The Nomadic Alternative – Page 38

of Punt with its dancing pygmies and frankincense trees. It is meaningless to decide if the hero lives out the myth or the myth lives itself out in the hero, and I take two examples to illustrate the point - one from the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, and the other from contemporary history.

Beowulf, the young hero in a corslet of glittering chain-mail, with the deaths of nine sea-monsters to his credit and the "strength of thirty men in his hand", voyages across the sea to the land of the Danes in search of adventure and further proofs of his manhood.

In the middle of the Danish kingdom rises the Heorot, a tall wide-gabled hall where the king lives with his retainers in golden magnificence. But each night Grendel, a half-human monster, cursed with the Children of Cain, raids the hall. He is the arch-enemy of God, a blood-drinking, bone-crushing horror, steel-clawed and with a history of atrocities committed against the human species. Beowulf fights the monster, rips off his talon and the fiend retires to die by his mountain lake where the waves froth with blood. Loud acclamations greet the saviour hero and his companions, the fine race of men who have destroyed the sub-human forces.

But while the heroes relax and enjoy their well-deserved reward, Grendel's mother licks her sores and plans revenge on those who have killed her progeny. She is an "enormous water hag", a "loathsome she-wolf of the water", surrounded by shoals of lesser marine monsters. Leaving her lair, she raids the hall. Again the hero rears up to fight and the ogress retires wounded. He follows the trail of her blood to the mountain lake, and after a critical fight, kills her. Beowulf has freed the Danes of the menace and leaves for his own home, heaped with treasure and acclaim, and, as a reward, his home Kingdom falls into his hands.

He rules with wisdom and justice for fifty years, but gradually the future darkens. Man-made evils, dissensions and blood-feuds break loose, and a new monster threatens. The Worm, scaly and malicious, the guardian of an ancient treasure, breathes fire into the houses of the people. The ageing hero wills to die a cool and