Rowling, Tolkien and Beowulf (Lumos 2006 Material)

This is just a brief detail one that popped back into my head, which I thought was really cool. During that panel discussion on Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings that was moderated by Peg Kerr one of the panelists noted a neat correspondance with the epic poem Beowulf. After Beowulf kills Grendyl has has to go kill G's mother, who lives down in under the bottom of the ocean. First point of correlation is that he is given an invisibility cap ... like Harry's cloak. The second is that he is described as swimming down intot he depths for something like days and days ... implying that he can breath underwater ... like Harry using gillyweed in book 4. I just thought that was really cool stuff, especially because some of Tolkien's most famous critical work was on the Beowulf poet as a Christian poet who is sort a bridge between the older pagan lit in England and the new Christian lit. In fact, the most well known book of Tolkien's essays (which includes the one on Gawain and the Green Knight I think) is titled, as a whole book/volume, after the one essay on Beowulf, "The Monsters and the Critics." I always loved the line Tolkien had on the Beowulf poet somehwere in that essay ... something like "He is a man ... and for some that is tragedy enough."