This paper argues that the Beowulf poet develops an intricacy in his poem that is
unusual to Old English literature. It considers
the nature of evil in the poem and also the notion of transience commonplace to Old English poetry. It looks at how "Beowulf" is
unusual in that it predates - by about a millennium - present conceptions of evil and how a modern reader might draw parallels between Grendel and Osama Bin Laden, for example. It examines how the poem is fashioned by its propensity for dwelling on the continuum that exists between good and evil, and subsequently by its use of dualistic modes of interpretation: the finite as against the infinite, the human in opposition to the non-human. It also contends that Beowulf presents a mode of
dualism that is ever present in human thinking and that the poem dramatises subtle behaviour in its subversion of this dualism.