With the waxing popularity of Christianity in late fourteenth-century England, the culture’s expectations had evolved to encompass new, more complicated views on human interrelations and the world view in general. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight represents a new conception of the heroic ideal, women, nature, and narrative technique. A comparison/contrast to Beowulf illustrates these changing ideals.
Archive | October, 1995
To Rome
The journey of Aeneas is typical in an epical tradition. In the Aeneid, Virgil presents the founding of a new empire and the story of its patriarch by manipulating history to show the influence of Greek culture on the Romans, but also to illustrate Rome’s new order and the death of Greek/Trojan ideology and way of life. Aeneas, the typical epic hero, must found the new empire by killing the old, and its representative, Turnus.
Aeneas and Dido
Dido, while the ruler of Carthage, does not have as rigid a destiny as Aeneas; therefore, she was able to forsake her duty for her “husband.” So, as is most often the case, the woman forsakes her career and ambitions for the sake of love — thus propagating the view so prevalent within our society: her work is never as important as his. In addition to Dido’s sacrifice, a lack of communication, responsibility, and bad choices constitute Aeneas’ and Dido’s relationship.
