15 September 2006

Beowulf for the homeschooled child

What you won't learn in your lib'ral public schools. Beowulf is about T. Rex. And it's obviously not fiction...

Only one manuscript of the original poem exists. People found it, partly burned, in England about five hundred years after Beowulf lived. No one knows who originally wrote it. Many literature books say that it is fiction, one of the earliest examples we have of an English novel. But if someone were writing fiction, he would not name so many real people; he would invent characters as novelists do. And if someone wrote it long after the events, he would not know all those real people who lived in Beowulf’s time. It must have been first written at or near the time that Beowulf lived. All parts of the story hold together as though one person wrote it. It does not show evidence that bards sang it and added and changed as the years moved along.

Wait. I'm confused. How do we know the names of "all those real people who lived in Beowulf's time"? Isn't this way longer that 500 years later. Nevermind. That's not important.

Why, then, do so many literature critics say that Beowulf is fiction? It is because they do not believe that dinosaur creatures lived at the same time men lived. Their evolutionary worldview says that dinosaurs lived long ages before men evolved on the earth. Therefore, in their minds, this all must be fiction. But with a Biblical worldview, we can see that dinosaurs entered the ark with Noah—land species at least—and they lived on the earth again after the Flood. But the post-Flood earth was not so hospitable to large creatures and they eventually became almost extinct.

Phooey, I say. They've convinced me. I believe. Plus, on a recent archealogical dig, this cave painting of Beowulf was found:

1 comments:

Angie Pansey said...

Ohhh...so that's what Beowulf looks like! Thanks!!