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
Old English literature Paul Muldoon's "Caedmona's Hymn" in his "Moy Sand and Gravel" (2002) and U. A. Fanthorpe's "Caedmon's Song" in her "Queuing for the Sun" (2003). These translations differ greatly from one another, just as Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" (1999) deviates from earlier, similar projects. Heaney uses Irish diction across "Beowulf" to bring what he calls a "special body and force" to the poem, foregrounding his own Ulster heritage, "in order to render (the poem) ever more 'willable forward/again and again and again.'" Old English literature Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the