Explore the relationship between the material and the spiritual in Essay

Explore the relationship between the material and the spiritual in Beowulf and The Millers Tale - Essay Example Geoffrey Chaucer’s â€Å"The Miller’s Tale† is the second part of the Canterbury Tales and narrated by the alcoholic Miller and is a vulgar fable, depicting debauchery in contrast to the heroism underlined in Beowulf. Both Beowulf and the Miller’s Tale have been interpreted as using biblical analogies and allegories and the focus of this paper is to explore the relationship between the material and spiritual in Beowulf and the Miller’s Tale. If we firstly consider Beowulf , it is evident that the recurrent themes of war, tragedy and loss and military heroism are pertinent to historic patterns human behaviour whilst simultaneously providing a clear depiction of Anglo Saxon cultural norms. Moreover, French Historian de Certeau argues that â€Å"history aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs† (Certau, 1998). Additionally, Certau highlights that the various themes and use of language in Beowulf convey the notion of inevitability through â€Å"labor of death and a labor against death† (Certau, 1998, p.5). This is further reflected in Beowulf by the denial of death and references to fear, loss and death. If we further consider the development of literary historicism, Foucault’s vision propounds that human behaviour is innately driven by motivation for power, which is clearly mirrored in Beowulf (Foucault, 1979, p22). Furthermore, in context of the medieval period within which Beowulf is set, there is clearly a dichotomy between philology, which studies the words and new historicism, which considers the historicism context (Frantzen, 1990, p114). Moreover, Philology posits that to understand people, the literary language must be understood whereas historicism indicates that to comprehend the language, the people must be understood for example the Anglo-Saxon gift culture represented assertion of