Examples Of Heroism In Beowulf

Chardalia Jordan
Ms. Nwadike
British Lit. / 2nd Period
Beowulf: The fight at the center

Introduction
The first of “two great moment in a great life…first achieved and final death”
The best of recent studies have drawn out implications that illuminate not only the social import of Beowulf heroism
First moment of heroism has been the fight with Grendel
“Entire episode…involving Grendel’s mother has been viewed as largely extraneous, a blot upon the thematic and structural unity of the poem”.
Critical emphasis to the second fight, “climatic moment” at the bottom of the mere rather than in Heorot Addressed herself to proving that the dam, far from being an extraneous extension of Grendel, is “more important socially and symbolically”
The Breca episode has several parallels with the fight against the dam. As in the mere, Beowulf, alone, conquers the monsters with a sword; light shines and the waterways are cleared:
[ . . . the morning found them (the sea-monsters) lying in the leavings of the waves, dead from the sword-wounds, killed with the sword, so that thereafter nothing around the deep waterways hindered the passage of the seafarers. Light came from the east, the bright beacon of God; the sea became still.]
Much as he does in the mere when careless of his life (l. 1536b), Beowulf gains the reward that can be attained only by an “immersion of the individual in the sea of experience . . . ready to risk all in the meeting."
Yet Beowulf has not become the hero in the Breca episode. His “heroic” actions there are more accidental than willed.
Meeting a boyhood challenge, Beowulf and Breca face the sea together to test their powers, not to use them for the benefit of
In order to defeat the force threatening society, it is necessary for Beowulf to learn that he cannot defeat it with Hrunting which, representing the “order and degree in human society” that weapons in Beowulf usually mean, is as incapable of defeating that force as Beowulf is within the civilized world of Heorot. When he stands alone in the face of impending death and, consequently, proves stronger than the threatening power of the mere, Beowulf makes manifest the heroic inner strength that then enables him to execute that strength in physical action.
Only then is he able to lift the Giants' Sword, associated with “primordial conflict,” and complete his quest as the savior of society.
That Beowulf's heroic quest has cosmological as well as social significance has been recognized by several readers.
It is not surprising that most of them have, until recently, concluded that it is in the fight at Heorot, the symbolic “center of the universe,” that Beowulf acts in a god-like manner by repeating the original act of