. The poem is strongly linked to the Germanic roots of the English nation and displays the qualities of English before the language and literary tradition became quite intermingled with French, classical and other non-Germanic cultures. The style and metre of Beowulf is essentially that of other early Germanic poems like the Old High German Hildebrandslied and the Old Saxon Heliand, and many of the characters and incidents in the poem are referred to independently by early Germanic writers on the Continent. Indeed, although it is usually seen as the first great masterpiece of English literature, from another perspective it may be said that by virtue of its large scale, refined style and lofty theme Beowulf is also the chief glory of early Germanic poetry at large.

The verse form used for vernacular poetry throughout the Anglo-Saxon period was that common to all the Germanic peoples, and was carried to England by the migrating tribes of the fifth century. It is therefore rooted in an oral tradition of poems composed, performed and passed on without benefit of writing. Some signs of the ways in which this poetry was created and transmitted can be gleaned from occasional references in vernacular and Latin literature. Heroic poetry in Old English tells of the professional minstrel at the court of kings, singing traditional legends from the Germanic past, and occasionally adding Christian stories to his repertoire, familiar tales made delightful to his audience by his skill in developing and embellishing them. In Latin works we learn something of the transmission of poems in more humble surroundings: William of Malmesbury, in the twelfth-century Gesta pontificum, reports King Alfred's story of Abbot Aldhelm (d. 709) reciting secular poetry at the bridge in Malmesbury to attract an audience for his preaching, and Bede, in the Ecclesiastical History, suggests that it was normal in the seventh century for men of the lowest social classes when attending festive gatherings to recite poems that they had learnt by heart.