The Character of Beowulf - Essay Example

04 February 2008 Beowulf The character of Beowulf is a controversial one based on opposing characteristics and qualities. A typical epic hero is likely to be presented to readers as an accumulated mass of past achievements, the slayer and the conqueror. Just this depth serves Beowulf well in his final need, when he can renew his strength for the dragon-fight by running back over his past of dedication and victory. Thesis Beowulf a hero possesses courage and strength important for all heroes combined with self search and self-identification process which helps him to fight and survive. Courage and self-search are important elements of the narration underlining heroic nature of Beowulf and his unique personality features. The epic portrays that Beowulf's tact in his successive parleys with the Danes he met as he made his way to Heorot seemed to be evidence for his own awareness of this potential tension. The Danes must determine whether the Geat is nothing but a wandering showoff and braggart, coming fordolgilpe and forwlenco, out of foolish boastfulness and pride. If he is, it would be truly humiliating for them to betray their own desperate need for help by treating such a heroic charlatan with respect. Thus, even if Beowulf's very well-chosen words had placated some of the Danes, it is likely that not all were ready to embrace the visitor. Unferth's sharp challenge of Beowulf may thus dramatically fill a psychological need for the Danes as a whole. At the least, taking Unferth as the spokesman for many Danes obviates any necessity to explain why they show no disapproval of his challenge to Beowulf. In this scene his only speech, the challenge to Beowulf, is no brag. There Unferth makes the charge that it is Beowulf who is an empty braggart with a low heroic credit rating, whereas Breca, Beowulf's competitor in the swimming-race, is not (Berger and Leicester 39). The character of Beowulf is shaped by the heroic world he is a part. The epic portrays the heroic system as a whole that underlies courage and bravery. Talk of the hero's personal vanity belongs to the heroic world more likely to be admired than reproved. It is the destiny of heroes that compels Beowulf to make his nonetheless wholly free choice to fight the dragon, a creature already actively engaged in bringing "dire affliction" upon his people. Necessary is precisely what Beowulf's death is (Guerber 267). The epic says: They felled the enemy -- courage drove out his life -- and they both then had succeeded in destroying him, those noble kinsmen. That is how a fighting-man should be, a retainer in time of need! (2706-09a) Beowulf's hero is expressed in the quality of such past actions, because that is after all probably the point of bringing them in. Following Guerber (1966) if readers make this latter judgment, they must blame him for scorning any help and for risking all on the chance of one more survival in a lucky lifetime series. If readers are to take this pattern of behavior in a Christian context at all, it is more likely that the poem is suggesting that he was allowed, by some higher power, even by the God himself, to survive those earlier tight places in order to win his last victory. The character of Beowulf and his heroic nature is portrays through contrasts and oppositions. The contrast is between passive behavior and what readers see in old Beowulf's behavior when the dragon attacks. Beowulf first has a moment of guilt that he might have done something wrong, broken some law, after which he is completely ready to meet a personal attack with all the strength at his command. Hrothgar merely grumbles that God could easily have stopped Grendel long before. The hero is here suggesting teamwork or shared labor between himself and deity. By maiming Grendel Beowulf has put a mark on him, just as God once marked the ancestor Cain. Both dark figures must now face the bright Lord. But the key to this close relationship is that it is active collaboration (Guerber 267). On the sword-guards of shining gold it was rightly marked out in rune-staves, set down and told, for whom that sword, best of irons, was first made, with twisted hilt and serpentine markings (164-98)). Beowulf's input of vast energy into his dynamic cooperation with God is entirely different from Hrothgar's sedentary piety. He reports that he seized Grendel intending to kill him there in Heorot, but he could not do so since God did not wish him to do it -- and then too Grendel was also very strong in pulling away. Beowulf accepts disappointment, but he points out that, even when he had to let go, still kept its grip on the monster and would go on holding him until the last great judgment) (Guerber 276). His courage and heroic nature is evident when Beowulf's subordination of his individuality to a group -whether ship's