Beowulf Analysis Essay

Davoud Bayat, Anthony Rohrberg, Anthony Brown

Ms. Dohren

English 4, Period 1

29 September 2017

Beowulf Project: Analysis and reflection of the epic to terrorist’s attacks The epic Beowulf written and translated by Seamus Heaney is mainly about encountering the evil and horrendous Grendel and defeating him and his mother. In this epic poem, Beowulf, is characterized as a hero that possess strength, courage and nobility, fighting to protect his people and land, while Grendel is the enemy that is trying to destroy and kill everything in his path, without caring about the outcome.

This epic relates greatly to numerous terrorist attacks in the past and to recent ones. One of the terrorist attacks that happened recently was the Berlin Attack. There is a lot of aspects in this poem that display

There also appears to be some sort of religious aspect to Grendel’s injustice, “It harrowed him to hear…the clear song of a skilled poet telling with mastery of man’s beginnings, how the Almighty had made the earth” (Heaney, 5). This is comparable to modern day terrorism with their religion and their different cultural opinions. As we notice in the quote, Grendel completely disagrees with the religion of the Danes and as we are told in the story he is from a different origin. Grendel is cursed by God and he is filled with a lot of jealousy when people have joy and happiness. At the mead hall he kills 30 people and after that he goes back hoping to kill more people. The Berlin attack had a similar outcome. A truck driver, who apparently was a member of ISIS, drove into a Christmas market in Berlin killing 12 people and injuring about 50 others. Such act of terrorism is truly horrible and as we can see it is related a lot to Grendel’s actions mentioned previously. The people at the market obviously were enjoying the atmosphere there, they were buying gifts before Christmas