Good and evil are a part of life. Sometimes a person’s idea of good may be partially evil to another. Books have a tendency to make good and evil seem black and white with a good guy who fights the bad guy. It is easy to want a simple answer to something being good or bad. Evil is not always terrible, evil can be there to prove a point or to make a statement. Good would not be as good without having someway to compare it to another not so good thing. Beowulf and The Hobbit have good vs. evil as a common theme in their plot. Good versus evil is a part of literature, personal life and society. In The Hobbit and in Beowulf the good and evil characters are placed in groups of good or evil. Beowulf has good being the strong, courageous and honorable men and evil being Grendel and his mother who are descendants of Cain, the first murderer. The elves from The Hobbit are the good and the goblins are the evil. This may be the simple way to put it, but there are more complicated parts, such as where these ideas come from. A common influence for good and evil comes from Christianity. Beowulf has the…show more content… Depending on where one lives, society’s idea of good and evil may differ. To some cultures ghosts are seen as evil but to others they are seen are good, being there to help lead. In the end good and evil come down to one’s perspective of morals and ethics. Even the definition of good is something that is morally right; evil being something that is immoral. It is not good to be immoral but how is one immoral if they merely have different morals than you. How can this be a solid definition if everyone has different morals? The answer is simple, it is not. Back to the ghosts, you cannot prove anything unless you have solid evidence one way or the other. Almost always the battle of good and evil falls somewhere in the middle, due to the fact that there are so many different