Excerpt from Term Paper:
When Grendel tries to attack the place, it truly is seen as the attack of chaos directed at structure and order. “Then a powerful devil, a prowler in the dark, / nursed a tough grievance” (86-87). Grendel is not an clever enemy but he is certainly powerful. His immense electricity turns him into a harmful force as reason will not reside inside him. The hall was a symbol of civilization as the poet informs all of us: “inside Heorot / there was nothing but friendship” (1017-1018). Thus hall has immense representational value available and is aptly described as the “greatest residence / inside the world” (145-146).
Beowulf is perfectly aware about the importance of Heorot. He knows that simply by saving the location, and defeating Grendel, this individual could actually be offered the greatest residence on earth. In a passage, he acknowledges the worth and value of this place:
The boys hurried forward, pressed on together to where they could obviously see the timbered hall, wonderful and gold-bright; that hall was probably the most famous to earth-dwellers within the skies, where mighty california king was holding out. Its mild shone out over a large number of lands. (306-311)]
Beowulf’s worth is definitely raised by fact that this individual could cleanse the hall of Grendel. He is seen as an deliverer much in the same way as Jesus. This is evident through the lines Hrothgar’s wife echoes when Beowulf gains win. She perceives Beowulf as “a deliverer she could believe in… to help ease their afflictions” (626-628). Grendel is seen as the “captain of evil” since his problems on the corridor are symbolic of devil’s attacks within the process of creation. “His activities challenge the identity that society has built for itself by transforming Heorot, the human equivalent of God’s act of Creation, back into the negative express of pre-creation: the corridor stands in the same way ’empty and useless’ (and is defined using the same words, idel ond unnyt [145b and 413a)) as turmoil is in the Older English Genesis, with the same sinnibte ‘eternal night’ (161b) hanging overhead. ” (Neville: 74)
The hall can be thus the most important object inside the poem. It is the arch-image with no which the poem wouldn’t have existed or perhaps would certainly taking its structural and narrative richness, vibrancy and splendor.
References
Intestinal a. Lee, “Heorot and the Guest-Hall of Eden: Symbolic Metaphor as well as the Design of Beowulf, ” in the Guest-Hall of Eden: Several Essays within the Design of Outdated English Poems, Yale University or college Press, 1972, pp. 171-223.
Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poems (Cambridge, England: Cambridge School Press, 1999)
Thomas Greene. The Norms of Epic, ” Comparative Literature 13 (1961), 193-207
Halverson, John. “The Regarding Beowulf. “ELH 36: 4 (1969): 593-608. Rpt. In Readings about Beowulf. Hillcrest: Greenhaven Press, 1998
Beowulf: A New Passage Translation. Trans.
