Give an account of the Pagan and Christian Element in Beowulf.

 

Give an account of the Pagan and Christian Element in Beowulf.

 

The Anglo-Saxon Poetry is characterized by curious blending of Pagan and Christian elements. The Anglo-Saxon pagan poetry with Beowulf  at its head was written before the Anglo-Saxon were baptized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and deals primarily with Pagan themes common to old Germania ---- with wars, adventures, journeyings and above all with the heroic struggles of man with the sea. Beowulf grew out of the independent lays composed in celebration of the glory of Beowulf who is supposed to be a hero of great velour. He is identified with a soldier in the army of King Hygeia. Beowulf has great similarity to the story and setting   of Scandinavian sages. It is an interesting of many elements: history, heroic legends, folk- lore, heathen myths, etc.  It is made up of heroic legends about the semi-historical persons which are interwoven with mythological conceptions upon which the Christian character has been super imposed by the last compiler.

 

 

Though the Biblical elements abound and Christian elements are incorporated in the poem,  the background of Beowulf is distinctly heathen and its philosophy markedly pagan, Pagan Elements are found in the love of war, deep-rooted belief in the heathen customs and ceremonies as shown in the description of the funeral of the heroes---- the hero is consigned to the fire. Pagan elements are also found in the description of feasts and halls and in the belief in weird or fate. The dead are cremated, omens are observed, sacrifices are vowed at the temple of idols. Besides, the revelry of the Thomas of King Hrothgar in the wine hall, the raid of Grendel and his killing of the Thanes, deals and blood shed within the hall, terrible fight between Grendel and Beowulf, the murder of Grendel and Grendel’s mother by Beowulf --- all there are the Pagan elements of the epic. The praise of the worldly glory, the theme of blood vengeance, the frequent references of the proof of wyrd, look to a heathen work which has undergone revisions by Christian minstrels rather than Christian work with heathen reminiscences.

 

 

                                Christian elements are inserted in different episodes of the poem and are evenly distributed between the speeches and the narratives. There are portions which are probably substituted later on for heathen passages by the Christian compiler of the poem. However, the Christian elements do not go beyond the description of simple Christian ways, institutions, rituals and a simple Christian faith in providence. While giving the description of Herrot among the desolate moors the poet suddenly digreness, and makes an irrelevant reference to the creation of the World, as described in the Old Testament. Like a true Christian the poet says that it was the Almighty God who created the earth and the Ocean, and set the sun and the moon to give light to the dwellers of the earth, and adorned the fields of the earth with branched and leafy trees.  After Beowulf’s victory over Grendel, Hrothgar thanks God for the death of Grendel, and says that Beowulf’s work was done in the strength of god: “The king of glory works wonder on wonder; let thank to him he quickly given. Now hath a hero, through the might of God, done that which all our wisdom could not do?”  We came across the Christian idea of the vanity of earthly things in What Beowulf says to Hrothgar after Hrothgar has described the cruel death of Aesckere, his best friend at the hands of Grendel’s mother, and the place where she lives, and has cried to Beowulf:        ”seek her out if you dare:”----

                              “Sorror not wise man

   Each of us shell the end await

  Of worldly life: let him who may gain

   Honour era death.”

The Christian idea in the early stages of monastic Christianity, of the futility of earthly life among scenery is also found in the poem.    

 

 

Importance of Caedmon's Hymn.

 

The main known survivor from Caedmon's Oeuvre in his Hymn wherein he adulates the brilliance of God. Caedmon's Hymn is a short Old English sonnet was formed between 658-680 by an unlettered cow herd. It makes due in a Latin interpretation by Bede in his Historian Ecclesiastical Genfis Anglorum. The sonnet is known from 21 composition duplicates making it the best alluring Old English sonnet. It is regularly settled upon by certain researchers that the Hymn is the soonest record of oral sonnet in English History. The sonnet is a noticeable milestone old refence point for the contemporary investigation of Old English prosody, for the early impact which Christianity had on the sonnets and tunes of the Anglo-Saxon individuals after their transformation and for the recorded establishments of English writing on the loose. We can maybe get the hang of something about Caledonian dream in the period of print. The Hymn has been respected by most of Scholars as the certified work of Caedmon.

 

It is dicey that most of perusers of today would discover in structure and setting of the Hymn to be fundamentally imaginative or moving yet this is the place "we are driven off track by our insight into later verse." The word usage and substance of this Hymn would have barely been viewed as traditional or cliché. Caedmon used a type of Anglo-Saxon verse customarily utilized for the worship of lords and rulers and articulated the vernacular in a manner that would make it allude to God rather than Monarch. He authored the Christian idyllic recipe in song was utilized by ages of later writers. It "had an originality that it lost over the span of time" however it has been declared by numerous that his graceful advancements qualified for be figured a virtuoso