Nature and Doom in Beowulf

Answer to an essay question on an exam.  Written in class, so the writing is less polished than in formal essays.

By setting the confrontations Beowulf has with the monsters first at night, then in the lake, and then in the dragon's underground lair, the author of Beowulf is at once expressing fears of those things themselves--darkness, the water, and the wilderness--and is also using those settings to externalize and express deeper psychological fears:  of the unknown and unseen (Grendel, lurking in the night), uncontrolled female power (Grendel's mother), and death (the dragon's lair is a barrow, where Beowulf does indeed meet his death).

These three primal fears all belong to the category of "nature"--the fears of the unknown, the female, and death are all fears of things that are both natural and unavoidable.  By using those fears, the writer of Beowulf creates a terrifying world, in which nothing and no one can be safe, even in the supposed sanctuary of the mead-hall.  This makes sense, as the people of the time were striving to impose order on their world.  Much of the code of honor the men of Beowulf's world adhere to, and all the attendant rituals of courtesy and careful marking of kinship and alliances, are designed to impose order on an unruly and threatening world; the monsters and all they are associated with are threats to the order men had created.  Nature itself is a threat because of its separateness from the world of mankind, and its tendency to harbor the unknown and the dangerous.  Thus, Beowulf's defeats of the three monsters are heroic because those defeats represent man's master of nature in its various guises.  As can be seen from Beowulf's death at the end, however, the author of Beowulf suggests that despite all other victories, the one unknown force that cannot be defeated and is inevitable for all is death.

This sense of impending death gives Beowulf a feeling of doom, enhanced both by the funerals that mark the beginning and end of the story, and the frequent, sudden, and senseless deaths throughout.  Beowulf was written after the time of those pagan warriors was past, by a Christian author who seems to lament the fall of their simple, hard ways, while at the same time knowing that their lack of Christian belief doomed their souls.  That author's lament for the old heroes and pity for their unshriven souls gives Beowulf its elegiac quality and sense of doom.