Drew Brees, Super Bowl MVP A few years back, if I remember the article correctly, I came across two interesting statistics about life in America on Super Bowl Sunday. During the game the country’s crime drops to the lowest level of the year. Following the game, however, acts of spousal violence hit their highest levels of […]
Tag Archives: Beowulf
Beowulf and Rifts within the NFL
Roger Goodell, a Beowulf or a Hrothgar? While football joy currently reigns supreme in Miami, dark clouds loom on the horizon (to use a hackneyed metaphor). Even as more people than ever are watching football, the owners are unhappy with the current players’ contract and want them to take an 18 percent salary cut, along […]
Manning as Beowulf, No Joy in Mudville
A quick update for today’s post: some football fans are elated this morning, some are dejected. “There is no joy in Mudville,” the immortal line from “Casey at the Bat,” may come naturally to citizens of New York and Minnesota – an instance of poetry providing solace by naming our pain. Here’s the passage: Oh, […]
Grendel’s Invasion of Fort Hood
I interrupt my Jane Austen series in honor of the soldiers killed by the army psychologist at Ford Hood. Facts are sketchy as I write this, but Beowulf, particularly the monster Grendel, may give us some insights into the tragedy. Think of Grendel as a warrior that goes bad. In the epic, Grendel lives on […]
Poetry Battling Despair
Odin’s Valhalla, Dwelling Place of the Einherrar, artist unknown While the major focus of this blog and website is looking to literature to see if it can provide solutions to life’s problems, at times I wonder if I am just engaging in wishful thinking. What if there are no solutions and literature is just whistling […]
A Queenly Response to Violence
My wife (who is currently out of town) has just responded to my last post with a story that expands my conversation about the Beowulf approach to societal rage. In the story related in Julia’s post, a woman takes a principled and courageous stand in an ugly situation and finds herself, against all expectation, making […]
A Modern Grendel on the Rampage
We have a Grendel problem in today’s United States. The troll that invades our special halls has many different names—Scott Roeder, who killed Dr. George Tiller; James W. von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum attacker; Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, who killed an army recruitment officer; gun lover Richard Poplawski, who shot three Philadelphia police officers; Jim David Adkisson, […]
