SOURCE: "Beowulf: The Fight at the Center," in Allegorica, Vol. V, No. 2, Winter, 1980, pp. 125-37.

In the following excerpt, Vaught argues that Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother is more exciting than is his earlier battle with Grendel and that it is also more important to the poem's focus on heroism.

Among the most helpful of recent approaches to Beowulf are those that have increased our understanding of the rise of the hero in the first part of the poem—in Tolkien's terms, the first of "two great moments in a great life … first achievement and final death." In showing how the poem attains that first "moment," the best of recent studies have drawn out implications that illuminate not only the social import of Beowulf's heroism, but the psychological and cosmological import as well. Until recently, that first moment of heroic achievement has been located in the fight with...