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 […]
Tag Archives: Beowulf
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, […]
Willow Rosenberg as Grendel’s Mother
This past year I was surprised to suddenly find myself a fan of the 1997-2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It would be hard to find a television show with a wackier premise, but it somehow works. In this entry I want to draw some parallels between the show and Beowulf and, especially, between […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dragon, Grendel's mother, grieving, Wiglaf, Willow, Zander Comments closed
Battling with Monstrous Grief
I said in the last blog that I am kept fresh by the variety of ways that my students respond to the works that I teach. Sometimes their reactions are entirely unexpected and altogether marvelous. To make this point dramatically, I share here a Beowulf reading story. The student was a 19-year-old African American woman […]
High Impact Literature
I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Like Leslie Marmon Silko in her novel Ceremony, I believe that stories are […]
