Both Blake and Smith make clear that a society that allows slavery and poverty to occur is a like a man that allows an illness and malady to run through him unchecked: that some illnesses need to be removed, not pitied or mourned afterward.

Historians have attempted to reclaim the lost sections of Beowulf ever since Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of their libraries and the fires that followed. Great leaps have been made in restoring the text through deductive reasoning and ultra-violet imagery, but still we have no ‘origin story’ for Beowulf… although I believe one to have been hinted at within the text.

In the end, Donald Ryan is a sad case of a man who succumbed to the pressures of duty and family and society, even when those pressures conflicted directly with his own wants and needs.