'Compare and Contrast Essay Between Beowulf and the Hobbit\r'

'I just this day finish reading A COMPANION TO BEOWULF by my friend and classmate Ruth Johnson. It was unco clear, well written, concise, and chock full of fascinate insights and observations. Let me in particular mark on her last chapter, which concerned Tolkien and Beowulf. I had non here(predicate)tofore been aw ar of how bountiful a record JRR Tolkien loomed in the learning of the epic poem BEOWULF, nor what a capacious influence his seminal essay The behemoth and the Critics, had in turning the attention of the donnish homo from the historical to the literary merits of the poem.Ruth Johnson makes the literary argu custodyt that overlord of the Rings is an updated version of BEOWULF. No, non the evets, exactly the military personnel, the humanityview, the motif, the techniques, and especially the approach toward religion. It is to be n iodind that m whatever critics faulted Tolkien for non including some(prenominal)place in diaphragm Earth any description or hint of rituals, rites, temples and cults with commit the vivid backdrops of separate works of fantasy.Except for a few indirect hints that in that respect is a High God nearlywhere, and angelic powers the elves revere, master of the Rings is mayhap unique among fantasies in that there is no mention of the ghostly emplacement of society or the uncanny side of man. But, of course, Tolkien is not unique: he is following BEOWULF. The poet of BEOWULF (so Tolkien interpreted the evidence) wished to depict his pre-Christian ancestors in the admirable light men ar right to get for their ancestors, and without attributing to them a Christian faith they could not guard had.In these modern measures, when Christian and Postchristian struggle for the souls of men, and the ordinary picture of the Christian is of a book-burner quite an than the preserver of pagan literature, it is a lot big(p) to recall the respect with which the Christian visual sense held their pagan fore-be arers and preserved their works. 1 train only open any ergodic page of Dante or Milton, for example, to see the dumbly clustered references to pagan myths reflected with considerably much than reverence than to a greater extent modern and sardonic depictions of the gods of old.As with Roman Christian and the classical pagans, so with elderly English and his Scandinavian fathers, at least in this case. The way the poet of BEOWULF handled the light-handed amour of showing the old age and the old ways as grand but, deprived of Christ, doomed, was to pass over the differences in a pregnant silence, and unless show those cardinal incorrupt excellences that pagans and Christian alike admire, in particular fortitude and honor. So too here did Tolkien with his center Earth and their peoples: the foremost virtue emphasized again and again in Tolkien was the Beowulfian virtue of continuing a cope up to now after all fancy is exhausted.The melancholy pronouncements of gloo m and doom are scattered throughout the War of the Ring, yet similarly match the elegiac eccentric of Beowulf’s last battle against the flying flying dragon of the barrow, and much(prenominal) of the tone in side tales mentioned in Beowulf. The Beowulfian attitude toward fate or ‘Wyrd’ seems a blend of the pagan model of inescapable fate woven by the Three Sisters, or the Christian picture of fate as the decree and willing of God. A similar attitude powerfulness be detected in Middle Earth.Frodo directlyhere lauds the fact that it is his free picking to carry the burden of the cursed One Ring, as, for example, Neo from THE MATRIX does in the completion of that trilogy. Instead, the wise Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo was â€Å"meant” to find the Ring, as if by some divine will supra and beyond the will of any prick in Middle Earth, even Sauron the rancid Lord. Meant by whom? As in Beowulf, it is not said, but the silence implies something li ke ‘Wyrd’ or the will of heavenly powers.Tolkien borrowed so much from Beowulf and the Old English, that the description of Medusheld (Mead-Hall) in Rohan top executive be taken as the opposite number of Hereot. Unferth, who sits at the feet of Hrothgar and scorns Beowulf at his first appearing in the big(p) hall, is somewhat gibe to Grima, who sits likewise and scorns Gandalf as a storm-crow and a meddler in others’ affairs. Many readers (include myself) have called Lord of the Rings a ‘medieval’ fantasy, but this is a gross misnomer. There is not a single Arthurian figure in Middle Earth, nor any such fit out or arms or equipment as might a nickname of the High Middle Ages have employ.The men are in hauberks and iron caps, as in Beowulf, usually carrying spears. The fantasy is Old English in clipting, Danish and Beowulfian, England of the time of Alfred the great(p); but also the scenes in Gondor might be imagined as if some northerly he ro visited the great and past cities, cities builded of stone and money, of Rome or great and once-invulnerable Constantinople. The Shire itself is redolent of a noble medieval period, some idealized squirearchy, but Rohan is wholly in the mood and standard pressure of Beowulf.In Beowulf, the elves or ‘ylfas’ are listed a retentive with ‘ettins’ and ‘orcs’ (elves, giants, demons) as being descendents of Cain, exiled by God for his kin-slaying (a umbrage the Norse held in particular horror) and therefore, even