# Beowulf  ## Metadata - Author: [[Seamus Heaney]] - Full Title: Beowulf - Category: #books ## Highlights - Its narrative elements may belong to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time. ([Location 35](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=35)) - Tags: [[old literature]] - The poem was written in England but the events it describes are set in Scandinavia, in a ‘once upon a time’ that is partly historical. ([Location 37](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=37)) - they devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly established Christian religion, which was fundamental to the poet’s intellectual formation, displaced him from his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem ([Location 54](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=54)) - In 1936, the Oxford scholar and teacher J. R. R. Tolkien published an epoch-making paper entitled ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, which took for granted the poem’s integrity and distinction as a work of art and proceeded to show in what this integrity and distinction inhered. ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=58)) - without recourse to this immense body of commentary and elucidation. ([Location 65](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=65)) - W. B. Yeats would have called a phantasmagoria. ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=81)) - the preternatural force-for-evil of the hero’s enemies comes springing at him in demonic shapes; three encounters with what the critical literature and the textbook glossaries call ‘the monsters’ ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=82)) - The ‘Finnsburg episode’ immerses us in a society that is at once honour-bound and blood-stained, presided over by the laws of the blood-feud, where the kin of a person slain are bound to exact a price for the death, either by slaying the killer or by receiving satisfaction in the form of wergild (the ‘man-price’), a legally fixed compensation. The claustrophobic and doom-laden atmosphere of this interlude gives the reader an intense intimation of what wyrd, or fate, meant not only to the characters in the Finn story but to those participating in the main action of Beowulf itself. ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=99)) - Tags: [[Sociology]] - It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. ([Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=146)) - Tags: [[old literature]] - For every one of us, living in this world  means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark. ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=147)) - this reconciliation occurs, it seems to me, most poignantly and most profoundly in the poem’s third section, once the dragon enters the picture and the hero in old age must gather his powers for the final climactic ordeal. From the moment Beowulf advances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by the rock-wall, the reader knows he is one of those ‘marked by fate’. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=152)) - Once the dragon is disturbed, the melancholy and sense of displacement that pervade the last movement of the poem enter the hoard as a disabling and ominous light. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002RI91OE&location=166))