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
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics thinker, religiously enlightened, who let his mind play over a lost heroic world of the imagination", in other words that the "Beowulf" poet was a man much like Tolkien. Niles cited George Clark's observation that Tolkien left "Beowulf" scholars with the "myth of the poet as brooding intellectual, poised between a dying pagan world and a nascent Christian one." Niles noted that Tolkien's view of the melancholic vision of the "Beowulf" poet, and of the heroic fatalism of the poem's leading characters, was not wholly new, but that his view of the poet himself as a hero was. Joan Acocella,