Beowulf Analysis

Imagine being there. The most fearsome monster in the land is in your grasp and you are killing him using nothing but the good inside of you. I believe that the story of Beowulf is a metaphor for using your weaknesses to your advantage and by accepting them you turn them into strengths. Beowulf is a great book to read if you are interested in a story about the influence of good and evil inside of yourself. It is a book about overcoming your weaknesses and using them for good instead.
The book, Beowulf: A New Telling, is set in the medieval era in the land of the Danes. To summarize the story, the good king Hrothgar has a great hall called Hall Heorot built for him. Hall Heorot get’s continuously terrorized by the infamous monster Grendel. A
Robert Nye made the story of Beowulf feel very lifelike by describing the thoughts, actions and dialogue of the characters with immense detail. He used details in describing characters and locations to give specific feelings of light and dark within the story. You can easily tell what in the story is supposed to be portrayed as good and what is bad. For example, hall Heorot is light, “so bright were its walls and roofs”p.5, and the fen is dark and muggy with pools of blood and where all of the evil things like Grendel live and come from. Along with that point, he specifically says within the story, “You think that bad brings forth bad only, and that the good man should hold apart from it. I suggest that things aren’t so simple, so black and white.”p.28. In the story of Beowulf, Beowulf draws his power from controlling the evil inside of him and only doing good instead. The moral of the book is to inform people that everyone has bad inside of them but that does not make you a bad person, “Even the wickedest person can do good for someone. The truly good man finds good where he
For example, the light characters include the amiable king Hrothgar, the benevolent queen Wealhtheow, and the heroic Beowulf himself. You can tell that these characters are considered to be part of the light side of the story because of not only their descriptions but because of the way they act and speak to each other. “He admits his weaknesses and in admitting them they become strengths”p.29. You can tell that the king and queen are light characters because of, for example, what they wear. Queen wealtheow wears a blue cloak and has golden curls that bounce around her head. On the other hand there are the dark characters like Grendel and the She-devil. They are both slimey and have disgusting attributes about them. You can tell the difference between light and dark because light characters are often beautiful or handsome like Wealtheow and Hrothgar and dark characters are usually grotesque like Grendel or Unferth. The theme of this story was about using the evilness that is inside of us for good by controlling it. I personally thought that Nye did a great job of getting this message