Beowulf: Hero or Hedonist? The way something appears at first is not necessarily what is actually true. Just ask Barney Stinson of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, for example. If you asked anyone who has seen the movie The Karate Kid, they would most likely say the main character of the film, Daniel, is the hero. However, according to Barney, Johnny, the leader of the Cobra Kai dojo, is the real hero of The Karate Kid. In The Karate Kid, Johnny is portrayed as a villain, but Barney sees him as the true hero in the film as opposed to the common interpretation that Daniel is the hero and Johnny is the antagonist. Similarly, in the epic poem Beowulf, Beowulf is portrayed as a strong and powerful hero who saves the Danes from the monster Grendel. …show more content…
As it is written on lines 91 and 92, Beowulf was “The strongest of the Geats‒greater / and stronger than anyone anywhere in the world.” The writer of this story paints a very good picture of just how much stronger Beowulf is than everyone else with this one quote. Similarly, after he kills Grendel’s mother, he takes Grendel’s head and carries it with one hand out of the water. When he hands it to the rest of his men, it is so heavy that they start “staggering under the weight of Grendel’s skull, / Too heavy for fewer than four of them to handle” (564-65). This quote is yet another example of the superhuman strength that Beowulf has. Without a doubt, Beowulf is clearly bigger, stronger, and more powerful than any other man on Earth, and he uses this among other things to further his goal of killing and accumulating …show more content…
He abuses his powers to the extreme, and gets everything he desires. With Grendel, he kills two birds with one stone. He killed Grendel, which satisfied his lust for killing, and then became even more famous because he killed in an area he had never been before, Denmark. Because he saved them from a monster who was destroying their population, this community will be eternally grateful to him, which is exactly what he wants. If it is not clear to you by now, Beowulf is not who he appears to be. Everyone who reads the story can easily see that he is a strong, powerful hero-type that saves a community from a monster. However, if Barney Stinson read that same story, he would come up with the same conclusion that I had: Beowulf is a bloodthirsty, vainglorious superhuman who values killing and fame more than the saving of a community or the vanquishing of a terrorizing