Beowulf
Critical Analysis: Supporting a Thesis

Scholars and critics have come to various conclusions about the themes and meanings of Beowulf. Choose one statement with which you agree or disagree and write an essay supporting your stand with quotes, episodes, and examples from the text of Beowulf.

A. Beowulf is steeped in a pagan tradition that depicts nature as hostile and forces of death as uncontrollable. Blind fate picks random victims; man is never reconciled with the world. Beowulf ends a failure.

B. Beowulf presents an ideal of loyalty to a thane, the comitatus bond. The failure to live up to this ideal on the part of some thanes points up the extraordinary faithfulness of Beowulf.

C. Beowulf is a blending of Christian traditions with a folk story that extols virtues of loyalty, courage, and faith in the face of extreme dangers and even death. It presents a model of man willing to die to deliver his fellow men from terrifying evil forces.

D. Beowulf is the story of a dual ordeal: an external battle with vicious opponents and an internal battle with human tendencies of pride, greed, cowardice, betrayal, and self-concern.

E. Beowulf is the universal story of man's journey from adolescence to adulthood to old age and the growth in wisdom about self and the world gained through the pain and triumph of experience.

A Method of Getting Started

1. Underline key words in the essay question. 2. Find examples in the text.

ESSAY A:
pagan tradition ". . . sometimes they sacrificed to the old stone gods, made heathen vows." (175-6)
nature hostile ". . . a little-known country, wolf slopes, windswept headlands" (1053)
fate picks victims "seized 30 warriors" (96)
"death comes faster than you think, no one can flee it" (1767-8)

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Updated 10 July 2006.