Fearless warrior Beowulf

At the last course, we continued with the superhero Beowulf. Beowulf is the oldest English epic poem that was saved. It was written in Anglo-Saxon period and it has up to the present.

The main character’s name is Beowulf who is fearless warrior.  The other characters’ names are Grendel who is a  monster, Grendel’s mother, Hrothgar etc. The reason why Beowulf is a warrior that he wants to be a hero and help their relatives, I think. Beowulf hears that a monster attacks Hrothgar’s country and he sails. He fights with the monster and he cuts it’s hand. Afterwards, the monster dies. After winning a victory against the monster, Beowulf becomes a king. After a long time, a new monster appears, a dragon. Beowulf decides to fight against it. He kills the dragon. Unfortunately, Beowulf gets injured fatally. So, he dies as a hero. Because he achieves killing the monster.

In the poem, there is a statement of Beowulf that effects me very deeply. ‘’We’re all going to die some day, so it is better for us to achieve glory before that happens.’’ It reflects that at that time, it was important to die while fighting.

 Every person can learn many things from artifacts like being fearless, courage, importance of kinship and heroism. As a teacher, we have to transfer to students every detail that shapes our life in the best way.

First Lecture

I have always interested in history. I enjoy learning about history whatever the nation is.  I think it’s true that we started to the course with the history of England which we don’t have much information before learning about English Literature. I think that as an ELT student, we have to know both literature and history of the language we’ll teach. Because we don’t lose anything when we know, on the contrary we obtain a lot.

One of the nations that I’ve interested is Vikings. When our teacher talked about Vikings, the first thing came to my mind was the cartoon of Vikings that I watched everyday when I was a kid. And this helped me concentrate on the course. So, when I was thinking of what I would have to write my blog, I searched about history of English.  Although English people are one of the legend nations, I found lots of disgusting things, and I want to share some of these. For example, long time ago (I don’t know the date exactly) English provided food and shelter for their little pets like dogs and cats in the roof. This was the only place that animals lived. When it rained,  the roof  became slippery and sometimes animals fell down.  This is the story of expression ‘’it’s raining cats and dogs.’’

In the other example, long time ago people used to have a bath in May every year in England,  that’s why couples got married in June and  brides carried bouquets of flower on their hands in order not to smell dirty. I don’t know how much the story is true but I’ve searched lots of examples like these.

Consequently, I believe that we have to become familiar with the different areas as a teacher of the future. When our students ask us a question, we have to have an answer to reply. Hence, I’m interested in history as well as literature. I can’t say that I have a knowledge of literature and read large numbers of books but I consider I’ll have much to learn thanks to this course.