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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.
Beowulf (/ ˈ b eɪ ə w ʊ l f /; [1] Old English: Bēowulf [ˈbeːowuɫf]) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines.
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 essays are: "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" looks at the critics' understanding of Beowulf, and proposes instead a fresh take on the poem. "On Translating Beowulf " looks at the difficulties in translating the poem from Old English. "On Fairy-Stories", the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrew's University, is a defence of the ...
The parallel in the story lies with the similarity to Beowulf's hero Sigemund and his companion: Wiglaf is a younger companion to Beowulf and, in his courage, shows himself to be Beowulf's successor. [ 30 ] [ 31 ] The presence of a companion is seen as a motif in other dragon stories, but the Beowulf poet breaks hagiographic tradition with the ...
Hall's other work on Beowulf included a metrical translation in 1914, and the translation and collection of Knut Stjerna's Swedish papers on the poem into the 1912 work Essays on Questions Connected with the Old English Poem of Beowulf. In the final decade of his life, Hall's writings took to a Christian theme.
Tolkien ends the essay with an analysis of lines 210–228 of Beowulf, providing the original text, marked up with stresses and his metrical patterns for each half-line, as well as a literal translation with poetical words underlined. He notes that there are three words for boat and for wave, five for men, four for sea: in each case some are ...
It represents Tolkien's attempt to reconstruct the folktale underlying the narrative of the first half of Beowulf. The book ends with two versions of Tolkien's "The Lay of Beowulf". 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 ...