Who Is Beowulf A Hero

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In Beowulf’s three fights with the monsters, his character slowly evolves. For each battle, he uses different methods, techniques and weapons to defeat the monster. By analyzing each battle, the reader can track Beowulf’s character development. The more Beowulf fights, the more he uses weapons, the more he loses his faith in God, and the more he loses his physical strength. Therefore, rather than evolving, Beowulf actually declines as a hero. Beowulf’s battle with Grendel is the pinnacle of his heroic legacy. Beowulf works for the good of God to rid Herot off the malevolent Grendel. When Grendel entered the mead hall, “human eyes were watching his evil step” (Raffel line 331-332). Beowulf fought off Grendel with his bare hands, and when Beowulf’s men tried to attack, they discovered that “the sharpest and hardest iron could not scratch at his skin” (Raffel line 375-376). Thus, Beowulf did not use weapons to rip off Grendel’s arm, and walked away from the battle without a single scratch. In Beowulf’s next battle, which took place with Grendel’s mother, he developed a fair bit of arrogance. He entered the monsters’ lair alone and bore no weapons. However, with this arrogance came his forgetting of God. Without God on Beowulf’s side, Grendel’s mother…show more content…
The main cause of this deterioration is that Beowulf traded his believe in God for Anglo-Saxon culture. In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, he writes, “Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given” (Homer 1.32-34). This illustrates that because he lacked trust in God, Beowulf suffered a worser fate than what God intended. It is with his loss of faith in God that Beowulf loses power. With each battle, he has more need to use weapons because of his deterioration of strength, and he also gets closer and closer to

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