Beowulf has been many times interpreted, re-interpreted and, undoubtedly,
misinterpreted by a never-ending sequence of readers and critics. There are
many reasons Beowulf is not easy to
understand. Very little is certain about the time and manner of its
composition, it is a product of an ancient time, set in times even more ancient
and very different to our own. A student who is new to the poem, must rely on
footnotes and commentary to make sense of much of it. Thus, we see the story
through many layers of tinted glass: the opinions, comments and interpretations
of generations of translators and interpreters. This paper is therefore a study
of the critical reception of the poem as much as of the poem itself. Testing
the critics against each other and against the text and getting rid of what is
least likely can result in a coherent view of the poem. Doing this without
bias, however, is impossible. My personal bias is simple: I believe the Beowulf poet set out to celebrate what he felt
was a glorious past that was worth commemorating in a long poem. He did this by
writing the life and death of Beowulf, a man who embodied all that was good and
noble about this time. I do not believe the poet was making a political or
religious statement at the expense of his characters
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