Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics of the hero by accepting Grendel and the dragon." In Tolkien's view, the poem is essentially about a "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time". The underlying tragedy is man's brief mortal life. Grendel and the dragon are identified as enemies of a Christian God, unlike the monsters encountered by Odysseus on his travels. What had happened is that Northern courage, exultant, defiant in the face of inevitable defeat by "Chaos and Unreason" (Tolkien cites Ker's words), fuses with a Christian faith and outlook. The "Beowulf" poet uses both what he knew to be
The Phoenix (Old English poem) relate Christianity to the text. The phoenix desires to be born again. Old English Christianity seems to have a generally fatalistic outlook on life. Themes of the inevitability of death and unhappy implications of the Final Judgment, for example, pervade other Old English poetry like Beowulf. Such does not seem to be the case with The Phoenix, which devotes passages to describing the beauty of its objects: the Garden of Eden and the Phoenix bird itself. The Phoenix conceptualizes existence as a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, using the analogy of “the nature of corn,” or the harvest.