General Critics Quotes Flashcards
(5 cards)
The reason for the ambiguous fight scene?
O’Brian O’Keefe suggests that the ambiguity is intentional to ‘prepare us for the merging of hero and hostile one’
Description of Grendel’s approach to Heorot?
Klaeber suggests this is the first of ‘the three great crises in the poem’
Renoir suggests that it is ‘one of the most effective presentations of terror in English literature’
Description of Beowulf and Grendel?
Dieterich - they meet in battle ‘the epitome of good, the epitome of evil’
they are ‘absolute opposites’
The reaction to the story of Sigemund?
Orchard calls this onomastic allusion ‘groanworthy’, since Sigemund directly means ‘victory hand, and this episode is after Beowulf has rendered Grendel armless
The focus on the minor characters and victims of Grendel?
Orchard suggests in his companion to Beowulf that this lends the poem its ‘curiously melancholic, even elegiac feel’
