Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The final act of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf includes Beowulf's fight with a dragon, the third monster he encounters in the epic. On his return from Heorot, where he killed Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules wisely for fifty years until a slave awakens and angers a dragon by stealing a jewelled cup from ...
The first warrior Grendel finds is still asleep, so he seizes the man and devours him. Grendel grabs a second warrior, but is shocked when the warrior grabs back with fearsome strength. As Grendel attempts to disengage, the reader discovers that Beowulf is that second warrior. Beowulf uses neither weapon nor armour in this fight.
Beowulf spots another sword, hanging on the wall and apparently made for giants, and cuts her head off with it. Travelling further into Grendel's mother's lair, Beowulf discovers Grendel's corpse and severs his head with the sword. Its blade melts because of the monster's "hot blood", leaving only the hilt.
Until the late 1970s, all scholarship on Grendel's mother and translations of the phrase "aglæc-wif" were influenced by the edition of noted Beowulf scholar Frederick Klaeber. His edition, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, has been considered a standard in Beowulf scholarship since its first publication in 1922. [12]
Beowulf's first fight is with the monster Grendel, who is often taken by scholars as a kind of troll from Norse mythology. Tolkien's trolls share some of Grendel's attributes, such as great size and strength, being impervious to ordinary swords, and favouring the night.
The former, subtitled "Beowulf and Grendel", is a poem or song [5] of seven eight-line stanzas about Beowulf's victory over Grendel. The latter is a poem of fifteen eight-line stanzas on the same theme; several of the stanzas, including the first and the last, are almost identical with the first version.
Unferth's very act of giving Hrunting to Beowulf and the sword's unexpected failure in the battle against Grendel's mother bear much symbolism in the poem. Given that Unferth shows his dislike for Beowulf early in the story, Unferth's choice to award Beowulf with Hrunting, which means "hunting", [ 6 ] can be interpreted as a sign of peace and ...
He ends by predicting a bad result if Beowulf dares face Grendel. Beowulf answers the challenge by boasting that he is the strongest swimmer in the world, and entertains the company with a tale about how, in that contest, he swam the North Sea in full armor while carrying a sword, killed nine huge sea-monsters who dragged him to the ocean floor ...