Cain and Beowulf

Book excerpt: "Thus, while Beowulf represents the highest standards of virtue in the poem, he does not represent the ideal Christian ruler nor does his realm symbolize the ideal Christian society, ultimately unattainable on earth. He is neither a Christian nor a Christ figure nor an Old Testament type, for the allegory of the poem does not seem to work in that way. He is poetically conceived as quite like his contrary, for as Grendel is simultaneously the historical descendant and spiritual representative of Cain, Beowulf is metaphirically one of the 'sons of God,' symbolically representative of the moral goodness of man that moves, however inconsistently and in whatever time, towards the Christian ideal of social harmony and civilized order."--Introduction, page 18