I have a real interest in the fact that there is not much background info on the Beowulf story. Since only one copy was found, we don't even know whether or not it was famous. Mr. B will probably appreciate this, but I can't help but envision a scenario where this was some monk who used his writing as a release from his normal life. Maybe he was the original comic book junky who tried to find an outlet for his creative side while obeying his oath to God. It could even be that maybe he wrote this thing and never let anybody else see it. Emily Dickinson wrote over 1800 poems, but fewer than a dozen were ever published during her lifetime. Plus, those that were had significant alterations to meet the standards of the day. Maybe the Beowulf author was like Emily. We assume that this was a fairly well know tale of its time, but there is just no way of knowing for sure.
The Batman vs. Superman discussion in class really got me thinking about Beowulf in a new way. I hadn't really thought about whether or not he was like one or the other. I never really thought about the fact that he might not be a normal man. I know he did some superhuman type of things, but I dismissed those as being the tall tales that legends are made of. To be Superman, he would clearly have to be superhuman. I know that Mr. B is like me in Batman being his favorite because he used to think that anybody could be Batman. He doesn't believe that any more, but I'm not willing to give up on that scenario. Now clearly I can't be Batman, but maybe a really dedicated son of a billionaire could be. He could arm himself with all of the gadgets he would need and he could train in all sorts of martial arts to become a champion in that arena as well. The hard part would really be keeping his identity a secret. With today's facial recognition software even Batman couldn't keep Batman's identity a secret. That said, I see Beowulf as the Batman of his day. Instead of going after criminals, he defended his people against the monsters of the time. They didn't have supervillains (or if they did, we don't know about it), so he defended them against the things that upset the status quo. He was clearly a champion's champion and someone that people could easily respect.
Beowulf didn't have outer space rocks to weaken him. Instead it just took the good old fashioned aging process. He still could do more in his senior years than anybody else could in their prime. Even though he had lost a step, he was still more than able to defeat the dragon which the author seems to portray as his greatest opponent. I think Beowulf was expecting the fight to be his last one and he probably knew that he was unlikely to survive the battle. He went out on his own terms and while his people were worse off for it, he did what he had to do. It is just by chance that this story survives today, but as it clearly serves as a model for many of the comic book heroes that our society spends big dollars watching in movies. Who knows what kind of entertainment we would have without Beowulf being in our lives? It makes our world more interesting, and we are all probably better off for it.
The idea of some monk sitting by himself creating his own "comic book" is indeed one that I like. I mean, consider a whole bunch of guys living together who have taken vows of chastity, poverty and peace. What outlet do they have for all their aggressiveness? Yeah, I could see them needing something and a story like Beowulf gives them that. In fact, there was an abbott who chewed out a monastery because they were reading adventure stories instead of the holy works they should have been using at meal times.
ReplyDeleteWe do have some historical evidence to back up that some of the characters in the poem were historical figures, but in a world where we can have a book in which Abe Lincoln is a vampire hunter, I have to admit it's possible that there's more fiction than truth to Beowulf.