Beowulf is a member of the tribe of the Geats, who goes to serve in the court of Hrothgar and Sir Gawain is King Arthur's great knight. Both of them are the heroes facing the grim challenges in the stories.
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To compare the idea of the hero in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both of the heroes in the stories are brave. The braveness of Beowulf lies in trying his best to help the king of the Dane, Hrothgar defeat the monsters, Grendel, and Grendel's mother. In the first fight with Grendel in Beowulf, Beowulf wanted to fight with Grendel with his bare hands. Although beating Grendel successfully, before long a more horrible fight was coming, Grendel's mom was sailing forth on a savage journey and desperate for revenge for her son. Facing such a tough fight, Beowulf still kept courageous to hold the hilt to cut deep into the neck bone of Grendel's mom. Furthermore, in the last fight of Beowulf, even though he was not young anymore, he still fought with the dragon in person to deal it a deadly wound. Also, Sir Gawain shares the similarity of braveness as Beowulf in that he accepted the challenge proposed by the Green Knight and kept the words to find him on New Year's Day. The bravest behavior of Sir Gawain is that he keeps his promise to be struck back by the Green Knight.
The contrasting idea of the hero in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is that no matter how tough the fights were, Beowulf did not flinch from the beginning to the end. However, although both Beowulf and Sir Gawain are brave and loyal in the beginning, Sir Gawain is afraid of being killed by the Green Knight and feigns a fearless state at the first strike, which shows the timidity in his heart that is different from Beowulf. Besides, because of Sir Gawain's lie, that is, he did not give the belt to the host after Green Knight reveals his identity as a host, he says that Sir Gawain lacks loyalty, which is the obvious contrast idea of hero between Beowulf and Sir Gawain. At the end of the story, Beowulf's braveness causes him died in glory; on the contrary, Sir Gawain still alive after the fight but the symbol of his fault - the scar on his neck and the girdle he held up shows his untruth would last until he died. The contrasting ideas of these two heroes make the different ends of the story.
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Beowulf and Sir Gawain: Compare and Contrast Essay.
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