What is the meaning of war? This may seem a peculiar question, for war is always terrible: It always mean the death of young people at the order of their elders in the name of one ideal or another. But therein lies all the difference: The ideals that push one society to war would be dismissed by another. What constitutes self-defense by one group would be seen as blatant aggression by another. These differences in what constitutes what the early Christian church called a just war are important to remember even as our own country is at war, for the rhetoric of leaders during wartime is always that the war is just and inevitable. But by putting that rhetoric within the context of what other societies and other historical eras have considered to be the appropriate response to danger and aggression we can better judge whether the responses of our own nation are appropriate against the backdrop of history.
If we look to literary accounts of war, we see the examples that we might expect of glorification of fighting and the deaths of heroes, but we also see sobering reminders that war must be a last resort, the actions of a people and a leader who find themselves with no other recourse. In the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, for example, we see the title character of the poem going to war as the only way in which he can defend his people against the terrible monster Grendel and Grendel's mother. This is the kind of war that most people still understand as being terrible but necessary, a war of self defense, a war against an enemy that has invaded one's own land. There are other similarities with today's justifications for war Beowulf marches forth with the gods on his side, a claim that many armies and nations still make:
Then came from the moor under misted cliffs
Grendel marching God's anger he bore.
But there are also important differences between war as we see it being waged in this poem and today: Beowulf dies in the defense ...