Is Beowulf an Heroic Elegy or an Epic Narrative? Essay -- Epic of Beowu

Is Beowulf an Heroic Elegy or an Epic Narrative? There is considerable debate as to whether the song Beowulf is an epic narrative poesy or an epic elegy. Which is it. This essay intends to depict both sides of the story. Some great literary scholars think that the poem is an heroic elegy, celebrating the fantastic accomplishments of its great hero, and also expressing sorrow or lamentation for the heros unfortunate death. In Beowulf The Monsters and the Critics Tolkien states We must dismiss, of course, from mind the notion that Beowulf is a narrative poem, that it tells a bilgewater or intends to tell a tale sequentially. The poem lacks steady advance so Klaeber heads a critical partitioning in his edition. But the poem was not meant to advance, steadily or unsteadily. It is fundamentally a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of both moments in a great life, rising and setting an elaboration of the quaint and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death (Tolkien 34). Another literary scholar attacks the proposition that the poem is a narrative epic as many critics say For the building of the poem is not sequential, but complemental at the outset true parts of a situation are displayed, and these are given glueyness and significance by progressive addition of its other parts (Blomfield 60). These attacks on the epic-narrative theory regarding the poem Beowulf leave one with the only choice left over that the poem is an heroic elegy, a poem celebrating the achievements of its hero Beowulf, and at the aforementioned(prenominal) time a poem of lamentation and sorrow and mourning over the death of that great he... ...all, Inc., 1968. Greenfield, Stanley B.. The Finn Episode and its Parallet. In Beowulf The Donaldson Translation, edited by Joseph F. Tuso. revolutionary York, W.W.Norton and Co. 1975. Rebsamen, Frederick R.. in Beowulf A Pers onal Elegy. Beowulf The Donaldson Translation, edited by Joseph F. Tuso. innovative York, W.W.Norton and Co. 1975 Robinson, Fred C. Apposed enounce Meanings and Religious Perspectives. In Beowulf Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom. late York Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Tolkien, J.R.R.. Beowulf The Monsters and the Critics. In Beowulf Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Wright, David. The Digressions in Beowulf. In Readings on Beowulf, edited by Stephen P. Thompson. San Diego Greenhaven Press,1998.