Week 3: Shelby Kirk

“There was no one else like him alive. In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth, highborn and powerful. He ordered a boat that would ply the waves. He announced his plan: to sail the swan’s road and seek that king, the famous prince who needed defenders. Nobody tried to keep him from going, no elder denied him, dear as he was to them.” (194-203)

In this passage of Beowulf, the author is describing Beowulf’s plan to sail overseas to help destroy Grendel. In Culler’s Literary Theory, it states that, “A literary work- Hamlet, for instance- is characteristically the story of a fictional character: it presents itself as in some way exemplary, but it  simultaneously declines to define the range or scope of exemplarity- hence the ease with which readers and critics come to speak about the ‘universality’ of literature.” (Pg. 36)

This quote from Beowulf shows that the story is a literary work at its face value. As the quote states, “there was no one else like him alive.” Beowulf is the hero of this story. One could argue that he was destined to be the one to slay Grendel. Beowulf knew that he had a good chance of dying and never seeing his home land again, but he says “I meant to perform to the uttermost what your people wanted or perish in the attempt, in the fiend’s clutches.  And I shall fulfill that purpose, prove myself with a proud deed or meet my death here in the mead-hall.” To him it did not matter that he could die. “He was the mightiest man on earth, highborn and powerful.” If Beowulf could not defeat Grendel, then no one could.

This passage is important to think about because this is the true heroic story. This lead today’s standard story-line, of the hero overcoming a great obstacle and defeating the bad guy. This can be seen in almost every great story from Beowulf to Shakespeare’s, Hamlet to Disney’s, Sleeping Beauty. The hero always wins in the end.