Anglo-Saxon Literature: Beowulf, Night and Macbeth

During this year of English we read the earliest works of English literature. Many of these works were passed down orally for centuries before they were written down. Anglo-Saxon literature includes lyric poems that express emotion, as well as the earliest epic poem of the English language, Beowulf, which presents the adventures of a hero who is larger than life. Additionally we read an extraordinary and touching book about the Holocaust. This book was one of the best we read this year in my opinion. I read the whole thing and really enjoyed reading it which is unexpected of me as a reader since I really don’t enjoy reading books forced. Then there was Macbeth and excellent play about a women taking power and plotting murders a twist on things. Beowulf, Night and Macbeth all share a common theme, power and they are illustrate and demonstrate in different ways.
Beowulf an epic told by . The fight with Grendel shows Beowulf’s power. Grendel is a demon that has killed many people and many people attempted to kill him. Everyone that attempted to kill Grendel always wore armor and used weapons. Beowulf said that he would not use weapons. He is bragging that he is stronger than anyone else. During the fight, Beowulf was described as the strongest man ever. “The captain of evil discovered himself in a handgrip harder than anything he had ever encountered in any man on the face of the earth” (749-752).
“He was overwhelmed, manacled tight by the man who of all men was foremost and strongest in the days of his life.”(787-789).
Both of those quotes prove how powerful Beowulf is. They state how Grendel never encountered someone that strong and tough. The fight is a perfect example of Beowulf’s strength and power.
Night by Elie Wiesel is just one of many memoirs written, who survived the Holocaust. Wiesel feels required to put up with recalling the pain that he experienced and observed in the concentration camps. In Night he narrates the sympathetic of the deaths of his family members, the death of his teenage years, little kids, and the death in his naïve belief in man’s innate goodness. The power of the type of the memoir is that it captures experience and insists that forgetting and powering through the horrible incidents that happen. All the horrible and devastating crimes against humanity are not a choice, neither for Wiesel nor for the reader. In the Memoir Night we as readers also see abuse of power. We see this action in the SS officers, the leaders of the concentration camps. The SS officers had abused their power, especially with their weapons. Less important but the doctors had taken gold crowns from the Jews, the Jews were taken over and in fact lose power of themselves which is honestly truly just sad. Macbeth by Shakespeare is one of the many play where the females that carries the power in the situations