Thursday, November 6, 2014

Week 12 Essay: Beowulf Reading Assessment


 First Page of Beowulf.  Source

Looking back at everything I have read up to this point, I must say that the Beowulf has been my favorite unit to read so far, even more than Hiawatha which was my favorite up to this point.  I honestly can say that I enjoyed every part of the epic, from the exposition to the conclusion.  I thought that it began strongly, showing Beowulf as a gifted youth who wanted to test his limits.  The background was good as well; it gave enough information to immerse the reader in the world but not enough to bore with pointless information.  This reading fits into my plan to add a new story between my first and second storybook entries.  The character of Wiglaf and the dynamics between him and Beowulf can work out for my storytelling for a transition between my stories, which I felt were too spaced.  The main things that surprised me were Beowulf's age and the story involving the dragon.  After that abomination of a CG Beowulf movie, I just assumed that it followed closely and Beowulf was an older man when all of the story occurs instead of a very young man.  I also didn't think there would be a dragon in the telling of Beowulf, but I thought it was a nice part.  In regards to the story itself, I thought everything worked very well.  The descriptions were phenomenal, when I was reading the unit I could imagine what was occurring with ease.  It reminded me a lot of a game I used to play on Xbox, The Elder Scrolls, Skyrim, which had a lot of similar story telling methods and similar backgrounds and themes.  I was slightly surprised that this was a English story though, I always just assumed that Beowulf was a Scandinavian tale instead.

Beowulf

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