Pyre

Beowulf was written by an unknown Christian Monk that lived in Anglo-Saxon England who used Judeo-Christian beliefs and pagan traditions in his epic poem. The poem was written about the Jutes and the Danes and their Germanic tribes while they lived in a pre-Christian time. It was composed orally during the time when the Anglo-Saxons were still pagan but wasn’t written down until after they became Christian. These elements were hard to ignore because of how much they define Beowulf and his…

When you think of evil, what do you think of? Death, blood, night, and darkness most likely come to mind. What about when you think of when you think of good? You probably think of hope, life, daytime, and clear, white light. In the romantic horror novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, an overambitious scientist, creates a monster from corpses. The creation ultimately leads to the horrific downfall of both him and his family. The monster starts out as an…

Historical Young Adult books are so few and far between, I was delighted that The Witch Hunter was both that and a fantasy. The earlier time period fit the tone of the story very well, especially considering that Elizabeth's profession is to hunt witches. In this world, a powerful wizard was blamed for the start of a plague years ago, so all magic is forbidden. If you are caught practicing witchcraft, you will be arrested and burned at the stake. There are those who of course oppose the laws -…

Emile Durkheim was largely seen as a positivist. As such, he believed that sociology should be studied in the same manner as the natural sciences - scientifically. In 1897, Durkheim published Suicide, a study that is now seen as a model of positivist research and methodology. In Suicide, Durkheim lists and explains his finding of four areas of suicide; finding quantitative differences between gender, class, and religious groups. During the late nineteenth century, sociology was establishing its…

Battles remain as one of the most important components of epic poems, particularly those following the hero’s journey template. Beowulf represents an excellent example of a true epic poem due to not only the nature of the poem, but the battles themselves. Beowulf approaches each fight in a different way and each encounter has a different outcome. Additionally, the reason why Beowulf fights each battle to begin with tends to both differentiate and share likenesses from battle to battle. The…

Heracles, or as the Roman’s called him, Hercules, is possibly the most famous hero in the Greek and Roman history. Alcmene (granddaughter of Perseus) and Zeus were parents to Hercules. Zeus stated that whoever was born next in his family will rule all of Greece, but Zeus’s envious wife, Hera, had played a trick so a different child, the evil Eurystheus, was born first and soon became king; when Heracles got older, he had no other choice but to work for him and also go through the terrible wrath…

Asklepios is the god of medicine. He is born between the Apollo and mortal Coronis. Before he was delivered to the world, his mother fell in love with Ischys, so Apollo let Artemis murder Coronis in his anger. As Coronis, however, was burnt on a funeral pyre, Apollo took the unborn child out from her womb. Then, Apollo brought his son to centaur Chiron to raise the baby, and, for this reason, Asklepos have learned the art of medicine from Chiron. After grown up by Chiron, He won a fame not…

“A Worn Path,” by Eudora Welty, the main character’s name, Phoenix, has great significance in the short story. A Phoenix is “a mythological bird of great beauty fabled to live 500 or 600 years in the Arabian wilderness, to burn itself on a funeral pyre, and to rise from its ashes in the freshness of youth and live another cycle of years” (“Phoenix Definition”). Phoenix also means “a person…that has become renewed or restored after suffering calamity or apparent annihilation” (“Phoenix…

society for himself as well as others. Right before this event took place, Equality is watching a transgressor get burned alive for saying the unspeakable word. The author writes, “They brought the transgressor out into the square and they led him to the pyre. They had torn out the tongue of the transgressor, so that they could speak no longer.” (50) The transgressor said one word and therefore got burned alive for the whole community to see. The government is making it clear that they control…

Title: Knowledge can be very dangerous to your existence Bradbury's fictional society is one in which books were banned and you had to exist based on the knowledge that was told to you. Books as we know them today provide value sources of information. However, in Bradbury’s society you were not allowed to think anything other than what allowed or considered normal. If you thought differently from the society, you would have been considered mad and place in an asylum. The various characters in…