Beowulf Sentence Examples

After Beowulf has reigned prosperously for fifty years, his country is ravaged by a fiery dragon, which inhabits an ancient burial-mound, full of costly treasure.

Beowulf is also a culture-hero.

The epic of Beowulf, the most precious relic of Old English, and, indeed, of all early Germanic literature, has come down to us in a single MS., written about A.D.

The subject of the poem is the exploits of Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow and nephew of Hygelac, king of the " Geatas," i.e.

His story is told in one of the oldest songs of the Edda, the V OlundarkiOda and, with considerable variations, in the prose P13rekssaga (Thidrek's sage), while the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and Deor's Lament contain allusions to it.

Beowulf and his friends are feasted in the long-deserted Heorot.

One of Beowulf's friends is killed; but Beowulf, unarmed, wrestles with the monster, and tears his arm from the shoulder.

All fear being now removed, the Danish king and his followers pass the night in Heorot, Beowulf and his comrades being lodged elsewhere.

Richly rewarded by Hrothgar, Beowulf returns to his native land.

Beowulf, with fourteen companions, sails to Denmark, to offer his help to Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose hall (called " Heorot ") has for twelve years been rendered uninhabitable by the ravages of a devouring monster (apparently in gigantic human shape) called Grendel, a dweller in the waste, who used nightly to force an entrance and slaughter some of the inmates.

When all but Beowulf are asleep, Grendel enters, the iron-barred doors having yielded in a moment to his hand.

Beowulf proceeds to the mere, and, armed with sword and corslet, plunges into the water.

The dragon hears Beowulf's shout of defiance, and rushes forth, breathing flames.

The fight begins; Beowulf is all but overpowered, and the sight is so terrible that his men, all but one, seek safety in flight.

The young Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, though yet untried in battle, cannot, even in obedience to his lord's prohibition, refrain from going to his help. With Wiglaf's aid, Beowulf slays the dragon, but not before he has received his own death-wound.

With his last breath Beowulf names Wiglaf his successor, and ordains that his ashes shall be enshrined in a great mound, placed on a lofty cliff, so that it may be a mark for sailors far out at sea.

The news of Beowulf's dear-bought victory is carried to the army.

When seven years old the orphaned Beowulf was adopted by his grandfather king Hrethel, the father of Hygelac, and was regarded by him with as much affection as any of his own sons.

We now have 16 additional hard disks to install on the 16 node Beowulf.

The hero Beowulf comes to the court of Hrothgar from the land of the G6tar, where Hygelac is king.

Beowulf himself won fame in this campaign, and by the aid of this definite chronological datum we can place the reign of Healfdene in the last half of the 5th century, and that of Hrothgar's nephew Hrothwulf, son of Halga, about the middle of the 6th century.

Beowulf's own burial is minutely described in terms which have a strong resemblance to the parallel passages in the Iliad and Odyssey.

The treasures of the dragon's hoard are buried with his ashes; and when the great mound is finished, twelve of Beowulf's most famous warriors ride around it, celebrating the praises of the bravest, gentlest and most generous of kings.

In the first place, a very great part of what the poem tells about Beowulf himself is not presented in regular sequence, but by way of retrospective mention or narration.

In the disastrous invasion of the land of the Hetware, in which Hygelac was killed, Beowulf killed many of the enemy, amongst them a chieftain of the Hugas, named Daghrefn, apparently the slayer of Hygelac. In the retreat he once more displayed his powers as a swimmer, carrying to his ship the armour of thirty slain enemies.

Beowulf, out of loyalty, refused to be made king, and acted as the guardian of Heardred during his minority, and as his counsellor after he came to man's estate.

When Beowulf became king, he supported the cause of Eadgils by force of arms; the king of the Swedes was killed, and his nephew placed on the throne.

It begins by celebrating the ancient glories of the Danes, tells in allusive style the story of Scyld, the founder of the " Scylding " dynasty of Denmark, and praises the virtues of his son Beowulf.

If this Danish Beowulf had been the hero of the poem, the opening would have been appropriate; but it seems strangely out of place as an introduction to the story of his namesake.

But the value to be assigned to Beowulf in this respect can be determined only by ascertaining its probable date, origin and manner of composition.

Now it is related in Beowulf that Hygelac met his death in fighting against the Franks and the Hetware (the Old English form of Attoarii).

It is true that the invading king is said in the histories to have been a Dane, whereas the Hygelac of Beowulf belonged to the " Geatas" or Gautar.

