Beowulf is divided into three sections in which the eponymous hero fights three different monsters. In the first two sections, as Beowulf confronts and ultimately defeats Grendel and then Grendel’s mother, the work is primarily a narrative in which the theological dimension is subsumed parabolically, especially in the recurring motif that human will and strength is insufficient, in the absence of divine assistance, to defeat the power of evil. This is presumably an orthodox riposte to the heresy of Pelagianism,3 which plagued Saxon England and is a major preoccupation of Bede in his
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