Why Beowulf is Important
You know, I was walking up from the dining hall, and I thought of something:
Everything in my life I owe to Beowulf.
Now, that may sound like a really weird statement, but bear with me.
When I was much younger, my parents got a Childcraft book every year. One of those books had the theme of Myth and Legends or something like that... big, golden book. The first story in that book was the last tale of Beowulf, where he and Wiglaf face a dragon. I loved that story. My mom read it to me the first time, and its basically the story I perfected my reading on... I must have read it fifty times.
Of course, I was a rambunctious young boy, so I wanted to fight dragons like Beowulf (my mom confronted me about this, and I quickly changed to Wiglaf... I would much rather be the one who survives ;-). Now, since I wanted to fight dragons like Beowulf, I started playing with toy swords... sticks, really, that I'd stripped of bark in places so I could have a hilt. Of course, I started to grow a bit, and you can't play with sticks all your life, and moving to Korea from Virginia severely curtailed their availability, anyway.
Since I couldn't fight imaginary dragons with sticks any more, I turned to paper, pencil, and dice (I now have a box full of dice), and started to learn fantasy role-playing. Gods, how I loved that. I still remember my first adventure... I won't bore you with the details, but, needless to say, I had a blast.
Of course, I was not only rambunctious, but I was curious (still am), so I started reading about the basis of role-playing... both the myths, which I knew, and the history, which I didn't. I read a lot of history... mostly books with a lot of pictures, because those were really the only histories that are on level with me at the time (about 6th grade). Of course, when we started taking history in school, I devoured it.
All my studying of history led me to look at my past, at other religions... I was Christian at the start of this journey. That opened me up to a lot of questions, and I wandered for a bit. But my love for history brought me back to a religion of history... I started on a Druid path because of Beowulf.
Now, I'm looking around myself. I'm a few years older than the kid who fell in love with Beowulf and Dragons and dice. I'm in college, studying history. I'm trying to learn to be a druid, though its going slow, because I'm also trying to learn to be a professor. My weekends are filled with research and role-playing, and the writing skill I picked up reading Beowulf is getting me published in gaming magazines, newspapers, and on the web in 3 different languages. The 29th of April, I have a paper to do in my Poetry class. I'm writing it on the third tale of Beowulf.
Having written this, I don't think there really is a point to it. I guess I was just rambling in my own way, but its still rather odd to think about. Would I be me if it weren't for Beowulf? If some nameless monk in the 8th or 9th century hadn't written down a skald's story, if some executive editor hadn't decided to include _that_ particular tale, to tell
it first, and before any others in the book, who would I be? How would I be different?
Postscript: The paper that I had to turn in on Beowulf recieved an A. Checking around my room, I can't seem to find the paper, but I seem to recall him saying it was "Brilliant, as I expected." I thought it was rather tepid and forced, myself, but then, I know I wrote it just to get an A, and had to leave out the passion.
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