A piece on Beowulf

Beowulf is one of those work that had a profound effect on me.

It's an epic poetry but it's not on length as Iliad and Odyssey, it's much shorter and rather it feels more of an Elegy disguise as epic poem; a lament to a world that passed by and never coming back.

Especially in the wake of Beowulf's death and his burial as described by the following passage:

The folk of the Geatmen got him then ready

A pile on the earth strong for the burning,

Behung with helmets, hero-knights’ targets,

And bright-shining burnies, as he begged they should have them;

Then wailing war-heroes their world-famous chieftain,

Their liegelord beloved, laid in the middle.

This signals an age of unrest as without Beowulf as their guardian, the glory that Beowulf brought them and all its treasuries are now with him, it's a remnant of the rituals during the Pre-Christian age of Beowulf. The Poet is very careful between the traditions of old in that he fuses them with some Christian sensibilities as great example is that Beowulf's victory is owe much to God's blessing, he's a warrior that fights the fiends of the devil.

A lot of this are myths for us today, but to the poet and his audience they're real and the cultural shift since the arrival of Christianity, Beowulf offers to their audience and us of what the culture was like before and the transition towards the Christianized era of the Anglo-Saxon people. In a way the poem is a informed transition of the period the people are going through.

I often find myself daydream such times and I really enjoy how sad and yet real the poem is, it speaks to us the nature of humans from our great spoils of our first hunts to the last; our laments and our treasures that's most precious to us. Beowulf is a narrative piece that uses the myths of its day to inform how the nature of human life works.