Compare and Contrast Essay Between Beowulf and the Hobbit

I just this day finished reading A COMPANION TO BEOWULF by my friend and classmate Ruth Johnson. It was remarkably clear, well written, concise, and chock full of fascinating insights and observations. Let me in particular remark on her last chapter, which concerned Tolkien and Beowulf. I had not heretofore been aware of how large a figure JRR Tolkien loomed in the scholarship of the epic poem BEOWULF, nor what a great influence his seminal essay The Monster and the Critics, had in turning the attention of the academic world from the historical to the literary merits of the poem.Ruth Johnson makes the argument that Lord of the Rings is an updated version of BEOWULF. No, not the events, but the world, the worldview, the motif, the techniques, and especially the approach toward religion. It is to be noted that many critics faulted Tolkien for not including anywhere in Middle Earth any description or hint of rituals, rites, temples and cults with adorn the vivid backdrops of other works of fantasy.Except for a few indirect hints that there is a High God somewhere, and angelic powers the elves revere, Lord of the Rings is perhaps unique among fantasies in that there is no mention of the religious side of society or the spiritual side of man. But, of course, Tolkien is not unique: he is following BEOWULF. The poet of BEOWULF (so Tolkien interpreted the evidence) wished to depict his pre-Christian ancestors in the admirable light men are right to have for their ancestors, but without attributing to them a Christian faith they could not have had.In these modern times, when Christian and Postchristian struggle for the souls of men, and the popular picture of the Christian is of a book-burner rather than the preserver of pagan literature, it is often hard to recall the respect with which the Christian imagination held their pagan fore-bearers and preserved their works. One need only open any random page of Dante or Milton, for example, to see the thickly clustered refer ences to pagan myths reflected with considerably more reverence than more modern and sarcastic depictions of the gods of old.As with Roman Christian and the classical pagans, so with Old English and his Norse fathers, at least in this case. The way the poet of BEOWULF handled the delicate matter of showing the old days and the old ways as noble but, deprived of Christ, doomed, was to pass over the differences in a pregnant silence, and yet emphasizing those cardinal virtues that pagans and Christian alike admire, particularly fortitude and honor. So too here did Tolkien with his Middle Earth and their peoples: the foremost virtue emphasized again and again in Tolkien was the Beowulfian virtue of continuing a fight even after all hope is exhausted.The melancholy pronouncements of gloom and doom are scattered throughout the War of the Ring, yet also match the elegiac quality of Beowulf’s last battle against the dragon of the barrow, and much of the tone in side tales mentioned in Beowulf. The Beowulfian attitude toward fate or ‘Wyrd’ seems a blend of the pagan notion of inescapable fate woven by the Three Sisters, or the Christian notion of fate as the decree and will of God. A similar attitude might be detected in Middle Earth.Frodo nowhere lauds the fact that it is his free choice to carry the burden of the cursed One Ring, as, for example, Neo from THE MATRIX does in the climax of that trilogy. Instead, the wise Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo was â€Å"meant† to find the Ring, as if by some divine will above and beyond the will of any creature in Middle Earth, even Sauron the Dark Lord. Meant by whom? As in Beowulf, it is not said, but the silence implies something like ‘Wyrd’ or the will of heavenly powers.Tolkien borrowed so much from Beowulf and the Old English, that the description of Medusheld (Mead-Hall) in Rohan might be taken as the twin of Hereot. Unferth, who sits at the feet of Hrothgar and scorns Beowulf at his first appearing in the great hall, is somewhat parallel to Grima, who sits likewise and scorns Gandalf as a storm-crow and a meddler in others’ affairs. Many readers (include myself) have called Lord of the Rings a ‘medieval’ fantasy, but this is a gross misnomer. There is not a single Arthurian figure in Middle Earth, nor any such armor or arms or equipment as might a knight of the High Middle Ages have used.The men are in hauberks and iron caps, as in Beowulf, usually carrying spears. The fantasy is Old English in setting, Danish and Beowulfian, England of the time of Alfred the Great; but also the scenes in Gondor might be imagined as if some northern hero visited the great and ancient cities, cities builded of stone and gold, of Rome or great and once-invulnerable Constantinople. The Shire itself is redolent of a high medieval period, some idealized squirearchy, but Rohan is entirely in the mood and atmosphere of Beowulf.In Beowulf, the elves or ‘yl fas’ are listed along with ‘ettins’ and ‘orcs’ (elves, giants, demons) as being descendents of Cain, exiled by God for his kin-slaying (a crime the Norse held in particular horror) and therefore, even as lesser clans must feud and retaliate endlessly, so the Sons of Cain with the race of moral men, descended of Seth and Noah. While the orcs and other monsters in Tolkien are creatures innately evil, no more to be reasoned with nor spared than Grendel, the elves are not quite the Liosalfar of Norse myth, albeit they are more akin to this than to the diminutive sprites of MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.In olden times, northern people found stone arrowheads, or saw evidence of heart attacks or madness that seemed without cause, and blamed the unseen people, the elves, who were not necessarily cruel and wicked, but they had no concern for the things of men, and went their ways invisibly. Something of this mood is present in Tolkien’s elves, albeit he makes them both more manlike, and something like a prelapsarian man still at one with nature, to suit his purposes. The dwarves of Tolkien, on the other hand, could have stepped out of central casting from a Wagner Opera, and the names are taken unchanged from the Eddas.It may be useful for a moment to contrast the free peoples of Middle Earth with the other fantasies from Tolkien’s generation and before, in order to emphasize a point easy to be lost in our modern Dungeons and Dragons generation: namely, that elves and trolls and dwarves are purely Norse and Beowulfish in origin. Tolkien took them from the world of Beowulf and made that world and no other the staple of fantasy worlds. Tolkien made the ylfas and orcs and ettins into the elves and dwarves and trolls we now tend to think of as trite stereotypes of an overly-plowed field.But you will in vain seek their like in THE WORM OUROBOROS by ER Eddison, nor in LUD-IN-THE-MIST by Hope Mirrlees, nor in anything written by James Branch Cabell nor William Morris nor Lord Dunsany nor Clarke Ashton Smith nor William Hope Hodgson nor William Beckford nor Arthur Machen nor the great Robert E. Howard in any writer in that genre that used to be called fantasy before the coming of Tolkien. These peoples and creatures entered the common imagination from the forgotten north of the world through the pen of JRR Tolkien.Turning for a moment to the Hobbit, we see the dragon Smaug circled on gold in his buried hold in much the same manner as the dragon of Beowulf. Both are stirred to outrage by the theft of a trifle from their greed-gathered horde, a gold cup. Both rise up in flame and wrath to burn nearby homesteads. It is an entirely Norse conception of a dragon. The dragon slain in myth by Saint George was no hoarder of gold; Nagas of the East and Liang of the Far East are different beasties entirely, albeit called dragons in our language.One artistic technique the poet of Beowulf used was to interpolate referen ces to even earlier events and sagas into the matter of the poem. Early critics of Beowulf thought this a structural weakness, or even evidence of two or three poets cobbling disjointed earlier material together. But a close attention to the matter perhaps shows the poet meaning to draw out parallels and contrasts between the ancient events and the struggle in Hereot, or the dark mere, or the barrow. It gives the poem, which was meant to be antiquarian at the time it was ritten, a richness of depth, by depicting a world of many layers of ever receding time. Behind every treasure sword and necklace, there is a tale, and weapons have names and histories even as great households and heroes and the lineages do. Tolkien is often complimented on the richness of the detail, the sense of many ages piled up behind the event in the current War of the Ring; but what he did was to copy Beowulf, and use the same technique, giving names to swords and remarking on the histories of towers and lands until the weight of history settles into the imagination of the reader.I contrast it with, for example, Homer’s ILIAD, where the technique is not used. Aside from the armor of Narses, I cannot recall the history of any weapon being recounted among the Greek. It is purely Norse touch. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings seems a real world because so often mention is made of former days and older ways, and the tale is of the passing away of things with deep roots who once stood long in their places.Finally, the world itself, the Middle Earth, is merely the Old English word for Midgard, the world suspended halfway between the dark of hell and the light of heaven. The melancholy of the passing away of the older world was also a theme in BEOWULF, in the ears of the listeners even if we cannot hear it today. The English poet set his tale amid Danish lands and centuries (even at that time) long gone by. The old ways were past, and the new had come. The poet says farewell to the worl d of Beowulf even as he writes his saga.In much the same way, JRR Tolkien says farewell to the world and worldview that passed away before and during the Great War in Europe, the death of the days when the world was alive and elves lurked unseen in the twilight, the death of faith and faithfulness, the passing away of kings and heroes and all things ancient and fine, and the final triumph of the smoggy mediocrity of Mordor. Part of the reason for the fame of his book is that many folk share the sentiment of elegy, and wish, with Professor Tolkien, to say farewell to a world nobler than our own.

