The Cake In Beowulf

When baking a cake, the baking soda’s role is to make the cake mixture rise and increase in volume, in its absence the cake fails to take on a proper shape or texture. The culinary term for the baking soda’s role is a “leavening agent”; the better the leavening agent is the better the cake tastes, and the more there is the more it rises (Cristensen). Just like cake requires something to make it rise, heroes require something to compliment their mixture of potential to bring the best out of the cake batter. Many find this thought to be an encompassing truth: that the hero’s rising ingredient is an obstacle, coming in the form of a villain or a challenge, and that the quality and quantity of obstacles elevate the hero.

It seems etched in human

From Grendel’s mother’s point of view, as in John Gardner’s novel Grendel, was Beowulf in any way a face of good, or that horrible man that killed her son? Was it not the dragon that was “robbed of silver and sleep” (Raffel 95) first before attacking the Geats and killing Beowulf? To the members of the Ku Klux Klan, were the civil rights activists and those who fought for racial equality a group of tireless foes standing in their way? It seems that the deeper we dig, the further away from certainty we get. Which in essence, is the entire idea of the hero and villain: there’s no single way to define either because every person has his or her own definition. To begin with, what varies with the meaning of a hero is the meaning of justice: One person’s justice can be another’s injustice; and with 7 billion people in the world we find 7 billion meanings of justice, and another 7 billion of injustice. As much as Beowulf and the Danes felt every right to slay Grendel, Grendel’s mother felt every right herself to avenge the men who slayed her son. Also, while the Geats observed the dragon in horror as it “burned down their homes” (Raffel 95) and killed their great leader, the dragon didn’t feel any sympathy for them after it was robbed its own treasured possession. Yet, the slave who stole the dragon’s jeweled cup felt he had a legitimate reason to do so himself, as he needed a way to repay

White supremacists feel that the Klan was the face of justice, and the way they perceive African Americans, minorities, and other groups give themselves sufficient reason to oppress them. The Adolf Hitler that most of the modern world knows -- the Adolf Hitler, who brainwashed the face of Germany and convinced it into nearly wiping out European Jews, putting millions upon millions of innocent men, women, and children through undescribable horror before leaving six million of them dead -- isn’t the same Adolf Hitler that Nazi Germans saw, or that Neo-Nazis see today (“Introduction to the Holocaust”). And while ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim terrorists can be viewed as heartless, death-loving demons especially to the American public and media for countless deaths and horrendous acts of terrorism, their existence relies on the fact that there are people that find their actions