Comparative English EssayCompare the Beowulf poet's presentation of the battles with Grendel and his mother with the Gilgamesh poet's depiction of Gilgamesh's battles with Huwawa and the Bull of Heaven. Fame and glory were the most admirable characteristics in the Middle Ages and even before Christ in ancient civilizations. The epics of Gilgamesh and Beowulf are stories of heroism and immortality achieved through fame. The purpose of the main characters, Beowulf and Gilgamesh, is to be a good warrior by being brave, respectful and prudent, protector and servant of their king (only at the beginning of Beowulf, since he will later become king and Gilgamesh already is) and their country. In both poems the main characters' struggles with monsters and supernatural creatures to gain fame or to protect themselves are central scenes in which Gilgamesh and Beowulf demonstrate their heroism and the social code of their society becomes perfectly clear. Therefore I will compare the battles of Gilgamesh with Huwawa and the Bull of Heaven, and Beowulf with Grendel and his mother and analyze the different meanings of the fights and their relevance to the entire epic. I will first cover the fighting in the Epic of Gilgamesh, starting with Gilgamesh and Enkidu's fight with Huwawa, the "guardian demon" (p. 25, line 14). Gilgamesh sets out to kill Huwawa to “cut down the cedar and win glory” (p. 19, line 12). Huwawa is described as supernatural, evil, and at the same time guards a forest; he is nature. "Huwawa's mouth is fire […] the demon hateful to the sun god." (page 20, line 1-4). The gods hate Huwawa and killing him is glorious and so Gilgamesh decides to fight him. The monster lives in the "Cedar Forest which...... middle of paper......gh offers himself as a servant) or using the same weapons (killing Grendel in hand-to-hand combat), but they are in a social and civilized system and therefore they also defeat their enemies not because they have to, but because they want to obtain fame, which is a kind of immortality the external, accidentally, challenges that in other circumstances he [Beowulf] would not have been able to take up, enemies by which he could have been distracted or diverted." (Beowulf, xix) Therefore the fights are tools to demonstrate the main rules of the two somewhat similar societies and to show the importance of the heroic code that guides their lives, "For each of us, living in this world means waiting for the own end. May he who can gain glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark." (p. 46)