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Wannaburger Restaurant Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

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English for Junior College - Essay Example When it came to my parents, the older I became, the more they were fading from me, until all I could see were the last few moments spent with them by the river. The rest blended together like the ingredients in a too-long-simmered stew: reveries and dreams, wishes, fantasies. Is that what it would also come to with Sebastian?" (Danticat 245). The author uses dreams to as symbolic in the novel to develop themes such as identity. In most of her dreams and thoughts, Amabelle contemplates the tragedies and traumatic experiences in her past life. Since her life was a nightmare, Amabelle uses her dreams for comfort. On page 310, she says, â€Å"I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said that the dead add their tears to the river flow.† Therefore, it is only through sleep that she can escape the reality that her life is a nightmare. Danticat uses dreams to remember the past and also to expand on the characters. It is clear from the novel that characters who dream to escape from their realities only end up facing their past particularly in their dreams. Amabelle and Sebastian are examples of such characters. Amabelle mostly dreams of the death of her parents while Sebastian dreams of the death of his father in a hurricane. In her dreams Amabelle recounts her parents deaths, â€Å" I thought that if I relived the moment often enough, the answer would become clear, that they had wanted either for us all to die together or for me to go on living, even if by myself." (Danticat 309). The characters are escaping reality by finding comfort in their dreams. Despite the fact that the characters are still revisiting their dreams, they are trying to move on as people. Moving on allows the characters to grow and develop. Amabelle and Sebastian open to each through dreams. The two use dreams to share their experiences and problems.

WTS Migration Plan To Develop E-Business Capability Essay

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Gathering Research Data Paper Essay Example for Free

Gathering Research Data Paper Essay Within the criminal justice system there are various types of data gathering research methods that can be utilized. The method chosen for this research paper is the email survey method. The proposed research for this paper is job satisfaction within the police field with emphasis on the patrol officers. With patrol officers being the backbone of the police departments the research should be pretty insightful. The main goal of this research is to pinpoint the patrol officers’ main dissatisfactions during their workdays. The specific interview structure that will be used is an email questionnaire survey. This type of survey will allow and hopefully enable every patrol officer to participate and it will also allow graphical results. Just about every criminal justice case begins and ends with a patrol officer. Beginning with the criminal offense report, to the arrest, and ending at the testifying in court. Although there are many various key players in most cases besides the patrol officer, it is highly unlikely that crime reduction would exist without the patrol officer. Understanding the needs of a patrol officer and what is pleasing and displeasing on the job is key to crime reduction. A happy employee does their job successfully and to the best of their ability. An unhappy patrol officer will definitely not complete tasks let alone risk their lives for another individual. The department has the responsibility to ensure that the majority of its patrol officers are satisfied with their working conditions to prevent silent strikes and to also prevent behavior manifestation. Using an email questionnaire survey would be the interview structure used to conduct the research regarding the employee satisfaction. This survey will involve the simple format of a YES or NO option only. Constructing a different variables list will enable determination of what issues the questions will be based on. This list will also ensure that main concerns and topics are covered along with not duplicating any issues. Configuring what type of  data and data analysis is needed will be the next venture followed by figuring out how to word the questionnaire. Taking into consideration patrol officer lingo and technical wording to avoid any biased or compounding variables to each question. Some examples of questions that would be asked are: 1. Do you intentionally avoid police functions when off duty? 2. Do you take a level of pride when wearing your uniform? 3. Do you take sick days when you are not ill? 4. Do you hide your profession when off duty? 5. Do you take extended training courses or classes to avoid fieldwork? 6. Do you use cellphones, tablets, or any other devices to entertain yourself while on duty? 7. Do you avoid public interaction while on duty? Using these initial questions will not only help me gather data on satisfaction but will also help me gather data on other issues as well. An example of other issues would be the topic of whether or not response time intertwines with officer satisfaction and how this affects crime statistics. This type of qualitative data gathering is a great advantage because it records attitudes, feelings, and behaviors. (Analyse This!!! Learning To Analyse Qualitative Data, (2008)). As mentioned also opens up new topic areas that were not initially considered. These initial questions are also structured or closed ended questions in which will involve the needed information. Which means the data collected from the answers won’t involve thorough answers that need to be explained. In completion of the questionnaire questions, a small group of similar respondents will take a pretest that will point out any confusion or misunderstanding of question formatting and wording. To have the best outcome of participants and to ensure the best results, compensation would be offered in the form of extra paid time. This will also ensure a more quantitative data analysis due to a larger number of people responding to the survey. Some researchers believe that rewards and/or incentives given to people who participate in surveys increases response and reliability A tailored design method or TDM will be used with this email survey question. According to Hagan ((2010)), â€Å"The â€Å"tailored design method† or TDM, â€Å"uses multiple contacts seeking response and endorsements to increase response rates† by â€Å"tailoring the survey to the  group being studied in order to foster trust, increase rewards, and decrease the cost of participation.† This phase would be to get endorsed by the patrol unions to ensure and response, respect, and acceptability of the survey in the patrol officer’s eyes. These unions were founded and organized to assist and defend patrol officers, with the backing of these unions the participation and legitimacy would be highly prosperous. In turn, the unions will be knowledgeable with the results of the survey. One of the main focuses of this survey will be that it is truly an anonymous survey, and that each individual who fills out a survey remains anonymous and has no ties or repercussions from their answers. A few approaches to this could be survey kiosks or ballet boxes. These would allow no log on requirements or have any tracks on keystrokes. It is detrimental that informed consent and confidentiality be withheld and not compromised. According to The Role Of Numeracy In Informed Consent For Surveys ((2009)), â€Å"Two key ethical issues for survey researchers are obtaining informed consent and maintaining the confidentiality of responses. Informed consent implies that two requirements have been met: (1) that research participants have been informed about the essential elements of the research, including the risks and benefits of participation, and have understood the information; and (2) that they have given their consent to participate†. If compromised the survey answers could potentially cause issues with employment or job environments. This type of outcome could cause the survey to become unreliable and null and void. References: Analyse This!!! Learning to analyse qualitative data. ((2008)). Retrieved from http://archive.learnhigher.ac.uk/analysethis/main/qualitative1.html Hagan, F. E. ((2010)). Research Methods in Criminal Justice and Criminology (8th ed.).Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collection database. The Role of Numeracy in Informed Consent for Surveys. ((2009)). Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857726/