The Hero's Journey

Not everyone appreciates Beowulf, and I get that.  The idea of telling heroic tales in the body of an epic poem to modern ears is overly complicated.  Then the ancient sounding words and crunchy translations that are technically accurate but have no mercy toward the modern mind steal away the impact of the story. There are people who hate stories from the past.  There are people who think they neither matter nor are they worth the time to enjoy.  I think it would be true to say, people who think NASA and other purely exploration based groups are unnecessary and expensive, would think the stories from a specific culture in ancient form, would also be unnecessary and uninteresting.

But telling the stories of antiquity through translation, or listening to or reading the exact work and translating it yourself has value.  The stories and heroic tales of the past have enormous value.  They tell us what was important in the past, and can visit those values in modern culture today.  Sometimes the ancient tales seem alien, they don't reflect things we feel or think in the present. Beowulf tells a story of a hero, who uses intellect, guile and courage to defeat a monster, and that monster's mother.  He faces incredibly uneven odds.  He does what needs doing, and pays the ultimate cost for it.  We need courage.  We also need heroes who aren't simply users of weapons.  If society inherited just one value from Beowulf, it wouldn't be that a contest of arms is the most exciting or interesting aspect of a hero's journey.  It is quite the contrary.  Using a certain kind of thinking added to a willingness to pay your life's blood for the cause is far more valuable than the resort to violence.

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