Christian Elements In Beowulf Essay Research Paper

Christian Elements In Beowulf Essay, Research Paper

Christian Elements in Beowulf

The praised epic poem, Beowulf, is the first great heroic poem in English

literature. The epic follows a courageous warrior named Beowulf throughout his young,

adult life and into his old age. As a young man, Beowulf becomes a legendary hero when

he saves the land of the Danes from the hellish creatures, Grendel and his mother. Later,

after fifty years pass, Beowulf is an old man and a great king of the Geats. A monstrous

dragon soon invades his peaceful kingdom and he defends his people courageously, dying

in the process. His body is burned and his ashes are placed in a cave by the sea. By

placing his ashes in the seaside cave, people passing by will always remember the

legendary hero and king, Beowulf. In this recognized epic, Beowulf, is abound in

supernatural elements of pagan associations; however, the poem is the opposite of pagan

barbarism. The presentation of the story telling moves fluidly within Christian

surroundings as well as pagan ideals.

Beowulf was a recited pagan folklore where the people of that time period

believed in gods, goddesses, and monsters. It.s significance lies in an oral history where

people memorized long, dense lines of tedious verse. Later, when a written tradition was

introduced they began to write the story down on tablets.

The old tale was not first told or invented by the commonly known, Beowulf poet.

This is clear from investigations of the folk lore analogues. The manuscript was written

by two scribes around AD 1000 in late West Saxon, the literary dialect of that period. It

is believed that the scribes who put the old materials together into their present form

were Christians and that his poem reflects a Christian tradition. The first scribe copied

three prose pieces and the first 1,939 lines of Beowulf while the second scribe copied the

rest of Beowulf and Judith. In 1731, a fire swept through the Cottonian Library,

damaging many books and scorching the Beowulf codex. In 1786-87, after the

manuscript had been deposited in the British Museum the Icelander, Grinur Jonsson

Thorkelin, made two transcriptions of the poem for what was to be the first edition, in

1815 (Clark, 112-15).

Beowulf is a mixture of pagan and Christian attitudes. Heathen practices are

mentioned in several places, such as vowing of sacrifices at idol fanes, the observing of

omens, the burning of the dead, which was frowned upon by the church. The frequent

allusions to the power of fate, the motive of blood revenge, and the praise of worldly

glory bear testimony to the ancient background of pagan conceptions and ideals.

However, the general tone of the epic and its ethical viewpoint are predominantly

Christian . There is no longer a genuine pagan atmosphere. The sentiment has been

softened and purified. The virtues of moderation, unselfishness, consideration for others

are practiced and appreciated. Beowulf is a Christian reworking of a pagan poem with .a

string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian

antiquarian. (Clark, 112).

The author has fairly exhaulted the fights with Grendel, his mother, and the

dragon into a conflict between powers of good and evil. The figure of Grendel, while

originally an ordinary Scandinavian troll is conceived as an impersonation of evil and

darkness, even an incarnation of the Christian devil. Grendel is a member of the race of

Cain, from whom all .misshapen and unnatural things were spawned. (Kermode, 42)

such as ogres and elves. He is a creature dwelling in the outer darkness, a giant and

cannibal. When he crawls off to die, he is said to join the route of devils in hell. The

story of a race of demonic monsters and giants descended from Cain. It came form a

tradition established by the apocryphal Book of Enoch and early Jewish and Christian

interpretations of Genesis 6:4, .There were giants in the earth in those days, and also

afterward, when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men, who bore

children to them. (Holland Crossley, 15).

Many of Grendel.s appellations are unquestionable epithets of Satan such as

.enemy of mankind,. .God.s adversary,. .the devil in hell,. and .the hell slave.. His

actions are represented in a manner suggesting the conduct of the evil one, and he dwells

with his mother in a mere which conjures visions of hell.

The depiction of the mere is the most remarkable because it is a conceptual

landscape made fearsomely realistic by the poetry. The closest parallel with Grendel and

his mother.s mere is from the vision of hell in sermon 17 of the tenth century Blickling

Homilies. This scene is based on the apocryphal vision of St. Paul, where the saint visits

hell under the protection of St. Michael. The similarities to the mere are italicized:

.But now let us ask the archangel St. Michael and the nin

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