It is therefore evident that the personality of Hygelac, and the expedition in which, according to Beowulf, he died, belong not to the region of legend or poetic invention, but to that of historic fact.

The Swedish princes Eadgils, son of Ohthere, and Onela, who are mentioned in Beowulf, are in the Icelandic Heimskringla called Adils son of Ottarr, and Ali; the correspondence of the names, according to the phonetic laws of Old English and Old Norse, being strictly normal.

There are other points of contact between Beowulf on the one hand and the Scandinavian records on the other, confirming the conclusion that the Old English poem contains much of the historical tradition of the Gautar, the Danes and the Swedes, in its purest accessible form.

As the historical character of Hygelac has been proved, it is not unreasonable to accept the authority of the poem for the statement that his nephew Beowulf succeeded Heardred on the throne of the Gautar, and interfered in the dynastic quarrels of the Swedes.

That they have been attributed to Beowulf in particular might seem to be adequately accounted for by the general tendency to connect mythical achievements with the name of any famous hero.

The Danish king " Scyld Scefing," whose story is told in the opening lines of the poem, and his son Beowulf, are plainly identical with Sceldwea, son of Sceaf, and his son Beaw, who appear among the ancestors of Woden in the genealogy of the kings of Wessex given in the Old English Chronicle.

The story of Scyld is related, with some details not found in Beowulf, by William of Malmesbury, and, less fully, by the loth-century English historian Ethelwerd, though it is told not of Scyld himself, but of his father Sceaf.

In Beowulf the same story is told of Scyld, with the addition that when he died his body was placed in a ship, laden with rich treasure, which was sent out to sea unguided.

If Beowulf, the champion of the Gautar, had already become a theme of epic song, the resemblance of name might easily suggest the idea of enriching history by adding to it the achievements of Beaw.

While, however, it thus appears that the mythic part of the Beowulf story is a portion of primeval Angle tradition, there is no proof that it was originally peculiar to the Angles; and even if it was so, it may easily have passed from them into the poetic cycles of the related peoples.

There are, indeed, some reasons for suspecting that the blending of the stories of the mythic Beaw and the historical Beowulf may have been the work of Scandinavian and not of English poets.

Sarrazin has pointed out the striking resemblance between the Scandinavian legend of Bodvarr Biarki and that of the Beowulf of the poem.

The hypothesis that Beowulf is in whole or in part a translation from a Scandinavian original, although still maintained by some scholars, introduces more difficulties than it solves, and must be dismissed as untenable.

In its original form, Beowulf was a product of the time when poetry was composed not to be read, but to be recited in the halls of kings and nobles.

That Beowulf is concerned with the deeds of a foreign hero is less surprising than it seems at first sight.

It is probable that down to the end of the 7th century, if not still later, the court poets of Northumbria and Mercia continued to celebrate the deeds of Beowulf and of many another hero of ancient days.

As originally dictated, Beowulf probably contained the story outlined at the beginning of this article, with the addition of one or two of the episodes relating to the hero himself - among them the legend of the swimmiug-match.

Now the first fifty-two lines, which are concerned with Scyld and his son Beowulf, stand outside this numbering.

Many difficulties will be obviated if we may suppose that this passage is the beginning of a different poem, the hero of which was not Beowulf the son of Ecgtheow, but his Danish namesake.

It is true that Beowulf the Scylding is mentioned at the beginning of the first numbered section; but probably the opening lines of this section have undergone alteration in order to bring them into connexion with the prefixed matter.

Sarrazin, Beowulf-studien (1888), which advocates the strange theory that Beowulf is a translation by Cynewulf of a poem by the Danish singer Starkadr, contains, amid much that is fanciful, not a little that deserves careful consideration.

For the same period we derive a considerable amount of information with regard to Swedish affairs from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.

The latter fled for protection to the Guar and the war which ensued cost the lives of Eanmund and of Heardred the son and successor of Hygelac. According to the poem Beowulf himself now became king of the Gotar and assisted Eadgils in a campaign which resulted in the death of Onela and the acquisition of the throne by his nephew.

What is said in the poem with regard to the end of Beowulf belongs to the realm of myth, and for three centuries after this time we have no reference to Swedish affairs in English or other foreign authorities.

Moreover after the time of Beowulf and Jordanes there are very few references to the kingdom of the Gotar and in Olaf Sktittkonung's time it was merely an earldom.

In this saga AOils (the Eadgils of Beowulf), son of Ottarr is one of the most prominent figures.