as lesser clans must contest and retaliate endlessly, so the Sons of Cain with the race of moral men, descended of Seth and Noah. While the orcs and other monsters in Tolkien are creatures innately evil, no more to be yarded with nor spared than Grendel, the elves are not quite the Liosalfar of Norse myth, albeit they are more akin to this than to the diminutive sprites of midsummer NIGHT’S DREAM.In olden times, northern p eople found stone arrowheads, or saw evidence of heart attacks or madness that seemed without cause, and blamed the unseen people, the elves, who were not necessarily cruel and wicked, but they had no concern for the things of men, and went their ways invisibly. Something of this mood is bow in Tolkien’s elves, albeit he makes them both(prenominal) more manlike, and something like a prelapsarian man still at one with nature, to suit his purposes. The dwarves of Tolkien, on the other hand, could have stepped out of central casting from a Wagner Opera, and the names are taken unvarying from the Eddas.It may be useful for a effect to contrast the free peoples of Middle Earth with the other fantasies from Tolkien’s times and before, in order to emphasize a point easy to be baffled in our modern Dungeons and Dragons generation: namely, that elves and trolls and dwarves are purely Norse and Beowulfish in origin. Tolkien took them from the population of Beowulf and mad e that world and no other the staple of fantasy worlds. Tolkien made the ylfas and orcs and ettins into the elves and dwarves and trolls we now tend to think of as usualplace stereotypes of an overly-plowed field.But you will in vain strain their like in THE WORM OUROBOROS by ER Eddison, nor in LUD-IN-THE-MIST by apprehend Mirrlees, nor in anything written by crowd Branch Cabell nor William Morris nor Lord Dunsany nor Clarke Ashton Smith nor William trust Hodgson nor William Beckford nor Arthur Machen nor the great Robert E. Howard in any writer in that genre that used to be called fantasy before the coming of Tolkien. These peoples and creatures entered the common imagination from the forgotten north of the world through the pen of JRR Tolkien.Turning for a moment to the Hobbit, we see the dragon Smaug circled on gold in his buried hold in much the same manner as the dragon of Beowulf. dickens are displace to outrage by the theft of a trifle from their greed-gathered horde , a gold cup. Both rise up in ignite and wrath to burn nearby homesteads. It is an entirely Norse conception of a dragon. The dragon slain in myth by Saint George was no hoarder of gold; Nagas of the easternmost and Liang of the Far East are distinguishable beasties entirely, albeit called dragons in our language.One artistic technique the poet of Beowulf used was to interpolate references to even earlier events and sagas into the matter of the poem. Early critics of Beowulf thought this a morphologic weakness, or even evidence of two or three poets cobbling split up earlier material together. But a close attention to the matter perhaps shows the poet meaning to draw out parallels and contrasts surrounded by the ancient events and the struggle in Hereot, or the dark mere, or the barrow. It gives the poem, which was meant to be antiquarian at the time it was ritten, a malodorousness of depth, by depicting a world of many layers of ever receding time. buttocks every treasure s word and necklace, there is a tale, and weapons have names and histories even as great households and heroes and the lineages do. Tolkien is often complimented on the richness of the detail, the sense of many ages piled up behind the event in the electric current War of the Ring; but what he did was to copy Beowulf, and use the same technique, grown names to swords and remarking on the histories of towers and lands until the weight of taradiddle settles into the imagination of the reader.I contrast it with, for example, Homer’s ILIAD, where the technique is not used. Aside from the armor of Narses, I cannot recall the history of any weapon being recounted among the Greek. It is purely Norse touch. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings seems a real world because so often mention is made of former eld and older ways, and the tale is of the super out of things with deep roots who once stood long in their places.Finally, the world itself, the Middle Earth, is tho the Old Engl ish word for Midgard, the world suspended halfway between the dark of hell and the light of heaven. The melancholy of the passing extraneous of the older world was also a theme in BEOWULF, in the ears of the listeners even if we cannot hear it today. The English poet set his tale amid Danish lands and centuries (even at that time) long gone by. The old ways were past, and the upstart had come. The poet says valediction to the world of Beowulf even as he writes his saga.In much the same way, JRR Tolkien says congé to the world and worldview that passed away before and during the Great War in Europe, the death of the age when the world was alive and elves lurked unseen in the twilight, the death of faith and faithfulness, the passing away of kings and heroes and all things ancient and fine, and the final blessedness of the smoggy mediocrity of Mordor. Part of the reason for the fame of his book is that many folk dole out the sentiment of elegy, and wish, with Professor Tolkien, to say farewell to a world nobler than our own.\r\n'