Beowul, Hygelac & Hrothgar Essay Example for Free

Beowul, Hygelac Hrothgar Essay The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf contains accounts of several powerful men, the three most important ones being Beowulf, Hrothgar and Hygelac. Hygelac, king of the Geats, is Beowulf’s uncle. Beowulf is, therefore, both Hygelac’s nephew and his thane. He comes to aid Hrothgar, king of Denmark, when the latter is experiencing difficulties that have the power to destroy his kingdom: the monster Grendel has been attacking Hrothgar’s mead-hall Heorot regularly for a long time, and Beowulf is the only man who can put an end to this misery. In many ways, these three old English heroes are similar in character, both in their earlier years and when they have grown old. One thing the gentlemen have in common is the fact that they were all brave warriors when they were young. Hrothgar only became king after his bravery in battle had been established: â€Å"The fortunes of war favored Hrothgar. Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (line 64-5). Hygelac is described as a â€Å"battle-famed king† (l. 2190), indicating that he too had to obtain renown in battle before being allowed to rule the Geats. Beowulf also had a share in victorious battles. Before he sailed to Denmark, he had already fought many a time. â€Å"‘(†¦) I am Hygelac’s kinsman, one of his hall-troop. When I was younger, I had great triumphs.’† (l. 406-9). His real fame, however, came with his defeating Grendel and subsequently the latter’s mother. â€Å"‘(†¦) Beowulf, my friend, your fame has gone far and wide, you are known everywhere.’† (l. 1699-1705). Another shared characteristic is their self-confidence, which is depicted in descriptive passages about how they made their way in battle: they were fearless and relied wholly on their own strength. For example, Beowulf is at one point described as â€Å"the sure-footed fighter† (l. 1543), indicating that he believes himself to be equal to the challenge he faces. This self-reliance has much to do with their pride: they were all proud men. This is shown, for example, during Beowulf’s boasts in the mead-hall. â€Å"(†¦) Beowulf, that prince of goodness, proudly asserted: ‘When it comes to fighting, I count myself as dangerous any day as Grendel.’† (l. 675-8). The aspect of self-confidence is entwined with the fact that they were very loyal warriors as well. In order to come across truly loyal and honourable, men had to depict an image of themselves that would live up to expectations. In short, they had to boast, make good on those boasts, follow their lords anywhere and anytime and be familiar with the required courtesies of the time. Although it is not literally stated in the text that Hrothgar and Hygelac were faithful thanes, it may be inferred from the descriptions of their loyal character when they are kings. That is to say, it seems the three men do not change much when they become kings, so it may be assumed that they were loyal both when they were young and when they were older. Next to being faithful to either their lords or their thanes, they were also faithful to God. Some characteristics reveal that they have not abandoned pagan morale altogether: â€Å"Hygelac’s kinsman kept thinking about his name and fame: he never lost his heart.† (l. 1529-30). The importance of winning glory in battle is associated with pagans. However, on the whole the three kings can be said to be Christians. â€Å"’And may the Divine Lord in His wisdom grant the glory of victory to whichever side He sees fit.’† (l. 685-7). Apart from having been warriors, they have all been kings as well. Moreover, they were very similar kings: all three men were good and loyal rulers. â€Å"’Hygelac may be young to rule a nation, but this much is known about the king of the Geats: he will come to my aid and want to support me by word and action in your hour of need, when honor dictates that I raise a hedge of spears around you.’† (l. 1830-5). As Beowulf states, Hygelac would aid him in any way he could because he is such a devoted lord. Also, the kings were very generous. â€Å"(†¦) Hrothgar’s generosity was praised repeatedly.† (l. 1884-5). It was very important for a king to reward his thanes properly, and Hrothgar, Hygelac and Beowulf are all very open-handed. Furthermore, all kings are described as being perfectly capable of ruling their kingdom. Even when, for example, Hrothgar seems unable to control the chaos Grendel created, it is said that â€Å"(†¦) there was no laying of blame on their lord, the noble Hrothgar; he was a good king.† (l. 861-2). To conclude, Hrothgar, Hygelac and Beowulf are very similar characters. Both as warriors and as kings many parallels can be found. The main characteristics they share are loyalty, bravery, pride and their belief in Christianity. Their reputations are well established, both in the story and outside of it: in the mainly fictive world of the poem, their names will not be forgotten, but readers of the poem nowadays will remember them just as well.