The account given of him agrees in general with the statements in Beowulf, though the nature of his relations with Ali (Onela) has been misunderstood.

His full name appears to have been Yngvifreyr or Ingunar Freyr and his descendants are collectively termed Ynglingar, though we also occasionally meet with the name Skilfingar, which corresponds with the name Scilfingar borne by the Swedish royal family in Beowulf.

To the north also belong the sagas of Gretti the Strong (Ioio-1031), the life and death of the most famous of Icelandic outlaws, the real story of whose career is mixed up with the mythical adventures of Beowulf, here put down to Gretti, and with late romantic episodes and fabulous folk-tales (Dr Vigfusson would ascribe the best parts of this saga to Sturla; its last editor, whose additions would be better away, must have touched it up about 1300), and the stories of the Ljosvetningasaga (1009-1060).

Thus it is touched upon in Beowulf, and fragments of it form the most important part of the northern Eddas, the poets of which evidently assumed that the tale as a whole was well known and that their hearers would be able to put each piece in its proper place.

Beowulf cluster, that is, a cluster of computers connected together.

Beowulf Some of the beowulf service will need to be upgraded to FC3 about the end of the summer or early autumn.

Beowulf The beowulf lcfg server has now been upgraded to FC3.

Calculations were performed on a 16 processor Beowulf cluster and required approximately 1 gigabyte of RAM per process.

Has anyone else achieved good parallel speedup on beowulf systems?

Beowulf contains the tale of a dragon who guarded buried treasure within an ancient tumulus.

So curiously alike in their general features were the sepulchral usages connected with barrow-burial over the whole of Europe, that we find the Anglo-Saxon Saga of Beowulf describing the chambered tumulus with its gigantic masonry "held fast on props, with vaults of stone," and the passage under the mound haunted by a dragon, the guardian of the treasures of heathen gold which it contained.

His swimming exploit among the Hetware, allowance being made for poetic exaggeration, fits remarkably well into the circumstances of the story told by Gregory of Tours; and perhaps his contest with Breca may have been an exaggeration of a real incident in his career; and even if it was originally related of some other hero, its attribution to the historical Beowulf may have been occasioned by his renown as a swimmer.

Grimm, in Die deutsche Heldensage (2nd ed., Berlin, 1867), quotes the account given by Jordanes, references in Beowulf, in the Wanderer's Song, Exeter Book, in Parcival, in Dietrichs Flucht, the account given in the Quedlinburg Chronicle, by Ekkehard in the Chronicon Urspergense, by Saxo Grammaticus, &c. See also Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus poeticum boreale, vol.

When he swings at you, use Beowulf's Hammer, roll out of harm's way, then try to attack him from the back.

Use Beowulf's Hammer and try to push him back, then attack him with it.

His film appearances include Beowulf and Sherlock Holmes.

Much of this description comes from Tolkien, but most believe that Tolkien's interpretation is very accurate because he based his fiction upon ancient texts of legend, such as like Prose Edda and Beowulf.

Of the latter the number has tended to diminish in the light of modern scholarship. The fashion during the 19th century set strongly in the other direction, and the " degraded gods " theory was applied not only to such conspicuous heroes as Siegfried, Dietrich and Beowulf, but to a host of minor characters, such as the good marquis Rudeger of the Nibelungenlied and our own Robin Hood (both identified with Woden Hruodperaht).

It is an amalgamation of the myth tof Beowa, the slayer of the water-demon and the dragon, with the historical legend of Beowulf, nephew and successor of Hygelac (Chochilaicus), king of the Geatas, who was defeated and slain (c. 520) while ravaging the Frisian coast.

The water-demon Grendel and the dragon (probably), by whom Beowulf is mortally wounded, have been supposed to represent the powers of autumn and darkness, the floods which at certain seasons overflow the low-lying countries on the coast of the North Sea and sweep away all human habitations; Beowulf is the hero of spring and light who, after overcoming the spirit of the raging waters, finally succumbs to the dragon of approaching winter.

In Beowulf cremation is represented as the prevailing custom.

In Beowulf we hear of a Danish king Healfdene, who had three sons, Heorogar, Hrothgar and Halga.

When Heardred is killed in battle with the Swedes, Beowulf becomes king in his stead.

There are, however, many other episodes that have nothing to do with Beowulf himself, but seem to have been inserted with a deliberate intention of making the poem into a sort of cyclopaedia of Germanic tradition.