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Beowulf

Throughout history, the ongoing battle between one’s pride and one’s fate remains undefeated. One’s pride distorts the distinguishable difference between reality and that of the imagination. Pride offers one the appearance of control over fate rather than allowing the essence of fate take its course. Poems such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf exemplify the continuous conflict of illusion verses reality and how one cannot have both pride and the ability to accept one’s fate.
Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight feels as though he can control his fate when taking the belt in order to live for all eternity. He is offered a golden opportunity and finds himself at a weak moment, therefore taking the sash for his own protection. He fears his own inability to complete the task at hand and inevitably failing in the eyes of his peers. Gawains’ pride clouds his mind and removes the line between the possible and impossible. Desperate to find a solution to what he fears may be his very own inadequacy, Sir Gawain convinces himself that a device that will impose a human beings very own immortality actually exists. “If he bore it on his body, belted about, There is no hand under heaven that could hew him down, For he could not be killed by any craft on earth,” (p. 139).
It is in that very sash that Sir Gawain finds his own vulnerability. He has been so successful thus far and in doing so the public has built up such reputation of which no human being is able to fully live up to; even as the one it was initially built up to be. In the moment of accepting the sash he falls to the pressure of society in hopes of maintaining a false image appointed to him by everyone in his surroundings. His pride and inevitable Gawains’ ego allow the line between reality and illusion to become more gray than ever before, which in turn causes Gawain to believe that his own immortality lies within a mere sash. He chooses to take what little...

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