Compare and contrast the following passages: Lines 1591-1631 (When Hrothgar’s men leave, but Beowulf’s retainers stay) and lines 2401-2668. What do we think about the fact that Beowulf’s men stuck by him in the past when he fought Grendel and Grendel’s mother, but they abandon him when he fights the dragon? He hand-picked these men both times, so what happens in the fight with the dragon? How/why is this fight different? What does their behavior say about Beowulf as a king? What does this say about Beowulf’s *best* men? How can we explain their abandonment, and what do we think about Wiglaf?
Your response should be at least 2 pages double-spaced.
AI Policies:
The submission or use of any Generative AI-produced material in this course without my explicit direction or approval constitutes academic fraud. If questions arise about Generative AI use, please consult me. This is a reading and writing course, and I cannot properly assess your critical thinking/writing skills and help you hone them if you are not submitting YOUR own original work. All of my prompts are designed and written to ask for your specific thoughts and ideas about the reading assignments, not a computer program’s. You may think running the prompts through Chat GPT, Grammarly, etc. to help brainstorm and/or enhance your writing may make you sound more professional, but AI has been around long enough for professors to easily recognize the patterns it uses in its responses. Turnitin is used for all of your written work in this class, not necessarily for the purposes of catching plagiarism, but it has the ability to do so.
Note: we use MLA style in this class. For poetry, this means citing line numbers when providing a quote in your answer. Your citation must be a complete sentence–you cannot drop a quote into the body of the text without incorporating it into a sentence. When citing 1-3 lines, you need to use quotation marks and include a forward slash separating each line of poetry. For more than four lines, please use block quotation format. You do NOT use quotation marks for block quotations. Instead, you indent each line one tab from left margin. Here are example of how to cite both forms properly, and pay attention to where end punctuation goes in each instance:
1-3 lines:
In the fight with Grendel’s mother, the men waiting on the edge of the meer “saw a heave-up and surge of waves/ And blood in the backwash” (1593-1594).
Block quotation format:
In the fight with Grendel’s mother, the men waiting on the edge of the meer
Saw a heave-up and surge of waves
And blood in the backwash. They bowed grey heads,
Spoke in their sage, experienced way
About the good warrior, how they never again
Expected to see that prince returning. (1593-1597)
Requirements: 2pgs