Procrastination Essay -- essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  To procrastinate is to put off doing something out of casual carelessness or common laziness. It often needlessly postpones or delays events or objectives in your life which can effect others. Procrastination is almost like a drug in your life, because once you start doing it a little bit, it slowly adds up to a dependency that you will find to be common habit. Although this is what we all perceive procrastination to be bad, there are some benefits to it. It can have beneficial impact on how you take pressure, or how well you can act when time is limited.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Procrastination is something that you don’t naturally have an innate ability to do. It is often brought on by finding ways around things such as due dates. It will mostly start off as not doing small homework assignments or even just simple house-hold chores that you try to put off as long as possible just to be able to play more. Or when you are even doing homework, such as a essay, you can find your self having a multitude of characteristics of it. Some may be just seem like difficulty concentrating or daydreaming. You may think that you are just having a small writers block, but you could actually possibly be subconsciously procrastinating because you know u you don’t want to do this, so you delay it.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Amazingly how so many high school, and college students do this, not many seem to realize the consequences of it until its to late. S...

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, by Craig Raine Essay

Formal The first method of criticism to use to better understand the 1979 poem â€Å"A Martian Sends a Postcard Home† by Craig Raine is Formalism. When you want to analyze a poem wishing the formalist method you should look at three things. The form, the physical structure of the poem, such as the length of the lines or stanzas, their rhythms, and their rhymes and repetition. Next is diction, what the words of the poem literally mean and why they chose that exact word instead of another one. Last is the unity of the poem, this is when significant parts of the poem come together to make the entire then whole. A formalist will look at all of these things when they critique a poem to try to understand the deeper meaning. Let’s first look at the structure of the poem. â€Å"A Martian Sends a Postcard Home† is comprised of 34 lines in couplets that do not rhyme. Sometimes words seem to be places where they shouldn’t be almost overflowing onto the next line. This use of couplets is for the readers benefit, it makes the poem much easier to read on the page. He also could have formatted his poem like this because the poem contains many metaphors and it is easier to focus on the metaphor if there is a break in between. Cleanth Brooks would call this an Aesthetic Structure because the structure of the poem is meant for the readers to understand it easier. Raine tries to write the poem to appeal to whoever is reading it and that is why he chose this form of writing in his poem. Second, we need to look at the diction inside the poem and there is a lot of interesting word choices by Raine. The best way to do this is to look at what words are in each line and what each line is saying. The first six lines are where the author uses his first comparison. A Caxton is a reference to the Englishman Will Caxton who first printed books. He then compares these books to a creature of earth, birds. He compares the bird’s wings to the pages of the books and both birds and books each have their way of showing their importance or meaning. Birds show how their importance and meaning with their color and books show how their importance and meaning with the words they contain. â€Å"cause the eyes to melt/ or the body to shriek without pain† refer to human emotions cry and laugh that the speaker of the poem (The Martian) doesn’t understand. Then he goes on to say how a book cannot fly but he has seen one perch on the hand, making note of how humans hold bo oks as they read them. The next four lines also make a comparison between nature and mankind. â€Å"Mist is when the sky is tired of flight† could be saying that the sky is a way to travel for the Martian through a UFO or spaceship. â€Å"engravings under tissue paper† takes us back to a book but this time it seems unimportant, like the Martian might not understand the importance of a book. Lines 11 and 12 the rain is compared to a T.V. They both make things appear darker than they really. Also, rain could be like the static in a T.V when the signal is fuzzy often when it is raining. The next two lines talk about â€Å"a Model T† which is a kind of car that was very popular in the early 1900’s. The â€Å"room† is the inside of the car where everyone sits and the â€Å"lock† is ignition where the key goes. â€Å"Key is turned to free the world† is the car moving and the â€Å"film† is the mirror that lets you see the world as it goes by in case you mis sed something. Lines 17 and 18 talks about something a lot of people have an obsession with keeping track of, time. Tied to a wrist is a watch and kept in a box is a clock. The Martian is saying that humans try to make time an object and there is no reason for this because your time will always run out. Lines 19- 24 make another comparison to mankind and nature, an ongoing theme in the poem. This time it’s comparing a telephone to a baby. If the phone rings it is similar to a baby when it cries, a parent needs to pick the baby up when it cries as you need to pick up the phone when it is ringing. When the baby is tickled it is like when you dial a number into the phone you are both using your fingers do the action. The next six lines talk about a child and an adult using the restrooms differently. The children â€Å"are allowed to suffer/openly† while the â€Å"Adults go to a punishment room / with water but nothing to eat.† Going back to a similar theme with time being imprisoned the people impress themselves in these bathrooms. Everyone is punished when they use the restroom and no one is safe from this punishment. The people force themselves to use the restroom and the children as well, in the eyes of the Martian. The last lines have the last comparison which brings us full circle in the poem. He makes the comparison of reading to dreaming. The night everything becomes dark and the people as a couple start to dream. The author might have used couples like how the whole poem is in couplets showing that humans belong in pairs. â€Å"With their eyelids shut† is them sleeping in bed â€Å"read about themselves† is their dreams. All in all, there are many metaphors to unpack in this poem and you start to get an understanding of the overall meaning of the poem and its unity. So what message is Raine trying to get across to us with all of his man vs nature metaphors? A formalist would argue that Raine is just trying to paint a picture of what an outsider would actually see if they were not in our society. They don’t see things the way humans do and they can’t even think of the right words to say for the things the Martian is seeing. The metaphors thought out the poem reinforce the point that the Martian isn’t sure what he is seeing and can only describe them in things that he has seen before. The Martian is able to take his experiences and connect them in a way with the humans. He thinks some of the things they do are strange and funny at the time, but he can still make references to his own life and his views on life. However, this might not at all be what the author is saying. It is possible that we have no idea what Raine meant when writing this poem and Allen Tate argues the only real way to understand what modern poetry contains is to â€Å"Start young, read the classical languages and later read the philosophers.† We can only make a guess at what Raine was saying in this poem and that is what makes poetry beautiful. Everyone can take it their own way, an infinite possibility of what the poem means to them or to anyone. Or could it be that formalism is not the best method of understanding this poem and we need to look more outside the text to understand what Raine meant? Psychological Criticism This next method of Criticism isn’t as much as taking the text at face value like the formalist method. It is about trying to get inside the mind of the author and figure out what was going on in his head when he was writing his poetry. There are 4 main critics that use Psychological criticism when unpacking literary work and they each have similar but unique styles when doing so. The first is Sigmund Freud, to have a Freudian approach to this text you would not oversimplify what the author meant and exaggerate your interoperations of symbolism as well as using all of Freud’s psychological jargon. This will allow you to dive deeper into the text and not just float on the top of the water. The second is Carl Jung and Mythological Criticism. Jung focuses on two things, the Conscious/Unconscious and archetypes. The Conscious/Unconscious refer to the human psyche and how our ancient ancestors thought and felt. Archetypes are very typical examples of a certain person or thin g. Jung talks about archetypes for characters, images, and situations. The third Northrop Frye used Jung’s ideas of archetypes to help promote his â€Å"theory of myths†. Frye argued that every text follows one of four mythoi and the whole text was called the monomyth. Last Jacques Lacan came up with an updated Freudian method for understanding literature. He had a different method for analysis characters in stories such as other and Other. The small o being the inside and the Big O is the outside of the body. Lacan also came up with Antirealism which is his assertion that langue is detached from reality. All of these four authors methods are important when looking at what Rain meant when writing â€Å"A Martain Sends a Postcard Home† and to get a better understand lets us apply of these to the Poem. The last Stanza of this poem â€Å"read about themselves/ in color, with their eyelids shut† could be argued that this is a dream that the humans are having. Freudian theory becomes stronger when people are dreaming, Freud believed that dreams are a symbol of antiquity and that their dreams contain the needs of the induvial that they might fight troublesome

