Beowulf Essay

Beowulf is the oldest surviving epic poem of Old English and also the earliest vernacular English literature. The epic poem has an unknown author and also has parts of the poem missing. Beowulf, Grendel and King Hrogthar are some of the most influential characters in this epic poem. Grendel, a troll like monster, is aggrieved by the noise that comes from the dining hall in King Hrogthar’s kingdom and terrorizes it every time there is a social gathering there. Beowulf’s heroic character appears when the terrorizing of the meat hall, Heorot, is unbearable. All three characters interact and affect the poem in different but major ways. Beowulf is steeped in a pagan tradition that depicts nature as hostile and forces of death as uncontrollable. Blind fate picks random victims and man is never reconciled with the world.

Beowulf is a true epic in its amount of interests and empathies, even though it is centered on the calling of one man killing three monsters. The action and the characters of this seemingly simple story, have the strength to symbolize the experience and ideals of the original audience. The brutes contribute in evil and disorder as no human could, but the evil that originates innocently within the human heart is not overlooked. Transforming both the fairy tale monsters and the appalling power politics of the background is the objective gratitude of human struggle for understanding and order.

In Beowulf the narrator and characters use human experience to understand the human condition and to find the noblest way to live their lives. In part Beowulf's epic extensiveness comes from the narrator's often short observations, which place the poem in a larger, superior context. The narrator sporadically reminds the reader of t...

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...compound noun that metaphorically stands for something else. Beowulf is steeped in a pagan tradition that depicts nature as hostile and forces of death as uncontrollable. Blind fate picks random victims and man is never reconciled with the world. Beowulf is a very simple story told with great elaboration. A man of great power, valor, and bounteousness fights three monsters, two as a young man, and the third in his old age. Other more complex human events precede these, others interfere, others will trail, but those more realistic events are all essentially background. The real calamity of the poem may not lie in Beowulf's own demise, which transcends the tragic through his faith in God, but in his people's desolation which leads to the re-burial of the treasure. Beowulf gives his life to save them from the dragon, but in the end he cannot save them from themselves.