FolioWestern literature

The Beowulf Poet

Medieval · Epic poem · c. 1000

Beowulf

The Beowulf Poet

A Geatish warrior clears Heorot of the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother, then, late in life, dies fighting a dragon. Glory is real and it is not enough.

Heroic epic

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
Beowulf, trans. Heaney

Characters

Beowulf

Hero whose strength is legendary and whose end is solitary.

Grendel

Outcast of Cain’s line, the hall’s negation given a body.

Wiglaf

The last loyal thane, a remnant of the comitatus ideal.

Themes

The heroic code

Gifts, loyalty, and fame against a world that outlasts every hall.

Transience

Even the best of men is a brief fire in a long dark.

Motifs

Civilization as light, gold, and song, always besieged.

What the community cannot include returns to tear it.

In the Folio

Set beside

Blood Meridian
The mead-hall and the desert: two ethics of violence. Beowulf’s world still believes the hall can hold the dark outside it. McCarthy’s Judge claims the dark was the hall’s true god all along.