The Ethics Of The Enron Scandal - 1902 Words

Ethical Scrapbook In the three excerpts that will be discussed in this report there is a theme. That theme is ethics or the lack there of. What all three of these cases have in common is that people were willing to trade in their reputations, their livelihood and in some cases their personal freedom to get what they wanted. In two of the examples, the prize they sought was money, pure and simply a case of greed. Importantly, these people already had significant wealth, and they were willing to take the chance on losing what they had already attained to get more. In the other case, the defendant’s ethics are what initiated his behavior. Enron The first story is without a doubt one of the most serious cases of its kind. The Enron†¦show more content†¦The investigation revealed a network of partnerships designed to hide Enron’s debt. Unfortunately, by November 2001 the company’s stock had gone from a high of $90. to $1. investors had lost billions of dollars (Silverstein, 2013). The company filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001 and around 5,600 employees lost their jobs. The U.S. Justice Department began an investigation and by January of 2004 Fastow accepted a deal to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud in exchange for his cooperation with the Justice Department (Silverstein, 2013). In February 2004, Jeffrey Skilling pled not guilty to charges of wire fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and making false statements on financial reports (Silverstein, 2013). In addition, Kenneth Lay was charged with fraud and making misleading statements, he pled not guilty. The trial began in January 2006, in the end Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling were found guilty of lying to investors, employees and regulators in an effort to conceal the loses of the company (Silverstein, 2013). Eventually, Mr. Skilling was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison however, in July 2013 his sentence was reduced by ten years. Although, Mr. Lay was also found guilty, he died July 5, 2006 at his home in Aspen Co. before being sentenced. This scandal epitomized the excesses of the 1990’s and the management failures of