"Beowulf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these details may be found duplicated in Maerchen of the "John the Bear" and "Strong Hans" types. For analogues, see Friedrich Panzer's Beowulf, pp. 28-33, 47-48, 50-52. In Grimm's story of the "Young Giant" (No. 90) the hero, when born, was only as big as a thumb, and for several years did not grow one hair's breadth. But a giant got hold of him and suckled him for ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... person Homer may have been, he never obtrudes himself into his narrative; and we may read both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" without deriving any more definite sense of his personality than may be drawn from the hints which are given us by the things he knows about. No one knows the author of "Beowulf" or of the "Nibelungen Lied." These stories seem to tell themselves. They are seen from nobody's point of view, or from anybody's—whichever way we choose to say it. Many modern authors, like Sir Walter Scott, instinctively assume the epic attitude toward their characters and incidents: ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... endowments on the new-born child, as in the beautiful Helge Lay ... a point of the story which survives in the Ogier of the Chansons de Geste, wherein Eadgar (Otkerus or Otgerus) gets what belonged to Holger (Holge), the Helga til of Beowulf's ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... of a maritime nation are brought out in strong relief throughout the whole of English literature, from its very birth down to the present day. The author of "The Lay of Beowulf," whoever he may have been, rivalled Homer in the awe-stricken epithets he applied to the "immense stream of ocean murmuring with foam" (Il. xviii. 402). "Then," he wrote, "most like a bird, the foamy-necked floater ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... find here (in Vitellius, A 15) the story of Beowulf, the oldest monument of AngloSaxon literature, reaching back into the ages of heathendom. It is a pagan war-song which, in being handed down from minstrel to minstrel, has lost nothing of its wild, exultant beauty, while it has received many Christian inflexions ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... language and tradition; sometimes in tradition alone. There was a minor Celtic quickening in the twelfth century A. D.; then Wales was in a fervor of national life. She had not the resources, or perhaps the will, for outside conquest. But her Authurian legend went forth, and drove Beowulf and Child Horn out of the memory of the English, Charlemagne out of the memory of the French; invaded Germany, Italy, even Spain: absolutely installed Welsh King Arthur as the national hero of the people his people were fighting; and infused chivalry ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris |
