Beowulf

Beowulf is an odd story. I can't make up my mind if it seems like a really odd story because I'm female (and to put it mildly, this is a story of manly men doing manly things) or because the culture is so unknown to me.

I read Beowulf for the first time while I was in college. As far as I can tell, the reason people read Beowulf as widely as they do is because Tolkein talked about it, and most (male) academics are geeks at heart who loved Lord of the Rings (the female academics are geeks, too; they just read Jane Austen instead).

In the story, Beowulf kills Grendal, Grendal's mother and a dragon — all creatures that are not human. So, yes, I get the bit in Beowulf about the enemy being a non-human villain which can be slain without remorse. It neatly ties up people's abiding interest in violence and death, without any moral complications as the creatures which are being killed represent evil.

What seems odder to me is the exaltation of the warrior class. It is clear at the end, after Beowulf dies, that lacking his protection, the country he ruled is going to fail and be overrun. The options for a country seemed to either be strong enough to hold others at bay, or for the inhabitants to be murdered and enslaved.

As long as warriors rule, war will always be present. And as long as war is present, warriors will always need to rule. The people in Beowulf were unable to break this cycle (I suspect it wouldn't even have occured to the ruling warrior class to try). The best they could do was to find a strong leader and shelter behind him.

The treatment of the hero, actually, seems a lot like an action movie to me. The main hero is a strong man who establishes order and protects the weak. In Beowulf, the main hero also has lesser heros at his side who are not as strong. A hero can die a heroic death but a hero is never crippled by the loss of a limb or a blow to the head. In other words, a hero is never weak; he's either strong or gloriously dead.

Action movies are notoriously aimed at men. Perhaps the similarity beteen Beowulf and action movies (i.e. the glorification of a super-alpha male through violence) is one of the reasons the story seemed so strange to me.

While violence is certainly an important part of a modern government (though it's referred to as "defense" now), we idealize violence in war and the violent less. It may in part be our methods. In Beowulf, a warrior killed his opponent on the field of battle in hand-to-hand combat, he didn't bomb a house and accidentally kill school children. There is something admirable about defeating an opponent in combat face to face; it's hard to make the same argument for bombing people.

If you're a Tolkein fan, you should certainly read this story.  Even if you're not, it's worth reading, if only for the story of defeating evil incarnate in the form of Grendal, Grendal's mother and the dragon.