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Beowulf and his men spend the night in Heorot. Beowulf refuses to use any weapon because he holds himself to be Grendel's equal. [26] When Grendel enters the hall and kills one of Beowulf's men, Beowulf, who has been feigning sleep, leaps up to clench Grendel's hand. [27] Grendel and Beowulf battle each other violently. [28]
Beowulf, too, concerns the life and death of its hero. [ 41 ] [ 42 ] [ 43 ] Flieger writes that Tolkien saw Beowulf as "a poem of balance, the opposition of ends and beginnings": [ 40 ] the young Beowulf rises, sails to Denmark, kills Grendel, becomes King; many years later, the old Beowulf falls, killing the dragon but going to his own death.
The next day, Beowulf was lauded and a skald sang and compared Beowulf with the hero Sigmund. However, during the following night Grendel's mother arrived to avenge her son's death and collect weregild. As Beowulf slept in a different building he could not stop her. He resolved to descend into the bog in order to kill her.
Grendel flees but dies in his marsh den. There, Beowulf later engages in a fierce battle with Grendel's mother in a mere, over whom he triumphs with a sword found there. Following her death, Beowulf finds Grendel's corpse and removes his head, which he keeps as a trophy. Beowulf then returns to the surface and to his men at the "ninth hour". [4]
Tolkien was a philologist and an expert in heroic Anglo-Saxon culture and literature, especially Beowulf.He derived many aspects of The Lord of the Rings from the poem, including the heroic culture of the Riders of Rohan, who resemble the Anglo-Saxons in everything including their Old English language, except for Rohan's widespread use of horses.
Heoroweard is a character who appears in Beowulf and also in Norse legends, where he is named Hjörvarðr or Hiartuar. If he existed in real life, his name would have been Proto-Norse *Heruwarduz. In the Norse sources, Hereoweard rebelled against Hroðulf/Hrólf Kraki and killed him, but otherwise the sources vary greatly. This is an account of ...
Title page of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, 1936 "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published as a paper in the Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been reprinted in many collections.
Skjǫldr appears in the prologue of Beowulf, where he is referred to as Scyld Scefing, implying he is a descendant or son of a Scef (‘Sheaf’, usually identified with Sceafa), or, literally, 'of the sheaf'. According to Beowulf he was found in a boat as a child, possibly an orphan, but grew on to become a powerful warrior and king: