Anti-Hero

            The winters are cold, harsh and hard. The once green grass is covered in a thick layer of snow. There are sharp thick long icicles that have been frozen from the last melt of the sun. The snow layer is thicker than the snow Frederick County experienced in the last couple of years. It is deeper than during the East Coast Snowmageddon where we had more than ten feet of snow. The ponds are covered with thick layers of sheet ice. The layers of ice thicken as the winter carries on through the months of November, December, January, February, and March. The ice is thick enough to walk on, and the water below is cold enough to freeze the fish. Beowulf has carried his people through fifty winters of increasing peace and community without hunger. Beowulf aspires to prove himself to his people. He wants to make amends for his shortcomings as the King. Beowulf talks about the men he has known over the years and how they were taken from this world by circumstance, debauchery, and battle. This particular winter, Beowulf must defend his people against a dragon that attacked his village and castle.

            It is debatable whether this text or any mythology from the Norse regions that consisted of Germanic people including Scandinavia, France, German, Belgium, and Great Britain, demonstrated any desire to glamorize, glorify, or worship the ground on which villains stood. It can be said that Beowulf surely isn’t an antihero. He is not a villain, so it isn’t possible to suggest that these people have an obsession with evil. They merely desire their villains to be powerful and awe inspiring.

            The dragon is a wise, brilliant, creature that was stirred into a rage because a thief, along with his consorts, wandered into his cave to steel his precious hoard of gold and gems. The thieves looted everything from the dragon’s cave. The dragon follows the thieves’ footprints into the village which he then attacks in retaliation. The narrator in the text treats this dragon foe as a strong, intelligent, adversary who just wanted his money back. Today, the thieves would be considered trespassers and arrested on suspicion of burglary. The dragon would probably have been able to retrieve his treasure.

            In battle, the scales of the dragon gleam, and the fire from his mouth blazes. The audience is supposed to sympathize with the dragon enough that Beowulf has to rile the dragon to force himself to fight the dragon. Beowulf has to draw on his internal rage to draw the dragon out and inflame the hatred between them. This creature isn’t a super villain. He does not want world domination. The dragon hates like a wounded animal locked in a cage deprived of food and water. Hate is something human that has to be learned otherwise hate comes from fear.

            Let me exaggerate. What other evil, black, terrible villain of this story does the narrator, or the audience, or even Beowulf and his men show sympathy for in the book? Beowulf and his men show little if any sympathy for Grendel’s mother. Yet, the audience can muster sympathy for a woman whose only son has been murdered. He was the only person who lived with her in their cave. She has no one left. She has every right to be upset, but in the end it was Beowulf that made the jump on Grendel’s mother. These villains aren’t antiheros. The dragon does not wake up one day and decide that he is going to give his gold away. Grendel’s mother does not admit that she made a mistake in raising her son to be a blood thirsty beast. Grendel does not go to therapy for the habits he can’t kick such as eating human flesh.

            We are mostly sympathetic to Grendel because of the way Grendel is introduced as friendless, isolated and living in a solemn and hermit-like existence with his mother. Grendel seems to have made a lot of mistakes in his life. It would have made a better read if in some twisted way Beowulf was some mass murdering hulk. I mean he is, but I’m talking about the evil kind that ignores the rules of engagement. The evil kind that has to thrive off murdering women and children, or defenseless animals. If the old men of the Norse period sat around and talked about their past heroes that committed mass genocide, what kind of world would we live in? The Germanic people certainly weren’t Nazis-like.

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"Winter Posters and Prints." CoolAntarctica. CoolAntarctica, 2001. Web. 06 Sept. 2016.

I affirm that I “have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this paper”

Alex Cooper

Alexander Stephen Cooper                                                                             7th September 2016