The Old English poem Beowulf offers a number of contrasts in telling the story of the hero Beowulf and his fight to save a community not his own from the monster Grendel. One of the contrasts is between youth and old age, and this contrast is not presented in a very explicit fashion but is inherent in the role of the young man, Beowulf, who is expected to achieve a certain heroic stature before he becomes older, like the leader of the Danes, a man much older now but one who would have been more like the youthful and vigorous Beowulf when he was in his prime. Now, he needs the help of the younger man to protect his kingdom and so to maintain his household. Through his actions, Beowulf is able to create his own legend and secure his own riches and his own kingdom, and later in the poem he is placed in much the same position as Hrothgar early in the poem except that he is still the mighty warrior and can lead his own men into battle anew.
The story of Beowulf is an interesting case of a literary work that had no influence on subsequent works until modern times because the work was lost, and though a handful of learned antiquaries could study the text in Shakespeare's time, they could not comprehend Beowulf, the most important text preserved in Anglo-Saxon prose. The work did not begin to reach a wide audience until after World War I, and after World War II it would become an influence on modern literature (Clark 1).
There remains some question about the origin of this heroic poem, but it is believed to have been an Anglian poem composed in Northumbria (or possibly Mercia) during the first half of the eighth century:
[The version that exists today] presupposes an aristocratic Christian audience whose Germanic background and ancestry included the knowledge of Scandinavian and all of Germanic tradition and folk-lore of which the stories of Beowulf's three battles were a part, stories which were transmitted to England duri...