crew, family, or nation, is in fact quite characteristic of the cooperative team-play he favors and exemplifies through the poem; however, as it appears here it is used by the poet chiefly as a preparation for an absolutely incandescent outburst of pure ego in his first "credentials" speech to Hrothgar. During his fights with the monsters, Beowulf remains (to use the military phrase) temporarily attached to Denmark, but immediately thereafter he must disengage himself from that relationship. Indeed, it has been persuasively argued that Beowulf extricates himself from Danish dynastic politics with some difficulty. Critics have not generally accepted this subordination of importance, but Guerber sees no reason not to take this passage as straightforward and without any bitter irony, even though the poet himself may be more critical of Unferth's murderous past than the Danes seem to be. But this does not mean that the text here contains a patronizing allusion to the Danes' lamentable and inexplicable blindness to Unferth's real and rotten nature; it merely shows that they are not presently engaged in a flyting with him. A flyting would be the appropriate occasion to dredge up and bring forth such bits of past scandal, but the duration of a flyting is limited and time-bound (Berger and Leicester 57). At the end of the epic, the statement that Beowulf is not afraid to lose his life is not a mere rhetorical gesture. He really thinks he will survive. If he dives into the mere readers have just seen, as warm with ravenous sea-monsters, he will probably lose his life, and he knows this. To go to the edge of this terrible mere and stand there is an act of courage. This passage that immediately follows Beowulf's death and describes the reactions of the survivor Wiglaf: Then the young man had this pain happen to him -- that he saw on the earth that dearest mail faring wretchedly at the end of life. The killer lay there also, fearful earth-dragon bereft of life, pushed down by evil. In no way whatever did he surge up in play at midnight to show his face, proud with his treasures, -- no, he crashed down to earth through the hand's work of the battleprince (2821-35) To plunge beneath its surface is an act of heroism that seems simple lunacy to non-heroic minds. How do the techniques of the traditional oral style define the nature of this situation First of all, at the start of the passage, movement is set in contrast with the lack of movement. Beowulf's steady and intent activity (arming himself, without assistance) is played against the lounging of the Danes, seen as a group of zoo-visiting tourists at the mere. At the end of the passage the now ready Beowulf is contrasted with the hesitant and unheroic Unferth (Berger and Leicester 67). A brave man like Beowulf such cowardly bystanders where few assertions are likely to stand alone without being buttressed by counter-statements or negative instances. In practical life a brave man needs brave neighbors rather than cowardly ones. In this severe challenge Beowulf really needs some help, help he cannot get from those around him. This may be why the poet expands the concept of neighbors or comrades back into the past and out of the scene to include those anonymous artisans, probably now all long dead, who once crafted his armor. What matters in the end is the man, not his hopeful armor. But in the end one must say that there is some odd if slight circularity or overlap in this passage that eludes exact defining (Guerber 267). It can only be lamely stated along lines like these: Beowulf' puts on armor because he does not fear for his life because he puts on armor. Beowulf's old age, displaying the fullest heroic energies to the very end, is made to seem all the more right, all the more a part of the universal journey, by a complex set of contrasts with the merely pathetic old age of Hrothgar. In sum, the character of Beowulf possesses unique personal qualities and features which make him a real hero. Beowulf kills Grendel for reasons other than the money, but surely the original audience would have thought the achievement incomplete without the enormous rewards Hrothgar heaps on the young man afterward. At the poem's end, death becomes 'a reward' for his greatest and most difficult victory. Beowulf is a real hero because he follows his own code of values and honesty, bravery and courage so important for struggle with evil and chaos. Works Cited 1. Beowulf: The Oldest English Epic. (end). Ch. Kennedy; Oxford University Press, 1978. 2. Berger Harry Jr., and H. Marshall Leicester Jr. "Social Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf." Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving Jr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. 37-79 3. Guerber, H. A., The Book of the Epic: The World's Great Epics Told in Story. Biblo and Tannen, 1966. Read More