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Home  » Text Analysis » Reading Beowulf Between the Lines
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Fardella
[author: Flora Fardella - postdate: 2006-02-22]
From reading the text I can say that the narrator used various techniques to describe Beowulf.
In the first line we already find a word that gives us information about the context of the story and in particular about Beowulf’s society. The word is “thane” which means a royal vassal of some importance.
Another important word, in the second line, is Gaetland that it lets us learn the place where the story was set.
As for the character of Beowulf, he was described with a lot of techniques. The narrator gives us information about him speaking about his reputation, his behaviour, providing back-ground information about him, his social relationship and making various comparisons.
The third line “there was no one else like him alive” is important to understand what the narrator want say about Beowulf: there is no body else like him in the world. The hero was different from other people, because he could do a lot of deeds that other people weren’t able to do.
In the fourth line we can find the sentence “the mightiest man on earth”. In this way the narrator puts Beowulf in the forefront while common people remain in the back ground.
The key word is “mightiest” that is the superlative of the adjective mighty. This is important because the adjective is referred to God, therefore in this way the narrator compares Beowulf to God. There are a lot of superlatives because they underline the importance of the hero.
In the first part of the fifth line we can read “ high-born and powerful”. This means that the hero came from a very important family.
There are a lot of verbs that give us information about his behaviour, like “he ordered”, “he announced”… Moreover in the poem there are a lot of similes ( “like him”, “dear as he was”, “like the leader he was”..) that compare Beowulf to a ruler, a leader so that the tenor is the hero and the vehicles make the reader understand that he shares all good qualities and skills with they who rule.
From the analysis of Beowulf's behaviour the reader learns that Beowulf is generous, courageous, expert about see, careful..
Another important point is that the narrator tells us what people think about him and in this way we understand other hero’s characteristics, for example “dear as he was to them”.