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Literary analysis: Beowulf

Beowulf is considered to be an early Christian English piece of literature when the underlying tone in the epic is that of the old pagan warrior.
If Beowulf was truly a Christian story then why show so many pagan principles within it? Honestly besides when Beowulf claims that he will kill Grendel in the name of God with his bare hands, there is not much else that would show him to be Christian.

Firstly Christians are supposed to be "gentle, loving, kind, non-warlike, and be selfless". Harold Bloom states, in one of his analyses, that, "mildness, gentleness, and kindness are hardly Christian, since they never are exercised toward Beowulf's human enemies," which show's that even though Beowulf claims to be Christian he is truly a Germanic warrior (Bloom, 1). However in this epic Beowulf seems to be the opposite in all of these cases. Instead of being selfless, he boasts about everything he's done in his past, like losing in a race only because he was attacked by sea monsters and defeated them, killing Grendel and his mother, and slaying a dragon and wishing to die with all of his gold around him.

Could the epic of Beowulf be about how pagan values were still big in Christian England and be changed to show that these pagan values are on the fall only to be replaced by those of the Christians?
Harold Bloom seems to believe so and it does make a lot of sense and would help to put away a lot of questions about how this epic is supposed to support Christianity. Bloom believes that, "All of the poem then is a beautiful fading away of Germanic origins, presumably into the light of a Christian common day," (Bloom, 2). If this is truly the case then this will account for how Beowulf goes from an epic of a man that graves glory and honor yet claims to be Christian while only showing off the pagan values. The work strikes me as an attempt for a Christian Monk in early Christian England to save this work from destruction once it was finally written down somewhere and changed to show some form of Christian values, while somehow showing also the "fallacies of mankind and the lure of the old ways of life of glory, honor, and gold" which Beowulf did eventually get consumed by and would later die for.

The epic leads me to think of Christians as a lazy group of people who don't want to have to take the time to come up with their own work. This work would show their ways of life while showing a lot more clearly that Beowulf is an example of what would likely happen to someone if


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Literary analysis: Beowulf

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