Comparison And Contrast Gender Roles In 'Beowulf'

Beowulf is the story of one of the greatest heroes with no weaknesses, but has also been told as the story of the greatest hero with many weaknesses. As old poems and stories are told over long periods of time they tend to change, the same thing tends to happen when poems get turned into movies. This is also true for the story of Beowulf. Beowulf is an old Northern European story about a great hero who goes to a different land to help them defeat their monsters. Both the poem and the movie share similarities; however, the way that each contrasts gender roles, the comportment of a hero, and the role of religions reveals the values of the societies that each was created for. The first example of similarities and differences comes in the form gender roles. Both the movie and the poem are blasphemous towards women and show that Anglo-Saxon culture was based on patriarchy. In the poem the scop states that, “No female, no matter/How fierce, could have come with a man’s strength,/Fought with the power and courage men fight with,”. In the movie, it seems like women are just there to birth children. However, in the poem women play almost no role in the story, but in the movie women played important parts of the plot. In the …show more content…
In both the poem and the movie, Beowulf is the perfect ideal of what a hero should be and is a role model to all the other thanes. In the poem, after Beowulf kills Grendel, people from many lands came to celebrate and praise him. In the movie, after he kills Grendel, Unferth apologizes to him and praises him for being an amazing hero. However, in the poem Beowulf is seen as a perfect hero who has no weaknesses, he states that, “‘They have seen my strength for themselves,/Have watched me rise from the darkness of war,/Dripping with my enemies’ blood.’” However, in the movie, we know that Beowulf has a weakness for women and lies about it to protect his